Session #231: Time Management for Hypnotists

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 231, time management for hypnotists. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. It’s about time we do a podcast session about.

Hey, it’s Jason Lynette here, welcoming you back to the program and this week’s episode, I’m now back home in Virginia after spending quite a bit of time, actually out in Las Vegas for the hypno thoughts Live 2019 convention. And this week’s episode is a bit of a variation on a presentation that I gave this year on hypnotic balance, time manage.

For HYP test. In this episode, we’re gonna talk about how it is you can take better control over the timing of your own sessions, better mindsets in terms of how you manage your business, in terms of the ability to scale things up year after year, and really just give you some simple, workable strategies that you could put to use right away to start to get greater results with your clients and greater results from your business as well.

And on that tone, of course, check out hypnotic business systems. Dot com. That’s the all access pass to my Hypnosis business training library. Check that out [email protected]. And with that, let’s jump directly into this week’s episode. Here we go. This is session number 231, Time Management for hypnotists.

So I can be a bit of a sucker for. And it’s where there’s certain types of television programs or even movies that normally I would not watch. And yet when I hear the author, when I hear the creator, the writers, the, even the directors talk about the presentations, the programs. That’s often the place where I’m sucked into these programs.

So there was a TV show a number of years ago that went on for a. Bunch of seasons and did quite well. And at one point, it’s not really the type of thing I typically watch. Again, you know, here’s a whole TV program about crime and drugs, and I tend to be someone who’s a little bit more looking at comedy, but suddenly I heard this writer by the name of Vince Gilligan talk about this mindset.

That’s basically, let’s take the dad on the Brady Bunch and slowly turn him into scar face. Throughout the program, you wouldn’t be able to tell if he was the hero or if he was the villain. And suddenly, there we go. That was the TV show Breaking Bad and I was hooked. And even considering as there’s a made for TV movie as a sequel coming out, my wife and I are actually talking about watching the entire thing again.

It was that good. And trust me, if you haven’t seen this one, go back and watch that entire series. It was remarkable. And on the similar tone, I don’t really have much of an interest. In horror movies, you know, because they’re scary. But then suddenly here was this basically comic book writer, a graphic novel if you want to get picky about it by the name of Robert Kirkman.

And he’s explaining that in the universe that his characters live in. It’s this existence where zombie literature never existed. So suddenly when something happens and these things are out there, first of all, there’s no frame of reference, so no one knows what to call them. And second of all, the people that are still alive are more terrifying than the zombies.

And right there again, now you have the premise for the graphic novels and now TV show Walking Dead, which started off really. And we lost interest in recent seasons. But again, the original premise, what I’m getting at here is that very often in dramatic writing, they begin by setting rules of the universe, that here are the premises that exist within this world.

It’s where you’d often hear, there’s an anecdote, and I’m gonna paraphrase this one very heavily, but apparently JK Rowling, the creator of Harry, Created the entire universe, crafted all the characters before even beginning to write the first sentence of the first book. Similar stories I’ve heard about Tolkin with Lord of the Rings, which I may be off on some of those references yet again, looking at this mindset that if we can set the rules of the universe, if there are specific abilities that we set within our life, that that gives us greater freedom.

Because now here’s a character that can only do these certain things because here’s what they stand for, here’s what they’re against, and so forth. So this week’s session about time management, why do I begin with these opening frames of metaphor and theory? Well, it’s where if you set the rules of your own universe, You understand what time of day you see your clients, the mindset in terms of how you navigate your business, what you do, and also what you don’t do.

And I share the inspiration for this as a friend of mine who years ago was a massage therapist, and she figured out I’m in the Northern Virginia area, so is she. But she was commuting quite a bit that here was a specific day of the week that she’s commuting back and forth to Washington DC to work with specific athletes.

Then she’s over in the part of Virginia that’s named Restin. If you’re familiar with the Tyson’s Corner area, it’s right around there and she spends two days there. Meanwhile, she takes the next day off and then for three days a week, she’s at this other spot around Springfield, Virginia, which is where Virginia Hypnosis is located now, and realizing at the end of the week that she spent the equivalent of an entire working day commut.

