ScreamingBox Technology & Business Rundown

Dave Erickson 0:00
Your boss is screaming at YOU for the TPS reports, your AI assistant is giving you nonsense answers, and your kid just threw up at school. How can anyone deal with this much stress? On this ScreamingBox podcast, we are going to explore some unique ways to deal with the stress of work and business. Please like our podcast and subscribe to our channel to get notified when the next podcast is released.

Dave Erickson 0:48
Every day, things at work or in your business go wrong. It's how you deal with the stress that determines how successful you'll be in finding happiness in your work. Welcome to the screambox technology and business rundown podcast. In this podcast, Botond Seres and I, Dave Erickson are going to search for ways to deal with the stress of business with Ryan Christensen, founder of Ryan the Hypnotist. Ryan is a leading expert on using hypnosis to help high performance professionals manage stress and unlock their full potential. With over two decades of being a military intelligence officer, Ryan has developed unique methodologies that go beyond traditional hypnosis techniques. His work focuses on helping CEOs, entrepreneurs and business leaders break free from their limiting beliefs, and helps them manage stress effectively and achieve lasting transformation. Ryan is also the author of “Winner Peace”, how to end inner conflict and make success inevitable, a transformational book that guides readers through the process of reshaping their internal narratives and achieving lasting success. Before starting his career as a hypnotist, Ryan served as an intelligence specialist in the Marine Corps and Air National Guard, as well as 16 years as a senior intelligence officer in Washington, DC. His deep understanding of human behavior, decision making and high pressure environments informs his approach to hypnotism, making it a powerful tool for business professionals dealing with stress, burnout and the relentless demands of leadership. Ryan, welcome to the podcast.

Ryan Christensen 2:23
Well, thank you for having me on. It's an honor to be here.

Dave Erickson 2:27
Well, let's start at the beginning, Senior Intelligence Operation Specialist, sounds like a job title with a lot of stress built into it. Can you talk a little bit about how you originally dealt with the stress of that job?

Ryan Christensen 2:41
Sure. Well, it's definitely the kind of situation where, you know, you're working counter terrorism, you're working counter proliferation, so you're going against terrorist networks, you know, various countries that are doing all kinds of stuff you don't want them to do. And it's an incredibly difficult environment, because fundamentally, the job is trying to figure out what people don't want you to figure out and stop people who don't want to be stopped. And there is no such thing as things going to plan ever, right? So you're walking in the door in the morning, it's like, okay, great. What's on fire today? Right? And so quite frankly, it's, you make one plan, it goes wrong. You make another plan, it goes wrong, and it's just a matter of just continuing to iterate the problem. So fortunately for me, I've got ADHD, and that's the kind of environment that I really thrive in, because there's that constant pressure, that constant deadline, which really loves me to play at full level, you know, full capacity at all times. But it's really draining, because that doesn't stop, like, you get maybe a 20, 30, day break, a load of stuff within the course of, like, six months to a year. But the thing that really kind of kept me going was just the importance of the work, you know, being in the Marine Corps, that idea of just mission accomplishment over true welfare, you just, like, get it done, you know. And so during the days, yes, you're just cranking away, just cranking away, cranking away, coping afterwards. That was kind of the trouble, right? Because you deal with things like alcohol, things, stuff like that, just like de-stress and turn down things and kind of reset yourself, not the most healthy ways of coping. Let's put it that way. It wasn't until much later in my career that it found things like hypnotism, like meditation, to sort of turn those styles down. A lot more so for most my career is just like brute force in it. Just make it happen. Make it happen. Make it happen. Deal with the consequences after.

Dave Erickson 4:20
Yeah, it sounds like in a job like that, different personalities deal with the job in different ways. What type of personalities do you think would deal with the stress of the type of job you had, better or worse than yourself say?

Ryan Christensen 4:40
Well, I think there's probably two main skills you have to have. The first is, you have to be able to detach from the nature of the work, right? So we're dealing with counters, and you're like, you're dealing with some really heavy, really nasty, really yoga stuff, the worst people in the world doing all kinds of heinous stuff. And you”ve got to be able to, like, detach from that and not get emotionally involved in it, so it doesn't suck you down that rabbit hole of, like, all the bad stuff and all the negativity, right? You also have to be able to de-personalize your own role in it, right? It's not about me and what I'm doing. I'm supporting senior decision makers and what they're doing. I'm supporting the people down down range and helping them do what they're doing, which means I don't matter, my opinion doesn't matter at all. My job is to give them the best possible information and advocate for the course of action; the course of action that I think is best to the best of my possibility, to the best of my ability. But if they decide to go a different direction, they're taking things into account that I don't know, like office politics, there's computer priorities, whatever it happens to be, they've got more information I do, and I just got to let that be. And at that point, I have to take my own personal feelings aside, set them aside and just execute on their plan and make it work the best I can. Now, maybe me. I've got that plan B in my back pocket for when things do go sideways, but my job is to faithfully execute whatever plan they decide. So by like, taking that emotional distance from the actual work itself and de-personalizing it, where I'm just playing a particular role and that's all it is. It's not about me. It's about the work, It's about the mission. It's a lot easier to deal with a lot of stressors because you're not actually putting it on you. You're not taking it on you.

Botond Seres 6:09
Right? I was wondering, how do you go from being a senior, Senior Intelligence Operator to hypnosis and working with business executives. I mean, I suppose there is some word up with the depersonalization aspects, which, with which hypnosis can help greatly.

