The Subconscious Side of Safety

You know that moment when you’re in the middle of something at work and suddenly you realize that you don’t even remember

starting that task? Or how about when you lock your front door, drive all the way to work, and then you panic because

you don’t remember if you actually locked it. Sure, we’ve all been there. And that, my friends, is autopilot. And

it actually got me thinking. If we do little things every day without realizing it, what else are we actually

doing in autopilot? And could some of those things actually translate to unsafe tasks at work? I don’t know.

Maybe. I’m Monica and I’m here with my co-host Scott and we are joined by two amazing guests, Mike Mandel and Chris

Thompson. They are internationally known hypnosis trainers, co-founders of the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy, and

they’re experts in how subconscious patterns shape real world behavior. They teach everybody from therapists to

corporate leaders on how the mind really works and how to influence that ethically. And on today’s episode, we’re

going to be digging into the subconscious side of safety, the hidden patterns, shortcuts, mental scripts that

drive behavior more than rules ever do.

So, Mike, Chris, it is truly an honor to have you both here. How are you doing, especially coming off of that 5day

training you just wrapped up in Toronto? Oh, gee. [laughter] Well, I’m just Today is my first day

back. I I discovered that I need I used to need two days to recover. Um, but it because there’s a huge prep time too of

about 30 to 40 textbooks I power read the week before. So, it’s two weeks of intensity and at 72 it’s not as easy as

it used to be. But I need three full days to recover. And today is day four. So,

I don’t Yeah, I don’t bother Mike and uh I let him I let him have his Saturday, Sunday, Monday to relax. And it’s it is

a good metaphor that you use, Mike. When we’re teaching, we’re like running the engine at 7,000 RPM all day, all week

long, and then we put it into idle and kind of rebuild. So, we’re back. We’re fresh. We’re ready for you guys to talk

about some fun topics. Fantastic. Scott, how are you doing? Yeah, I’m doing okay. I I’m I’m totally

pumped uh by by spending this this hour and um I you have me buffaloed when the

when the title came up and told me to be ready and I didn’t quite know how to be ready, but here I am. And Trevor, you

are looking and sounding just a bit different these days. So, I had one

other colleague that was joining me and and now we have tossed him and we have

replaced him with you. Is that what we’re saying? Is that is that what we’re we’re all about, Monica?

Well, as the uh executive producer, I did make that executive decision that I

think we need a little prettier of a face for the podcast. So, I am in her place.

That’s that’s so good. So, at least I have a uh a colleague to go forward with

and uh so I’m looking forward to it. We’re going to miss Trevor, you know, but I’m really really looking forward to

you and what your perspective is on some of these subjects that we are uh that we’re going to discuss.

I mean, no pressure, but I’ll do my best. No pressure. And I don’t know if you had a chance to listen to their podcast. It’s called the

brain software, but I actually just listened to the most recent episode where they talked about the strategy and

science of creating happiness and the conscious and unconscious side of it, which is actually a great segue into the

first question. So, Chris, Mike, in your humble opinion, why is it that people

actually take shortcuts when they know better? Is it habit, routine, or is it more of a conscious bad choice?

Oh, great question. And I can tell you exactly why. Um, it it goes back to our utilization of glucose and oxygen as

humans. Back in the days when we lived in caves and fought saber-tooth tigers and live dayto day or moment by moment,

one of the worst things we could do would be expend undue energy because if we do, we may not have sufficient energy to get the next meal. And so we became

wonderful at not using energy, which is why it is much easier to lie on the couch than it is to get up and run a

marathon. But in all seriousness, that that is the case. If you I say to people who are swimmers and tell me they’ve

never lost weight, and they said, “That’s because you’re swimming.” Because in order to swim efficiently, you have to be buoyant. And to be

buoyant, you have to hold more fat. And the brain wants you to make swimming as easy as possible. So you’ll retain fat

instead of burning it up when you swim. That way, it uses less energy when you swim. And everything is gearing down to

energy depletion and restoration. So on that note, it it’s way way easier to to

create shortcuts and to systematically and continuously use them. Once we do, the neural pathway gets burned in and

it’s what we will continue to default to. I think the same thing is true with pretty much everything we do, right

Mike? When we were looking at some of these topics, we thought, well, the reason why it’s called a shortcut or

that it’s unconscious is that we do it without thinking. We do all of these things. We talk without thinking. Imagine if we had to plan every single

word and sentence structure that we were going to utter over a podcast like this. The brain is a big organ. It runs and it

requires a lot of energy. If we had to use it for every single musculature movement, every single word that we put

out, every single thing that we had to plan, we’d never get anything done. We’d probably have to eat 10 times as much

food. So, yeah, the brain and pretty much all human activity is based around unconscious patterns.

So, so for you guys, right, so I think this is very interesting. Uh, because I’ve watched this in action, right, my

entire career. Uh, so what you’re saying is there we’re we’re basically built

instead of going A, B, C, D. We want to go A to D, right?

