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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 72. Mike Mandel on Pushing Boundaries. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, Your professional resource for hypnosis training and out. Standing Business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. Hey, it’s Jason Lynette here, and there is only one way to sum up this conversation that you’re about to listen to that I just had with not other than master hypnotist, Mike Mandel out of Canada.
And the description I love is that, You’re gonna hear an amazing three or four hour conversation that we manage to have in only about 45 minutes because we cover everything. I mean, we go at it from the directions of this true renaissance that hypnosis is going through in our profession today, we talk about the philosophies of training, how to empower students to take the information that we share out into the world and recreate the same results and even better.
Go further along that. Beyond that as well, we talk the business of hypnosis. We even get into what might even be considered fringe topics, though, in my opinion, directly related interests such as handwriting analysis, as well as the martial arts, and just the true fluidity. Of how we become that well rounded person.
How we develop that rapport, not only with our clients, with ourselves, and as Mike so brilliantly puts it, it’s all about pushing the boundaries to challenge things to a brand new direction. I get to give a great plug here before we officially jump in, that if you’re a listener of the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, which I have to assume you are, Listening to it now.
Also, check out Brain Software with Mike Mandel. That’s the podcast that Mike does along with his business partner, Chris Thompson. Chris is an awesome guy. If you’re heading to Hypno Thoughts Live 2016, if you’re listening to this before it, Go up and meet them, interact with them. I’m actually signed up.
I’m doing my Hypnotic Business Mastery course on the Tuesday, Wednesday before hypno thoughts and, uh, hey, Thursday’s open. So I’m gonna be hanging out in the room, taking the Mind Scaping class with, with Mike, and hanging out with Chris and everybody else there as well. Again, this, this session is a force of nature, an amazing three or four hour conversation that we just had in a matter of 45 minutes, hypnotic content.
At wholesale value. Let’s jump right in. This is session number 72, Mike Mandel on Pushing Boundaries.
So what I’m fascinated by is that, you know, many of us, I’m sure the story wasn’t growing up. I want to be a hypnotist or was it for you? Well, it actually, um, you know, there’s the people. I guess want to be hypnotist and there’s those who have hypnosis thrust upon them. , I think I fall into the second category cause you know, at 12 years old, um, we had come to Canada from England and my father was British Army.
He was an engineer. And um, my parents were both insanely English eccentric. You wouldn’t even believe the stories if I told you they were true harmless eccentrics. And um, and at age 12, I remember my dad being concerned cuz I wasn’t reading enough. I’d become a TV addict, cuz in Britain back then there were only two channels and there weren’t even any commercials.
It was BBC and itv and that was it. And then we’d come to Toronto and you get all these great stations in Buffalo as well. And I thought it was fantastic. And my dad was concerned because of the, just the sheer amount of television I was watching. And he said, I want you to read more. And I said, Well, get me some books.
Well he did. He dragged me off to a bookstore and said, Any book you want, you can have any. And I found in a, an old band, I think it was like 75 cents or something key to hypnotism Walter Gibson. Hmm. And bought that book and bang it, it, the bug bit. And that’s how it all started. That was, which correct me on this, Gibson was also the, uh, the writer behind the shadow.
As well, the shadow Lamont cran, which is no surprise really when you think of it, you know, the clouding of men’s minds and so on. Right. Yeah. It was prolific magician and magic writer. And, but it was, I still have, not the original, but I have a copy of it somewhere in my library and I still use one of the techniques out of it, or at least teach it to this day.
But that was it. And that’s, that’s, uh, more than 50 years ago now. Wow. Wow. And, and it’s been a career where from stage to hypnotherapy to training, doing a bit of, Yes, Yes, very much so. And the hypnosis shows started in 1975. I started doing this January 75, full time. Left my office job for Bell Canada and uh, proceeded to star for a couple of years.
Fortunately, I was living with my parents, so I didn’t really starve and, um, It, it just, I, I love being on stage, loved doing the shows, the universities, the high schools, and then eventually the bars and the corporate stuff as I get older. And, but then moving into the NLP and training an nlp and then doing the therapy.
But now the, uh, the teaching hypnosis is my real love. I think it’s, nothing turns my crank. Jason, I, I know you, you do every aspect of hypnosis too, and you probably. I agree with you. Nothing’s better than seeing somebody else replicate excellence. Like if you can show somebody something and they get amazing results with it, it, it really is a cool thing to know that they are spreading that now.
Well, it’s that metaphor that you would often hear of the, the trainer, the fish. Yeah. Well, the students are all gathered at the feet of the master pointing back to look what he can do. And , I, I don’t really have a specific name as I make this reference, but I’ve, I’ve heard the story over the years of someone goes to a training and asking, Well, what did you learn?
And I’m hearing this feedback of, oh, he was so giving, he just gave everything away. And I. But what did you do with it, ? How did you put that into action? What’s your next step? What are you doing with it? Oh, he was just, he’s wonder, and it’s that, it’s that place of the, you’re right, the measure of the success is it, is the students replicating that and right to, to be there.
