Hypnotherapy Secrets for an Amazing Mind with Ken Dubner

A Personal Note from Orion

Have you ever been fascinated by a hypnotherapist show and wondered how they do their magic? I was, so I decide to talk with one and get behind the curtain…

Contrary to what you see in pop culture, hypnotherapy is not about making people quack like a duck on a stage – although the incredible effect it can have on your mind means that under the right hypnosis, you can accomplish just about anything.

Ken Dubner has been changing lives for years with hypnosis. With his technique, he is able to allow people to reprogram their belief systems and radically change their lives. Whether it is breaking through depression, eradicating deep rooted fears, or saying goodbye to painful memories of the past, hypnosis therapy can truly transform the way you live your life.

About Today’s Show

‏‏Hello, and welcome to Stellar Life Podcast! Today, I have with me master hypnotherapist and master NLP practitioner, Mr. Ken Dubner. He is the CEO and founder of Mind Training Solutions. He does trainings for the American Hypnosis Association. He teaches at UCLA about hypnosis, and an interesting fact about him is that he used to be a comedian. I have seen him live-demonstrating hypnosis on stage. It was incredible and I was really, really impressed. I’m very excited to be talking to you because I love the whole subject of hypnosis and NLP, and I’m always curious about how do we work and what can I do to help others breakthrough. Thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the show!

‏‏Thank you, Orion! It is a pleasure to be here.

‏‏Yeah, so my first question is, what made you transition from a comedian to a master hypnotherapist?

‏‏Well, it’s the same thing that made me become a comic was part of my transition, and it was dealing with depression my whole life and being fascinated by the mind. As a stand-up comic, comedy was my defense when I was a kid. By the way, this is 20 years ago so if you’re looking me up on the internet, you’re not going to find me. But for being a comic, it was the skillset of helping reframe things when you think about it-you think I’m going to say one thing, I take it another direction. Humor is very healing-it was how I dealt. My dad used to say, “Everything’s a joke to you,” and then finally, when I got to learn the things I learned, I had to reply, which is, “Yes, everything’s a joke to me because I had suicidal thoughts when I was five,” so yeah, I think making everything funny is really healing. When I transitioned 20 years ago-well, first, before that, I had already been fascinated with the mind. I think the first time I informally hypnotize someone, I was in third or fourth grade. Definitely by college, I was doing it, but not knowing that it was hypnosis in college. It was giving massages and then talking about the beach, and I remember girls saying, “Oh my God! It was like I was at the beach. I forgot I was here!”

Making everything funny is really healing. Share on X

‏‏Wow.

‏‏That, to me, is a trance. As I got older, I got more fascinated with the mind and more disenchanted with the LA comedy scene, and around the time that I got married and got my life together, in certain ways and realized the road life as a comic wasn’t going to help me, I actually come across a training center here in LA that had a one-year program. I realized, at that point, I was basically spending all my spare time reading about the mind and hypnosis, and it had really become a passion for me so I went to that program, and I haven’t looked back. Since then, I’ve, of course, gone on to study with other people and other techniques, and worked with people over the past 20 years. I did end up doing stage hypnosis just because there’s a performer in me that loves to perform, but now I don’t really do that either. If I do stage hypnosis-routines, so to speak-it’s really more as a display and as a way of saying, “Hey, this is a demonstration of what the mind can do… so it may be fascinating and it may be funny, but at the end of this, I’m going to pull together what you just saw, and see how it applies to you so that you can move your life forward,” so it’s kind of unique. It’s very different than what you would think when somebody says stage show.

‏‏Right. What’s the difference between hypnosis on stage to hypnosis one-on-one?

‏‏Oh, it’s apples and oranges. On stage, I’ll pull the curtain back or as your fiancé likes to say, “Pull the kimono back!” Man, he likes talking about that kimono. I’ve heard that four times on his podcast. The “pulling the kimono back” would say that, when you do a stage show-part of the art, I teach hypnotherapists how to do great demonstrations, and as part of it, I teach them everything I knew before I ever did my stage show the first time. The biggest part of a stage show is, finding the people who are the best at exhibiting hypnotic phenomenon-that’s half the battle. In other words, if you give me a hundred people, there are 10 of them who are completely wonderfully-skilled and who are already going to hypnosis on their own. They have a natural proclivity to do it. Those 10 people-I could coach you on how to do a great stage show with them because they’re the ones who are then going to demonstrate the phenomenon.

‏‏Wow.

‏‏When you do one-on-one, you don’t have that luxury. You are there helping each individual reach whatever they need to reach. The good news is, most people don’t need to go to that level of trance where they’re acting out as a stage show will portray it. A lot of times, watching hypnosis could be one of the most boring things on the planet-trust me, I’ve watched thousands of hours of training. For the most part, it is me talking and the other person with their eyes closed is listening. At some point, when they open their eyes, they may say, “Oh my God, that was incredible!” My insight shifted all that, but I’d say 9x out of 10, that’s what you’re going to see. What I bring to the table as a hypnotherapist that a lot of them don’t is that I’ve done stages shows. I can do the physical stuff if I think that’s going to help you. If I think that’s going to be something that we worked into your therapeutic program, I’ll do that.

‏‏Is that better to be one of those 10% that are very easily going into trance or is it better to be the 90% to avoid being influenced by the media?

‏‏Right. You know that’s a great question. Look at it like a bell curve-a certain percentage, and it’s not exactly 10 either way, people can go on hypnosis really easily. For a certain percentage, it is really difficult for them to conceptualize or go into that state or, at least, for them to really go into it where they feel they’ve gone into it. In other words, I’ve seen people exhibit all the phenomena and then tell me, “No, I was totally aware!” If there’s a spread on either side, and you’re saying which one’s better and which one’s worse, it kind of goes back to one of my basic premises, which is-it’s not about either extreme, it’s about the flexibility in between. In other words, if you’re at one extreme of the scale, and you come to me and you say, “I’m great at going to trance,” I’d say, “Well, good. In that case, I’m going to teach you how to not go into trance.” If you come to me and say, “I never can go on trance,” I’ll teach you how to go on trance. If you come to me in the middle, that’s great because now we can go either direction depending on what you need. The advantage of being in that 10%-hyper, creative people who are able to feel, able to conceptualize, and able to imagine. I mean, these are the people, and that’s not who you might always think-actors, of course, make great stage hypnotic subjects, but engineers, people who work in their head, and people who just naturally have that. It can be a strength in that they are very creative. It can be a weakness in that, yes, they may-they may-be easily influenced by certain things. However, if you go to the other end of the spectrum, the people who are proud to say, “I can’t be hypnotized!”, “I wouldn’t be hypnotized!”, or “I can’t do that!” to me, that’s basically, probably, saying, “I am extremely stupid. I have no skill set for thinking!” Those people-yeah, that’s great. You really got it locked up as far as anybody making a suggestion and you being able to act out on it, which, to me, means, you are probably one of the more rigid human beings out there. And I can tell you, from 20 years of experience, rigidity doesn’t lead to a happy life. Flexibility leads to happy life. I’ve had people come in-again, where I’ve had to teach them how to be able to go into that altered state where they can be really creative, really open to be receptive to change, and then change. I’ve had to do what we call, “block other people”, from just spontaneously going into it so much that when somebody just lushly describes something, you’re already there because that’s not helpful either if that person is describing something that you really don’t need to buy or want. Does that make sense to you?

