Session #246: Duff McDuffee on Resilience to Stress

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 246, Duff McDuffy on Resilience to stress. 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. So why do you think you were able to change so easily now?

Hey, it’s Jason Lynette and welcome back to the program. And this week we’ve got Andrew Duff McDuffy. And this is quite honestly a conversation I’ve been wanting to capture for quite some time. And we had it, and man, did he deliver. In fact, you’re gonna hear some really cool moments where he just dropped these, as we call them on the web these days, knowledge bombs, where there were some serious knowledge bombs dropped.

And you’re gonna hear me really unpack some of the languaging that he shared. Cuz let’s call it out. One specific element that he highlighted, I’m going to be immediately implementing within some of the work that I do when it’s a right fit for my clients. And on top of that too, be sure you head over to the show notes [email protected] because at least the timestamp of the conversation once it begins, probably about maybe 45, 46 minutes into the total recording.

Duff did my favorite thing, which is where I ask about a specific technique. And as we like to say, show is always better than tell and rather than describe the technique, well he just started doing it, which of course, as we’ve done before, I’m gonna have my technical team, aka nerds in the back, go off and pull a transcription of that and we’re gonna put the full transcription of that specific technique in the show notes.

[email protected]. That’s where you can also learn how to connect with duff. You’ll learn about the upcoming winter H P T I I C B C H conference, which is happening in February, 2020, which duff’s gonna be a speaker at talking about the programming, putting the programming back into neurolinguistic programming.

It’s an amazing event coming up. Day one is gonna feature a full day training. Kelly T. Woods and Karen Hand, who happens to be my favorite hypnotist, but don’t tell the others. Doing a full day presentation on working with groups. The day will wrap up with Tracy Barrett Adams talking about birthing as well as fertility issues.

And then there’s some guy who wears too much purple than host a podcast doing the keynote to kick off the day. Hey, it’s me, but I’m gonna be talking about the themes of hypnotic framing in the themes of how we actually stack the process influentially in such a way that we can create even greater results.

It’s gonna be officially, I think, the first time I’ll be talking about one of my favorite themes going placebo on techniques that actually work. So how do we take the stuff that we already do that we know works and make it work even as we like to say, more good or better? So again, check out the show [email protected].

That’s where you’ll see the links as well over to boulder hypnosis works.com. That’s Boulder, not like the Rock, but Boulder like the city in Colorado, which is where Duff is located. Again, that transcription of this specific technique. So take some notes. In this conversation because there’s some really cool takeaways of some really fascinating methodologies and just ways of looking at how we build that resilience within our clients.

And there’s a theme that I love that he highlights here. Which is that it’s not just about acknowledging the feeling, it’s not just about understanding the feeling, of course, it’s also about then getting that foot in the door as we both agree to then change that reaction and get things in motion, and plus a really cool conversation about when it’s appropriate to sort of become that ongoing resource for your clients.

So this kind of fits into my favorite theme of, we basically had a good three hour conversation. In about maybe 46 or 47 minutes. So there’s a lot of great information here as well. So begin, check out the show [email protected] and while you’re there to head over to Hypnotic Business Systems.

Dot com. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it’s time to grow your thriving successful hypnosis business. So we briefly talk about client intake, client feedback strategies that’s fully detailed in hypnotic business systems. Plus all the various booking strategies that I’ve used over the years to build a thriving hypnotic practice, which now has reached all around the world.

Check that out. Get the all access pass over at hypnotic business systems. Dot com. And with that, let’s jump directly into this phenomenal conversation. Here we go, episode number 246. Use those muscles Duff McDuffy on resilience to stress.

So I think the first time I. Was even aware of hypnosis as a thing that human beings could do was in college. Uh, a friend of mine gave me a book on self hypnosis that he got from his dad. It must have been from the fifties or sixties. I don’t even remember what it was called anymore. I wish I could find it, but it was all about guiding yourself into a relaxed state of trance.

And I thought that was pretty intriguing. So I tried some of the exercises and honestly, I couldn’t quite get them to work. I could only get them to work a tiny. And some of the first things this author recommended was to put your body to sleep. And I was like, How do you do that ? So I was experimenting with things and I couldn’t get my whole body to go to sleep, so I started experimenting with just my feet and trying to put my feet to sleep.

And I used a kind of dark visualization. I don’t do this with my clients nowadays, but it worked for me at the time. I imagined what it would it, what would it feel like? If I just was actually dead and I didn’t have to move my body, I didn’t have to tense any of my muscles in my body because you know, I just didn’t have to do that anymore.

And for some reason that was the key thing that actually started to work for me to put me into a relaxed state of trance. And that was some of the first experience I had. And so I started playing with this a lot. Yeah. I just wanna branch off of that for a second. Yeah. Cuz I’d share almost an identical thing that, uh, I was actually in a hypnosis training officially learning self hypnosis and the exact same description of, it’s a, it was a variation on Jerry kind’s light, Which self hypnosis dropped the finger, the entire body shuts down.

Mm-hmm. . And the feedback of, well, how was that for you? It felt like my body was. That was amazing. Followed by them, of course. Going, Yeah. Don’t, don’t say it that way. To your clients. . Yeah. I’ve never done that with my clients, but some reason work for me. This opens up two side dialogues, which is that we can claim the seemingly quote negative language for ourselves if, If it serves us Yeah.

