NOTE: This transcript has not yet been proofed read and may contain typos. It will be updated as soon as proof reading is complete.
Cal: Hello, everybody. Cal Banyan. Here we go. Cal Banyan's Hypnosis, Etc. I'm back again with Brenda Titus. Before I give you an introduction to her, I want to tell you that in this episode I'm putting on my drill instructor's hat and I'm gonna talk about how to become, or at least work, like an expert even if you're brand new at this. That's right. Today I'm going to talk about how you can do hypnosis, whatever technique, like an expert, very quickly, even if you're new to the profession.
All right. Let me tell you about Brenda. Brenda is a delightful person to work with. She's smart, she's beautiful, she's caring, and she is an inspiration to those in our class because every time we do our 10-day certification course, our 7-day certification course, Brenda is in there. She talks a little bit in the class because she knows what it's like to have been in the class and go directly from classroom to clients, giving them that little pep talk, and then during our practice sessions every day she's walking around and coaching and helping, using her sparkly personality. She can correct people in a way where they feel better. She'll go, "Excellent!" when excellent needs to be said and she'll go, "Oh, well. That was pretty good but here's this place." She's just a very good, gentle coach. She's got a bachelor's degree in sociology, a master’s degree in criminology. She's previously done work, the rape crisis intervention work. She's spoken at the National Guild of Hypnotists convention. She's going to do it again this year. I'm just honored to have her on my team here at the Banyan Hypnosis Center. How are you doing, Brenda?
Brenda: I'm great, Cal. Thank you so much for having me today. Let me tell you all a little bit about Cal. Cal is the hypnosis celebrity, not just because of all of these videos that are available to all of you on the Internet out there through time and space. Over 420 videos. He is also the hypnosis celebrity and authority because he has been awarded and recognized with almost every award and recognition in the profession. He really truly emphasizes hypnosis that works. That's exactly why I can come to his class and help teach, help support and promote this amazing profession. I really did go from classroom to client very quickly with five path hypnotherapy system, with Cal's certification program to be able to help people in such incredible ways. It truly would not have been possible without actually doing what we're going to do today, which is that drilling, learning, but also actually learning five path hypnotherapy. Truly, when we talk about hypnosis that works, I really believe in the system of five path hypnotherapy as well as seven path self-hypnosis. I'm excited to be here today to talk about drilling and certification. So take it away, Cal.
Cal: Thank you very much, Brenda. Now, one of the things about our certification course that I'm so proud of is, yes, it's got all the information that you need to go from classroom to client, but every morning and every evening before and after class, we spend practice time. A lot of people don't know this about me, but in addition to teaching everything I've ever done, one of the things I did was I used to be in base security in the Air Force. After my first two and a half years or so I became training NCO for security forces. I really learned the difference between training and education. Education is like right now. I'm going blah, blah, blah, and you're going listen, listen, listen. So you read, read, read. That's education. Just getting information. But training has the fact of doing it, doing it, doing it. When you're doing it, doing it, doing it, that's called drill. In the military we have training instructors and we have drill instructors. The importance is that we want to have you do it over and over and over again. I know that just sounds boring, but it's not. In fact, when it does get boring you've succeeded at where you want to go.
My first paid job as a trainer was training NCO in the Air Force teaching people how to defend a base. It included shooting, riot control, working the perimeters, and that kind of thing. I still to this day study military training because military training is training for when your life depends on it. If you train like your life depends on it, you're going to get better training. You're going to do better training because your career, your work life depends on it. As a matter of fact, right now I'm reading a book. I just got through reading a military academic book called On Killing. Now I'm reading a book called On Combat. Both of these are by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. On Combat was also with Lauren Christensen. The full name of it is On Combat: The Physiology and Psychology of Deadly Conflict in War and Peace. It really talks about your physiology when you're asked to do something that's kind of scary or extremely scary, as in the case of combat or with police officers having to shoot in the line of duty or even civilians having to shoot in their line of duty.
Some interesting things are, for example, science has reviewed World War II action. They found out that only about 15 to 20% of the military in action actually shot at the enemy. They either dropped their rifles and did something else or they shot over the heads of the enemy. This is terrible from the viewpoint of a country that's trying to defend itself if your military is not in the action doing something that they need to be doing. Then something happened during the time of the Vietnam War. Those statistics went from 20% actually firing to 95% actually firing and shooting at the enemy. What happened was how they trained. In World War II they were mostly shooting at targets, targets that look like a bull’s-eye. In Vietnam, during that time, they started shooting at realistic looking targets. That was a big part of the transition. More and more, Richard Marcinko, who wrote Rogue Warrior, who was a very important part of the development of the whole SEAL team idea, he came up with this saying. There are a couple versions of it. One is: the more you sweat in practice, the less you bleed in war. Another version of it is: sometimes the more you bleed in practice the less you die in war.