Flexibility leads to happy life.

‏‏Yeah, it has nothing to do with intelligence either.

‏‏Not at all. Well, if it has anything to do with intelligence, I’ll tell you this: The more intelligent, the easier it is for you to do. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t some really smart people who have a hard time doing, it just means that I notice that the more intelligent people are, the more likely they are to be able to shift their mindset into that altered state.

‏‏Right. What’s the difference between meditation, hypnosis, and guided meditation?

‏‏You know, that’s almost like asking what’s the difference between my definition of God and your definition of God because, to me, it’s all the same. Meditators would tell you there’s something very different because they’re going for a state, which you are not thinking, although most people, I’ve noticed, use guided meditation and meditation almost interchangeably-as in, my understanding of meditation was, it was a totally clear mind, but most people will say they meditate-they say, “I meditate on this thing. I pictured this.” So, as far as a guided meditation, I do guided meditations with people. I do when I’m in hypnotic trance. If I watch somebody do a good guided meditation, that person they’re doing it with would exhibit all the signs of trance as I know it so to me, there is no difference. It is, what is your technical skill-like getting them into the state? That’s the hypnotist’s part. What is your skill set at painting a lush picture and all of their sensory systems that allow them to experience something? That is the guided visualization part. And then as a hypnotherapist, for me, it goes even deeper. I have to say, “Okay, and how do I use those two skill sets to bring that person to that therapeutic outcome?”

‏‏Right. Yeah, I did a workshop recently, and at the end of the workshop, I kind of like put them into a guided meditation. I took them deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, and when they woke up 15 minutes later, they felt like-I got it from a few people-“That was only 15 minutes? I felt like it was three hours!”

‏‏And that is classic hypnotic phenomena-the loss of time sense; the thinking this was only on this long when it really went way, way longer.

‏‏Yeah.

‏‏So, to me, if I was watching it, I would probably be able to point out, “That one was in deep trance,” or “That one was in a light trance.”

‏‏Oh, wow.

‏‏It’s funny, Orion, when you said it, you said, “And I took them deeper, deeper, and deeper,”

‏‏Yeah, exactly!

‏‏Your voice went deeper-it was classic, classic hypno stuff!

‏‏Absolutely. Yeah, I love that stuff. I learned about it on my level. I’m not certified, but I learned from Speaking Empire how to talk in a hypnotic way. It involves NLP and hypnotic techniques so NLP, including a little bit of hypnotic techniques in it. Actually, what’s your definition of NLP?

‏‏I’m horrible when it comes to what’s your definition of whatever because I have to go to such a non-linear place, and I had this problem on Stephan’s podcast because-

‏‏Well, I’ve-

‏‏Yeah?

‏‏I’ve listened to that. Please go non-linear. I love that.

‏‏All right. When it comes to NLP, it’s a little different because people get really dogmatic about hypnosis, it’s almost a little more open. My definition of NLP is, it’s modeling the mindset of excellence, and really figuring out what did people do to be able to do that. Now, within doing that, one of the people that they first modeled was one of the foremost hypnotists of all time named Milton Erickson. When they did that, they have, of course, picked up techniques. In fact, Erickson said these guys can tell you what I do better than I can tell you because I just do it. If you tried studying Erickson, you would find, “Wow, that’s really confusing and hard to keep a through line,” because I read three pages and I kind of get lost because he’s very hypnotic. If you read Bandler and Grinder, who are the people who studied him the linguistic aspects of what he does especially, it’s more in a logical linear way so by modeling someone’s mindset and even the physical techniques that they use, NLP says that you can then replicate, and by having modeled enough mindsets, they really got a nice vast repertoire of technique. Also, it’s about modeling the way the mind works. Because there’s process and there’s content. We tend to talk to people in content, and NLP practitioner tends to talk in process. What I mean by that is, if I said, “Hey, Orion, you know how you really like ice cream, and chocolate ice cream, and if you would imagine eating it, isn’t that cool?”-that’s content. If I said, “Orion, there are certain things you like,” and when you do, I’m guessing you make a big picture so if you were to make a big picture of ice cream and really imagine the feeling that you have as you bring it close to your face, I’m taking you through the process. I’m taking you through the subtleties that you don’t usually notice on a conscious level. Hey, when I see something I like or think of something I like, I tend to make a big picture. By the way, if I think of something I’m afraid of, I also make a big picture.

‏‏Right.

‏‏Well, if you’re afraid of something, I could go into the whole content of why not to be illogical or I could just teach you to make a smaller picture-

‏‏Right.

‏‏In which case, that tends to carry over to, “Oh, wow! I don’t feel afraid of it anymore!”

‏‏What are your favorite NLP techniques?

‏‏Anchoring, definitely. But the thing that I find I have excelled at and really taken to a new level I feel is, the perceptual positions. I do most of my work with people with perceptual positions because if you understand the difference between being in first position associated within your body and what they call third position, which is dissociated looking at yourself, there are amazing things people can do. Again, it’s a subtlety. I have to teach people to notice how they think, and then how to change how they think, and then how to do it long enough that it becomes automatic. NLP talks about the stages of mastery. Unconscious Incompetence means you don’t know that it exists-the thing I’m talking about, you didn’t even know that it exists, then Conscious Incompetence-well, you now just heard Dissociative/Associative First/Third Position and now you know it exists, but you don’t really know what it is.

‏‏Right.

‏‏With a lot of practice, you get to Conscious Competence. Conscious Competence means, “Okay, if I really think about it-if I really think about making a picture smaller of something I don’t like-well, I can make the picture smaller, but I have to think about it. If I really think about driving a car, the first year I’m driving, then I can drive it.” And then there’s Unconscious Competence, and that’s what mastery is. I don’t have to consciously think about driving a car or walking across the room, I just do it.

‏‏Right, and that’s why you get into trance and miss your exit?