At a guy one time, go I, you know, I wanna become appropriately obsessed with. Like, Okay, yeah, we can work with that. Sure. But also the difficulty of, you know, learning self hypnosis, learning some of these things from a book. So before we really get into everything else here, how does that translate over to nowadays you’ve got someone in front of you and you’re gonna teach them something.

Does that inform how you kind of bridge that connection? How you perhaps demonstrate the process with. Well, you know, I’ve learned a lot since then, so I have a lot more tools than I did, uh, , you know, when I first came across that book. But, you know, even just the idea of dead weight, you know, sometimes people say that and you know, some hypnotists are like, Oh, don’t say that.

You’re saying the word dead. Mm-hmm. . But sometimes I’ll throw that in there and I’ll explore and experiment to. Find out what works best for the individual I’m working with. I think that’s the real thing I took away from that. And also, I was an especially difficult client, so I like to keep that in mind.

But I’m working with challenging people is that there’s always a way to get there, but at first it might be tricky to sort through for certain people. The vast majority of people, I do a, you know, a standard induction or a standard process. Have a great experience, but there are, you know, maybe 10 or 20% of people who are challenging and have need some more sorting.

Mm-hmm. And I was definitely one of those people too. Yeah. Yeah. So then what was that next step of kind of formalizing that training, looking for more information? Well, a lot of what I did at first was very informal, so growing up I had a lot of my own issues. I think that some, sometimes why people get into this field.

I grew up what they, at the time we’d call shy, but now we’d call autism spectrum generalized anxiety, social anxiety, sensory processing disorder, all sorts of things that sort of clustered together. So growing up I, I had a few friends, but I didn’t have a ton of friends and the world just sort of felt overwhelming to me, which is a typical.

Description that people on the autism spectrum often give that loud noises touch, you know, food taste kind of strange as a picky eater. All these things sort of clustered together to make the world a little overwhelming, actually very overwhelming for me, to the point where I would often withdraw, had a hard time holding eye contact and on and on.

And so part of exploring hypnosis and then later also neurolinguistic programming. Was for me trying to figure out how do I deal with this? How do I deal with my own responses to the world in a way that I’ll be more resilient to stress and be able to handle what’s going on out there. And also connect with people because sometimes I had a challenging time connecting with people cuz of social anxiety.

So in college I explored a number of things, uh, including that self hypnosis. From that book, I was a philosophy major at the time, which is about as abstract and heady as you can get . So even just connecting with my body and trying to make it dead and feel that relaxation in my body was real challenging for me.

But what I liked about philosophy was actually a branch of philosophy called philosophy of mind. So trying to understand how we do what we do in terms of our cognition. You know, why do we even have cognition? Why do we even have awareness of things, and how does that relate to our body, our brains, and the outside world?

And what comes together is a field called cognitive science. So I was taking classes in linguistics. I was taking classes in cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, and I was trying to piece together how does the world work? How do human beings work? How does psychology work from this sort of very abstract, philosophical place and this scientific study.

and that was all very interesting, but it wasn’t helping me personally. Mm-hmm. , it wasn’t really helping me to relate better to the world, to transform my anxiety, to function better, to relate with people. And so I kind of got burned out on it. You know, my professors thought I should go and become a professor of philosophy.

I probably would’ve been really good at that, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. So after college, I really started getting into personal growth, reading books, trying to figure out are there any methods that really help to transform your experience and relate better to the world, and right their distress and this sort of thing.

And I read a bunch of things. I experienced a bunch of things, and most of them weren’t really doing that much for me. They were giving me more information, more intellectual experience, and somehow I stumbled upon dancing. Hmm. Of all things, , I had had several experiences in my life where I’d danced and not very many, three or four, and they’d always been like this.

So there’d be a bunch of people dancing, there’d be all this music. I’d be sort of standing on the edge of it, freaking out and wanting to participate, but not knowing how, because I couldn’t understand it intellectually. Why were people moving like this? You know, What were people doing that they were having fun?

And I was m. So I was trying to figure this out with my head and it wasn’t working, and I had a couple breakthrough experiences where I was able to just move my body and I wasn’t planning what I was gonna do, and I wasn’t trying to do anything in particular. It was just fun. And not only was it fun, it was ecstatic.

It was liberating. And it took me many years later to realize that that was a trance state that I had broken through the conscious mind into just the unconscious spontaneity of exploring and expressing. And it was amazing. It was amazing, and I couldn’t repeat it. , and so I got obsessed with going out and dancing in my early twenties and just trying to find that state again, trying to find that flow, that trans state that I had accidentally tapped into, and also got me into my body, and also got me relating with people and enjoying life and being creative and all that.

You know, it brings me back to a quote that I learned from Marie Mongan, from HNA Birthing that some of the happiest people you’d ever meet are completely outta their minds. . . No, because they’re just in the experience. They’re not thinking about it. Yeah. They’re just experiencing what’s going on and, you know, some similar tendencies of, you know, observing the experience rather than fully being in the experience.

Right. Have, have you developed strategies over the years to be able to get close to that? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Now that experience is very close. You know, it took, it took a while for me to get out of my planning mind, my conscious mind, and operating from that mode 24 7 into being able to just express and be spontaneous.

In fact, even doing a podcast interview like this would’ve absolutely terrified me many years ago. Now, it’s not that hard at all. It’s just talking with Jason. No big deal. But that’s the sort of thing, , I mean, Jason’s pretty intimidating. Well, thanks . But yeah, just even having a free flowing conversation, conversations are.

