Chris Thompson

1:00 - How the 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and Chris' mastermind group inspired him to create his Talking To Toddlers program and team up with Mike Mandel to create the business he has today. He had no experience or knowledge of how to sell a program online but did it anyway and learned as he went.

6:00 - Mike Mandel’s reading list and how it impacted his forward trajectory and personal development

7:20 - How Chris modeled Tony Robbins to create energy and engagement as he recorded his Talking to Toddler program

9:00 - When Chris' wife listened to his Talking to Toddlers program.

12:10 - We discuss how listening to podcasts and audio books gave us the experience of virtually spending time with high achievers.

12:50 - Chris talks about his impostor monster in creating his Talking To Toddlers program. He was nervous people wouldn’t find him credible yet he did it anyway and received phenomenal testimonials about his transformational program.

15:30 - Chris talks about the value of external validation and how modeling other great presenters allowed him to become a great presenter himself

16:00 - Christ talks about important ingredients to creating dynamic and engaging presentations.

19:00 - How Mike Mandel is a dynamic, flawless presenter because he knows the content so well and has been doing keynote speeches for so long. Chris learned by observing and modeling Mike and other excellent presenters.

22:20 - Chris’ advice to practitioners who need to focus on hypnosis and business and marketing at the same time. His hindsight insight is to outsource sooner.

25:25 - His dad “Just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean you should do it.”

28:30 - How to find a person to outsource to and how to stop being precious about your business and give over the control.

30:10 - Chris sneaks in one of his famous empowering questions, “How would an engineer solve that problem?”

32:00 - Chris walks me through a process to become willing to outsource podcast editing. Listen if you need a mindset shift regarding outsourcing. Here’s a great demo of conversational hypnosis.

35:47 - Chris explains how they made The Castle and how much people love it.

42:30 - We talk about MMHA Language cards and how useful they are

45:30 - How Chris overcame the “What-ifs” of doing something scary and new

47:30 - Why MMHA is the training I recommend first. Chris explains the process of going from in-person training to creating a digital course and his “aha” moment in realizing it enabled more people to engage with progressively more in-depth trainings.

52:00 - Chris gives a metaphor for a great sales funnel.

54:00 - Getting over the discomfort of doing a podcast etc and moving forward anyway.

56:00 - Don’t worry about always knowing how it will turn out. You just need to be a few weeks ahead of the people you’re teaching.

59:00 - The story behind “The Chris and Jeff Show”

1:02:00 - Advice for people who have limiting beliefs about their ability to stand out when other people are already doing what they want to do.

0 (0s):
If you were haunted and harassed by your own inner critic, if you've ever been curious about why hypnosis works so well, if you're a seasoned hypnotist, or if you suspect that the inner critic is actually hypnotizing you to hold back from reaching the greatness that you know, deep down is inside you, lean in and get inspired to get out of your comfort zone and create your one precious life with purpose and intention. If you like this show, you'll love my powerful hypnosis audio, the answer room, because it gives you crystal clear guidance and direction and illuminates an ingenious way to make triumphant decisions.

0 (47s):
No matter how stuck you feel or how confused you were. This powerful hypnosis audio is my gift to you. When you go to the imposter monster.com again, that's the imposter monster.com. Don't forget the, the, the imposter monster.com. And yes, I'm done saying it. Thank you. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart for listening. I'm Lori Hammond, and I'm truly grateful for you. I am

1 (1m 18s):
So excited for today's podcast episode. Ever since I scheduled this interview, I've been adding more and more questions that I want to ask. Today's guest. I feel like I've gotten a free consultation with one of the top business minds in the industry, and I hope you hang on his every word. As you listened to my friend and mentor Chris Thompson share how he has harnessed forward momentum. In spite of the imposter monster, whispering what ifs in his ear during this wide ranging conversation. You'll learn more about how Chris created his talking to toddlers program became the driving force behind the Mike Mandel hypnosis Academy, and is now a trainer and presenter himself.

1 (2m 4s):
There are so many gyms in this one, and Chris even created a way for you to get your hands on the castle along a weighted much requested hypnotic audio that Mike Mandela recently created. Chris mentions several valuable resources throughout the show. And in the show notes for this episode, I've added links to all of those resources, as well as links that let you have the castle recording the language cards and learn how to get a free sneak peek into the mic Mandela hypnosis Academy. Enjoy the show. Welcome Chris. I am so excited to have you on the show today. I'm really excited to talk about the business side of hypnosis and find out places where you have silenced the imposter monster in your own voice, in your own journey and moved to where you are today.

1 (2m 57s):
Fantastic. Thank you so much for inviting on your podcast

2 (3m 0s):
And I look forward to it. It's going to be great fun.

1 (3m 3s):
Well, I'd like to jump off. This is a little bit of a selfish place to jump off and doesn't have a whole lot to do with the whole imposter monster idea, but I have a six month old grand baby. And when I first started listening to you and Mike's brain software podcast, once in a while, you would mention talking with toddlers. And so will you tell me a little bit about how that developed and your journey with, with that process?

2 (3m 29s):
Yeah, that may end up giving us something to talk about in terms of any of that imposter syndrome stuff as well, but it actually, it stems from around 2007 or so when, whenever Tim Ferris came out with the book, the four hour workweek and we just offline, we were talking about how Tim Ferriss has a podcast that we both tremendously love. So he's a good subject right now. Well, he had put out the four hour workweek and as part of that process, I was at the time masterminding with a couple of hypnosis buddies of mine, NLP hypnosis buddies, where we had studied, you know, with Mike together. And we had taken NLP training at NLP training, Canada and sorry, and LP Canada.

2 (4m 11s):
I think it was just called tongue twisted on that one under a Chris Keeler at the time I studied with him. And so I was hanging out with these two guys, Ron and Julio, and we were talking about hypnosis and NLP and Julio used to bring us copies of DVS, like just a DVD rom with some material that he'd burned on. It might be some Tony Robbins material or whatever one day he brings us this DVD and says, Oh, there's this book on it called the four hour workweek. It's an audio book. I think you're going to really love it. And I thought it was a weird sounding title, but I gave it a listen. I loved it. And you know, story goes on that obviously Tim Ferriss, his approach was very inspirational. So we had all agreed as the three of us that the next time we meet we're going to come up with three business ideas each or what Tim called muses.

2 (4m 57s):
Right. And so one of them, of course, you know, was Mike Mendell hypnosis because that's where I spend most of my time now. But one of them was, I thought I am a new father. I've got two kids and one's a new mod, one's a toddler. And I've never seen anybody apply the concepts of NLP, conversational, hypnosis, all that area to parenting. And I think it's really effective. It was already doing it with my oldest daughter and just using concepts, like distracting her from whatever emotional state she was in. Let's say she was in the back of the car and we're driving. And she had dropped a stuffed animal. And was now kind of crying about the stuffed animal?

2 (5m 37s):
Well, I could just ask some questions as simple as what color is fluffy or whatever, you know, the name of the stuffed animal was. And if I could get her to say, Oh, white, white is, is he bigger or is he small white? You know, and get, show me with your hands and completely take her away from the idea that she's just dropped, you know, this fluffy who you, that stuffy, you know, Oh, that was my uncle Ryan or whatever it is. Right. And it was just remarkable. And I thought if I could put together a course that is essentially NLP, but just geared towards the specific niche of NLP for parents who have toddlers. And I called it talking to toddlers. I thought it was cool name.