‏‏Exactly. When you’re in that trance place, and you’re driving and you’re thinking, and you miss your exit. Well, here’s how unconscious competence plays out in your life: There was a time you didn’t know how to walk. You didn’t even understand that you had limbs and then you learned, “I got these little things in the bottom and two arms, two things with fingers on them in front of me, and I got to using them,” then you started crawling, and you start looking around saying, “Hey, some people don’t use all four of these limbs, they only use two, and they’re a lot taller than me and they go a lot faster,” so you started trying to stand up, and you are now consciously incompetent. You look at them, you realize you can do it, you try to do it-through repetition, through practice, through falling down, and then getting back up, you learn to stand and toddle then to walk then to run. Now, for most of us, if you say, “Walk across the room,” you don’t think of all the things you have to do to get up out of the chair and walk across the room. There are actually millions of calculations. There was a time-it’s changed now because technology has finally caught up-but there was a time, I think, even less than 10 years ago where the Japanese had spent $7 or $8 million dollars on a robotic project to teach a robot how to walk like a human-to mimic it, to do all the calculations that it needs to move one foot forward, and do this, and do this so that it can’t just move forward-any track could do that-but it could go up a hill and it could step upstairs. After $7 million dollars, they were able to make something that could go up a slight incline and not fall over.

‏‏Wow.

‏‏Because that was, at the time, and this was, again, maybe 10-15 years ago-now, they’re a lot better. They’re able to do amazing things. Technology exponentially grows.

‏‏Yeah, I saw robotic dogs. Seriously. It’s like, dogs running around. It was weird.

‏‏So, yeah. Robotic dogs, robotic cats, living together-who knew? With that understanding, it’s like, when I get up and walk across the room, I mean, anybody listening-if you’re sitting in a chair and you’re not driving, get up, but think about all the things you have to do to get up because you don’t just stand. Try standing up without moving your body forward-without shifting forward-you won’t be able to. You, literally, can’t-you’ll fall down. You won’t even be able to actually get up at all out of the chair. If you tried doing it without shifting your body forward first-so, what happens when you get up? You throw your body forward, and then you kind of catch it in the momentum that then pushes and you propel yourself up from there. When you walk, you’re actually falling the whole time and catching yourself. You’re just doing it so smoothly.

‏‏Wow! I never thought about that. When I walk, I just walk the whole time.

‏‏Well, when you think about it-if you thought about it, guess what? You’d start stumbling. It’s the phenomena-any guy who’s ever been in high school understands this phenomena when I tell him, “Hey, by high school, you know how to walk right?” “Oh yeah, I know how to walk!” “You know how to run, right?” “Yeah.” “Did you ever have the girl you have a crush on, walk behind you in the hallway in high school, and you know she was walking behind you?” “Yeah.” “Did you screw up and trip?” “Yeah.” “Why?” “Because I was thinking, ‘Don’t screw up, don’t trip. Put one foot. I have to look cool!’” and maybe, that’s just my own experience because I was falling down all the time. If you take something that you’re really competent at, and you think about it too much on a conscious level, you take something that you’ve mastered, it’s harder. I remember reading this in a book about shooting pool back in like, 18, and said, “Look, if you know how to shoot pool to a certain level, but then you try doing the techniques in the book, you will be a worse pool player for a while.” Your skill set will degrade, actually, for a little bit before it improves again because you have the way you’ve been doing it and now, you have to really think about it, and in the thinking about it, you won’t do it as well. It’s the same when you teach. When I teach hypnosis-when I first would start doing classes about hypnosis, it was hard. I actually had to think about what I had learned to do over the years unconsciously. When I do hypnosis, I’m not really thinking about it the way that somebody has only been doing it a year thinks about it. I’m doing it the way you walk across the room-I just do it. I know that you need something and I just do what you need. I don’t really have to think the smaller pieces out, it comes to me naturally at this point.

‏‏Wow. One of my favorite books that I read when I was 20 was The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. What is the power of your subconscious mind? What’s the difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind?

‏‏Okay. Well, there are two things: One, I tend to use subconscious and unconscious interchangeably so if you hear me say, “Unconscious-”

‏‏Yeah, I use the same thing. Yeah.

‏‏But your conscious mind is linear. It is logical. It is logic, reason, and will power. It’s all the things that never help when you’re trying to change something because you’re going to really understand your problem, you can have a million reasons not to do your problem, but unless you really get it on a deep level-unless that part of your mind that runs the show understands it is good for you to stop doing this or it is good for you to do this, you won’t change. The unconscious mind is the part that runs the show. It’s about emotion. It’s about what you learned growing up. It’s about all the things that you take as assumptions-you don’t even think about it. Unconsciously, you’re aware of whatever you’re sitting or standing on, but you probably weren’t just thinking about it until I said it. However, you had to sit on it or stand on it at some point so you were aware of it, but where did it go when you stop thinking about it?

Unconsciously, you’re aware of whatever you’re sitting or standing on, but you probably weren’t just thinking about it until I said it. Share on X

‏‏Right.

‏‏You still knew it was there. That’s your unconscious. Your unconscious takes it all in. Your conscious mind can only take in a small amount of information at any one time until it gets overwhelmed, your unconscious takes it all in-millions of bits of information. It was formed throughout your childhood as you grew up from the little baby onward. It really kind of starts to set in place around seven or eight, which means that a lot of your concepts about the world are really kind of stuck at that point and will take a lot to change. By 9, 10, 11, you really are now are starting to say, “Okay, I know how the world works.” I don’t know if you talked to an 11-year-old lately, but they really don’t know how the world works. Yet, we all walk around now as grown-ups having built upon that framework of understanding thinking, “Yeah, no, we’ve got this covered,” so the conscious mind is linear, logical, likes to talk in a sequence-“Is this connected to this connected to this,” the conscious mind is creative, open, it thinks in what’s called a “gestalt”. It takes in all the information, and it connects it at one time. It was form throughout your early childhood. As it sets in place, it becomes harder to change it, and what happens is that sets you become able to critically think, which means that as you’re a kid you’re very open. I tell an eight-year-old, “Here’s some magic beans. Take them. Jump out the window, you’ll fly.” If I say it congruity, they’ll do it-one time. I can remember that “milkweed” is a thing that they have in New Jersey, at least, when I was growing up. Being at a day camp in kindergarten and them saying, “This is milkweed. It’s called milkweed because it has a milky inside,” and they said, “It was milkweed,” and one of the people who was walking us around said, “Yes, it’s milkweed. In fact, here, taste it, it’s milk,” and I tasted it, and it was horrible. It was only a minute later when I realized, “Wait, I know that milk comes from cows.” Why did I think that? Because someone in authority was telling me, and I had not the framework to say, “Hey, you know what? Sometimes, people mess with you.” I was open to suggestion, and that one didn’t serve me-in other ways, it does because the only way you really learn is to taking in suggestion. If somebody can get to the age of 10, 11, 12, 13, 14-now, they start to be more able to critically take in information. In other words, to think about it so if I give a 14-year-old magic beans and tell him to jump out the window, he’ll tell me where to put the beans because he understands it, right? That 14-year-old understands it. By the way, the best part about being a parent-any parent will tell you this-the most unique part, let’s put it this way, is you watch your children go from being highly suggestible to everything you say-you literally are the giver of truth when your child is small and hopefully, your person takes that responsibility damn seriously-then you watch as your child develops that critical factor. They start questioning-really question, not the “why” that little kids ask when they want to know how it works, but the 14-year-old’s “Why should I?” The one who’s starting to have independence, and you feel proud of that. You go, “Yeah, they’re really developing into their own adults.” Sometimes, it’s very frustrating. “Can you just take in the suggestion? This is what it is. Don’t argue with me,”-you hear that all the time from parents. Yet, at 17-18 year old, they become so unsuggestible for the most part to their parents. They are wide open to suggestion from their peers. They can be hypnotized. Think about this: If you think of hypnosis as being open to suggestion-think back when you were a teenager when your friends could get you to do crazy things, and it made sense when he said it. I can’t tell you how many times I came home thinking, “It made sense when he said it!” Once in a while, it was in a police car, but it made sense when my friend said, “Do it” because I was a teenager, and I was wide open to that suggestion. In order to change the unconscious mind, you asked me the whole difference so picture the conscious is on top. It’s, maybe, 10% of you’re on. It’s the part you are actually aware of right now. Whatever you’re thinking of right now, that’s your conscious mind. Everything else that you know is your unconscious mind at the moment until you bring it up to conscious awareness. The critical mind is like the filter between the two. In order for something to get into the unconscious mind, it’s got to get past the critical mind. In other words, If deep down you think you’re worthless, and you meet 50 people in a day who give you a reason that you are worthwhile, and you meet one person that day who tells you what an absolute horrible human being you are, you are going to take in the one who says that you are an absolute horrible human being-cognitive dissonance. We want to have things that agree with what we already know. You will reject the other 50. You’ll find reasons-logical, rational reasons. “You save that person’s life!” “Well, of course, I saved their life. What was I going to do? Anybody would save their life.” “No, you really put yourself at risk. You’re a great person!” “Well, you know, really, its social conditioning. It’s not that I’m a great person.” Take somebody else who has a good self-image, and they’d say the same thing, but they say, “Yeah, because by the way, yeah, I’m a good person!” because they’re going to take in the one message that supports, “I’m a good person.” When you have on a deep unconscious level of belief, it’s really hard to change with logic and reason.

