Session #252: Michelle De Lude on Powerful Metaphors

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 252. Michelle delude on powerful metaphors. 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. What if the same way into the problem could also become the same way out of the problem?

And this is one of those greatest strengths I found in hypnosis. By utilizing the words that the client says and crafting metaphors to then position them as the hero of their story to then get out of. Hey there and welcome back to the program. It’s Jason Lynette and this is a podcast session. I’ve been excited to, uh, share with you for quite some time with Michelle Deluded out of the Portland, Oregon area, who, Michelle is someone who I got to know as she joined up with Hypnotic business Systems, my online business training community, and really seeing.

Put the information to use and truly excel with it. But over time, seeing some of the commentary she shared inside of the private Facebook group and truly seeing here’s someone who is a worker within this industry. And you’re gonna hear an interesting background how at one point being the employee in someone else’s hypnosis practice, which eventually that other business closed, and then realizing the need was there to get out there and represent herself.

As a professional in this industry. So you’re gonna hear some really interesting starting and stopping moments about what worked as well as perhaps what didn’t work. But also we’re gonna spend some ample time talking about the power of our own communication in terms of how we ask the right questions to our clients, how we elicit these powerful metaphors as the focus is this week in terms of crafting this artistic process as well as direct process that helps the client to interrupt that old ineffective story that they’ve been potentially stuck inside of, and now move into that new empower.

Result. So a lot of takeaways. This is one you may end up listening to a couple of times, plus a beautiful moment where she highlights a bit of an untapped market that most people in hypnosis might not yet be considering and realizing a little bit of a place that we can, um, well make the world a much more happier, peaceful place, well as finding the positives out of what we can in our lives rather than the traditional negatives.

This, unfortunately, too many of us may do from time to time. So listen to this one. A lot of great information. You can find links in the show notes [email protected] to learn how you can connect with Michelle, and I’d encourage you as well check out of course hypnotic business systems.com. This is the program that Michelle references in our conversation, and as of now, it’s more than 150 hours of business training content, specifically engineered.

For the hypnosis profession. This is not theory. These are the things that I’ve tested for you, and as you’re hearing, my folks around the world have duplicated as well, and it delivers as several dozen specific action plans because you can’t do everything right away. So instead, Focus and think of that word, focus as an acronym.

F O C U S Follow one course until success. So that’s where you can check out the digital version of my training, though just recently announced that. I’m so excited to invite you along with this ride. Check out the six Figure Hypnosis practic. Blueprint hypno thoughts live in Las Vegas has easily become in about the last 10 years, the biggest and the best hypnosis conference, not just in the US, but really the entire world.

If you’ve never been to this conference, you owe it to yourself to make it a priority to join us as about a thousand hypnotists from all around the world, gather together for this incredible giving event. So it’s three days. The details are [email protected] and stick around post-conference for this two day event that I’m offering, the Six Figure Hypnosis Practice Blueprint.

Now, this is the live hands on version of my business training because basically there’s two models of education that are out there. Model number one is teach you how to do it, and that’s what you’re gonna get from hypnotic business systems. Yet many of us, and even perhaps some people inside of my program already need that hands on feedback that continuous.

Loop in terms of communication to punch up your strategies as well as just simply take the time to build the necessary assets. So the event post-conference at Hypno Thoughts Live is the do it with you style of approach. So whether you have my online program or not, this is where you’re gonna jump in with all of that intention and start to build the materials you can use.

So as soon as you’re back home, or for those of you a little bit more ambitious, you can already have some of the business assets in place to start to scale up your hypnosis business, book these clients and really start to get out there and make a difference in your local community. So that event is happening post-conference at Hypno Thoughts Live in August of 2020 in Las Vegas, the six Figure Hypnosis Practice Blueprint.

You can get all the details for that live event by heading to hypno six s I x. Dot com, hypno six.com. And as I’ve learned, I have to say, be careful that your auto correct doesn’t fix that, because that might be an entirely different website. So check it out online, hypnotic business systems.com. Or even better, get the hands on continuous feedback to build the skills, build the assets, and get out there even faster.

And make it rain. Check that out hypno six.com. And with that, let’s jump into this content rich session. Here we go. Episode number 252. Michelle dilute on powerful metaphors. I think it was my last year of junior high. Or my first year of high school, there was a stage hypnotist who came to the high school I was gonna go to, and my parents took me and I was blown away.

I’d never seen anything like it before. I was probably about 12 years old, and I don’t remember a whole lot about the experience except how impressed I was and how as we were leaving the auditorium, I said to my dad, Whoa, that was amazing. And he’s, he said, Oh, that’s not real. Mm-hmm . And I thought, What do you mean it’s not real?

We just sat through an hour’s worth of a performance. And he said, No, no, no. They were all faking. And my parents had, in my experience, been unreliable, narrators in many things. And so I did what. Always did as a nerdy kid, and I went to the library and I risked everything I possibly could about hypnosis and.

For me at age 12, there were only three applications. One was to get the bullies to leave me alone and the popular kids to like me. And that really wasn’t a high priority. The second application was to use it to get good grades, cuz I wanted to go to Stanford Journalism school. And the third thing was to improve my writing skills so that the stories and the articles I wrote drew people into a really visceral and experiential narrative.

