Think about the challenges we often face in our life. Well, talk about a fear. I see a lot of people, a lot of business owners for public speaking confidence. “I know I’m the one in the room who’s qualified to deliver this message. And yet, I’m shaking like I’m back in my third-grade math class.” To which, to these people, and even to you, I would say, “Congratulations, you’re already doing hypnosis. Let me just show you how to use those powers for good.” You know, your business can change people’s lives, but you don’t yet have the right words to inspire them to take action. Imagine the changes you will create in your business as you tap into the secrets of ethical influence and positive persuasion, to not only better serve your clients, but also to supercharge your financial freedom. I’m your host, Jason Linett, and welcome to the Hypnotic Language Hacks podcast. I help entrepreneurs and business owners just like you to close more premium sales. And no, this isn’t about tricking or manipulating people, not at all.

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It’s about helping your prospects to appropriately sell themselves into your products or services. Please hit Subscribe and get all the episodes now at jasonlinett.com. How can a hypnotist help you grow your business? And, you know, I know that’s the question that startled you out of bed this morning. And it’s so good that you’re here with me right now. Otherwise, that question clearly would have gone unanswered. So you’re in the right place. Okay, well, maybe it was a rhetorical question. Either way, I’m Jason Linett. This is the Hypnotic Language Hacks podcast, where each and every week, I’ll be coming out to you with strategies of ethical influence and positive persuasion to build dynamically positive relationships with your prospects and have people wanting to buy from you at a premium rate even before you make an offer. This week’s episode, “How can a hypnotist help you grow your business?” is in one part my sort of superhero origin story, which is going to be a great way

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for you to get to meet me, even before we work together. That being said, this is not just about telling you my story. Because as I go through this, I’m going to be marking out specific turning points. And here’s why. If you think about this, major life changes happen in just a moment. If you think about it, some of the biggest significant turning points of your life, whether it was the start of a relationship, or maybe the end of a relationship, whether it was the idea to go into a specific business or to leave another one behind. Yes, these are things that may have been decided over time, but when you really look at it, even in terms of major personal transformation, we can pinpoint a singular moment where everything changed. And as I go through my story here, I’m going to be highlighting, metaphorically shining a spotlight on those specific moments. Because who knows, my specific turning points might become your specific turning

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points as you start up or scale up your own success. So with that, here we go, “How can a hypnotist help you grow your business?” Let’s begin. Before we get started today, if you want to easily grab people’s attention, naturally build authority, and organically have your prospects wanting more from you even before you make an offer, I’ve created a step-by-step strategy to help you to do just that. I call it The Video Influence System. This is your opportunity, now, to discover my highly-effective, entirely free on-demand workshop at jasonlinett.com. It’s specifically for entrepreneurs who want to deliver premium value to their clients to receive premium value in return. If you want a proven framework to boost your confidence and deliver value every time you go on camera, get The Video Influence System now at jasonlinett.com.

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I’m in my head right now because one way that this episode could begin would perhaps to be that bullet point list resume of all the various accolades, and honors, and awards that I’ve received, that I could stand here and I could boast about those things as a means to hopefully impress upon you just how awesome, just how cool, just how smart and successful I am. And that’s maybe how other people would do it. I do things a little bit differently. Because as much as what I’m about to share with you is my story. My goal is to make parts of this also your story. And right out of the gate, let that be a teaching lesson. One of the most overlooked things that people miss out on, the mistake that most people in business make if they’re trying to use storytelling in their sales process is that they fail to universalize the experience. You know that feeling when you’re sitting in an audience listening to a speaker and you’re thinking, “That’s really interesting, but that’s got nothing to do with me?” Which, by the way, that sentence that I just said, that was

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an example of universalizing. It’s where we then break the fourth wall, if you know that term out of theater, we break the fourth wall to come out of the story and make a statement, which now makes it universal to everybody in the audience. How about that, teaching in the first couple of moments here. On top of that, I also tend to say, start with the end in mind. Because if you can define exactly where you want to go in life, if you can define it, it’s even easier to get there. Even better, if you can isolate why you want to achieve it, and even better, what it means to you, as well as what it’s going to mean to the people whose lives you’re going to impact by building it, then, again, you can step back, and the journey of creating this new thing, basically, now begins to write itself. So with that, let me start towards the end of my story because yes, I’ll talk accolades, honors, and all that cool stuff. However, as much as I’ve built a business, which has scaled around the world year