You know, and I’m not planning every word that’s coming outta my mouth. Mm-hmm. . Whereas actually I used to do that, you know, before I’d have a conversation with somebody, I tried to plan out everything I was gonna say, because what if this and what if that and what if this and that was sort of the essence of the social anxiety is trying to have everything controlled and planned in advance, which doesn’t work.

And that’s not how we live our lives. You know, as hypnotists, we know that that. We live better when we’re, uh, you know, living from the wisdom of our unconscious mind. Mm-hmm. and we’re able to be spontaneous and present in the moment, but it took me a long time to get there, so I like to help other people to get there quicker so it’s not as painful.

Yeah. I was about to ask how this has come up in terms of working with clients where these are, these are common issues that we often hear that expectation of, I’m gonna be able to have, to have control over this situation, which, well, comfortably we don’t really have control over much. . We may have the perception that we do, but again, no.

Yeah. I really am influenced by the stoic, the philosophers of ancient Roman Greece, and there’s this one stoic named Epictetus who was a slave, and then he was freed and became a teacher of stoicism, and he has this very simple saying, Some things are within our power, while others are. The basic idea got translated into the Serenity Prayer, which is how most people know it now.

You know that bit about accepting the things you can’t change, the courage to change the things you can, the wisdom to know the difference, and it’s such a basic, fundamental concept, but obviously easier said than done. Mm-hmm. . So I think a lot of what we’re doing as hypnotists and a lot of what I do in my work, Is actually just trying to help people make that distinction and accept those things that are outside of their power and change those things that are in their power.

And one of the interesting things I think about hypnosis and NLP is there’s actually a lot more in our power than we realize because a lot of the things that are automatic, the automatic feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, They’re not directly in our conscious control, but through hypnotic processes or NLP techniques, we can transform the things at the unconscious level or influence them so that they start going in different ways automatically.

Yeah, I mean, you’ve shared some really outstanding personal insights towards that is their story of working with a client and some, somehow the result that they got that best illustrates. Yeah, there’s a, there’s a lot of stories of clients, but I’ll tell one that I worked with recently that’s just very simple, works for a nice story.

So I had someone come in and, you know, this person was actually struggling with an unusual problem, which is that they had not been super successful in their career before, but suddenly they’re getting a lot of attention. A lot of success and getting overwhelmed by all that attention and success such that they were not checking their emails or text messages.

Mm-hmm. and mail and not getting back to stuff for weeks and months at a time. And that was not so good. So we worked with that. We worked with actually a method that I’ve developed, I call the rapid centering technique and involves transforming the feeling. and shrinking ’em down, bringing ’em into your center in your body, in your lower belly and digesting them fully nice so you can reuse that energy throughout your body.

Very simple, very elegant. And there happened to be layers upon layers of things. So it wasn’t just like an anxiety about getting back to it or, you know, I don’t remember all the specific things, but there was like, you know, something about like, Oh, people are trying to control me in my time and. You know, and this person was pretty surprised that that was coming up.

They didn’t think that was even there, but we transformed layer after layer and by the end they felt very neutral. I asked them, you know, Do you want to feel neutral towards these things? And, and they said, Oh, well actually I’d like to have some motivation to do them. So we added in some motivation with some simple anchoring, you know, brought up what that would be like to be motivated.

In another context, borrow. And put it in that context of checking emails and text messages and getting back. And then we also create a practical strategy because this person was very time limited and they needed to plan when they were gonna do that. So we created the strategy for when exactly to do that.

And afterwards they said, Oh, it’s totally cleared up. Now, not everything works in one session that way, . I wish it did, but that was a particularly successful session. That was very straightforward, you know, and, and that’s what I found is so great about these tools. You know, for years and years I struggled to find anything that would work up the direct level like that.

I just isn’t very common knowledge, you know, outside of the world of hypnosis and nlp. You know, if you go to hypno thoughts live every year like I do, and you. You know, dozens and dozens of techniques are taught every year like that, that work very directly. But if you go to psychotherapy networker as Steve Andrea, who I worked for for many years would go to, he would come back and say, And express how frustrated he was that nobody taught any direct technique at all.

From what he could tell, it was all intellectual knowledge about human beings. Wow. Yeah. Um, you know, and about depression and about anxiety and these sorts of things, but there were no demos. There were no, like, this is how you do it. And he would always keep pressing people for that, and they just thought he was.

Well, I mean, to look back at, you know, part of your backstory on this, you know, beginning with the philosophy, which is, you know, just to oversimplify it, , you know, coming at it from the why and here’s the explanation, as opposed to that transition into hypnosis and NLP follows up the question of, Yeah, but what are you gonna do about it?

Right? It’s really the how. Yeah. And that’s what we talk about a lot in our linguistic programming is, you know, if we ask why questions, we’ll get intellectual answers. We might even get answers that reinforce the problem. Like, Why am I such an idiot? Well, you know, because you messed up last week on this and that, you know, you’ll get.

Answers that aren’t very useful to resolving the problem. But if you start asking how questions like, How can I overcome this problem? How can I automatically feel more confident in the social situation? Oh wow. Now that’s a useful question and what I’ve appreciated so much. I’m mostly in the NLP world.

What I’ve appreciated so much about that is it’s very step by step. Mm-hmm. , it’s, you know, this is step one, this is step two, this is step three. Now the steps don’t always work for every person. You have to be a little flexible with them, but like a recipe for cooking a meal, you know, I can’t cook if I don’t have a recipe, you know, but give me a recipe and I’m amazing.