‏‏Right.

‏‏That’s where hypnotists come in. There are other ways to get past the critical mind, by the way. Music does it. Poetry. Imagery. Guided imagery. Love is hypnosis-totally. Sex is very hypnotic because the critical mind is wide open. In order to enjoy sex, especially for a woman, it’s very hypnotic. In order to enjoy an orgasm as a woman, you can’t think in a linear way. You cannot think logically. You cannot have an internal dialogue and have a sexual orgasm because you have to let go of the inner dialogue. Inner dialogue tends to, again, be a conscious rational process-talking to yourself. Again, asking, “Am I fat?” “Does he love me?” “Am I actually going to have an orgasm?” All these questions will get in the way of you doing it so sexuality is another way to get past the critical mind like love. Have you ever been in love when you were young, Orion? You’re in “love.” The first time you’re in love-“Oh my God! You’re so in love!” They are the most wonderful thing in the world. Everything about them is wonderful-the way they talk, the way they walk, and the way they smell-“Oh my God, it’s like something from heaven, the way they smell!” And then you break up, and suddenly, they don’t smell so good because you were hypnotized. You were wide open to any suggestion that they are good and really not looking at all the things that weren’t good about them.

‏‏Yeah, love is like algebra. You look at your “X,” and you’re asking “Y.”

‏‏Well, we all have friends who are with somebody, and you know this is horrible and it’s not going to work out yet they’re positive at that moment-they are so sure in their heart. Why? Because they’re wide open to anything positive about that person, but closed off to the negative. They are stuck in one direction. We also have people whom we don’t like, and if we don’t like them, they’re going to have to really try hard to do anything that we look at as anything more than a horrible thing to do. I talk about politically-good politicians get past the critical mind, but the ones that get past your critical mind, are the party that you vote for. The guys on the other side of the aisle-everything they say is a bunch of bull so your mind is immediately closed down. Think about that. If you are really a Republican or a Democrat on either end, do you listen to the other party the same way you listen to your own guy? Do you let your brain go, nod your head, and say, “Yes, that sounds good? I’m going to just take it on faith that everything you’re talking about, you’re going to handle the details”? Or, do you pick apart with your conscious mind everything that you can do about that other party, and why they can’t fulfill what they said? By the way, they’re full of crap, anyway, because we know those guys lie. Not my guy!

‏‏Of course. So, what do we do? Actually, looking at the world in black and white-there is a critical mind and the non-critical, do we play in the gray zone as well? Because it looks like we’re kind of black and white people-like, we see the world in black and white.

‏‏I think we tend to go to that dichotomy a lot, but I think the gray zone is where the real growth is. Again, it comes back, and if you could see me, you’d see I have one hand up and then I put the other hand up, and any client of mine knows exactly-like, they’ll roll their eyes because they’ll hear it always. See the hands go up-they’ll go, I know, Ken, flexibility. I’ll put my right hand up, I’ll say, “You come to me because you have this. You think this. This is my problem. I’m too shy. I’m too overconfident. I can’t meet women. I can’t start a business. I’m at this end of the spectrum and I want to go all the way over here where I’m super confident or I’m shy, I’m the opposite of what I am,” and that’s not the solution either because now, you only have one choice where you are, and then you’ve got two choices, and that’s not really a choice either. Where I am, or this other extreme, and everything in between is where the power lies so in other words, if somebody comes to me because they’re really quiet and they say, “I want to be more outgoing. Can you help me?” Well, is my job to get them to be the life of the party every minute of the day-the Robin Williams in the room? No, because God bless Robin Williams, but he was literally a pain in the ass to be around if you ever watched him interact with other people because as wonderful a guy as he was, he wouldn’t shut up. Would I want you to be the one that won’t shut up? No, it’s the flexibility to say, “Hey, sometimes, I’m going to be large and in charge. I’m going to run the room.” Sometimes, I am going to be the quiet one because it’s time to shut up and observe. But most of the time, I’m going to be somewhere in between. I might be slightly outgoing, I might be right in the middle, or I might be a little less than outgoing because I need to be flexible enough that I fit the situation most effectively because there’s another principle, and it actually does come from NLP as well as cybernetics: The most flexible thing in any system is what really has control of that system. If you are interacting with another person, if you are more flexible than them, you influence that interaction more than they can.

If you are interacting with another person, if you are more flexible than them, you influence that interaction more than they can.

‏‏Is that the nuerosynopsis? Where two people come together, and they feel the same feelings and the same thoughts?

‏‏You know, I’m not familiar with that word neurosynopis? I’m familiar with neurosynapse.

‏‏Okay, synapse. Maybe I made a mistake, I’m sorry.

