Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the episode today, we have Luke Chao. Luke, welcome. Thank you for having me. It is my pleasure. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do? Sure. When I was 23 years old in 2006 I started a hypnotherapy practice called “The Morpheus Clinic for Hypnosis” here in Toronto Canada, and at that time I really didn’t know what I was doing.
As most 23 year old’s don’t, I didn’t know, I didn’t really fit into the 9-5 corporate world, but one of my first early jobs was to work for a company that made websites for real estate agents, template websites in fact, so I kind of got exposed to marketing. I realized that people who ran successful businesses aren’t necessarily smarter than me or harder working than me. They just made different life choices, so hypnotherapy was something I was always kind of interested in starting when I was an unhappy adolescent and read a lot of books in the library. Then I got a degree in English literature and after that I found myself in the working world, so I kind of put everything together, started my practice and within a few months I was making a full time living from hypnotherapy. Within a couple of years I hired my first employee and then onboarded my first associate practitioner, so I grew my practice into a group of practice, and I’ve been doing this ever since then.
So far I’ve survived the global financial crisis, I’ve now survived a pandemic, I’ve survived the street that I’m on. The pandemic actually has made online calls more than normal, which is why I’m confident that in the next phase of my career, I’m going to have more international clients, especially as I make more videos, spread more ideas. I’m going to inevitably have more international clients, and I’m here to kind of talk about some of the biggest insights that I’ve realized going through this journey, because hypnotherapy is what I would describe as an emerging profession. In most jurisdictions it’s not regulated, and that kind of poses some problems where if you go to, let’s say a dentist, you know that they’re going to follow good hygiene procedures, you know that there’s a certain standard of practice that they need to uphold to keep their license, you know that they’ve been through a certain number of years of university education and probably certifications beyond that. With the hypnotherapist, you don’t know whether they had a weekend workshop they took or whether they actually studied for a few years.
That information asymmetry where the hypnotherapist kind of knows the profession and their credentials or their lack of credentials, and their qualifications or lack thereof, but clients don’t is sort of one of the challenges we face and I think that any listener who’s say a yoga instructor or a fitness trainer or who’s otherwise in an unregulated profession or occupation faces similar challenges as a hypnotherapist where they could be excellently qualified and be doing excellent work, but just because they have a lot of colleagues who don’t, it can be a challenge to kind of onboard new clients, so that’s what I’m here to talk about.
Thank you for the introduction. It’s a good opener, so how do you go about tackling that issue that, let’s say many other businesses face? Yeah, well I — so one of the issues is the information asymmetry. Another issue is the emerging profession and another issue is that personal services come with a certain cost, unlike to say dentistry, people usually pay out of pocket, so that’s yet another barrier that a hypnotherapist or a yoga instructor or a fitness trainer then has to overcome. So how do we stand out, how do we compete? So over the years, I’ve kind of abandoned some common practices and I’ve kind of developed my own best practices and one common practice in a service profession like this is the free consultation, so you’ll kind of meet in person or on the phone or these days online for 15, 20, 30 minutes, You chat with the client and the client kind of decides from that conversation if they want to work with you usually on a per hour basis.
So that’s kind of the norm. It actually isn’t really an exceptional offer if your offer to new clients is a free consultation, so I was kind of looking at how do I how do I exceed that? How do I stand out? At the same time, I was thinking about this puzzle. I also was starting to damage my voice, where, because a hypnotherapist working ethically is going to be efficient with time. We always have to be onboarding new clients. So every time I would give 30 minutes away for free, let’s say half of those people became a client and out of the people who become clients, they might do two or three sessions. I was giving away a lot of free talking for each paid session that I could actually charge for. Just before we started recording we were talking about how your sales at the end of the year are the product of the number of clients you have that year, multiplied by the number of visits or appointments multiplied by the average cost per appointment, and the product of that is your sales.