Uh, . And that’s how I started out in an lp. I was like, Well, I don’t know how to help myself or others. But, oh, there are these recipes. I can try them out. Mm-hmm. and see how they work. Yeah. That end up something that’s interesting that, you know, here’s a hypnosis training where sometimes it becomes, Okay, so here’s our next technique.

Let’s do a demo of it. And the most pure of, let’s say, the more NLP minded demonstrations have kind of almost taken the shape of someone suddenly says something and the demo turns into, Ooh, I do something else here. . Mm-hmm. . That. No, I love that transition of getting out of the the why into the how. Here’s the client who calls up and I’ll get this call like once every other month of I wanna find out why I drink so much.

And the follow up question, that becomes great. We can do that now. What would you like to do with that information? Mm-hmm. . Well, I’d like to stop. It’s like, well, why don’t we focus on that? Right. Um, then again, the favorite catchphrase these days is to never, ever, ever use absolutes. Which of course never.

Yeah, that’s an absolute. So when would you break that rule? At what point would you pull out the why, if any? Yeah, I think actually why is useful after you’re done? Yeah. Hmm. So why is it that you were able to change today? Oh, nice. You know, why is it that you know, you’re no longer anxious in these social situations?

And then that creates reasons that support the change or support the belief, which is why it’s not useful. Ask that question about the problem state. I wanna highlight that for everybody to ask the why question. I just took note of that, to ask the why question after you’re done, because then the mind, here’s how I wrote it down, then the mind is creating its own cause and effects and its own complex equivalence is as to why the issue’s no longer there.

Right. I, I, you know, I didn’t learn that myself. I got that from a friend who’s a therapist, . Yeah. And he emphasized. It took me a while to get what he was talking about, but he, you know, cause I’m like, Oh, you know, just change at the unconscious level. You’re done. No problem. Yeah. And he’s like, No, no, no. Add in the conscious reasoning too, to support the change.

So then it’s both conscious and unconscious. It’s even stronger. I thought that brilliant. Yeah, I mean that’s, that’s one of the biggest reasons why the, the most recent virtual conference, which this presentation will probably around New Year’s or Christmas, be a podcast episode around getting, uh, client testimonials, which as much as, yes, that’s the thing that drives my business nowadays as much as I’m the guy teaching, here’s Facebook marketing search engine optimization.

What’s really bringing people in nowadays are all these testimonials and all these social proof things online. But really behind all of that, beneath it all is the reality that that’s reinforcing the client’s story. Hmm. So I’m asking that testimonial really. Not just for my benefit though. It’s an amazing benefit.

It it’s really because now they’re getting to tell a different story as to the one they felt they were stuck inside of. Right. You know, and I think that’s important because, Story doesn’t change too. It can, They might get the change at the unconscious level at first, but they might revert back because they had this other story about who they are and what they’ve always been.

And if that doesn’t also shift, then it can sort of interfere with the change. Yeah. Yeah. Which, I mean, I’ve always, at the end of the process, been asking the question of, so what’s different? What do you notice now? We’ll put yourself in that situation, but to throw in that kicker, I want everyone to hear this is something I’m putting into use right away.

Thanks. Do of what’s your phrasing around? Let’s get specific on that. Well, you ask why questions. Why is it that you’re this way now? Why is it that you were able to change these sorts of things? Nice. Nice. Which I know one of the themes that I’ve heard you talk about before is that of resilience to stress, which just to kick that off, that’s kind of building that presupposition that yes, there is going to be stress.

Mm-hmm. , but it’s, the reaction to it is what we’re really addressing. Right? Yeah. And whenever we’re talking about stress, We really need to divide it into two things, the stressor, the external thing, and the stress response, which is internal. And of course, you know, even in cognitive behavioral therapy, they talk about how the response is optional.

And that’s the same thing in stoicism. The external thing is not in your power. The internal thing technically is even though you might not be in your conscious control right now, the stress response is of course generated by the autonomic nervous system. We usually think of it as fight flight or fight flight or freeze, potentially.

So it’s an automatic response. It’s not in your conscious control, but. One of the things we do in hypnosis and NLP is influence those things that are not in our conscious control, that are controlled by our unconscious mind or our body through various methods. So we can take control of those things or influence them in ways that are more useful.

So when we’re talking about resilience to stress, I think realistically. Things are gonna happen in your life that you’re not going to prefer. Right? From the, from the small to the large, from slow internet and traffic to, you know, people you love passing on. If you live long enough, that’s gonna happen quite a bit, unfortunately.

So we have to think about how, or we don’t have to, but I think it’s useful to think. How we’re going to respond to these things and to prepare for them. And of course there’s already things happening right now that are stressing us out whether we like it or not. You know, even if we’re very positive people, we always have some sort of thing that gets to us.

And for me, I. Sort of reframing things positively. Sometimes works, but oftentimes wouldn’t work just on its own, you know, to just call anxiety, excitement. Mm-hmm. . And some people say that’s a good way to go, and there’s some research backing that up because it’s a similar response in the body, right? It’s just, uh, you know, so the flight response can be.

Exciting or terrifying, but it is based on sort of how much control you feel and that’s not generated by my conscious mind. So for me, that sort of reframe didn’t work very well. I needed ways to actually transform that response so I didn’t have it. Uh, you know, at first I did a lot of meditation too, and meditation’s a wonderful thing.

A lot of us hypnotist also teach mindfulness and meditation can be a very useful tool to be able to notice the sensations in your body or sensations externally and to just become with. Okay, so I noticed this, uh, you know, butterflies in my stomach and it’s right here, and it’s about this size and oh, it, oh, now it’s going away.

