Jonathan Altfeld: The Architecture of Belief and Linguistic Mastery

In this episode of AWAKEN with Ryan DeJonghe, Ryan welcomes Jonathan Altfeld, an internationally recognized NLP trainer and consultant known for his deep expertise in the technical and structural side of Neurolinguistic Programming. Moving away from traditional hypnosis, the conversation focuses on Jonathan’s specialized work in belief installation and the precise linguistic patterns that drive human behavior.

Jonathan discusses his evolution within the field, emphasizing that many of our current challenges are actually outdated compensatory habits—behaviors that served us in the past but have now become blockages. They explore the importance of precision in communication, the difference between cognitive understanding and neurological change, and why Jonathan believes that no one is ever truly stuck; they are simply running a program that hasn't been updated yet. This episode provides a masterclass in the "NLP guy’s" perspective on how to deconstruct the architecture of one's own mind to create lasting, systemic change.

Key Takeaways & Meaningful Quotes

"We learn our compensatory habits to cope with current circumstances. And then, without noticing it, circumstances shift. And now we've got a habit that's not serving us anymore, and we feel stuck. And no one is ever truly stuck."

"If you change a belief, the behavior changes automatically. Most people spend their lives trying to change behaviors while keeping the old beliefs in place, which is like trying to drive a car with the handbrake on."

"NLP isn't about being 'positive.' It’s about being accurate. When you get accurate about how you are representing the world to yourself, you suddenly find you have a lot more choices than you did five minutes ago."

How to Connect and Work with Us

Connect with Jonathan Altfeld:

Jonathan offers advanced NLP training, business consulting, and specialized workshops on belief change and linguistic influence.

Website: nlpmasteryinsight.com

geniusmapping.com


Work with Ryan DeJonghe:

Ready to explore your own transformation through hypnosis?

Website: trancewell.help

Email: ryan@trancewell.help

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Welcome everyone. Uh first of all, I am so grateful you, the listener, watcher, are here. I consider you a personal friend of mine. I'm so glad you've tuned in for this. We have a special guest, Mr. Jonathan Otfeld. Welcome, sir. Welcome.

SPEAKER_03 0:18

Ryan, thank you so much for hosting this and for inviting me to join you. I'm grateful to be.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

Yeah. And it's so weird how you are here because I I had a previous guest, Carlos, and phenomenal guy, hypnotist. And yeah, yeah. And I said, Well, who should I have on this podcast? We've been doing mainly people that do hypnosis. He said, Oh, you gotta get Jonathan. And it's like, Does Jonathan is he a hypnotist? No. So here we are. Yeah. I just listen. I I've learned if you listen to Carlos, usually he'll steer you in a good direction. And so I've been blessed already, just we've been talking before we hit record here.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

And Jonathan, you're a main part of what you do as NLP, right? That's that's my jam. That's what I do. That's your jam, yeah. And then before we were hit record, you mentioned that uh you did you studied some hypnosis and you're like, you know, great for habit work and stuff like that, but you wanted to how do you phrase it? Something about the impossible.

SPEAKER_03 1:28

Let me clarify that. I have never gone to hypnosis classes as a student of hypnosis. I never wanted to. I wasn't attracted to that. I was attracted to the mechanisms of trance as taught through NLP training. So it was true that uh when I went to NLP courses as a student, there was often a lot of trance work involved. There was a great deal of emphasis on the language of suggestion, the language of the various elements of the hypnotic process. And I was fascinated by that and absolutely fascinated by the language work and the vocal nuances that allow us to be more effective in doing conversational trance work. So I have never pursued or wanted to do clinical hypnosis work. But incredibly, the my explorations and the work that I've produced over the years uh seem to be found really valuable by hypnotists and hypnotherapists, probably most notably in uh in the work that I do around finding one's best voice. I call it finding your irresistible voice. So a lot of hypnotists have bought that particular program. I'm not trying to get into sales mode, I'm trying to share that there are elements of the work that I do that seem appealing to hypnotists and hypnotherapists.

SPEAKER_02 2:43

Another I'm sorry, was a finding your what voice?

SPEAKER_03 2:47

Finding your irresistible voice. I have programs by that title. There's volume one and volume two. And um, and there's a lot in there that that really appeals to hypnotists, like how to deliver embedded commands more effectively and learning rhythm in your voice so that you can be more uh captivating to audiences. So the ability to use natural cadence in what you do, it draws people in. People start to expect the next thing. And right, and so I see you're doing it now, yeah. So there are elements of how we use our voices and how we strategically structure communication that are really helpful for hypnotists and hypnotherapists. Um, I think one of the great gifts of this work from NLP for hypnosis professionals is the ability to learn pattern that you can create on the fly such that you never need scripts anymore. To me, scripts are evidence that someone is not yet skilled enough to do the work on their own. I don't mean to diminish the value of scripts in learning. I think it's essential. I think uh people who are learning and learning from scripts, more power to them. But you want to get away from scripts as quickly as possible so that you're fully present for your clients. And I think NLP Milton model language and studies in NLP for a variety of things, which includes sensory acuity, calibration, anchoring, reframing, all of and especially metaphor, right? Especially for anyone in Ericksonian work, uh, the ability to learn from NLP so that you enhance your craft in hypnosis. There's endless options for that. So it's exciting, and I'm grateful for it.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

