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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis podcast, session number 441. Duff McDuffee on Paradigm Shifting. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Linett, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Linett. I’ll tell you my favorite thing about this conversation that you’re about to listen in on. It’s the fact that it’s going to take several of the popular things that people would say and things that fit into the category of I should do this or I should do that, and it just completely obliterates them. Hey, it’s Jason.
And this week on the show we’ve got Duff McDuffee from Colorado telling the story of some major transformations and discoveries that he’s made in his own life in the last couple of years, as well as the way that it’s really informed and changed the way that he works with his clients. So for those of you who may be in the category of people who feel like you keep getting close to what you want, but you don’t quite get it or you achieve some level of success and there’s something a little dissatisfying about it, there are some incredible takeaways in this week’s episode that really break down ways to then bust through that as well as kind of shift those goals along the way and make better discoveries and better epiphanies. This, of course, is session number 441.
So to check out the show notes for this week’s episode, you can head over to worksmarthypnosis.com/441 and that’ll direct you over to this episode as well as the notes, details and links of exactly what we talk about in this conversation. And while you’re there, also head over to worksmarthypnosislive.com we have our brand new systems for persuasive hypnosis training and certification program kicking off very soon. If you can make this upcoming event awesome. And if you can’t make this upcoming event, no worries, we’ll have one right around the corner after this one. And also for those of you who have been struggling with the technology, with the software, with everything that comes around to building out your websites, your funnels, and really automating your hypnosis business online, head over to doitnow.vip
You’ll see there’s a couple of videos over there as well as an application to get our help to help you to build winning offers in your hypnosis business. Once again, you can check out those details over at doitnow.vip. So here we go. This is session number 441, Duff McDuffee on Paradigm Shifting.
My whole understanding of hypnosis, of change, of motivation, has really gone through what we might say, a paradigm shift.
Oh, yeah. Would you say that was motivated by something or just kind of a natural evolution over time?
Oh, definitely motivated by something. So I think the last time we talked was right before the pandemic or right.
You and I have talked. Talked a few times since then, but in terms of having conversations that several thousands of people also get to listen to, you were back on the show. Episode number 246, but who’s counting? December 12, 2019, which we’ll put that in the show notes over, of course, for this episode. But yeah, about that time is when things were rumbling in the news, and then everything shifted in March that year.
Shift happens. And so right at the beginning of 20 before, people were like, oh, it’ll just probably blow over. I was actually invited to go to Sweden and teach a training for the NLP Society of Sweden, which I didn’t know before, but they found me online. They were like, oh, we love your stuff. Come out and teach a class. We have a class every year. And so I did. I created a class on resilience, and I taught it there. And what a topic to teach on. Right before the planes got shut down. It was like a week after I got back and nobody could fly sudden, and the whole world was exploding. So I was learning about resilience, I was teaching about it. And then I realized resilience was not a good enough niche to really attract enough clients for what I wanted.
So I started reading this book. Book yourself. Solid.
Yeah, Michael Port, great stuff.
And he said, you know, go back over your old clients and try to discover what’s common among all of them. You know, what. What problems do you solve regularly? And as I was doing that, I was also discovering for myself my own neurodivergence. The fact that I’m autistic and didn’t really know that growing up. And as I was looking back along all my clients, I was like, you know what? I think almost all of my past clients are neurodivergent. They don’t all necessarily identify that way or would say that, but they’re struggling with the same things that I kind of struggle with. Really creative, lots of ideas, but kind of stuck in implementing those ideas and getting stuck in things like procrastination or focus or perfectionism or Imposter Syndrome or overwhelm.
And so I started to think, well, how can I start to solve this problem for them? Which will also solve it for me, because I like to be congruent. And my wife actually was in school at the time in user experience design, and we decided to run what’s called a user research study. So she interviewed a bunch of people that I knew who were neurodivergent, who had big ideas and not so much action, and we asked them a bunch of questions. I thought the solution was gonna be super simple. There’s gonna be like one trick to solve it all. And that was totally incorrect.
Well, I mean, even to look. Even look at that for a moment. You know, theme of paradigm shifting, the whole categorization of anything within neurodivergence, it’s where, you know, from one perspective, someone would say, oh, people didn’t used to get these titles. What’s different? And really, over time, it’s that, well, here’s a way that better understanding of the brain, better understanding of certain things and, you know, better terms, better concepts. I correlate it briefly to. In a hypnosis training one time, the classroom wanted to derail off of the whole, well, how do you prove the statement that the subconscious mind doesn’t really understand the difference between a strongly imagined situation in reality? And my answer was to go, well, here’s what matters. This is the terminology that we’re currently using, right?