Well there is an upper limit to how much I can charge before people start thinking I’m greedy or unethical. It’s also of course unethical if I’m having the client coming back for unnecessary sessions, and in hypnotherapy it’s quite possible to talk someone out of a smoking habit in two hours. It’s quite possible to talk someone into the mindset of a confident public speaker for them to recognize the legitimate authority and expertise in a few hours and beyond that, in my view, it’s kind of unethically dragging out the client’s progress. So the one factor that we can increase ethically is how many clients we onboard, and you may have heard that old line about how it’s cheaper to retain a client than to onboard a new client, right? Unfortunately in hypnotherapy after 15 plus years, I believe the best practice is to import new clients.
It is true that we will have repeat clients who quit smoking and then come back later to overcome their fear of public speaking. That that does happen, but in many cases, I think when a practitioner’s looking for ways to maximize the number of visits, that’s where it crosses over into unethical territory. So we have to solve this puzzle of how do we regularly onboard clients? Well, one big picture solution that I’ve kind of arrived at is that there’s cheap signaling and there’s costly signaling, and this is an idea that comes from economics. So cheap signaling is when you signal that you’re good through means that anyone can do or means that are easy to fake, so for example, anyone can put up a professional looking website that claims they’re the best, right? That doesn’t actually take too much experience or training or skill or knowledge these days.
But not just anyone can offer a money back guarantee the way that you do, or at least not over a timeline that lasts a few years. In my profession, I have seen some practitioners kind of copy the money back guarantee, I guess they think it’s an empty boast, but then they realized very quickly that if you advertise a money back guarantee and the client’s not happy, they’ll call you on that, so it’s not an empty boast. You actually have to first set reasonable expectations and then deliver upon whatever promises you make in order to have a money back guarantee long term, so that’s an example of costly signaling. It is a signal to potential clients that you’re good at what you do, but it doesn’t come cheaply. So, over the years, I’ve kind of increasingly emphasized the costly signals. One, is the money back guarantee that I’ve had since day one, which I kind of use as a feedback mechanism to improve the work I do.
I’ll share this with you. I actually intend to become one of the best practitioners; one of the best hypnotherapists in the world, or at least the English speaking world by the time I retire. And considering I started at 23 and considering I’m actually buying feedback via a refund policy, I think it’s actually plausible that at some point in my career I’ll be the go-to person for the more difficult cases. Just a side-note there, let’s say that’s a goal for you, how will you realize when you meet that goal? Just purely out of curiosity. Yeah. So, one of my sort of internal informal metrics for whether I am sort of the, the go-to person or whether I seem to be standing out above the crowd is how many lawyers do I have as clients that year? And it seems like a weird metric, but for me, I actually like lawyers interestingly enough. I think that there are professional that generally values truth and morality and that values ethics.
I actually quite like my lawyer clients, but I take how many lawyers I have as clients, or have onboarded that year as kind of an informal metric as to, am I communicating the right message to the public? Because I’m in downtown Toronto, it’s not the capital of Canada, but it’s the financial and the media and the cultural center of Canada. So, how many lawyers I have. Also another informal metric that I’ve kind of been keeping an eye on is how many clients do I have of a prominence such that they have a Wikipedia page. Again, it seems like a strange metric, but when it comes to just kind of inside my head, I’m asking, am I sort of standing out as the crème de la crème? It’s how many lawyers do I have and how many clients do I have this year of a prominence that they have a Wikipedia page?
Because that’s telling me that they are doing the research and they’re coming to me and that’s where I want to be. I want to be the person that people choose when they do a really deep dive into. So coming back around to big picture strategies. The costly signal that I’ve implemented for the past 2 and a half years is the written treatment plan, and this is something that I’m not aware any other hypnotherapist does. I know it’s not common in psychotherapy or psychology to provide a written treatment plan at cost or for free up front where the sessions are outlined and an estimate for a total is given, so it’s only after more than a decade in the profession that I was able to kind of gather enough feedback from prior cases that I can use that data to predict future cases with a degree of accuracy.