And I’m sure it’s this experience of, I, I’m, I’m, I’m on your private Facebook group as well. Where here are people who are making use of the information that they’ve learned from. Yeah, sharing their feedback. And I, I share a dirty, rotten strategy of mine in one of the private groups that I run , um, which I maybe shouldn’t be revealing on recording, which is that I will, I will see the question and I will purposefully ignore it for a few hours.
Oh, nice. So the reason that I now see the other fellow students in. Answering it instead. And I’m able to swoop in and yes, it does make my life easier cuz I can go Yeah. What Josh said. That’s right. . And, uh, that’s fantastic. I I, I’m applying that forth with, I mean it’s, that’s a great strategy because even when I’m at our cottage on vacation, you know, Chris is always saying, he’s the business guy.
He’s saying, You gotta get out to mm h a every few days, just have a presence there. So I go up to the local library where I can get wifi for my iPad and uh, and it’s what you said, you know, somebody will post something and there’ll be. Responses from other people, Oh shoot, I gotta jump in on this. But it, it makes it a lot easier when other people already have, and you can sort of see the tack and the direction that it’s going.
Yeah. Well, I mean, let’s get onto this theme and we kind of bounce all over the place on this that, Yeah, when I first got into hypnosis and in my first entry point was seeing a stage hypnosis show back in 2001, watching it and going, Oh, that’s, And grabbing every book I could, and I wish I could track down which book it was just for the reference of how horrible it was.
Because I think the language really was memorize these words that ought work. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that’s burned into my retina even to this day, which I wish I could track it down just for the reference of any book. But this one though, it’s that point of view that there’s been a real shift, I think, and.
It’s that place of, Well, years ago as I got into training, there was this pushback about that’s a, that’s a high fee and that’s a challenge for me. And the biggest issue these days is, is I can’t make those dates work. Do you have an online option? So right, we’re in this renaissance of learn at your own pace, information on demand.
And I’m just curious to hear from your perspective, are there, are there benefits of, let’s call it distance. that you’ve discovered as you’ve, as you’ve progressed over the years, as the trainings expand to a worldwide audience. Absolutely. Um, it’s, it’s really getting in there early enough I think was, was a good thing.
And I attribute all of this to the genius of my amazing business partner, Chris Thompson. Yes. Is also a great hypnotist and probably the nicest guy anybody will ever meet. He’s just completely genuine. He loves to help people. He’s just, that’s the way he is. And he got on my case for years cuz he first saw me when he was in university.
And um, he said eventually, Studied with me and then joined a martial arts class, and we became close friends and he said, You’ve gotta put it online. That’s the next big wave. And I didn’t see it. You know, I’m, I’m in my sixties for crying out loud. It’s like, you know, I use the internet, but I don’t understand it.
To me it’s like cotton, you know, I use cotton, but I don’t know how it works, . So he says, uh, he says, You gotta get it out there. Like, online training is the way to go. Cause I, I love doing keynotes and for corporations and so on, and. He was right because the number of people now who are connected with the group from, I never dreamed it would open the door to having people fly in.
Like psychiatrists come in from Singapore to study in Toronto, like, and they’re hearing all of this because of the online presence, whether it is. Mike made Notes Academy, or whether it’s our own podcast, brain software, that the use of the internet has changed everything. I mean, it’s, you know, I said to my wife, I really do not miss dragging my butt around Southern Ontario , which is what I did for so many years.
Right. And it, it’s changed everything. And I think you really nailed it. Jason, when you mentioned the line, people wanna learn at their own pace. As well, and it’s one of the things I’m in love with, which comes out of the US is the great courses. And I have studied everything from, you know, quantum physics to cathedral architecture, just just for the sheer joy of learning.
But that is what makes it work for me, is being able to do it at my own pace. You know, I can power through five lessons if I want or take two weeks off. And I think that is the direction people are definitely moving. And there’s something to be gained about too. That ability to go back and review the information and access what they need to see rather than Absolutely, yeah.
It’s that flash in the pan and then it’s, Yes. Yes. Which I mean, to back up the other side, I, I did some of my original training and then revisited a course with that same instructor about eight years later. And that was a moment in terms of my experience where it became the, Oh wait, I thought I learned that from this person.
But I came up with that type of moment of unpacking what I had, you know, the line of do it this way, and then it becomes the. The telephone game in our minds where it just slowly morphs into something else, morphs into something. Yeah. Yeah. They call it postman or something. In England, when you’re kids, it, it, it’s, yeah, you’re delivering it for the next person.
It keeps warping you. But that, that’s so funny because the way you described it is the ideal way. You, you go back eight years later and you find out that this brilliant idea did not come from the trainer. It came out of your own brain. I had the opposite one half. Recently . I’ve been, I can’t even remember what the quote was as in my notes.
I’ve been saying this thing for years that I thought was absolutely original. I was convinced it was me until I read it in the Milton Erickson book a few months ago. . I went, I get this from Erickson. I thought it was me. So, It’s a humbling thing. You know, I, and, and again, working with people’s learning styles too, I, I know we’re, we’re sort of stuck online doing the, the visual learning and the auditory learning, and then people hopefully are gonna get out and do something with it rather than just watch the videos and listen to the recordings.
