Session #86: Dr. Will Horton on Becoming Elite

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

---

This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast. Session number 86. Dr. Will Horton on Becoming Elite. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. Hey there. Welcome back. It’s Jason Lynette here, and so good to have you here with the program once again.

Session number 86 featuring Master NLP trainer, Dr. Will Horton right out of Florida. I chair that. This is a conversation that I’ve been wanting to capture for quite some time, and you’ll hear that we talk across themes of hypnosis, NLP training, martial arts, acting magic, exercise, passion, Little bit of everything.

I, I’d share that there’s an insight that I’d share with you that the more. And you’re gonna hear more of this topic inside of this interaction. The more that we work on ourselves, the more that we achieve excellence in our own lives and bring that into our process. The more that we become the change in our own perspectives, it tends to open up the process a whole lot more.

You know, it’s an interesting interaction that many of you know me as I talk about how to get your business built, how to get your clients, how to run an effective, profitable career as a hypnotist and, and it’s always amazing how often I, I met with limiting beliefs from our community of life is abundant helpers.

To look at what we’re capable of. It’s how there’s often this conversation, and this one popped up recently inside of a Facebook conversation about, uh, Facebook form, about can the hypnotist be overweight? Can the hypnotist be a smoker? Can the hypnotist have fears? And I think the answer is yes, absolutely.

We, we do not have to be perfect to help a person produce change. I, I forget where I first heard the quote, but the quote, the phrase was, Who has sold more diet books? Dr. Phil or Paris Hilton. And it’s where? You know, inside of this process to say that it’s working rather than it’s just worked is effective.

That being said, you’re gonna hear will hit on the theme of first impressions or things that cannot be regained. So as much congruency as we can bring to the process, the better. You know, I, I share on that topic. I’ve had, I’ve had clients come into my office and reference they had been to other practitioners and I’ll, and I’ll edit this statement, just as comfortably say, they were not referring to people in my local market, so don’t play the pointing game.

But they had been to hypnotists that very clearly. Whether it was the fact that they smelled smoke on them, they were overweight, they were talking of their own fears. Well, we’ll leave the specifics out of it, but they lost some faith inside of the process. And it’s that question of, I, I’ve actually had a client look at me and say, If this stuff is so effective, why are you not this multi-billionaire?

Why are you not achieving these things? So it it’s this perspective that we are all on our path towards our own improvement. And as you’re gonna hear inside of this conversation with Will Horton, that it was through learning n LP and then subsequently learning hypnosis, helping him to overcome addiction, helping him to produce changes in his life, and then discoveries such as martial arts and acting, whether for theater, whether for film, and the things that come back into the process.

So if I had to give you a specific action step to take, other than listening to this outstanding content that you’re now about to integrate into your life, would be to take that bit of a survey. Take a survey of your own life, what are those things that you are currently doing to improve yourself? You know, and, and I don’t want the answer to be, Well, I just bought this product, I just signed up for this training.

And yes, I can jokingly say, unless they happen to be mine, then go right ahead now. Uh, but it’s that phrase of what things are you doing to improve yourself? What things are you doing to grow as an individual? What areas of life are you finding greater discipline at and how is that influencing your life around you?

I, I personally shared that there’s something that I was oddly enough inspired by in some way through conversations with Will, and we hinted this inside of this conversation. I wanted to keep the topic a little bit more broad, but the concept of what I’ve really gained from the mindsets of strength training, that it’s something that I’ve been passionately doing now for going on about a year.

And the specific style is what’s referred to as progressive overload, where you gradually are increasing the weights. As you hit a certain number of desired reps lifts, that’s when you increase the weight. So it’s a progression system where you’re slowly adding more weight and gradually getting stronger.

And there’s an interesting theme that really has been ringing true inside of it. that style that I do. One school of thought would say do a lot of volume. The other school of thought, which the next is what I do is where it’s based very much on letting the body recover. I do a very heavy lift for anywhere between six to 10 reps, and then I take a break for like four or five minutes.

So I could be in the gym for about an hour and I maybe have only worked a total of seven or eight minutes. It’s a very minimalist approach, and yet in the past year, the strength gains and the body recomposition chains have been, changes have been outstanding. So the, the thing that I bring to this conversation though is that this idea of progressing, so the goal is to hit what they call a pr, a personal record.

But the moment you do that, you then set the goal higher. And it’s interesting to point out that at the end of the week, I maybe will have done. , maybe upwards of 15 different styles of lifts throughout the week. But the phrase is not every single one of them is a personal record. However, there’s always benefits somewhere in the body.

We’re either conditioning the body to maintain the strength. Or retraining the body to increase that strength. So consider that as a metaphor. Consider that as a mindset inside of, well, first of all, the change process with your clients. I, and I use this consistently with my weight loss clients now that everything has a result somewhere in the body.

They could go to the gym, they could walk for 45 minutes. They maybe burned 150 calories. Does that mean they could step on the scale and suddenly be 20 pounds lighter? No, of course not. They could be out to dinner and maybe they order this more appropriate portion size, appropriate choice than they normally would’ve done.

Does that mean the next day they’re on the scale, 20 pounds? Of course not. However, to work from this mindset that everything has a result somewhere in the body, let’s bring that into your business as well. That as we work on promotion, as we work on advertising, everything has a result somewhere in our business.

And chances are, if you’ve been on anything social media in the last year, you’ve probably become aware of a man by the name of Gary Vaynerchuk, who’s a bit of a social media marketing guru. Outstanding speaker, outstanding presenter, definitely follow his stuff. Really, really great guy. Check out his book, I think it’s co titled Jab Jab, Jab, Right Hook Being, uh, Found in an Noisy Social Media World.

And we’ll link to the show notes of, uh, the link to that book. It’s an outstanding read, and there’s a time that I heard someone ask him, you know, Should I advertise on this specific platform? And his response back was, Of course, first of all, well, how much does it cost? And it turned out to be not that big of an expense, followed by how many hours have you spent weighing whether or not you should do that.