So, again, it’s a costly signal. I am signaling to the market that I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m talking about, so If one of your listeners has been in their profession for 10 years, 20 years, at that point they don’t have to do what they did as beginners, because as a beginner I had to kind of give 30 minutes to the client for free as a conversation, and I talked about the the downside of that, but as a more seasoned professional, I can develop my own best practices, I can do things like written treatment plans, I can make predictions that more often than not come true based on the experience that I’ve gathered. So, the written treatment plan kind of falls under a kind of, I’ll say open source philosophy. The term is borrowed from the software industry where the source code of software is given away for free, but then implementation of your specific business use case might be charged for consulting or tech support might be charged for.
So, I am kind of, showing up to two podcasts. I am making YouTube and TikTok videos sharing the ideas my clients are paying for when I give them my private time and personal attention under the idea that good ideas ought to spread, and I’m not holding back. It’s not like my paying clients get the secret sauce and then the public gets a watered down version of the secret sauce. I’m actually sharing the ideas. I think the whole world ought to hear, because my private clients are benefiting from them, so I’ve taken this sort of open source philosophy and I’m doing written treatment plans and doing like podcast interviews and YouTube videos and so on. Which, again, is a costly signal. It’s hard to fake or maybe even impossible to fake unless you know what you’re doing, and for many of your listeners who have been in their business for a number of years. At this point, they might want to update their self image, because probably after a few years you really know what you’re doing. After a couple of decades, you definitely know what you’re doing and you can probably incorporate costly signals into your marketing in ways that a newbie can’t and especially in these kind of emerging or unregulated professions where the barrier to entry is very low and clients don’t really know how to sort out practitioners who know what they’re talking about from practitioners who don’t.
That’s a nice principal, thank you for sharing it. The slightly funny thing is that the beginning of every episode, there’s an offer of a free consultation for the marketing agency, which is kind of funny. I might want to like speak over that just as a funny edit or something, but the interesting thing that I wanted to get your feedback on was — because I have spoken to people about ethics in pricing before and there are — there is some take on if you’re, let’s say if the problem that you’re solving is that valuable to the person to the degree that they would pay, say, I don’t know what you charge but a premium price, let’s say for a problem they really want solved and there’s nothing unethical about charging that way. I don’t come with a preformed conclusion on this, so it’s not a loaded question, but what are your thoughts around, because you mentioned charging too much is unethical. How do you unpack that?
I believe I actually phrased it as “Seen as unethical”, I don’t actually believe that. In the future when I’m in demand and I might be charging $800, $1000 per session, I don’t believe I’m practicing unethically if my calendar is actually full enough that that’s how much I have to charge, but it is unfortunately often seen as unethical if other people in your profession charge $150 or $200, and you’re charging $300. We both know there are reasons to kind of charge a higher rate, and it lets me do things like I can target rapid change. If I were only charging $100 an hour, I need the client to to come back for 5, 10 sessions for me to make back the customer acquisition costs and my rent and everything else I have to pay for. I charge a high enough fee that if a client only does one session and they’re done and they’re happy, I don’t begrudge them because I got paid well for that session.
I think there’s actually an argument to be made that if one is to be at his best, if one is to not be in survival mode, but is able to kind of put the client’s needs first, then one must charge a high enough rate that they can kind of self actualize as whatever professional they are, so the complaint isn’t that it’s unethical. The complaint is that unfortunately it’s seen as unethical, if you charge, say three times as much as your competitors and that’s not really the public image that I want.
If you’re going to be the world’s greatest hypnotherapist, or someday, or maybe you are even now and you’re not even aware of it, then you might have to consider charging a higher rate. And then there might be a conflict there, If you have that in your mind, but if you don’t, then no worries. Currently I’m priced so that clients don’t have to wait more than one or two weeks to get an appointment with me, but my typical week is fairly busy and there’s still a little bit of time for things like podcast interviews, or everything else I do, like I. T. H. R, and all the other tasks that a business owner has to do. So I’m busy enough charging probably the highest rate in Toronto or among the highest rates in Toronto. Obviously once I expand my reach beyond Toronto, I’m going to just by necessity, because I can’t make more time have to charge a higher rate, but one of the best parts I think about this open source philosophy is that it does kind of offer an ethical solution to the fact that I’m going to block access to me when my rates are higher. So, in in the healthcare world, often we talk about access to care, and just like lawyers will take cases pro bono. Sometimes psychotherapist have a sliding scale.