That was, that was my criteria for good writing and, and really writing was all I cared about at that age. And, and really all I had cared about since I was like six. As soon as I figured out that a human being put words in the books that I read, I wanted to be that human being. So, so that was my first experience of hypnosis.

Yeah. And I love that story because it’s like so many of us that that’s part of my story too. And very often our clients as well that, you know, we may have sometimes in our community this us versus them mindset between the hypnotist who sees clients and the stage hypnotist. But for so many of us that is that, that first introduction.

So, you know, we can say that those were, that curiosity was peaked. At what point did you actually then go out and seek out the training as they had the test? That was in 2004. I was, uh, in a, there was a gentleman who came to town by the name of Marshall Rosenberg. He was teaching a process called Nonviolent Communication and.

In that introductory lecture, he said, The map is not the territory, and I felt this electricity run down my spine because of course, that is something that Bandler Grinder said over and over and over again in their N LP books, which I had discovered about the time I graduated high school. That was when Frogs and the Princess came out.

So it was about 2004. I was sitting in this auditorium and I went, Oh my God, it’s back. And it, and it had always come in and outta my life, but yet, I mean hypnosis. I had known people in California who had gone to Gil Boy’s school, but the training was just a little bit outta reach. I had been saving up money to buy a house.

And I just decided hypnosis training was a lot more important. so, So that was when I got the training. I went to a positive institute here in Portland, and they had a terrific program and still do. They invite guest, guest lecturers from all over the state, so you get a real variety of hypnotists, how they teach and what their specialties are.

There was a fellow from Albany who had spent 50 plus years in stage hypnosis. He taught speed inductions and pass life progression. There was a fellow from Salem who came up and taught eft. We had another instructor from one of the, the hypnosis schools come and taught Marks, hows forensic. Voiceless diagnosis that you work with people who can’t hear, people who have hearing impairment.

So, so it was really a lovely, lovely training. They brought Michael Hall in for a couple of guest workshops, so there was, there was really terrific. Training there. And I, I just soaked it up. I thought I took the training because I was interested in nlp because NLP again, really served my purpose of writing, but I just fell head over heels in love with hypnosis.

Yeah. And one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the program is just this appreciation of communication that, you know, when we look at the work of the hypnotist, so much of it comes down to, you know, not only listening to the client, calibrating to what their specific needs are, but also then feeding it back in such a way that, you know, then is the appropriate process that they need to build that change.

So I would ask you from a bigger picture perspective, what kind of communication benefits have you found beyond the work that you do, as the work in the hidden and the hypnosis office? From the work that you’ve done over the years, did you find there’s any specific, like I I phrase it as side effects that we become often a little bit more effective in our communication by doing so?

I find that people don’t understand well formed outcomes and the kind of questions that we ask that are designed to be very open ended and lead toward goals, help people unpack stuff. And use it in a way that they haven’t been able to use it before. And that is helpful in business, in writing, tech, technical manuals in interviews.

And I, you know, I was thinking about some of the questions that I would really love to have you ask, and I thought, you know, this is, this is journalism. A friend of mine says that you have interrogators, , you have spies, and you have journalists. And they all ask questions, but hypnotists do too. And I think that asking questions and listening to, to what people say tells you so much about their world and.

By people are fascinating. I love people. I think they’re absolutely fascinating. And I think if they listen to each other, we get a lot more creative, collaborative. We have more fun. I’m all about fun. Mm-hmm. , But it’s great. And, and I can’t think of a single thing that communication doesn’t help with Jason.

I really can’t. Yeah. Well, I’m curious to ask, is there, is there a story that kind of stands out of working with a client where really the result perhaps came from asking those right questions at the right time? Oh my gosh. I saw a client for pain management. He came in and said it had been decades that he’d been in pain.

And he sat down the chair and I said, Well, when was the last time you, you weren’t in pain? I, I can’t remember. I was really young. What did you like to do when you were a kid? I like to go surfing. Well, I grew up in California, so I know a little bit about that. I’d never surfed myself, but I knew surfers, so I just asked him about his experience.

What was that like for you? Where did you go? And So we did the whole session basically. Hardly ever talked about the pain. Just focused on going back to that experience of surfing and when you can really associate someone, I mean, really, really associate someone into an experience as though they’re having that experience right now, which is one of the things I love about hypnosis.

It’s almost like time travel as our books, they’re, they’re experience completely shifts. And he came, he emerged from that session and he looked at me and he said, That is the first time I’ve been pain free in 12 years. Wow. And we never even talked about the pain. Yeah. We just took him surfing. Beautiful.

Beautiful. So looking at, you know, drawing out the client’s, you know, their own internal metaphors, their own internal stories, and something that I’ve heard you, you know, mention online at times before is looking at how we can start to craft these metaphors. So how, how is it that you can be in process with someone and where do you tend to go to find these metaphors, to find these ways of working creatively with what they’ve shared with.

What are your hobbies? What do you like to do? Why do you like to do that? We’re really taught to stay away from those why questions, but I think that why you want something when we’re looking at the toward motivation instead of the away from motivation, I think that those why questions Simon Sinek talks about Find your why.