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after year, I’m the most proud to say that, while also being at home each and every night, unless I’m on travel for a conference or a speaking engagement, but for the most part, being at home with my family, my wife, Michelle, we’ve been married now for more than 10 years, and our kids, Claire, Max. It’s a big family, two dogs, Cheddar and Blossom, and we’ve got a cat named Lily. So the opportunity to be in business mode throughout the day, but then turn that part of the mind off and go home and let that become the dominant focus in that experience. So I wonder what’s going to happen for your life. As you create your business that’s so successful, you can also step away from it. See what I just did there? That was another universalizing experience. So end of the story, if you look me up further online, you might see things like the fact that a number of years ago, I was honored and awarded as being the Hypnotist of the Year. If there’s a major conference in our industry, I’ve done the keynote at most

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of them, events in Las Vegas, events over in Australia, up in Chicago, speaking at events over in the UK, traveling around the world. And the opportunity, this is probably one of the few times that I’ll mention my other podcast called the Work Smart Hypnosis podcast, you’re listening to the program right now, Hypnotic Language Hacks. This is meant for people in business who want to make use of ethical influence and positive persuasion strategies to better scale your success. The other program, Work Smart Hypnosis, you’re welcome to check it out. You’re probably not the audience. In fact, I’ve had clients over the years say, “Oh, I found that. That was interesting. That wasn’t for me, was it?” It’s for us by us, basically. It’s meant for people already in that industry. So it’s not that there’s trade secrets because, even better, in this program, Hypnotic Language Hacks, I’m going to be peeling back the curtain. I’m going to be revealing to you the stuff that we would use to help clients to overcome bad habits to rapidly dissolve away fears and let go of old

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traumatic events, how those exact same methods can be used for positive influence within your business. And, again, other things I’ve been up to in recent years, as much as I see clients, I also help to organize programs so other people can qualify to become practitioners of professional hypnosis, running certification programs around the world, and above and beyond that, in recent years, helping to organize the leading program now for other professionals in that world to then qualify as instructors. And what I’ll have you take from that is that I’m not just the guy that people come to to either learn hypnosis or create change, I’m actually now the person that other hypnotists come to to better sharpen their skills and perfect their craft. So that’s where things are in the current state of things. Let’s rewind back. Because, again, if we know where we come from, if we know where we come from, we can benefit from the lessons, the learnings, the skills that come from those experiences.

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You’ve maybe heard this phrase before, “Stop calling them soft skills, because they’re just skills.” And of all skills to have at about five or six years old, I began with a hobby of sleight of hand close-up magic, you know, like you do. I was ravenous for reading all sorts of books on the topic and eventually, down the road, even paying part of my way through college by doing performances, close-up sleight of hand card magic at restaurants, designing programs, and pitching them to different theme parks. And I’ll tell you why I left that world. And, again, I’m very much in honor and respect of what I learned from that. But the reason why I left it behind, there’s two reasons. One, first of all, it was based upon lying to people. One of the definitions of a magic trick is exactly that word. It’s a trick. There was also something expositional about the process that I just sort of lost an interest in. “And here I have an ordinary pack of cards. And here I have these coins.”