My answer to that is that people can hear my best ideas that I’m putting out there in public, they can meditate upon those ideas, they can listen to what I put out there as often as they want to. It’s free. The good ideas are free, please take them. People are paying for my time and attention, which is scarce. So, let the good ideas spread, but of course just because I can’t make more time, my time and attention is what people are going to have to pay for, whatever the market rate is going to be. Generally speaking, what are the problems that you typically solve, and I interjected, so feel free to go on with with what you’re what your notes were. No, no, no, no, no, no. So, hypnotherapists kind of have a reputation for helping people to stop smoking, we have a reputation for helping people lose weight, we have a reputation for helping people to overcome fears. So just because of that expectation, people will often come to us for those three issues and the other, so that’s about half the pie chart.
I’ve made pie charts showing the breakdown of which issues my client’s come for, so that’s half the pie chart. The other half of the pie chart is divided rather finely into quite a number of different issues. All falling under the category of problems that benefit from a change in attitude or perspective, and hypnotherapists kind of do work that’s distinct from psychotherapists in the sense that we very specifically use verbal suggestion, we use our words to give people a world view or perspectives or attitudes that are going to help them with less regard for how they got to the point where they have a problem and with less regard for the past in general. We don’t work as much with serious mental health issues. Obviously, I’m not speaking for every hypnotherapist in the world. In different jurisdictions, hypnotherapist can do different things. In Ontario, we don’t see people as much for serious mental health issues, so I’ll refer out cases of depression for example, but we will see clients for things like, to improve their golf game, we’ll see clients for things like, they want to be more intimate with their wife, but they kind of feel a little bit uncomfortable, so they want someone to talk them into sort of maybe a more sex positive worldview, or things like that are the typical case where in many cases the client doesn’t really feel like five years of psychotherapy is the solution.
They might instead go to a hypnotherapist such as myself and as long as it’s in the realm of something that benefits from an attitude change, I can probably help. If it’s outside of that, like major depression then probably I wouldn’t be the right professional or at least the first professional that you would see. Another point I kind of wanted to add is that this whole transparent, or what I’ve called open source approach, which is encapsulated by the tagline for my business, “We make hypnosis make sense.” Seems to attract a different clientele and um you know this this will be of interest to your listeners because you know obviously if you’re in a service profession where you have only so many hours, you kind of want to spend those hours with an ideal clientele rather than a non-ideal clientele.
So, when my marketing kind of, put the guarantee more first and foremost, or if I offered a free consultation, just like everyone else, I was kind of attracting just the general public. It tended more to be somewhat more women, somewhat more educated people, but it was a fairly representative cross-section of downtown Toronto, but ever since I started doing these things that other people aren’t doing, like having a written treatment plan or posting YouTube videos where it’s literally unedited footage of me working. Now, I’m attracting more of an affluent clientele. I’m attracting more of an educated clientele, more of a sophisticated or discerning clientele who will go out of their way to research and to be looking for someone they can trust, someone who might actually add a layer of better thinking over theirs.
So, because the work I do is to kind of, give people more helpful thoughts to keep than the ones they generate on their own. Someone who is, let’s say, a lawyer or a physician might not trust just anybody, right, because it is possible for a hypnotherapist to kind of leave you with a worst worldview than you walk in with. So, it is appropriate to be discerning about who’s putting ideas for you to accept in your head or at least who is suggesting ideas that you might accept for yourself. So ever since I kind of started doing these written treatment plans up front for free, or this kind of costly signaling that is hard to fake. I’ve been fulfilling kind of, an internal metric for how sophisticated my clientele is. Which is, how many lawyers and my onboarding or how often? And it used to be in the earlier days of my career, it was kind of an event when I onboarded a client and on the intake form, their occupation said lawyer, it was like, okay, this person trusts me enough that they’re letting me put my ideas in their head, that that was an event.