It's funny, it's one of the serendipity moments because minutes before coming on to this, someone messaged me saying, Who would you recommend for an NLP trainer? And I'm like, and it's funny because I know a lot of NLP trainers, the the tricky question is who would I recommend? Like, because a lot of you know you've seen them, these NLP guys, they're almost like assholes. You know, like it's like yeah, it's like dude, like it's used for manipulation and control. And I like how you say it's it's you finding your voice. And I love how you talked about the pattern, because I see the guitars behind you, and I feel like these scripts are like learning music. You learn the chord, you learn the note, and then and then eventually you just you play, you go from playing the guitar to being a guitar player.

SPEAKER_03 5:30

Yes, and it's that being capable of improvising for improvising, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 5:34

And the improvising is like just you're no longer playing, you're being. It's like you're in a zone, a flow, and you're just the music is coming from within you. You're yeah, for those listening, Jonathan just used his arms and it's like it's coming out from the center of his heart, going wide. And I feel that's the same with the NLP. Once you learn the the cadence and the rhythm and the notes, you're able to develop, as you call it, the pattern, the pattern.

SPEAKER_03 6:02

I I would I would amend the metaphor a little bit because I don't see like NLP session work that I do, like the coaching work that I do, or the training work. I don't see it as just expressing and being. I think that the outcomes that I'm aiming to reach. Uh so I do typically always begin with an outcome in mind.

SPEAKER_02 6:23

Got it.

SPEAKER_03 6:24

So I wonder if I want to find it.

SPEAKER_02 6:26

Yeah, and you mention Ericksonian language. Sure. And Ericsson was an interesting guy because it almost felt like it was just coming out of him. Like he wasn't thinking about it.

SPEAKER_03 6:37

Well, you know, this let's dive into this a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:43

No, let's go as deep as you want, man.

SPEAKER_03 6:44

This is great. So, first of all, I'm not an Ericksonian hypotherapist. I'm not classically trained from the Ericsson Institute. I don't have that level of background. I have more than a layman's understanding of Ericsson's work, but less than some of the people you've had on, like Bill O'Handlott, for example. I would claim to have that level of mastery and depth of understanding. What I have focused on in my work with a fascination in Ericsson, to be sure, is Ericksonian tasking. I am absolutely fascinated with the concept of Ericksonian tasking. And I have used it extensively to the degree that I think it's in the same genre in my coaching work. So I will often design exercises or homework or tasks that focus on one thing consciously but unconsciously get a building block of whatever their ideal intervention is going to be. So uh it's really powerful to distract the conscious mind with some task or some activity where there's a secondary gain that's incredibly important. So, for example, if the secondary gain is flexibility, I want them to be more flexible in a situation, I will assign them a task that requires them to be flexible. And only after they've completed the task have they achieved that level of flexibility. So I'm I'm immersed in that. I'm always using tasking in my work. And I think it's fascinating to do that. I think people get in their own way, and also clients can be incredibly intelligent, and the more intelligent they are, the more they can undermine the work we do. Because they analyze and they think, well, that couldn't work. That couldn't possibly work. When in fact it often works if they're not distracted by it and paying attention to it. It doesn't mean it always works, it means it can. Uh so uh I'm I'm fascinated with those elements. Um, as for Ericsson, I think we have to keep in mind that as gifted an innovator as he was, and his entire life story dictates and shares why he was so powerful and innovator, not every client case was successful. Right. Yeah, let's talk about that. Or some suggestions didn't take place. It's just that the ones that are written up, they're all the successful ones for the most part. And and we learn from all of them in much the same way that hypnosis students learn from scripts, right? There, that's evidence of mastery. Um the same is true for all NLP and hypnosis people, change workers of any kind, is we do our best to be profoundly effective, and not everything that comes out of our mouths or not every session is necessarily as optimal as it could be. Right. But we aim for that.

SPEAKER_02 9:33

Right. We aim for you do a number scale, let's say 100%, like maybe our success rate, whatever you call success, is 30%, and you want to make it 45%, or you want to increase those success rates, because you don't want to leave the client feet stuck where they're at when it comes to you.

SPEAKER_03 9:54

Um I think my numbers are a bit higher than that, and that's well, yeah, that's being conservative.

SPEAKER_02 9:59

Like some people, of course, you're the you're the NLP master, and you know, so you've had years of experience in this. So your numbers now are higher. And as we're learning it, I feel like some people are just say they automatically say, Well, I know everything, and then they're just they don't really look at it. They're like just turning people in and out. So those are the the other people. Yeah. And like, but a good practice is look at those numbers. What's the meaningful change that we're seeing? How can we make it better for more people?