Yeah. We just want to go to D as fast as we can, as most efficient as we possibly can. Yes. And in order to be efficient, we

have to be in the best possible state to do that. And we have different states, different uh levels of integration we go

through during the day. And we’re running through different altradian patterns about 90 to 120 minutes where our brain cycle through rest cycles and

energy cycles. And one of the best gifts we can give ourselves is to recognize our own rhythmic states. We know when

we’re energized, we know when we’re not. For instance, today, Scott, um it’s 1:12 here in Toronto, I guess,

probably same time where you are. Uh, the interesting thing is I tend to Chris will tell you fall asleep at 2 p.m. And

in Chinese medicine, if you take the time you go to bed, if you do it habitually and the time you’re awaken, so for me that’s 10 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. So

there’s an 8 hour stretch. I don’t sleep that whole time. But if you divide that in half, then I’m getting 2:00 a.m. Now,

if you flip it by 12 hours, that’s the time your energy will tank the most. So

I know my energy would tank at 2:00. So in preparation for that, I took a power nap for a half an hour before this

meeting to ensure that my energy will be strong. So we tend to learn to work with our systems and work with our uh

internal rhythms to work more efficiently that way. Working smarter not harder, right? [clears throat] Recognize the

patterns and hack them. Yeah. So so saying that, right? So you got an employee that’s working, eight to

10 hours a day. How do they hack that system? Uh you know, because they can’t take a power nap, right? will be a

little frosted if they did that. Yeah. Well, the the answer is what I discovered at my cabin this summer. We

have a 600 square foot cabin. I live there three months of the year up northern Ontario and just very austere.

But because of the surroundings for my workout, which is uh pretty intense, I

love to use a a pull-up bar as well. Well, there isn’t one up there, and there’s no way of setting it up without ripping the walls down or something. And

I started to get irritated about the things I couldn’t do up there. There was no, you know, there’s no stationary cycle. is not this is not this and I

started to say well okay I can’t do any of that what can I do really well still and for people who don’t have that

cyclic control over their lives especially people who god forbid are in shift work you can’t do that so you have

to find what can I do really well that will compensate for that and I got home and I hadn’t lost any fitness or

anything so I evidently found ways around it the same with our states through the day yeah I think if you’re looking at people

who are working and doing shift work they do take breaks. So if people are noticing that they’re getting

particularly let’s say fatigued, it’s probably important to structure breaks. Even if it’s just a 15minute break or

whatever timing people have, you can you can just sit and chill and go into self-hypnotic trance if you want to for

minutes and get a recharge or 10 minutes or whatever the case may be. So if people learn how to do that, I do that.

I don’t do that while I’m driving, but a lot of the times if I am driving middle of the day where I would normally be tired, how many times have you caught

yourself driving behind the wheel, hopefully behind the wheel, and just go, “Oh, I’m kind of having one of these

waves of fatigue, right?” Sometimes you just need to recognize that it’s time to pull over and just rest for a little

while before you get back on the road because it’s a safety issue if you don’t have the energy.

Yeah, I I think that’s very interesting. when I I left uh one company, right, big large uh

company and then I went to another in pharmaceuticals and I I literally had to build in my day by by direction an hour,

right? An hour a day and they really, you know, the company really wanted to go over to the gym and walk on the

treadmill or go outside and walk or just do something different, right, than you were doing to rest yourself, right? And

I did find that in those 8 n 10 hours that I would work normally during the

day, I was a lot more efficient by taking that hour out of my day and dedicating that to rest, right? Rest or

doing something different than uh than what I would normally do, sticking at

the desktop, right, and keep on going, trudging through. Uh so I think that’s [clears throat] a very interesting

perspective. Yeah, really is. It’s it’s that it’s that metaphor, Scott. You know, the the old woodsmith and the

young lumberjack and they have a contest who can cut the most trees down and the old guys taking all these breaks and the young guys just going like crazy. At the

end of the day, the old guys cut down more trees. And he said, “But you took all those breaks.” He said, “That’s when I was sharpening the axe.” And that’s

what the breaks do for us. You there’s a tendency to say, “Oh, I can’t take a break. I’m too busy.” But the break

enables us to do the busy work better, even if it is just five or 10 minutes. Do do you find when you’re talking about

and you’re doing this on a daily basis, right? Talking to organizations, do you find a barrier when you’re talking to

senior leaders saying, “I want your people to take time out for breaks.” And do you do you see the flags that we

recommend gambling, you know, a real break? Just kidding. [laughter] Heading down to the casino down the

street and Yeah. Or on your phone. On your on your phone now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard. [laughter]

What’s your answer to that, Chris? I I think that there’s I I have a many

decades in the corpor Well, many decades is an exaggeration. A couple of decades in the corporate world before we left it

all behind to do this, teaching people hypnosis and how to live an awesome life from the from the comfort of my own

home, which I love. But I think that there is a tendency to think that working harder is working

smarter. And you know that Mike people would wear as a badge of honor, right?

The idea that they don’t sleep. I only get 4 hours of sleep a night. Like it’s something to be freaking proud of. And

the reality is Mhm. just like getting not enough to be stupid and bad for you.

Um constantly just trying to work yourself down to the bone and have or having a manager that thinks that you

need to because he does and he imposes that will upon his his staff. you should all believe the same thing I do. This

leads to well uh loss of raore with your the people you’re working with less

productive time because now it I mean just think of it like those are the two things it really leads to but think of a

parenting situation if you’re raising kids and you tell the the child let’s say you can’t eat cookies cookies are

bad for you you’re not allowed cookies what does Johnny do when he goes over to his friend Bobby’s house and Bobby’s mom

buys cookies he eats them all right so I think people they rebel and this

whether they rebel in childhood with their parents or in school with their teachers and then the same thing is

going to happen in the corporate world where they’re on a manufacturing line or whatever the case may be of their job

and their boss is kind of well what’s the term we use for this in the technical sense Mike

yeah I was going to say [laughter] yeah close enough so if you actually

comes to one of the main points that we really wanted to make sure we communicate ated with you guys here is that the the big picture stuff, the

power of raor is so important when in the workforce. So if you’re a leader and

you’re working with people, you need to be respected, not like liked as if

you’re their best friend, but you have to be in ra. Have you ever had a teacher who was just a phenomenal teacher? You