‏‏No, that could be-well, it’s rapport. It’s what they call it in NLP. When you’re in high rapport with somebody, you kind of do. You ever have that where you’re kind of reading each other’s minds in a way? It’s not really reading each other’s minds. You’re just so in the same zone. You’re going in the same groove. You’re walking in their shoes. By the way, that’s another perceptual position-when you step into somebody else, that’s called Second Position. If you learn how to really know when it’s most appropriate and most effective for you to really look at it from your viewpoint, when it’s best to really step into them, totally taking away your viewpoint, totally stepping into theirs, not arguing it, just understanding it, not necessarily agreeing with it, and when it’s really appropriate to step outside of that interaction and just look at two people going back and forth, and not have what’s called The Dog in the Fight-not care and say, “Well, this guy’s right, that one’s wrong,” or “This one was right, that one’s wrong,” just say, “I’m observing this.” If you know when to go into those or when to combine those perspectives, you are incredibly more effective and, again, pretty much anyone that comes to me with an issue, at the end of the day, I can tell him relatively quickly which perspective they’re using, and why that one’s not the most effective for the issue they have, and in part of that is teaching the flexibility to go between all of them.

‏‏Right, and as a coach, working with people, sometimes I have to be below them; sometimes, eye level; and sometimes, I just have to take charge. It reminds me of that. You do have to dance in order to build rapport and to be very effective.

‏‏It is totally a dance, and I’ll give you an example of that because you use the “under equal and above” metaphor.

‏‏Yeah.

‏‏In hypnosis, there’s a thing called Paternal and Maternal. A paternal way of talking to somebody is to say, “Orion, close your eyes. Allow yourself to relax. Breathe in. Breathe out,”-it’s very like a guy, it’s like a dad. It’s very directive. A maternal way to talk to someone is, “Orion, if you would like to sit down now, and if you could, close your eyes. Would you allow yourself to breathe in and breathe out a little bit to let that happen?” so it’s more like a mom. It’s more saying, “Hey, we’re doing this together.” “Hey, would you do this?” It’s very, very no-pushy. Well, a lot of times, people see me on stage and they assume that if I’m going to do work with them, I’m always going to be paternal because I’m large and in charge onstage, and I’m a grown-ass man as I like to say. I do not apologize for who I am, and I do not pull punches with my clients so it’s kind of a different experience, especially once I worked with you for a while because then, you get to hear the Jersey side of me so people think that’s all I’m going to bring to the table-they’re wrong because that’s not flexibility. There are some clients who have never heard me raise my voice, never heard me say it like this because they don’t need that-they need this. They need someone to say, “Okay, sit down. Breathe. It’s fine,” and by the way, most clients have seen me at all extremes-being the most maternal, caring human being they’ve ever met where I’ve got their back and they know what, and literally, I have other clients that I have told, “I’m going to walk out of the room right now until you get your shit together because I think I’m going to end up kicking your ass if you don’t,” and that guy that I said that to, when I came back in, he was still in the room. I told him, “You could leave if you want, but what you just said is so out of whack that as a father and a friend, I got to tell you, I can’t sit with it.” I came back, he’d gotten the message. Would I do that with every client? No. It would be totally inappropriate for most people, but for him, he needed that at that moment. He told me later on, “That was one of the best things you ever did in the time you worked with me. You called me on my shit. You made me have to really examine something I had said that was kind of flip in a way, but indicative of what I was going on deeply and when I had to do that, when you confronted me, you said, ‘I’m walking around the block,’ This relationship can be over if you want to walk out of the room. If you’re ready to get your shit together and work on this, I’ll work with you, and I got your back. I knew I needed to stay and get my shit together.” I used his metaphor, by the way-that’s how we do-but he was also from New York, I’m from New Jersey. He was also in entertainment so we went a little potty-mouth. Other clients will never hear me talk that way, other clients will only hear me be maternal, and most clients-hey, on certain days, you might need this part of me, and on certain days, you might heed this part. On certain days-and most often, you don’t need either extreme, you need me to flexibly go between. As a coach, it’s the same thing. There are times where you’ve got to be the person saying, “Hey, I’m in charge. Shut up and follow what I do. I’m the authority figure so just do it right.” There are other times where you have to say from a consensus point, “Hey, what do you think? Would you and I be able to do this? Is this something we should agree on?” and there are times you have to, literally, let them be above you and say, “Look, you are the authority figure for yourself, figure it out and tell me what we’re going to do,” so flexibility-it always come back to flexibility for me.

‏‏Right. What’s the most interesting case you handled?

‏‏Let me think of the ones I can talk about because I handle-I’ll tell you off the air some things that will curl your hair so to speak. Everybody’s interesting. I know it’s a horrible answer. Everyone is interesting because at this point, I don’t work with somebody unless I really like them, want to work with them, and I’m interested in what they’re bringing to the table. It’s not like when I first started-when you first start anything, you got to just take clients as they come. I’m really picky. I vet my clients. I’m really a pain in the butt to get to work with because by the time you’re getting in the room to talk to me, I know you’re serious. In other words, it’s not, “Hey, Ken! Can I come in and talk to you?” and we’re going to do an appointment? No. I’m going to talk to you on the phone first. I want to hear about what you want to work on. I want to hear about, are you willing to put the work in? I want to hear about, hey, are you interesting enough that I want to see your face for an X amount of time while we go through this program? Do I look forward? I love my clients. I look forward to seeing my clients. If I’m having a bad day, and I have clients that day, I’m having a good day by the end of the day. But to get back to the most interesting-I dealt with everything. Now, I specialize more in the area of confidence, people dealing with stress and performance. Those, really, are kind of where I’ve morphed to, and I do programs where we’re really changing people’s lives over a couple of months, rather than, “Hey, I come in, I have a phobia of elevators, can you get me past that?” Yes, I can. “Can you help me stop smoking?” Yes, I can. I don’t really do that stuff anymore. I know one of the more interesting ones I did recently was elevator because in the office I used to be in, there were two elevators, and somebody came to me with an elevator phobia. They said, “I can’t be on an elevator. Even with people, I’m freaking out, and this is getting in the way of what I want to do in my life,” and then they start to generalize to other parts of their lives. I got him to the point where, there was the glass elevator out front that looked out to the outside, and it was nice. There was the freight elevator that seemed to have been built in 1903, and it rumbled when you are in it-really scared any human being who got in it because it would kind of stop in the middle. I got him in the first session to be able to get on the big elevator if I was in it and other people were in it, and then finally, to be able to get to the point where you can go up and down that nice, smooth elevator with the glass window, and be okay, which he hasn’t been able to do for years. It took me until the second session to get him to the point where, I finally put him on the freight elevator. First, I went on with it, and when he wasn’t looking, I hit the stop button, and the whole thing came to a jam and halt-

‏‏Wow.