In recent years it’s once a month maybe. It’s quite common for me these days to have a new client who’s a lawyer and they are letting me put my ideas inside their head, because first I actually wrote out what those ideas will be, and if they want to do a deeper dive, they can see very transparently how I work via my YouTube channel and then they reach out, because they trust me and it also kind of locks out the competition who might not commit what they say to writing or who you can’t just kind of transparently watch ,and again, each business owner kind of reaches a point in their career where they’re able to do this kind of thing. It’s not going to be in year one, but after a number of years they might be confident enough to do written proposals, or to do a money back guarantee, or to show unedited footage of them in action when they do the work that they do.
So, I’m saying to your listeners that if you are in a service profession that’s kind of, opaque or that’s poorly understood, at least I’ve gone first to say that in my rather unusual profession, this kind of strategy works and attracts a good clientele for the limited number of hours I have in everything. Yeah, it’s a marketing lesson for those that are listening, but it’s also kind of an example of how you should put your best foot first, is the phrase that springs to mind. I had a couple of questions if that’s all right. The first one was, how does the client feel about being on YouTube? What your thoughts are around that, because I would imagine that’s something that someone would run into if they tried to do that themselves and then, as a sort of secondary one, do you still get anyone who’s very skeptical of the whole concept of hypnotherapy or even hostile towards it.
So to answer the first question, I’m not looking among clients who ask for a treatment plan for people to put on YouTube. The people you’ll see on YouTube in my watch me work series are kind of, I think two of them are friends of a former employee of mine. So, we kind of got them through that back channel where they know exactly what they’re signing up for. They’re not paying for the session. They kind of are okay or more than okay being on YouTube, they know what the deal is. One of them I think was a former client, again, the deal is it’s a free session. You could either pay to work with me privately, which I’m happy to do, but for anyone who’s absolutely okay with it, if you want to kind of participate in my project to show what I do to the world, then if you volunteer, we we just ask for consent that we post the session on YouTube so that there is no conflict there.
The second question about skepticism or hostility. Well, the people who end up reaching out to me are a self selecting group and generally they kind of know that they’re gonna be paying out of pocket for this private service. So by the time someone’s in a mindset where they’re reaching out to potentially pay for a private service, there is no hostility, sometimes skepticism, that is there, but it’s kind of, it would be very unusual for someone to call us and they’re hostile, because there is no court mandated hypnotherapy, and if someone’s spouse is making them quit smoking and call us, then we kind of don’t really want to engage with the client until we have their full consent and consent matters. And in any healthcare profession, which, depending on your jurisdiction, hypnotherapy might or might not fall into informed consent is the standard for consent before you deliver any kind of treatment at all, where the client ought to fully understand what they’re getting themselves into.
They also ought to know what risks, if any, are involved before they’re able to consent to treatment. So hence the written treatment plans and all the transparency and so on and so on, but it also kind of, I think helps to shortcut any skepticism. My one liner for people who question whether hypnosis works is that for me, it’s unusual that a few hours of careful listening to careful speech makes no impact. It’s almost inevitable that a few hours of careful listening to careful, relevant speech is going to have a positive impact. Yeah, logical position. I mean it’s a very, should we say, beginner’s knowledge that I have about, I would say “hypnotism”, rather than “hypnotherapy” and I’m not sure how — if you make a differentiation between those two, but hypnotism for me as I understand it is; there are different, should we say, levels of suggestibility that different people have.
Have you ever had anyone who was very difficult to help? Yeah, there is some debate in the hypnotherapy world, both when it comes to hypnotism as distinguished from hypnotherapy as well as whether everyone can be hypnotized. So I’m kind of old school, I started practicing over 15 years ago. I used the term hypnotherapy and hypnotism rather interchangeably. Not everyone uses these two terms interchangeably, so yeah, I do straight up traditional formal hypnotism where I am talking to the client almost nonstop throughout the session. That’s what I specialize in, that’s what I’m good at, that’s what I find is the most effective when it comes to getting the client from Point A to Point B. There are practitioners who kind of meld psychotherapy with hypnotism, but in Ontario that’s kind of legally fraught with peril. So, yeah, when I say hypnotherapy I’m talking about straight up traditional hypnotism to me, it’s somewhat academic that the character of that debate, because for practical purposes, not everyone can expect to, let’s say, quit smoking after a few hours of careful listening.