Oh, now it’s getting stronger. You know, noticing those sorts of things can create kind of a detached, relaxed place where you’re just observing like a scientist or, you know, curiously, that can be a very useful first step, especially for change. But what I noticed in meditation communities is that people stopped there.

That was all they had to. Was just notice this and you know, that’s it. So I got really good at just noticing things and being present with them. In fact, I went on these 10 day meditation retreats called Vipa courses after a friend of mine encouraged me to go on one. It’s like the boot camp of meditation.

You get up at 4:00 AM to start meditating at four 30. You do about 10 or 11 hours of meditating a day nonstop in silence. You don’t talk for, uh, eight or nine days. Very, very intense. A lot of physical pain, and surprisingly, a lot of mental pain and suffering arises too. Just sitting there doing nothing.

You’d think that’d be very relaxing, but it’s actually very stressful. I’m drawing the inappropriate correlation to solitary confinement, but this Yeah, sort of like solitary confinement. That was like a nicer community where you went , Right? I and the United Nations has, has declared solitary confinement to be torture, so it’s not too far off.

Yeah, but since you choose it, it’s of course quite different. But there’s some similarities in the pain and the discomfort that you experience over those 10 days. But there’s also bliss and transformation, and there’s all sorts of things happening. And that was another reason, another way I got into my body and got into my experience.

But one thing I noticed after doing. A number of courses is I could now sit very presently while I was having a full blown panic attack and people wouldn’t necessarily even know, cuz I would just be internal and I’d be noticing it. And so I’d be very, very anxious. But I’d also have equanimity, sort of meta to that anxiety so I could notice it, but it was still very uncomfortable.

Right? You know better to not have anxiety than to be very present. And so I kept searching for tools. Yeah. Let me pause you there for a moment cuz that does at least get that foot in the door that, you know, the, the catch phrase of I’m not my thoughts or just my body is having anxiety in it right now.

Just that simple moment of dissociating out of it that, you know, this is often where that client is coming in, that this perception that, you know, now that I’m noticing this thing, I don’t have control over it. But something shifts there. There’s an interview we probably can’t link to it cuz I don’t think it’s still available widely out there, but it was back when Robin Williams was on the Mark Marinn WTF podcast, which is this amazing conversation to listen to, cuz basically for an hour, Robin Williams didn’t do any characters.

There were no bits, they just had a conversation, which there’s not many appearances where he did that. And he told the story of one of the times that he had relapsed. And basically what got him out of it was something similar to that. To be able to sit down and go, Okay, well I’m anxious right now because here’s what’s going on.

Here’s what’s bothering me, and, uh, here’s what I can actually do about it. Okay, well, I’m stressed right now because I’m shooting a movie. I don’t want to be shooting. I needed the money and this is where I am right now. Mm-hmm. . Okay. And that’s an excellent first step I think. I’m not knocking mindfulness, right, Or, or stepping back from your experience, you know, observer position as we say in NLP or dissociation, but dissociation as negative terms in psychology, but whatever.

Yeah. Which, which, if I may call your next shot that, you know, that may get that foot in the door. Yet we also as practitioners, wanna get in there and change that thing too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes the metaphor I use is, imagine you went to a very mindful car mechanic, , and he opens up the hood very slowly and gently and observes the what’s happening and says, We know exactly what’s happening with your car.

The carburetor has stopped functioning. Mm. That’ll be $900, that’ll be $900 . No, I want, I want my car to be fixed. I wanna drive it somewhere, man. I wanna use it. And so, you know, again, going back to this stoic idea, or the Serenity Prayer, the wisdom to know the difference between what I can change and what I can’t, so, I think sometimes in meditation communities and in mindfulness, the wisdom is lacking.

We have the awareness, but we don’t necessarily know, Okay, when should we act and when shouldn’t we? And it’s not always easy to know, right? Because when things are automatic, when emotions or thoughts or bodily sensations are automatic, Is that potentially in our control. And the vast majority of non hypnotists would say no.

Emotions just happen. Mm-hmm. . And that’s how we treat them. 99% of the time in our daily life, we don’t go up to people. And you shouldn’t go up to people who are crying and say, Hey, snap out of it. That’s in your control. . Yeah. That doesn’t work. Right. Cause it’s not in their direct conscious control. You know, it also doesn’t help to walk up to them and say, Hey, use your NLP techniques on that.

Mm-hmm. , even if they know them, because in the moment we don’t have access to that either, you know, But we can transform those experiences, those stressful experiences, you know, that’s why we start with empathy, to create some connection and then we can use a, a technique if someone’s open to, uh, help resolve things.

But, you know, most of the time people don’t believe that’s in our control, so we don’t do anything about it. The radical to me perspective of hypnosis and neuro-linguistic programming is that we can actually influence those things and change them. And over time, especially if we work with them, we can change so many things.

You know, it’s amazing what we can do, uh, sometimes very quickly with the right method and especially with practice over time. Yeah. Yeah. So then putting that in motion, so someone’s coming into your space. Kind of walk us through what that user experience often becomes. Sure. So, you know, the first thing I do is a free 15 minute phone call.

Talk with people about what it is that they’re looking for, and also a little bit about how I work. Uh, emphasizing that I work differently, I emphasize this internal experience. So a lot of the time your eyes are gonna be closed, you’re gonna be having some experience reporting back on it, et cetera, and then asking them what is it they want.