And the answer was quite a bit of time, and the response was for the macro lesson of whether it works or not. It’s worth the micro investment. And I love that as a mindset that the macro learning from the micro investment. So it, it’s how kind of bringing it full circle there. I was at an NGH Hypnosis convention years ago and I’ve heard the name Will Horton, but I didn’t know who he was.

So going into a workshop and just noticing right away, this is a guy who gets it. This is a guy who gets how to talk about change and says things in a way that, yes, there’s politics and all that we do and some people would challenge the thinking. Yet it’s a school of thought of bringing efficiency and effectiveness to the process.

So you’re gonna hear inside of this conversation the length of training, that’s gonna be a major topic as well as how do we find passion? How do we address the change? And should we learn hypnosis first? Should we learn NLP first? And then what if we had to really tie it down, what is the one strategy we would both turns out make use of to help someone produce.

It’s all about producing a conversation. It’s all about getting you to think differently about how we approach this process. So share your feedback. Go over to work smart hypnosis.com and over at the show notes for this session, leave your commentary. In addition to that, leave your review on iTunes.

We’ve got a whole bunch of brand new reviews online, and I’ll tell you right now that is the best way to help us spread the awareness of this program. So let’s jump right in. This is Work Smart Hypnosis, session number 86. Dr. Will Horton on Becoming Elite.

So the way that I usually begin this is kind of that superhero origin story approach, and I just hit the magic red button here a moment ago. So what was kind of that arc of how you first got into everything that it is? Hypnosis and nlp. . Well, it, it, it, I kind of backed into it like a lot of people. My first experience with hypnosis was in high school.

Like a lot of people. I read a book called Hypnosis for Change, which is still published by the way. And I used to have a yellow cover, and I remember I read the script out of it, the, the relaxation and a script, and it worked, which scared me to death. And so I didn’t really pursue it. I made some self hypnosis recordings back then.

They were tape, to be honest with you. It was even before they had cassette tapes. But I made some self recordings and listen to those. But it got, you know, actually looking at it, got put on the back burner. If you fast forward about 15, 16 years after an addiction, took away a couple of careers, I stumbled back into the hypnosis and the nlp.

And in fact, the NLP first, Because it was easier to find in the early eighties rather than hypnosis because there were really no ways to get hypnosis training other than Gil Boy out in California. There was really no trainings. So, but NLP was really cooking up. So I started taking NLP trainings, which reminded me of the hypnosis trainings I had.

So that’s kind of it in a nutshell. And what I found with the NLP and hypnosis, which go hand in hand, is it’s sped up. All the stuff I was doing to overcome the addiction. And it started me on a path which, you know, I’m still on of doing the hypnosis, the nlp, especially with the emphasis on addictions and a couple other things.

So that’s kind of how I got into it. And I did go back and get, you know, my, uh, master and my doctorate degree in clinical psychology, and I’m licensed, but I mostly tell people I practice hypnosis and NLP because it works, and I’m still doing that. In fact, now I’m, you know, starting a new addiction treatment program that uses NLP and hypnosis at its core.

So that’s kind of it in a broad side, . Yeah. And it’s, it’s been a journey I’m sure of, you know, your own practice working with clients as well as the style of training and the spreading the information that’s out there. I, is there a specific story that kind of comes to mind of working with whether it was, uh, a client or even a student in terms of really imparting this information and something that kind of sticks out as, Wow, this, this is great, this is why we’re doing this.

Well, yeah, I, I, like I said, I kind of backed into this. I didn’t really ever intend to do this kind of stuff for a living or anything, but I started doing some volunteer work at an alcohol and drug treatment center. Actually, it was a detox center back in the mid eighties, and, Couple people there that were constantly going through the, the detox cuz they couldn’t seem to sober up.

And you know, everybody’s working with them, they’re doing what they normally do. And then one day I was there just doing some volunteer work hanging around and I, I started talking to them on the side and I ran them through a couple of NLP patterns that worked for me. And it just seems to shift them.

And they had the same kind of experience where I did where, you know, it’s like everything just went like that, you know, a click and it was like everything started to make sense and so that let me know that this was the proper way to do it and it, it augmented everything else, whether it was a 12 step program or psychotherapy or whatever somebody’s doing.

This was actually the key to get them to change quicker. And I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t done more. And then right after that I was in another, I was at that treatment center helping out doing some stuff and. We had a guy there who, uh, was one of the counselors and he, you know, had been sober for a long time, but he changed smoke cigarettes and he got a picture, this is the mid eighties where you could smoke anywhere.

And this guy literally smoked like three packs a day. Every room he had a cigarette burning. Anyway, he goes to one of the Holiday Inn guys, right back when those were popular, the people that used to do the stop smoking, weight loss, which I’ve done hundreds of those. So, but he goes to this guy and he goes to the stop smoking thing, comes back, and he’s not smoking and he’s not angry.

He’s not, you know, freaking out. He’s just not smoking. And I’m like, Well, why don’t we do this with our clients for the alcohol and drug addiction? And I remember guys going, especially social workers, like, Well, might work for smoking, but it wouldn’t work for like alcohol or drugs. And I’m sitting there going, Well, actually it should be easier because you can’t just, you know, get, get high everywhere.

So it, it made me realize that if I was gonna go down this path, it was gonna be a little bit different than normal. So, let me ask you this, because there’s often this game, I’d say from from both sides of ano versus them, which I’m seeing a lot less of that than I think what a lot of people in the hypnosis profession would, would talk about that.

You know, in the past couple of weeks there’s been several referrals from psychologists, psychiatrist, even specifically a psychiatrist here in my office as a client. So how would you draw the line, if there is any, as to the differences as to the approach as to what the value is from one school of thought of the psychology into the hypnosis and the NLP world?

Okay. That’s a great question. And it it, it reminds me of one other thing. I remember when I was first really getting started, there was still a big divide between the hypnosis world and the NLP world that now is totally gone. They’re kind of inter interchanging, if you will, but in the, like, in the clinical world, I think we’re seeing a radical change, especially in the last couple years.