Ryan Christensen 6:29
Yeah, I think that. So it was really started my own journey back in 2019. I was trying to figure out the whole dating thing after my second divorce, doing a lot of work on myself. And one of the groups, there's a guy talk about, you know, toxic shame and emotional baggage. I'm like, Well, you know, Catholic so I got some of that, did a session with them, and just felt lighter. Keep carrying around 50 pounds of stuff. Get rid of 20 pounds. Everything's easier. I was, at that point in my career, I was looking for the next big thing, because 2019, 2020, I'm realizing that the world does not be, does not want to be saved. So I'm clearly in the wrong line of business. And really kind of caught my attention, right? And so I started work, working people, one that I had a talent for. It started my business in april 2020, went full time in October 2020. It is a very natural transition, because a lot of what I'm doing is that same kind of thing, like, okay, figure out what's going on in a place that you don't really have access to, put the puzzle together, take it apart. And the reason why I tend to work with things like entrepreneurs, CEOs, executives, professionals, is because a lot of the men's groups I was in was working heavily on the entrepreneur side, building a business, building that independence. And so I started seeing kind of the struggles that they were kind of running into, you know, the typical limiting beliefs, and the things we're kind of holding back from really being able to perform. But every single one of those beliefs, every single one of those limiting beliefs, has a particular structure. It's trying to accomplish a particular goal, trying to solve a particular problem. So once you understand what's driving that thing, you can take it apart, rebuild it into something better. And that's the same kind of thing I was doing in my intelligence work for 23 years. Figure out how it works, take it apart. Now there's just take it apart. Decide you gotta actually build something in your place. But that's a fairly easy transition.

Dave Erickson 7:56
I think, you know, there's a similarity with the work that you are doing and the work that developers do, in a sense, because developers like you are kind of given a mission, although sometimes clients don't give it as clearly as a mission, but basically, we're there to kind of support whatever the team is doing, which may be a team of 10 developers or two developers, and the stresses of that are kind of similar. Maybe you can kind of talk a little bit about what are some of the kind of techniques you discovered when you were doing your intelligence job, and what kind of things you did to relieve the stress.

Ryan Christensen 8:21
Well, like I said, it really kind of comes down to that depersonalization, like that's the biggest, biggest key, if you can take yourself and your ego and your identity out of the process, everything is so much easier. The difficulty is especially like in the work that I used to do, and also in the IT world. It's very much a you built an identity of being a programmer, of being an IT specialist, of being developer and your talent and your ability and creativity is like, what defines you. And so having that challenged, having that questioned, having that being, you're told you have to put that in a box and put that aside, that's incredibly, incredibly difficult, because it's your identity that's being challenged. So one of the biggest things that, that worked for me is like, Okay, this is not who I am. This is what I'm doing. This is a role in performing. This is work that I'm doing. This is how I bring to the table. And it's not about me and my identity, because I don't matter to this thing. I'm just a cog in the machine. I'm just a person doing a job. What matters is the success of the mission, the success of the project. What matters is the client's happiness and the client's fulfillment, right? So whatever I need to do to take my owning out of the process, like I'll do whatever that is right now, it's pretty easy for me because, you know, had that had to do that in the Marine Corps, that was kind of beaten into you whether you really wanted to or not. And I've also got the Autism, so it has always been a situation where I've never really been a part of the team. I've always been kind of separate, or haven't really fit in, so I've never needed to. I Figure out how to navigate that piece. On the other hand, it really made it really hard to do the inner office politics and the interagency politics, which is why I live with let that be done by somebody else, right? Just knowing where you're very best at, knowing where your talents are, knowing what you're not good at, taking yourself and your identity out of the process, and just letting it be a job you're doing. It fantastic performing that. That's the best advice I can give.

Botond Seres 10:19
It strikes me it's quite odd that you mentioned depersonalization in such a positive light, because generally, that's in the, let's say, the medical literature. That's not something that you want, that's something to strive for. Yeah, I do absolutely agree with you that there is a healthy amount of that.

Ryan Christensen 10:40
And it's not necessarily about depersonalization in terms of, like, not making a person, like, the medical term of depersonalization, like, definitely about it, yeah. Like, that sucks, that's, that's a horrible, horrible place to be in, where you're not even a person anymore. What I'm talking about is removing or disassociating your identity with the work you're doing, right? Disassociating the results of the work with your identity, right? Because when your work you're doing, if it's just something I'm doing rather than who I am, how I'm defining myself, it's a lot easier to create that space and distance and not be so emotionally tied up in things. Because it's that challenge to your identity, challenge to your expertise, challenge to how you're doing things that push all those emotional buttons, that drive their threat, drive the stress, drive the emotional activity, drive the, all the problems that we see. So by depersonalization, I mean like separating identity from work, separating identity from the things you're doing.

Dave Erickson 11:27
You mentioned something that was, I know that Botond and I have both dealt with this, him, maybe from the developer side, and myself, more from the project management side, but that is, you know, you're giving advice to your clients and your customers, and they don't want to take the advice, or they don't listen to it, or they question why are you coming from it from this approach? And you're passionate about what you're doing; you want it to be successful, so emotionally, you start getting really involved in the debate of, you know, why are you not doing it this way? And this should be the way it's doing. What are some of the things that you kind of learned how to resolve that and make, you know, take it from being stressed out, from they're not doing what I think they should do to Okay. How do I just do what I need to? How do you get past that?