No, the typical person in my experience can quit smoking after a few hours of careful listening. At least when the speech while they’re listening is helpful and relevant and is going to give them stepping stones to join the non-smokers in their life. So, we do our best to kind of assess clients up front. It’s part of practicing ethically, in my view. I don’t take the idea that everyone can easily be hypnotized, or everyone is a suitable candidate for hypnotherapy. I think that’s one of those lines that hypnotherapists kind of use as good PR, but which doesn’t really kind of stand up if you, for example have a money back guarantee. So yeah, the money back guarantee actually is a great filter for sorting out the good ideas from the bad ones without having that kind of accountability. Often you say things like everyone is suitable for hypnotherapy, but with a filter like a money back guarantee, then you stop saying things like that everyone’s a suitable candidate for hypnotherapy.
So we do our best to kind of separate um you know those for whom will recommend alternative next steps and that happens Maybe 10 or 15% of the time that we are onboarding a new client. It doesn’t mean they can’t be hypnotized, because plausibly over many, many hours of careful listening, they listen more carefully and then with good speech they can adopt the ideas being spoken, that is plausible, but that’s academic to me. Because when people want to know if they should engage, they’re asking about the rapid change, they’re not asking to be in here 10 Times over the next five minutes. Is there anything that I should have asked you about today? I feel like I’ve covered most of at least what what I wanted to talk about. We did talk about kind of giving your listeners a sample session of hypnotism that’s kind of geared toward what a business owner or what someone who’s in charge of marketing might want to adopt as a mindset.
So if that’s still amenable to you, if we do have the time for it, I’ll briefly outline it so the listener can give consent before proceeding. Would you like to share what your goals are before you get started with that? Sure, my goal here is that there’s that saying, which I think can be attributed to Gandhi, “to be the change you want to see in the world.” I have had bad experiences engaging with personal services or even mental health services for myself in the past. I wish I had been given informed consent or I wish I was given the information I would have needed to give informed consent. I wish I was given a timeline. I wish I was given a treatment plan. So I am kind of practicing in ways that I want to see more people do and because I’ve kind of gone first, I can say with some authority that this transparent approach, if you do have kind of the years of experience to be offering a transparent approach, that this is a good practice, this does get you a better clientele, this does overcome many of the roadblocks that prevent people from signing up as a client with you.
So, that’s a large part of the reason why I’m here. If people want to get in contact with me for private sessions, they can contact The Morpheus clinic for Hypnosis at www.morpheusclinic.com and if you want to hear me talk for hours and hours about the things I talk about, my YouTube channel or my TikTok channel are at “Morpheus Hypnosis”. The TikTok channel is newer than the YouTube channel, but both have videos that I’ve put out where you can hear my ideas about how to live a good life. Well, thank you for that and thank you for the answer. Before you go into your cool sort of hypnotism stuff, that’s a technical term that I just used there. Have you considered that you might actually be an amazing voice over artist also? I have considered it and I also have a few thousand dollars of microphones as a good voice over artist does, but I am busy enough with my hypnotherapy career, which also demands a good voice, that at this point I have no plans to do voiceover work, but I have thought about possibly volunteering to narrate some public domain works.
If the pandemic gets worse, if I kind of start running low on clients. A way to kind of occupy my time, it might be too kind of narrate some classic books. Yes, I have thought about that. Thank you. All right, Luke. Well, thank you for your contribution and your your time today. I think it’s been very interesting, and would you like to take it away? Absolutely, and thank you for having me. I’ll describe for your listeners first the outline of what I intend to communicate, and then I’ll do the session, which I will try to do as succinctly as possible. So it’s going to be first a process of relaxing and turning inwardly. I’m gonna communicate then the idea that there’s much power in having reality on your side, or one way to put it, is having integrity. So caring about truth, pursuing truth. That gives you the power of having reality on your side, where the confidence you’ll have is grounded in truth. Another point of view that I’m going to communicate is that in most human endeavors, a positive sum view of the endeavor is more helpful than a zero sum view of the endeavor.