‏‏And I watched to make sure, “Okay, this guy’s fine. He’s bulletproof. He’s there.” I had to make sure. I just can’t throw someone in the box and be like, “Yeah, we’ll see how you do!” I was doing a check. I’m always doing what’s called an Ecology Check. Once he said, “Yeah, I’m hanging with it,” I sent him up and down that elevator. I pressed all the floors so he didn’t when it was going to stop, it was just random, it would lurch, and I did it a couple of times, and just sat him in there for a good 5-10 minutes. Most people, at that point, would be a little claustrophobic in a freight elevator that is jamming up and down. Like a champ, he was done. He was done. That was really rewarding for me because this person had had their whole life locked up in this one thing, and I was able-in two sessions-to change it. There are NLP people who would say, “Hey, that’s one session too many. Fast phobia cure.” For those of you who are out there, congratulations-you’re wonderful human beings. Sometimes, you hear things, and I love the people who read it in the book. By the way, I love how many experts I’ve run into about hypnosis in this world who will tell me what can and can’t be done, why they can and can’t be hypnotized, how it works, how it doesn’t work, how it’s a bunch of crap, how it’s this, how it’s that, how it’s anti-God, how it’s demonic, and how it’s all these things, and I’ll say, “How many books have you read? How many people have you hypnotized? How many years have you helped people? What’s your body of work that you can look at and say, ‘Okay, now, I can draw some conclusions’,?” Usually, I’ll get, “Well, no, I’ve heard about it,” or “I saw this thing on TV eight years ago.” At that point, there’s a part of me that has to go to that very calm Zen place that says, “I’m not going to be New Jersey right now,” and point out that I’d like to smack that person. I’m just going to go to that place of love and understanding that says, “Well, good luck on your journey. If you ever want to learn more than what you saw on the TV show 15 years ago, feel free to talk to me,”

‏‏God bless.

‏‏Or, “I can turn you on to some resources. God bless and good luck!” I love that you say, “God bless!” You know I say that to everybody? Have you ever seen me do that? I’d say, “God bless,” and then I’d do that little thing with my hands, people think I’m Krishna because it looks like I’m praying. It’s just something I started doing once, a long time ago. I say, “God bless,” when I say goodbye to people, and I really mean it, but here’s how meaning can change, and this is an example of the conscious, unconscious, and what meaning you take from things. I say, God bless,” to everyone, but, again, Orion, I grew up in New Jersey. I got a salty background. I was a comic. I, sometimes, am less than Zen, and sometimes less than spiritual. I can, at times, be a real dick-I try not to be, but hey, we all have that inflexibility, right? I have a way of putting things that’s pretty straightforward. A friend of mine once said, “Hey, dude! You’re like blunt trauma sometimes,” and I’m like, “Really? I thought I was highly diplomatic with clients.” He goes, “Yeah, with clients, man, but when you’re a friend, you’ll just straight out say, ‘No, dude! That thing looks on you. What the hell? Take it off!’” so I say, “God bless,” to everyone, but I used to say, “God bless and good luck,” I used to say, “God bless and fuck yourself!” because that was a big thing for me when I was a comic, which was, “Hey, you know what? Spiritually, I want you to go on your way, but I don’t particularly like you, personally. Please never talk to me again so God bless you and fuck yourself,” was part of what I would say. Well, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve split the two. When I say, “God bless,” I tend to mean it, but my wife has known me for 22 years so one day, we were having a discussion-we were having a difference of opinion-I said, “Hey, you know what? You have a right to your opinion. I think it’s different. I think you’re wrong, but you think I’m wrong? Hey, God bless!”

‏‏Uh-oh!

‏‏And she got so mad at me. “You know, when you say, ‘God bless,’ you really mean, ‘Fuck yourself!’ You just basically told me blah-blah-blah,” and I said, “Babe, babe, babe, that was my old thing! You got to update the definition!” Still, there are people I say it to, and that’s what I mean-God bless and good luck. God loves you, but that doesn’t mean I even like it. For most people now, but for most people now, when I say, “God bless,” I mean, God bless. My meaning had changed in an unconscious level for that statement. As I’ve gotten older and mellower and more spiritual, the meaning of that statement changed quite a bit from when I was young, full of testosterone, ready to fight you, and a comic on stage. I’m going to be the funniest person in the room and goddamn, if you get up in the middle of my show, you’re going to wish you didn’t get up because I want to take you apart verbally. That’s a different guy.

‏‏Right.

‏‏Therefore, the meaning changed overtime. The deeper meaning changed. The unconscious meaning of it changed for me to the point that, when I said it to my wife, it truly meant, “God bless, I love you. We have a difference with opinion, may God bless you.” She hadn’t gotten the update yet.

‏‏Right.

‏‏Think about that. I’m going to ask the listeners for a second-think about that. Is there somebody in your life that you’re still running the old recording for? Somebody in your life-you know how somebody say something that sets you off, especially in a relationship? Your boyfriend or girlfriend or your husband or your wife says something and maybe, you’re the kind of person who listens to Orion’s show so you’re probably into self-awareness and examination, you’re probably into inner journey-maybe, you’ve been able to say, “Wow, it wasn’t that you said it, it was that my old boyfriend/my mom/my dad used to say it or used to have that look on their face when they said something, and what they’re really saying or the meaning I took out of it is, ‘You’re an idiot,’ so even if you say something nice, you had that look on your face, and I took that. I took that old meaning. I put it to you. That old meaning was something inside of them. That old meaning was something deep in them that they took, brought up to the surface, projected onto you.

‏‏Right.

‏‏And until they understand that their old meaning has to change, they’re going to have that reaction to people. They’re going to have the same reaction. Every time somebody raises an eyebrow like mommy did, they’re going to get mad because she has the other observation of 20 years of doing this with people. We are all little children walking around in big kid bodies using big boy and big girl words to impress the other little children walking around in big kid bodies using big boy and big girl words. Everything we do is because the unconscious mind decides it based on emotion, and then we use logic and reason of the conscious mind to justify it. It’s like salespeople will say, “You buy an emotion, and you justify what logic.” Well, I go at deeper level. I’ll say you do everything because your unconscious, emotional understanding and connections, and then you use logic to really sound like you really thought it out.

‏‏And that goes back to triggers like NLP triggers. We can be triggered by a sound. We can be triggered by a facial expression. We can be triggered by even a color-all according to our belief systems, and what happened to us. The disassociations that we gave that trigger. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that our partner said something, it’s just something in us.

‏‏It’s something in us that came out. Or, it’s something that’s been put in as a post-hypnotic suggestion over years with that partner. That’s another thing. Have you ever been with a couple who has been together for a long, long time, and you’re sitting there on the table, everything seems fine, and then the next minute, they’re at it like crazy people, and all one listens that is, “Honey, can you pass the salt?” but they said it like that- “Can you pass the salt?’ and the association over years and years is, when I’m talking to you like this is because I think you’re wrong, and so they get into this big fight because somebody used certain tone of voice. Somebody says, “Honey, can you pass the salt?” and the other person says, “Yeah? And your mother’s an alcoholic!” You’re like, “What happened? What just happened?” They said an anchor in the other person, right? As a comic, I’ll tell you this. It’s the funniest thing as a comic. Every one thinks they’re funny. People, if you’re out there, trust me-you’re probably not. It’s a very small percentage of people who are funny. A lot of people are humorous and a lot of people have sense of humor, but get on a stage for 45 minutes, and make a crowd laugh, and then I’ll tell you that you’re funny. But people would come up to you after the show, “Oh, I got to joke to tell you!” “Oh, here’s that you can improve that thing,” Everybody had advice because we all think we’re kind of funny because we know what we think is funny, but very few people are. As a stage hypnotist, everybody thought, “My God! What that person does, what you do, it’s almost like magic! Those people are doing this. The state of mind you put them, and I can never do that!” Some people would say, “Don’t look him in the eyes. Oh, he’s going to do this!” Give you this deference and yet, we’re hypnotizing each other all the time.