Driving and when she suddenly decided to basically batch down her entire business to be working in one specific office, Well, something amazing happened. All of those elite clients of hers were more than willing to travel and work with her. Also, the benefit was her personal relationships got better, her lifestyle improved, and she found she was actually earning the same amount of money, if not saving it, by not having to waste the money on gas and lost time.

In terms of the. Which again, rules of the universe to go for more positive inspirations beyond high school science teachers to cooking meth or zombies walking the earth instead, if you set the rules. So this is where very early on in my business, I mean, before I had kids, my wife was at the time working a job in Washington DC which was involving, again, you’re noticing a theme here, a bit of a commute.

And at the time we were planning on having kids, and soon after that, she was then soon pregnant. And I really said out loud, I really said to myself, Great, I’m young right now. Let me go ahead and burn out now. So this was a timeframe BC before children where I was seeing clients at eight in the morning, 9 30, 11.

I then take a little bit of a break, one o’clock, 2 34 o’clock. Five 30, and depending on the day, depending on the projects that she was doing, I’d sometimes even do a seven 30, which not that all of my client appointments were an hour and a half, No they weren’t. Some of them were, but it was the time in between.

I’ve always lived by the phrase that I schedule a 90 minute block, so we’ve got the time if we need it. However, most sessions are about an hour, maybe hour 15 on average. So the first time we meet plan on that being the. Hour and a half. So this is how I was scheduling out this back to back lifestyle, and I was returning calls in between those appointments, giving myself about 30 minutes in the middle of the day to at least eat something and return a few calls then.

And it’s where nowadays I can very comfortably make this next statement and you’ll know what I mean by it. That clearly nowadays seeing hypnosis clients is not the only hypnosis thing that I. So there’s my trainings, there’s the work I do in the business world, there’s the ongoing maintenance of all things work, smart hypnosis.

There’s other projects coming down the pipeline. So it’s where nowadays, because I’ve set the rules of the universe, I see a 10:00 AM I see a 1:00 PM and I see a four o’clock appointment, and that’s it. So my fees have raised substantially over the years, yet in working less hours, earning a better. And I flash back to another story of Rose.

Rose worked at the post office that I used to go to when I lived down around Mountain Vernon in Alexandria. And Rose would just be on autopilot the moment she walked into the post office. Someone would, you know, go into mail something and she’d respond. Initial in the box, sign your name in the rectangle.

Oh, do I do that here? Initial in the box, sign your name in the rect. Is this for domestic shipping? Initial in the box, sign your name in the rectangle. And one time I finally had to ask her to go, You just go on autopilot here, right? She goes, Oh honey, it feels like I’ve been here for a half an hour and I’ve been here for nine hours.

So the, by setting that rule of the universe, what I’m getting at here, this is where when someone calls me up and they go, Hey, the best time for me is like a Sunday, a. And I respond. I’m in the office Monday through Friday. I do a 10:00 AM a 1:00 PM or a four o’clock appointment. What’s best for you? Yeah, again, I could really do like a Sunday at, uh, around one o’clock.

I’m in the office Monday through Friday. I do a 10 o’clock, a 1:00 PM and a four o’clock. What’s best for you? And they kind of get my point there. It’s polite. It’s to the point. But it’s where I like spending time with my family. I like spending time with my kids and so that way when I’m done with that last appointment around five 30, I’m back home in a couple of minutes and they’re around the dinner table with everyone else.

So the amazing thing is this, as soon as I set that specific rule of the universe, that these were the hours that I would see clients. What happened was that the one who’s insisting they need the Monday evening around seven o’clock, well, they would make the time for themselves to actually adjust things around and do that four o’clock appointment.

And just to call out the obvious, as a business owner, you cannot be a match for every single person at every single time. I mean, to rewind my story back like 10 years ago, I got my start in hypnosis really 12 years ago now I got my start in hypnosis by doing high school fundraisers. You know, as a stage hypnotist, and that’s where oftentimes, you know, we’d be in this back and forth game about what night do we do the fundraiser program?