And based upon this terminology, which even to its origin was represented to be a metaphorical description, not necessarily literal, it’s that under this description, here’s research that backs that up. My real answer, give us another 50 to 100 years, we’ll have better research tools and better terms. But this is our working model right now. So categorizations within neurodivergence of, you know, this diagnosis or that one, it kind of follows a similar route. Which is. What would be your working definition to kind of define this category?
Yeah, yeah. So what I would say is you sort of have a bell curve of brains, right? And everyone’s sort of seen a bell curve.
It’s a great name for a band. I’m writing that down.
Bell curve of brains is my band name. Sorry, you can’t have it. But yes. So most brains fall in sort of the center of the bell curve, most nervous system. So we have kind of a lot of similarities. And then there’s people kind of on the edges of that in various ways, right? So there’s people who have incredible excellence in some field or some way of being. And then there’s people, of course, who have incredible challenges in some way of being. But neurodivergence could be either end of that bell curve or sometimes both. So, you know, someone maybe who’s on the autism spectrum, and it is a spectrum in that no two autistic people are the same, or someone who is adhd, Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Now that. That’s the diagnostic category.
But there’s a lot of people who can kind of relate to the symptoms who aren’t necessarily diagnosed as adhd, but it’s more than that, too. So people who are highly sensitive in some way, that could be a wonderful positive thing because maybe they can take in more information in that area, and then so they have some more skill in that area. But they could also be, you know, more sensitive in a negative way at the same time, because as we say in nlp, every skill is useful in some context.
And I want to highlight that too, because I’ve talked about this on here before, and you were someone who was inspirational to me on this, which was that the outside perspective would often be, oh, this is the excuse. This is the thing that. Why someone defines why they can’t do something. And you represented as someone to me that, oh, this helps to explain something. And this now informs me what I can do better. And, you know, briefly, my story was that my father has Parkinson’s and I’m suddenly reading things. And this is like, well, after the diagnosis, but just kind of independently, here were moments where just the focus wasn’t there and just certain things were not firing off within my brain. And I went to his neurologist. He lives nearby in Kissimmee. I’m in Orlando. I went to his.
I then went to a recommendation that neurologist made, who then referred to a psychiatrist who talked like I do, where the psychiatrist goes, either I’m going to piss you off or I’m going to make your day. I’m like, again, you talk like I doctor. He goes, yeah, this is standard ADHD of this specific classification. Here’s the perception of what this might be, which is the stereotype, which is incorrect. Here’s the actual definition of. And we’re gonna go on a journey testing four different medications to figure out which one works for you. Or you could choose not to. It’s up to you. And suddenly it was this, oh, that explains a lot. Oh, that explains a lot. Yet kind of how. What I saw you do at one point was how this became almost like a superpower Secret weapon or just a better filter?
And never the reason of I can’t. Because.
Yes, right. So we can look at difference in different ways. And this is how I started to look at it after were doing this user research study to come back to that loop. We discovered that there’s no one size fits all for neurodivergent people, which makes sense because we’re not divergent in the exact same ways. We’re divergent in a million different ways. The only thing that we really have in common is that we’re not in the norm. But there’s different ways of looking at difference. We can look at difference as disorder. So we have the who, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Every single category in that manual is something that’s wrong with you and why you should feel ashamed. No, they don’t necessarily add that part, but that’s what people take away from it. They’re like, I have a disorder.
There’s something wrong with me. I need to fix this problem. But then do we have solutions to fix that problem when we’re stuck in the disorder way of thinking? Right. The actual way to solve some of these problems is to no longer think of it as a disorder, but actually to kind of shift a paradigm or a belief system to see difference as diversity or divergence. So we have neurodivergence. It’s just divergent from the norm. It’s just different from the norm. It’s not necessarily bad. Sometimes it’s good. Or we could even think of it as diversity, like biodiversity. In a forest, in an ecosystem, you have beetles, you have birds, you have snakes, you have all these different animals. And if a beetle is like, oh, I can’t fly like a bird, what’s wrong with me?
You know, I have not bird disorder, then that’s going to cause a lot of problems for that beetle. But it’s not a problem.
In the words of the comedian Emo Phillips, I’m not as strong as the swimmer as I used to be, you know, thanks to evolution.
Yes, exactly.
It’s a whole other topic here. Although I want to go back to something you mentioned a moment ago, which is that a lot of people in hypnosis, even the ones that are, let’s say, well established and out there seeing clients, I’ve kind of nicknamed what I’m about to reference as the niche trap, which is where the fear is that, oh, if I pick this one specific thing, it’s what I have to do forever. Which, first of all, one, everybody that you and I know who is known for that one thing also does other stuff. So really niching or niching down, it’s a marketing strategy. It’s either a great method for starting up or branching out to other audiences.