2 (6m 17s):
And yeah, I don't know if that answers the question or if I went off a bit of a tangent there, but yeah, that's where it came from. Tim Ferriss's book, promoting the idea of having some sort of side business that could eventually maybe create some sort of passive income that I liked the idea of selling things online. Because of course there are almost no cost of goods sold and it just appealed to me, but I had no idea what I was doing. I'd never built a website. I'd never recorded an audio program. I'd never edited an audio program. I had never created a PayPal button, you know, for giving me money on the internet or any of those things. So it was all brand.

1 (6m 56s):
Okay. That's perfect. So what brought you to the place of complete novice to, to starting to take those action steps, to learn that and overcome those obstacles and create the program?

2 (7m 9s):
Willie? Yeah. Okay. So that's a great question. And honestly, I had, since let me just back up to around 1992, when I saw Mike do a stage hypnosis show at my university, I was a first year engineering student in Ottawa. And Mike was the entertainment as one part of the frosh week experience. Do you guys still have that? Did people call it frosh week where you are or first party week or whatever, whatever it is for people around the world. It's that first year of university where the first week is usually some sort of orientation week. That's the official name for it, but, and there's a lot of parties and social activities. And Mike came in to do a stage hypnosis show and it blew my mind.

2 (7m 50s):
I thought this is amazing. And long story short. It completely convinced me that this is just a totally fascinating topic. Well, the next year I was now part of the group to facilitate, to help the orientation week. I was a volunteer in my second year to help all the first-year people out. And Mike came back. But this time it was a little bit different because instead of just a hypnosis show in the E in the afternoon, he did a brain software seminar. It was the very first year that he'd started doing that 1993. And what he was basically teaching is language techniques and physiology and breathing the stuff that you and I called the grinder model now. And I didn't know it, but that was basically a lot of NLP techniques.

2 (8m 32s):
And when I got a copy of his reading list, it included things like he swears it was awaken the giant within, by Anthony Robbins, but I'm pretty sure he's wrong. And it was unlimited power. Cause that's the first Anthony Robbins book that I bought unlimited power. And then fast forward a few years, I ended up in a job where during the interview process, they asked me, well, what kind of things am I into? And I said, well, I'm, I'm really into NLP and personal development. And I love Tony Robbins. And this guy, one of the guys in the interview, his name was grant. He stands up and he goes, that's it, this guy's got the job. It was the funniest thing in the world to me because I didn't know it, but they were big into personal development type of stuff.

2 (9m 15s):
And they told me after I got the job, I was so happy because he goes, yeah, we've actually got like a drawer full of all of these things and you can bring them home and listen to them. They were cassette tapes, right? So I borrowed a Tony Robbins. What was the program? It was like a 30 days to personal power, personal power. I think it was called or whatever. He's, he's renamed it over the years, but I, I started listening to the audio cassettes of Tony Robbins, just teaching people how to have a better life. So that in a, in a long-winded answer, what is the inspiration for when I wanted to create a program, talking to toddlers, I thought I need to channel like an inner Tony Robin. So instead of just a boring, well, hi, I'd like to talk to you all about how to parent toddlers and how you can use language to distract them and possibly perhaps even use conversational, hypnosis and embedded commands and metaphor.

2 (10m 6s):
No, I just like, okay, everybody. So, you know, in this lesson, I really want to get down to the details of how we can distract kids from the emotional States that they're in. And I would, I would hear Tony Robbins in my head, right. Because I didn't quite do it exactly that way, but that was to me, like a model to follow. And I thought, okay, if I can just get a microphone, get an audio recording piece of software on my Mac book, figure out how to make it sound good. Pre-write all the material, I guess pre-write of course it's always pre-written right. You don't post right stuff. Maybe you could. And what I did is I decided, okay, how am I going to make this easy on myself?

2 (10m 47s):
I'm going to write the whole thing as a script. And I want it to sound conversational. So I'm writing it in my head as if I'm saying it. So I'm writing an audio book, not a book, an audio book, I'm thinking it like an audio program. And then I'm just practicing and I'm breaking it up into bite sized chunks. I had a lot of experience in my life already writing long reports and things like that, but never anything in a real conversational style like this. So that was new to me. But all I had to figure out was how to record it and make it sound good, edit it and all that stuff. And that was actually not very difficult because I'm technically savvy. I'm good with computers and all that stuff. I'm not afraid to learn a new software program.

2 (11m 30s):
So I started recording the first few, I got my wife to listen to them. And I remember the look on her face were sitting and I had it playing through the stereo and she was sitting on the couch or having a glass of wine and I could see she's engaging with the material and I'm just Chris to her. Right. I'm just, you know, I'm just the dad of the kids and I'm not, I'm no one special. I'm just Chris. I'm not a parenting guru or anything, but the reaction on her, I'm like, she's actually thinking this is good. And she encouraged me and said, yeah, this is, this is really good. Put this whole thing together. Let's do it. And so that's how it all started.

1 (12m 4s):
That is so awesome. And, and as you're speaking, I'm having all these takeaways. One of, I believe it's a, it's a Jim Roan quote that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. And I really think that I am where I am today because I'm not surrounded by entrepreneurs or high-level performers, but I read that same awaken the giant within book. I went through it a couple of times and it's a dense book and I took group. Yeah. Yeah.

2 (12m 34s):
There's so much gold in this stuff that Tony Robbins published. He's the FinTech. I know people have, you know, different people have different opinions on him. I'm a fan. I just think that he's changed a lot of people's lives. He absolutely changed mine. I thank Mike Mandel in the beginning for introducing me to his concepts. And so between the years where I only knew Mike as a stage hypnotist that taught that seminar and I had no further exposure to him until almost 10 years later, everything that I learned about NLP and hypnosis came from books that he had recommended in his presentation. And then I only got to know him and be mentored by him much, much later. That's incredible. It was great to be able to have, like, if those books didn't exist, maybe I never would have followed the path of continuing the learning before becoming friends later on with Mike.

1 (13m 24s):
That's incredible. Do you happen to have that list still?

2 (13m 28s):
I think I do. It was in his original brain software seminar PDF notebook. I probably have it somewhere on my hard drive because we re produced it for the website to make it as a lead magnet. So actually our homepage has changed now. So you can't even go to our homepage, download it, but it is free on our website somewhere. I should probably fix that note to self the PDF. If I remember correctly, when he would physically have them printed and bound and he gave them out, I think it had frogs into princes Richard Bandler, John grinder. It had, I'm pretty sure awaken the giant within or unlimited power. It was one of those, like I said, I think Edward DeBono, the six thinking hats was in that list on that list.

2 (14m 12s):
And there might've been a few others, so yeah. Phenomenal list though.

1 (14m 17s):
Okay. That's awesome. If, if you happen to come across it, I can put it in the link. So

2 (14m 23s):
It's yours, you

1 (14m 24s):
Got it. And everyone who's listening. Cause I have a feeling I'm not the only one. Who's curious about that. Another thing you mentioned was how you, you listened to Tim Ferriss and, and for me, just listening to all of these podcasts, I would listen while I was in my car. And to me that was like the five people that I was hanging out with is Tim Ferriss and all these people that he's interviewing.

2 (14m 46s):
Yeah. You get to hang out with people virtually that don't actually know you, but you can be influenced by them. The people you're exposed to really that matters.

1 (14m 54s):
Right. So moving to the, the idea of the imposter monster and thinking about how, when you, when you created this program, were you calm? Did you feel confident? Did you feel like, Oh, I know people are going to love this or was there a part of you that thought, okay, I've only been a dad for a couple years.