Oh, but the volleyball team is laying out of state that day. I don’t know if we can do that. And sometimes I just have to call it out to ask the question, of the 2000 students at your high school, how many are gonna be out of state at that volleyball to. . Oh, 25. Yeah. Okay. So we’re doing a junior class fundraiser and none of your junior class advisors are on the volleyball team.

I think we’re okay to schedule that event. We’ll make the video available to them, and we were set. So again, you cannot be a match to every single person, every single time, and this is where I send a lot of referrals out for people who work evenings, for people who work weekends. Setting those rules of the universe really is what helped to set the mindset of my own business in place.

But let’s rewind. Or really fast forward, a little bit forward because this was now so far talking about the actual appointments that we set. Here’s one of the biggest situations that I find that hypnotists run into, especially those that are new. And I’d say this as a disclaimer. Most of us are not qualified to be talk therapists, so stop pretending to be one.

And what I’m getting at is that a client comes in and I often hear this report that I realize we’ve now spent about an hour talking about their problem, and I’ve basically run out of time and I have to rush the hypnosis. I want you to hear this next statement from the most positive, loving, helping position that I can share it from, which is that I’d encourage you not to spend your entire session time basically tearing apart the problem and convincing each other that this issue is too big and too impossible to be.

There, it had to be said, and it’s not that my intake is rushed. It’s not that it’s, you know, too short. It’s that really all of my questions are outcome based. Also, as soon as they come in, Using a little bit of hypnotic terminology here. I set the frame as to what our conversation is going to be in my office paperwork.

Those of you inside of workers, you’ve seen this. I’m asking for a list of outcomes and benefits they’d like to create. What’s your goal? What’s your expectation a month from now, a year from now, five years from now? Which the beauty of that is you’re getting your client to Hypnotically future pace themselves, even before they come into the.

So the benefit of having this piece of paper, which, yes, as much as I’m digital, as much as I’ve gone paperless in my office, my office forms are still as of now paper because I find by getting people to actually sit and write out the answers, I get better information for my sessions. I hooked up a digital platform similar to what Michael Desalt mentioned in a recent episode, and just from my style of work, I got better information when they had to sit down and and do homework

So that’s why I reverted back to that. And as soon as they. We scan and shred. Yay, paperless office. So the benefit of having this single piece of paper inside of my forms is that I can now set the frame for my session as soon as they come in. Great. Thank you so much for filling this out. The way that we’ll work today is we’ll start by spending some time discussing what you’ve shared here.

Then we’ll talk about hypnosis, what it is, what it isn’t, and then jump into the work from there. Sound. And everyone says yes because, well, what else would you do? The benefit of this though becomes is that that single page of outcomes and benefits and then the future based questions, as soon as I get to the bottom of the sheet, which it doesn’t feel like we’re reviewing paperwork, is just very conversational.

If you’ve seen my intake process, when we get to the bottom of that piece of paper, It’s a natural pivot. Great. So in the process today, your mind will be alert and aware the entire time. You’ll hear everything, all positive pre-talk, all positive pre-talk episodes of the podcast previously. So it’s where in about 15 minutes time.

If even that, we’re making that natural pivot out of the intake process and instead into the pre-talk procedure, which again, the reason I was able to do that was again, rules of the universe, time management for hypnotist. Are you noticing a mindset here? I set the frame as soon as we began. Because, well, what else would you do?

So again, by having that document there, by having the ability to go sequentially from the top of the page down to the bottom, make the natural pivot, and then directly into the pre-talk, and then into the session of course, as well. Now, of course there’s gonna be variation to this. Some people come in with a whole bunch of questions even before we start to talk about their goals.

And if that’s the case, we just make a natural pivot, which again, be flexible, deal with what emerges, you know, the usual hypno at hypnotic routines. So again, setting the rules of the universe. We’ve so far discussed how it is that I set my hours working with clients, how it is that I set the mindset in terms of how we navigate throughout the session.

Another adjustment recently, and this is something I just recently published inside of Hypnotic Business Systems. The name of this was modeled after Michael Port from his book. Book Yourself Solid. It’s the mindset of the Velvet Rope strategy that, And, go ahead, check this out. You can head over to Virginia hypnosis.com and see this in action so that nowadays in the most polite way, I can manage it.