And really what you just talked about is something that best illustrates the right way to do it, which is to kind of begin and see what you work well with and then make the decisions after that. So take us back to, again, kind of doing that reference of looking at the people you had already worked with and kind of how you came upon this new sort of focus of what you do.
Right. So what I discovered from looking back is I was like, all of my past clients seem like they’re neurodivergent. They’re often really bright, really gifted, and struggling with the same sorts of things with just getting started on what they want to be doing, with focusing, with perfectionism, with all this kind of stuff. And I looked at myself and I’m like, that’s also very familiar. So how do we solve this problem not just for me and not just for my clients, but for every neurodivergent person? That’s kind of the question I was asking. And the standard solution was just force yourself. Just man up, bro. Just like, you know, just have some discipline. And every single client who had come in had already tried that, and I’d already tried that, and it had not worked for us. Now, I’m not saying it doesn’t work.
For some people, clearly it does. But for me, that caused me to burn out in high school. You know, I was a high achiever in high school. I was doing, you know, cross country, running on top of AP classes, on top of band, on top of all this stuff. And I’d go home and I’d just crash out on the couch at 6pm and sleep until the next day because I was so exhausted from pushing myself so hard, from just this hustle culture of working all the time. And so I already knew that wasn’t going to work for me. So I needed to find another way, a new paradigm, a different way of doing things.
And as I started to dig into this deeper and actually have lots of long conversations with my wife about all this, we started to discover that there are some principles here. There’s some deep principles here about motivation and about how we see the world and how we see people that make a huge difference. It’s really a difference between heading towards burnout and heading towards more aliveness. And it all starts with the idea of difference as good or bad, right? So what is our goal? Like, a lot of people have an unconscious goal. Running, which is. My goal in life is to be normal. My goal in life is to be normal. And so when people come into a coach, a hypnotist, a therapist, often the first thing they ask is, I’m dealing with these problems. Am I normal? Right.
I mean, looking at the most classic thing in hypnosis, which, full respect to Milton Erickson, telling someone that’s right is older than him, so let’s. Okay, give him some credit. But that’s human nature. Anytime someone’s doing something for the first time and they’ve, you know, it’s the first experience, the natural inclination is, am I doing this right?
Am I doing this right?
I’m gonna pull you back to something that apparently the new theme of the Work Smart Hypnosis podcast is Jason is interviewing people who said, like, one sentence nine years ago, and it changed his life. And if you don’t remember this, let’s just claim it was you. There’s something you posted one time online about why you still do lower body weightlifting exercises every week. Am I remembering that right?
Possibly.
Can I just quote you? And let’s just say it was you. I make it a point. I do that barbell squat every week because otherwise it’s more difficult if I’ve taken a break and I go back to it out of the fear of the pain and muscle soreness is only a sign that you’ve done something you haven’t normally done. And it’s something you said around that. That’s brilliant. Let’s just say it was you.
That sounds good.
No, but it’s that nature of, you know, my opposite of that. I was working with a personal trainer one time, and it was a technical move he was teaching me, and all I said was, oh, yeah, it’s a little clunky right now, but I can see with practice that’ll get easier. And, like, he drops his clipboard and he goes, no one says that here. But the nature of anything. I mean, someone connects for a zoom call for the first time. Someone is doing a practice session. And any skill set, it’s natural to go, am I doing this right? Am I doing this the right way? And even what’s the right way is. Is something that itself changes and morphs over time, too.
That’s right. And people want to know, am I doing this human thing right? Am I being a normal human? Am I fitting in? And, you know, most coaches, most hypnotists, most therapists, they do something called Normalizing. And I do this too sometimes. I used to do this exclusively in the past, which is when someone says, hey, is this normal? You say, yes. Lots of people experience this. Totally normal. Right. The weird thing is when a therapist does that, then they also give you a disorder. Like, you, okay, it’s normal to have a disorder. That’s a weird paradox. Whereas from like a coaching or NLP model, I don’t even think in terms of disorder. I was trained to think in terms of every behavior is useful in some context, right? So whatever your problem is also probably your skill in some other conte.
Like, I once worked with someone who is diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder. Now, I don’t diagnose anybody, but that’s what his diagnosis was from his psychiatrist. And he came in and this guy is an engineer who sends things into space. He sends satellites into space. And so at work, he’s obsessed with getting things down to the, you know, fifth decimal point of exact precision. And what he was having problems with is he’d go home and he would be like, no, to his wife. You’re put the cup incorrectly into the dishwasher. You know, it needs to be precise in this way. And they were getting into arguments. And so I pointed out to him, oh, well, you know, yes, in that context, not as helpful. But you know, what we don’t want is somebody working on these satellites who’s like, dude, whatever, man. Close enough.