‏‏But, honestly, I mean, you have the knowledge. Do you think you have, sometimes, even too much power?

‏‏No. Do you think I have too much power, Orion?

‏‏I think you do.

‏‏Here’s the funny thing about it: A stage show is designed to look spectacular, but it’s all phenomenon that other people do. In other words, I make you unable to think that you’re not seeing me, but you’re seeing the thing I’m holding so in your mind, you’re kind of imagining it and that it’s just there. You may, on some level, be aware that I’m still there, but you’re also not because the hypnotic stage is not logical or linear so you’re looking at this thing floating in front of it. That seems like, “Wow, that’s a negative hallucination.” You’re not seeing something that’s there. It’s a very deep hypnotic phenomenon. Certain hypnotic scales-that’s so deep. And yet, how many people have glasses and have looked for them for 5-10 minutes only to know that they have them sitting there, locked inside of their shirt pocket, or on top of their head? How many times have you looked for the keys on the table, walked by eight other times, and then noticed there’s where the keys are-right there. I’ve walked by it. I looked at the table eight other times. When you can’t see something that’s there, it’s called a Negative Hallucination. A Positive Hallucination means, you’re imagining something that’s not there.

‏‏Right. Have you ever self-hypnotize yourself?

‏‏Oh, yeah. All the time.

‏‏Yeah?

‏‏It’s harder to do self-hypnosis than what’s called, Hetero Hypnosis, which means another person is doing it for you because when I’m guiding you, I am, by the way, doing a little light trance myself to be creative, to kind of get into your head, and give you what you need, but I’m also staying a little linear to keep us on track. I’m not going to the depth that I’m bringing you to where your mind is really going. When you do self-hypnosis, there’s nobody there doing that. You’ve got to do it yourself so a lot of times, when you do self-hypnosis, people tend to drift. It has more limited applications. You can’t really change-make a deep level change-with self-hypnosis, but you can support deep level change. You can do incremental change. You can practice that change. All my clients are basically learning to do self-hypnosis also because they’re learning how to visualize, they’re learning how to relax, they’re learning how to go inside, they’re learning how to breathe differently, and they’re learning how to do all the things that somebody in hypnosis does. I’m telling them, as homework-do that breathing; do that visualization; sit in your house and imagine that third position, and looking down on that person. Well, if you’re doing that, and you’re breathing calmly, and you get to the point where you forget you’re sitting in your chair because you’re busy kind of looking down at the person sitting in the chair-you know that you’re not but you kind of are-you’re in a light trance. I do it, yes. All the time. I do it daily. All for different things-whether it’s to reinforce some good things; whether it’s to plan things; whether it’s to come out of overwhelm and overload-it’s really good for that; whether it’s a step out of anger-it’s really good for that; or to get to a spiritual place-it’s really good for that. Now, all the people would say, “Well, no, I do guided visualizations. That’s my spiritual place,” and I’d say, “Yeah, you do. God bless you. Good luck!”

‏‏Can you give our listeners a few tools on how to deal with anxiety? How to increase confidence?

‏‏Sure. I’ll give you one quick one, and it’s the easiest thing to do. It’s to go at it. Reality is shaped on a couple of different levels for all of us There’s the body-what the body feels. There’s the unconscious mind-it’s the emotional part of you. There’s the conscious mind-it’s the logical part; the internal talk; the self-taught. And then, there’s the perceptual part-how you view that? Are you making big pictures or small pictures? What are you noticing? What are you deleting in the picture? Those four things-those four quadrants-make up your reality. You change any one of those-you make big pictures the good things-then you are making bad things you tend to find that you’re finding more good things. You change your emotion around those things, and you tend to find that they’re not that bad. You have a different internal dialogue about them, and that tends to change some things. Or, if you don’t feel scared when you’re around them in your body. You change one, and it kind of changes all of them so I’m going to go with the body part, and I did it with you right before we got on?

‏‏Yeah, of course.

‏‏I said, “All I want you to do is breathe down into your stomach.” It’s called Diaphragm Breathing. It’s called Combat Breathing. They teach this to Special Forces for the guys out there who think this is all woo-woo stuff. Yoga people know how to do it. Martial arts know how to do it. It’s funny-even the people who do yoga will tell you, “I know how you breathe,” and they’ll suck in. You just do this goofy thing that I’m going to tell you: What you do is, you breathe down to your diaphragm-in other words, you breathe past your chest. As you breathe past your chest, you have to move your stomach in and out. Most people in America-in the West-we tend to breathe in our chest. We tend to breathe in and our chest expands, our shoulders go up, and then, maybe, our diaphragm, then we breathe out. Most of us in LA were taught, especially women, “Hold that stomach in, darling!” Especially, Orion, I know you would never do this, but it’s funny-I call that breathing in the chest the “how-I-got-out-of-a-ticket-if-I’m-a-woman” breathing because I’ve noticed that a lot of my female clients will go, “Oh, I know how to do that breathing! The chest breathing? Yeah, I do that. I do that when I want to distract the guy. I just breathe in that big breath, right?” and I say, “No, this is the opposite. This is the breathing you do when no one’s watching. This is for you.”

‏‏Right.

‏‏You breathe down into your diaphragm. The way you do it is this: You, literally, imagine that the rib cage is going offline because your lungs extend downward and the diaphragm pulls the air downward so what you want to do is, breathe into your stomach. Imagine if there is a ball or a balloon that you inflate as you inhale so your stomach and your belly button move away from your spine then as you exhale, you deflate it. You’ve heard people say, “Take 10 deep breaths,”-well, yeah, I changed your state. I don’t know how many breaths you took, but I changed your state. Today, I was talking to a client. I said, “Take 10 while I’m doing this because you would have done a lot of the work.” By the way, I think I should trademark the “lazy hypnotist.” In fact, I guess I just did because I said it publicly. My goal is to do as little work as possible to get the biggest result for people, and by teaching them to do this, I don’t have to-each time they come in upset, chill them out-they come in, upset, I remind them, “Did you do the breathing first?” “No, I didn’t,” “Okay, breathe for a minute.”

‏‏Tell them about quantities and about quality.

