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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, Session number 37, Learning Hypnosis with Scott Sandlin. 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, welcome back. It’s Jason Lynette here with part two of the two part series with Scott Sandlin, and especially as we’re leading up getting closer to hypno thoughts live, you’re gonna hear all about that upcoming event here on this program.
There’s a lot of content here. Let’s jump right in. So the origins of hypno thoughts. Mm-hmm. expecting maybe 160 users. And what’s it at now? Uh, we’ll hit 18,000, uh, in the next probably two months. Mm-hmm. , and you might not have the exact number, but how many of that 18,000 would you say are active? Well, I, I can give you other numbers.
Okay. Yeah. So daily we do, well, we were doing about 1800 unique a day. Which is really high. That’s, that’s phenomenal. Yes. Um, and then what I did was I decided that rather than going for a broad number, I wanted to go for a deeper number. And, and that’s why we took hypno thoughts off Google. So, uh, we, we sh we closed it down to make it, You could only read stuff if you’re a member and you’re signed in and pulled all the, uh, the search engine stuff and the Google bots and all that stuff.
We pulled all of it. So, You know, if you and I are having an argument on hypno thoughts about a technique, our clients can’t read that. Yes. And I, I, I thought that was a better thing I’d personally share. That’s, that’s what brought me back to it. Yeah. For a while I was just on there as Jason L. Right.
Because I, I’d Google my name in terms of playing the game of what happens when a client searches me and I was seeing posts. So, So thank you for that. Yeah. Because hypno thoughts was getting so much activity compared to a normal hypnotist website. Right. You know, you get hundreds of posts or a week. And very few hypnotists create a hundred new posts on their website every week.
So when you typed in most hypnotist name, their profile and hypno thoughts came up in the top three, uh, you know, often before their Facebook page. And that just becomes, that’s not what I want it to be. So I want it to be a community. So I locked it down. So now we’re, we’re down to really about 800 a day, uh, unique visitors, but the time on site and the page views per site both went up.
So, Total number of page use is a little bit more than it was when we had twice as many people showing up. So that, that tells me that we are getting that richer, deeper engagement. And our time on site has done almost the exact same thing. So, uh, for those numbers, I’d say we get 800 people a day. In terms of how many people are active, the way to measure that, that I’ve been told is standard in internet communities, uh, across the board is 9% will, uh, respond to post and only 1% will generate new posts.
Right? Yeah. So of the people who are showing up every day, there are an overwhelming majority that I look at of people who sign in today, read five posts, and then sign in 10 days later and read five posts. So in terms of activity, we. a couple thousand that show up every single week. I’d say 4,000 show up a week.
So the, the equation of long term listener, first time caller. Yeah. We, we used to be much more about getting a whole bunch of people that were only coming once a month and now the people who show up show up every week. Mm-hmm. . Sometimes, you know, every day. So I know for a while there was a momentum that was building and then came the Hypno Summit, which was a purely online event.
Yeah. And what I’d be curious to spend some time chatting with you about here, there are certain belief structures that were put out there. And I’d say this isn’t just a hypnosis thing, I’d say it’s any sort of, let’s put it as private education outside of the, I’m gonna go to college and I’m gonna learn this thing.
But there was this message that was put. and there’s still groups that agree with this, that the distance learning is not as good as being there in the room. And my thought on that is that it comes down to the quality of the content and the presentation. So granted, Hypno Summit then was replaced by hypno thoughts Live.
But let, let’s go back to that video education, which even within H P T I. Yeah. How much of that is video instruction nowaday. So, yeah, I, I hear that, uh, discussion too. And, and I’ll be in, uh, uh, a board meeting for I M dha, or sometimes one of the other organizations will ask me into their board meeting to discuss this topic.
And there is the discussion that inherently hypnosis must be taught. In person, which is just the laziest argument. Right? And there is absolutely something to be said for hands on practice time. Yes, there clearly is. And at and at H P T I, we require that, but there’s so much of hypnosis education that is just talking.
There’s so much of hypnosis education that isn’t the hands on time. And if you’re gonna teach a five day class, right? Let’s say you take a teach a five day class, it’s 50 hours, it’s five, 10 hour days. Well, if I’m in your classroom, I’m pretty sure I’m gonna zone out for at least two of those 50 hours. No matter how compelling you are or you are giving me so much great information, I’m overwhelmed and I miss some.
Yes. Now online education means I’m watching it. When I’m ready, I can pause it and rewind. So there’s huge benefit in that respect, especially when you talk about rewinding and listening to it two or three times while you’re taking notes and being able to pay attention to nuances in the person’s presentation.
And that goes back to what we were talking about, about having a voice and and developing a voice. So I think there’s, there’s real value there, especially for some of the stuff that isn’t taught in hypnosis classes. You know, I don’t think very many hypnosis certification courses spend two weeks on law and ethics, uh, because they can’t, because no hypnotist is gonna take two weeks off their day job, go fly, stand a hotel for two weeks to listen to how the laws work in their state.
But if you want to be a professional, you should know how those rules work and you should know what professional ethics are and that that’s not the same thing as being a good person. And that there’s a dramatic difference that most people don’t pay attention to, but those successful ones tend to, and all of that kind of education, I think, should absolutely be put online.