That also helps to explain, I mean, the nature of. And I’m always cautious around this one, that just. There may be people who are more inclined for specific tasks. There may be the person who’s more primed to be, let’s use that term here carefully. There may be the person who’s more primed to be the business owner versus the employee. There may be the person. And sometimes there’s other, of course, other considerations such as the expectation of the actual work that’s going to be involved. Yet it’s where here’s the skill set, here’s the personality type. So I know you said something around paradigm shifting, you know, out of fear. What’s on the other side of that then?
Right? So, yeah, for instance, if we’re not afraid to be abnormal, almost everyone’s totally afraid to be weird and abnormal and stand out and be different. And that stops us from actually exploring our unique gifts and what would really work for us. So when we can put aside the goal of normal and be like, you know what? It’s not my goal in life to be normal. That’s not. My purpose in life, is to just be a normal human, whatever that means. Five, eight. I guess I’m not five, eight. You’re not either. So I don’t know. I guess we’re not normal. You know, whatever normal is, it’s not my goal. My goal is to be me and to be uniquely me and to bring out my strengths. Okay, now, how do I do that? That’s going to be different. Right.
So when someone comes in and says, hey, Duff, is this normal? What I’ve learned to say is, how the hell would I know? Look at me. I’m a certified professional hypnotist. They do not let normal people become certified professional hypnotists. I’ve been to the hypn gnosis conference. There’s normal people there. And that makes them laugh, of course. But then we can get beyond this idea that the goal is to be normal and that the ultimate failure in life is to be weird. Maybe it’s okay to be weird when you’re being yourself authentically, fully, and we can get beyond the fear. And instead of motivating ourselves and others with fear, what I call the punishment paradigm, we can start to motivate ourselves and other with. With joy and love, and it just changes everything.
Well, tell me if I’m going the right direction on this one, that a lot of people who work with athletes, you know, the language would be not necessarily to play exactly like this one person, yet it is really this understanding of just how to play to your best abilities and get better over time.
Absolutely. Right, right. So, yeah, not every basketball player is going to play like Michael Jordan in the late 90s at his peak. And that’s a good. Because everybody’s got different limb lengths and different genetics and different style. And yeah, if you’re trying to copy somebody else in sports, in business, in life, you’re not going to actually perform at your best. You know, you can start there, like as a hypnotist. Maybe you do study Milton Erickson. Maybe you start with some scripts and you learn some good things that other people have done. But eventually, even Milton Erickson said, become your own best therapist. You know, do your own thing. Don’t copy me. He said that to people. He said, don’t copy me. Do what your intuition says. That’s what I’m doing. I’m doing what my intuition is saying to do.
So do what your intuition says to do, which is going to be different. And you might also have different goals. Right. So how we’ve done things in the past on the personal level or the collective level. We don’t have to do it that way forever. Right? That’s part of a certain paradigm that like, we need to do it how we’ve always done it. This is just how it’s done. You know, we’ve always done things this way and it’s like, okay, well, you can do it that way. But people keep doing that way out of fear again, they’re afraid to try something new. They’re afraid to be like, you know what, I have a thought though, that might improve this process, that might make things better. So instead we can start to think like a designer.
And designer goes in and goes, what are we actually trying to achieve here? What are we trying to create? And then how do we run experiments and test and learn so that we can try to actually make that thing?
Yeah. So then here’s the follow up to that then, which is that, let’s say, and I’m assuming out of this, here’s phase one, which is helping to break that normal trap and break out of that idea of what it should be. And the other part of that though is that often I’m imagining the target, the outcome, the focus of where things are going. That’s going to change over time too. That it might be. Initially the goal is I want to achieve X, and then over time it needs to be something else.
That’s absolutely right. And this is a funny thing with goal setting, right? Like almost all goal setting methods fix the goal. They’re like, you create this goal and then you stick with that goal. And if you can stick with it, you’re disciplined. And if you don’t, then you’re just a loser who will never achieve their goals. That’s sort of implied, usually not said explicitly. But we evolve and change as we pursue a goal because we learn new things, right? We actually don’t know if that’s the real goal we want. You know, before I met my wife and we got married, I actually did this funny experiment because people say, you know, when you’re single, write down what you want in a partner and then you can manifest them or at least you know what you’re looking for. And so I did that.