But you never know. It’s like when I did my NLP trainer training, With the late Derek Bomber who was a Cambridge linguist here in Toronto, his trainer track was two years. So it’s, we, you know, we’d meet a couple of times a month for two years, but that kind of immersion it, really make sure that you get it, you know.
And he used to smack me in the side of the head and always tell me I was working too hard, put too much into it. You’re working too hard. Take it easier, you’re pushing. It. Smack me in the head again, but. Yeah, it’s, I, I, we haven’t got that luxury now, but with, with the online academies and the online learning possibilities, I can’t even imagine what the next phase of this is gonna be.
You know, like, what’s it gonna be, where’s the learning gonna go? And especially because hypnosis right now is worldwide going through the biggest renaissance in history. When you said Renaissance, you’re correct. I mean, it’s, it’s, this is also the biggest. Fascination with the subject since the 1880s, that was the last time it peaked like this and it’s now just boom.
It’s worldwide. People wanna know all about it, whether it’s for using it for hypnotherapy or you know, stage stuff or whatever. So it’s a great time to be in this fascinating industry and I’m sure you’ll agree with me too, having, I was just at my first hyp thoughts last year. It does draw some colorful characters, doesn’t it?
Like really? That’s a good way of putting it. Yeah. No, I’d reference that and we’ll put a link to this in the, in the show notes here for this podcast that there’s, there’s a, there’s a talk that I put out online about a year or two ago called just the 21st Century Mindset, that I really feel that in hypnosis the.
Well, the best way to describe it, there’s a student who’s in a class of mine sometime, I think it was like March last year. And the way that I typically train, I’m in the Washington, dc uh, suburb area, which means that I’ve got apparently six of the 10 most affluent cities all within 20 miles of me. So it’s, it’s, wow.
It’s pretty easy. I was, I was doing a coaching call with the student out in Iowa yesterday and. Asking the question of what’s the nearest big city in finding out of Chicago two hours away? So it’s easy for me to do a course where it’s a weekend format. Yes. Because there’s so many people in a tightly compact area.
So I mentioned that because it’s where students are back. It’s the second weekend, it’s like three weeks later. And one of them had this experience of talking about the training with her family members. And I mean, she’s coming in and she looks like she has just been run for the ringer. She’s been beat up by them about the mind of, But they’ve said hypnosis is weird and it’s scary and people won’t come to me.
And my real honest response was, it’s not a matter of what they were saying being the issue. The issue is you’re agreeing with. That I think brilliant in terms of our, in terms of our hypnosis profession, we are actually much further along than most of us would give it credit for. I, I crack the joke that you set up an alert online in different news cycles, and there’s always stories of this celebrity, this person making use of hypnosis.
Sometimes we have the celebrity where we’re going, Yeah, thank you, but just anyone but you, but we have these moments. Uh, the research that’s coming out, the results that’s coming out, the feedback, the, the people who would say, Well, you hit on this earlier, the people who would say, Oh, doctors won’t refer to you yet, you also having doctors in the room as students or even clients that it’s this.
I think the hypnosis profession needs a bit of a hypnotist at times in terms of increasing that confidence of here’s where we really. Uh, That’s interesting. I find too, there’s sort of a barrier with people who have been immersed in reading scripts at people for so long that they have very little confidence in their own abilities.
There’s, there’s a whole layer of, of hypnotists who have maybe been doing this for 10 or 15 years, but they’re still resorting to essentially having a programmed response to a client instead of interacting with a human being. And when people learn to jump in the deep end and swim instead of sort of paddle in the shallows with somebody holding their hand and, you know, wearing a swimming ring, then, then they’re not gonna be afraid of, of whatever they’re dealing with, or they’re gonna have the confidence and know that.
On the fly, they’ll be able to interact with that person and guide them into something more appropriate, guide them into a resourceful state and start working from there. But I agree with you, It’s, it’s booming, it’s amazing. And, uh, maybe we are a lot further along than we realize. It’s, uh, there’s, there’s so much going on in the world of hypnosis, and I, that’s why I’m thrilled that we’re all gonna.
Hit my thoughts again next month. It’s in fact, I just said to my wife, I gotta renew my passport. I better hurry up and do it because I’ve only got a month to get it done. And my, my US visa is in my current Canadian passport. My, my US visa does not expire for a couple years yet, but my passport’s expiring, so I’m not sure how that all works.
I’ll have to figure it out. I’ll, I’ll say it comfortably. I’m signed up for the class to get that in order. No, the, the, the metaphor of people who are doing the same thing day in, day out. The thing that’s coming out of some interactions with clients and students these days. The imagery of the birthday party clown, who also does animal balloons.
So it’s not quite their specialty yet. It’s something that they can add on as a service and, Hey kid, I can make you any animal you want, so long as it looks like a dog or a snake . Right, right. I, I’m curious to take the conversation at a different place for a moment, which, We very often get into themes of how we got into hypnosis, what our inspirations are, and what we’re currently doing.