If someone were to call me. They hear that they should actually go to my website and schedule a specific call back time, and the main call to action on the Virginia Hypnosis website is click here to schedule your 20 minute strategy session. Now, there’s a trade off for this, which is that nowadays I am receiving less inquiries, less people are reaching out to me because from a hypnotic mindset, You’ve heard me on this program before.

Talk about the premise of compliance proceeds suggestibility by putting a few more action steps between the initial curiosity and the actual reaching out to discuss their process by having a few more steps in those procedures. I’m getting less inquiries, but higher quality ones. So the trade off was I went from getting about 10 to 15 new calls a day, which is really good to really getting about three or four a day, but booking practically every single one.

And I think that’s a better use of their time. In mind, which I’ll just basically expedite this section to say, just simply head over to Virginia hypnosis.com and see that actually in motion. And for those of you inside of hypnotic business systems.com, that’s where I teach that step by step and give you the exact software that I’m using to pull that off.

But again, by scheduling those blocks. So let’s rewind out. There’s a willingness to set aside time, a willingness to actually block off, time to be for specific purpose. So again, my schedule nowadays is I see a 10 o’clock, a one o’clock and a four o’clock, and basically for three different segments throughout the day.

There’s like either two or three of those phone inquiry spots that are open. Sometimes, like if I’ve been out of town, Coming back from hypno thoughts live out in Vegas. I actually set up the Monday of this week, first day back in the office after being gone for a while to be actually mostly calls, which not for bragging rights, but yesterday I had about six of those phone consults and booked every single one of them.

So again, it’s about getting a higher quality rather than just the quantity as well. So by scheduling those specific blocks and also at times being willing to block off specific. Rules of the universe. Here’s another mindset behind this. That ability to block off time to build things that have greater scale.

So what I’m getting at is if I’m not willing to not book an appointment, let’s say this coming Wednesday, tomorrow at one o’clock, because there’s a specific thing I need to record to go into one of my online programs. Sometimes there’s the game of found time. Sometimes there’s the game of harnessing time that would normally be lost.

I forget whose story it was. I’ve now modeled this one around. If I’m going to the doctor’s office, not to be the workaholic, but I’m gonna bring along my computer. Why? Because I don’t need to sit there and read People magazine and see what Taylor Swift is up to this week, cuz Katie Perry’s. More awesome anyway, but I’m not gonna use that time to just simply waste.

There’s gonna be the ability that there’s always gonna be some collection of emails that need responded to some bit of writing that needs to be done. And rather than waste 20 minutes seeing what T Swift is up to this week though, the new album is pretty good, but it’s gonna be the mindset of using that time in a much.

Valuable way. My dentist is the one who goes, I’m the only patient he’s ever had that made him wait that here I was one morning for a nine 15 appointment and at nine forty five they finally call me back. At which point I go, I need another five minutes. And he walks out and goes, No one ever says that.

And I go, Well, if you made me wait for 30 minutes, you can give me an extra five to finish this project. I’ll be with you short. And he smiled and his now since revealed that he uses the same strategy as well. Or you could schedule your day. Rant over . The similar note to this is that mindset of batch producing, which this program that you’re listening to is an excellent, excellent example of that.

I typically only record this podcast several times a year. This session this week is a bit of an exception because I’m coming down in the morning before the kids wake up to record this specific episode because just some timing things got in the way and we had to reschedule some appointments. But it’s where oftentimes if I’m recording interviews, I’ll take one specific day and I’ll record like three or four of them and run the math on a weekly podcast.

That now means I’m done for the next month, or even specific timeframes where I’m using a really excellent podcast production company, and I know they take almost all of the month of July off. So even before heading out to Vegas for two weeks of hypno thoughts, this program was. Several months in advance, and again, with further travel coming up for Australia and other events, we’re gonna be back in that batch production mode once again.

You know, the biggest issue, anything technology, If you’re shooting videos for promoting your local business, if you’re doing some writing for your website, the biggest issue at times is the setup and the take down. So anything you can do to expedite your schedule that it used to be that if I was setting up the video camera in my office.