SPEAKER_03 10:32

Yeah. I'll tell you what I the way that I go about it is I don't assume perfection and I don't assume I'm always going to be successful. So my view is is you can figure out relatively quickly in a session if you're getting some results, if you're getting insights that the client is finding valuable, if you're making progress with their discoveries, if they're edging closer to a solution. Um, I think we can find that in 15 to 20 minutes. It's a little bit different in hypnosis session structure, where if the person is in trance the whole time, um, it may be more subtle to measure incremental movement towards a solution. But in conversation, doing conversational change work with NLP, um I know very quickly whether or not I'm a good match for a client, whether I'm making progress, and I check for that. My view is if I'm not being successful with a client, I shouldn't be charging. And that's very unpopular with my competitors, with other clients, with other or not with clients, with with other coaches, with other uh NLP folks. It's unpopular to uh to challenge their frame, which is that they're always charging for their time. And I do that too, but I don't charge if I'm if there's an immediate mismatch out of the gate. Right? If we're 20 minutes into a session and there's just no um no progress, or the person just feels like I'm not cluing into what their their situation, I say maybe I'm not the right fit. And I and we we part with a handshake. Uh I don't believe in being paid for work that doesn't have merit. I just don't. So isn't that weird?

SPEAKER_02 12:02

I mean it it's just doesn't it's funny, it's like you talk to these business guys because there's plenty of business guys in hypnosis and NLP, they'll be like, if you buy my course and go by my strategy and use this program, you'll have success. You'll you'll I I literally saw someone saying, pay for my course $67, and then you'll make three to five thousand dollars a week.

SPEAKER_03 12:27

Are they saying you will or you could? You will. Uh then somebody needs to call the FCC FTC because that's illegal. You can't unless every single one of your customers has achieved that.

SPEAKER_02 12:41

Right. So it's just so that that is and people fall like dominoes behind that line. And then when you say, isn't this weird, and that's kind of how I'm leaning as a practitioner these days, like I almost have this inclination of saying like just I'm not going to charge you for the session. Yeah. At the end, you can leave a donation if you want.

SPEAKER_03 13:12

Yeah. So that's a really interesting model.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

Yeah. Does it work for you? I don't know. I just started because I was on that, I was on the domino. I fell for those other guys, not that guy I just mentioned, but similar people. They're like, you you buy this program and you do these steps, and then like you do develop your funnel and develop your advertising. You still there? Yeah. Did it come out? Were you back? We're back. Yeah, it just felt like the more I was driving in that model of if I advertise as much, I can do this and that, and then this is the result. And it just felt like the result was getting pushed further away. So I'm now I'm like, well, what if I loosen up a little bit and do like there's a I know I'm pronouncing this word incorrectly, Vapanessa?

SPEAKER_03 14:00

I don't know it.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

Oh, Vipassana, Vipassana. That's correct, yes. Right. Vipassana. Like the way they do it here. I'm in Connecticut and in Massachusetts, the Vipassana. They don't, it's donation only, and they won't accept your money until you've done Vipassana.

SPEAKER_03 14:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

So you go there after you've done it, then you can give. Yeah. So it's interesting. I have a day job at the V, I work at the VA hospital at the Blind Center. So that pays for the walls you see behind me, you know, and the food in my body.

SPEAKER_03 14:45

By the way, thank you for doing that work. Our our veterans need that work.

SPEAKER_02 14:48

Dude, it's a joy because I used to work at American Express and I was like working for Satan. You know. And then I worked at Fortune 500 companies. I've done some nonprofit work. This is just a joy. I'm a veteran and it's a joy that's to serve it. Yeah, absolutely. And like so, people that lose blind, they lose their sight. And that's who comes to see us. I work at the blind center. Oh wow. And that's kind of what got me into hypnosis too, because there's a type of blindness called functional blindness. Some people call it hysterical blindness, where your eyes work, your optic nerve is intact. And your brain, either through trauma or a a brain injury, your brain then says, No, you can't see anymore.

SPEAKER_03 15:35

Right.

SPEAKER_02 15:36

So they saw something horrible in war, and the brain says, Nope, don't want to see any more of that. And then I know because it happened with another hypnotist in England where they worked with a person and that person was able to see again. Yeah. Cool. And I imagine NLP would be very similar in that you mentioned about the impossible. We'll circle back to that now. So when you say you're looking for the impossible, what are you looking for?

SPEAKER_03 16:08

So, in a case like that, first of all, I would never do work with someone like that unless I were supervised by a medical professional.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Right.