didn’t think he was your buddy, but you you went, “Wow, this guy’s awesome or this woman is awesome. taught taught me

chemistry or calculus or physics or whatever the case may be. You just learned something and you so enjoyed the

teaching environment that you looked up to that person and you were in ra and in much the same way I think leaders need

to be in ra with the people that they work for or what they well they are kind of working for I’m working in support of

you who’s on the production line let’s say right raor is absolutely critical skill and if

you communicate that you value that person’s time you value their energy and their efficiency and you want to support

them in any way you can. You are going to promote that kind of healthy healthy

lifestyle. Getting the appropriate amount of sleep, getting good quality rest, taking that 15 to 30 minute rest

if necessary, recharging. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And I think the the

modern term for that is hustle culture, which I think is way too glorified. I love my

nine hours of sleep. Yeah. Um, but on the topic of leaders, do you think that leaders consciously or

subconsciously influence behavior, whether it be safer decisions or even

the ethics of it? Um, is there any sort of influence you think? Yeah, Mike, I’m going to turn I’m going

to turn this to you. I think we are all doing hypnotic behaviors all the time

without necessarily realizing it. Most people are influencing other people

without recognizing that they’re doing it usually in a bad way like I said. So let’s say being a bad example, not being

in ra creating those kinds of environments where people are likely to rebel in some way or take shortcuts

because they just don’t want to do it the way they’ve been told to. They don’t feel in rap or they don’t have an identity of

I’m a safety-minded person. I’m a corporate contributor. I’m a team member. They’re in it for themselves

because the environment was set up that way. Mike, maybe you can talk more about that. Well, I’m thinking right away, Chris, of

um, God forbid, Edward the Confessor, because King of England 1000 AD, he was known for having something called the

royal touch. And back then, they believe that kings and queens in Europe were put there by divine will. So, you had to

believe them and trust them and so on. Lately, that’s not been understood or believed in quite so much in the case

certainly of Andrew, formerly known as Prince. Um, but if you think of these things, if someone is in a position of

of authority or power are perceived to be important, you have something called

prestige kicking in. And Edward the Confessor used to have one day a year when people who had scroila, the king’s

evil, a form of skin tuberculosis. They would come into the king, which would be about as easy as getting to see the

pope. And he’d lay his hands on them and often because of his prestige, the problem would disappear. The health

problem would vanish. Now there’s layers of rapour happening all the time. My medical doctor told me that how many

people ask him for financial advice? Should should they buy gold? He’s a medical doctor but he’s perceived as

having prestige. And when we’re in a position of authority, when you combine prestige with raor, which values the

other person, and raor is nothing more or less than seeming to be sharing the

same model of the world. We we like people who seem to be similar to us. They feel trustworthy and nice and people who seem to care about us. When

we have prestige and raore together, our power of influence is hypnotic.

So, it’s really about it’s about just to turn this all into like the right

direction for us all here. You can not know that you’re doing a crappy job of having a hypnotic effect on people. Or

you can turn it around. You can learn how to influence people ethically in a useful way like Mike just described with

the, you know, being a king and having the prestige. And then either way, you still want that to become the new

default autopilot unconscious pattern that you’re running. You’re just naturally in raort with people naturally

a good communicator and you don’t have to think about it and that influences them in the right way.

Yeah. I was combining as I was listening, boy, this subject is a mile wide and it’s a mile deep, isn’t it?

Because I think you know, you go all the way back right to the first conversation that we had. I I can remember the days

where I stayed until the senior leader left the office. So I would go behind him. So he would quote know that I was

really following what his his influence was, right? He had no clue. He he absolutely had no clue that I was

staying, right? But I look good to myself. I I was willing to do that. Now you kind of translate that over to what

we’re talking about now. I think whether a leader knows it or not, they have significant influence in a positive or a

negative way, right, over the organizations that that they lead. And

and it’s uh you know, I I’m a big reader of folks like John Maxwell, right? And

and he really kind of tells the message that well, leadership is influence,

right? However, [clears throat] there’s there’s several paths, right, of how you influence an organization and you have a

choice, right? Am I going to do this in a very positive way? Am I going to do this in a very negative way? But many

times I don’t even think a leader recognizes that he may be influenced in

a very negative way. Right now, let’s talk about that because that’s fascinating. Uh, one of the things I learned from one of my

teachers, Dr. John Grinder, was something called the awesome commander problem. And they it came to light a

number of years ago that people in the airline industry because the captain of the plane has so much prestige because

he’s the commander of an aircraft 747 or trip 7 now he’s got a first officer and he’s got a flight engineer too a lot of

the time but he’s perceived as so perfect he’s the awesome commander that even when he made mistakes errors that

could endanger the aircraft they would not say anything even if they saw them even if they saw it

because they shouldn’t speak up. So that’s the kind of influence you could have. So how do they get around it? The solution was they institutionalized it.

And on any given flight, the commander would make three distinct mistakes and

their job was to look for them and catch them. So there’s there’s ways you can get around this stuff.