And I, you know, I’ve been a psychologist since 99 license, and what’s happening is I, I, I see a much more open thing as long as people, you know, stay as like the organizations would stay within your scope of practice. Don’t make these outrageous claims that you hear some people making you know that, you know, I can cure cancer or I can do this, or I can do that if you stay within it.

Because a lot of your psychologists, especially things for like stop smoking, weight loss, stress management, and that they’re happy to refer out because they don’t really do that in their practices. You know, their practice is much more mental health oriented anymore, you know, and so they’re constantly looking for places to send people, especially for, again, like I said, the stress management, the smoking and the, and weight loss, and even addictions.

They’re sending people out because they can’t do that in their office. And as long as a hypnotist or an NLP or pres presents themselves professionally, can talk coherently, you know, and understand some of the research and some of the, uh, proper terminology. You know, I’ve never seen people have a problem with it.

So then how would you describe, let’s, let’s go from this direction. What would you say is just in terms of the perspective of creating change, how would you draw that line differently between the one school of thought and the other? Well, I think, you know, the, the psychotherapy world attacks a conscious downward.

Right, cognitive, behavioral, rational, emotive, it all starts with the conscious and then through the conscious mind kept, you know, it’s almost like repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, replace, and it begins to filter down from a conscious where most of us, the hypno hypnosis in the NLP world kind of bring the change from the inside out.

But we are seeing a change where I’m beginning to see some of the hypnotic techniques more and more integrated into clinical psychology with the advent of things like, you know, rapid change therapy, brief therapy, things like that. Because, you know, it starts, it’s, it’s born in the n inop or the hypnosis world, and then it gets incorporated into the psych world because, you know, the, the insurance now, they don’t give people unlimited visits to their psychologist.

So the psychologist has to affect some change rather quickly just to keep going. So they’re adapting more and more of our skills. So I think we’re seeing kind of merge and we’ll see what really happens. You know, all the changes that are on the horizon begin to ripple through. Yeah. So I, I mentioned before we jumped into recording that I had a little bit of a roadmap of where I wanted to take this, which let me just give the best headline to this, which is the, Let’s talk about hypnosis by talking about everything that’s not hypnosis

Okay. And I mean, similar to the NLP world as well, that there’s something that I’ve picked up from your trainings over the years that I think is a message that many people in hypnosis and NLP and really any specific profession often need to hear. Which my take on it is to be a human outside of your work.

How’s that for an introduction to have a life? There you go. To have a life outside of what we do. So, but it’s how I’ve seen you pull in themes of martial arts, your military background. So, so kind of give us, and even nowadays in terms of the, the acting work that you’ve been doing as well, and even themes of things that you’ve become interested in.

I’m gonna leave the cowboy out of this conversation. , Why are you laughing at that now? Now you have to explain this . Yeah. Well that’s returning backwards as they say. But the, Well, you know, I always believe that, you know, when someone first gets into hypnosis or nlp, they usually get into it for some, something happened.

They get exposed to it, they see it in a stage show. A lot of, probably 60% of our people that get into it have some kind of personal change where an NLP or a hypnotist help them at, you know, do this change quickly. So that brings that personal, you know, drive to learn it. And of course, once you first get involved in it, there’s all that passion.

Whenever you learn anything, when it’s new, there’s passion, there’s drive, there’s, Oh my God, I can’t get enough of it, which is wonderful. But what happens the way your neurology works, eventually that passion is gonna subside, right? It’s just the way your neurology works, it cools, it slows down. And then, you know, that’s where you see people get burned out and they kind of like, they lose interest and they, they drift away from the field.

But what I found is the, when you look at people and you know me a little bit and give some background, I’m always studying when the people that are successful, anything I want to know, what did they do different than those that did not be successful? Whether that’s addiction, whether that was weight loss, whether it’s like you or I, the HIEs that learn a skill and then open a practice.

Well, what are they doing that makes them successful versus those that don’t? So, going back to this, what I found is people that I, you know, and I’ve been in this field since the early eighties, mid 80. And the people I see that not only stay in the field but thrive in the field, have multiple passions.

Yes, their NP and the hypnosis is one of their passions, but when you really start talking to ’em, they may have other passions, right? Whether it was like Jerry Kind when he used, he was a pilot for many Min until his health went, you know, the list goes on. Richard Bandler is an avid musician. Studies music, you know, hangs out with musicians, so he has passion.

O other people get into different kinds of passions. You know, you are into your exercise, you do things, and what that does is it makes you a, a more well-rounded human being. But what everybody forgets is that passion is generative. And what I mean by that is when I have a big passion, Whether it’s theater or martial arts, it will spill back over into other things.

It makes my daily life, whether it’s working with my clients, sitting in a chair when I had my clinics gone, or teaching a bunch of classes, you know, it, it makes it more vibrant because that passion just ripples over. It’s kinda like when, you know, when someone first falls in love, they’re magnetic, right?

And, you know, some people say, Well, they’re, you know, they’re on a pink cloud. Well, that’s wonderful because it’s magnetic. So when people have multiple passions, you know, and like, you know me, I talk about my martial art, my theater, my acting, things like that, right? My training, you know, physical training, all these things just make you more vibrant.

Plus, if you’re a, a therapist or a trainer, a lot of it is about telling stories and if. If you have more things to draw from the stories, it becomes more vibrant for your clients and your students. And so, you know, it, it just ma and it makes you a, about a better, well-rounded person, you know, because I don’t want the hypnosis and the NLP community to fall into where we do see somewhat sometimes in the psychological and the psychiatric community where, you know, they’re not very healthy outside their profession.

Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Where they’re inside of it way too much that you, I, I’d share it’s, it’s how we pull it in. There’s a comedian that comes to mind that you’ve probably seen a ease on z on tv. When the show Parks and Rec was on, he was on that television program. And there’s something about in his side of his standup comedy, This is a guy who hangs out with rappers and he tells stories of hanging out with rappers and like a good comedy writer, even if you do not know who these people are, he’s talking.

the stories are still funny. The references still fit. So it’s , the, the phrase that as we study history, the one who doesn’t study history is doomed to repeat it. A, as we look at the nuances of what it takes to learn another skill, it brings that passion, it brings a refinement back to what we. Yes. Yeah.