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And I tell what, while you’re thinking of the name of that friend that I’m about to guess, write it down. And yes, there was some procedure and some of the secrets that I won’t reveal here as to why those things had to be used. So it’s where later on when it’s my freshman week of college, first week at university, and someone comes during the Welcome Week, and he does a comedy stage hypnosis show that just grabbed my interest, that just piqued my curiosity, and all the fascination in one thing rapidly moved over to something else. So think about that. One specific introduction of something new can suddenly shift your life in a brand-new direction. Now, at the time, I was in college for management and learning about the administrative side of professional theater. Now, I wasn’t an actor. I wasn’t a director. I wasn’t even a designer. I was in production management. Again, I was the wizard behind the curtain communicating with unions, organizing the scene changes, and taking all those various creative

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people and helping them all to get along, and working for a number of years getting my card in terms of Actors’ Equity Association, the union here in the U.S. that organizes actors as well as theatrical stage managers, which I was. And here’s the lesson to take out of this. That was a career I was excelling at, I was doing quite well. However, just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it the rest of your life. And that’s a hard lesson for some people to take. Other people may be praising you and congratulating you on a job well done. But just because they acknowledge that you’re really good at it doesn’t mean you have to do it for the rest of your life. That being said, the mistake that so many people make is to be dismissive as to where they’ve come. The fact that now I run a business that goes all around the world, where, back in the day, I was organizing spreadsheets, tracking when each and every actor and each and every prop either entered or left the stage, and to have multiple pages in Microsoft Excel as to how that works is

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the exact same skill that I use nowadays to take a step back and design a webinar for people to learn what I do, the opportunity to have systematized aspects of a business. So, again, make use of the skills of where you’ve come from, harness the things that you’ve learned, and use those skills in other markets as you continue to grow and cultivate further. So that’s where I had set this, like, five-year plan ever since I saw the first hypnosis demonstration, which, mind you, that was entertainment. That was comedy. Here’s what happened. I went online in early days of eBay, and I decided, “Let me now buy all the books I can find on hypnosis.” And I made a really great mistake. I thought I was getting the books on stage hypnosis, entertainment. And instead, nearly everything I was buying were hypnotherapy, how to work with clients, one-to-one, for personal change, which, by the way, is a process which has been scientifically proven, and there’s tens of thousands

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of peer-reviewed studies all around the world. It’s even as I interact with people, they might go, “Oh, hypnosis, I believe in that,” to which I have to say, “Spoiler alert, it’s not Santa Claus. We have the science as to how it works, what’s happening in the brain, and, again, here’s the tens of thousands of studies that validate exactly what it can accomplish.” So I was reading the wrong information, yet something about it grabbed my interest. You know those moments where you discover something new and you just gets swept up into the experience, like getting pulled into a good movie or a fascinating book, and you can’t get pulled away? Think about that. So the opportunity where now learning something new was grabbing my attention. And admittedly, I was burning out beautifully from the theater career. It had become a job. And not to go to the negative, but there was one specific moment, it was a holiday, I think like either the day before or even it might have been Christmas Eve, and we’re in this late-night technical rehearsal

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almost till midnight. And a former mentor of mine said, “Well, you do this because you’re passionate about the art, and that’s why you give your life to it.” And here’s the lesson to have from this. And a quick side story before I come back to that. I had a client who came into my office one time, and he was so frustrated that he had read Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. And the challenge was Napoleon Hill talks about building your own burning desire. And think about it this way. That was the representation of motivation for Napoleon Hill. He called it “burning desire” that might align with you. Your neurology, your vocabulary might be something different. So if that’s not working for you, come up with a different title, as I did with this client, and suddenly, that motivation, that drive was absolutely there. So this opportunity, again, of recognizing, “Here was this catalyst experience of reading all the wrong stuff.” It was a hobby at the time, and the mentor goes,

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“You do this because you’re passionate about the art, and that’s why you give your life to it.” And something clicked in that moment to go, “I can be passionate about the art, but I can be in the audience now.” And what was originally in my head a five-year plan. At this point, again, I started with the wrong information. So I became, in my words, the stage hypnotist with a hypnotherapist heart. So my market, I don’t do these programs anymore, I’ve since retired myself from it, but my market at the time, I wasn’t doing comedy clubs, I definitely wasn’t doing the R-rated program. No, I was working mostly with high schools, high schools, or corporate audiences, which, for what it’s worth, by the way, it was the same program, just different music soundtrack behind me. Same program, just change out the songs. So the question was always, “What’s the problem that your organization is facing?”