I wrote a big list of things I wanted and then I met the woman of my dreams and we’re not together anymore. It didn’t work out. In fact, when I got what I wanted, I was like, I don’t know that this is actually what I wanted. And I didn’t know that until I achieved it. I Think that happens for a lot of people who are successful in other areas. They make a lot of money in business, and they’re like, this is really unfulfilling. It’s really meaningless. You know what? That’s okay. That’s okay. Because you’re evolving and learning as a human being. Wonderful. That’s good. But so that outcome can change over time, and we can keep evolving, and that’s a great thing.
Well, it’s that revelation that sometimes. What’s the classic line from. It’s most often attributed to Thomas Edison of discovering all the ways to not make a light bulb the first time around. And sometimes you’ve got to actually be successful at something to realize, okay, I can do that, and I don’t want to anymore.
Right, right. And so this is the approach I take more and more to coaching or hypnosis. You know, I think techniques and protocols and so on are great, especially when you’re learning. You know, you’re a beginning hypnotist. Like, how do I even hypnotize someone? Oh, I can just. I can learn this induction. And if I do the script and I do it well, then someone goes into trance. That’s a wonderful thing. And as you evolve as a practitioner, you start to think about, what are the principles behind this? Well, how can I be more flexible? Because I noticed this thing that I use, it worked with 80% of people. Then I have these 20% of people that I just don’t know what to do anything about, and I would like to be able to help them, too.
So you go deeper into the principles, and then you get more flexible and you can start to design things on the fly. And so all of my coaching, all of my hypnosis, I try to design things on the fly for the person right in front of me. And that especially makes sense because my audience is neurodivergent people. So sometimes the protocols that work for 80% of the population, that’s just for the neurotypical people. And then the people who come to me are the people who. They’ve tried that, and it hasn’t worked.
So then to kind of break it down and this might get into specific methods or specific approaches, like, what’s different then in terms of what you’re actually doing in the session with people, which then allows for. What I’m hearing is to be, well, greater flexibility and not necessarily being tied to a specific approach the moment it begins.
Yes, yes. So I’m operating from a set of deeper principles which I call the progress paradigm. That is distinguished from the punishment paradigm. So the punishment paradigm we could call the way of seeing where it’s like, you believe the best way to motivate yourself and others is with fear and pain. Best way to motivate yourself and others is with fear and pain. So you kind of force yourself. It’s all about discipline. If you’re trying to, like, make a sale, you’re like kind of push and pressure someone into making the sale. If you’re parenting, you’re kind of like disciplining children. Now, I’m not saying that’s always a bad thing to do, but there are some consequences from using fear and pain to motivate ourselves and others. There’s some side effects from that often to the relationship.
If a parent 100% of the time is trying to motivate their children with fear and pain, in 20 years, that child is probably not going to have a relationship with that parent because they’re going to be like, I hate you for how you treated me my whole life. Right. You know, if you’re always motivating yourself with fear and pain, eventually there’s going to be some burnout, probably, or some, you know, probably going to go to a therapist because something’s happened with your emotions. So it’s not that you can’t do it. You can, but there are some side effects. But there’s a whole different way of doing things. It’s called the progress paradigm, where we can motivate ourselves and others with love and joy. Progress paradigm is motivating ourselves and others with love and joy. Now, from within side, the punishment paradigm, that seems impossible.
That seems like there was no way that would ever work. That’s why we call it a paradigm shift to move from one to the other. Because inside this other paradigm, you’re like, of course this would work. And there’s people living here all the time that are like, yeah, I enjoy my job, I enjoy my relationship. It’s a great relationship. I love my kids and they love me. And we don’t yell at each other. We just kind of like, talk it out when we have disagreements. And it just makes sense. From within the paradigm. Everything makes sense because the paradigm’s like a whole belief system. It’s a whole worldview. But when you’re not in the other one, you’re like, that makes no sense at all. Why would you do it that way? Right? So within the progress paradigm, that’s what I’m.
That’s like my hidden curriculum as a coach. That’s what I’m really Teaching because I figured out years ago not all of my coaching clients are going to get their results. I know I would like it if they all got their results. Let me, let me just.
Oh, wait, are you, hang on, are you being honest here?
What? I know, I know there are some Hypnotists who claim 100% results with all their clients. If that’s true for you, fantastic. Just make sure you actually do some follow ups and find out because it might not be true. And in my own life, when I do change work on myself, I don’t get 100% success either. I’ve changed amazing things in myself.
And even going back to something we talked about here, it’s that often, you know, I have to say this too. It’s like, well, correlation for me is I teach hypnosis certification programs and that often be the moment of how many of your students actually open up shop and become professional hypnotists. And I go, it’s a hard answer because one, I have people who attend the training who already are doing it. But also two, not everybody who takes the training is that their specific goal. And similar to that, it’s that along the way people may have goal number one and along the way goal number two then becomes the real focus.