Ryan Christensen 12:18
So number one, I will say, Don't do this. Do not do what I did. This is a bad idea. I always used to revert to what I call Hulk Smash diplomacy, right? You're not listening, so I'm gonna make you listen, right? And that very much, that sort of bull in a China shop like, pig headed like, No, you're gonna listen, and I'm gonna drag you through this until you get it, which didn't necessarily play over so well with all these different senior government officials that I'm working with. Right? I definitely got myself fired once or twice because of it. But at the same time, you kind of have to be a fierce advocate for your perspective, because you're the expert. That's what they're paying you for, and it's your job to try and convey that, right? So one of the big things, the biggest things, you have to do is figure out what is the disconnect. Where exactly are they sitting in their perspective and their understanding of things that's making things so difficult, what that, What's that chasm you need to cross? Because if you understand what their concerns are or what they don't get about your explanation, now you can fill those gaps, right? But fundamentally, like once the apps are filled, once you've had all the data, you have to let them make the decision. And if that means the product is not what you think it should be. That's fine, because ain't about you and your understanding the project is about their understanding, right? If they want to be a certain way, here you go. There you go. And if it blows up, yeah? Sorry

Botond Seres 13:36
To look at it from the other direction as well. What is it that I am missing that? Yeah, that is making this other person go in a completely different direction with the decisions. What is that one puzzle piece that I just failed to understand?

Ryan Christensen 13:51
Yeah, and that's one of the biggest things of the work I used to do, is that there's so many other things at play in these fields, in the national security field, that you just have no idea about, and he can have no idea about that. Like, it was very clear from the beginning. It's like, you, I'm here to give you advice. They have to make the decision because they're taking into account many more things I could ever understand, right? But yeah, one of the biggest questions, the most powerful questions you can ever ask when you're running up against a problem is, what am I missing? Because there's something wrong about your perception of the things, because if you were right, you'd be fixing it, it wouldn't be a problem. So there's something you're missing, something's wrong, there's an assumption you made, something is incorrect. There's data that's missing, there's something wrong, there's something missing. What am I missing?

Dave Erickson 14:32
I was doing a lot of work that was very stressful. I was a publisher for many years. Deadline always had deadlines. It was an endless deadline. Every month there was a new deadline, and you get close to that deadline, you're just really stressed out. It's a very hard deadline, everything has to be finished. I didn't realize how stressed out I was until literally after I left the publishing business. What are some of the things that you can, can, how do people recognize they're getting stressed out? How do people recognize that they're in a very stressed situation, not just from feeling because they may not, they may get numb to it after a while, because they're just doing it all the time. How can they start recognizing that they're getting stressed out to the point where they need to do something?

Ryan Christensen 15:21
Well, I'd say there's basically two main indications. Number one is, you get this kind of, like, mental lock. We're just like, you just can't, there's too much stuff in there. You just can't really make any progress. Can't really think about anything more than, like, one thing at a time, and just like, your brain is kind of locked up and not really able to do a lot. That's kind of like, you know, processor overload, where there's just too much stuff in there and nothing's running the way it needs to. The second thing I'd say is when the rest of your life starts falling apart, when the job, the thing you're doing, has taken up so much space of your mental capacity, physical capacity, emotional capacity, that there's nothing left for the rest of your life. It's a really good sign that there's something off. And for me, the biggest thing about stress is the lack of priorities, right? You got a million things going on. You got a million number one priorities, great. Nothing's gonna get done. You have to take a step back, organize that stuff, rack and stack and say, This is the only thing that's important. I'm gonna do this and nothing else until this is taken care of, and then I'll move on to the next and on to the next. And that does mean that sometimes you're sacrificing things, but at least you're doing it in a deliberate, conscious way. You made the decision to, which means you don't have to stress about it anymore. You don't have to keep it on your mind anymore, because you've deliberately taken it off your plate.

Dave Erickson 16:32
There is a lot of things that can help relieve stress. One of the easiest things is, you know, do some physical exercise, but there's, of the different things that you can do to relieve stress, I guess there. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between relieving stress, eliminating stress, and maybe coping with stress? That they seem to to me, be three different things, but maybe they're not. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Ryan Christensen 17:02
I'd say that's exactly right, because coping with stress and relieving stress are definitely two different things, right? Relieving stress is like, Okay, I've got too much on me. I got to get some of it off. And, yeah, physical activity is one of the easiest way to do that, because you're burning off all that energy. You're burning all that accumulated stuff off, right? Going. Can get a massage. Also a great way to do it, because you're cranking out all that muscle tension that's built up, right? You're giving your body ways to release that stuff. Coping with stress is ways as the stress is happening, to manage that load, to keep it below a level that becomes critical, right? There's all kinds of different things, the meditation and the journaling and the mindfulness and stuff like that, breathing techniques, breath work is really good for that stuff too, kind of just like turns down the dial and keeps that pressure below the boiling point. Managing stress, or the way I look at us, preventing stress, is about actually designing your mind to work in a more effective way. Because stress, fundamentally, is different parts your mind fighting and not coordinating, right? It's that mental overload from all this, like friction down below in your unconscious mind that's happening below the surface, right? I kind of look at my the mind as kind of a company it’s great as great analogy consciousness as a CEO, your rational mind is kind of senior management, emotional mind that middle management and seeking to mind, kind of those work abuses at the dock, right? So if those teams aren't coordinating well, if there's friction down below, now, everything is gummed up, right? There's all this, all this extra waste is going on down there because they're fighting, and it tends to drive a lot of the stress response and the emotional responses reactivity. Because if they can't coordinate and fix things down below, they’ve got to come to the boss for help. So for me, performance and stress relief and like stress prevention is okay. Figure out why those suckers are not coordinating the way they’re supposed to, figure out what the stressors are, figure out what those blocks are, get everybody on the same page, working together. So they know how to coordinate now. Everything's running smoothly down below, so you don't have that friction, you don't have that build up of stress. You're moving forward with a unified team that knows how to work well together, which means you don't get bothered with less stuff because they can handle it. You know they can handle it. If there is a problem, you know, it's actually a problem that they're coming to you for help. So just like normal stuff that they can't manage.