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So perhaps with students, it was the topics of what they call “character building,” you know, things like having an honor code, not cheating, not going off and using drugs, not having the kids going off and produce more kids to say it politely. Use your filthy imaginations to guess what I’m saying there. So finding out from the administration, what were the problems that their students were facing, and let’s now design an entertainment program, almost like Warner Brothers or even Rocky and Bullwinkle. Here’s the formula, get them to laugh, then ask them to listen, which take that as another lesson here, by the way. Get your audience to care about the message that you’re sharing before you ask them to listen. This is why so often when I’m speaking, I bring people into the experience of what I have to share, and only then do I finally then introduce myself. Bring them in, “Hi, I’m Jason Linett.” Now we’re in sync. Now we’re in rapport. So this opportunity to go into schools or even businesses.

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One of the examples would be the fact of here’s the insurance organization, that, unfortunately, as so much of that work was going online and becoming digitized by really cool online systems, they were laying people off. So why did they bring in me to do the seemingly funny program? Well, here’s why. Lighten them up, and then let that become the delivery mechanism of going, “Now you’re all safe. You’ve voted to stay on the island as it were, we’ve given you the rose,” as if like that Bachelor, or Bachelorette TV show, “but now here’s how we can create better relationships.” So get your audience to care before you ever ask them to listen, which at this point now might be a good time to kind of explain what this whole hypnosis thing is about. Let’s get technical for a brief moment. I’ll then break it down, make it very simple. One of the sort of godfathers of modern-day hypnosis, his name was Dave Elman. He was a practitioner in the early 1900s. He passed away in the 1960s or 70s, though his son, Larry Elman,

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is still alive and well, and we’ve often taught some classes together over the years. It’s where Dave Elman would say that, “Hypnosis is the bypassing of the critical faculties of the conscious mind and the acceptance of positive selective thinking in the conscious mind.” That’s a whole lot of jargon now, isn’t it? Let me give it to you once again. “Hypnosis is the bypassing of the critical faculties of the conscious mind and the acceptance of positive selective thinking in the unconscious mind,” which, for a moment, recognize that conscious and unconscious mind are metaphors. They’re constructs. You can’t point to them. Conscious mind, everything rational, analytical, willpower is there, which, by the way, if willpower really worked, we would all have everything what we want, but we don’t. So willpower is limited. Meanwhile, in that unconscious mind, kind of like the hard drive of a computer, that’s all your habits, behaviors, emotions, beliefs, and feelings. That’s that part of you that makes you who you are.

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That’s that long-term memory process. So we’re bypassing that critical awareness to tap into that unconscious processing, which, just for a quick scientific nod here, give us another 100 years, and we’ll have a better model than conscious and unconscious. But that’s what we’re using nowadays, again, through neurological stands, validating the process. You can look at scholar.google.com, find tens of thousands of peer-reviewed studies. Let’s break down that jargon for a moment, though, by the way. Bypassing critical awareness, what does that mean? Automatic reaction in spite of conscious awareness. And here’s the example that I always give. You could be driving in your car thinking of everything other than driving your car and you still end up where you would like to go. You could be watching a movie and you know it’s all fiction. They’re actors dressing up and pretending. In my former career in management in theater, I had to sometimes remind people, “Part of your job description is the word ‘play.'” So people are pretending. We know it’s fake.

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And yet, we get swept up into the story. Though, think about the challenges we often face in our life. “I know that I want to quit smoking. I know these things are killing me. Oh, but they relax me and they make me feel better.” There’s a disconnect. Well, talk about a fear. I see a lot of people, a lot of business owners for public speaking confidence. “I know I’m the one in the room who’s qualified to deliver this message. And yet, I’m shaking like I’m back in my third-grade math class,” to which to these people and even to you, I would say, “Congratulations, you’re already doing hypnosis. Let me just show you how to use those powers for good.” Now, this is not a program where my goal is to necessarily hypnotize you. My goal here is to help you to become even more hypnotic, to let your words become even more influential, to let your business process draw more people in, to speak with impact in a way that people stop and they pay attention to you. So that’s where we’re going inside of all of this. So what was, at one point, a five-year plan to leave behind the