So in marketing and business, we’re creators. We have visions about how things ought to be and then we do what we have to do to make our vision into reality, which means we’ve added to the world by showing up at work. So this kind of positive sum view of the world where we’re adding as opposed to just taking a slice of the market or taking money from our client’s. This positive Sum view is, it gets people up in the morning and it kind of, puts people in a good mindset for the work, any kind of work that they do along with that is the idea of value creation and creating things that are original. I’m gonna talk a little bit about the idea that it’s possible to be wealthy and a good person at the same time, which kind of goes along with this positive sum view of the world, because a lot of people listening, I do have inhibitions around, for example, charging higher fees when they actually have a busy enough calendar, they ought to be charging higher fees.
So, if reality is telling you that you are that good, then higher fees come with the territory and in some ways it’s more ethical to charge higher fees, take care of your needs, Make sure you’re not in survival mode and then be able to help the clients who seek your help. I’m going to talk about how there’s no such thing as failure. There’s only data on a long enough timeline, there’s no such thing as failure. There’s only data that will improve your future work. So, if those ideas sound like ideas you want to kind of internalize as your own, the session I’m about to launch into will help you to to internalize those ideas as your own. All right. So you want to make sure that you’re not driving during this, that you don’t have anything on the stove and that you do have, let’s call it about 15 minutes to kind of relax and turn inwardly. You want to take a comfortable position, close your eyes, take a deep breath and get as comfortable as you’re able to get. If you have to pause at this point to kind of get yourself into a comfortable place, go ahead.
With every breath that you’re breathing, you’re feeling some of the good kind of power that you have on planet Earth, where this is the power to think with, to act with, to create with, to speak with. In every breath you are doing as martial artists and Yogis do when they sit to breathe and they to tap into the good kind of power to make a positive influence on planet Earth while they’re here. In every breath, perhaps you’re also beginning to feel as a monk or Yogi does. Some relaxation, some peace, some comfort, and it’s not just because I’m talking. It’s not just my voice or the cushions you’re on. It’s because breathing very dependably causes comfort. So make sure you’re crediting the right person here. Then perhaps you can bring your attention to the top of your head now and imagine that a wave of relaxation is beginning to go down, and that wave of relaxation is beginning to relax your forehead and the muscles around your eyes.
And again, you’re the one who’s actually doing this by sending some helpful signals through the mind, through the mind body link. Then feel that relaxation spread down to the muscles of your jaw, so that if there had been any tension there, make sure that you’re helping to soften that tension and feel that relaxation then spread down to your neck and your shoulders. And perhaps you find even revel or at least give yourself credit for the fact that you’re causing your own softness, you’re causing your own muscular relaxation through the signals you’re sending from your mind down to your body. So the mind body link for you after this experience is not just for Yogis or monks. It’s also for you. Then send that softness down, down your back, all the way down to your lower back and send it from your shoulders, down your arms so that your biceps, your triceps, your forearms, your hands, your fingers can all soften.
They can relax, because you will it to be. Then send the relaxation down your hips, down to your legs, down past your knees, into your calves, and all the way down to the bottoms of your feet, so that from head to toe you can enjoy this kind of self generated comfort and softness. Now the quality of the thoughts you have in your head, now a very palpably is causing a higher quality experience inside your own body. More and more, perhaps you’ll be selective about the thoughts you keep and for the rest of this experience I’ll give you some thoughts worth keeping to keep creating a higher quality experience in your own body. More and more, perhaps despite the world and some people in it, you will value truth.