Yeah. And I think when we talked about this, there’s there’s a sense that a manager or leader could establish that

in a culture. And we want to challenge people listening to think about how can you gify the idea of making mistakes on

purpose so that it’s almost like a challenge for the people on the team to

point them out in a fun way like they’re winning a competition in a sense right and if [clears throat] that could train

people unconsciously see we all learn by repetition and if we are not afraid to do something and then we get to do it

enough it just becomes the new autopilot and all of a sudden it’s oh haha I see the mistake here let’s fix this And all

of a sudden, like Mike said, it’s institutionalized and now people aren’t uncomfortable pointing out things that

need to be improved. Right. Right. And that does tie into, I

guess, if these everyday habits turn into autopilot, that would surely affect

safety because you’re skipping those important steps. And Scott, I’m sure you’ve seen a million examples of this

in your EHS. Yeah. Well, I I have. I mean, I think uh you know, I I I published a book last

year and it was because I spend way too much time on LinkedIn now, right, that I

should and I’m I’m I’m seeing a lot of consultants trying to lead a path that says, well, this is the treeway to

safety success or it’s this way, right? And and I I I see these uh these path

kind of wandering about, right, without uh an author that I know has kind of

walked the ditch, right? So, so a lot of people are making uh very advanced

choices for how we should act [clears throat] that has never been to the front line of an organization to see

how work is actually done. Right? So, when we’re talking about decision- making, when we’re talking about uh

behaviors, uh I I I teach a webinar on, you know, what’s what’s the uh what’s

the problem with safety two? Well, safety one is a problem with safety too, right? So you know safety one how I

started my career of risk mitigation of finding things wrong in the environment fixing those things right and then you

slide over to safety two and says boy it’s about learning right it’s about how things can go right it’s about looking

at things differently it’s about understanding without blame you know how we fix things in a sustainable fashion

and I look at all of the talk going why wouldn’t you do both right why wouldn’t you do both of those things so I look at

it totally as a practitioner. My job first is to take risk out of the work environment and take as much out as I

possibly can knowing that I’m never going to take as much out as I need to. Right? So there’s two sides of that that

I’m always working on. And when I think about it, well, what if people make the decisions that they do? Well, some of it

they don’t know. Right? So some of it I mean it it’s it’s really kind of funny that we’re having this conversation. I

did a webinar uh last night late late last night with an airline company out

of Malaysia and it’s some of the very same things that we’ve already talked about is very hierarchal. We didn’t talk

about senior leaders in the company and I I they asked me says what could we do? I said just doing a better job of near

miss notifications of observations that everyone sees in in the organization

would help you immensely. And there was a stare. There was a blank stare as I was saying those words because it’s not

the way that they work, right? But it should be the way that they work, right? Because

there there’s just tremendous benefit of all all of us learning together, right?

And if we can start to identify those things together, we can start to build controls into the work system. So, I

think this is fascinating talk because I don’t do I don’t say it as well as Chris or Mike, but I I absolutely agree that

yep, these are solutions to these these resident problems. Yeah,

absolutely. Um, and I think the first step to prevention is actually awareness. So, Chris, Mike, do you guys

have any practical tips or insights into how someone can become more aware of these habits?

Um, you want to one of the things Go ahead, Chris. Go ahead. No, no, you you go ahead.

I was just going to say that one of the problems people make is whenever they’re attempting to lead others in a specific direction. They

tend to speak in nominalizations which are essentially management speak. Nominalizations are using nouns that you

cannot put in a wheelbarrow. So we all know that we need a new understanding and as we get this kind of

recognition and this is all nominalizations. It has no real content beyond what their personal experience

and beliefs and so on. reality tunnels put on it. We need a greater specificity as to what is required. And that

specificity in our terms goes to VAK. It’s what will you see, what will you hear, what will you feel when it’s

correct. We’re being so specific that we’re giving something to focus on instead of just vague generalizations.

Right? And that actually fits in so nicely with in the field of NLP or neural linguistic programming which I

really got interested in because of watching Mike do a keynote back in 1993.

That’s what got me all hooked on this. But this all comes from NLP neural linguistic programming. The idea of what

we call the meta model. So that is if someone’s doing you know politicians do this all the time but not with any rapor

a lot. You somebody asks you a hard question. Well, we’ve considered all of the ways that the economy needs to be

transformed so that people can come together in the right sort of way and we have the support of all of the people

and can manifest the you know the it’s [laughter] like shut up because you’re saying absolutely nothing. Now

that can be very hypnotic when you have raur as well or otherwise can be a massive raore breaker. But when

someone’s communicating in that way that isn’t very meaningful, we have to start using language to clarify language. And

that’s what the meta model does. So you can simply use some phrases like how specifically can we x or what

specifically? Usually the word specifically is a nice one to throw in there. How will we know when that has

happened? You can ask clarifying questions to get to the actual deep structure of the meeting. So if somebody

wants you to show up 10 minutes early to this particular production line and

check that these things are are I don’t know set up correctly or calibrated or whatever the heck is going on in the

world of operations. We have to be very specific and not just say it’s important to consider the ramifications of a loose

safety framework such that the safety of all of our teammates is maintained in an ecological what the hell does that even

mean right there. I I don’t disagree with that. I I

think we have learned we’ve adapted right to that type of communication because we live in this Google culture

and now we’re living in a chat GPT culture because I don’t have to be specific because I know they’re going to

turn around and go chat GPT this or going Google for a better answer or a deeper [clears throat] answer. I’ve even

notice that I write like that, right? Is that don’t get too specific because you isolate, right, the message of what that

person should should should feel or should see. I I kind of want to go back. So, so Mike you mentioned what we see,

what we hear. What was that other one? What we feel and what we feel. So, this is how we

process information. Yes, we have visual sense, auditory and kinesthetic. And kinesthetic has the subgroups of

alactory sense of smell and gustatory sense of taste and we process the world through all of those whatever the world

is because we do not apprehend it directly except through the sense of smell which is the only sense that goes

into the lyic system of the brain. Everything else goes through a series of transforms. F1, F2, etc. So when I look

at the screen in front of me, I’m not seeing the screen. I’m seeing an inverted image from ocular vision in my

occiput in the back of my head and my brain is projecting it as though it’s out there. So those are how we look at everything.