Botond Seres 19:13
So which category would the way David Goggins manages his stress go in, where he just wakes up in the morning, runs 20k and says that nothing can be worse than that throughout the entire day.

Ryan Christensen 19:26
I see that as an incredibly unhealthy way, because essentially, what he's doing is he's basically punishing the snot, the snot out of himself. It's like the beatings will continue until morale improves and I refuse to accept anything else right? But that's, that's; man, that's this level of self loathing and self hatred that I don't want anything to do with, right. Now, there's a big piece where it's like using those physical exercise to, to create a certain mental space, in terms of, like driving your neurochemistry, driving those stress responses. That's great way to do it. But fundamentally, you're trying to manufacture a mental state. You're trying to manufacture a mood through external simulation. And fundamentally, there's no difference between, like, hopping in a cold plunge and taking some cocaine, the exact same increase in your dopamine levels, right? Or like, Imma go and just pop some Advil or, sorry, Vivace or some Adderall., same thing. He's doing it in a healthier way. He's doing a way that he can actually use to feed his ego in terms of being an athlete and being hard, right? But it's the same physiological effect, from my perspective, that's a bad way to go about things, because you're just dealing with the output and the and the, the consequences of downstream cascade of this mental construct that created that cascade in the beginning. Why not just fix how that thing is generated? Then you don't have to deal with it, right? If the stress and the emotional load doesn't happen because it's being handled. you don't have to deal with it on the back end. And then physical exercise and everything else becomes a different piece; It's how I say healthier, how I compete, or whatever that happens to be, not a stress management technique.

Dave Erickson 20:52
There are several different things that you can do, and we've mentioned some of them, exercise meditation, you mentioned hypnotism, going to church, you know, those type of things. Maybe you can talk a little bit about, you know, if you're dealing with, say, a CEO or business person who's come to you and says, I'm really stressed out, what are kind of some of the things you start having them do to relieve stress, and what's kind of the journey that you would take somebody through to help them manage their stress and learn to deal with it better.

Ryan Christensen 21:30
So fundamentally, I'm just, I'm not a coach, right? There's a bunch of different techniques that people can use. I don't teach that stuff, right? There's a million places where you can go to find that stuff. Fundamentally, what I do is very specific, very deep process about clearing out everything that's going on in your unconscious mind, give anybody on the same page, getting anybody on the same team, and fundamentally, it's about getting to a place where you have a specific set of beliefs down there that kind of drive everything. That is,there's nothing wrong with me that never was. There's nothing to heal that never was. I'm good enough as I am to deserve whatever I choose, and I don't have to prove it to anybody, not even myself. And this puts you in a very interesting place, because a lot of stress is like, Okay, I've got to prove myself. I got to make these goals. I got to do something to, to support this identity, right? I've got to fix myself. I got to, you know, solve these problems. I'm wounded. I got to heal. I got all this trauma I'm dealing with, right? So if you can take all those problems off the table now, there's so much less stuff to deal with, right? Everybody down there is on the same page. There's no part of yourself you're rejecting, you're running from there's no need to create an identity that's based on your performance as a programmer or a developer. You get to get all the ego out of the way, because the ego kind of goes away in a certain way. And that whole good enough deserve whatever I choose, takes that whole question of like, do I get to do this? Am I allowed to do this? Right? Am I good enough to have this in my life? It's about figuring out all those things that drive those negative responses, drive that stress, drive the friction, drive the inefficiency, getting all that off the freaking table now you just don't have to deal with it. There's no downstream cascade, because it doesn't happen in the first place.

Botond Seres 22:59
Sounds to me like a big part of reducing stress is not judging ourselves.

Ryan Christensen 23:05
Oh, 100% 100% because it says self judgment that drives a lot. It was like, Oh God, like, I'm not good enough. Great. I gotta perform hard. I gotta push myself hard. I gotta be more. Gotta be more, right? And if you look at like entrepreneurs and business professionals in particular, almost all of them like, great. I've got this goal, I reach my goal now what? I gotta build another one, a bigger one.

Botond Seres 23:25
Yeah. Then comes the empty feeling of, what the heck am I doing with my life?

Ryan Christensen 23:30
Yeah, Yeah, It's like, why don't I feel good enough? Well, that's because you're trying to do that to prove something to yourself. You feel like you're not good enough, trying to prove that you are but one of the things in hypnosis that we talk about all the time is that your unconscious mind judges true and false based on what it already believes. So if the belief is I'm not good enough, you can't prove it wrong from the onset end, because it's ignoring all evidence to the contrary. So it doesn't matter how successful you are. That never goes away. But if you get that down and change it from I'm not good enough to I am good enough now you don't have to doing that stuff, right? Got Alex and Mosey talking about building a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are; makes sense, but if you got one piece of undeniable proof, Aren't you done? Why do you need a stack? Why is the stack not big enough yet? Why do you have to keep adding to it? It's like that ain't how that works. I'm sorry that is not how that works. It's just not going to work. So if you take the, if you take that need off the table, what happens? A lot of that pressure, a lot of those things you're doing to try and sustain that you don't have to do anymore, your cognitive load, your effort, all this sort of stuff, goes way down, because there's a massive need that you don't have to fill anymore.