And plus, if we really believe what we say about how hypnosis NLP helps us be better at whatever it is we’re gonna be, are you, are you demonstrating that to the real world? You know, are you attacking something you wanna learn, you know, the way you would help a client. But I, and I think a lot of that becomes a subconscious thing that you push to your clients.

If you’re not reaching out, trying something new, whether it’s like you running marathons and, and, and things like that. Or me trying to learn film acting after all these years of stage acting. Well, what does that tell my client subconsciously? And I believe in all that subconscious stuff going on with energy flow.

Well, lets them know maybe I don’t really believe what I’m saying. Right. And so I think you, you have to be the change as, and I could forget one of those motivational guy that says you have to be the change, you know? And I firmly believe that. There’s a story of a, a social worker who took my class and granted, I fully embrace everything that I’m about to quote as being a massive generalization.

Yet if it defends our, uh, process, then let’s keep it up. But he was saying that the benefit he found of his journey was similar to yours, that inside of mental health, he then started to learn about nlp, and then from there he began to learn about hypnosis, and that’s when he discovered me and took a class with me.

Yet his phrase was, Well, first of all, he was working in a treatment facility that at the time, and this fizzled out and why he was kind of looking at going things on his own as he was folding an NLP strategies. Suddenly he was four or five sessions in and quote, I couldn’t think of anything else to say to these people because the problem was solved.

Yet there was an argument in the facility about yes, but the insurance is covering this many more sessions. Followed by I, I know, but I can’t think of anything else to say to this person because they’ve already fixed the issue yet from his perspective, which again, was every reason why he’s now doing his own thing and repositioning in a coaching environment more than anything else yet.

His statement was that from most things, mental health, and yes, this is the generalization, that it trained him to think of things in a dissociative manner, that as soon as he could attach a label, address the label as opposed to with the nlp, with the hypnosis, or more specifically the nlp, to ask the question of, Well, how does that feel in your body?

How do you know you’re feeling that way? What’s going on? That bringing this, this discovery mode, this, this curiosity to the process. Made every single situation differently. I, I, I mentioned that from, from someone who trains a lot of hypnotist and a few folks within lp, the hypnotist going through the NLP training will suddenly discover, Oh my God, I’ve been working with these anxious people, as if that was all the same issue.

But suddenly by asking the right questions, it’s entirely different from one individual to the other. Right? Yeah. Yes. That’s a, Yeah, that’s, that’s a great, And yeah, , , well satisfied that conversation. Fantastic. . So then let’s rewind the story back, which is that as you’re, as you’re learning it and as you’re folding it in yourself and as you’re getting your own benefits in terms of expediting your own, your own process, what was that journey moving forward of actually then folding it into your work and then eventually, let’s call it out, this training empire that you’ve now built?

Well, I. Like I said, I was just doing volunteer work, you know, and because it was a missing piece and the stuff I was watching, and then I started helping people, you know, lose weight and, and of course back as still goes on, stopped smoking. But back in the late eighties, early nineties, there was a lot more of it.

And, and in fact, I got into that backwards because I knew all these people in recovery that wanted to stop smoking. And so I started working with them and then I started going to these conferences just to network and to hang out because as we said before we got started, I knew from going to other conferences back in the last career I had, before I got into this with sales and stuff, that you learn more, you know, when you’re at that like a conference just by the networking in the hallways, grabbing lunch with somebody, getting a cup of coffee.

So I thought I’d go to these conferences just to, you know, see what I could pick up because I thought, you know, this is a nice way to make a living. And just as the story you just said, I didn’t want to do it in a facility because I saw the downside to the facilities. So I started going to these conferences and one of the first conferences I went to was the National Guild Hypnotist Convention and started networking and hanging out.

And so then that’s when NLP was kind of ostracized from the hypnosis world. And they asked me, would I, would I come in and give a, like a one or two, a couple of one hour talks on nlp? And I did, which led me into someone calling me up, asking could I do a trainer, could I do a training course on nlp? And I never really thought about it.

And so, you know, I, I kind of started doing that. And again, it was like one of these wonderful things that happens. I didn’t start out with the goal of doing this, it’s just that no one else was doing these shorter, more intense NLP trainings, especially for people that were already hypnotist or addiction counselors.

So they didn’t need. You know, a 28 day program where, to me it’s like very repetitive and boring. So, you know, and, and they already understood, especially the hypnotist, the, the subconscious aspect. So I kind of put together that program and it’s been a wonderful journey. And then much like yourself, the other thing when I looked at the elite trainers, when I decided, well, if I’m gonna do this, the people that successful, why are they successful and other people not, right?

And so when I looked at it, what I found were the successful trainers had some kind of theatrical background, you know, much like yourself being a magician. And you look at like a lot of the heist that were very good back in the day, you know, especially those that did trainings. They all come from the magic world, you know, the Orman, McGills and things like that.

And then even now, when you look at some of the top, you know, and Richard Bandler being a musician, things like that. Because they understand the showmanship involved to be an elite trainer. Yes, you’re training train, you’re, you’re training information and technique, but you also have to entertain whether you wanna call it the conscious mind or whatever we want to call it.

But if you’re entertaining, it makes it much more powerful. And of course the biggest, you know, the 800 pound gorilla on the block is, is Tony Robbins. You know, who, if you’ve ever seen him, he, he imparts great information, great knowledge, and great change work, but it’s entertaining, you know. So when I started doing it, I said, Hmm, so I’m gonna have to make this entertaining.

So I broke it down and basically looked at it like, how would you put this together? So not only is it entertaining at the conscious level with the jokes and with the music and the things that you’re doing, but you’re imparting stuff at the subconscious level, you know? And that, again, when I look at the trainers that seem to make it, they understand that you’re constantly doing those two things.