And, and in doing so, it doesn’t make in person education obsolete. It makes in person education more. And I love in person education, and probably in 10 years or 15 years or 20 years, we won’t need it because technology’s gonna do something that none of us are imagining yet. But with the technology we currently have, good in person training is really, really important.
And actually getting the hands on feedback of feeling what it’s like to do an arm drop or to feel, you know, what the catay feels like when you push down against their hand. And to have someone supervising you and. All those things are valuable. You know, at H P T I, every student has to turn in multiple videos throughout the year and they’re doing videos that demonstrate the technique they’ve just been taught.
So they’ll take a class with Roy Hunter on parts of regression, they have to do a regression on video, and then Roy watches it and writes up, you know, a half page of feedback to them. And you can’t get that in an in person. Yeah, you can’t do that live and you need time to go off and put the information into use and then actually be able to demonstrate it.
Even pull that off. Yeah. And no matter how good an instructor you are, if you’ve got 30 students, you’re not paying attention to each one of their practice sessions. Right. You know, you just can’t, That’s not how physics works. So there are big upsides in terms of logistical limitations that online learning really has.
You know, we did the hypno summit. The biggest video we could stream was, uh, two 40 by four 80. You know, were these little tiny windows I in low depth. Nice. I just found the keynote from that the other day actually. And it is so pixelated and terrible . But yeah, technology’s growing and I think online education, uh, especially for vocational training is going to be more and more common.
And, uh, you know, things like this are just a demonstration of. Well, even not just the vocational, the number of college programs, um, that where here’s something that can be done by way of webinar and there even the prerecorded webinars that here’s the information, then you’re gonna interact with it afterwards.
Yeah. I’d even point out that I’m the one at a convention. Looking at the listings and stacking the deck in terms of, Okay, well this one’s gonna be a lecture. I can just listen to that one in my car later on. Right? This one’s gonna be demonstration. I’ll go to that one in person. Right? And just buy all the audios to spend the time, as we’ve already referenced at, at the bar, interacting with people and meeting here in the actual stuff.
It’s these interactions where you really get that information and so much of it. No, I. A lot of my focus has been shifting in recent years that I had a course I put together as a two day event, and as soon as it was filmed, as I was unfortunately editing it myself due to a lack of Oh yeah. Planning and using the wrong equipment, realizing, okay, everyone was overloaded by three hours in.
right? And it’s something that the offer has been there, but to go, this serves so much better of as a purpose when it’s something that’s interactive. And I even love the author Timothy Ferris, the way he writes his books. The way that they start with the, the choose Your Own Adventure challenge of if this is your goal.
Watch and interact and read these chapters first. Yeah. If this is your goal, this is the most important to you, it allows people to sort of embrace their own learning strategies and then fold that content into it the way that’s the most appropriate for them. Yeah. You know, both my sisters are, uh, elementary school teachers.
It’s crazy. I have two aunts, three cousins, and an uncle who are also teachers. So most of the people in my family are educators. And so we had these interesting conversations at Thanksgiving and Easter about, you know, this concept of flipping the classroom. So you do your homework in the class when the teacher’s there to answer your questions, and you watch videos at home where the education can just be dry and recorded, and then you’re getting the help when you are actually doing stuff instead of requir.
A parent who’s come home from work and doesn’t know how to do this thing, to try to learn it with you. And, uh, it, it makes the teacher a more useful, proactive tutor. And they got the basics out of the way, pre-recorded. And, and that is this idea of flipping the classroom. And, uh, blended learning is the other term that they’re using.
It’s just good. And so the idea that hypnosis is somehow a special thing that can’t be taught online, I think is a really lazy argument because you can learn the guitar online. You can learn cooking online. There’s cooking channels, multiple. Oh yeah. You know, there’s all these things that are artistic that we can learn online.
And Harvard has psych classes online, so there’s of course a ton of data that shows we can learn creative things remotely, just as well as anything else. So now that we’ve spent some time building up distance learning, tell me about hypno thoughts Live 2015. Sure. It’s gonna be big this year. I mean, it’s been big, you know, this is year three, and you know, the first year we had a really big turnout.
Second year we grew noticeably, and this year we’re finishing up the schedule right now, and we’ll probably have it out on Monday. Of the, the complete conference schedule. But when you look at the people who are showing up now, the people who are saying no to us are now calling and asking, like we were calling ’em and saying, Hey, do you wanna come?
And they’re like, Nah, not really. And now they’re calling and saying, Hey, can we be involved somehow? And we, uh, we are growing noticeably. One of the things we’re doing this year. That’s really cool. Like you said, I wanna be able to listen to the recordings. We’re going to record. Class, the one hours, the two hours, and the three hours.
Uh, because like we do, you know, the one, two, and three hours are all free. You pay for the conference, you get access to all of them. We don’t upsell those because I don’t want people to have to make a decision based on finances. Uh, I, I really want people to get what they want out of the profession cuz I was broke when I got into this and I knew that there were classes I just couldn’t afford to take.