Mm-hmm. really a listing, their basic outcome. You know, nlp, outcome orientation. Trying to figure out what is it that you’re trying to get out of this so that I don’t, you know, solve a problem that they don’t even care about. Yeah. Or send ’em in a direction that they’re not interested. And particularly I like to ask them what would have to happen, you know, if we worked together.

Yeah. You’re looking back. What would have to happen for you to feel like, wow, I really got my money’s. And then they tell me and then I do that and then they feel happy.

It’s a good way of putting it. Yeah. . Yeah. And then we work for however many sessions that’s required to do that. And I’m also switching more towards a, uh, ongoing format as well. I used to be very solutions focused. Let’s get your solution as fast as possible. Mm-hmm. , And I’ll still do that for whoever wants that, but now I’m realizing.

Yes, that was the thing that was obvious to you starting off, but once you clear that up, it’s not like you never have any problems or stress anymore. Right? And in my own life, you know, what’s given me the most benefit was working with things over time, even on a daily basis, uh, especially with certain techniques that really bring about wholeness, that welcome all parts of your experience that don’t make anything wrong or bad, but really include everything.

So over time you become more of a. Authentic human being. And that to me has been the most valuable thing. Yeah. That brings up something beautiful cuz I had a class recently that we were having the conversation about how many sessions and my response was, well, you know, it depends. And I do to this day have a ton of ongoing clients.

Mm-hmm. and you know, it’s not the game of what are these days, you’re eventually gonna quit smoking. No, it’s that . Right. They came in for something, which the problem did begin. You know, moving out of problem into solution. But I found, and this, this kind of goes back to a business strategy thing, that when I first got my start working with schools, the whole conversation was not about selling the first show.

It was about building the tradition of coming back year after year and what’s gonna happen as we do that. And then as I moved outta that, easily able to put someone else in who kept those traditions running for me to look at how the more the process was focused on. instead of solving a problem, but helping you move into that better solution.

This is where the simplest of pivot to go, Hey, I think this is what we can do if we were to continue working on this. Mm-hmm. , where here’s, I’ll shorten the story, but here’s someone that, as I counted in my, in my notes the other day, I, I’ve seen her about 28 times. Now this is over the course of like the last six or seven years.

And again, no, we’re not just doing the same thing over and over cuz one of these days it’s gonna stick. No, it’s that from moving out of stopping smoking to moving out of losing weight to suddenly here’s the confidence of launching her own business. Here are the strengths of her relationships. Here are some personal things that are kind of in line with what you and I first began this conversation talking about.

And I love this because to look at where she is now. You know, this is the story that I may tell through indirect metaphor, that if someone goes, What if it wears off? To see that we’re no longer working on that smoking thing. It’s instead, here’s everything she was able to do as a result of not having to do that and, and the entire way through to give this model some defense would be that, you know, she has found something that worked for her and the entire way through.

I am constantly reminding. You know, you could use those things that I showed you . And she goes, Yeah, I know. And I get a better result when I go to the gym with my personal trainer. Exactly. What do you, Thursday next month? Yeah, that’s, that’s how I’ve been, you know, realizing things more and more recently, you know, in my own life I’ve often struggled with something.

That I feel like I don’t have sufficient self discipline. Mm-hmm. . And you know, one of the things I did recently that’s actually pretty interesting, I’ve recommended it to other people now. I discovered something called Cave Day. Have you heard of Cave Day, Jason? Oh, I’m excited about it already. . Tell me more.

So Cave Day, are you familiar at all with, with the book Deep Work? Yes. Okay. Excellent book. It’s all about how, you know, in today’s society, we are distracted all the time by all the shiny gadgets and all of the things notifying us and constant information, fire hoses that we don’t sit down and really focus.

on difficult, cognitively demanding tasks for long enough to really advance our careers and make a difference. Mm-hmm. . And so his whole thing is about, you know, what models are there out there and how can we create sort of a structure that blocks off time, blocks out distractions so we can focus, regain our ability to focus and develop our careers.

You know, do some writing, do some real deep thinking about something and so on. So Cave Day has taken this idea from the book, Deep Work. and uh, they started in person in New York and LA and they have in person meetings where people come in with their laptops and they have like three or four hours and you just crank things out.

You take little breaks as a group, you know, move around, focus on one thing, have little check-ins to make sure you’re still on track and so on. And they also have remote caves now that are on Zoom. It’s, you know, five to 20 people on Zoom checking in, working. I do this every Sunday night now for three and a half hours, and I’ve just been cranking out on a new website.

Nice. As a result, something that I’ve been procrastinating for months and months before that, and it’s so simple. You know, like part of me is like, why am I paying $35 a month for this ? I could just do this on my own. But the fact is I couldn’t do it on my own because I think human beings were just fundamentally social creature.

For millions of years, it was weird to go off and do your own thing. And so I think there’s still some part of our evolutionary psychology that’s like, if I go out and do my own thing, I’m gonna be expelled from the tribe and die. Mm-hmm. . But if you do it with a bunch of other people, even if the activity is super weird, like hypnosis or you know, moving your body in strange ways, in an exercise class, it’s totally normal cuz there’s 50 other people doing it with.

And so I feel like that’s a, a real thing that I’m gonna start tapping into as well with group classes because when it comes to. Resilience to stress. There are very effective ways to become more resilient, to transform our stress response when it’s not useful. And people won’t do it because it’s too weird.