That’s right. That’s right. And there’s different ways we can go about achieving a goal, right? There’s people who have achieved a weight loss goal by absolutely punishing themselves, just starving themselves and just kind of like the Biggest Loser, that TV show. Like they would lose a lot of weight, but almost everyone on the Biggest Loser gains it back and more because they’re doing it from the punishment paradigm. They’re making it absolutely miserable to lose weight. Wait, so as soon as they are no longer on the TV show or, you know, no longer in the program, they’re like, this fucking sucks. I’m not going to do this anymore. Oh, language. This is terrible. I’m not going to do this anymore. And when we do this to ourselves, we don’t want to keep doing the thing that feels really bad.
So if we can make the process enjoyable and easy, which is kind of what hypnosis can do, right? Like the whole point of hypnosis is to make the process of change easy and enjoyable. Goal and what if your life could better even if you fail to achieve your goal? Like that is how I’m thinking about coaching now. It’s like, not all my clients are going to succeed at getting the thing they think they want. Maybe they get it in A way that’s not good for them. That would be punishment paradigm. I want to actually help people to do that.
How familiar are you with like classic structure of what’s hero’s journey as Joseph Campbell would talk about? Yeah, yeah. That’s the overall description, the simplest way of talking about it. The hero leaves a place to go to another place to find a thing that they’re looking for that either one they already had the entire time or they find something else.
Right.
That it’s in dramatic literature. It’s a letdown if easiest one in modern time. Well, Star Wars, Kung Fu Panda, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. Of course, let’s reference the classics here. But it’s that, you know, here’s an example of one of the remake or one of the sequels of the Rocky movies. When they made oh, what was it with Michael C. Anthony. That’s hypnotist Michael B. Jordan. Yeah, there we go. Where Creed. And it would be spoiler coming. It’d be a letdown if the movie was just. He wants to be this winning boxer. Oh, he won. Roll the credits. And it’s that really he discovers a greater understanding of who he is and his relationship to his now passed on father. Because as I would say from watching that movie. Oh, he won because he lost.
Yes.
Yeah. And again, that hero’s journey arc is one where often we find something better than what were looking for. Pee Wee wanted to find his red bicycle. And not only did he find it, he also finally had friends.
Wow.
There’s the better journey.
So important. But yes, it really comes down to like, I think maybe just maturing as a practitioner myself, but also, you know, thinking deeply about this stuff. It’s like what you know, is. Is life just about getting what you want? I mean, yes, wonderful to get what you want. But if we look around, there are some billionaires who are public figures now and they are controversial. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, but some of these controversial billionaires are controversial because they don’t appear to be very happy. Which is kind of strange to us in America where we’re like, well, I mean, money, that’s what makes you happy. If you have lots of it, then you must be just happy all the time. And so, you know, sometimes getting what you want isn’t what you want, which is wild.
Sometimes you get what you want, but you do it in a way that destroys everything else in your life. That’s not a good outcome. That’s not what I want. To help People to do. So what I want to help people to do is, yes, pursue what you want and your life gets better in the process of pursuing it, whether you achieve it or not. And so the way I approach that now is called the progress paradigm. And let me give you an example. So I’ve had more than one neurodivergent client come in for procrastination and say, duff, my problem is I procrastinate the things I really want to do. But don’t worry, Duff, I already have the solution to this problem. I just need to be harder on myself. Can you help me to have a harsher inner taskmaster?
Have you tried hustling?
Have you tried hustling? Have you tried grinding? Hustling and grinding. I’m out of ideas. No, but that’s what they come in with. The attempted solution to the problem is causing the problem. And this is something they talk about in systems theory. In fact, in the emergence of family therapy around Milton Erickson’s time, everyone was talking about systems theory and they’re talking about how ironic processes work in human psychology. And one of the ironic processes is the attempted solution causes the problem. In this case, the attempted solution is whenever I fail at doing the thing I intend to do, I’m just gonna be really mean to myself. I’m gonna have the worst inner critic. I’m gonna feel all this shame and guilt and anger, and that will motivate me to do it correctly next time.
But actually what it does is as soon as I fail to do it and I recognize I do it, I’m punishing myself. And so by punishing, what I’m really punishing is taking action. And I used to do this to myself. I would procrastinate something for a long time, months maybe, and then I would actually do it. And you know what would happen? As I completed the task, I would say to myself, yeah, but I should have done it earlier. And what I was doing in that moment is punishing success. I was associating pain with completing a task, so no wonder I didn’t want to do it next time, right?