‏‏If you breathe down into your stomach, what you’ll find is, at first, for a lot of people, they’ll still move their chest, their shoulders may go up and down a little bit, but as you do it for a while-as you breathe in slowly-let the stomach expand, breathe out, belly button gets pulled back in towards the spine, you start to get a different rhythm. You start to slow down, people’s voices tend to go a little deeper, and they tend to notice that they’re coming out of the fight-or-flight response. When you’re nervous, you’re in the fight-or-flight response. Your body is reacting as if you are under attack. It’s maybe something you’re imagining, but your body is still reacting to it. You’re not under attack, but you may think, “Oh, if I don’t get the rent paid by getting this thing done on this job, I’m going to lose my home,” and therefore, your body is going into the place of danger. Well, that’s not really going to help you get the job done. The reason they call it Combat Breathing, by the way, is when people shoot at you, oddly enough, a lot of people get nervous. When people are shooting at you and you’re in special forces, you have to be very calm because one of the things that goes out the window when you’re nervous is your fine motor coordination, and it makes it really hard to shoot back and hit the person that’s shooting you so they teach you breathe down on your belly so that you can calm yourself-even while the bullets are firing around you-enough to take aim, fire, and eliminate a threat. It’s the difference between a professional soldier and somebody with a gun who is just randomly freaking out and shooting it all over the place.

‏‏Right.

‏‏To do that breathing, all you’re doing is you’re imagining a balloon down there-a balloon beneath your rib cage-you can put hands like, one hand on your stomach and on your belly button, and one hand on your breast bone, and breathe, and notice-Am I breathing more into the belly hand or the breast bone hand? And then shift downward. If you shift downward, you can very easily change your state very quickly-just like you did when I was talking to you. I think I gave you three suggestions while I was doing that. It was really just to get you to be distracted enough to stop breathing in your chest, and to start breathing down your belly. Actually, I’ll do this for your guys. At the end of the broadcast, we’ll figure out how I can get you a copy of-I have a breathing relaxation recording. It takes about eight minutes to do it. It changes state massively. I call it The Breathing Relaxation Vacation, and very quickly, you can learn to calm yourself by just following along the recording. It’s my voice. It’s my luscious, caramel DJ voice. It’s a little music. It’s me giving some suggestions, and I’m guiding you through that breathing. At the end of it, you feel like butter. We’ll figure out how I can get it to you so that you can have it where people can access it who are listeners to your podcast, and that will be my gift to them because I really feel like everybody needs to learn how to breathe. It really is the first thing I will teach any client. There is never a client who comes in and who’s breathing right if they’re nervous, if they’re anxious, or if they don’t feel confident. They are breathing wrong.

‏‏That’s an amazing gift I really appreciate it. I’m sure they all appreciate it. It’s going to be in the show notes.

‏‏It’s where you go to make the change, and to understand yourself at a deeper level than ever.

‏‏Wow! This is awesome. What are your three quick tips for having a stellar life?

‏‏My three quick tips for having a stellar life is: Be unapologetically you, which means really unapologetically you, but within that, also, be impeccable to yourself. What I mean by this is, your own understanding of impeccable action. What that means is, my understanding of how to conduct myself as a man, as a father, and as a husband may be different than yours, but I have to be true to mine. If I’m true to mine, I’m being impeccable with myself as I understand it so therefore, you may still disagree with me, but you’re going to get the congruent me because there are very few things that I take as importantly as those three things. I’m going to behave in ways that I think are impeccable-maybe not in the way the society, you, the Bible, or some moral person who says that they’re the one who tells everyone what is and isn’t-it’s my impeccable. “Unapologetically me,” means-I think you get it, Orion, when-

Be unapologetically you, which means really unapologetically you, but within that, also, be impeccable to yourself. Share on X

‏‏I got it!

‏‏Yeah, you know I’m pretty unapologetically me. It’s take it or leave it, folks! Love you, God bless you, and you figure out which side of that spectrum you’re on for me because I don’t have time for it. Number two is, impeccable as you understand impeccable, and number three-I think, number three is, and this is going to sound so ridiculous for somebody who just talk the way I talk-you have to love everybody. You’ve got to really-everyday, you have to work on loving everybody. If you dislike somebody, you know what? They might have dislikeable qualities, but can you learn to love them anyway? Not from the, “Hey, I want to be your best friend!” but can I just love the humanity in you? If there’s no humanity in you, can I feel bad enough to love the kid that you were born before it got taken out of you? Not that I do it every day, and there are certain people that I still have a hard time-certain historical figures-and I don’t know if I ever will be able to. But that, hey, you know what? It’s on me. It’s on me to decide how I take you. It’s not just you. I can dislike you because you did something to me, or I can forgive you and say, “Hey, how do I love you despite?”Walk through the world with that behavior, with that demeanor, and with that understanding, it makes for a much nicer day.

‏‏I love that! I love your tips. They’re beautiful.

‏‏Thank you.

‏‏Where can our listeners find you?

‏‏You can go to my website, MindTrainingSolutions.com-mind as in mind; training as in training; and solutions, and the reason it’s Mind Training Solutions is because I think there’s always a solution. It’s something else that I say all the time. I honestly think there’s always a solution. It may not be the one that you want to go to, but there is a solution for everything. MindTrainingSolutions.com, and that is the information I have to reach me, and you could take it from there. If you’re somebody who thinks you might want to work with me-hey, I’m happy to start the conversation. Like I said, I don’t take a lot of clients at this point because I’m interested in people who want to make deep, deep changes in their life. If you’re someone who’s interested in booking me as a speaker-also, go to that website and we can start the dialogue. I’d love to be on your stage. My mission right now went from, “Hey, I help people to break free of their prisons, and step into their power and confidence.” It changed last year. It changed from that to, “Hey, I’m going to help as many people as I can to step out of their prisons, step into their confidence in the time I have left on this planet using every skill-everything I’ve ever been through-to do so-every gift.” And because of that, I’m working more towards stage, being in front of people, talking to larger crowds, and creating products that everyone can use-not just the people who can afford me and can see me. By the way, one thing that people think about hypnosis-“Oh, oh. Do I have to be in the room with you?” No. Half of the clients that I have right now are on Skype. I have clients in Europe. I have people I’ve never met in person because it’s communication so don’t let that be a block for you. If you really think, “Hey, I resonate with what this guy says, I’d like to find out more,”-the website is next way of finding out some things about me, and then past that, “Hey, I’ll start a dialogue with him.” Just tell him, “Orion sent me”.

‏‏Yeah, that’s important.

‏‏That’s the most important.

‏‏Yup. Thank you so much, Ken! It was extraordinary. I enjoyed our conversation tremendously. Thank you, listeners. Will talk to you soon. You have a stellar life and God bless!

‏‏God bless!

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About Ken Dubner

Ken Dubner is the Founder and CEO of Mind Training Solutions. He has dedicated his life to empowering people by guiding them to use their minds more effectively. Already impacting the lives of thousands of individuals over the last 2 decades as a Mind Training coach, Ken has begun taking action in helping more people through large scale trainings and programs.