Those are identity and mission and purpose statements that you can uncover with the why. So why is it that you like quilting? What is it that that allows you to do? What’s even more important than that? What are those? What are those things you like to do when you wanna relax? Or what did you like to do as a kid?

All kinds of questions. What do you like about your job? Why do you do it? Which I’m hearing a small adjustment to this because it’s where, in some manuals I’ve seen that phrasing never ask a why question. And I kind of put it into the same category of leading that. You know, in a regression training, there’s always the catch phrase of don’t lead the witness, don’t lead towards an idea of something.

And I think the filter to that regression commentary is never lead. If you’re doing the quote, find the cause section of the work. But if you’re moving towards the desired outcome, then leave like crazy because that’s what they’ve hired you for. And I think you’re right, there’s value perhaps in holding back the why do you think you have this issue?

Why do you have this problem? Why do you keep doing that? But instead, if we’re looking at drawing out assets and resources from our client, this is a beautiful place to be asking that why question. Because now, We’re getting, you know, their communication, we’re getting their representations of that specific thing, which now we get to utilize and help them move towards that desired result.

Right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So looking at the idea of bringing about, you know, these metaphors, which, this brings a different perspective of it because it’s not, I’m going to suddenly now tell you the story of some classic book or something from a movie that you’re looking at building these more meaningful metaphors on the fly.

So how do you, how do you go about constructing them, even while in process with someone once you’ve got that information? Well, the first thing I do is look for the gap. Where are they now? Where did they wanna be and what’s the, what’s missing? And then I just, I, I don’t know, Jason, I’ve been, I, I’ve.

Telling stories and looking at that hero’s journey and different ways for, you know, my whole life mm-hmm. and, and getting someone to move into that new space is just a matter of, of what’s the next step. You know, I love quilters because that’s all about constructing a new reality. You start with a piece of fabric and you weave it into this patterned thing.

I mean, you’ve got a sewing machine, you’ve got hand stuff. It’s very kinesthetic, it’s very visual, and they tend to sort of zone out when they’re doing. They’re quilting. So that’s a immediately an associated trance metaphor because they’re already in an altered state as they’re doing that craft work. I love engineers.

I freaking love working with engineers because they’re used to seeing the plane or the machine before it’s even there, right? So they already know how to imagine something that’s gonna be real. And it, it’s, it’s, everyone is creative. And by tapping into a metaphor that moves you from where you are now, that involves as many.

Of our senses as we can just gets them into that, that new space. I do not ignore direct suggestion. I love direct suggestion. It’s one of the things I, I really enjoy about stage hypnosis and I think that as practitioners we can do, we, we can take a lot from stage hypnotists. I move around my office a lot mm-hmm.

so that I’m standing on one side often when I’m talking about the, the future and a different side when I’m talking about the past. And that’s, that’s pretty easy to do, especially if you do an Elman induction, which I do. I think I’m getting off the point of metaphors, but no, I love where it’s going.

Keith, Just, uh, it’s just everybody understands creativity on. Level, and that’s what they come to us for. I need to create a new future. I don’t like my job. I don’t like my attitude. I don’t like my, the way I smell when I smoke. And a lot of times they have trouble figuring out that that well formed outcome.

They’re so focused on what they don’t want. It’s very difficult for some people to articulate what they do want without referring to that past behavior. So metaphors like sewing, building, climbing, anything that takes you from one state, either physical, mental, or emotional or spiritual to a different state, that’s gonna be something that you can weave in the same kind of progress.

That, that the client wants to build with their behavior. So staying out of certain rooms, rearranging their furniture so that the, so the m and ms are on the left instead of the right and somehow just changing your environment, that little bit is enough to break that habit. What’s beautiful inside of that is, is something that I’ve not really heard many people, you know, talk about, which, and some of this may use some language that I think some people might find a small bit of offense to, which is that our client is hiring us.

And it’s not that our person is broken. This, this goes back to the map is not the territory that they are who they are, and that issue is just a thing that they’re going through. So it’s not that the individual is broken, it’s that they’re reaching out to us because here’s a situation in their life that.

As it is at the moment is not currently working for them. And it’s through hypnotic suggestion, whether it’s through metaphors you’ve been sharing or even dipping into the direct suggestion, we’re helping to introduce a new and improved better reality. So, you know, to look at the neuroscience, like for those that have seen the documentary, what the BLE do, we know we’re interrupting the patterns that don’t work, to now introduce a new one.

And I love that that nuance of just simply moving something in the house to, uh, to let it be different that, you know, there’s no change without change. Are there other, you know, homework or exercise, you know, things that you’re often, often sharing with your client to really take that result, not just from the office, but truly out into the real world?

There are. You said something and it just went right outta my head because I thought, Oh my God, that’s like, that’s such a cool thing to talk about. Well, let’s go back to it. I think it was the mindset of. And again, it’s not that our client has broken, it’s that they’re hiring us because here’s a part of their life that’s not working for them, and we want to help introduce that new automatic reality of something that works even better for them.

Was it branching off of that? Oh gosh, I don’t, I It was a brilliant idea. We’ve changed everyone’s. As soon as I hear, soon as I hear the replay of this, I’m gonna, I’m gonna call you up and go, Ah, that’s the thing. It’ll come back later. But let’s chat about that idea though, of, you know, putting some of the responsibilities, some of the activities on the client.