Though I, I think the conversation often needs to be had about what it is that we do that makes us just human. The things that we’re doing that are just within passions of ours, and even how it’s inspired some of our work with clients that you have a pretty strong background in the martial arts. Yes, that’s quite true.
Yeah, I, I used to joke and say hypnosis is a martial art of the mind, but instead of down cranking someone and, and twisting their neck, instead you’re actually helping them stuff. , I don’t think the, the, it doesn’t work too well as a metaphor, but yeah, the martial arts, it ties into it to a large degree.
And the funny thing is, Jason, the number of people who have have joined our hypnosis classes in Toronto. A lot of them came in through my British Jiujitsu class first, or a lot of our British Jiujitsu students were hypnotists first. So there’s a huge overlap there, although I’d be hard pressed to determine exactly what it is.
Yeah, yeah. What, from that, what from that style, what from that approach would you say has influenced your hypnosis over the years? Wow. Or what from your hypnosis has influenced that? I think it’s the, um, the aspect of, of fluidity dealing with the situation instead of going in with a plan. That, that, I’m huge on that with both hypnosis and with the martial arts, you know, dealing with, you know, in chess they say play the position, not the opponent.
Look at the position on the board and play that regardless of who’s across from you. Find the best move and it’s the. It’s the same with the martial arts. I mean, you, you have to adapt it obviously for people who are larger or whether or not they’re trained, whether or not they’re armed and so on. But it’s the fluidity, the thinking on the fly that being able to stay in a very resourceful state and follow it wherever it goes.
I think that that’s something I brought to the hypnosis and from the hypnosis back to the British juujitsu as well. Yeah. Yeah. So then avoiding rigidity, I guess avoiding rigid. and now we’re talking about what we’re avoiding instead of what we’re moving towards . So avoiding rigidity, That’s my away from value and, and moving towards fluidity.
How’s that? Yeah. I mean it’s the, it’s a line from Charles Tez about just deal with what emerges, right. That whatever I think I loved about Tebo. Yeah. What, whatever it is, like deal with what’s the, what’s happening, work with what’s there. And that’s one of the contributions from Tets. I think that’s really, really good.
Just, you know, instead of a plan instead of. A script instead of some organized system, you’re gonna use what’s presenting itself. Deal with that first. Well, let’s rewind it back then. So the client is in front of you, and is there a specific journey? While it may not be, obviously, obviously not a scripted out process or even a specific protocol, is there something of a style, something of a, let’s call it a thematic structure?
That you feel you’re really bringing to the process in terms of the journey that client’s about to go on? I think so. I think it really just comes out of setting up the most profound raw rapport loop with the person I can and being genuine, which means being prepared to be vulnerable as a therapist.
And I think that builds tremend, and we’re talking now purely therapeutically, but I think that can build tremendous trust. I think people can sense that. I think especially people in TRAs. Really able to calibrate phoniness really quickly or something that, not even phony, but just artificial. And I think if we can be vulnerable and.
Really be ourselves with clients. We go a long way towards helping people change. Because remember, I don’t know who it was, you might, you’ll probably know Jason, the person who said, whoever it was, who said the number one thing about getting someone to change is whether or not they like you. And . If we can be genuinely likable human beings and this is gonna, I’m gonna be vulnerable with you here.
Now, it’s a very odd thing when every hypnosis class and my students laugh about this cuz I. The final day of every class we fived course, we all go up for Japanese food together for lunch, and there’s a lot of polarity and we have a blast. And then come back and hang out and do the state last thing and sign the certificates.
And then I give them the final metaphor of the day. And we present gifts in that to some of them who we think have really excelled and every freaking time. I am convinced I’m going to get through this without tearing up and I never can because it’s been a week of seeing people just replicating excellence and seeing people grow and people who’ve been afraid of even speaking in front of an audience in day five.
They’re delivering these killer metaphors they’ve invented that are just amazing. And then my vulnerability comes out and it’s, I think people. My, one of my students, I met with him when I was in Boston. He’s a medical doctor. He’s an obstetrician. I think he listens to you actually, so he’ll, he’ll know who I mean.
But he said he was surprised that I was actually. Pretty normal and, and a fairly nice guy. Like he thought I was gonna be really arrogant and everything from the podcast, which of course a complete joke. It’s just a persona for the podcast. But so in the class, you know, the thing is, I think some people, we get people coming in from New Zealand and India to study in Toronto, and there can be an a factor that.
It makes my hypnotic work easy, that’s for sure. But I think it’s good for them to remember that the Wizard of Oz is actually just human, you know? Mm-hmm. . He’s just being a little further down the yellow like brick road than some of them, but just purely by living longer. I think that kind of vulnerability and honesty does a, does a lot for the students too, because they know, they know they can be themselves and do sterling.
Yeah, I, I’d mentioned of all things, my, my background was working in professional theater on the management side, so I wasn’t, I wasn’t the actor, designer or, you know, any of those things. I was the person creatively finding ways to make all these people get along, which the line is, if that’s not psychological training, I don’t know what is though.