Where I’ve, I’ve been into some trainings. God loved the people. , the information’s wonderful, but it’s, you know, you have to take toothpicks and prop your eyes open. , I think the proper phrase is from the cartoon family guy of somebody throw a pile already. . Yeah. Or the other way. They’re, they’re all, they’re all, uh, it’s all entertainment.

No content. Yeah. It’s all sizzle, no stake. So it’s that constant balance. So yeah, that’s, yeah. So that’s kind of how I got into it. There’s a, there’s an approach to that, which oddly enough, I think, I’m trying to come up with a specific name in the magic community, and of course, maybe one 10th of this audience will correct me on this.

It was either Darwin Ortiz or Eugene Burger, and the, the phrase was, you go to a concert and every song is not a ball. You know, there’s the upbeat song, there’s the sad song, there’s the kind of funny song, there’s, there’s texture to all of it. And this, this was a theme that I, I kind of gained cuz my, my background was the magic led me into theater.

And, uh, you learned so much more about, and I’m sure you might be on this side of it too, now that you’re in this direction of it as well, which is that by sitting in the rehearsal hall watching good directors and bad directors, you learn so much more about staging by, by watching it from both sides. But the, the, the scope of texture, that is something that I think needs to really be addressed inside of not just the training, which is what we’re talking about, but inside the process as well.

That my theme of it is it’s compounding on different emotional levels. that it’s not just for the, the celebration of now that you’re quitting smoking, you’re gonna be around for your children. But then here’s this moment to laugh at yourself about how challenging you used to make this. Here’s this moment to celebrate about how much better you’re going to feel.

And the same is inside of a training. We can just stand there behind the lectern and point out the facts and give the terminology and point to the papers and the wall behind us. Yet it’s where, throw in the story, throw in the metaphor, throw in the anecdote that this is what really provides that well rounded training and experience.

And it’s where it’s the natural humor that comes out of producing change and learning humor, Not as in two Jews walk into a bar, but instead humor of the actual process of how we put it all. Al. , Right? And it’s like, you know, when I studied theater and, you know, it was one of the careers I drank away . But you know, one of the things when I started doing this, I, I was talking to somebody and they go, Well, there’s a reason why in theater, especially in like a big musical, right?

They spend more time on the opening number and the closing number than any other part of the show, right? And why, why is that? Well, if I don’t hook, and we look at movies now, especially with our attention span, and this is good for us as trainers or even, you know, with our clients one on one is if you don’t hook them within the first couple minutes they’re done.

Right? And so they spend all that time setting up what they want. And then you do all the good stuff in the middle of the show and then you make sure you have a slam bam ending and it kind of see, you know, seals back everything that they’re doing and use musical analogy. They remember the songs, the highlights, you know, the, the breakout songs, you know, the show stoppers.

But they also, at a subconscious level remember all the things that went into it. And so I think it’s the same way, you know, whether I’m doing a training where, okay, I gotta, I gotta grab their attention early and then I gotta have this, And you know, you’ve heard me talk about how in the strategic use of humor, because it seals in a lot of the neurology, right?

And unfortunately a lot of people don’t understand that. And I see a lot of trainers and they say, make the same mistake in their therapeutic practice where. Yes, we deal with very heavy and you, you hit on it brilliantly, which is, you know, we, we can deal with some heavy, uh, issues that we’re doing that, but out of that comes some of the funniest stuff you can imagine.

Right. And if your client or your students see that, then it’s, then that’s when the magic happens. You know, as Billy, our friend Billy Shilling says, you know, it’s magic in plain sight. Right. And that’s, to me the, you know, that that’s what I, I, you know, one of the things I keep trying to bring into the field.

So then let’s get into specifics on it then. If it’s the, the big opening number and then the big closing moment, how would you recommend the, the practitioner in the office harness that time more effect? Well, you know, everything we’ve said for years, millennia that, you know, there, you can’t make a, you can’t make a new first impression.

So when you first meet your client, how is it set up? And going back to what we said earlier, do you have passion in your life? Do they see that, my god, this guy’s living life, Whether or this lady, you know, they’re running marathons or they’re riding horses, or they’re, they’re doing something with their life that makes, makes your client go in a, in a roundabout sort of way.

Wow. That’s, that’s cool. That’s fascinating. You know, and to use the, you know, transference issue if we were studying clinical psych, right? It’s like, I kind of wanna be like them, right? So are you healthy? Are you vibrant? Are you a living example of what you’re gonna do? And so when you’re in to do something as powerful as you can, you know, in the first couple sessions, kinda like what you said about that social worker.

So if I can get them to make a major shift at the beginning, And I know it’s gonna be a process like, so it may take, you know, several sessions, but if I can get some kind of major shift at the beginning, then that hooks them. Kinda like, you know, when the movie Star Wars open and there’s this epic space battle, you know, you’re, you’re pulled in and you’re gonna set through the whole movie.

Or in our case, they’re gonna sit through the session. So they make sure they get that outcome that they wanted. And, you know, a lot of that is just asking the right questions. One of the magical things NLP brought to the table, to the hypnosis world and, and the psych world was just asking the right questions.

You know, if you ask the right questions, you get the, you get the direction you need to take your client or your students in. And, you know, so when, and I don’t know how many times I, when I start doing work with people and I just start asking the question, What do you want? What would they do for you? How will you know when you have it?

Are you moving toward it, away from it? Just, just the stuff I do. They’re like, No one’s ever asked me these questions before. Right. And then it goes back to more like the ericsonian approach, which is you ask the right question, they start setting their gyro scope inside their head for better success. So, you know, the first session it, you know, kick it out of the, you know, kick it out of the park as much as you can at the beginning.

Then it gets even more powerful. Well, it’s that beautiful side effect of the meta models that through those questions we’re, we’re getting them to think about the issue in a way that they’ve never really thought of. It, it’s been, it’s been at that surface structure, but getting into the deeper thinking of, well, how do I feel that way?