2 (15m 12s):
Yeah. You're, you're, you're raising, raising a really interesting set of questions here that I don't even think I would have thought to suggest if you would ask me and yeah. At the time. So who was Chris Thompson? Right? Well, he was this guy working in the finance industry. I had four years experience, four to five years experience working as a telecom ish engineer, mechanical engineer, and then went on to become a stock analyst. What the heck credibility do I have in the parenting market? Right. Well, I've done a bunch of self development, skill learning, hypnosis and LP. I know that this is an important skill, but I don't have, you know, any authority on this topic.

2 (15m 54s):
So that to me was a little bit scary. I inside, I didn't know, I have value to add, but how am I going to convince others? So that, that part was the scary part. Was that external validation. And I am the type of person in NLP. You know, we have the meta-programs of internal versus external, right. For example, validation, if you tell me, Oh Chris, you're such a wonderful guy that, that lights me up. I feel great. As opposed to other people who just need to say to themselves. Yeah, you're a wonderful guy. Everyone loves you. You're awesome. Right. I have more of that external medicine system or Metta program. So I would worry, well, are people gonna think this is as awesome as I think it's going to be.

2 (16m 35s):
And thankfully they did like the testimonials that came in and to this day, I still remember getting completely unsolicited emails from people around the world going, like, I remember one woman from Malta. She say, she said, you changed my boy and my life. I was the quote she gave me, I'm going, this is amazing. This is great. But I did not have all of the confidence in the world going in. I just figured, what do I have to lose? Right. What do I have to lose?

1 (17m 4s):
Yeah, that's incredible. And I would think your wife being engaged and encouraging you to move forward. That's a huge one because I think our family members who see us as dad or mom or husband, wife, and then they start to see us as presenters, something shifts. I recently saw you present for the first time at Hypnos thoughts, you were going to be there in person and it didn't work out for Canadians. It was so crazy. So we're recording this at August 21st, right? And the crazy, hopefully the craziest time of this whole pandemic. Yeah.

2 (17m 39s):
Hopefully on the down downward end of the COVID situation.

1 (17m 43s):
Yes. Crossing our fingers. So I turned on your presentation. It was recorded. And I was just, it's almost like I was doing this internal happy dance because you are a phenomenal presenter. And I'm wondering how much of that you attribute to modeling and what other,

2 (18m 3s):
Thank you so much, by the way that external validation we were talking a moment ago. Remember when you said that you told me I loved your presentation. I thought I was at the cottage with my wife and it was her family's cottage. And I said, Laurie just said, said the most amazing thing to me, it made my day completely because yeah. You know, I don't know how people are going to feel about the material that I put out there. And when I get that kind of feedback back, it feels tremendous. It makes me want to keep doing it. Right. So yeah. How much, how much went into modeling others? A lot. I would say if we go back, this is a really good part of that whole imposter monster thing too, because we've been going to hypno thoughts live since I think 2015.

2 (18m 49s):
Is that about right? This would have been the sixth one. I believe I'm pretty sure. So I think 2015, I could be off by a year, but anyway, we've been going for a long time. And in the beginning, of course, I saw myself as well. I'm Chris Thompson. I'm the business guy behind Mike Mondell hypnosis. Mike is the man. And no question, like, I don't know anyone that presents better than him on the topic of hypnosis the experience, the knowledge, and those are two different things, the use of comedy. And so the humor, the making learning fun and easy and just the dynamicism of the presentation. So we see so many people in the hypnosis field, unfortunately, and I'm not picking on any specific person.

2 (19m 31s):
It's really, it's not even just hypnosis. It's any field education by video tends to be a lot of, let's say the prerecorded, you know, webcam. Hi, okay. In this presentation, I want to talk to you about whatever the topic is. And there's not a whole lot of dynamic range. There's not a lot of, you know, ups and downs. But if you think about a musical piece, I think Mike would really like this metaphor, given how much he's a musical fan. If you listen to some of the great classical pieces and stuff and or rock or anything, just the ups and the downs and the dynamics that happen. And I think that's necessary and presentation. And when I see people like Mike presenting that way or call out a few others, obviously Carl Smith, very dynamic presenter, Ken, so brilliant dynamic presenter, Jason Lanette so many of our friends who you, of course, right.

2 (20m 19s):
You're newer at it as am I. But back in the day, I saw myself as the guy who was just going to market Mike Mandale, he's the guy, but over the years, it's taken me awhile to discover people want to hear from me too, because I have a different perspective on things. I have actually a different skill set. I'm more the techie and business guy. And I see big picture, things like that and can put those big pictures into details specifically around building the business and the marketing and all that thing. Whereas Mike has just unbelievably talented at learning anything, mastering it and making it so fun to learn from him. And he's a great dynamic speaker.

2 (20m 60s):
And I got to through the years when we were putting together the Mike Mandale hypnosis Academy, which is for those listening, if you're not familiar, it's our online flagship hypnosis training and certification program. You'll find it at our website, but we built that starting in around 2013, I was behind the camera. Mike was on camera. So I had a front row seat to watching him masterfully deliver video after video and what I would see, and this was intimidating in the beginning because I've never seen anyone able to do what he can do, which is I call them one take Mike. Cause it would be all right. We're going to do a video on what do you want to do now?

2 (21m 40s):
Oh, double binds. Let's talk about double binds and presuppositions. Okay. Do you want to plan it out? Nope. I don't want to say, okay, Chris, just yell action. When you're ready, click the button action. And it would be all right in this video we're going to talk about, and then he would just launch into it and it would be flawless. One take every single time, almost without exception. There were a few times we retook a video or something, but you know, I'm watching that going. He just knows his material. He's so congruent. So confident, so experienced because he's been doing keynote speeches for a long time. So I got to watch that and model that. And then of course over the years, I got to watch and model bits of other presenters because we hadn't been going to any hypnosis conventions in 2013, 2014.

2 (22m 26s):
We only started that later. That was hugely important to me to be able to watch that. And I'm, I think I'm pretty good at watching different people present and realizing what aspects are effective and what aspects are ineffective. And I'll know, for example, one big thing that I think I've done a reasonably good job at improving in myself is getting rid of all those filler phrases, the ums and the AHS. I still do some, but sometimes I'll listen back to my own presentations and go. That was pretty good. I couldn't have done that five years ago. I would've, I would've just, you know, like sort of that kind of thing.

1 (23m 7s):
That's amazing. I almost just put one of my fillers in, right at the end, doing this podcast and going through and editing. I noticed that. I say, I love that all the time. I love that. I love that. And I do it's it gets me excited, but I thought, okay, Laurie, do you need a new phrase?

2 (23m 24s):
I love that. You said that

1 (23m 26s):
Love that you love that. Okay. So when I first, when I first decided that I was going to go into hypnosis full-time I went and visited my daughter in Nashville. And I knew that Steve reign was in Nashville. And I thought about this idea that you, the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So I reached out to him and said, can I take you out to dinner? Can we connect? Because I wanted to get inside his head. I also knew that he worked over zoom and I wanted to work over zoom. So I thought I would get some feedback from that. And one of my takeaways from the conversation is he talked about how he was looking for his own Chris Thompson.

1 (24m 7s):
He said, we all need a Chris Thompson. He told me that in Vegas a few years ago. Yeah. And I've heard so many hypnotists that I've connected with. Talk about that. So, you know, we have Mike Mandel, who's the hypnosis guy and Chris Thompson. Who's the, the engine behind everything else, guy. Yeah. And I love that. Now you are starting to align yourself with, you know, that you're training and talking about the hypnosis and stepping into that skill level that you have by modeling and apprenticing under him. And I'm wondering what you would say to a hypnotist who's maybe just starting out, who's getting ready to build their business. And for a while they have to be the Chris Thompson and the Mike Mondell.

1 (24m 50s):
Yeah. What kind of advice would you give?