And when we and see everything and feel everything and when we help people unpack their experiences in these are

called modalities. Uh when we start to unpack these modalities, we get a greater insight to what they’re actually

processing. Wow. Which leads us to the two magic questions. The Jedi questions. Whenever

somebody says something in any setting and it might be controversial, it might be interesting. The first question is

how did you come to believe that? So they will give you now their epistemology. And then the second question is how do you know it’s true?

I’m looking for their I’m looking [laughter] for their how they’re representing it in their brain to tell me whether or not it’s real. Whether I’m

dealing with somebody with a phobia or listening to a speech and asking for clarification. How did you come to

believe that? And how do you know it’s true? What’s your evidence criteria that this is true? Well, I just thought and

then you start to break this down and we can start inserting different information, but everything is going to be VAK in the long run. Chris.

Yeah. Those are those are the two belief busting questions or belief challenging questions that we can use in

I was going to say almost any conversation but any conversation where let’s say what’s being decided upon is

fundamentally driven by some belief that seems to be out there. We can ask those

questions to unpack the belief. Find out is the belief something that’s still logical? Does it make sense? Is it

correct? How did we come to believe that? And how do we know it’s true? And that might lead you to re-evaluate maybe

how processes are done or what documentation you should be following or um who should be even who should be

doing something. Should this be someone you know this person here’s job or should it be someone else’s job

and these can be really really useful. Yeah. I I think, you know, because my

head goes directly to well, what I see, what I hear, those seem to be the easier

ones, right? What I feel, right? That that kind of tells me it’s in my gut,

right? I’m I’m feeling this way. How do you unpack that? Well, I’ll give you an example. Um,

years ago, I was at HRE College in Toronto, and the student who brought me in to do a hypnosis demonstration said,

“Can you do anything about dyslexia?” And I said,”What do you mean?” She said, ‘Well, I’m dyslexic.’ I said, ‘How do

you know?’ And she said, ‘My doctor said I am.’ And I said, ‘What is the evidence?’ And she said, ‘Well, I can’t

spell.’ And so I said, um, spell a word like renowned. And she goes, R E.

What? What was it? And just gets lost instantly. I said, “What you’re doing?” She’s looking down and to the right. That axis is kinesthetic, the feeling

sense. She’s trying to spell by feelings. That doesn’t work. Watch kids doing spelling bees as they’re spelling words. They’re looking up back and

forth. firing the occiput the sight center. So I said, “Okay, um I’m going to write in a piece of paper ALBU.” And

this the classic way of doing it. I held it up to So she had to look over to the side. I said, “Can you see it?” She went, “Yeah.” I said, “Say it.” She

went, “Albu.” And I said, “That’s very good.” And kept doing this. Anyway, we

broke it into sections and I said, “Now put it all together.” She looks down and to the right and I said, “No, no, it’s up here.” Now she’s using her brain

properly and goes, “A lb bub queue e.” I said, “Congratulations. You just spelled Albuquerque.” And it’s like, “What?” We

break it into sections. She was told she was dyslexic, so kept spelling by feelings. You must apply the right

remedy to the drug. What’s the What’s the old line, Scott? I continued to apply the correct solution, which did

not work despite being the correct solution. That’s exactly right. Running the brain more effectively,

right? Instead of relying on that kinesthetic, that feeling sense of, you know, does it feel like it’s the right

spelling, actually using the visual sense instead. Uh, now obviously kesthetic can be emotions that we feel,

but it can also be tactile stuff. So if you’re doing a job that requires physicality, you’ll know like if you if

somebody was lifting a a heavy weight of some sort, whether it be in the gym or moving something around a warehouse, how

do they know that they’re doing it correctly? They’ll be able to tell you, well, I can feel that I have tension

here, but you know, I’ll know it’s wrong when I feel pain in my lower back or whatever the case may be. And that I

don’t know if you guys have a lot of clients that deal with those kinds of things and people get injured by moving things around, but that’s where feeling

can come in as well. It doesn’t have to be an emotion. [clears throat] Well, I I think it’s I think it’s a um

it’s a big important part of being a practitioner, right? Because we we are

trained to look for things, to listen for things, to hear things, right? But this whole idea of feeling and and we

run into that head-on every single day with people on the front line that they

don’t want to do something or they don’t feel right that that seems safe but they

may go forward with with with you know that direction and they may be be injured but I try to unpack that right I

try to ask leading questions well why do you feel that way right what’s what’s

one barrier that you think you can overcome come right to do that job correctly. Right. So, honestly, I guess

and and I’m not as trained as what you’re demonstrating today, but right relationship building, asking the right

questions is a real important part of being able to unpack what they’re feeling at the time. Is there more to

that? Yeah. Yeah. You just said something that I know Mike and I have just calibrated on on when you said, “Why do you feel that

way?” There’s a key I think there’s a really key concept we want to make sure we explain. Go ahead, Mike. No, you go ahead. And I have a different

thing to say. Oh, all right. Oh, okay. Cool. So, then we’ve got a double. All right. So, the first thing that I I

learned this, man, back in 1993, Mike, when you when you were doing your first brain software keynote lecture at

Carlton University, Porter Hall, and I was so lucky to be there, and you taught a lot about this. There’s this concept

of present state, which is where people are when they are typically stuck. Usually, we describe this for stuck

state. So if people are saying like well I’m depressed or I’m tired, I’m not in a

good mood that they’re describing their current state which is not where they want to be. And then where people want to be, we call that the target state.