So the one, two, and three hours are all free. That once you pay for the confide, And we we’re still gonna pay for meals. Then we’re gonna record all the one, two, and three hour recordings because we, we’ve had to add rooms. We have more rooms than we’ve ever had. We have a business track, we have an entertainment track.
Uh, we have all these things designed so that we can have a, uh, a larger subset of stuff. I’m really excited that we’re gonna have actual classes on how to use mentalism clinically. And, uh, there’s a lot of cold reading skills that have gotten me jobs in rehab centers that are just, Oh yeah, basic. Cold reading that most people don’t.
If they’re not exposed to it, they don’t know what it is. And it really does look like magic, but it goes back to soft skills and it goes back to all those pieces. And we really like the idea of. Making it a place where you can sit at the bar, you can take in a show, you can have fun, you can stay up late, and you can learn from a wider, more diverse group than, uh, we’ve been able to provide in the past.
Yeah. And, uh, an impressive listings for pre and post as well, right? Yeah. Oh, our pre and post actually is so good this year. I’ve had multiple presenters from the pre and. Call me a little concerned when they saw the list, they said, Look, I speak at other conferences. They don’t come up with lineups like this.
Why is anybody gonna come to mine? And these are really successful people who you know, do very well at all. The conferences are looking at the list saying, I’ll share with you one better. Someone who actually did a program with going. I’m looking at the listing and I’d rather go to this one than teach mine.
Yeah, yeah. That’s a good problem to have. It’s a great problem to have, and really what it comes down to is we’ve set it up so that our goal is to have the presenters make more money at our conference than at any other conference because we really look at it as three legs of the stool. Right. There’s, to run a conference, you need an organiz.
that’s gonna front things and, and put it all together. You need presenters who are gonna bring good content and you need attendees who are gonna, you know, enjoy it. And you have to think of all three as equal. And, uh, you know, being the organizer, it’s real simple just to put ourselves third and say, if the attendees are getting an insane value, they’ll want to come.
And if the presenters are getting an insane value, they’re gonna want to come. And if both of those are working, then we’ll be just. And so for the first two years we’ve really demonstrated that, you know, at a normal conference, you know, the, the 1, 2, 3 hour courses, even though we are not collecting money, we still pay the presenters.
So they’re getting paid on having a three hour talk, even though that I’m not collecting any money for. And the pre and post, instead of doing a 50 50 cut, like a normal conference does, we do a 70 30 cut and give them noticeably. And so just doing things like that, you know, and just giving away, We literally give away cash.
I mean, no one does that. We just give away cash every day just to get everybody into one place. That’s the only reason we do it. I say if I give away a hundred dollars, everyone will show up because they have an equal chance of winning a hundred dollars. And that means everybody’s in the same room together.
And that’s where there’s value. That’s where there’s community and that’s what we’re doing. And it’s, it’s a very overt bribe to get people to play nicely with. So we’ll wrap up in a couple of minutes, but Sure. Uh, I’ll save The easiest question for last. What is it that we all need to do as hypnotists to take what we do to the next level in terms of our professionalism in terms of being more widely accepted?
I, I, I feel we’re more accepted than even a lot of hypnotist would even accept. Uh, I think we’re further along than a lot of us would admit we are, but there’s still obviously work to be done. What are your thoughts on that in terms of what we need to do to make this all? The, the real answer I think is be willing to do the homework and be willing to do things you don’t want to have to do.
You know, I, I think that success comes from effort. It really does. It’s just grinders win and you look at what it’s going to take to be taken seriously. We need to take our career seriously. And I know a lot of hypnotists who say, How quickly can I put up a shingle? And how quickly can I get a trifold out there?
And how quickly can I get people to know what I’m doing instead of really diving into the craft? and learning how to be a true consummate professional. And I’m really fortunate to be on the treatment teams that I’m on, and that’s given me a different perspective because I see what it takes to be on those teams, and I see how all those people work together and those people start from a area of respecting each.
And I think hypnotists don’t do that. Uh, we may give each other the benefit of, of the doubt, but I think hypnotists start with, Oh, he’s a hypnotist. Well, is he any good? Yeah, he’s a hypnotist. Well, who he trained with. He’s a hypnotist. Who’s he certified by? And that kind of feuding tribes mentality is the thing that holds us back.
And if we can just say, Look, if he’s a hypnotist, if he’s a pro, Then he’ll be just fine and I can refer to him and, and until we’ve earned that from each other, we can’t ask other professions to give us that. Absolutely. Thank you. Great answer Scott. Thanks so much for this. Oh, it’s absolutely my pleasure.
Well, cool. Uh, I’ll put some links up in the show notes, uh, to your website as well as to hypno thoughts live. Have you announced yet the keynotes? We’re doing some interesting keynotes. We’ve got Igor Ledowski doing one, and uh, Kevin Lapine doing another. So we’ve got a stage hypnotist who does Vegas, and we’ve got one of the biggest international trainers doing the other one.
Cool. Excellent. I’ll see you there. All right. See you then. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast and work smart hypnosis.com. Hey, it’s Jason Lynette here with one last Quick Favor. Just a quick request if you would head over to the iTunes listing for this program and leave a quick review.
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