Yeah, it’s too weird to tap on your face at home. It’s too weird to close your eyes and you know, imagine strange things happening in your body. But if you’re in a room of 20 people, you’ll do. Because it’s normal cuz now everyone’s doing it. Now I add flash two there. There’s basically three levels of products.

There’s teach you how to do it and let’s give the, teach you how to do it. A single dollar sign. Mm-hmm. , uh, there’s the do it with you, which is gonna be, let’s say $3 signs and then beneath that there’s done for you and let’s gonna be $15 signs in terms of the expense. No, I’m, and there’s a workshop that I went to earlier than this year where it was a full out implementation.

Workshop of, you know, let’s build this content together. And it was people from all different markets. And what was beautiful about it was they made it a point to build these clusters of tables where nobody was in the same industry. Mm. You know, they weren’t falling prey to the game of, Okay, well Jason, you’re a hip test.

Let’s put you at the table with the yoga instructor. Let’s put you the, the yoga instructors at this Adventist eventually gonna be on this podcast. Uh, let’s put you at the table. We were completely different markets. and it became this glorious kind of swipe file experience where now here’s a headline I’ve been using for some of my material, which was from a dating coach.

And you would never know and she would never recognize it either. And this aspect of actually doing it together, I mean, it’s where you know, this is the thing that, you know, I’ve popped up at times and you just hosted, Okay, we’re gonna build a product together. Here’s the template, everyone go off in your own directions.

Then even down to the simplest of example. Of just, you know, getting those things done the way that the entire family will clean the house together. . Yeah. Yeah. That looks true. We, we do as a family, it’s boring and put it off otherwise with you. And you hate the world because you’re doing it by yourself, but when everyone’s doing it, it’s a little bit better.

Yeah, exactly. And I think there’s so many things like that, like, you know, Know we’re coming up on the new year, I think when after this podcast is uh, launched. And virtually everyone who does an exercise will have the intention for a week or two to exercise regularly, and most people will not follow through.

But everyone who shows up to a CrossFit class exercises. Nobody just sits there on the corners and be like, I don’t think I’m gonna do it today. I’m just gonna watch. This makes me now ask an extremely personal question just to verify a joke that you used to be or may still be, uh, workout buddies with Mark Andreas, and you too will hype each other up with extremely literal language, right?

am I remembering this right? Yeah. Yeah. One of our, one of our cues while the other person is lifting is, Use your muscles . Sounds ridiculous, but you know, it is important. Right? Well, it’s good advice. I, I assume . Yes. Which somehow, I think when I first read that online a few years back, it locked in my brain.

I’m like, All right, use the muscles , use the muscles. It’s so easy to, to wimp out when you’re lifting the heavyweight, I think. Yeah. So let, let’s go back to something that you had hinted earlier just to kind of elaborate on this. This concept of digesting anxiety or digesting the emotional Yeah. Uh, could you elaborate on that?

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, There’s a very, very basic method. I taught this at hypno thoughts, uh, two or three years ago now that I developed called the Rapid Centering Technique. And the way I came across this actually was there’s a meditation technique from, uh, the guy who started Key I keto, not regular, rolled to keto, but a specific branch of a keto called Key I Keto.

And the key. Is like chi, you know, it’s about vital energy, whatever that is. And I don’t really know what that is, but there’s a subjective experience sometimes that correlates with that. And so the guy who created this key I Keto, had this meditation technique that involved the lower belly, the very center of the body where you’d imagine like, Something shrinking smaller and smaller and smaller into the center of the body.

I was like, Okay. And I tried it and I was like, Eh, I don’t really get it, but people are saying it’s really great. And I just kept trying it and playing around with it. And eventually I was like, Oh, duh. Turn into an NLP technique, Duff. Mm-hmm. . And so I did that. So it’s very simple. You start with a feeling in the body.

Well actually you start with a scenario. So let’s say someone feels anxious in a social situation, so you say, Great, think about that social situation. and step back into it and see what you see, hear what you hear and feel what you feel when you’re back there now. So what feeling do you feel? And they’ll say, Oh, anxiety, or whatever the feeling is.

And where do you feel that feeling in your body? And then you shut up and you let them answer. Mm-hmm. . And they say, you know, in my chest and throat. Okay, great. And how big is it? How far does it extend in the chest and throat? Is it, you know, like a narrow tube or does it take up your whole chest? And they tell.

and then you say, And what color is it? Uh, you know, from up until then, you’ve been asking sort of things that seem like they’re kinesthetic, but actually when you look back, all of those things could have been visual as well. The location, the size, the shape, and so on. The color, the color is absolutely visual, so some people be like, Huh, what do you mean color?

If it had a color, what would it be? Mm-hmm. , that sort of classic question. And they tell you, then you do a very simple visual. Imagine in front of you is a full length mirror. You can see yourself in that mirror. You can see your hair, the color of your hair, your face. You can see your shirt, the color of your shirt, and if you look down towards your belly button, below your belly button about two inches, and inside your body at the very center of your body, you can see a tiny little dot, like the size of a grain of sand, no bigger than a grain of sand, in fact.

And you could also see that, let’s say, red circular shape in your chest over there in the mirror, representing the anxiety. Now in a moment on the count of three, what I want you to do is imagine in and see in the mirror that red circular shape shrinking and getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until it fits inside that tiny little.in the center of your body over there as if there’s a powerful magnet or a black hole sucking it up.

Sh. On the count of 3, 1, 2, and three, see it happening in the mirror. Now all of that energy’s shrinking down smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until it’s sucked into that tiny little.in the center of your being and is absorbed within it now. And then you wait to see their face to see if they’re processing or if it’s happened and you say, Great.