And in order to transform the present state into the target state, we need to focus the right resources there. We need

to know what we actually want. And we can guide people there by asking effective questions. Usually the way to

do this is to turn a stuck state question like why am I feeling this bad

way into a how question or a what question. I like how questions. How can

I whatever the case may be such that I feel way I want to feel. Now in order to

do that you have to ask the magic question which starts like this. What do you want to have happen? Or just simply

what do you want? People have to be able to identify what they want. Well, I feel they’ll usually tell you what they don’t

want. So, they’ll unpack. Well, I don’t want to feel so unmotivated uh to show up at work. Okay, wonderful. What do you

want instead of that? Well, you know, I I They’ll repeat themselves and they’ll tell you what they don’t want again. And

at which point, we’ll usually joke with them and say, “Well, the list of things that you don’t want is infinite. You

don’t want I like how Mike says this. You don’t want to build bonfires in your bedroom. You don’t want to mine for tin

on the planet Jupiter.” And I like to add in and you don’t want a dozen root canals even if they are free and

performed by Elon Musk himself. [laughter] So the things you don’t want is infinite. You have to find out what

people do want and then ask them how questions in order to aim them at that

target state. Yes. Who goes to the grocery store with their shopping list of everything

they’re not going to buy? Yeah. Right. Yeah. That actually makes me think of

the sheep mentality at work where I’m sure we’ve all come across somebody like this where they they’re usually a happy

person, but they go to work and all their co-workers around them are miserable. So then they turn miserable

as well. So I guess how do you snap yourself out of that if it’s something

that you have to ask yourself? Because if you’re in that misery, misery loves company and you’re not going to want to

snap out of it. So what would you do? Mike, what you should answer that and you I know you had something else you

were going to say as well. Maybe you’ll find a clever way to blend them together. Let’s see. Let’s go back to what I was

going to say, Scott. When you were explaining about, you know, dealing with people in the workplace and so on. One of the keys with the visual, auditory,

and kinesesthetic systems is people look up back and forth when they’re accessing the visual sense. They go on a level

plane back and forth when they’re accessing the auditory sense. These are all things hardwired in the brain. They

look down and to the right, a right-handed person when it’s feelings. But also the predicates of their speech give it away.

And the different predicates of speech, people all have one preferred system. 60% of Western society prefers the

visual sense. The second largest is kinesesthetic or feelings. A lot of athletes are kinesesthetic. They’re very

in touch with their bodies. And the smallest group is auditory like me. They process the world by sound, by words, and so on. So when you’re talking to

someone, the key is to listen for the predicates to influence them. years ago, my agent was trying to get me to go to

Australia in a certain month. And my wife was saying, who speaks in visual terms, can’t you see? It’s not a bright

idea now. And my agent is coming back with, “Well, I just feel it’s a solid thing for him to make a presence and

she’s talking.” And listen to the two of them back and forth. They couldn’t even communicate. Listen for what the

person’s saying, the feeling sense, and answer them in feeling terms. You know, I want you to grasp this because you’ll

find it’s really solid if you feel talk in feeling terms to them and they’ll listen.

Hit the nail on the head. Get a grip on it. Speak to them in their language that they [clears throat] dialect. Yeah.

Now, you Monica, you you had a question. Just remind me. I now already forgotten.

Um it was more around the sheet mentality and you’re working in this negative environment. How do you snap out of it?

Right. And so, Mike, I think we can talk about this because obviously if people they form this group trance and in fact

it it really makes me think about stage hypnosis shows that you’d done for decades where they go into a bit of a

group trance, the volunteers on stage. So, we would typically say that the the show can progress at the at the rate of

the best subject as restricted by the worst subject and tend to send the bad

volunteers back into the audience. And I think it’s kind of the same mentality in a workplace environment where if a

couple of people are in a bad mood and then people join that, it becomes magnetic and we’re in this bad state.

Now, how can you break through that? Well, the the concept of a pattern interrupt can be useful. But I think

more so is the concept of just modeling the state that you do want others to be in. So if you’re a leader, if you’re a

manager of some kind, you’ve got to get good at controlling your own state and

showing up in the state that you want others to be in. So if you smile and you ask people good quality questions, if

you I mean, we start our Monday morning meetings in our company and we start with, “What was a win for you last

week?” Just anything. I don’t care if it’s business related or I went and got to see my kids at

university on Sunday and we, you know, my wife and I drove to Kingston and we we hung out with our kids for the day and it was awesome. Super fun. Get

people talking about things that are awesome. One of our team members this Monday morning, he said, “I got in

Argentina, he got to go see the band Oasis on the weekend.” And he just lit up. And when people get to talk about

things that they enjoy, they show up. And this completely pulls them out of

their bad state and gets them in a good state. So get really good at asking questions that drive people into these

awesome states and then just amplifying those. Yeah. And changing states on purpose.

years ago, I had a thing for Yamaha in Niagara on the or Jordan Station near Niagara and it was in a beautiful

setting. I showed up right from an event in Toronto and they were hammered. They’re standing around the bar and

everybody’s drinking and laughing and I went, “Oh, shoot. This is going to be hard. No one’s going to pay any attention to a guy with a freaking flip

chart and some markers here.” 10 feet. Not at all. I went out in the hall. I went, “I’m in a really bad state having seen that.” So, I shook it off. If you

move your physical body, you change state right away. I changed my breathing slow and deep and I thought I’m going 30

seconds later I’m going to go back in and look at that room with different eyes. And I walked in and looked around in this different state and I realized

they weren’t drunk. Some of them were drinking ginger ale. They were happy and it was one of the best keynotes and

trainings I did because I wasn’t carrying the baggage of thinking, “Oh, they’re going to be a problem.” Because if I thought that, I would have

presented that back to them. Your perceptual filter changed. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. I think that’s

actually called the confirmation bias. If you have a thought, Yes. you’re going to search out things to confirm that

thought. It is. Yeah. Yes. That’s right. We’ll delete information of the contrary because we’re getting 3 to 20 million bits a

second at any given moment. Robert Anton Wilson called it your reality tunnel. We put together all of our confirmation

biases and we get one reality tunnel and this is what we believe even if it’s wrong.