SPEAKER_03 16:17

I would discuss the strategy in advance with them. I think it's really important. There's a lot of people who will take on clients they're not qualified to work with. I am very qualified to come up with very creative outside the box approaches to conversational change work. But in the cases where there's a medical condition involved, I would always want to consult uh a licensed professional first. And if they were supervising and thought, ooh, that's a really interesting approach, only would I do the work? Um it's really important. Uh, there's there's a lot of regulation and it differs from state to state. And I don't mean emotional state in this particular case. So it's I think it's important to do great work that is also, if if it's a medical-related issue, it's it's properly supervised. Now, assuming that I had proper supervision and I had buy-in from someone who's professional, at that point, I would suggest thinking about the uh the blindness as an incredible skill that their brains had created. You never try and ostracize the issue as the person is broken or uh or the they've got some kind of a mental illness. I wouldn't construct as that. I would say this is a gift you gave yourself, right? And so you have this ability to not see trauma and and difficulty out in the world. How amazing is that? I wish I had that. And I would be playing up my admiration for this thing they've created in their heads. And that would change the frame from I've become a victim of trauma in the world to I've conquered this desire not to see difficulty. And I would do my best to encapsulate that ability and remind them that their brains, because there's no physical injury, also has another encapsulated ability to see the world for real. And what you haven't yet learned how to do, but could benefit from now that you're no longer in war or wherever, right? Is the ability to choose between the ability to see and the ability to not see. I wish I had that. And you would you would show not just admiration, but like envy, right? For their capacity to learn that. Um, and and I would ask them um if they thought that that would be ecological. Like we would check in with them to find out if they thought, well, maybe that would be desirable. So, first of all, I'd check for the outcome. Would they want it? Would they want to be able to see and not see? Would they want to be able to develop strategies for turning one or the other on? And and I would check for their desire to go in that direction, and then we would start figuring out well, if you could teach me how to do that, how would you go about it? And then they start coming up with elements of the solution themselves. And as they're doing it, as they're parsing their own inner language, constructing it for me, they're teaching themselves how to do it. So that would be the first approach to asking them to learn how to distinguish between when they want to see and when they want to not see. Um it's a terrible ambiguity. Want a Nazi. I don't want a Nazi. Um not have to see. How's that? That's better.

SPEAKER_02 19:33

Right. Right. It's like giving them the choice. Yeah, the creative choice. And it's funny as you're explaining to say something.

SPEAKER_03 19:41

Oh, I was just saying, uh, we have to be careful with some of the unintended ambiguities in our language.

SPEAKER_02 19:45

Oh, right. Yeah, that is true. And in that creative choice that you're presenting there, it's witnessing you talking about it, it seems like you know more about Ericsson than people that study Ericsson.

SPEAKER_03 19:59

Oh, I'm certain that's not true. I would never claim that.

SPEAKER_02 20:02

Um I know you wouldn't claim it. I'm telling you, as a witness, yeah, I feel that's that's what Ericsson's doing. Like he's he's he's taking the person's supposed weakness, their the thing, and he sees it as their superpower.

SPEAKER_03 20:18

Agreed. Yes, I absolutely do that. Yeah. Yeah. Uh and I and I've also uh so I've I've certainly done deep dive studies into both Erickson and Bandler, and and I studied you know with Bandler in person, uh, and John Laval and Rex Sykes and uh and a couple of others. Uh those were the primary three, uh, is Richard and John and Rex. Um, but I've I've uh poured over endless material from other gifted minds who've written some incredible work. Um and I would never claim to be um what some of these you know long-term professionals who've written books about Ericsson. But I do think I've embraced the thinking patterns there to the point that I hallucinate how they worked. And I do believe that turning someone's perceived weakness or issue into a gift is an incredible reframe to start any session with. Right? Because it's all about creating more choice. And I think of all of NLP uh coaching work as that. It's about creating more choice. Now, here's the thing about choice. Um if you only have one way of doing anything, like we call it, whether it's in strategies, uh NLP strategies, right? Your VAK type stuff, uh, how you make decisions, how you uh choose things, you're stuck. I mean, it's a it may be a great strategy, and it may be working beautifully for you. It may be um connecting you with lots of wonderful people, it may be making you lots of money, it may be making you happy, but it's still one method of doing something. And if you've only got one choice, you're stuck. You don't have as many options. So a great deal of NLP is all about adding options, it's about creating more choice. And there's a dark shadow side to that too. Because if you create more choice, if you create too much choice, and you don't also have developing alongside that better decision-making strategies, you eventually get to analysis paralysis because now you have too many choices and no good strategies for choosing the best one. So it's great to have more choice, and it's also great to have better decision strategies at the same time. And that's the goal in NLP, I think, in most change work, uh, is to create more options for uh for somebody and also get better better wisdom for knowing when to use which.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

Dude, that is beautiful.

SPEAKER_03 22:43

I love that. I hope it helps your your podcast listeners.

SPEAKER_02 22:46

And you're talking about, yeah, I'm sure it will. It's helping me, you know. I'm you know, I'm getting a lot out of the conversation. And you're talking about choice, and you go back to these things you have, the finding your irresistible voice.