I was only allowed rules of the universe. I was only allowed to do that if I was shooting multiple videos. Now in the recent move of Virginia hypnosis and the rebuilding of the technology of the office, that’s now changed because my central office where I do all my admin stuff, is now a permanent video production studio.

So other than having to reposition a ring light that now mounts on top of my computer, it, I can set up a new video in a matter of 10 seconds. Which was specifically built out in that purpose. I mentioned that trip to Australia coming up as well, that originally to get personal here, that originally was going to be a family vacation.

However, with the kids, just going back to school with my wife, going through a licensing process and an upcoming bit of a medical thing that we’ve gotta work around, basically that’s now become, A solo trip, which quite honestly, at first I was dreading and then I realized, oh wait, here’s this major project that I’m now building and I’m gonna have 48 hours of travel going out to Brisbane and back, and you better believe that project is going to be done by the time I’m back.

Well, at least the background’s, the slide deck and all the technology of that specific project. So again, making use of found time rather than going, I can’t find the, There’s plenty of time out there, which, let me sidebar here for a moment. For a bit of a story. A story that many of you know that I used to work in professional theater and I wasn’t an actor, I wasn’t a director or a designer, was basically my job to manage all the creative personalities and help all those creative types get along.

And if that’s not psychological training, I don’t know what is on a similar. Being a backstage technician, a stage manager, you know, the maintenance of the ongoing production. So it still had the integrity of the first performance after that thing had run for several hundred performances. So that’s where I learned the mental stamina to work with clients for long days.

That’s where I learned the value of building systems and the way. The business basically helps to run itself because once we had figured out the production, we knew this scenery couldn’t fly in until this piece of scenery removed. This actor queue was called after this prop left the stage and so forth.

So whether you have any experience in professional production or not, doesn’t matter because if you’ve been involved in any kind of stage performance, you’ve already heard someone say, Make sure you can stand so the audience can see your face. That like the number one rule of theater or giving a public presentation is stand so the audience can see you.

Which by the way, for the stage hypnotist out there, be mindful of the amount of time you spend with your back to the audience. And let me just call it out. It’s kind of silly that you’re facing your volunteers and, uh, talking to them because their eyes are closed. They can’t see you, and chances are you’re using a microphone in a stage performance so they can absolutely hear you.

And this is just a little side note of the ability to put variation into your presentation. You know, back when I was doing that full time, I would most often be looking at the audience, delivering suggestions to my volunteers because, well, why look at them? Because they can’t see that I’m trying to make eye contact with their closed eyes, you know?

And again, adding texture to the program In a moment, the people behind me are gonna discover. And yes, there’s value of checking in with your volunteers and seeing who’s the most deeply hypnotized, who’s the most responsive. But you could pick up all of that in the midst of doing your actual skits and routines.

Hypnotic stage management now over. So there’s this professional performance we were a part of one time. And it was the Play All Wilderness by th Thornton Wadler, the same playwright who wrote the the Play Our Town. And you can imagine that this is now a play with big family. Everything from the teenage kids to the grandparents, and because these are all actors, let me call out some obvious components for those of you not keeping up with the story here, which again is true though it’s gonna pose an amazing metaphor for us, which is that you can imagine the actors playing the grandparents.

We’re very likely much older than the actors playing the teenagers. And because of that, as they were in this performance, these were actors who had been professionally acting for now going on more than 60 years. Very seasoned performers when meanwhile, the actors playing the teenagers were actually people who were in their early twenties, you know, because of child labor laws.

But better yet, these. Te. These were actors in their early twenties who looked very young. You know, here’s a friend of mine that she was so excited that she finally got to play an adult. She’s an actress up in Chicago, and basically ever since I knew her, when we were both 18 years old until recently, where we’re both now 36, she goes, I finally look old enough to play a 20 year.

Which most people would not be excited about that she is cuz she’s kind of tired of playing teenagers. So because of this, you could imagine now the actor playing the main teenager, the main sort of protagonist of this play was someone that he was fresh out of grad school. This was his first real professional performance and you could imagine.