And so now what I did to actually retrain myself is when I complete a task, if I’ve been procrastinating, especially I complete a task and I pump my hands over my head and I go, yay, I did it. Woohoo. It sounds totally stupid, but what it does is it starts to associate pleasure with completing something. So this is one of the silly things I teach my clients to do, is to just celebrate and take in the good and feel good about yourself. You know, it doesn’t have to suck. We have this weird idea that virtuous people are in pain all the time. They’re just like pushing through pain. They’re just disciplined, they’re just miserable. Like David Goggins going out for his morning 100 mile run at 3am and just miserable. And it’s like, okay, well, you know, maybe that worked for David Goggins.
That doesn’t work for me. What I’m going to do is learn how to enjoy exercising. And that’s what I do. I’m like, oh, this feels good. When I do it this way, then I’m more likely to want to do it tomorrow, which is good because in order to be in shape, I’m going to need to do this every day for the rest of my life. Life. So instead of making it miserable and painful, we can actually make it pleasurable and we can take in the good of our accomplishments and our successes and that makes it so much better.
I mean, in many ways it’s about breaking down some of the expectations that are, you know, kind of hardwired in there. And this expectation that certain things should be hard, should be complicated. I’ll tell the story as briefly as I can, but there’s a time where a client of mine is a quick thought to correlate to this. It’s where a family member said to him he had lost about 60 pounds of body fat. The family member says, hey, good for you. I know how hard it is to lose weight. You look fantastic. And he couldn’t figure out why this compliment was bothering him. And it finally clicked. He goes, here’s what was different. It was the fact that for the first time ever, thanks to the hypnosis, like, I was actually enjoying eating right.
I was enjoying figuring out how I can feed myself better. And it’s the first time I didn’t label it as being. Being hard.
Yes.
And something really shifts where we step into that and you know, just by gotta be a better way.
And this all relates actually back to user experience design, which my wife was in school for and got a master’s degree in. So user experience design is about improving products, processes, experiences to make them easier and more enjoyable so people can accomplish the goals they want to accomplish. Usually it’s applied to apps and websites. That’s like the main jobs in user experience design is apps and websites. So, you know, like when you go on a government website and you can’t figure out anything and it’s an extremely frustrating process. You want to tear out your hair. That’s bad user experience design. And you know, when you use an app or website, you don’t even think about it, and it just works and you get what you want done. That’s good user experience design. But it doesn’t just apply to apps and websites.
It applies to literally everything. The father of UX design, Don Norman, wrote an amazing book that I think all hypnotists should read, actually. It’s called the Design of Everyday Things. The Design of Everyday Things. And one of his examples he gives is about doors. So if you go into a major city anywhere in the United States, you can probably find a door that has a handle on both sides that comes out, you know, so, like, you can reach and you can grab onto something, and your natural inclination when you hold the handle like that is to pull. But on almost all of those doors that have the same handle on both sides, one of the sides has a sign that says push. Because people naturally, intuitively, unconsciously want to pull a handle. And so they had to add a sign afterwards.
And what happens is a thousand times a day, someone reaches out, grabs that handle, pulls again to make sure they’re not crazy. Looks up, sees the sign that says push, and go, ugh. And then they push the door open, right? And that bad design does something for the experience of the person who encounters it. They either feel like, what’s wrong with me that I can’t operate a door? Or they go, what’s wrong with the designer of this door that they design it this way. So they go into shame or blame. Shame or blame is the natural consequence of something that’s badly designed, that doesn’t designed for human psychology. And so a thousand times a day, we’re not just encountering doors, we’re encountering all sorts of things in life that are badly designed.
And this is especially true for neurodivergent people, because our brains are even more different than the norm. And so what this leads to is the feeling like there’s something wrong with me or there’s something wrong with the world from the punishment paradigm. And I need to discipline myself to remember to open the door the proper way. I need to discipline myself to do the things that are on my to do list and so on. But there’s another option, which is we can design things to work for human brains. That’s one of the things that hypnosis does so well, because we use the power of the imagination to imagine this thing’s going to be easy to imagine that eating the healthy food is going to be fun and easy and enjoyable. To imagine exercising is going to be fun, easy and enjoyable.
And as we use the brain in the way that it’s meant to be used, then we no longer are operating in this badly designed way. We’re just going with what the design of the human being is like. And human beings want to experience joy and love. We want to experience joy and love. We want things to be easy and enjoyable and so we can set things up that way more and more. And when we do that, we don’t have problems like procrastination. Like, if you really enjoy the process of doing something and you feel good after you accomplish it, procrastination is not going to be a problem in that situation. It’s only when we are beating ourselves up or we’re struggling to focus on the thing and so on.
And it’s an unenjoyable experience that these kind of problems show up in the first place.