Dave Erickson 24:38
So Ryan, what led you to looking at hypnotism as a tool to deal with some of the things you were dealing with, and dealing with some of the stress and kind of changing your mental outlook.

Ryan Christensen 24:55
Well, it really came down to recognizing in 2020, 2021, that I, you know, I was just not getting what I needed in life. I was throwing myself under the bus, doing everything for everybody else, and it's just not getting what I needed. And that had been kind of a an issue that I've been dealing with my entire life. You know, grew up with autism and Kansas in the 70s and 80s, nobody had any idea what's wrong with me, nobody could help me and just the world works for everybody else, just not for me. So I knew from a very early age that I was never gonna get what I needed. And 45 years old, I'm like, I can't live out of this anymore. So I really kind of, like, went on the war path of, like, I've got to figure out what the, is wrong and fix it. And through that journey, I tried basically everything under the sun, you know, therapy and CBT and spiritual stuff and psychedelics and energy work and energy healing and, like, hypnosis and all of it, and all of it helps. All of it moves them all forward. All the creation space, but 80, 90% of the problems I'm facing are in my subconscious mind, how it's processing the world, the behaviors it's doing the, ways it's sabotaging me. The emotional response is driving Great. That's the place I got to go to fix this. That's where the problem is. Only two ways to get down there, psychedelics and hypnosis. Psychedelics are beautiful, but they take you on whatever right they want to take you on, you don't have any control, can't go down and work on anything specific, and there's limits to the amount of changes you can make while you're down there, because you're on a ride. Once the ride is over, the doors closed again, I don't have access to that stuff anymore, so all the integration work I'm doing is conscious now they have this understanding. What do I make this, how do I do things, decision wise? Right, How navigate life that way? Hypnosis, on the other hand, lets me open the door to your unconscious mind and stay down there as long as I want to. I can go after anything I want. So once I kind of identified what the problems were, I would use hypnosis and different hypnotic techniques to say, Okay, I understand what the problem is. Now I need to go fix that thing. And it's just a process of iterating through that to figure out what level of problem and where I need to go, and the place I ended up was really kind of met and errors right the forest versus the trees, because your emotional mind isn't looking at details. It doesn't care. It's looking at patterns over time. It's looking at narratives or through things. It's a lot of things we run up against are just like, I'm not good enough, showing up in a million ways. There's something wrong with me, showing up in many ways, different ways. So instead of playing Whack a Mole down here, why not just figure out how to fix I'm not good enough as a meta narrative, as a meta concept, because if you got a big box in your head with a million things in it and label on sizes, I'm not good enough. Typical approaches take stuff up, put in a different box, and it works, clears out space, but there's a million things in the box, and more stuff gets added all the time, so it never ends, which is why you see the skin to your process, like always having to deal with, always having to manage, always having to cope with this stuff, because the problem is not solved. But if there's a label on the box, why not just change the label. So I can change labor from I'm not good enough to I am good enough now, everything the box means I'm good enough, and you don't have to deal with it. It's done. Don't have to move it to another box, it is exactly where it's supposed to be. Now you don't have to fight about it, fight against it down here, which is what causes all that stress. Then it can grid between what you think and what you feel right, between what you know and what you believe. So if you get the beliefs and the thoughts on the same page, no friction anymore, everything's congruent, now I can rock and roll, and that's how I got to a place where I could actually get everything I need in life, and that made it finally worth living.

Botond Seres 28:07
That's quite inspiring, to be honest. So it's quite apparent that you're very much in hypnosis. Right by, if you don't mind me mentioning, with tone of your voice, it's thank you so much. It's a clear indicator. And you know, I'm quite a bit into hypnosis myself, but the part of it, specifically that I'm into is self hypnosis. I think that is what you're talking about as well.

Ryan Christensen 28:35
So I don't use self hypnosis as much as a lot of people do. Talk about things in terms of like generative and restorative. Generative is creating new stuff, new possibilities, and so forth and so on. Restorative is just fixing old things. Self hypnosis is phenomenal for the generative side of things. I want this. I want to create this. I want to create these habits. I want to have this sort of target, beautiful for that, really bad for fixing stuff, really bad for trying to fix stuff. And it kind of makes sense if you have this friction between you and your mind, your mind doesn't trust you, doesn't trust your leadership, and all the changes you want to make are to do things that it thinks are bad, wrong, dangerous in some way. So why the heck would it let you change it? So it's really difficult to make those changes on your own. Right. You can create space by saying, Okay, this is too painful, or it's too painful not to have this. Sure it'll give that to you now, but you haven't changed the underlying friction, underlying problem, because half the time is not going to bother to show you what it is. And so one of the most frustrating things about my journey is I'd have, know exactly what the problem was, know exactly how to fix it. And mom would say, Nope, not allowed. So I have to go hire somebody else to go in there and fix it for me. Oh, my God. So frustrating, so frustrating.

Botond Seres 29:44
That's like the definition of ADHD.