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theater career, enough was enough, put in a few weeks notice, and I haven’t looked back. So the nature of where I’m standing right now, I’m standing in an office. I opened up Virginia Hypnosis. I opened up my business in Virginia in November of 2009. Prior to that, I was in downtown Baltimore, prior to that down around Williamsburg, Virginia, so traveling around quite a bit in terms of where I’ve gone in that experience. But again, back to that experience of doing these programs for schools, or even corporate groups, finding out what people need, and helping them to then connect those dots of exactly how they’re going to get there. So it’s where over time, the sort of origin of learning hypnosis was still in the back of my head. And the time, again, start with the end in mind. I wanted to have a family. I wanted to be home. That’s when I started to take down the programs. I was doing schools all over the country, all the way from Alaska to Alexandria,

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which, yes I know, one’s a city and one’s a state, but the alliteration just sounds so good, right? Yeah. So doing these programs all over, at one point doing more than 300 programs in one single year. A lot of driving. So the opportunity was then to go, “Let’s open up a local business.” And that’s what became Virginia Hypnosis. Which, as a side note, again, if you can define who your ideal audience is, it’s so much easier to get in front of those people. So for that business, Virginia Hypnosis, the goal there was specifically targeting the people who were already looking for that process to create a change. They were already sold on the process and now they were just doing their research to find, “Well, who’s the most qualified person to help me?” And doing everything in my marketing to ethically and appropriately take on that positioning. That was the story that created that business. So recognize, you can talk to an already warm audience of people who are already looking for the service you want, but then speak directly to their needs. This was the same thing I did back with schools and corporate groups.

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You know, it’s where someone would go, who was maybe my competition, “Yeah, but they don’t want a hypnosis program.” “Yeah, because they don’t know they need it.” Sell them what they need. Sell them what they want, deliver what they need, which right there, that’s an amazing formula for underpromise/overdeliver. Tell them what they want, and in the process of giving them what they want, deliver exactly what they need. The process then begins to easily write itself. So taking down those long commuting hours, bringing up the live hours in person is where I eventually kind of retired myself from that. And it’s where, unless something is your goal, unless something is your goal, it’s kind of hard to get there. Start with the end in mind. Well, you’ve heard of smart goals, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, trackable. You’ve maybe heard different letters. A friend of mine one time said, “Call them smarty goals. Put the letter Y at the end, specific, seasurable, attainable, realistic, trackable for you.”

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It has to be your goal. So people at the time, not to pat myself on the back, were going, “Hey, you’ve got an interesting take on this. You’ve got an interesting premise on how this work is done, you should teach it.” And I went, “It wasn’t quite my goal.” Now, meanwhile, at the same time, something was happening. People were knocking on my door calling me up, or sending me emails, or inviting me to speak because here’s the other aspect of the story. I never once took on the premise that it had to be hard to launch a business. I kind of just looked at everything and went, “Well, what has to happen?” Start with the end in mind, everything then becomes an asset. And yes, it might have been an asset given the fact that in my family, at least, everybody was an entrepreneur. My parents were wedding photographers, my grandfather owned a jewelry store, and all sorts of other businesses in the family. So, again, the idea of opening up your own thing, even if it wasn’t a quirky little world of hypnosis wasn’t too out of the ordinary.

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So this mindset that, again, of making use of the principle that, “I can do this, and this is going to be easy,” and not buying into the idea that it has to be hard. Think about that. Maybe there’s something that you’re struggling with right now, and I wonder what would happen if he just said to yourself, “This is easy,” or even better, put some movement to it. “The more that I make use of this skill, it’s just going to become easier and easier and easier.” The other part of the story was that it was easy to pivot people, easy, easy to pivot people from the stage program into the office. And here’s why. You should always make use of a built-in audience. Who are those people that already know, like, and trust you? So it was this combination of the way that I could look at the business and go, “Here are the systematic aspects. Here are the moving pieces that build these machines, that if I want to turn the business on, I just have to run this thing more. If I want more clients, go to the network meeting,