But I you know I to add to that and and again right my perspective is that

leaders have an opportunity to lead differently right and happiness in the

workplace it it’s not exclusive for the leader to mandate that we’re going to be happy right but that person’s actions

certainly elevate the possibility that that could happen I’ll give you a story that I was a junior leader right in my

my first facility but I came from an environment, my family environment where

relationships were important, where my ability to get to the front line was mandated by my grandmother because she

worked the front line in a manufacturing facility with a message that said, “You better take care of people like me,

right?” So, one of the first things that I did, I I would get with these work crews right on the front line and they

weren’t all happy, but I would ask questions is, “Well, tell me about your life, right? Tell me about your family.

Oh, your your son plays little league ball. I would show up at a ball game, right? I didn’t say anything. I just

showed up at a ball game and they would go back to work and they would talk about it, right? I would show up at a

piano recital. Even those those are not my favorite, right? But they would come back and they would talk about it. And

those small things, right, created a different behavior at work than the

other leaders could act ever achieve, right, because they were looking for somebody that would step out. Right. So

my conversations changed, my relationships changed simply by doing small things, right? And you could see I

mean Mike and Chris, I mean literally you could see joy, right, with those teams when I engage with them

rather than some of the other leaders that were only forcing down mandates, right? So I think as leaders we have to

step out, right, a little differently than normally we do. I think I think

you’re you’re raising a really interesting point here that the quality of a leader the qualities that a leader

needs to have or manager are different than the qualities of somebody on a production line or doing some somebody

on um whatever the case maybe even even in sales. How many times have you seen

people get promoted because they performed really well at a job at this level, level A, let’s say. So they get

promoted to level B and now they’re a people manager. Maybe it’s a sales manager, maybe it’s a production

manager, something like that. But it’s a totally different skill set, isn’t it? Totally. And just because somebody performs

really well at the level they were at doesn’t mean that they have the skill to do the next thing. And I actually think

this this makes so much sense. We we have a lot of uh hypnotherapists in our

business who are really good at helping people with the skill the tool of hypnosis or inner linguistic programming

or life coaching whatever the skill is. It’s a totally different skill to be an entrepreneur and run your own business

and need to learn how to do the marketing and the client attraction and all that kind of stuff, right? All the

all the different things. And so it’s much the same way. Just because you’re good at one thing doesn’t make you

automatically go to the other. So I think if you’re this is a Peter principle. Yeah. Yeah. Peter principle. Everybody tends to rise

to the in an organization to the level of their own incompetency and then stops and stays there forever. Bingo. So if you’re a hiring manager and

you’re putting people in these positions where they’re managing people, at least make sure that they show an

interest in the kinds of skills that you just described, Scott, rather than just being really good at the thing that

their people do. You can be excellent at the thing that your people are doing and totally suck at communication, not show

any interest. The absolute best thing you can do to inspire them is have them respect you like we talked about with

prestige and stuff like that, but also show an interest in them. H be be in raor with them and share their

interests. Yep. I think it’s u a well-known fact that people don’t leave a bad job

because of the job. They usually leave because of bad leadership. Yeah, that’s [clears throat] a really good point.

Yeah, we need to speak to you about that, Chris. [laughter] I’ve been wondering how I could open that. So,

that’s hilarious. Yeah. Oh, man. We have a we have an ongoing joke in our company

where we fire each other for hilarious things, but then immediately hire each other back. So, I think you’re you’re

fired. And I go, well, I just hired myself back. Haha, I can do that. I’m a CEO. Um, yeah, that is that is such a

good point. That is such a good point that it is about people people first. If you put people first

and you build relationships with them and you create the right kind of performance states so that they want to

do a good job that those become the automatic to get back to what we started

with, right? The unconscious autopilot habits. You want them in the right kinds

of habits. Right. Right. So I think as like the main takeaway just to wrap everything up

whether you’re top down or you’re in the minds I think the biggest takeaway is

you just need to be aware of your behaviors and how it all trickles down and circles back to each other.

So do you have a simple trick that everyone could take away and maybe try

today to improve this? Yeah, Mike, do you want to do you want to um a couple

of things we can do here. Either getting just getting in the zone, I think is a really important skill we teach everyone to do. We could also talk about some

some just some quick linguistic things that we have in our notes, which getting in the zone, are you

talking about the getting in the zone one? Well, no. I mean, just a general idea of how how would you how do you get in the

zone to be a people person? Uh so I think just the idea of all John

Grinder’s chain of excellence the idea that you you your performance is going to be dictated by the state that you’re

in your state is going to be dictated by your physiology which is how you stand how you move etc. And then your

physiology is going to be affected at the highest level by your breathing. So breathing the right way and getting yourself in that zone even re just

repeating some positive affirmations. Mike taught this to me years ago. uh we call it ego state shopping to get that

right ego state in the executive brain you can just simply stand the way you would stand if and then develop the

shopping list I am feeling really connected to my people enjoy talking to me I share an interest with them I’m a

natural people person I build rapport I inspire them to feel good about what

they’re doing and open communication so if you just sort of say a bunch of those things out loud while standing and

breathing as though it’s say as though you believe it yeah what’ll happen is you’ll be immediately in the right zone. So there

was that to which I would add. You want to you want to add to that? No, I’m just going to say the as if

frame. The as if frame is ask you how would I how would I stand, move, speak

if I was extremely confident, extremely affirming of the other people around me, extremely empowering of others. How

would I do it? And then you step into it. We don’t say fake it till you make it. We say fake it till you become it.