When are times that I don’t feel that way? Is that what that always means? And just simply opening up that door and, you know, throwing in a few hurdles into what, how real and how solid this thing was before, uh, I, I think it was you that I heard say the side effect is they suddenly think we’re a lot smarter than we really are.

right? Yeah. , yeah. Whether we are or not is irrelevant. Yes.

But that shifting of perspective of, you know, these places where there’s these violations of, you know, the, the distortion of, well, it’s always this way and this is what it always means. And just to, to discover those places where there are other options, there are other strategies, there are other ways to, to look at it, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And then you got ’em hooked and then they’re much more likely to follow you. So when you do get to some of the stuff you gotta do, like in the middle of the, of ongoing session work or in the middle of the training where you’re really imparting information they’ve already bought in at the beginning.

So they’re much more likely to stay in until the. So I share a bit of a massive generalization that I’ve made and this will either be the moment where you back me up or you edit it and make it better or you say, Jason, you ignore it slut and you completely trash it. But you mentioned, you know, going back a good 20 years or so, this, this sort of us versus them even inside of the hypnosis and NLP communities.

And I’d share, it’s more often the brand new student of this stuff that I interact with is gonna start to ask the question of, do I use hypnosis for this or should I use NLP for that? And even to hear some of the big name presenters in hypnosis who I, I’ll leave out the specifics of who, they’ll have fun guessing later on after the fact who would often brag that they don’t do any NLP with their clients.

And yet you look at what they’re doing and there’s a lot of NLP style strategies inside of it. To which would a student would, someone’s asking, or even the occasional client who has knowledge of, you know, both sides of it. The phrase would be, which one’s gonna work better? And my real opinion as I, first of all, in my wonderful smart ass style will respond.

Yes. Which is absolutely no reaction yet. It’s the phrase that, to date back the story of nlp, behavior modeling, behavior excellence, modeling the phrase that they were studying, Bandler and Grinder were studying several people, one of whom happened to be Milton Erickson. So because of that, my phrase has now lovingly become all of hypnosis fits inside of nlp, but not all of NLP fits inside of hypnosis.

Okay. Yay, nay . Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. Well, and then like you say, some of the NLP stuff, the report mirror matching the big, the big outline stuff. Is useful for just about everything. Absolutely. You know, and then some, some of the techniques fit beautiful, like you said, fit beautifully in a trance state and others not so much so.

But then on the flip side, there’s some beautiful n LP techniques that people can do without going into formal trance. So it’s, it’s a wonderful balance. But, you know, I’m always amused when someone says, like, what you said about, do I do NLP or hypnosis? And I’m like, what’s the difference? ? Mm-hmm. , You know, it’s like, how do you, And the biggest thing I’ve found is like, when I was first doing this especially, and these people have been doing hypnosis for a long time, hadn’t take a formal NLP training, the biggest compliment I’ve ever gotten is when they go, they come back and go, I don’t know how I was doing this without N nlp.

And then I’m like, Well, okay, that’s, that’s my goal, right? And, and so it one builds on the other. And the only time I ever see it really come up anymore, to be honest with you, is when people wanna do a turf battle or they’re carving out a niche. So basically they’re building a cult is what happens , you know?

So you have to do that. You have to separate yourself from the from, from the rest group or from people that know what you’re doing. It’s why there’s been more than one. That’s that. And again, they’ll remain nameless. They go nuts when they find out their students taken an NLP training. You know, especially in NLP training by someone that’s trained, if you wanna call it my lineage, to use the martial arts analogy, because then they go back and challenge everything, you know?

And I think one of the other things I love about true NLP methodology in your mind is it opens up to the point where I think people really got it when. As long as you get your goal. I don’t care how we get there. Right. You know, we’re going to LA as long as we end up in La in a reasonable timeframe. , you can drive, you can fly, you can take the train.

I don’t care. So yeah, that’s, yeah. No, I agree there. Well, it kind of brings him to the question that there’s, again, there’s this turf war. There’s, as I would say, it is someone way too close to Washington DC for a profession of people that are all helpers. Man, there’s a lot of politics though. It’s one of the biggest conversations, if not arguments, both within hypnosis and even inside of nlp about the length of training.

Mm-hmm. , the, the length of the course that there’s organizations that are battling it out from hours, ranging from 50 to a hundred to 300, to which my responses, I can name 12 day courses I’ve been to, That would’ve been phenomenal. Five day courses. I can name two hour, uh, workshops I went to that I wish were a week long.

It’s the quantity, it’s the quality rather than the quantity. What is it about the process that makes it so you think it can be trained more efficiently, would you say? Well, one thing is. You know, if you understand the basic premise of what I teach you in four or five days, that’s the start. I use the, again, my martial arts analogy, you can get a black belt rather quickly, but in the true martial arts, once you get your black belt, what that really means is now you can study, you understand the basics well enough to study.

And, you know, a true martial artist, the reason they call themselves artists is, you know, then there’s, their goal is to make it theirs. You know? You know, I’m five foot eight and a half on a good day, . I don’t want to hear it, You know, . But, you know, and I’ve got, I’ve got a, I’ve, I’ve got shorter legs. I can’t do a spinning back kick.

Doesn’t mean I can’t do effective stuff. I have to make it mine. Mm-hmm. , and, you know, and I, and I think the truly elite trainers in hypnosis and nlp, and there’s not that many to be honest with you, I’ll just, I’ll take my gloves off, is they encourage people to make it theirs it, you know, it doesn’t have to be X plus Y equals Z minus R or whatever they’re doing.

They understand that they’re, they’re gonna make it their, their, their art. Right. Much like as you’re a magician, you know, I can watch you do a trick, a gap, and you’re gonna do it totally different than like Chris Johnson. They’re both excellent, but they’re gonna be totally different. Even though it’s the same trick, you know, with the setup, with the delivery, the trick itself might be the same or the, the, the illusion might be the same.

And it’s the same with what we. And, you know, I’m always going back and saying, you know, the world doesn’t need another Tony Robbins or, or you know, Don Madden or, or you know, Jerry Kind. The world needs what you can bring to it to make it uniquely yours. And then all you gotta do is get the basics, understand the basics, and then the real work starts where you really go and do it.