2 (24m 53s):
It is a tough one. I think that I wouldn't give the same advice that I took myself because I took a slower path to figuring out how to step out of my own way. So in the beginning, let's say I was the sole trainer, right. I had to play the role of Mike and Chris. I do everything like a lot of people do in this space. You can't be good at all of those things. And as an example, even though I had Mike and that, Oh my goodness, that makes things so much easier because I don't have to think about the being the expert on the content side. That's covered. We, we have world-class content right out of the gate because this guy is Mike frickin, Matt Dell. So I've got to deal with that now.

2 (25m 34s):
Well, who's building the web pages. Oh, that's me. Who's writing the sales copy. That's me. Who's writing the email auto responders and connecting all of the technology bits together. Who's editing the videos. That's me, all of this stuff. And even, you know, in the beginning I liked I'm an engineer. So I like the idea of figuring out all the plumbing, metaphorically and how all this works, how the processes fit together. But I should have, in retrospect, been willing to spend a bit more money earlier on to get out of having to do all those things. And it did take some time, but that would be my main advice is understand a bit more about your financial risk in terms of, can you go and find someone to edit your podcasts sooner?

2 (26m 20s):
If it's going to cost you 30 or 40 or 50 bucks an episode to get someone to edit it for you. And I don't know what it would actually cost because we have a full-time guy. So he does a lot of stuff. So I know how much we pay him for all the work he does, but on a breakdown per task, I have no idea, but there are people you can pay to do these things. So it's a good idea to do them in the beginning, right? But I imagine, you know, if, if you, Lori start getting very busy with all the different projects that you want to do and all the marketing you want to do, maybe you don't want to be editing the video behind these podcasts. You want to find someone to do that for you. And that would have been something I should have considered doing sooner. Same thing with webpage design.

2 (27m 1s):
I mean, I don't build very good web pages. I'm not a web artist of any kind. What I can do is probably find other pages that look reasonably good and then say, can you, Jason Lynette says this a lot, make me one like that. And so in a nutshell, that's one thing I could just say is you want to learn how to do more and outsource, just follow along with what Jason Lynette's teaching. He's probably the number one guy in the entire space in terms of teaching people, the business processes. And he, he's a very good teacher. So from that perspective, find people who can teach you how to get out of your own way.

2 (27m 42s):
Not have to do all of the steps yourself, to the extent that you can financially budget that. And if you find someone who doesn't work out, that's fine. It's not a long-term commitment. You can say, ah, this guy is horrible. Editing podcasts or videos are making really bad landing pages. And my dad always taught me this when I was younger, just because you're better than someone else at something doesn't mean you should do it because you'll only have a fixed amount of time. So you should really only focus on doing the things that you truly are exceptional at, and that are worth the most to your business. And so for me right now that is business strategy, marketing strategy, and basically planning out all the customer journeys that people are going through.

2 (28m 29s):
So whether it be someone buying a deck of cards and then once they buy these language cards, there should be a journey that we take them through to handhold them and build rapport with them and show them what we have. That's next because obviously nobody watching this thinks we make a bunch of money selling these cards for $9. By the time they get out the door, the manufacturing, the shipping, the fulfillment costs, this is a breakeven prospect. We just want customers to get experience with who we are. Right. So I think big machinery planning. I'm good at that. I shouldn't be doing any artwork, any landing pages, any video editing and maybe even copywriting. I shouldn't do. I don't know.

2 (29m 9s):
So that would be, my advice is just, you have to do it all in the beginning, but as soon as you can figure out as Perry Marshall put in his book, 80, 20 sales and marketing. Sorry, it wasn't Perry Marshall. It was the ready original 80 20 principle. Yeah. What's Richard. I'm going to get the author's name wrong. So I'll just pretend, I didn't say that

3 (29m 35s):
The 80, 20,

2 (29m 37s):
No, maybe it was actually Perry. Marshall. I think it was him. Yeah. Richard Cole. Richard Kosch Richard Kahn.

1 (29m 44s):
Gosh. Okay. I C O K O C H.

2 (29m 46s):
Yes. I got Richard part out, right. At least. Okay. So it was either in Richard conscious original book, or it was Perry Marshall's version called 80 20 sales and marketing. I can't remember which, but he basically says, you've got to figure out what are the tasks that are the $10 an hour tasks? What are the hundred dollars an hour tasks? What are the thousand dollar, an hour tasks and possibly depending on who you are and all that, maybe there are certain things that you do that are like $10,000 an hour tasks, right? And you should not be doing the $10 an hour things. You can pay other people $10 an hour or the a hundred dollars an hour things, you know, when you get to the point where a copywriter might cost you, something like that.

2 (30m 28s):
Well, if you can pay someone that, because you know that you can now focus on things, let's say around business automation and strategy and product creation that I know if Mike and I spent a few hours creating a product, obviously the return on investment from that is going to be a whole lot better than let's say Mike and I working on a webpage together. Right. Right. So I don't know if that answers the question the way you intended, but that's my answer.

1 (30m 57s):
Yeah. I love, I love that. Okay. So for a person, and I may know a woman like this, who knows it's time to start outsourcing, but it's being precious about their business and thinking, well, they're not going to do it the way I do it. Number one, where would you recommend they look for a person to outsource to, and number two, how, how do you help them get over themselves and actually implement what they know they should do?

2 (31m 25s):
That's a good question. So there's a whole bunch of resources out there around where you can go to find people to do the various jobs. And it really depends on what you're looking to outsource. So maybe I'll actually pick your brain on that. In a moment, we can do like a mini, a mini test case consultation type of thing around it. But I would say I actually had this for, I'll give you an example in my own life here. So we did the brain software podcast and it's a bit wacky. And, you know, there are different sound effects and I was editing them on garage band on my Mac. So we would record using audacity and I would just export the wave file.

2 (32m 6s):
And I would bring that into garage band since it was on my Mac and garage band had all these little Apple sound effects and other specialty things, and I would edit it. And at some point I was getting frustrated going, I really shouldn't edit this. I should get Ross to do it. He's our guy doing all the videos and graphics and other things. And he said, he's done audio work for me. In fact, he edited a bunch of, I think he edited my talking to toddlers audio book many, many years ago. That's how I met him and phenomenal work. Right. He did great job. And I was hesitant to hand off the podcast. Why was I hesitant to hand off the podcast? I stopped thought about it. And I realized, Oh, it's because he uses a PC and I use a Mac. And so how was I going to get him the different audio tracks that we use?

2 (32m 50s):
Well, that's stupid. How would an engineer solve that problem? Well, how about I just export the sound effects to a wave file or something, stick them in Dropbox and say, here you go, Ross here, all the files that you will need to duplicate the style. And guess what? The first few times, he pretty much nailed it, exactly what I would have wanted. And then we had the freedom and the flexibility to say, Hey, we have an idea. Can you do this or this? And he'd have the time to dedicate towards maybe deepening our voice, you know, for the, Hey you're still just Danny, those type of commercials that we put in. And he did an amazing job and sure enough, you know, years go by and we eventually had a new script written for that journey to the castle that we just released by the time this goes live, this might be available for free on our website, who knows, but Ross edited the whole thing, the entire audio sequence and made it a masterpiece.

2 (33m 45s):
People were saying in our group, this is sounding like a Disney soundtrack. You know, the whole thing. And I have him to credit. If I had decided all I'm going to still edit my own podcast because you know, I'm on a Mac and he's on a PC and that's just too complicated. No I'm putting brick walls where they don't belong. Right. So basically in a short version, figure out what the process is documented in some way that you can teach it. And with things like loom, which is a plugin for your browser, you can make screen recordings for free loom dot L O M loom like a loon labard, but with an M instead of an atom. And you can use that as totally free.