Ryan Christensen 29:47
Yeah, well, kind of, kind of, but it's very much like, uh, if you and your employees, if you're the CEO of a company, and you and your employees are their employees on strike in their union, you can't fire them. Negotiations are broken down. What do you do? You gotta have the third party labor negotiator come in and have that conversation for you, because you ain't listening to it, and stop listening to you. So you have to have somebody to figure out that problem for you.

Botond Seres 30:08
So what do you say is the main difference between common self hypnosis and the hypnosis techniques that you like to use?

Ryan Christensen 30:12
So the common hypnosis techniques are like, Okay, I've got an idea what the problem is. There's a particular thing I can identify. Great. So can identify. Great. Let me go ahead and create a new story, a new framework to play with this, and let me go and drop it down to my unconscious mind, perfect, generative, individual problems, individual issues, individual events, individual traumas. Left brain, trees in the forest, right? Because that's typically the way we frame problems, right? What I do is I'm going after that meta narrative, that meta that meta belief, and instead of trying to create a story around it, no Why bother, your mind knows exactly why it's doing what it's doing. Knows exactly the problem is trying to solve, knows exactly the constraints, knows exactly the objective. It came to that conclusion for a reason. There was a chain of logic that created that so why am I guessing? I'm gonna use my intelligence techniques and my investigative techniques to say, freaking show me. I'm not gonna guess at how the black box is wired. I'm gonna open that sucker up and say, show me how you’re wired. Because once I can understand that chain of logic, I can then disprove that old chain of logic. I can use updated understandings to disprove that old chain of logic. I can create a new chain of logic that draws a different conclusion from the same data, and now what you're doing is you've removed that old belief. You remove the entire need to do that thing. You've created a new response and a new belief that drives completely different behavior. It's fundamentally restorative plus general but that restorative piece, like getting rid of the old belief, getting rid of that understanding, old understanding, is what creates a space for something new, instead of just trying to, you know, throw a new feature on it, like a decade or two of spaghetti code, right? No, go back and fix, fix the spaghetti code first, and then you can build the new features, and everything runs so much smoother.

Botond Seres 31:52
Sounds a lot like meditation to me.

Ryan Christensen 31:57
Now, because, again, what are you doing in meditation? You're taking yourself on a conscious process, right? You're getting down from, like, beta to alpha, but you're not actually getting down to the theta state, most likely, when you're doing this, like yoga, need or stuff like that, which is more data meditation, so somebody else is taking on it, right? And again, even in meditation, your mind, your unconscious mind, gets to decide what it shows you. It doesn't have to do what you say. If it did, you wouldn't have these problems. So if it gets to show you what it wants to then you don't necessarily know what actually is going on down there until you get access to that part of your mind ask the right questions in the right way with the right kind of relationship. So it helps you see it right. But fundamentally, that's a process where you have to kind of let me lead you through it, and your mind has to agree to show me the problem before we can actually go there.

Dave Erickson 32:43
Many people see hypnotism as kind of a stereotype that they've seen in movies with the old guy and a couch and a watch and, you know, counting to a 10, and then they do whatever they're told to do. But maybe you could talk a little bit about what hypnotism really is, and what is the kind of the mechanics or the technique of it, so people can have a better understanding of that.

Ryan Christensen 33:07
Sure. So I define hypnosis as just a set of techniques that gives me access to your unconscious mind. That's it. What we do when we're down there. That's kind of the art of the whole piece, right? And you can use hypnosis for all kinds of different ways. Can I swing and watch in front of your face. Sure. Does that work? Absolutely right? There's a billion different ways, called different inductions, different ways of getting you down there. There's a progressive relaxation. Great having an atlas really could say, Okay, go and relax your feet and then your calves and then your thighs and then your stomach. And you basically bore somebody into hypnosis, right? Kind of like a guide of meditation, just like, wait until they give up. There's the different techniques of like, going deeper and counting yourself down. The one I use is called an element induction. It's pretty quick. It's about, takes about five minutes, kind of leading you through a specific set of steps, kind of like a compliance letter, almost, you know, taking you doing these things, doing these things, seeing how you respond, because that lets me, like, verify how deep you are. There's something called a fractionation induction, where you're kind of taking somebody rapidly into and out of trance, just like drop. Trance, just like, drop them way the heck down. It's incredibly powerful. There's confusion inductions, where I'm just talking a bunch of stuff and kind of taking you back and forth and just like, eventually you just give up and drop in right? But once you get there, that's the magic space of like, okay, what am I going to do while I'm here? And fundamentally, there's a couple of different things you could do. Number one, there's a suggestion based general stuff. Go ahead and channel the stories. Get your mind thinking about things in different way. Get you some different frameworks to play with. So your mind's got different tools down there that it hasn't necessarily incorporated on its own. The other thing is, you can change the way your mind processes the world. Now. Pain control is a big thing in hypnosis. Smoking cessation, big thing in hypnosis, weight loss, big thing in hypnosis. A lot of times you're changing the way your mind is processing. Okay, instead of like cigarettes tasting good, they taste disgusting. You don't want to put that thing in your mouth, right? Or they change your relationship to food and how you're being attracted to it, so that you can then move, have different behaviors. Again, the way I do that, investigative states got access. Why am I not just asking questions, right? But fundamentally, that's the science, that's the art of it, and all of it comes from a process of you allowing me to lead you through the process, because fundamentally, you're always in control, and I can't make you do anything you don't want to do. The other thing is that the part of your mind that's the most protective is your unconscious mind, because this job is keeping you alive, keeping you breathing, doesn't really care if you're happy, so it's not going to allow me to do anything that's going to harm you. It has free will, just like the rest of you. I can't make it do anything. It has to accept the suggestions and behave it, right. So fundamentally, I can't take you over, make you do things you don't want to do. That's not how that works. I'm not going to hypnotize you, make you give me all your money. I'm also going I can make you cluck like a chicken, because that's dumb. You have to pay me extra for that, right? But, you know, the stupid stuff they see you do on stage, you know, with stage hypnosis stuff, he's like, Oh, I don't want to make you do, you know, make, have you do some ridiculous stuff. I mean, it's like, great, great. Everybody who's on that stage wants to play the game the hypnotist. Before he even brings up somebody on that stage, he's doing a lot of stuff, kind of testing with the audience. Testing with the audience is seeing who is responding the most in the audience to what he's doing. Who wants to play the game? Who wants to do dance, bring you up on stage, do a bit more testing. Who's really wanting to play a game? Great. These five people, awesome. You have all agreed to play the game. Y'all know I'm going to make you do stupid stuff. You're willing to let me do stupid stuff with you. Fair enough. What's wrong? Right? I can't make you do anything you don't want to do. You got to be willing to let me lead you through process. You got to be willing to play the game and do the dance.