What this is about, this is let's do training in class that does two things. One, it needs to be realistic. Two, you need to do it over and over and over again. Let's face it, ladies and gentleman, if you're on the battlefield and the enemy's coming over the wall, that's the worst possible time to dig out the user's manual for your M16 rifle and try to figure out how it works or your notes from class on the M16 rifle. What they do is they drill, drill, drill how to load it, how to reload it, how to fix a jam, side alignment, trigger pull, all these different things. How to get cover and shoot. They do it over and over so that when it happens it is automatic. Some people are going, oh, this is so hard and gross. We're talking about military killing, but let's get away from that a little bit.
This is the exact same thing that musicians do. They have drills where they go through scales and they play the songs over and over and over again. We've got dancers. They drill and do stuff over and over again so that it looks easy. Actors, athletes, they drill over and over and over again in as realistic conditions as they can over and over again so that when they actually have to do it, they're not so stuck on the technique, they're not so stuck on the form. They can actually be in the dance. They can actually be in the play, in the character. They're not just trying to remember the words. They can play that song with feeling, you see.
When you've drilled, drilled, drilled as a hypnotist and those techniques, like inductions, deepening techniques, testers, testing and convincing, these kinds of things and the other techniques, when you have drilled them over and over again, what happens is now you can be with the client. You can watch them. You can hear them instead of just saying, okay, I'm doing A, B, C technique. So we have to accept that drill and repetition is the required thing to go from novice to expert. I want you to know that you do not need to have someone to practice with to do a lot of this. We've always followed this process in our classes, and that's why our students can go from classroom to clients. You can drill, drill, drill a lot of this stuff without a practice partner. I moved very quickly in this profession because I understood this drill mindset and I had Mr. Pillow, which was just a pillow off the sofa. I’d put him in the chair and that'd be Mr. Pillow. I would go through all the processes exactly from beginning to end, like a musician, like a dancer, like a military man so that I could make sure everything was done right. What do you think of that so far, Brenda?
Brenda: I definitely agree with everything that you're saying, Cal. I think that part of as we're drilling through class is you're really getting those words down and what they mean. Finding your own voice, practicing using those words, and as you're saying this, I’m thinking oh, my gosh, I almost feel like my first year was that drill because as you're doing it then with a real live client, you're getting better and better doing it more and more so that you can finally get to that true goal, which is to be so present with your client you're not scrambling and looking at your notes. The more you can practice during your certification to be that much more comfortable with the words and why you're saying them, what you're doing, and what you're watching for, it's going to make it that much easier when you get started with the real live person there for you to help when you have to start seeing clients.
Cal: Perfect. Brenda, you're going to be surprised because in this next upcoming course, that is February 23rd to March 6th this year, and we're going to take this whole idea of perfecting this kind of musicians, athletes, or military persons drill to a new level and you're going to find out that our students are going to be even more confident and smoother than ever before. Is that all right with you?
Brenda: That sounds exciting. I'm looking forward to it.
Cal: All right. Good. Let me just run through a list he real quick. One of the first things you have to recognize is that in class or after class at home, whenever you practice something new, you're going to be nervous. You're going to be scared. In military talk, they talk about going from the white zone, into the yellow zone, into the red zone. One of the measurements is heart rate. I know that if I was taking the heart rate and the blood pressure of these students as they read the script for the first time or they do a testing technique for the first time, that their heartbeat is up, their blood pressure is up because it is scary. So this is what happens if you don't have semi-regimented and supervised training. What will happen is the protective part of you will have you waste your time. You'll be visiting and chatting and stuff like that. When I went to my certification training, there were 17 people in the class. Only two ever tried to actually do the work, and only one of them ever succeeded and that was me. I think one of the reasons for that is, out of the entire seven days of training, there was only one hour set aside for practice. So there was no confidence, there was no competence, and that one hour was me and another hypnotist reading an induction script. You know that we're just going to twitter away some of that time talking and visiting and trying to figure out what we're going to do. A third of the time was wasted that way. Then we split the rest of it. That's 20 minutes each of actual practice time. You're going to get three times that just in one of our practice sessions.