And you can do this with many areas of life. You can’t do it with brain surgery or you know flying an airplane. you can

do with lots of other areas. And I I did this years ago, uh 2005, knew nothing

about wine, didn’t drink wine, didn’t drink at all back then. Bought a wine encyclopedia, wine for dum dummies, read it, and started posting as

though I was a wine expert in Toronto. City Bites magazine called me one of the top nine in wine in Canada. I got

invited to um host the Ontario Wine Awards in character. People started sending me cases of Burgundy and

Bordeaux. I jumped in at the top and figured it out on when I got there. Now, some things you can do that with, but

act as if you already have that skill and notice how everything changes. Yeah. Wow. I actually practiced that myself.

I’ve been saying lately, act like the person you want to become to motivate myself to go to the gym in the mornings.

Uh, it hasn’t been working, but that’s that’s on me in my coffee machine. But anyways, that’s a great point.

[clears throat] Well, you can [snorts] um you can leverage this will apply well to corporate world I think as well as going to the gym that we we call it the baby

steps baby steps principle. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time at a

time. Yeah. You get there one bite at a time. So you look for the smallest little

noticeable change that you can make. So if somebody’s looking to motivate themselves to go to the gym in the

morning, maybe instead you start with I just I just do five push-ups or whatever

on my floor and when I get to the sufficient level of improvement, okay, then it becomes just going to the gym.

So or it’s just I pack my gym clothes and I put them in my gym bag and that’s what I do in the morning. That can be

the little incremental step. I drive to the gym and if I don’t feel like it, I don’t do it or I go there for 5 minutes

and I’m not feeling it, I leave. these whatever the incremental steps work out for you and I think the same thing can

be the the um the process in a work environment. So what is the one little

change that we can make that’s ridiculously trivial to in terms of effort but can actually

give give us a result and start maintain the chain. Mhm. Yeah. Maintain the chain which was a Jerry Seinfeld line right maintain the

chain. So he would write comedy every single day even if it sucked. just get in the habit of spending a few minutes doing it, never skipping a day. So,

maintain that chain of little baby steps. Um, another really useful concept

doesn’t come from hypnosis, but we learned this from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, the idea of habits

stacking. So, if you need people to make a small change, what can you tack it on to that you already do? Simple example

was uh actually within about the last year or so, Mike, you and I both started taking creatine as a as a supplement,

which has a lot of health benefits. Well, to remember to do it, it would be easier to just add it to the coffee that

I’m already having in the morning. Simple thing to just have it stack going, well, I already have my coffee with my cream. All I got to do is grab a

scoop of this stuff, do it. So, what can you do in the workplace or what can you inspire people to do or teach your people to do in the workplace where

they’re already doing a thing? It’s already unconscious and you just bolt on another little habit to it.

Yeah. Yeah. In my case, I’m a thyroid patient, so I have to take thyroxine every day for 30 years. So, it’s just

thyroxine. Oh, yeah. Creatine right to it. So, stacking those two together, something that’s already happening. There’s one other thing I want to make

sure we leave you guys with, and that is the idea of language for you versus we.

And the way to think about this is imagine you’re giving somebody some sort of constructive criticism. You are

always late, right? You know, it’s important that you show up on time. It’s important that you do your sifty checks.

That feels combative. And that usually comes along with body language where you’re opposing each other. You know, if we’re sitting on opposite sides of the

table, we are like confrontational. So, it’s much better body language aligned

to people. And when you’re giving them feedback on something you want to change, use we language. We find that

it’s so much more effective, isn’t it? When we act, hence the feedback. So there’s no table in between. No barrier.

We’re a team. We’re we’re positioned beside each other, right? And and you can use that as a metaphor. You can

actually do it if you’re in person. It’s hard to do over Zoom. Um but using wei language when you’re offering some sort

of suggested change. Now, if you want to on the opposite side of the coin, let’s say you want to commend somebody for a

job well done. That’s great. You can say, “Hey, I really appreciate how you

xyz,” whatever the thing is because people will love that that you’re calling out them. They like to get the

recognition when it’s positive, but they don’t want to be told you need to fall into line, you need to do a better job,

you need to show up on time, that kind of stuff. Interesting. That is a really good takeaway, actually. And I think I do

that even in arguments with friends or partners. It’s always you did this instead of we should be working on this.

No, that that’s amazing. Um Scott, any final takeaways? I I think it’s just a fascinating

discussion. I know we’re probably at the end of our time. This could be a two-hour podcast and maybe it should.

Uh but I I think that I always try to think with a lens of of leadership and

and you know what that influence model looks like. what are some methodologies that I should consider? So, I’ve learned

a lot, you know, today and maybe some subtle subtle changes that I even need

to consider um you know, and how I lead. So, nope, I uh mine’s clear. I just want

to ask more questions and maybe we will. So, I know I’m also hypnotized. I can talk

to you guys forever. But um anybody wants to learn more about what Mike and

Chris offer, visit mikebandhypnosis.com. Check out their podcast, The Brain Software. It’s available wherever you

listen. And Mike, Chris, thank you again so much for joining us today. It was a very eye openening conversation. Um we

would love to have you back again. And like I said, I could just keep talking to you forever. So thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. A pleasure indeed. [laughter] All right. Thanks, guys.

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