Dave Erickson 36:29
You have this book called Winner Peace. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the book, why you wrote it, and kind of what's in it for people. Why? Why would they want to take a journey through that book?

Ryan Christensen 36:42
Sure. So Winner Peace, how to end a conflict and make success enable, I've got a very different model of hypnosis and how the mind works. Got a very different model on how to move through the world, and I wanted to get that out there, because I've seen some incredibly powerful results from it, not on my own life, but also for my clients. And so it's really a laying out like, what is my theory? What is my framework? How does this work? How do I view how the mind works? How to reframe things like emotions, so instead of emotions being pain, let's make them questions. Let's make them, our mind saying, Hey, I'm facing a problem. I need you to help solve a problem. Once you do that now you don't have to avoid that pain. Your mind doesn't have to keep you away from those situations that would push those buttons, and every negative emotion you feel helps you, because it's showing you what's in your way to getting what you want right. So now they're actually helping you figure out what the problem is. Because the hardest part of solving any problem is figuring out what the heck the problem is in the first place. So if your mind’s saying, I'm looking for this kind of thing, well that speeds up the process of figuring out the problem is you can get down there a bit faster you actually go through that process of solving problems to get what you want. Get what you want faster. The other thing is, if emotions are no longer pain, something really interesting happens. Your capacity for work is your capacity to deal with pain and suffering, right? I can only lift, I can only train until I get sore then I'm done. But if emotions are no longer pain, can you suffer mentally or emotionally; which means your capacity to do mental and emotional work essentially becomes infinite. It's no longer a question of how long, how hard can I work? It's a question of how hard do I want to work? Because that friction is gone, the pain is gone. Your mind can't push you around with that stick and carry it anymore. Has to play there, and because you've done all that work to line up those different parts of your mind by teaching them what these different questions are, they can solve a lot of problems at a lower level. So your baseline mental state becomes kind of Zen, like mental clarity, general sense of well being, and you don't have to do anything to maintain it. That's just where you are. So if you can work however long you choose, you're solving problems faster. Anything you want in life is already yours. It's just a matter of time. And the book is designed to take you that process and get you there to the extent that a book can. And once you're ready to do the deeper work and really clear stuff up, that's when you come and see me to do this stuff for real and actually make sure everything's lined up on that unconscious mind. But if you're starting with a book, you can do yourself, get yourself pretty far down the road by yourself.

Dave Erickson 39:02
What type of people from business are coming to you, and what type of help are they mostly looking for when they, when they come to you?

Ryan Christensen 39:12
I've worked with all kinds of people, mid level executives. I've worked with entrepreneurs, worked with attorneys, worked with doctors. I've worked with some guys doing like, seven figure businesses on their own. Work with the guy that had a couple seven figure exits of companies already done kind of a retirement, trying to figure out what's next. And fundamentally, there's basically three different problems. Number one, they're kind of stuck in a cage, right? They're here. They should be here. They know that gap in the potential they just can't seem to break through. I tell that being stuck in the cage because everything's kind of off limits that you really want, kind of boxed in by that pain of fear, fair enough. The second are those guys who, they just can't take their freaking foot off the gas, right? They're stuck chasing the goals, stuck putting points on the board. The rest of life is kind of a mess, right? And they're like, I need to figure out what the heck is going on here. Sometimes they're coming to me from the perspective.

Ryan Christensen 40:00
You’re like, okay, how do I hit the next level? And which is like, okay, let's reframe this problem a little bit first. Is this really what you want to do? Because if somebody is just like, what's more and more and more, that's not the kind of person I can help. It's the people that can recognize that that's a problem. Those are the guys I work with. And last one of the ones that it's like, Okay, I've done all the success, I've checked all the boxes. Like, I should feel amazing and I don't right. Or I'm doing everything else and I'm not getting what I need. Like, what the heck? Right? That's where it's like, Okay, now we need to shift that space of meaning for you to where you can actually get what you need. You actually have that fulfillment, so you don't have to try and chase that stuff anymore.