It’s, it’s the moment where, Suddenly it’s this big name who’s now on this production or here in the DC area. I’d be doing some sort of political event and doing management for that in this moment of, Oh yeah, this one’s trying to find their keys. Oh, that’s right. and I, I’m having to flash back to a moment where I call it the Willie Nelson effect in an odd way because my, my mother was a huge, it still is a huge Willie Nelson fan.
And finally, after 40 years of being a fan, I surprised her with tickets to go see him in concert. And I mean, consummate professional into the show. He sits on the edge of the stage. He talks to everybody. Oh, and they’re having a conversation that. she’s already been having with him for 40 years and he’s just being welcomed in for the first time.
Oh, fantastic. It’s why I do so much video, uh, as, as you all do well, where it’s the students are coming in and they’re continuing a conversation that I’m interacting for the first time, though, my version of that was as the students showed up early for the first day of a recent course, he goes, You’re taking out your own trash.
And I’m just having to give the brutal, the brutal honesty of Well I hired someone to do that once during a class and I basically paid them for nine hours to work for 10 minutes. So, um, I got it, I got it. . Oh, brilliant. It’s brilliant. It’s funny cuz my wife and I were in the Loblaws, the Loblaws, just the local variety, our grocery store here, one of the big chains, and we’re in their shopping and my wife is getting something off the shelf.
And this kid must have been in high school age, walked by, there’s old 15, 20 years ago, he said, Mike Mandale, you shop. I said, Of course I’d shop. He said, You think little elves bring my food to me? It’s like, What are you talking about? You just couldn’t conceive that I would shop hypnotize people to make my food float on into my house, you know?
So that’s the same one, isn’t it? That the Willie story. That’s fantastic. I like what you’re saying about the continuing the conversation, you know, it’s just now she’s getting it from him directly. She’s now present as he’s speaking. That’s wonderful. Yeah. Which, especially to look at our change process. I mean, the client’s coming in and for them to have already had most of these interactions, it’s where, uh, I feel there’s so many things we can do.
Thanks to kind of going back to our first chat here about conver uh, technology. There’s so many things we can do that suddenly now the process is already in motion. I mean, the hypnosis begins the moment they know we exist. , right? Yes it does. To, to plant those seeds. To plant those influences. Yes. Oh, for sure.
Yeah. So Nico is one of my students from France. He’s actually a wing CH teacher too. Really interesting guy. But he does the thing. I do the same thing. We intersect people and he’s, he’s a comman natural I sector. It just begins a conversation with a stranger and it becomes, Powerful hypnosis just seamlessly, but not by choosing techniques or, you know, running through a deck of flashcards in his head or anything just by, it’s hard to explain.
I find everybody who’s doing hypnosis at, at a pretty high level eventually does that. That’s why I, I love coming to hypno thoughts. Like I said, I’ve only, I’ve only been once, but this second time I’m just thrilled to be there because the quality of the trainers, the, some amazing people teaching there, like William Woods.
I was, heard him. Yes. And um, I said, I. Bill, I said, I’m an NLP trainer, and I said, I have never heard anchoring, explained as co gently and succinctly as you just did, and as he demoed it, I just, I had aha moments going. This is brilliant. And then of course the EL elements that take, Have a connection to Larry.
Yes. Through Larry Elman to his dad and, and Carl Smith from Britain. And it just, it’s gonna be fantastic. I’m so looking forward to this. Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m curious to jump over for a moment once again. So where did the handwriting analysis come in? Oh, oh, that’s really interesting. It was my stepmother back in, um, about 1990, gave me as a birthday present cause I’m a reading fanatic.
She gave me a gift certificate for a store in Toronto that doesn’t exist anymore. It was called the World’s Biggest Bookstore because it was mm-hmm. , It was enormous. It was like a Walmart and it was just books and. So I, this gift certificate sat there for months and then one day my wife said, Are you gonna use that?
I said, Yeah, we’ll take it downtown. So went downtown. I went in the bookstore. She said, Here’s a book you might be interested in, and it. A handwriting analysis book, a graphology book. And the woman who wrote it, Andrew McNichol, had done graphology for the FBI and Scotland Winyard, and she trained at the Orban in Paris and University of Heidelberg.
We can get degrees in it. And it was based on science, like any other science where large numbers, you know, like, let’s look at the handwriting, the thousand people who are depressed, a hand handwriting, but 500. Extremely high achievers. What are the common elements? What can we deduce from this and can we then make predictions?
And, you know, it goes back a couple hundred years now, but, so I got the book, read it, loved it. And my wife said, You should study this. And, and she found a woman in Toronto, Elaine Cheryl, who was Canada’s best graphologist, and I went and had a private lesson with her. And she convinced me to do the International Grappl Analysis Society trainings, and I did that.
And then that led into dozens and dozens of other books and trainings and things. And because I have a very strong police connection, I’ve taught the advanced interviewing module at the Ontario Police College and a bunch of other stuff like that, they started coming to me. Not just for forensic hypnosis, but they found out about the graphology and said, Can you do this for us?