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give this pitch, that’s going to make the phone ring.” And it’s where I kind of realized, at that point, I’d kind of become the hypnosis business guinea pig. I won’t teach something unless I’ve genuinely done it myself. Years ago, I went to a convention, someone was teaching a premise for business. I asked a follow-up question, and he goes, “Well, I’ve never actually done this myself.” And as he turned his back to write on the board, I found a polite moment to leave the room. I’m only going to share with you things I’ve actually tested and vetted for you, either in my business or in my students’ businesses as well. So working from this mindset of proof, becoming that guinea pig, and that’s when the training business took off. The opportunity where an educational program should not be the person at the front of the room telling someone else’s stories. You should be learning what’s working right now, what people are responding to, what tests we’re currently running in the business. That’s how we all should be teaching. Guessing sucks. Theory is lame. Armchair philosophy only gets you so far.

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Let’s use the real-world principles. And that was the whole premise of, again, what became the Work Smart Hypnosis brand. Well, that’s an educational arm, again, that’s meant for people already in that industry who want to learn more and level their skills up. It’s where now the opportunity, the amateur changes their act, the professional changes their audience, is why you and I are here together right now. Though, there’s a bit of an edit there. Because as we build systems in our businesses, all of that continues to run. Yet because that now continues to run the clients book in, the people sign up for my programs, both in person as well as interactive in real-time online. That’s all now systematized, which now, I get to spend time with you. Because here’s what began to happen. And the lesson here is, listen to your clients. Listen to the fact that people look you up and they figure out exactly what they want from you and sometimes you need to listen to that.

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A client would come into my office for a fear of public speaking, and as we’re working together, suddenly they go, “Yeah, but could I have you look at my presentation?” And suddenly, then we were going through and applying these ethical influence principles to their languaging. Here’s the moment where someone was giving the talk, and they were doing the talk because they were invited, as opposed to they had, let’s borrow from Napoleon Hill once again, they had a burning desire. They had a message that had to be shared. Start with the end in mind. Ask yourself, why are you doing it, but also, what’s the impact you want to create. So looking over time of, again, leveraging one experience to the next, to the next, while at the same time, it’s all the same basic skills. The client would come in for public speaking, and suddenly, we were refining their messaging. Suddenly, then we were looking at their websites. And that’s what launched my accelerator program in terms of doing that one-to-one coaching with people who are not necessarily just using the process for an emotional change or habitual change, but also, how do we use these same

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principles to not just create a change in our life by way of hypnosis, but, again, also communicate hypnotically? And that’s where the Hypnotic Language Hacks podcast came from. A project that’s been in the works, I put out a book, Work Smart Business, back in 2009. Prior to that, doing a TED talk on “Rethinking Rapport,” which we’ll link to in the show notes over at jasonlinett.com/2, is where you can go for that. So the opportunity, again, to work with people one-to-one. So look where you are right now. Look at your own story, and ask yourself, “Am I where I want to be?” And let’s perhaps level that story up to somewhere even better. What happens in your life as you suggest to yourself, “I’m exactly where I ought to be right now.” You’re in the right place. And imagine the changes you’re going to create in your business as you speak

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from a place of authority, of integrity as you now start to refine your own story in a way that really helps to draw people in, has them wanting even more from you to realize you can change your audience over time and expand that reach. What happens when you let your own communication become even more powerfully hypnotic? What happens in your journey when you realize it’s your decision just how hard or how easy it becomes. And on top of that as well, the ability that along our journeys, we’re always building assets, assets, whether they be skills, whether they be tangible things like testimonials, which we’ll do a whole episode about later on. Whether they be our ability to craft copy and videos that have people watching and wanting more. So the whole mindset of this is, again, letting your communication become even more influential. Change your words, change your business, change your life.

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That’s where we’re going in this series. You have been listening to the Hypnotic Language Hacks podcast with Jason Linett. Please stop everything and start exploring jasonlinett.com for even more business influence and persuasion resources. Make it a priority right now to subscribe to this program and listen to every episode because the next one may reveal that one hypnotic influence secret to massively scale your success. Change your words, change your business, change your life. Get even more at jasonlinett.com.