Cal: Hello everybody, Cal Banyan here, Cal Banyan’s Hypnosis Etcetera. If you're watching this anywhere else except calbanyan.com, go to Calbanyan.com right now because that's where we have all the episodes, over 400 episodes so far; free hypnosis training for you. Alright, today we're going to talk about getting back on that hypnopreneurial theme. I want you to know that these topics that we do every week are driven 90% by our co-hosts.
If I'm working with Erika, as I am today, she's the one that brings these topics and so if you have topic ideas or questions that you want us to work on, you need to send to the co-host of your choice, be it Brenda or be it Erika. Today, fortunately, I'm with Erika and I want to tell you about Erika. Erika is a strong, up and coming star, I recognized that something special about her as soon as I got to meet her at the NGH convention.
She is serious about this; she's got a very logical, rational mind that I click with. She can use a system of hypnosis that makes sense to her, such as 5-PATH or 7th Path Self-Hypnosis. She started off after her certification, floundering a little bit, she went through a different school then she decided she would beef up her training. She figured she was worth investing in, she got her 5-PATH 2.0 videos and things started to click with that 5-PATH system of hypnosis. Then we got to know each other even better, she decided to come for the Week of Power -- not in person -- but she came to the class by way of the internet because our classes are also available online.
Live online, interactive she continued certification with 7th Path, 5-PATH, Master Hypnotist, all through our school and she's now become a trainer. If you are up there in Bellingham, Washington area, and you would like to become certified through our school, you can do it through her, if you don't want to come all the way down to California and see me. I have complete confidence in Erika to do our training program or she wouldn't be a trainer for us. How are you doing Erika?
Erika: Hi Cal, thank you very much for that introduction, that was very kind of you. I'm really happy to be here today and let me tell people about you, Cal. Cal is the hypnosis celebrity because of his fame in the profession and not just because of all these free videos, I think we're at 410 or 411, something like that Cal. He's the hypnosis celebrity and authority because he has received almost every single award and recognition in the profession.
He's also an author, he's been on television, he's been on radio promoting hypnosis, promoting his books and he's also the trainer of some of the very best in the profession. He's created a lot of really amazing content. I believe and trust in what he shares with me, what he puts on his episodes here, so once I was a 5-PATHer, I got a 5-PATH rating, I felt confident in seeing clients. So that’s what I've done ever since.
Cal, I'm just so grateful that I get to share this experience here with you on this show and get to ask you questions and get to share what's going on with me. Yes, I'm teaching a class in January. That will be fun. How are you doing today?
Cal: I'm just thinking about how smart my co-hosts are, they go to the training and then they hook it up so they can keep asking me anything they want like this on behalf of themselves and other people for as long as they are co-hosts, so smart.
Erika: That's right. That was my plan.
Cal: Hey, I'm doing great and I want to tell everybody something about this Hypnosis Etcetera. Etcetera means I can slip in anything I want. Last week, I went and watched a movie "Interstellar," it was a great movie; I think it's the 2001 Space Oddity, not Space Oddity, that's the album by David Bowie, 2001, Space Odyssey of this generation. If you have a chance, go see it, I think you will really like it and I want to recommend it to everybody. It has got nothing to do with hypnosis really, but it's a good movie. All right, what do you have for me Erika?
Erika: All right, today what I want to talk about, we're going to do a hypnopreneur topic. It's coming to the end of year and the end of the year for me means, what I want to do is called a year-end review. What I mean by that is I take a look at all my accomplishments for the year and everything that I've done. I take a look at...I have a personal and a professional mission statement for myself personally, mission statement for my business, I have a mission statement and I have personal and professional goals both for the business and for my practice and I take a look at those things and I use them to basically evaluate myself.
I will tell you, in my previous job we did the same thing, a yearly evaluation and you’d get a score from your management. This is something that you do for yourself in order...there are a couple of reasons that I do this. The first reason is that you get to look and see all the great work that you did all year long. It's amazing to look back and see "Oh my gosh, I did all of this in one year?" Because time goes by and you forget about things. The other thing is, it can help motivate you for what you're going to accomplish next year and helps you prepare and plan for things that you want to put on your calendar for the next year. That's what I'm talking about Cal.
Cal: So cool, now you mentioned this to me before we started recording and I thought I don't do any of that. I think that what you're talking about is especially necessary in your first few years of growth. To take an assessment of where you're at now and where you want to be in the next year, maybe even six months, year, two years and that kind of thing and I full heartedly support that. I don't do that, I've such an intense nature, I am kind of in that mode all the time. From a pure business point of view, this hypnopreneurial point of view to use hypnosis as your business. I think that's exactly the way you should be especially in those first few years. Tell us all about it, Erika.