And I said, Sure. So I looked at suicide notes and the threatening letters and all kinds of things like that, and the results were just amazing. So eventually I said to Chris, We should put this out as a product. And we did. It became our online graphology training as well. Right. And it’s astounding because if people knew what their handwriting revealed, and I know now everybody’s, you know, thumbing devices instead, but most people can still write if they knew how much it reveal.
And then it never ever lies. They’d never let anybody look at it. It’s, it’s unbelievable. Yeah. And to find those patterns. It’s, it’s that modeling of the experience that even with the scope of working with our clients, this place where while we don’t wanna fall prey to this is just like that, this is just like this, Oh, you’re reminding me of this other client who came in and let’s just run the same routine again where you want chemo doctor or snake, but to.
To go in and actually to reference back to previous session of this program, I had Chris Jones on here, which he was the guy that on uh, TV program, America’s Got Talent, got fellow Canadian, how he met Howie Mandel to shake hands, which was a big deal. Oh yes, yes. Right. Yeah. And there’s a whole revelation.
While the moment was absolutely genuine. , there was definitely the moment of the producers feeding Chris every bit of information possible to guarantee it was going to work okay. Which I, I love that aspect where they’re going, Well, his Howie’s wife quit smoking with hypnosis. He will shake hands with somebody if they’re wearing rubber gloves.
So use this as you can. And that’s, that’s how they crafted that moment. But I, I’d reference it where, , we can model from the experience anything the client is bringing to the table, whether it’s their right profession, their relationships, and I love this concept of even from the handwriting as well, that everything becomes an asset.
Everything becomes something in our disposal to gather information and then feed it back in Hypnotically to produce the results. Yes, absolutely. You know, Jason, that’s, that’s bang on. And the way I personally use that is when I see a client on Skype, I often do mind scaping on Skype, which becomes mind Skyping and, um, or whether, whether I’m seeing someone in an office, which I don’t, I very seldom do Now, I just, some got the time at this age.
So what happens is, At least 24 hours beforehand, preferably 48. So I got the time I get somebody to write about a paragraph of their typical handwriting on online paper, sign it, and date it and scan it full size and send it to me. So by the time they come into my office, I’ve spent. Five or 10 minutes looking at this.
And I know everything about them, so I know how, what they’re hiding from themselves. And so it gives me tremendous amount of information to feedback and, and work with them. And it, you know, it’s like cold reading except it’s accurate. It’s, it’s not, you know, a shot in the dark. It’s all gonna work. I had a, an event for Neil Straus out in Western Canada in Whistler.
And, uh, there were a bunch of guys there. One was a doctor, very nice guy, and he said, Can you show me what, Tell me what my handwriting says. And I looked at it and I said, It’s very quiet. I’m assuming, man, I. It says you’ve gotta deal with that incredible sexual aggression that you keep hidden . And he went bright red to the roots of his hair and he basically said, Bloody hell man.
Have you ever pegged me ? But that shows in writing really, really obviously, unless this person knows what to look for, that sentence, it’s not, It’s not gonna be any in any cold reading book . No, probably not. Yeah, . Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, so it’s great. Again, back to what you said, feeding back, you know what, what they’re giving you use, utilizing everything.
Utilizing and incorporating the environment and their schema, and their beliefs, and their doubts, and their happiness and their strengths, and feeding it back in a way that’s gonna give them the best possible response. So who would you say have been some of your biggest inspirations in hypnosis?
Certainly my, my mentor, Derek Bomber. He was, he was phenomenal. He was an NLP trainer who was certified by John Grinder. Secondly would be John Grinder himself. I, I got to know him as a, as. A friend and, uh, went up for dinner with him a few times and he’s just a super guy, but he is the most brilliant person I’ve ever trained with, I think is just to watch him work on so many levels at once is, is mind blowing.
I’ve modeled much of his stuff as I’m sure he is aware. They were both amazing. I’d have to say my grade six teacher, Donald Thane, who was. Another amazing human being and a wonder, an amazing teacher, and a wonderful human being. And Donald Thae was this guy who made learning just so fricking exciting. We had planets hanging from the ceiling.
He had a horn toad in the room, and tarant and snakes, a hive of honeybees vented outside. I mean, can you imagine doing that now with this litigious society in a school, having honeybees coming in and outta your class? And it was a hive and it, it just, he, he got me fascinated. I can see now with how you can get people to want to learn how you can move away from a typical, you know, regurgitate this material.
You can make it a process, a journey, something that’s empowering and lovely. Which, I mean, in terms of that journey, I love on one side, yes, it’s a, it’s a dash of branding, but the approach of referring to hypnosis as the architecture, Off H Mouse. Right, Right. Where, what was the inspiration? How did that come about as, Oh, I can tell, tell you exactly where they came from.
Jason, I, I had completed one of those amazing, great courses, which are out of Virginia, by the way, . Right. And, uh, yeah, I, I did gothic cathedral architecture. And if you’re not familiar with it, if your listeners aren’t, listeners aren’t familiar, I know. I have no connection with the company other than being one of their best customers.