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 23:00

And then a lot of hypnotists they talk about that having the hypnotic voice. And I've done both with like client work and stage work. And it seems like the voice is almost a little different sometimes. Like stage work, like yeah, so stage work sometimes is more excited. Yes, for sure. Like it's interesting. Yeah, exactly. So whether it's like I think I just told this from Richard Barker, one of his shows, is like this routine about imagining that you're a fish in a bowl, right? You know, you're getting excited and they're feeling the excitement, they're imagining it in their head, and like and then so I was talking to this other guy that does both stage and client work, and sometimes he'll change his voice. So the voice for like removing the obstacle will be slow and methodic, or that we'll call it the alchemy. Like you talk about that weakness, right? Someone comes to you, will say whatever that weakness is, or just say it, and then they'll slowly change it. And you talk about an LP the spin technique, right? So in hypnosis and start slowly spinning it, slowly change its direction. That's right. It's getting faster now, it's faster, faster. And then they change your voice. Spin it really fast now. Go ahead. And then like and then just push it away or whatever, you know, the imagery. And so it's interesting in the playing with that voice.

SPEAKER_03 24:34

Yeah, for sure. So let's clarify.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

Yeah, I figured you'd have lots to like like you're you're like leaned in and you're like, okay, what is this dude talking about? He's like, okay, let me look at it from okay. So yeah, go ahead and clarify, brother.

SPEAKER_03 24:47

And and and both involve a lot of skill. I mean, um I don't know a lot of hypnotists, I know maybe a couple uh I've met over the years, who are great at both. There are people who are gifted at stage work, like for stage hypnosis work. Um, and yes, their pattern is a bit faster, it's a bit um more rhythmic, it's meant for enter trainment, right? They are in training uh audience members on stage, and they are also in training the audience to laugh and enjoy and become more responsive. Because as a show goes on, they need more participants. I mean, rarely does a hypnosis show um involve just one or two or five participants. They want to get multiple groups coming up, so they need to prove with the first group that comes up that it's safe and fun. And what they're looking for, often with their selectivity questions that you know pare down an audience to a small number of people to bring up, is they're typically looking for the most obedient people first. Right? And then the next batch will be the most responsive, not necessarily the most obedient. So um that's very, very different because there's none of that in doing one-on-one client session work. Your marketing does that for you. It selects down to the one person who walks into the office. So if your hypnosis show is meant for the audience, you have to keep them absolutely fascinated the entire time. So that requires a nice fast pace, only with occasional brief moments of letting the client do whatever they want to do. So here's where things get really interesting for me. Kinesthetic is by far the slowest system, the slowest sensory modality of all five. Like uh you got visual, which is incredibly fast, and you got auditory, which is kind of a moderate pace uh in our neurology, right? And um, and kinesthetics often require time to go in and sense. So I don't believe that most stage hypnosis clients on stage are deep in their kinesthetics. I think they're being encouraged uh to imagine powerful realities and operate and play within that frame. So they've got visuals going on, they've got auditory. I think there are hypnotists who are good at occasionally dipping into kinesthetic, but I don't think they want the audience members out in the who are watching, and I don't think they want the people um who are on stage to be deeply in their kinesthetics, unless it's a sleep moment. But even if it's a sleep moment, they're often using a lot of visual and auditory language to keep the to keep them, you know, the the the their everyone's minds moving faster. In session work, you really want the person getting into their sensations, which is why if you induce deep trance in a client, uh, and let's say you set up idea motor signals with fingertips, or you know, um, it can take a while to get answers. Right? You could ask you set up the idiomotor signals and you and you ask a question. Um, if I ask you this question, um uh I'd like you to take a time or I'd like you to think through and come up with the answer. And it can be fractions of a second, it can be very fast, or it can be seconds, in some cases minutes. And there are, I think in the literature there are stories of people who you know went an hour or two before responding. I don't know how real that is. Um, but the point is that if someone's in their kinesthetics, it takes time to get answers. And you have to be patient, or you're interrupting the client's process and then you're out of rapport. Because you're you're doing a pattern interrupt too soon, uh, and then they don't get to the answers that you're waiting for in the first place. So I think you have to be patient in session work, and you really can't be patient as a stage hypnotist for more than a few seconds. I think you have to remain in control of the room when you're doing stage hypnosis. These are two fundamentally different environments. Um now there are skills that are valuable in both, without question. Um, if I develop the ability to have a nice fast pattern and I learn how to deliver language in a nice quick way, that's one thing that might work well on a stage. If I imagine something that's a little bit thoughtful that I have to process and I begin to go into that memory and I see what I saw, I hear what I heard, I feel what I felt, and I can begin to wonder how would things be different if things were a little bit better? And I can begin to build out that reality. So in other words, I can use uh slower cadence to invite myself into a sense memory, and if I start to ask about kinesthetics, I'd better slow down even more. Right? So again, same skills, but very different cadence. Yeah. Right. And energy level.