And then let me go back and close one of their loop, which is the other thing. The really elite trainers, the one that are so effective through time, they also continue seeing live clients. Yes. You know, people that don’t, they’re not impressed with, you know, they’re at a big seminar and I’m doing this wonderful change work on the platform, but they’re paying me, you know, 200 bucks to stop smoking and they don’t know who I am.

Right. And then that, that, that grounds me and makes me keep testing my technology, my techniques. Does it really work? You know? And so, and, and then to make it uniquely your. So what’s that journey of, again, how do we put it all together? The, the unfortunate metaphor that’s worked its way into my training a little, uh, frequently these, these days has been the birthday party clown who makes animal balloons that, Hey, well I can make you any animal you want as long as it looks like a dog or a snake

That when we get into training at times, and I, it’s why I agree with the mindset of it being a, a, a brief experience and quality experience, that there comes a point where, okay, but if we change this aspect, now it’s this. If you change this aspect now, it’s that I, Do you know who, uh, I might get, get the last name butchered here.

Charles Pollock. . Yeah. Yeah. Someone who’s well known in the strength training industry that I’m listening to an interview of his, and he’s talking about a membership training that he’s launching that has, uh, videos of all these different weightlifting maneuvers, and on one side I’m listening and it’s this reference to, yes, there’s 180 variations of the squat that we’ve now recorded, and I’m listening and going, At what point is it diminishing returns?

At which point are we spinning the wheels? When if you can’t do the first one right, why do we need another variation? Right? Yeah. Yeah. That when it comes back to it, I mean, how so many of. Again, it’s through the modeling of human excellence that left behind a trail of replicatable techniques. Yet it’s from that perspective that, okay, well it’s just this little shift to change, change personal history into reparenting to change this into this other strategy, into this other strategy.

And again, what do you want kid, a dog or a snake? Once we understand the basic principles, that’s where it, it, it becomes this more organic experience dealing with what emerges from what comes from that client rather than I’m now going to use this technique. Well, yeah, and, and what I’ve found, if the trainings that are too long at the beginning, especially the basic level, right, is they get so many techniques and so many things to do well then when they sit with a client, they get stuck in the thinking stage.

So I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this. And it, they haven’t reached the point where they’re comfortable enough with, Look, do anything. It’s gonna work. Right? And then you can do more. And you can do more. But you know, it’s like, to use a sports analogy, you always watch when a, the only sport I follow anymore is football.

But when a, a quarterback comes into the nfl, they always talk about simplifying the game plan, simplifying the game plan. . And not that they’re not good, not that they’re not gonna be great, but then once they got the basics and you, I just watched the game the other day and the guy’s been in the league three or four years now and they’re saying his skills have grown exponentially.

Guess what? He’s still throwing a football the way he threw a football. What? What it is, he’s learned how to read the defenses. He knows what he’s looking at. But that takes time. And I think for what we do as Imats and NLP is get people the basic skills, get them out there working with people and they begin to build on it and make it more nuanced.

Make it more covert if you will. But that takes a little bit of time. You know, and, and just like a lot of things, whether it’s you’re doing magic, me doing theater, martial arts, or guys playing football, you learn best in game time situations. I may get the reference wrong because I do not follow basketball at all, though I think it was LeBron James that, uh, is retiring, either recently retired or is about to retire.

And again, I may have it entirely wrong in the name, so take the metaphor of the story and leave the details behind. But the phrase was that he was someone who was drafted back in the days of playing in college and then went into the professional leagues. And the way that he put it was, I’m older now, I’m slower, and I probably wouldn’t get hired by the teams that I’m on now if I was going out today yet.

I’m definitely playing smarter and I’m playing better than I ever have. So the strength may have gone down, the speed may have gone down, yet the intelligence behind the game is what’s really enhanced. Yes. Yeah. So then, uh, here’s the get off the fence moment, though. I know the answer is that in many of your trainings, you’ve combined the two into one specific product.

If someone was pressed and they had to make a decision, they could either do NLP first or they could do hypnosis first. How would you respond? I would say take a good basic NLP course because we spend more time on the rapport, on the information gathering, and then on the, just awaken what I would almost call waking hypnosis techniques.

Just like the new behavior generator without formal trance. And then when you take a formal hypnosis course, it, you’ll see how it easily folds into that. But also too, in a really good NLP course, hopefully if they’re NF NLP train, they understand that they’re starting to implement from the beginning.

You’re still going in trance when I just say, Well, let’s just close your eyes and we’re gonna, you know, do like a new behavior generator or sub modality, something I understand and I train my students to understand they’ve already gone into light trance at that moment. And, you know, making the more formal trance add on.

So I would say take the, an NLP class from a competent trainer first, and then kind of roll into the, the hypnosis. And of course I know overseas a lot of the people, they train the, they, they walk their students through like what would basically be a basic NLP course, then they jump right into the hypnosis course and they do that in like a 10 day training.

So that, to me, that’s the perfect world. I chair, my favorite experience of that, which is sort of my, my schedule these days is that for every. Let’s say for every three hypnosis trainings, I’ll do one NLP training and one’s actually starting here in a couple of days. And the, again, all of hypnosis fits inside of nlp.

Not all of NLP fits directly inside of hypnosis yet can be applied to hypnosis. Let’s modify it then though. The fun would be that I would get people signing up for the NLP course, as is the one starting in a couple of days that don’t necessarily fit into the context of sit down, close your eyes, let’s do a process as is.

Most often what comes from the hypnosis training and the, the joy of it for me is that very often it’ll be people, if you want to talk business model, it’ll be people who have already done hypnosis training with me, who are then spinning around and then taking the next course of the NLP training. And the joy of it becomes that the people with the hypnosis training are the ones I’m having to quote work on more so than the others.

That they’re trying to I hear you laughing cuz I think you know where I’m going. They’re trying to suggest way too damn much. They’re trying to direct the process rather than discover what happens when, uh, I, I flash back to the, the years of going through a liberal, liberal arts education and theater where the actors had to take design classes.