Let’s call it out. Given the state of things that are educational scenario here in the us he’s now about $75,000 in debt. He’s now not really earning much because nonprofit theater is, you know, really not much of a money maker for people involved. I flash back to actors who would talk about, yeah, I did this major play up in Chicago for about four months, but then I played a dead body on law and order, and I earned more money in a weekend than I did in eight weeks of performance.

So again, nonprofit theater. So he’s now in his first professional performance, and you can imagine his frustration when this director, a Tony Award-winning director, is now telling him as soon as he comes on stage, you need to stand with your back to the audience. And clearly something about this bothered this young actor.

You know, maybe he was in his head considering the fact that, you know, perhaps as it was for most actors, his parents were concerned that he was gonna go into this career path and now they’d be in the audience staring at the back of his head. How was that gonna go? His girlfriend was gonna travel across the country to see him in his first professional performance.

And again, there he’d be with his back to the audience. And again, in rehearsal, it’s a symbiotic relationship where the actors are making suggestions, the director’s making suggestions, and they’re basically going into several weeks of experimentation to see how do we make this performance work? Well, what if I stand over here by the table?

What if I’m helping set the table? What if I’m over here watching the kids play? And again, clearly he’s looking for many more options to not stand with his back to the audience, at which point the director realizes. Something has to be said. The director gets up and walks over to this young man and says to him in a stage whisper, which means everybody can hear it.

I’m giving you a gift. I’m having you enter the stage with everyone else, but stand with your back to the audience because on the next page of dialogue of the script, you have the most important line of the entire play. You have the one piece of dialogue that sets the conflict of the story in motion, and if people miss that one sentence that you get to say, they’re not going to understand the rest of this.

I’m giving you a gift because by having you stand with your back to the audience, the moment you turn around and face the audience, there won’t be a set of eyes in the audience that are not looking directly at you. I’m giving you a gift because you’re gonna get to make a second entrance the moment you turn around and deliver that most important line of this play.

Well, as you might imagine, this actor was very pleased. Now that he understood why he was standing with his back to the audience and the rest of the story, the anecdote of it is that the actor then spent the rest of the performance, the rest of the rehearsal process, fighting to get more opportunities to turn his back on the audience, cuz he was always looking for that gift of that second interest to the point the director finally had to say to him, I’m just giving you one that’s enough deal with it.

And everyone laughed at. So to consider for a moment, what happens is you take better control of your time. What happens as you break away from what’s working? Because the final message to share with you is to allow yourself to embrace discomfort. In comfort in a presentation, which I’m gonna be slowly editing and pulling out chunks and maybe releasing as a podcast, or at least just putting it up online.

There was a look of terror in the eyes of someone in my audience back in Vegas, where I talked about the willingness to take client session blocks and not book people. This is the real reason why I put a scheduling software in motion in my business because now as I put my clients in control of booking their time, they can’t book that time slot tomorrow at one o’clock where I’m gonna be there working on a project.

I could look at it and go, Hey, look, if I see a new client that’s minimum $300, if I book a stop smoking client that’s like 650, hey, I could use that. Hey, I just had to replace my car. Let me clear away that production time and instead book a new person. However, the things that have really scaled my business up year after year came about because of that willingness to take time away from what’s working right now to build something that’s gonna create value in the.

So consider what will happen in your life, what will happen within your productivity, within your business, or even your personal life. As you take that moment to figuratively and maybe even literally turn your back on what’s working right now to build something else, to now make that new interest. The ference to a new market, to new possibilities, to really take control of your mind, to really take control of your own universe, to really take time of your own time management, because as you set those rules for yourself, That’s where, as we like to say, you can truly make it rain.

Hey, it’s Jason Lynette here. Thank you once again for interacting with this program, for leaving your reviews online and sharing this on your social media streams. Again, head over to the show [email protected] for more details on this week’s episode. And also, again, check out hypnotic business systems.com.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. There’s no need to have to start from scratch when you’re trying to really either start seeing clients or scale up your. I’ve published it all inside of hypnotic business systems.com. Now available on an all access pass on an extended payment plan. That way you can earn back the investment in even more, even before you finish paying off the course.

Check that out, hypnotic business systems.com. See you on the inside. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast and work smart hypnosis.com.