SPEAKER_02 29:45

Yeah, yeah. The the question that pops in my head now is looking at Tad James. He's a he's an NLP guy, right? Or was, I should say. I know, I know the facial expression. I see where you're going. And the reason I bring him up is because I believe he's the one that encourages hypnotists and people to do improv.

SPEAKER_03 30:07

Okay, so now we're going into a different area. Um, so first of all, sadly Tad has passed away um a couple of years ago, I think it was, and his business is now run by his uh by his spouse, uh Adriana James. Um I'm not a big fan of their business model, and I'll compliment Tad in one specific area. Tad was an extraordinary um student of the hypnosis history, of the history of hypnosis. Um Tad probably had more books on hypnosis than most other human beings on the planet. Um, Tad was a like a deep student of the history of the field. Um, I don't, and I think he himself was quite skilled on the videos that I saw. I've never met him in person, so I can't say. But I have seen videos of his courses, and I have had heard endless stories of his students. And the reason I've heard endless stories about you know how he manages his rooms is because in the first maybe 10-15 years of my training career from 1997 onward, uh, I was doing mostly bespoke three-day courses on specific applications of NLP. So I would see people who'd been trained at practitioner level from every NLP trainer under the sun. And I started to see signatures. And the signatures of people who'd been to TAD seven-day practitioner courses were not complementary to TAD. So I'm quite certain that he was a gifted neurolinguistic programming practitioner, master practitioner, and he's probably a great trainer if his business model were different or had been different. So I'm not a big fan of the level of integration in the students who've come to me. That is not a comment about every possible student he may have trained. Very specific about my my critique here. Um I don't think his business model produced skilled practitioners. Fair. There are other trainers who've produced far more gifted uh students that were impressive to me. Um, so having said that, um uh Tad's hypnosis work is probably well worth pursuing for the people who may want to pursue his uh his recorded content. Um where are we going with this? You're gonna have to.

SPEAKER_02 32:27

The improv question.

SPEAKER_03 32:28

Improv, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

Yeah, so part of me was thinking about that entertainment, but that entertainment requires a little bit of improv. And I feel like that's that's the connector you said. Some things are connecting between client work and entertainment. I feel the ability to improv and goes back to that pattern that you develop.

SPEAKER_03 32:46

Yes. So let's talk about improv. Yeah. Um, I've always been a fan of improv, loved Whose Line Is It Anyway, for as long as I can remember. Um, but until recently, I didn't actively study improv. I had gotten a few books on improv, I'd watched the show, uh, I had worked about 15 years ago actively to find specific improv exercises that would be great for me to include in certain of my NLP courses. And so the criteria for me picking improv exercises was very strict. Um, when you throw somebody into an improv pool, if they if they are thrown into the deep end too quickly, uh that can be a cause for wanting to leave, wanting to exit. So, what's that about? Um, some improv games can be very um very inducing of self-consciousness. And people who are self-conscious in an improv space don't typically perform well. You have to be willing to risk and look stupid. I mean, you have to be uh totally willing to make fools of ourselves. We have to be willing. And if I'm doing an NLP course, I need to know that every step I'm including, every exercise drill, every lesson, that it all builds competency. That means, I mean, it's like the NLP version of uh George uh W. Bush's statement, no child left behind, no NLP student left behind. That means every step I do has to be valuable for most, if not all, the people in the room. So I would never pick an improv exercise that I knew was capable of um of letting students fail. That's a hard criteria to reach. I found a couple. There's one called the good, the bad, and the ugly, which is outrageous and definitely not safe for work once the exercise really gets going. Um, but it's very funny. And the structure of it is this you get a group of four to six people, you know, in a circle. Hey, you're taking notes? This is great.

SPEAKER_02 34:54

I am you get because I have an improv guy coming up in a podcast later today. This is this is great.

SPEAKER_03 35:01

So the good, the bad, and the ugly. And the way it goes is this one person in the group shares with the group a genuine problem they have, like a current problem. Subconsciously, if you pick something that's already been solved and you're just not telling them it's solved, that leaks. It comes out badly somehow or other. So it needs to be a genuinely real problem, and it can be something as mild as um, I've forgotten how to make uh uh lasagna, right? So if that's a real problem, make it real. Um, it could be something bigger, but just we don't deal with the Freddie Krueger stuff and lasagna. It could be a genuinely current issue, like uh my laundry place closed, so now I have to find a new laundromat or dry cleaners, right? So there's a lot of variation in what kinds of problems can come up. Once someone has identified a problem, the next person has to come up with good advice. So if it's lasagna, you go, well, the best place to look is the internet, recipes are everywhere, right? Uh, and so they come up with well-meaning good advice. Now, this paces all of the uh less adventurous people in the group. So we're now talking pacing leaders into this exercise. Yeah, that's brilliant. Bad advice, like, oh, just throw the ingredients in a pan, shove it in the oven, it'll be fine. Yeah, right. Bad advice for lasagna. Right. Um, and and people giggle a little bit, and it's very safe. And then the next person comes up with ugly advice like um, just go out and buy store-bought lasagna and gorge yourself on that. Why would you spend time making your own food? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

So yeah, sound like my former mother-in-law now.