2 (34m 26s):
You can screen record to show people what you do so you can teach them what your process is. And anybody who's decent at any of these tasks, you can just show them, this is how I do things, and please do that and they'll do it. It's no problem. As far as where to go to hire them. There's so many different places that you can go. I use for most of the freelance stuff that I hire people for. I just go to upwork.com. Okay. Yeah. So what, what's like one thing that the person, you know, who's considering this might want to outsource

1 (34m 59s):
Editing podcasts

2 (35m 1s):
All. Okay. And it's basically a video in this case because we're using zoom and

1 (35m 6s):
Making it available. So I'm putting them on YouTube on my website, and then I'm putting the audio within the next week or so I'm going to be uploading them all to the various podcast platform.

2 (35m 17s):
Yeah. Yeah. And so what part of that is the most intimidating or that you're worried might go wrong?

1 (35m 26s):
I think I, I, I want to trust the person to know, to edit out the parts where I'm making a complete fool of myself, but leave some of them in. So people understand that you can do this. And another thing is I actually really enjoy it. So I do editing in Adobe, premier pro. And that's, it's something that I really enjoy, but it's, it's not contributing to my productivity.

2 (35m 51s):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's not a high dollar an hour value for your business, but it is enjoyable for the time being, and there's a trade off there because creatively, it's kind of fun and fulfilling in some ways, but I don't know how long it will be until you make that decision that the fulfilling part of it is diminishing. And I need to get fulfillment in other areas that I'm contributing to the growth of my business. Right. So when that happens and I don't know when that will be, now, you'll be prepared to, for example, screen, record the process of you doing it. Oh, okay. So this is how I like to do it. And of course, here's another tip that I think Jason taught me this, although it's sort of, in retrospect, it's quite obvious, but I will credit Jason because I think he's the one who mentioned it when you're doing any kind of an audio, let's say we're a video.

2 (36m 43s):
We do audio only. And we do this in our podcast all the time. If something is really bad, like Mike just has a horrible cough or something, we'll just go like this, you know? Okay. Ross, can you just edit that out? We're going to come back in at the segment where we were talking about how to change your beliefs. Okay. And, and we'd continue. That's a pretty clear marker for your editor to go. Yeah, really. Laurie does not want that in there, but when something's just a bit jokey funny, like, Oh, I screwed up, but let's leave it in because it makes me look more human. You don't even have to acknowledge it. And your editor will get the idea and it'll take a little while, but I guarantee you, it will unlock even more potential.

1 (37m 26s):
Will you talk to us a little bit about the castle and your language cards? Because I know people are going to be curious about

2 (37m 34s):
Yes, I would love to. We might just have to make up a URL right now so that when this is a free resource, people will know where to go. Okay, let's do it. Mike Mandela, hypnosis.com forward slash castle. I think if we use that, that will eventually become a page now marketing one Oh one, never just give it away completely for free. It will be free, but we're going to ask you for your email address and then we're going to promote stuff gently to you. You can always say no. And if you hate our emails, we don't send that many. There's always an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every single message. But we want to have a chance to at least tell you more about what we're doing. Right?

2 (38m 14s):
So journey of the castle, Mike 25 or so years ago recorded three audio tracks on a cassette originally. But then I think a couple of them got rerecorded and rereleased on CD. Then we eventually started selling them as MP3s and eventually just bundle them in with all the stuff we do now. But those recordings were recorded in a professional studio with a big mixer board and sound engineering and all that. And these three, which were stress-relief peak performance and memory power, they all had this similar starting where you'd be imagining yourself in this peaceful, restful clearing. And you'd take this journey and walk down these paths.

2 (38m 56s):
And at some point, Mike describes that. I think it was like to the left up a Craigie path. There's a castle, but that's not where we're going today. That's a, that's a destination for another journey on another day, something like that. So the track would go on and Mike would point out the existence of this castle, but people weren't going there. So for years, and years and years, people would email in or comment or something like when do I get to go to the castle? It was this mysterious thing that in their mind thought, cause he made it seem appealing during the trans induction. There's this castle, but we're not going there.

2 (39m 37s):
When do we get to go to the castle? And eventually I just said to Mike, I think we need to do a recording where we finally get people to go to the castle. And so he said, okay, we're going to do it. So we brainstormed a bit. And he came up with this genius idea that he described as his best work ever. And I thought, Oh, okay, really? Come on. Unbelievable. I I'll just leave it at that. It's a different castle. It's a different kind of hypnosis journey, but people are just freaking loving it. And I'm so happy with how it turned out. And it was a project for me. That was interesting because I didn't get involved in writing the script at all.

2 (40m 18s):
Mike did the whole thing. I didn't get involved in editing any of the audio whatsoever. I gave the whole raw file to Ross and I just guided him along saying, step one, all I want to do is get rid of all the mouth noises, you know, because of course when you're breathing into a microphone, when you're trying to be perfectly hypnotic and I'm going to do this on purpose, you know, the mouth notes. So you don't know if you're going to have background music covering that at that moment or not. So I just give it okay. You know what for now? Just get rid of all those extraneous noises. I had to coach him a bit on the process that I remember using from years ago and he did it flawlessly. It was perfect. Then it was okay, Mike, your job is to go and decide all of the music that you want in there.

2 (41m 4s):
Here's the program or the membership. We have a appsumo.com membership to a place called audio hero.com. It was like $50. Okay. And something like 3000 download credits. So essentially infinite, like I'll be dead before we use them all.

4 (41m 22s):
And

2 (41m 24s):
I just gave Mike the login and said, go log into our account that we bought, pick all the music that you want and put it in a document and then, okay. He picks the music and I'm listening going. This is amazing. He's so auditory. He picked the most brilliant music and then it was okay. Now let's give Ross a script that has all of the notes of exactly what file we want in what soundtrack, at what point, where do we want it fade in, fade out, what do you want to do with it? And it was unbelievable. We only went through a couple of different iterations with Ross on just adjusting the volume because of course everyone using different versions of headsets or stuff, maybe the one Ross was using was, was playing the background music quieter than the AirPods that we were using or the over the air things that we were listening with.

2 (42m 12s):
But we just adjusted the volume a couple of times and I was on holiday. The whole thing got done, you know, wrapped up while I was on holiday between Mike and Ross. So I felt like as the self-designated CEO of this business, this is awesome. The people on the team are doing it. You know, Mike's the creative genius Ross as the editor, I didn't have to do anything. Wow. So I can take no credit other than project management.

1 (42m 39s):
Well, and that's, that's important. I listened to it at hypno thoughts right after I finished my four-hour presentation. And I was just depleted like physically and emotionally exhausted from putting so much into it. And I, I enlist, I think I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw someone talk about the castle and I thought I'm going to listen to it right now. I listened to my, on my little wonder, boom, because my AirPods weren't working properly. Right. And it was like a cinematic experience. I still have no idea what, what happened because I was so zoned out that it just, I could feel things shifting. And it was just this BW. I am so impressed.

1 (43m 21s):
And I was thinking, I know Mike picked this music.

2 (43m 23s):
I listened to the, I listened to the track just as Mike said, I'm really happy with it. What do you think? And I gave it a listen just to make sure that was the extent of my involvement. Really in a lot of this is just the final listen at a conscious level. Like I didn't go through the experience and use it on myself or change, but even still, I got to the ending and I'm almost crying with joy, you know? Like it's, it's quite emotional. Yeah. It's, it's amazing. So we are going to give it away. Yeah. Mike Mandela hypnosis.com/castle. And since this is now August 21st, and I have done absolutely nothing to build the page. That means I have to follow my own recommendation and I have to go pay somebody to build that page, or this will go live and I'll disappoint a whole lot of people.