Erika: The process for me... there are a lot of different ways to do it, there are some books out there that can help you with this type of a thing too. The way that I do it is, I look at my calendar. I have nearly everything that I do all day long on my calendar, I even put things on my calendar, I schedule and block my calendar for myself. If I'm working on a big project, I will block my calendar off for an hour or so during the day so that I remember, ‘Okay, I'm prioritizing a particular project,’ let's say over perhaps I say "seeing clients," like I'm teaching a class. I need to be prepared for that class. So I will put a block on my calendar for me to prepare for the class or get some material ready. At the end of the year I’m able to go back to my calendar and say I accomplished this, I accomplished that and I start writing all of these things down.
One really interesting aspect of this, that if you do this over time, you start to realize that you can be successful in things. Even if you started something in January and maybe it's not quite as successful the first time, usually by the end of the year I've accomplished what I set out to do. It’s very encouraging as somebody looking at what they're doing day after day or week after week, sometimes when you look at something in too short of a time frame, like you are looking at today or this week, it's not enough time frame for you to actually see the full impact of all the great work that you are doing. When you look at it at the end of the year on a calendar like that, you can really get a sense of all the great work that you're doing. That's how I start out Cal.
Cal: I think that in order to be going someplace, you need to know where you're coming from and I think that's a great way to do it because you can take the lessons of what you've learned and the way you're lining this up and have your mind in the right place to plan for the future. Perfect, keep going.
Erika: Once you have that down, you've written down a lot of your goals, and you've written down what you've accomplished for the year, what you want to do is you figure out which of these things really impacted your work. It gives you an idea of the direction or a theme for the year. I do this, you don't have to, but a lot of people would actually say, "This was the year of personal growth.†or, “this was the year of something or other." I haven't done this this year so I don't know what the theme is going to be. You start to be able to look at the work that you're doing and you understand how every little thing that you're doing from day to day is having a big impact throughout everything that you're doing. You find everything you're doing, you categorize it and you put it all together and you get a sheet with the top accomplishments that you have for the year.
Cal you said that you do things kind of like this on an ongoing basis, I would imagine that you still have projects that you're working on. You manage those projects in like project management way, would that be right?
Cal: I use a program call Infusionsoft to run my business and it does everything from shopping cart on the websites to scheduling. I also have my little area in there where I have my different projects that I'm working on and to-do lists and then I prioritize them as to what's hot and what's not. I may link to a more detailed outline of what I'm working on, the details of that project is a document in my Google Documents. So I bounce back and forth between my Infusionsoft and my Google Docs to keep everything organized.
What's interesting is that we are at two different ends of the spectrum. You are the lone hypnotist growing your center and right now it's at the office level and I believe one day, probably very soon, as fast as you want, have other hypnotists at your center, if that's what you want and then the staff. For me, we have Jessie who works here, who does Customer support, she does shipping, receiving, that kind of thing. We've got Maureen, who's the General Manager of the office and I've got Marianne, and she is my main little chief, and she manages over two other IT people. We do so much internet stuff, we've got three full-time IT people and I delegate to her things I want done. I’ll say, Marianne, we need this, this, this, done and I’d say "How fast do you think we can do it?" Together, we come up with a commitment time range and then we commit to that and then get it done and I check back with her and I can let go of the details and I can just check progress and let her work with Dean and Rexon, who are our other two designers. That's how I do it.
Erika: It sounds like, as you suggested, we're in two different phases. I'm still on the building phase of my business and I'm still updating my website. Meaning -- I know you update your website all the time, but you update your website with an ongoing type of content for these episodes. -- I'm still in the phase where I don't believe that I'm actually done with my website, meaning I still have other things that I want to go after that I just can't do it all right now. I'm still building and I'm not at that stage where I'm going to have another employee but I will probably will at some point, and that's on my list.
I'm not going to be able to do everything that I want do all at once. But I'm still in this building phase; I haven't created all the content yet or the things that I want to do yet. I have all of that stuff on a list and from week to week I will look and see, “Well, what’s the priority this week?†That's when it ends up on my calendar and then that’s how it makes it onto my list at the end of the year.
The list at the end of the year, what it ends up doing is, it helps me create two or three big things that I'm really focused on for the next year, so it helps me plan my next year. I don't do a lot of planning for my next year, meaning I don’t go ahead of time, I don't look in the future and say, “Oh, this Monday I'm going to do this,†or “This is Tuesday I'm going to do that.†I have some big goals that I want to accomplish. For example, I know I want to teach a certain amount of certification courses. Yes, I do put those on the calendar ahead of time because students need them on the calendar ahead of time; they want to see them ahead of time.
I know there are other classes that I'm going to be teaching too, but there might be some other things. For example, I might want to record a specific type of video. That might be another big thing that I'm doing. I might want to generate 10 or 15 blog articles for the year, something like that. So I might have certain things that I focus on and that's what it helps me do, but I don't put them actually on the calendar until the time comes because real life happens, and things in the world happen, and then priorities shift as we move along, some kind of fluid as far as when I do things in the next year. Does that make sense?