The design students had to take acting classes, and oddly enough, it was the lighting designers who sort of broke out as the star actors and acting classes because they weren’t trying to be actors, they were just trying to make the word sound genuine. Right. So it’s, it’s the hypnotist who’s in the, uh, the NLP course.

Okay. Well as you take this feeling and move it there, and suddenly now they’re dipping into hypnosis and now feel this sensation happening and this is the result and this is what you’re noticing as opposed to what do you notice now? Right? Yeah.

But yeah, the experience of having to, getting more to that, more organic approach of what, what happens inside of an NLP style of getting the answers, getting the subjective feelings, getting the results right. Yeah. Yeah. So then, uh, if, if we had to tie you down and say you had one strategy, one approach for change, what would you say that would wanna be?

It would be a kind of a, there’s a, it would kind of be two things interrelated in one. One would be to remove the conscious, subconscious conflict. Mm-hmm. , right? As, uh, for Spurs would say, top dog underdog thinking, you know, consciously I need to stop smoking, lose weight, da da da da. But part of me loves it, whatever.

So that’s, you gotta remove the conscious, subconscious conflict and within that, to look at the submodalities of those, of those two things. You know, how are they represented in their brain? Where is it, What is it? Is it color, sound, feeling? And if so, where, what, you know, cuz I’m the, I’m going back to, it’s almost like a felt sense in the body.

Where in the body is this stuff happening? Not just in your mind, but where in your body. And, you know, when you dive into that, then you really get some magic. So I’d say it’s those, and oddly enough, uh, similar answer that of, uh, working inside of the submodalities that as we get into unpacking the reality and shifting the reality, it’s where my, my go-to strategy, If there’s a client that I’m working with and just something isn’t budging, it’s not to appeal to the, uh, let’s call it the fian history of where did this come from.

It’s not to appeal to the, uh, even a benefits approach of where it’s all going. if there hits a brick wall in terms of this thing ain’t shifting yet, let’s just shift the reality of how real this thing once was. Right? Yeah. So then, uh, what’s, what’s in the works these days? What’s, uh, what’s the focus?

Cause I know you’ve got, there’s a major project that’s, uh, taking great shape and, uh, growing, uh, growing in terms of working with addictions in a new format. Right, Right. It, it’s the live free training.org, www.livefreetraining.org. And it’s an online alcohol and drug recovery program. We’re calling it training.

And you know what I done? What I did was I went back and looked again at, like, talked to probably a couple hundred people that. Had experience in recovery. So they’ve recovered from alcohol and drug addiction, whether it was through a 12 step program therapy, a religious conversion. Some people got into sports, some people went to school, some people got into their family.

But I was trying to figure out why did these people succeed and other people don’t, regardless of whether they went to treatment or not. Right? Cause some of the current research says you have pretty much the same statistical chance of really recovering from alcohol drug problem by going to the best treatment center in the country.

Or one of the best, You can argue which one’s the best, but going to a top flight treatment center, or walking into a therapist’s office, or a 12 step meeting, or just cold Turkey, statistically, there’s not much difference, right? So when you look at that, you go, Hmm, what’s going on here? And again, it has to do what we were, were just talking about.

They, they have enough leverage with themselves. They get rid of the conscious subconscious conflict and they begin to restructure their submodalities around the addiction and around the recovery. And so then they, it starts ’em on a different trajectory. And when we’re doing it online, just basically because I believe you do better, getting better where you are, you know, a lot of people would say, You need to get, you need to get well where you got sick.

Cuz I can, you see people, they go away to treatment for 28 days and they do wonderful in this closed loving environment. And then they go back home and the crap hits the fan as they say, and they end up relapsing. But if you can get better where you are, it, it can be more ongoing because then you can resolve the relationship issues, the other issues and all that in real time.

And so that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. So we, you know, we’re, it’s taken off. So I’m doing that and of course I still do the. NLP trainings don’t do as many as I used to because I have trainers such as yourself all over the country and the world doing the trainings. And I’ve kind of stepped back from a lot of the first line trainings.

You see me at like the National Guild and I’ll do one or two trainings a year down in Florida. And other than that, I’m kind of stepping back because for an art to grow, you need the younger people to really take it to the next level, right? And so say I’ve kind of, I wanna step back and be more the professor emeritus kind of guy, you know, And encourage the young trainers and the young people doing this.

And then not necessarily physically young, but young in the field and to go out there and do it, you know, cuz I’m really doing my, the addiction work and some PTSD work and, you know, that’s, that’s my two focuses. That’s weird. Again, allowing it to grow. And then I, I’m sure there’s been times over the years of.

Things being not for the sake of business, but just more productive and then taking a step back and then coming back into it that there have been times I know where you’ve been more actively running an office and then time away from that and then back into it once again that we, we come in again and it’s back to that basketball quote of, of playing smarter, right?

Yeah. So we’re things from a different perspective. Exactly. Exactly. So that’s, uh, what’s the URL for that again? www.livefreetraining.org. Or of course, if they have other questions, www.nf nlp.com and they’ll see you on that site and a bunch of other people as trainers and active and, and pushing the field to the next level.

Awesome. Awesome. And I’ll put links to those over in the show notes as well [email protected]. Will, thanks again for, uh, for joining me here today. Oh, no problem. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast and work smart hypnosis.com. Jason Lynette, back here once again, and as always, thank you so much for listening.

Thank you so much for your support. Head over to work smart hypnosis.com and check out the links, the show notes, the uh, trainings that are offered over there as well. You can also check out as well referenced www.nf nlp.com to find information about his organization with NLP trainings. To find my specific training that’s easy to track down.

I’m in Virginia and I teach nlp, so that’s Virginia nlp.com. More details over there as well as hypnotic workers, though coming up very soon in Las Vegas, the master hypnotist course, myself, as well as Sean Michael Andrews, joining together for six days of Master’s levels hypnosis training in Las Vegas.

We’ve got some outstanding promotions linked to that, some outstanding hotel deals as well. Join us, check that [email protected]. See you next time.