2 (44m 8s):
So I don't know how long it takes you to get these out, but I'd better go faster than you.

1 (44m 13s):
I put Michael C Anthony's out in about 48 hours. So I will let, shall we say a week?

2 (44m 20s):
Yeah. I'm, you know, I'm going to make it my priority this afternoon. I have a guy in mind who can build the page for me fast and I'll get it done.

1 (44m 29s):
That there are a lot of people that will be really happy that because I know it's created such a buzz inside MMA and people are wondering how they can get it into more people's hands. So I I'm excited.

2 (44m 40s):
I'm glad to hear it made such an impact. I'm just, I'm so pleased with it. And we have lots of ideas now in terms of, you know, for the MMA members, maybe we can do some sort of deconstruction, like what went into building that maybe we can even do tutorials that will help other hypnotists create their first audio asset that they can put on their website to be able to give away similar to what we're doing. So it is cool. And I know you also wanted to talk about the cards. What do you want to know about that?

1 (45m 8s):
Well, maybe I'll just talk a little bit about how I've used the cards. They, so before you put the cards out, I didn't have access to them. So I used an app that had very similar, I won't even say it because I want people to look at the language cards instead.

2 (45m 23s):
Okay. You're probably talking about the salad app. I'm guessing. Yeah. We recommended that for a long time. We still do. In fact as an app. Yeah.

1 (45m 30s):
Yeah. It's great. I, I did that based on a recommendation from James trip. So I saw him speak and I love just the way he uses language. And I went and asked, how can I, how can I be like you? And he said, go and look at the language patterns and choose one a day. And so I did that and I I'm telling you, Chris, I did it really poorly. If I would have done it with relentless consistency, it would have skyrocketed me forward even more quickly. But just starting to learn that, you know, I think everything about hypnosis is an NLP is learning a new language. And these, if you just grab one car today and find a way to implement it into your conversation, you're, you're going to become an effective communicator really quickly.

2 (46m 12s):
Yeah. Just stick it in your shirt pocket or whatever you, whatever equivalent you have and just think about where you can use it. So five of hearts, how would it feel if you.dot dot, right? How would it feel if you successfully outsource the editing of your podcasts from here on out, what difference would that make to you? You know, it's just a fun way of using it and you can slip that in dozens of times in conversation and it becomes your personal challenge. Here's my little secret I'm going to it's becomes your filler phrase. You know, I love that. Just switch that with, how would it feel if you, and then tomorrow, sooner or later everything changes.

1 (46m 52s):
Yeah. So we

2 (46m 53s):
Put together that was years ago, we would always be recommending zebu cards. The original right. Absolute original was zebu cards. And then Jamie smart. And he had the physical decks of salad cards. I think I've actually got them on my bookshelf over there somewhere. And then the salad app, which I think was like $20 or something. Once you added all the different packs, but these were difficult to get a zebu was almost impossible to buy and Jamie's cards. I don't think they're for sale anymore. I couldn't find them anywhere. And they certainly weren't cheap. And I thought as a marketer, we have good content. Why don't we find a way to make our own deck of cards that are good quality, good content that we can just ship to people more or less at cost, because this is not something we're looking to make money on.

2 (47m 39s):
On the front end. We just want to introduce people to our brand so they can get exposed to the awesome ness. That is what Mike is teaching and what I'm bringing together. And it worked out really well. I found a company that could make the cards for me and do the fulfillment and everything. And they've been for sale on our website now for a couple of years. And it's just Mike Mandela, hypnosis.com forward slash cards. And yeah, it's been a fun project. So that was totally new. And that was, again, one of those things where I had experience doing digital products. Right. But I had never done anything physical. Ooh, that's scary and new. Well, why when you sit back and think about it and go, what really is so scary about this?

2 (48m 22s):
Well, it's just that I haven't done it before. And what if the fulfillment company doesn't ship them properly? What if they get lost in the mail? What if people get a wrecked package? What if it's just too much burden from an administrative standpoint, those were all the challenges I was thinking about. Well, most of those are probably like, if you think about Tim Ferriss in his book, right. When he talked about the four hour work week, and I think he called the exercise fear lining like dreamlining, but fear lining, setting or setting or something like that. Yeah. It was well on a scale of one to 10, how bad would that be? Like if somebody got a mangled package in the mail, how bad is that on a scale of one to 10?

2 (49m 4s):
It's like a two. And what is the permanence effect of that on a scale of one to 10? How permanent is that problem is a zero, which is reship cost me a few bucks. Right? I thought, Oh, well, that's no big deal. Okay. So really I just need to bite this off one bite at a time, eat that elephant one bite at a time, find someone who can make the cards, create the content, get the artwork done, get the samples ordered or whatever it is, and set it up inside of our infusion soft system and make an order form. I've done all those things before. Okay, well, let's just do it. And I just decided let's just do it once you make a decision, it actually feels really good. There will be problems along the way.

2 (49m 46s):
You'll sort them out. And if you can, if it decides, if you decide it was a total mistake, so you're out a little bit of money on whatever you committed to buying decks of cards, that'll never get sold because you know, no one wants them or something like that. The worst case scenario, you'll learn a bunch of things and it'll cost you some money.

1 (50m 4s):
Right? So more than anything, what I, I would love to talk about this amazing program that you've been speaking of for, I'm always recommending MMA Jay to people. I have people come to me all the time and ask, where do I start? And sometimes people will come into my weight loss program. So many people in my weight loss program are already hypnotist who aren't, they'll go through the program and they want to look there. They're like, I have to know more. And I always send them to you. And Mike and I am so grateful that that's where I started because I had no idea where to start. I started there because we had rapport. I'd been listening to your podcast for months, maybe even a year or so.

1 (50m 48s):
And I thought, okay, I know Mike and Chris, I'm going to sign up here. And then I'll branch out. And every subsequent training that I have experienced makes sense and falls into place because Mike laid such a solid foundation. And I have such an understanding of like, I'm a why person. I want to know the science underneath and how it works. And he helped me for me. It's just, it's really the most neuroscience-based way of helping people. And it's incredible. So will you talk to us a little bit about MMA and maybe for people like me who like to geek out on the structure, just maybe explain a little bit about how that business model works.

2 (51m 29s):
Yeah, sure. You mean that business, like the actual financial business model,

1 (51m 33s):
Whatever you're willing and open to share. I'm so curious about all that.

2 (51m 36s):
Just you let me know what you want to know. We're pretty open about all of this. So it started because I knew that we had a really good live class taught in Toronto. The architecture of hypnosis is what Mike named it after going through this Gothic architecture course from great courses.com. He was inspired to think about it as exactly that the foundation and then the main structure, and then the, you know, the stained glass windows and the arches and all the decorations on top. And so teaching hypnosis from this foundation's first principles first was always something that he has done so well. And of course, I've been there through the classroom and moved from just sitting in the class and being the guy, administrating the class to coming up and helping answer questions.

2 (52m 21s):
And then co-teaching with them and years have gone by now. We really, we teach the class together. It's still mostly him, but I'm, I'm comfortable with pretty much all the material and teaching alongside him. And it's so much fun. But while we were going through that, when I wasn't yet at that stage, I did know this is an amazing class. We need to get this online because, and this is kind of a funny thing, just from a business standpoint, I thought there are going to be a lot of people who live in other parts of the world. They are not going to be able to justify the tuition for the class, the plane ticket, the hotel, the time off work, the cost of eating and whatever transportation, all of the expense involved in going on a trip and taking a class and not making money during that week or using up your vacation depending on whether you're self-employed or have a job.