What, what do you do in terms of whether it’s exercises or homework for your client? Homework that I absolutely love to give and will give almost every single client that gives in my chair. Gets in my chair. Is that wonderful Tony Robbins homework about What’s great about that? because we are programmed, you know, biologically to look for negativity.

We’ve got this negativity bias cuz if we’re walking down a path and we miss that pretty flower, that cute little bunny rabbit, nothing bad is gonna happen to us. If we miss that, that growl in the bushes, something bad’s gonna happen. So we’re just biologically programmed to be hyper alert and hyper aware of threats.

And when we’re. In kindergarten for crying out loud, they don’t circle the, the spelling successes in red. Mm-hmm. , they, they point out all the problems. And from the time where children were taught to, well think about what might happen. Right. So I love getting that little wedge in the door of what’s great about that.

And I’ll send ’em home and I’ll say, Watch the news. . Yeah. , watch the news and come up with 10 things that are great about everything you see. And make sure at least two or three of them are completely ridiculous. Mm-hmm. , because that breaks, that gets into the, that creativity mindset where we’re not talking about logical limitations now we’re talking about possibilities.

We’re talking about not just what you want, but something. Even better. Which is also a suggestion I love to put into sessions. Not just what you want but maybe something that even exceeds what you can imagine at this time. And so that, what’s great about that exercise, watch the news, start practicing. I had one client come back and say, my granddaughter dropped her pancakes and I said, Hey honey, what’s great about that

So they can make it fun. And I wait, I have to know what’s the answer. What was great about the pancakes? Well, grandpa got to make more pancakes. Oh yeah, there we go. . But it’s a muscle that that possibility muscle. is something that we really have to work on and another exercise is changing. Those have tos to get tos.

Mm-hmm. . So those things we feel obligated or forced into. What if we started saying, I get. To do the dishes, I get to vacuum, I get to clean out the garage. We start, and you can feel that incongruence in your body a lot of the time. There’s a somatic sense of I don’t wanna do that. That’s not a get to, that’s a have to.

And I think that just by practicing that, people come back and they say, You know, something changed. I don’t know what it was, but I just feel a lot softer, a lot easier, a lot more flexible about that than I used to and, and changing that should to a could. So I do a lot of language homework because our thoughts really do affect our experience.

How we think about things determines what we allow. Into our solution making processes. Yeah. I’ll share a quick, uh, version of that too, which I modeled this after the documentary Hungry for Change, which I think is still in Netflix, but it’s where the, the languaging of it. It’s not that, you know, I, I’m not allowed to do this anymore.

Oh, I can’t smoke ever again, or I really shouldn’t eat that food. But to begin from a place of truth that, well, I could eat that, but I really don’t need to anymore. Or I could smoke, I could go out and buy a whole packet cart of cigarettes. Yet. I know I don’t need that anymore. So that positioning of truth, What I’m curious to ask you, just as someone who clearly, you know, is that worker is really there seeing the clients and doing the work, just structurally, are these teaching components, are these things you might be doing in session prior to the hypnosis, folding an end during the hypnosis?

Or is it like an afterthought once they’re emerged and now you’re sitting there wrapping up? How, how do you present these to your client? Usually it’s during the intake. Yeah. Because those la those language patterns come out as they’re describing that problem state. Mm-hmm. , I have to do this. I’m stuck because I need to X, Y, z I.

Just, that craving means I just can’t do anything else. Okay. Well, what if you could do something else? . What if you had that option? What if you began to soften that? I just can’t. Well, I might. Mm-hmm. . So it comes out in the intake and I’ll say, Okay, so when you go home over the next week, what I’d like you to do is just listen to that internal dialogue.

And anytime you start using those words to yourself, just start changing them. And then I’ll put it in the session. Yeah. As we, we future pace. I’ll put that, I’ll put that in this. And you find that you get to be someone who wakes up in the morning. Excited to see the sun come up. You get to walk into a room knowing that everybody around that meeting table is eager to hear your ideas.

So all of those things that they’ve been sort of like, Uh, I’ve gotta do this, it’s a chore, instead it’s a reward. Nice. So really to unpack that, it’s something that you’re taking their language during the intake and beginning to reframe, but then also using the actual hypnotic process to then strengthen and reinforce that.

Absolutely. Awesome. Awesome. And I know one of the topics that we kind of mentioned before jumping on here was that of, you kind of hinted at this in some way, but we’re watching, you know, the news and finding something positive in something. And, uh, oh, we wonderfully find ourselves in a perfectly polarizing world right now, uh, with modern politics.

And I know you had some interesting thoughts about, you know, whether it’s utilizing the election cycle as marketing or dealing with a lot of the stress that may come out of that. I’d be curious to hear what are some of your thoughts on that? Well, when I started my hypnosis training in 2004, I was working for, uh, strategic communication company that did public relations, state and federal lobbying and ballot measure campaigns and all of those tasks when you’re attempting to get.