SPEAKER_03 36:50

So, what's happened in the exercise is you go from good to bad to ugly. Right. Right with the advice. One person comes up with a problem, then you get good advice, bad advice, ugly advice. The first few rounds are really lukewarm, like the ugly advice ain't right, right. And if you rotate the group precisely in the direction where the person who gave good advice is next going to give bad advice over time, that rotation makes everybody more adventurous. And by the time you've gone around a couple of times, like completely, um, people are talking about genocide and you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's but it's real bad. Yeah, but really funny bad. And you're giving yourself permission in the group to make fools of yourselves and say awful things, and everybody protects each other, right?

SPEAKER_02 37:39

That's cool. It's like a sacred space in there of safety. Uh-huh. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:44

And there's something if you if you if you did it in the reverse order, everybody would get more and more conservative over time. Huh. Right? Because of sequencing. We learn by sequence.

SPEAKER_02 37:59

Oh, what do you mean? Like, so in my mind, I was picturing like I I would be the ugly content. I'm all about getting as ugly as I can.

SPEAKER_03 38:06

And the challenge were in the first round, if you were the person to give ugly advice, and in the next rotation, you were the person to give just bad advice, and in the next rotation, you were just to give good advice. Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_02 38:21

Yeah, it didn't even feel good when you're saying that. Like I felt something within me, like, ooh, I want to go from one extreme to the other, and then yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:28

Right. So all these little factors matter in how you structure an exercise. And if you do it the other way, right, where everybody's going from good to bad to ugly, um, everybody gets increasingly flexible. Took me a while to find that exercise. Now, having said all that, and I hope that that's a good takeaway for you and your podcast listeners and for your friend that you're later. Yeah, I will tell you that I am um I I I know that you interviewed Cassie, my partner recently. Yeah. And Cassie is actively doing improv right now. Um, she she joined a group that I had first jumped into, and I was not going to perform because I didn't want to perform improv. Uh my focus is on building my NLP business. So I go to all the practices or most of the practices because I love it. And my goal in going there is to become an even more flexible trainer and coach. So I'm getting rid of it out of it.

SPEAKER_02 39:21

Right. It seems like you can learn so much. And even then, this is that you shared the good, the bad, the ugly exercise. I get where you're applying it to the people you're training. And the other thing I just took away from it is creating a sacred space of trust. Absolutely. And I feel like you do that, you're applying that with client and change work. Even on the stage for stage hypnosis, you're still creating that environment where you're you're okay. If you come up here, everyone here is going to support you and love you up on the stage. Yeah. Like no one's going to be harming you and playing. Yeah. So that's cool, man. Uh, what book was what book did you get that out of? I'm always down for good books.

SPEAKER_03 40:06

Um, I don't know which title. Um, let's take a look.

SPEAKER_02 40:10

Yeah, because you're talking about looking for these books, and one of you're looking at yours, and then I'm just you talk about the patter as well. I'm just pattering as I'm looking as we're both looking for these books. But there's this one that I found. It's written by a guy that was a clown. It's called Comedy Techniques for Variety Artists. Yeah, comedy techniques for a variety artist. Yeah. Uh Bruce Johnson. Nice. Or Charlie the clown.

SPEAKER_03 40:36

I'll tell you what, rather than going hunting by the bookcase, I'll collect a few of the titles and I'll and then that'll be in the description for the listeners and viewers.

SPEAKER_02 40:45

Yeah. And then of course, of we'll have all your information, Jonathan, of how people can find how you wrote it down, find your irresistible voice or any of these other uh classes. And what kind of things, how do you set up your business? You're talking about someone else's business model. How's yours like if a hypnotist? Because there's a lot of hypnotists, like you say, that one NLP. So do you have different levels? Do you do it live? Do you do it online?

SPEAKER_03 41:10

Um so my website is I have two. One is called genius mapping.com. No dashes, it's basically one word, genius mapping.com. And that's the work that I do for cognitively mapping beliefs and belief systems. That's that's one area of work. Um, it's basically an NLP modeling approach uh for analytical modeling, unpacking expertise. Um, that's one one of the websites. The big website is nlpmasteryinsight.com. Cool. And that's an extensive website.

SPEAKER_02 41:45

Yeah. So and some models, do you just do people pay like monthly and they get the resources, or do you have group classes?