2 (53m 11s):
So well, that's a big ask of people, right? Well, what if we just made an online option for them, then we'd probably get a lot of students who could train with us. And that would meet some demand that we couldn't otherwise meet, because we're only going to teach two, three classes a year. We only have spot for so many people. And a lot of people, like I said, just aren't going to commit the money to it because it is expensive to do that well at that part worked. But here's what I did not expect to happen. And in hindsight, it's obvious and I should've seen it, but it was just a lesson learned a good lesson. The other way around is what actually happened. People signed up for the online training first because it's like no risk, right? When, when we were selling this very early on at $47 a month, and that's still the price today, well, it's only $47 a month.

2 (53m 58s):
And if you don't like it in the first month, just tell us, we'll give you your money back. That's fine. That's the right way to do business. Now we have a free trial, so there's no need to even refund money if they don't like it within their trial period, just cancel. That's fine. You haven't paid anything. You can completely check it out for free, right on our website. And so I thought, okay, let's just do this bunch of people buy it. A bunch of people joined. They love it. And then what happens next? They go, I have to go to Toronto, right? Oh, you did that. Is that how you started? So I did not understand that early on. I didn't have enough of a marketing savviness to me to realize that people start the customer journey with the least level of commitment and they move towards the most level of commitment.

2 (54m 40s):
We don't get married first and then go on our first date and hold hands and have a coffee together. Right. We don't have kids and then go, Oh yeah. You know, maybe, maybe we should become friends and stuff. Right. Or at least it shouldn't happen that way. It goes the other way around. Right. You know, you see someone, you engage, you have coffee together, go hold hands, have a first kiss. And eventually you've got a family and like me, it just celebrated three days ago. My 19th wedding anniversary. Happy anniversary. Thank you. So I did not understand that people would start with the journey being, just try the online stuff. Just try it out. Try meaning experiment. Let's see. Let's go to a new restaurant. Let's see how this is.

2 (55m 21s):
Try it on. See if it fits and Oh, it fits really well like this. Okay. I'm getting on a plane. I'm going to see these guys. So that was kind of cool with COVID. Of course we've had to cancel every single live event this year, all the travel and all the local, which totally sucks. Something like seven events, but it's cool. So, okay. I answered how did Mmh form, because I wanted it to form and I just pitched Mike on the idea. I said, I've never done this before, but you know what, if you show up in front of the camera and I know he's good at that, I'll figure out everything else. And I have this idea, you know, we were going to make a white background and it would be like a white board.

2 (56m 3s):
So it would be just like a classroom and him teaching in front of a chalkboard, but it would be with dry erase markers. And I remember setting up the tripod and the camera and I bought a big piece of lek sand, you know, that transparent plastic and I put white paper behind it. It didn't work very well at all way, too, reflective all these, all these attempts. And it was just a horrible, and sometimes I'll cringe. I'll look back at the videos that we did produce the early ones. And even though they were pretty good at the time, there's so much worse than what we do now, but it doesn't matter. You have to remember that when you look back, you will hate the first stuff you put out. You know, it's sort of like, I mean, do you have pictures of yourself from high school and go, I can't believe I ever wore my hair that way or something.

2 (56m 49s):
Yeah, we all do. Right. Exactly. So that's going to happen and you just do it or podcasting, you know, people will be afraid. Well, what if everyone hates my voice? Because when we hear our own recorded voice, it sounds completely different than how we hear it in our own head. Because I guess it's going through different structures to get to our ear. Yeah. I get used to it. Right. I remember thinking my voice was horrible. And then one time, one of the students in class, cause she had been hearing our podcast. She goes, how do you get a podcast voice like Chris and I'm calling. She thinks I have a podcast voice weird. Right. But just accept it. Peep.

2 (57m 29s):
You're not going to be comfortable with the sound of your own voice. You're not going to be comfortable with how you look on camera. None of that. And I wasn't comfortable early on with, can I make this work, this video thing, like do I'm not a photographer? What do I know about this? What business do I have? I just jump in and figure it out. You will figure it out. And so we produced a whole bunch of lessons. The other, the other tip out of this is originally MHA was not all finished. And then Hey have at it join. It was one lesson at a time. And we, we drip fed people one lesson every two weeks and you're probably a member back in that. So we might've been, yeah, we were planning to do 24 lessons that were spread over essentially 48 weeks, right.

2 (58m 16s):
Or basically a year. And the idea being okay, well, if we can keep people in for a year that works out to be a pretty decent income compared to, you know, it's less than having someone fly to Toronto, but it's very, very affordable. You get some amazing training and then we'll figure out what we're going to do. Then maybe there's going to be a lifetime deal. Maybe there's going to be more content. I don't know. We didn't know the answer. That was my point is don't worry about knowing exactly how it's all going to turn out. In the end. We have changed our business plans so many times over the years just diff all kinds of different things. But when we started out, it was just, well, if we can just get like the first six or eight lessons done, then when we start selling it, we're ahead of our students on the runway.

2 (59m 1s):
We're starting to take off and climb to 30,000 feet. And they're just getting out of the hanger because they've just got less than one. So we've got weeks and weeks of padding, all we've got to do is stay ahead of them and produce the rest of the course. And in the meantime, you're getting paid to do that because you've got customers. So that was kind of a, a good realization. I learned that from just from other business people I had been following over the years that this is something you can do well. Okay, cool. And we were using the platform called Kajabi at the time and we still use it. And you do too. I believe I do know. And Kajabi, the original version of Kajabi had this drip feed feature, which was what sold me on it. Cause I was like, awesome. This is totally cool.

2 (59m 41s):
And all I had to do was get Mike to agree, to show up once a week at my house. And I had to figure out how to shoot video, edit video, and all that stuff. And then just stay a few weeks ahead of where our customers were. And from there it was all born.

1 (59m 60s):
That's incredible. This is so inspiring for me because I'm starting to do something similar with my imposter monster business where I know, I feel like Jason Lanette and Victoria Gallagher have already nailed the idea of teaching you the business aspect of it. And for me, I want it's, you know, the mindset aspect, okay, you have all this information, you know what to do. Now, it's time to actually understand the principles. And this goes back to that, you know, you and I have been listening to Tony Robbins and Mike Mandel and Tim Ferriss and maybe Pat Flynn and all these people that have helped us understand the, the characteristics of these high achievers.

1 (1h 0m 42s):
And so I'm, I'm wanting to create something like that. So this is so I wouldn't right now.

2 (1h 0m 48s):
Yeah. I learned this from Jason that we all help. The more we help each other, the more we help each other. And that we're all helping people. We're, nobody's competing with anybody here. This is a huge space. And if, if you want my take on it is find your voice. You're already finding it. And of course it gets refined over the years, but Mike and I have this standing joke, we call it the Fritz and Jeff show, right. It used to be called the Chris and Jeff show. And I'm sure any podcast listener, brain software. Might've heard us talk about the Chris and Jeff show. It's not the Jeff and Chris show. And we have this stupid ukulele song that we sing. It was originally called the Chris and Jeff show, not Chris and Mike show.

2 (1h 1m 30s):
And it was because in our humor, Mike had been emailing me and he would call me, Hey Chris. And he would write something and I would write back and then he'd write back. Okay, Chris. But he changed the spelling of my name, just ever so slightly. And then back and forth, I was ignoring it. I was just letting it go like what's he on to? And it would go from C H R I S to C, H R I S S to C, H R Y S S E or something like that. So I finally responded, I said, okay, Jeff, I just went straight to completely different name. And he thought that was hilarious. So we started calling it the Chris and Jeff show. So my point in saying, this is find your voice. Our voice involves a lot of humor and energy, right? We, I think we become known as the guys who have just so much fun in this space.