New laws passed or new policies formed. They all require storytelling. And storytelling involves trance. So I’ve got this and, and we worked with a lot of the legislators. We work with a lot of the city council members and, and I was, I had been in California where the legislature is up in Sacramento, and I lived in Los Angeles and in California.

The legisla legislative cycle is much different. In Oregon, it’s a biennial thing. The legislature meets for six months, every two years and the other 18 months everybody goes back to work. These are working people and, and they’re very human. They, they have the same kinds of, of issues that any human being does.

And I. I just have such an appreciation for anybody who puts themselves out there regardless of, of, you know, their, their, their focus or their, their point of view. There’s something very admirable about somebody stepping up and saying, Hey, I think we can make the world a better place. Now, the path or strategies that they use, we may have, have trouble with and, and all we have to do is turn on the, the commentary.

I won’t even call it news, because we’ve shifted from a fact delivery system to, to a commentary system. And the divisiveness of arguing about strategies, I think has really gotten in the way of seeing other people’s humanity and the ability to have a conversation about, well, what do we want? Again, coming back to well formed outcomes.

What do we want? And, and when you’re, I mean, Jason, you, when you’re doing parts work and those, the unwanted behavior on the one hand and that new behavior and that new future, on the other hand, bringing those things together, that’s, that’s a really transformational moment. And, and I love the idea of seeing that happen more in the world.

So building a part of my practice that helps people engage in their communities rather than just behind the, the comments on the newspaper or the comment section of the blog. I, I think that’s a really. I think it’s a worthwhile effort and it’s one I really wanna engage in. I’ve worked with. Yeah. And I, what I like about that is it’s not, again, it’s similar something you mentioned earlier.

It’s not necessarily looking at it as how do we solve a problem? You know, I’ve, I’ve had clients over the years that I’m upset this one got elected, or that one got elected, or my son is having an issue in school with this person because they believe different things. And this commentary that you’re sharing is now instead moving towards a positive outcome.

Which in many ways, if we operated that way, we’d have less of this conflict that’s out there now. Yeah. The ego strengthening the, the state management, the ability, it’s a lot of it is the same kind of skills. You, you work with clients who come in for public speaking. Yeah. So looking at that specific, you know, election cycle, how would you leverage that, you know, in such a way as marketing.

Boy, I am still figuring that out. Okay. , I’ve been working with the, the Chamber of Commerce. I, my office is about a block away from the Chamber of Commerce, and the people there were key in getting me into my BNI group in just helping me think about my business because even though I’ve been doing this work since 2004, I’ve only been in solo private practice for two years.

I was in a, a clinic with about a dozen other hypnotists for 10 years, and then that business stopped and I was sort of like, Okay, what am I gonna do now? Guess I don’t know. And I just couldn’t let hypnosis go because it’s so powerful. So marketing. and sales are very, very new to me. I’ve all, I’ve never engaged in, in those things before.

And the marketing of the business boy, if it weren’t for the hypnotic business systems. Thank you Travis Hoel for turning me onto works for hypnosis. Boy, I, I would be, I would be pretty. Torn, I might, you know, there’s that, um, home hypnosis party model. Yeah, that might be helpful. That’s something that candidates use or those house parties.

That might be something working with the chamber. We’ve, I’ve partnered with, and we’re gonna do another one. We did one last fall, but we’re also gonna do one next month with a, a professional lobbyist, uh, public relations and communications expert marketing, digital marketing guy who’s in my, in my, uh, BNI group.

And, and I, and I’m hoping to build a hypnotic product, a program that helps people that can be something that’s not just for this election cycle, but I mean, we do this every year, which you just made me think. Two things. One, an amazing flashback and thanks for the kind words about hypnotic business systems, but also now connecting back, I think it was 2007, so now we’re nearly, Oh, 13 years ago and uh, what is it in Oregon?

It’s not ihop, it’s Sherry’s. Right, Right. Yeah. Which is the Pacific Northwest sort of 24 hour diner restaurant where Travis, who you mentioned, was also doing stage hypnosis shows out there, as was I, and were all, you know, gathered together having, uh, breakfast at like five in the morning after doing high school entertainment.

So, um, there’s a flashback . No, but you just highlighted something about looking at the election cycle, modern politics, which this is something that I learned early on and I’ve continued to teach that it’s easier to sell to a built in audience. So rather than, let’s say it’s like the way that I teach doing, uh, self hypnosis workshop and using that as a leverage to now bring in your individual clients.

You can hang up the shingle and try to promote the event and bring in 15 strangers, or you go to exactly something like you’ve just mentioned. Here’s the chamber of commerce, here’s this local business, here’s this local organization that already has the people gathered. You just need the because as to why they need that specific service.

So here’s a whole segment that people are not necessarily serving, and it does make me think back, and I will very obviously generalize the story for clearly obvious reasons. If I had who I had about seven, eight years ago, which remember I’m in the Washington DC area and he worked for a firm that produces the commercials for political candidates.

There’s a whole algorithm that they use in terms of, you know, at this point in the commercial, these colors attract this style of voter. This attracts this style of voter, and they’re taking all the polling and realizing what gaps they need to fill. And just out of curiosity, I had to ask him, which side do you work for?