Well, here’s what I love about this. It’s that so often people get into a pattern of thought and it’s again, I should do this. I must be doing it that way or I’m doing it wrong. And it’s that so many times the journey towards that outcome is not just about better habits, better strategies, but also finding the better roadmap. And you know, that roadmap isn’t always linear. It’s not always step one, step two, step three. It’s often. We’re quoting wise philosophers here. MC Scatcat one time said in a duet with Paula Abdul, two steps forward, three steps back, to get the lyrics wrong here, but it’s that of this linear journey is not really how it plays out. And you know, with business, not everything is going to be the same level of success.
With health, not everything is the same consistency along the way. And there’s going to be the occasional injury, the occasional vacation or whatever interruption would be. But it’s that with what you’re talking about, of it’s presenting the new roadmap, which allows for that flexibility and that growth over time. I mean, is there a story that comes to mind of a client who I would imagine just simply laying this foundation, got some of the change already in motion.
Yeah. I don’t know if a specific story is coming to mind right now, but something you just said did trigger a thought around. Yeah. The shoulds and the musts and what we talk about in NLP as just the modal operators of necessity. Modal operators of necessity. Big, complex term. But I just think of it as a mode of operating. We’re operating in a mode. It’s called have to mode. I have to do this. I have to do that. I should do this. Because we could call it should mode or I must mode, but I call it have to mode. When we’re in have to mode, it’s not enjoyable. Whatever we’re doing, it sucks. It’s not fun. It’s just.
But we can also get into a different mode, a don’t have to mode, or a choice mode where we feel like, well, I could do this, I might do that. I choose to do this. That’s a very different mode to be in. And similarly, there’s this other modal operator of impossibility. Can’t. Couldn’t. It’s not possible. There’s no possibilities. And sometimes we’re in that mode and we’re stuck, and we’re like, there’s no possibilities to move forward. There’s no options. I can’t do it.
It’s not possible. But it’s just a mode. It’s just a mood. And when we shift out of that, then we get into can mode, we get into possibilities, and we can see all these possibilities. And one of the possibilities I help my clients to see is the possibilities of doing things while being kind to yourself. So, like, you know, here’s maybe a client story. I did have a client who came in and said, literally, I need a harsher taskmaster because I’m procrastinating all these things. And we worked to not create a harsher taskmaster, but to be more kind to himself and to celebrate and take in the good. To literally pump your hands over your head and go, yay. When he completed even, like, one minute on a task.
Anybody else out there listening and doing that to themselves right now, besides me, please do. Okay. Yeah, it works.
And you don’t even have to wait till you finish the test. You can even do it in your mind. And this is what I’ll invite people to do. Even the listener right now. If there’s something you’re putting off, imagine. First off, imagine that somehow it’s just easy to get started. Just magically just. You wave a magic wand, and you can just easily get started. And you do the first 10 seconds of that task, right? So picture in your mind what it’s like to do the first 10 seconds of that task and then celebrate, pump your arms over your head and go, yay. I did the first 10 seconds of that task that seems too silly to work. But that’s one of the best things I’ve found for procrastination.
If you keep practicing like that, what happens is you start to actually feel good when you start tasks and when you look forward to in the future starting a task instead of thinking, oh, this is going to be so hard and it’s going to suck and you start talking to yourself like that, you go, oh, I’m going to feel really good that I started. And so you just start changing. Getting started feels good. Getting started feels good. Getting started feels good. And you associate that enough times and it actually does feel good. Amazing. Hypnosis works.
It does. And BoulderHypnosis works right.com I know. Look at that. It’s my party trick. I know people’s email addresses and websites though you may have just answered the question. I love every bit of this. Where can people find out more of you and the work that you’re doing?
BoulderHypnosisWorks.com is the website I am starting a new podcast. It might be started by the time this episode goes live on your podcast. It’s going to be called the neurodivergent Entrepreneur. For those of you who are neurodivergent entrepreneurs, you might enjoy listening to other interviews with other neurodivergent entrepreneurs. And we’re going to discuss all the stuff we talked about today. Just different ways to do things. Things that work for our unique brains. Running experiments, Doing things from the progress paradigm. Finding joy and love as motivation.
Jason Linett here once again. And as always, thank you so much for sharing this conversation and your ongoing hypnotic dialogues for leaving your reviews online. And also head over to worksmarthypnosis.com that’s where you can find the show notes of this episode. Plus, check out worksmarthypnosislive.com for the upcoming Systems for Persuasive Hypnosis live training event. And for those of you again who are tired of struggling with technology, of getting your message out there, check out our invite over at doitnow.vip. I’m Jason Linett. See you soon. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis podcast and Work Smart Hypnosis.