2 (1h 2m 12s):
And of course we have good value in material, but people love to laugh at laughing, makes people have a better time and learn easier. But we changed it now to the Fritz and Jeff show. It's not the Chris and Jeff show, and this is all to do with Victoria Gallagher. So we were at hypno thoughts live and her and Steve G Jones walked into the suite where there was a little after party going on. And it was a little bit noisy, I guess. And I just, I turned to Steve and waved and said, Hey Steve, how are you? And then Victoria introduced herself to me. Cause I didn't know her yet. At this point she says, Oh, I'm Victoria. And I said, Oh, hi, I'm Chris. She heard it as hi I'm Fritz. And it has become this hilarious joke now.

2 (1h 2m 53s):
And I credit her for this. Just the funniest thing sometimes are completely accidental. Whoever would have heard Chris as Fritz, but for whatever reason, the echo, the noise in the room, that's what she heard. And it now has become our voice. Whenever Mike and I are talking and we're structuring out an idea for a video or an advertisement, we say, let's do a Fritz and Jeff video. In other words, let's make this a bit over the top silly, but still value added. Right? So if you find what's your version of that, your voice, you will be different than everyone else.

1 (1h 3m 30s):
That's beautiful. Thank you. So Ken Swetman story, isn't it, it's so valuable. This is exactly what I wanted. And I know people listening will find as much value I have since I stepped into this industry, I have considered you and Mike, my mentors, even though we never had a formal mentorship. And so often if I'm putting together a session for a client, or when I'm in a session for client, a client, I'll ask myself what would Mike do? And so often when I'm doing something in my business and I've even reached out to you first a few times that you've coached me, I'll ask, okay, what would Chris do? So it's, it's such a beautiful partnership and I'm so grateful to have you in my life.

1 (1h 4m 13s):
So grateful for your friendship.

2 (1h 4m 15s):
So we're lucky to have you too. And it's just, I love talking about this stuff and I love that. So many of the people come in as students become some of our closest friends. Yeah. And you're a shining example of that.

1 (1h 4m 28s):
Well, thank you, Chris. Is there anything that I haven't asked that you feel is important to convey or anything that you would tell a person who is just starting off on this path and maybe they're saying, Oh, well, Mike Mandela is already doing this. I can never do it as well as him or I don't have anything new to bring to the industry or, or some other disempowering.

2 (1h 4m 48s):
Yeah. That's a good one. You know your comment there. Well, you know, Mike Mendell is already doing this and you know, I can't be, you can't be better than him or whatever. It's not about being better. It's about being different. And I would also, I would challenge anyone with that kind of, Oh, I shouldn't do this because there's this other person who's already doing it exceptionally well. Well, when that exceptional person started, don't you think that there was some other exceptional person and why is it that they didn't stop in their tracks? How is it that they decided screw it? I'm doing it anyway. There are plenty of amazing magicians out there, right? I'm not a magician by the way. I'm not really good with cards or anything.

2 (1h 5m 29s):
You see Michael C. Anthony, he'll just blow your mind, the stuff he can do. But why do you think a guy like Michael C. Anthony would master card magic or close-up magic or mentalism when there were plenty of other people who were amazing at it because they saw it as an inspiration rather than some sort of reason not to do it. They didn't see it as, Oh, well, there's already these people, why bother? They saw it as like, this is inspiring. And if I work hard, I'll get to that level. And I think that if you combine that attitude with what I was just saying earlier about having your own voice, then you are a unique person and you get to present it in your own style.

2 (1h 6m 11s):
So if somebody says, man, that guy Mendell, he's so freaking amazing at presenting and teaching hypnosis. Yes. But there are going to be different ways that you can teach that are slightly different, that are going to resonate with an audience. Now, people in business, it's always, you know, they say B2B and B to C and C to C I E consumer to consumer business, to business, business, to consumer, it's all just person to person because people buy from people, right? So even if you're going to a big corporate website, you're going to be swayed by the commercial on that website where maybe a young woman is presenting a message in, it resonates with you, that is creating the emotional response and you're buying as a result of it. You're imagining in your head that you're doing business with the person that was on camera.

2 (1h 6m 54s):
And I think similarly, anybody who's podcasting anybody, who's creating videos, anybody who's teaching a concept, they're doing it with their own style. And there's going to be a percentage of the audience that resonates better with you than with Mike or with me or Jason or someone else. And so I think that is really useful to keep in mind, maybe a good metaphor for that would be. I remember being in university, studying mechanical engineering and the, you know, pretty much every thermodynamics class for a second year mechanical engineering student at any university, most universities there were gonna all use pretty much the same major textbook.

2 (1h 7m 36s):
So it was this big thick, really funky looking book, actually lots of colors and stuff written by, I think an author named Shapiro and this, so this book, my professor did not write that book yet. He taught the same material out of that book and we didn't invent most of, if you listen to Scott, Sandlin talk, he'll say this right? Most hypnotic stuff that you see spin around forever. It's not new. Right. We can package it in new ways or maybe put a name on it or something, but it's been an age regression anchoring, you know, the, the meta pattern for example, or any of its in carnations of how it's used. All this stuff has been around for all intents and purposes forever.

2 (1h 8m 19s):
It's about how it's taught, right? Similar to how someone takes the material could be calculus, thermodynamics, fluid, mechanics, whatever it is, all these books that I studied from, I had to have a great professor to make it interesting. And so just find your way to make it interesting. Find your own voice and develop into the expertise that you'll eventually have. Right? 25 years ago, Mike was still awesome. But if he knew how good he was going to be today, and he knew that that guy let's say was competing with him, I don't think he would have stopped and said, Oh, there's no point, right?

1 (1h 8m 57s):
What a great point. And in the same way you modeled Tony Robbins. When you presented on talking to toddlers, you still came across as Chris, Chris Thompson, and that modeling someone who's already doing it well allowed you to become, to develop your own style and your own way of showing it.

2 (1h 9m 14s):
Yeah. We're a, cause like you said, in the beginning, we're all just the product of the people that we are exposed to. And so if I'm exposed to Mike Mandel and Tony Robbins and all these other people, I'm going to pick the bits that resonate with me. I'm sure I've, I've been exposed to enough. Jason Lynette humor that it's working its way into my system because the guy's hilarious.

1 (1h 9m 34s):
Yes, he is hilarious. I love, I love his, his little sarcastic things that he always rejects on Facebook. I, he lightens my day every time.

2 (1h 9m 44s):
Absolutely. Absolutely. And just, you know, I'm, I'm so lucky to count all these people as my friends. Yeah. So just keep moving forward. Realize you're only going to get better with time. You will always have some screw ups. You get back up, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and find your voice and do it.

1 (1h 10m 5s):
Chris, this has been incredible. I just want to honest to goodness, thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you've given me for what you've given my audience today. I am so grateful to you and to anyone listening. If you haven't already engaged with Mike and Chris, you are doing yourself the biggest favor by going right now, too.

2 (1h 10m 26s):
I have to go make this page now. Well, not me because that's my challenge. Don't do it, but I have to go make sure that Mike Mendell hypnosis.com forward slash castle is live by the time this gets published.

0 (1h 10m 38s):
I'm so grateful. You've listened all the way to the end. What is one tiny action step you'll take now based on an aha moment you got during the podcast, maybe that life changing action step is to come accept the gift I have for [email protected]. Head there right now to get your powerful, hypnosis audio, the answer room that lets you make important decisions and get crystal clear about your next step forward on this path of purpose in your one. Great and precious life.

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Chris Thompson

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