Cal: Yes, one of the first casualties of any kind of implementing of any big plan, be it opening an office or a mission to do something during a war is as soon as you start implementing, the plan has to shift. To have that kind of fluidity is something that hypnopreneurs are really great at. We take a big company and they can't shift as quickly as the individual or a small business like we are, to do that kind of dance to quickly shift and maneuver very quickly, that’s very much an entrepreneurial trait. Beautiful, continue.
Erika: That's a really good point Cal and I've learned this from my clients, I don't expect certain things anymore. I can't accept the unaccepted, I leave things open, I know that I want to do something but I have no idea on how it's going to come about and there are times when the universe surprises me and opens the door for me because I've been either thinking about it, or maybe I've come up in a self-hypnosis session that I've been working on.
I don't think that something has to be a particular way in order for it to be successful. I leave it really open and I say that my clients taught me that because they surprise me all the time with their really creative solutions to problems. I don't try to tell my clients at all what to do, so to speak, I leave the door open so they can come up with their own solutions. Our subconscious mind is so fascinating, why would you want to try and tell it what to do, right? You can let it come up with things all on its own. That's how I move forward with the big things in my practice.
Cal: I think you have to know what you want as a general outcome and you put steps that look like you shall need to take. There's the old saying and I think it's true that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. You have to have this huge flexibility in mind and one of the things that I noticed in my life is that I'll make a plan, I say I want to do this stuff, and then because it can takes six months to a year but as soon as I start implementing it and putting energy into it, it seems like the universe helps me and everything start happening faster. I think that's where a lot of people miss out, they want to do this law of attraction where they just sit in their room and visualize having their Ferrari or having that business but you've got to give the universe something to work with and start putting that forward motion that overcomes the inertia of being where you were and that little bit of forward inertia can cause things to come into alignment in your future.
Boy, am I getting metaphysical there, or what? But that's what I've observed.
Erika: I totally agree Cal, you've got to have some action there and so there are sometimes when I take action on something, I'm not sure if it's exactly right and I'm not going to beat myself up in any sort of way if it doesn't work exactly right. I have to do something. As hypnotists, we can talk about using age regression or something where, “Hey, it’ll be nice then to know what you know now.†I can't know the future so I'm not going to be upset about it. I do my best, I take some action and then I adjust, there's no failure, only feedback and then you can use that information to do better the next time.
Cal: One of the things that we use as a motto around here comes from a title of a book 'Ready, Fire, Aim." Normally it's Ready, Aim, Fire, but we say Ready, Fire, Aim is that we don't worry about all the details of something, we just move forward and then adjust as we go. In the old days, sometimes what they’d do with a cannon, they fire it off toward the general direction of the enemy or the target and now they’ve got their bearings, they move the cannon to the right, the left, up or down. But, then you've got to fire to get going, so make your plans, implement and adjust as you go. Ready, Fire, Aim.
Erika: I love that Cal, haven't heard that before, thank you for sharing that with me. The last thing that I do, once I've got all these things that I've accomplished over the year, I allow to, really, fuel my passion and drive for the next year because this work for me is full of joy, full of gratitude, full of amazing things. Things that I can't explain, it’s just an amazing experience. I love this work, and looking at all those things fuels my creativity. When I start thinking about the work that I did this year and working with other hypnotists, I just have the greatest respect and honor for other hypnotists that I meet at NGH and other hypnotists that you work with Cal and just love working with other people and the work they're doing too, I allow all that to fuel my passion and drive for what I'm going to do in the next year. That's a really important aspect of this, get excited about the work that you're doing and allow it to help you do good things.
Cal: That's right, if you can't get excited about this, go find something that you can get excited about and then get involved, get the training you need, get the confidence, get the competence, start moving forward, get your business going, measure where you are at, make plans for the future, stay flexible. Sometimes the universe helps you along the way.
I think we're about that time.
Erika: That's right Cal, thank you so much. I want to say thank you to you Cal, especially for having me on the show here. I learn so much from you every time. I enjoy being here and I think our visitors and our viewers learn an awful lot too. My name's Erika Flint, and you can find me at cascadehypnosiscenter.com, erikaflint.com. I do want to hear from you, send me your questions, send me your ideas for future broadcasts. That's all, Cal.
Cal: Thank you very much, it's a pleasure having you on the show and I think you're doing a great job as a co-host because you make my job easy and you help us bring relevant, important content to everywhere in the world, except Cuba. I look into our stuff and for some reason, we never get into Cuba.
I would like to go to Cuba. Hey, you out there in Cuba, if you're a hypnotist and somehow this video gets through, let's work out a plan, some kind of educational visa where I can come and help out in Cuba. I hear in Cuba you've got some very nice rum, very nice jazz, very nice old cars and very nice cigars and I would like to see all of them. All right, do I digress or what?
Anyways, I'm proud of you guys for being the hypnotists that you are, for listening to these videos. Please like and share us and comment on Facebook, it's facebook.com/hypnosisetc, go there, like us there, and you'll get in another conversation.
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That's it. Cal Banyan, signing off.