And he responds, Whoever is paying me that week, uh, . So it’s where it doesn’t necessarily have to be your specific politics. And I, and I do tend to subscribe at least some. Degree, which by way of another metaphor, let’s go to George Carlin, uh, when he reduced the 10 commandments down to one that shall keep that religion to that itself.

That it doesn’t matter what my personal politics are, I can help you step into a better, meaningful existence, even if we may disagree as to what direction that ought to go. You mentioned the bni, you mentioned Chamber of Commerce, and this is another one of those reasons why I wanted to have you on here.

That what was that? So from being the employee as the heist now realizing if you wanna keep working, you’ve got to be your own business owner. So was the networking a natural first step for you? Oh my God, no. I was the kid who during mass I would sit way, way, way at the back of the church so that by the time I got up to the front.

Everybody else was kneeled down and praying so that nobody would look at me. I was so far from wanting to get out in front of people. I mean, I was a writer. I was a let, let me sit behind the typewriter, let me be the journalist who interviews and makes you the star, which I think was one of the, the things I loved about stage hypnosis.

And you, you know, you’re not, you sort of are standing up there, but you’re also kind of invisible. It’s a really interesting dynamic. But no, and my very first networking event was, it was fascinating because I sat as a women’s networking event was huge. It was probably like, I don’t know, 150, 200 people.

And I sat down at this table on the woman next to me, I said, Oh, hi. You know, I’m Michelle. Um, what do you do? I’m, I’m in commercial real estate. Oh, okay. What do you do? I’m a hypnotist and she takes a kind of inhale , and she like pushes a little bit back and she gets really stiff. And I, and I said, So are, are, are you mostly, you handle real estate in Portland or, or do you have a particular area?

Investment. Mm-hmm. . Oh, that’s interesting. Um, so how long have you been in it? 15 years. She, it was, it was awful. And hey, door closed, , we came to this break. The woman that I had gone to the event with, who was also a hypnotist, says to me, You can’t just say you’re hypnotist. And I thought, the hell, I can’t I am proud of it.

And if, and if you can’t be, you know, polite to somebody who’s sitting next to you drinking coffee for, you know, 90 seconds, I’m not the one with the problem. But it was, and, and then people told me, hypnotists told, Oh, I’ve never gotten anything from networking events. Those people just want you to buy from them.

And, you know, being a capitalist pig, I thought, well, if, if they provide a good service and if they’re, if they have integrity and good character and they deliver on time and they’re good communicators, and if they’re in your freaking group, why wouldn’t you give them business? I mean, that’s what it’s about.

So it was, it was kind of an uphill battle for me because I like people. I, I love business people. I mean, I was a, a, a Atlas shrugged. Groupy mm-hmm. back in the day. And, and I think that again, like civil service to build a business is a very creative act and requires a lot of, of bravery. And I never put myself in that category.

I was always kind of the observer, not the participant, but when the chamber gave me homework to visit every. Networking group in the city. I obediently went out and did it. I walked into my BNI chapter after visiting like three or four others and I thought, Oh my gosh, this is my tribe. These are my people.

I wanna be with them and I wanna be one of them. And thank goodness BNI has this amazing structure, which I really love. It’s part of why I love nlp. And they’ve got podcasts, they’ve got, yeah, Advance learning. They’ve got people at all levels of business, people who have been there for, you know, 12, 15 years.

People like me who have only been in business a couple of years. And I was just, I, I mean, I was just really stunned. I got my office through bni, um, next door. Is a BNI member who runs a studio. So there’s, uh, event space for classes. I’m in an office with two massage therapists and the aforementioned book of Jane, who, who does spa reviews on YouTube and, and I get walk-ins.

Mm-hmm. because, and there’s collaboration. I get to work with other people on the healthcare team. We do Facebook lives and cross promote. Oh, beautiful. And it is the, I mean, probably 60. Percent of my business comes from networking referrals, which you hit on something I wanna go back and highlight for a second, which was that this perception, and I’ve heard this from people like in business systems or even those who’ve just heard me speak that, Yeah.

But that’s just a group of people who are clearly trying to sell things to each other. I’m like, Yeah, that’s what business networking is . Now the other side of it is, of course, like with that cross promotion you were doing, you know, that’s where it comes back to the real important question about not just who are you, but also who do you know?

And there’s a small, you know, negative lesson learned the hard way, which is that just because someone’s a member doesn’t always mean they’re good at what they do. But this is where you can start to. The fact that, as you mentioned, there were some people who have been there for 15, 20 years. You know, So here’s where I recently switched.

I’m currently no longer a member of bni, but I joined a group that I had known of for like 10 years now. And my accountant and bookkeeper now have come from that group. And I hired specifically cuz it’s that I’ve known them for 10 years. I’ve heard enough brave reviews and I need to move my services somewhere else after some, uh, little tax accidents that occurred and just need to clean house.

And, you know, these are people that are now doing amazing work for me. I’ve got someone subletting my office now because she just wants to work evenings and I don’t. So it’s this cool dynamic that someone else is here and I haven’t seen her in a while, uh, . But it became ok. So, you know, you can move in early, you can set up shop a little sooner than the, the contract that we built says just one little nuance.