SPEAKER_03 41:52

What it's how do you individual um one-off classes that people attend? I've got NLP practitioner classes, uh, public speaking workshop. There's a public speaking workshop coming up in two months in here in uh in Ohio near near where we live. Um, and um there's a variety of other classes. Uh again, public speaking, practitioner class, uh, my genius mapping class, which is a six-day certification program, and I've got other classes that are on the roster. And really, I'm just sort of re-rebuilding um my workshop business that slowed down intentionally around COVID. So now that everybody's going to workshops again, which is wonderful, uh, I'm bringing all these courses back, which is exciting. Uh, I do session work via Zoom like this. Um, and so there are coaching sessions, and I've got about 12 or 13 different audio and video programs that are available in the shopping cart. But more more to the point, there's just a ton of free content at my website for people to learn from. Like there's a blog with about a hundred blog entries right now. Um, I don't do cookie cutter work. I you know, I really generally avoid that and give um I give a focus with each of my programs on specific things. Like, for example, I did an eight CD set uh on using NLP to interview for high-end jobs. It's a very specific sort of product. Uh an audio program that's four CDs. Oh, this is by MP3s now, nobody's by Called Creating the Automatic Yes, which sounds like it's influence and persuasion and all that, but it it is, but it's not about manipulative language patterns, it's about understanding other people's emotions and learning how to sequence people ethically through the right emotions to get a result. So creating the automatic yes will help you sequence someone from some initial state through a process to, if it's appropriate, to get to uh a state of hunger for the product or hunger for the service or desire for something for the right reasons.

SPEAKER_02 43:58

Yeah, it's funny you said get that. Yes, and you're sitting in the hunger for the product. And in my mind, I was thinking, let's just take one of your CD courses and how do we apply this to promoting your product? Like you have a CD course. How so if someone has a public speaking thing, they want help with that? How do they get the yes to you? Like there's they could Google public speaking help and you know there's a plethora of things. So how do you get that?

SPEAKER_03 44:27

Well, my hope is if they visit my website and they are if they're looking for public speaking in particular and they see the course, there's a long, there's a long page with information on how that specific course is valuable to people. So in other words, if they are reading the page and it matches them and it it piques their interest or speaks to their specific desire, then they could consider coming to the course. I don't believe that every public speaking course is right for every speaker. For example, here's an here's an op uh an example of when this would not be appropriate. My five-day speakers course that's coming up in late May is not right for somebody who is developing a TEDx talk. Because what I'm teaching is how to be flexible and speak confidently on the fly in any situation to an audience of one to one thousand. So that's about no preparation, public speaking.

SPEAKER_02 45:28

Right.

SPEAKER_03 45:29

Creative flexibility on the platform. For people who are looking to develop a canned talk, a memorized talk, a heavily scripted talk, a performance with gestures. I do that too, because I'm TEDx speakers. Um, but that's different than the course that's coming up at the end of May. So someone who wants to develop a keynote, for example, is not right for that course. Right, right, right, right. Someone who wants to develop a TEDx talk is not right for that course. But if someone needs to be more confident speaking in front of groups uh and knowing that they can wax poetic for however long they're asked to speak, uh that course teaches that and provides that skill. And everybody gets massively better. Um, it's another one of those no student left behind kind of things, which is why improv exercises and NLP courses have to, they really have to bring everybody up. They have to lift everyone up. Yeah. Yeah. So I appreciate you asking about products. I'm I is there anything else that I could do to help your podcast listeners?

SPEAKER_02 46:27

Just well, first, thank you for your time here. I really appreciate it, and I've learned a lot. I appreciate you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And then before we let you go, I wonder what's one message that kind of comes from your heart that you want the whole world to know in this moment.

SPEAKER_03 46:48

I would love people to know that they are never truly stuck. Now we can experience being stuck in lots of circumstances, and we need to know that that's temporary. And if it feels permanent, that's a false fear, right? That's that's a construct that people create, either to be lazy or to be uh gentle to themselves, or to feel like they just don't have to carry the torch any further, um, that they just can accept the status quo of being stuck, and no one is ever truly stuck. Uh we get really good at our habits, right? We get really good at our natural patterns. They are skills, not necessarily detriments, and probably we learned them because we were aiming to create um acceptance or a support system, or we were evolving to and adapting to meet a past circumstance. If we were overwhelmed, then maybe we developed a couch potato, right? If we were um, if we were stressed, then maybe we developed a workaholic mindset. If we were um uh not treated well by a lot of people, then we developed um a hermit complex. If we were um uh too lonely, then we developed a habit of going out to to spend lots of time around lots of people. Uh we learn our compensatory habits to cope with current circumstances, and then without noticing it, circumstances shift, and now we've got a habit that's not serving us anymore, and we feel stuck, and no one is ever truly stuck. Um, there are extraordinary and surprisingly easy uh ways to change, ways to evolve, ways to level up, and we don't need to be lazy if in the past we've thought that the stuckness can't be changed, but almost anything can be changed. And if we could help your listeners to maintain a belief that that's uh likely, maybe we've changed the world a little bit. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 49:01

Well said, brother. Thank you again.

SPEAKER_03 49:04

Yeah,