So you will be nervous, you will be afraid, and so what we need to do is have that supervision and we need to break it down into steps. We will say, okay, read the induction over and over and over until you're comfortable with it, for example. Good, you've got that. Now let's read the induction and emerge script. Good, you got that. Let's do it with one of your classmates. Beautiful. You do that over and over and over again.
One of the mistakes that people make in training is that, say you have a training partner, what they'll do is go say you hypnotize me, then I'll hypnotize you, and you hypnotize me, and I hypnotize you. That's the worst possible way to do it. What you need to do is you lose the drill factor in that case and if you need to do it two, three, four times in a row and then switch. Two, three, four times in a row and then switch. By doing that, when you do the first attempt at whatever the technique is, at the end, you're thinking I wish I would've done this part of it better. I think I did that part better. This is the perfect time to immediately do it again because you have confidence in the parts you did well and you can now, using hindsight, perform it better by doing the part of the technique better that you wish you had done better. You just do it over and over and over in a row like that. This brings about confidence and competence. You see that in class, right?
Brenda: Yeah, definitely. Every once in a while they'll say I think we should swap. I’ll say no, no. Cal really wants you to do one, two, three. Keep going because that's so important. Keep going. Drive it in and repetition.
Cal: Perfect. Like you said, we don't just stop when the class is over. You need to continue drilling. You go through basic training in the military, you don't stop. You go on to whatever you are advanced training is. In your advanced training, you're still going to be doing the basics but you build upon them. So after graduation, an excellent hypnosis instructor will also teach you how to continue to drill on your own because a lot of people you can't go right out of class and see a client the next day. So you're going to have time when you're getting your practice together and that kind of thing and marketing, getting your first clients in, and there will be plenty of space in-between clients. So you need to continue to have a way to continue to drill, drill, drill. So you need to have Mr. Pillow to continue to do this drilling with. What you want to add to that, Brenda?
Brenda: I think you hit it. I know for myself, my drilling became real-life clients very quickly, but I think that that is actually such an important thing, is that by doing that drilling I was ready for those first clients. I was looking through my notes recently in regards to my first and second clients that I ever saw and I was doing a word induction immediately. The first time I had a session two I did a word induction and that was only because I felt the confidence of having practiced in class, of having really given it a try and done it. I just kind of said okay, here I go. And I dove in the deep end. I think that that is such an important part of really developing that confidence and competence, is first being really prepared, excellent training, great practice, but then getting started and really doing it. So I'm glad that we were able to talk about that today, Cal.
Cal: Absolutely. So start off with just reading the technique over and over. Then if there's any physical manipulation that needs to be done, like open your eyes, close your eyes, or maybe it's eye-lock, you're tapping on the forehead, or maybe it's arm catalepsy and you have to lock the arm, do the verbal part first over and over and over just so it's automatic. Then go through the motions of doing the physical manipulation and then over and over with the speaking and the physical manipulation, then if you can get a practice partner who's not a client, do it with them over and over. Then when you get to seeing your clients, even though you’re brand-new, you will be in expert at the techniques. That's how it works, that's how they do it in the military, that's how they do it in the arts, that's how they do it in the sciences. That's how it's done. Brenda, got a question for me I can squeeze in real quick?
Brenda: All of the questions that I have are going to require more time. We're already at about 20 minutes so maybe we should wrap up for today.
Cal: Perfect. Wrap it up.
Brenda: All right. Well thank you all so much for being here. Come see us in class. Like Cal said, I come in and do my best when I'm available to observe your drills, give feedback. Of course, Cal is here teaching you how to do it and we'd love to see you all in class here at the Banyan Hypnosis Center. I can also be reached, if you ever have questions or just need a little "you can do it," at ochypnotherapy.com, brenda@ochypnotherapy. I'm also on Facebook at OC Hypnotherapy and Healing Path Hypnosis. I'm also on Our Hypno Space as me because we use our real names there. BrendaTitus at Our Hypno Space. I'm always over there at the Hypnotist Lounge. I try to post an interesting question there once a week so that we can engage and talk and just kind of have some social time. So I look forward to seeing you all there.
Cal: Perfect. Thank you so much, Brenda. Interact with Brenda, Erika, myself, Celeste, everybody who's over there, something like 600 members on the Our Hypno Space. You can even start your own group. Let's say you're interested in child hypnosis or you're interested in sports and hypnosis. You can start your own group. You don't have to be an expert in the topic. You just have to have a sincere interest in that topic. All right. I want to see you in class. As I said before, I've got a class coming up starting February 23rd running through March 6th. That's 10 days because there's a weekend off in the middle. See you at the convention. See you on Our Hypno Space. I am Cal Banyan. Over and out.
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