And, um, they get the, Maybe 2%, 5% of professors in the world as chosen by their students. And these guys put courses together, so maybe 24 to 48 lessons on a subject and you watch them or listen to ’em or strain them and you get a a workbook with it. So you’re basically taking a college level course, but you’re never tested on it.
You’re doing it purely for the joy of learning. And I did one with Professor William Cook. Cathedral architecture right back to Notre Dame Gothic cathedrals. And I was blown away with the quality of the presentation, the beauty of the, the videos and so on. And uh, one morning I woke up. I had already been teaching hypnosis for NLP Canada years ago, and I woke up one morning and I had an epiphany.
I lay in bed and I suddenly saw a hypnosis training that was structured like a gothic cathedral. It had an actual structure with a solid foundation and pillars and days and up into, you know, the tower and the stain glass and everything had a point and it just mapped across instantly in my head. And that’s when I decided to call it the architecture.
Hypnosis rebuilt my course from the ground up, and that’s what it became. I love it. So in the terms of rebuilding, if there was, if there was a hypnotic suggestion to offer to the hypnotic profession a, a change, a transformation for the hypnotic profession, what would you suggest that be? Push the boundaries.
Push the boundaries. That had one evening training with Richard Bandler and he said, he said Never, never set the limit to yourself. He said, We don’t know what they are. He said, Don’t worry, you will hit them. You’ll eventually run your head into a wall. But if you act as though there aren’t. You’ll get way better results and that’s served me very well over the years.
Back when I was, even before I heard that from him when I was. My twenties doing Georgian College, which is north of Toronto. And um, I was taking away people’s names by firing these states without knowing exactly how I was doing it just sort of intersecting people. And a man came up to me afterwards and was, I rate this guy probably my age now, and he had his wife and a friend and he said, You are doing something wrong.
And it what he said, You’re taking away people’s names without a p somnambulistic trance. And that’s impossible, . Well, I said, You just saw me do it, but that’s just wrong. Well, I didn’t know that you couldn’t do that. So I think if I had known that that was the limitation in the model, I probably never would’ve done it.
So yeah, except no limitations and, and see how far we can push the boundaries because we have a wonderful art that is also a science and it, it’s a great time to, to learn from each other and continue to grow and get amazing at this stuff because there are so, There’s probably 90% of all the brilliant hypnotists who’ve ever lived are alive right now.
So, you know, we can all learn from each other and continue to grow, except no limitations. I love it. And again, it’s that renaissance of this place where things are flourishing and the opportunity to interact with others, whether it’s, uh, we’ll give a plug for your podcast as well, and, uh, tell us, tell us a bit about Mind Scaping, which I, I have to admit, first of all, we’ll give the, uh, definite plug, which is.
This is actually, I think, probably one of the first times you and I are actually getting a chance to sit down and chat. Yet, oddly enough, your business partner, Chris Thompson, and I keep running into each other at both hypnosis conventions and marketing conventions. . Yeah. Right. So it’s that moment of.
Okay. Yeah, we’re friends now, but it’s that, it’s that place. So there’s the classes coming up. It’s gonna be the Thursday before hypno. Thoughts live though. This is also an online offering. If you can’t make the live event, give us the, the, let’s call it the landscape of what is Mind scaping. Okay. Scaping has its origin in things like youngian archetypes and even Genesis was.
Thinking about how we’re coding time and space geographically, and an internal environment that is four dimensions, like length, width, height, and also time. There’s a temporal aspect to it. I just had an idea once and I tested it on Chris and it worked really well and I kept doing it. We. I got three amazing female therapists in Toronto and trained them in it and set them loose, and they started reporting.
You were getting these amazing, phenomenal results with all varieties of things without really understanding how this is working. And mind Scaping is essentially a form of hypnosis with no formal trends, but it, it elicits an internal map that is specific to the client’s problem, and it can be a map as huge.
The person’s health and wellness or as small as that meeting I have tomorrow morning. And there’s a map that the unconscious will present. And when you’re working with clients, it’s important to have a metaphor that’s gonna match their problem and make the changes. And Ericsson was brilliant at giving the right metaphor to the right person, which is terrific if you have his unconscious mind, but most of us don’t.
But mind scaping what it does that’s different. Is it elicits the metaphor from the subject’s own unconscious mind, so the subject’s unconscious presents you with the key that will unlock the problem. And it is freaky. In fact, the other day, Jason, I literally, last week I was in town at the where our summer cottage is and I saw a young man in the story, he spoke 17 years.
Chris remembers this. I drove up to visit him last year, drove two and a half hours, the request of his father because the kid had a huge health concern, teenage boys. So he had weird, weird blood work and they, first they were thinking lupus, then they didn’t know and he went to Toronto to Toronto’s sick children’s hospital, which does a lot of adolescent medicine as well, one of the best in the world.
And they couldn’t figure out what they were seeing with the blood work. And they started thinking maybe leukemia. And he was scared to death. His parents were scared to death. So I came up and the only thing I did was, did a mindscape on his blood work that specific, and that his body would use the blueprint for perfect health, which said nothing to lose by throwing it at it.