You will value the pursuit of truth and the power then of having the full weight of reality on your side when you speak and act in the world. And perhaps if you’ve been doing that already, you can feel the comfort and confidence that comes with having the full weight of reality on your side, because you’re on the side of truth. And if in any way there’s any gap between how you may have thought or acted or spoken in the past and having the full weight of reality. That’s where you find weakness that you will bridge, that you will gap by having the full weight of reality on your side. Another thought worth accepting is that you are a creator here on planet Earth. You’re not just here to consume what other people produce or create as a business owner. You are one of the creators. You are a visionary.
You have thoughts in your head that through your words and actions make this world a better place. Even if you just make widgets, you’re making this world more convenient, more comfortable, more beautiful for your customers, and you can absolutely give yourself credit for that as a creator. Every day you show up at work, you’re adding value to the world. Every day you show up at work, the world’s a somewhat better place, especially if you’re helping people, especially if you’re in personal services. So make sure to give yourself credit for the good work that you do, because as the business owner, certainly you’re not getting it from employees or most clients or customers, maybe not even your spouse.
So make sure that in your head and heart, you’re treating yourself like a loved one, and when you do good work you’ll recognize it, and if you do make mistakes or error, a gentle correction is all you need. The inner critic doesn’t actually have much to offer. It’s the voice of conscience, that softer stiller voice of conscience that can help you stay on the path of what’s good and what’s right and that will gently correct if you were to error. So it’s possible to be wealthy and a good person at the same time, even if you’re a future wealthy person and not a current wealthy person, it’s possible to be wealthy and moral at the same time. These are not two ends of the same spectrum. These are two different dimensions. Where when you achieve wealth, all your best qualities will be amplified, your generosity, your ability to contribute, your ability to create, your ability to make the world a better place every day you show up at work, will be amplified when you are increasingly wealthy.
So perhaps you can relinquish any ideas to the contrary. That would place wealth and morality on opposite ends of the same spectrum to fully accept this worldview. If you agree with it, that wealth and morality are separate dimensions. You can be wealthy and good at the same time. And especially with that voice of conscience helping to keep you on the right track. And on a long enough timeline, there is no such thing as failure. As long as you have another day, the next morning. As long as you get back up again, if you should fall down, what just happened was you collected data and that’s about it and data is not intrinsically good or bad. It just kind of is and you’ll make use of this data, so that tomorrow will be just a little bit better, a little bit closer to your bigger picture, or longer term goals.
And perhaps you’ve already been doing this in many ways. You just might not have given yourself enough credit for it, but perhaps to treat yourself like a loved one in your head and heart, you will give yourself credit for good things you are doing and things you want to see more of, so that unhypocritically you’re treating yourself the same way you would treat anybody in the workplace, or a household, or a community. And perhaps then you can imagine how with a head and heart full of these thoughts, these ideas, your future might be different. At least the way you talk to yourself in your head might be different. The actions you take might be different. The words that more easily come out to speak to others might be different as well. And you don’t have to hear me repeat this too many times, but your future will be better with these clearer lenses through which to see yourself in the world, you actually have no obligation to believe anything I say if you don’t want to, but if I presented to you perspective that you deem worth adopting, then in your adult judgment, you don’t have to keep ideas that you now disagree with.
So take it all too heart, let it sink in. And I’m going to begin counting and as I count, begin to bring all of your attention outward to begin to feel energy return back to you as you return back to the room and back to the world that you’re in. One, become aware of perhaps where your hands and feet are resting, become aware of where you are and perhaps what time of day it must be. Two, then notice if there’s any sounds outside of the sound of my voice, notice perhaps what you have planted next and how your outlook of the rest of the day or the rest of the week might have taken on some new perspectives. Three, More and more perhaps you will be selective about the thoughts you’ll keep, and perhaps you’ll keep discarding thoughts you never actually chose freely and you’ll keep the lines of thought that with your adult conscience, you deem good worthy thoughts to keep which you have every right to do.
Four, then feel a huge wave of energy start from the bottoms of your feet and go all the way up to the very top of your head, making you feel energized, making you feel refreshed, making you feel wonderful in every way, knowing you’ve made a change, ready to be back in the room, ready to be back in the world, and Five, in the time you need to accept these perspectives and be fully back in the room. Then open your eyes to return fully back to the room that you’re in