You cannot professionally see clients in this space. Until you’ve got renter’s insurance, just, you know, to have that coverage call one of these two or three people, they do great work. Then a slight negative, which is that here are the two general contractors that we hired on and had to fight them to finish the damn job.

You know, and the beautiful thing of seeing these people on a weekly basis, and I, you know, I’m assuming that they do things in a better way now, just to comfortably say, Look, I cannot refer to you because if this is how the service went for me, I’m not gonna put someone else I know through that experience.

You know, So it’s where there’s a bit of a learning curve of how we interact with these communities. But I’d imagine, you know, as much as, yes, they are there to sell their business, these are normal everyday people with specific issues that, uh, hey, look at that hypnosis can help them to resolve those things.

I am, I have, I have nothing but good things to say about networking and meeting other business people and, and seeing how people do it wrong and how I did it wrong in the beginning. Yeah. How, how did they do it? How did you do it wrong? Oh my gosh. Well, and the, and the lovely thing about BNI write is that you’re there every single week and you get to try things out.

It’s like, uh, it’s like speed reading. Mm-hmm. , you’re, you’re in a safe place. It’s like improv and you can fail, and they’re gonna be there next week and say, Okay, do better this week. How did, how did I do it wrong? I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t go in with a goal. I didn’t go in strategically and the people who I saw do things wrong, they tried to sell to one another.

Right? Like, Hi, who are you? This is who I am, wanna buy my stuff. I mean, it was just super aggressive. I had never, you know, the, It’s like Groundhog Day dad. Ryerson, yeah.

one of my life insurance. And it wasn’t the insurance people, but it was it. It was just promoting their stuff the minute they met you. Right. Rather than, you know, building those relationships. Well, it’s the phrase of earn the right to give the offer. You know that we have to have that rapport. We have B, and I would put it, they, they teach the acronym of vcp, visibility, credibility, profitability, or let’s put this in a more commonly understood, you know, mechanism of we understand that people do business with folks that they know, like, and trust.

And until we have no like and trust, we cannot yet move towards buy. So there has to be that. So, you know, so that was perhaps the origin of that. What have you. What have you modeled out of that? What have you now put in place to not be that person who’s just going, Buy my stuff, buy my stuff? Oh my gosh.

Just trying to give value. Just emailing little articles to people. If they mention a book that they really enjoyed, if I see it on a, you know, podcast, I’m a big fan of Impact Theory, and I’ll just shoot it over to them. If I, if I see that they’ve got an anniversary or something on LinkedIn or they’re, they’re gonna be speaking somewhere, just shoot ’em a little email going, Hey, you know, wish I could be there.

I know you’re gonna do great. Just, just staying in touch, asking questions, making them the expert because they are, How have you ever experienced this? How did you handle it? Do you know so and so are, are they, are they worth working with? I mean, those. Those just appreciating people, um, send out cards is, yeah, such a terrific service and I don’t use it as often as I, as I could, but I know that that is something people really enjoy getting and I might not hear from them until they see me and they’ll then they’ll just go, Oh my gosh, thanks for that card.

That was so awesome. So just, you know, treating people like people rather than a cash register. That’s, that’s just not what it’s about. Which are you saying that the key to person to person business networking is actually dealing with people. Actually people , if only the solution was actually in the words that described the thing.

Well, I don’t know what your BNI group was like, but it’s those, It’s those one to ones, Yeah. That the chamber I don’t think really walks you through that. The, the, the chambers here. We have two really, really good ones in the area, but it was not intuitive to, for me and in the, they have a kind of networking 1 0 1 class, but it doesn’t talk about taking it from the big mixers to, Hey, let’s go get coffee so you can tell me a little bit about what you do and who you’re looking for and how I can keep my ears open.

You know, what should I, what little phrase should I listen for? It’s like a, it’s like an anchor. Mm-hmm. , right? Oh, that’s what I was gonna talk about earlier. So, going off on a whole new tangent, there’s an exercise someone told me, I, I don’t know if it was, uh, till Tim and Susie Hals and LP class, but they said part of the final was that you had to get up in front of the room and explain how everything in NLP boiled down to anchoring.

Oh, no, no, no, no. Everything in NLP boils down to chunking. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Everything in NLP boils down to anchoring. So just shifting that meta position gives you a, a tool that is infinitely flexible. And I thought that was, I thought that was just a, a really sweet. Exercise, and that’s kind of similar to the what’s great about that, but yeah, anchoring with the people that you meet by doing those one on ones and getting to really know them outside the mixers.

Go play golf. We’ve got a great golf thing here in, uh, on the west side of Portland where I am. People go play golf. People go drink beer, people have coffee. Um, those one toones are, they create very, very deep and long lasting relationships. And yes, we’re there for the business, but business is, is kind of in your blood.

I never wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I cannot imagine now not being one. You mentioned the anchoring, and I think that’s one of those most critical things, especially where, you know, you’re in the BNI world, you’re building this environment where we’re all supporting each other. You’re basically training those 20 to 30, if not 40 people, to also be on your sales team.

And I, I’ll share a quick story of, there was a person who was in a chapter that I was a member of that I sent so many referrals to. And I could have gotten angry about the fact that he wasn’t sending me anything. And rather than that, cuz that wouldn’t have produced anything beneficial. We scheduled another meeting and I had him, you know, describe in a little bit more detail the work that he did.