See what happens. That was, it took about half an hour and I drove back to Toronto and I didn’t see him until last. And when I ran into him in the store, I said, How’s your health? He said, Fantastic. He said, It fixed itself, just like you said What? And then his father came over to our cottage two nights later and told us the whole thing.
He said the pathologist didn’t know how to deal with it. They didn’t know what had happened. All his blood work had just changed, so, I didn’t do anything. His unconscious mind made the necessary shifts, but I worked with a, a cancer patient out in, uh, Western Oregon, over Skype. All of a sudden he was getting amazing results.
He’s back at work again, and it’s, but it’s not just for health. You can throw it at anything and elicit the unconscious minds assistance and use it on relationships or attitude towards money or pretty well, anything you can think of. And there’s an internal map for that situation. Once you have the. Just seeing it will often change the situation, but you can also then landscape the map.
And when you change the map, it change changes our subjective experience and then everything changes out there too. So would you, would you categorize it as another modality, as a specific strategy inside? Or how would you, how would you, If we had to compartmentalize it, I would think of it as a modality.
Yeah. Or, or another is a lot of ways, right? Mm-hmm. , it could be another form of hypnosis or a way. Building profound rap rapports. So the unconscious of the subject shows you what to do, but I guess it would be a modality. It’s a standalone modality. You can use it as, you know, a social worker or a sports coach, or a hypnotherapist, or you can use it with NLP and with hypnosis more formally, or you know, any of the tapping regiments.
It’ll work seamlessly with pretty well any of them. So it’s a standalone technique, but it’s a product, but it’s also something that can be applied across the board. Yeah. And again, that’s gonna be happening uh, Thursday before hip all day slides this year, which, uh, hey, I’m signed up, so I’m looking forward to it.
Well, that’s great, man. Well, we’re, I think we’ve got 50 people in the class. Oh, beautiful. So it’s gonna be a blast and, um, we’ll see what shifts we can make in the class. Yeah. Nice, Nice. Hey Mike, this has been fantastic having you on here. Buddy, it’s been great talking to you. Chris talks about you all the time, , and I think you’re one of the reasons he’s looking forward to hypno thoughts so much because he did say that you’ve certainly become a friend, so that’s fantastic.
Likewise for me, and you can interact with both Mike and Chris over on their podcast. It’s Brain Software available on iTunes and anywhere else. That podcast may be downloaded. And the website is Mike Mandel. Mike knows Mike Mandel. Dot com. Dot com. You got it. Beautiful. We’ll put links to all that. We’ll put some videos and, uh, I, I love the lineage and we’ll definitely put a link to this there as well.
I love the, the demo on YouTube where there’s the history of even the Dave Alman induction, where the line was for the fractionation. At 1.4 is too many and two is not enough. And there you are doing it six times and it works. That’s right. So, well, I love it. Excellent. Which is a place where again, I mean there’s, there’s a podcast session, a few ones back with Melissa Tier and she became famous and infamous at Hypno Thoughts last year where she gave a keynote at an H P T I graduation under the theme of.
I think it was, I, I may paraphrase it, but at least get theme right of quote, all this blank is made up , which is that for every, no, for everything that we hold dear, for everything we treat as gospel, I always flash back to the, the infomercial line of there’s gotta be another way. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you’re right, It’s that mindset of pushing the boundaries.
What if I do it this way? What happens if I do this? What if I go for that phenomenon without profound some nab bism and I get the same? . Right. And I, I really think there’s something to be said with the old adage too, in order to, you’ve gotta know the rules in order to break them. I think one of the best things people can, one of the best things people can do who want, want a career in this remarkable art is to get a very firm foundation, and then you’ve got something to launch off from rather than sort of bouncing around in the dark in every direction.
So yeah, it’s, uh, it’s gonna be an exciting few years ahead of all of us. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast. And work smart hypnosis.com. Jason Lynette here once again, and as always, thank you so much for interacting with this program. Thanks for leaving your feedback online. Head over to work smart hypnosis.com/itunes and that’s where you can leave your feedback online or.
Hey, just go over to the Work smart hypnosis.com page and browse around. You’re gonna see there’s a lot of really cool resources there, and I’m just gonna ramble them off here so you can get an idea as to some of the amazing content. There’s the digital access to the virtual gastric. Band training, probably one of the prob, I would say, the hypnotic weight loss protocol that has helped launch more hypnosis businesses than anything else of its nature out there.
There’s access to hypnotic workers, which is the entire brain dump of my hypnotherapy training that you can get access to over there, and not just programs that are for purchase. Also, some amazing resources you can check out for free, whether it’s go. The guide to Guiding Your Clients to Profoundly de Guide guide leading to, I can’t talk today, guiding your clients to profoundly deep hypnosis.
We’re not editing that out as well as, Hey, this was, uh, session number 72 with Mike Mandel, which means there’s at least 71 other outstanding action. Sessions that you can check out as well. Many of them we even referenced inside of this program here with Mike today. So head over to work smart hypnosis.com, Click the buttons, get on the list, stay up to date, grow your hypnosis business.
Go out and push some boundaries. I’ll see you soon.