Now that it’s all on your belly, because it’s in your belly, you can digest fully all that energy, eliminating any of it that you no longer. pH sending it back and fully digesting the rest. Just like you digest carbohydrates into glucose, digest fats into lipids, you break down proteins into amino acids.

You can break down that energy into pure energy and allow it to circulate throughout your body wherever it’s needed, trusting the wisdom of your unconscious mind to do that in the right time and the right place. And that’s the whole thing. Nice. And then you check in again and see how they’re feeling.

Now, sometimes it’s completely gone. Sometimes there’s still a little left of the same feeling. Sometimes there’s another feeling. Doesn’t really matter. You just do the same thing until they feel neutral and calm. And then you can also add in positive feelings with anchoring if you want. Depends on the context.

Yeah. And cool if we get that transcribed, put in the show notes over at the website. Yeah, feel free. Awesome. Yeah, we’ll get that done on little piece. Yeah, we’ll get that pulled out as a transcription and I’ll, uh, edit out the parts where I go. Oh, cool. Uh, , let that be. So that’s the most important part, isn’t I know, right?

Yeah. It’s, you need to have commentary of, Oh, that’s great. Inside of the process. This has been outstanding, haven’t you? On here, And it’s where we’ve, we’ve known of each other for many years. I think this is the longest real conversation we’ve had, and these are the favorite podcasts where we actually just get to, you know, sort of highlight the work that you’re doing.

What’s the best way for people to reach out? Yeah, if you go to uh, boulder hypnosis works.com, that’s Boulder, B O U L D E R, like Boulder, Colorado. Boulder hypnosis works.com. Outstanding. And you’re gonna be a speaker at the upcoming uh, H P T I Winter conference too, right? Yep. I’ll be in Las Vegas twice in 2020 for two conferences.

One in February and one in August. Hot damn. We’re really cold. Damn hot. Yeah, , right? I know the hypno thoughts presentations haven’t yet been announced, but what are you gonna be doing at the winter conference? At the winter conference, I’m going to be teaching on putting the programming back in neurolinguistic programming.

Nice. Go ahead and do that whole thing right now. Okay. . No, but briefly what, what does that entail? The basic idea is, you know, a lot of people, the neurolinguistic programing has, uh, you know, sort of three words in it. Neuro referring to the nervous system in brain, linguistic, referring to the language and how we represent things internally and programming, referring to computer program.

But no one really has updated the computer programming metaphor in neurolinguistic programming since, uh, I don’t know the seventies or eighties people have really taken on the neuroscience part, uh, especially, uh, Sean Carson, Sarah Carson, and that whole group, uh, the linguistics, Steve Andreas has really taken on, in his book Six Blind Elephants One and Two, which are excellent and very, very geeky if you haven’t read those.

But nobody’s really taken on the programming part as this, seriously. And I think there’s a lot of value. In thinking about computer programming and how it relates to the how the unconscious mind processes things. So I’m gonna make that very simple for you. You’re not gonna have to learn any programming languages, but it should be very interesting.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. We’ll put the transcription of that little demo in the show notes [email protected], along with links to your websites too there as well. Before we wrap it up, any final thoughts for the listeners out. Yes, I do have one final thought, which is if you wanna become more resilient to stress, which means being able to bounce back from what happens, not being affected as much by all the craziness in the world, and the world is pretty crazy right now.

I think there’s one simple key to that, which is, number one, find a technique that really works for you, that actually trans things, transforms things at the unconscious level. And then number two, Do it every day. Just work with it a little bit every day, even if that’s five to 15 minutes, if it’s 30 minutes, whatever you have time for.

But if you can work with your own experience a little bit every day, that will make a world of difference over weeks, months, and years time. Jason Lynnette here once again, and as always, thank you so much for interacting with this program, for sharing it on your social media streams as a ongoing resources education of this hypnotic profession.

And of course, We love you for going online and leaving outstanding reviews. You can do that either on Facebook, You can do that on the iTunes listing, or just simply share this anywhere you choose. Once again, head over to the show [email protected] where we can track down this episode. Top left.

Just type in Duff and that’ll bring you over to the episode that this is associated with. That’s we’re gonna see how to connect with Duff. That’s where you’ll see. The transcription of the demo that he did In the middle of this, uh, conversation, you’ll see links to the upcoming I C B C H Winter Hypnosis Conference.

It’s freezing right now in Virginia. I wanna go to Vegas now. That’s gonna be coming up in February. It’s still kind of cold there, but. Not this cold that’s coming up. All the details are [email protected]. And once again, check out hypnotic business systems.com. It’s featuring everything from Done For You Marketing campaigns, more than three dozen business action plans and content, which is publishing in the business systems library in December, 2019.

We keep adding to this thing. I’ve pulled the top 1000 organic keywords. That people were using to find the Virginia Hypnosis website. The ultimate sales conversation begins in the language of the consumer in the problem state, and it ends in the language of the consu of the expert in the solution state.

And this is a problem. A lot of hypnotist too, they try to talk in solution based outcomes, which that’s good, but your client is looking online. To solve their problem, so you’re gonna see exactly what words people are using. We’re gonna take all the guesswork out of what you do. This resource alone is a business action plan, ready to put in motion.

Get that along with the hundreds of other hours of content [email protected]. We’ll see you at Vegas twice coming up in 2020. Thanks for listen. I’ll see you soon. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast and work smart hypnosis.com.