And inside of that, I was pointing out specific flags to go, if you run into. That’s something I do if you run into this, this is something that I do. And he then goes, he go, Why? Why are you pointing these things out? And I just called out the numbers. I contract that I’ve sent you about 30 or 40 referrals and you haven’t sent me a single one.

So back to nlp. The meaning of the communication is the response that it gets. Let me now highlight the specific I, I use the term flags and we can use the term anchor that when you hear this, That’s what I do. When you hear that, that’s what I do and what happened as a result until he moved to the west coast of South side California,

Suddenly now the referrals were now equal because it was my responsibility to point out those specific anchors that that’s what I worked with, that when you hear this phrase, That means I need to send that person to Jason. So in, in terms of the shape of things that, you know, so now here you are and kind of describe that sort of lifestyle design.

How do you spend your time? Is it mostly balancing clients? Are there other projects or what tends to be that, that focus Nowadays? Nowadays it, I, I feel like a slow learner sometimes . Mm-hmm. , because I have reinvented in the, So I opened this practice in August of 2017, and I spent like three months on a particular micro niche.

That I just couldn’t figure out how to market to, I knew there was a market, but I just couldn’t figure out how to reach it. Yeah, I haven’t, I, I’ve got that on the back burner, but then I reinvented, and then I reinvented, and then I reinvented and it’s, and I’m not sure. Yeah, so marketing is really challenging.

And so that , that’s where I spent most of my time. Well, there’s a constant game that, you know, we’re always changing up the model. We’re always inventing new. I think, you know, before we jumped in that I shared the mild frustration that my microphone from my video camera stopped working. But you said it perfectly after eight years, it didn’t owe me anything.

Um, and, and the trade off is the new one came in yesterday. I shot a video this morning and I’m like, Wow, it actually sounds a whole lot better. Imagine that the technology probably got better in the last eight years, which, damn. Uh, yet it’s where, you know, the, the statement is it’s never done. You know, this is for the relaunch of the Virginia Hypnosis website and there’s always.

Some new market. There’s always some specific new thing you could go after though. I’d be curious to ask you what, what are the standard issues? What are the standard things that people are mostly coming to you to see as heist? Oh my gosh. Stress and anxiety. Yeah, stress and anxiety. I get calls for that constantly.

That is the, that’s the big thing. And I, you know, mar the networking is, it is really labor intensive. It is. It is a time intensive thing. And when you’ve got the time, It, it, it’s, it, it just, I mean, one event, it’s so, I mean, when you can spend an hour and come back with a couple of clients, that is time well spent, right?

Yeah. Especially when you’re looking at a, a life, a lifetime, because it’s not just that one hour, it’s not that just one client, It’s that relationship that you’re building that’s gonna last for years. But as far as what I am focusing on right now, the product building, so that I can build a program that is, Something people can go to online so that I don’t have to be there because networking, again, I’m not in my office, I can’t be seeing clients, and if I’m in my office seeing clients, then I can’t be out networking.

So I need to build an online library of resources for people. I have not been doing that, and I wish that I had. Right out of the gate. But you know, the best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago. The second best time is to do it today. Me to the metaphor, . So, so building that online library is important.

And, and also just getting back to blogging. I did that for a year and a half and it was super satisfying. It was in a different genre, but, but you know, one of the things Russell Brunson says is, is every day, get it out there every single day. And I’ve been, I’ve been lax on that. So, so I think that in the, in the month ahead, that’s gonna be one of my goals.

Beautiful. Well, this has been fantastic cause we’ve covered, you know, not only what to do in our sessions, the discovery of untapped markets and how to better customize for the individual, but of course how to get out there and seek out those clients and really enhance our local business community. Uh, Michelle, how could people.

Get in touch with you, How can they find out more about what you do? My website is destinations hypnosis.com. That’s destinations plural hypnosis.com, and I’m here in Portland, Oregon. Outstanding. And any final, Yeah. Any final thoughts for the listeners out there? You know, I’ve got this little card that I keep up that says to the world, You may be one person, but to one person, you may be the world.

People come to us because they want to change their world and we can help them do that.

Jason Lynn out here once again, and as always, thank you so much for interacting with this program, for sharing it on your social media streams and of course, leaving your reviews online. And again, check out the show [email protected] and how to get in contact with Michelle. Check out hypnotic business systems.com to get the all access passed to my digital training library of hypnosis business content.

But even better, join me live and in person and get the hands on experience to really get in depth building the assets that you need to build this powerful hypnotic business. That’s the Six Figure Hypnosis Practice Blueprint. You can get all the details [email protected]. And as a side note, for those people who register for the live event, who have not yet registered for Hypno Thoughts Live, that’s a convention that will be $595.

At the door. Now, once you sign up for my two day post convention, you’re gonna get a private access link to sign up for the conference for just $337. That’s a massive savings, more than $250. That is for those who sign up right away. That will probably go away around July 4th. Tends to be the cutoff for that discounted convention rate, so, uh, helping you earn money and also helping you save money.

Join me in Las Vegas hypno six.com. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis podcast and work smart hypnosis.com.