Botond Seres 40:36
Ryan, this might be like a rehash of what I already asked. But I do have some trouble understanding the nuances and the differences between meditation, self hypnosis and your personal brand of hypnosis,

Ryan Christensen 40:57
Sure. So I would say that it comes down to,like access to the unconscious mind and kind of what you're able to do with it, talking about brain waves. Beta is like your normal waking state. Alpha is that meta state of state, theta is that kind of like bridge between the waking and the dream sleep. And delta is your sleep state that theta state is very important, very special, because it allows you to bridge between the conscious and the unconscious minds in a meditative state. Basically what you're trying to do is turn down the noise and the input from the mind to consciousness. It's an exploration of consciousness. Really. I did some deep Buddhist meditation, got down to what's called the seventh Jana, which is a place of like non perception, where essentially, like your consciousness floating in like nothingness, like zero connection to your body. It's fascinating, but it's essentially trying to take your consciousness away from the body and the mind to create some separation for yourself. I self hypnosis, getting yourself down in that theta state, but you're still trying to drive from the boat, from a conscious perspective, all right? And so it allows you to put stuff down into your unconscious mind. Allows you to have a little bit more access to it, but your unconscious mind is still able to have that space of like, okay, I'm going to decide what am I give you?

Ryan Christensen 42:02
Right? I get to decide what I'm going to show you, because you're not fully in it. You're still, like, trying to play both roles, and you're doing it in a way that the subconscious mind is still subordinate, right? Very good for, like, dropping things in, phenomenal for state changes, right? Talk about stress relief. If you can drop yourself in a hypnosis now you're in a broken state, you can bring yourself back out of any state you want. Go ahead, and I'm sure I'm gonna go and drop myself in for a minute. Bring myself out. Chill, relaxed, focused. Beautiful for that, beautiful for that general stuff. Let me drop in my goals. Let me drop in my affirmation stuff, and dropping where I want to go. Beautiful for that, but in terms of fixing things, in terms of really doing deep exploration, not particularly effective because you don't have access to it. Your unconscious mind doesn't have to play. And if there's a problem need to solve between the two of you, it don't trust you, so it's not really going to let you do that. By having somebody else take you down there, by putting your unconscious mind fully in that driver's seat. Now things are different because you're putting consciousness and support in space, and you say, okay, unconscious mind, tell me what's important to you. Tell me what your concerns are, what your priorities are, what's driving your decision making. Because it's going to be different. Has to be otherwise you should be on the same page. And that's the space where you can say, Okay, I am negotiating with the unconscious mind to address its concerns and its objectives in a way that it can get its needs met or we can solve the problems. So now you guys can actually play the right way. Why are things things off limits? Why are things these things bad, wrong and dangerous? Can we shift that from bad, wrong, dangerous to something good, something useful, to something desirable, right? Because now, if the things that used to be off limits are the things you actually want, need and give you what you want, that now becomes a goal. Now you guys are on the same page. Now you can play together, but you have to have somebody come in and do that for you, because you have to be out of the driver's seat. You cannot be your own brain surgeon. I don't care how hard you try, just not have not the way that works, right? You got to let somebody else drive the boat so you can relinquish that control, so it can be fully in the driver's seat.

Botond Seres 43:59
I think I understand now. Thank you very much for the detailed explanation.

Ryan Christensen 44:03
Of course.

Dave Erickson 44:04
So Ryan, maybe you can talk a little bit about your consulting business. Who are the type of people you're looking for, and what are kind of the things that you offer?

Ryan Christensen 44:13
Sure. So again, I'm a hypnotist, not a consultant. I only do hypnosis. I don't do coaching of any kind. The way I see it is, this is my zone of genius, and everybody else could probably help you figure out the other you figure out the other stuff better. I'm not a coding guy. I'm not a, you know, entrepreneurship guy, like, Do not ask me how to do relationships. I've got two divorces in my belt. I'm the wrong guy to ask that. Right? What I am here to do is that there's something more that you're wanting, something more that you should be doing, something more to life that you don't have access to. My job is to get all those internal barriers out of the way so you can have it, figure out what that conflict is, so everybody's on the same page. I do things in a very programmatic way. I get you to a specific space belief wise. Nothing wrong with me never was nothing he'll never was good enough as I am, I deserve whatever shoes don't have to prove it to anybody named myself. I charge a flat fee. I take you there. I don't care how long that takes. Typically, we're able to do all the foundational work in about three sessions. That's really all it takes, because there's really, like, not that many things to fix when you're looking at things from that high level concept that said, sometimes we gotta do some work ahead of time. Actually get you a place where you can do that work. Sometimes there's some cleanup we need to do on the back end. No way to know how much work we need to do until we get in there. So again, you pay me a flat fee. I take you to that particular result, because that's really what you want. That's really what you want to pay for. Okay? The kind of people that come from me kind of worries me. All walks of life, doing all kinds of stuff. Some people have been on a self improvement path for a while, and they're like, nothing else is working. I'm not done, how can I finish this path up? Great. Some professionals looking up for the edge. Some of them are looking at that fulfillment, right? But there's just something more that they're needing in life. The thing I need from a client is really a couple different things. Number one, you gotta have humility. The story you've been telling yourself about your life is wrong. The story you're telling about yourself about who you are, is wrong because it was right. You gotta fix this stuff already. So it has to be wrong, at least in whole or in part. And you're basing it and you're basing it on all these individual data points that your mind is giving. If that ain't the whole data set, you're missing the bigger picture, number two, you have to be willing to accept and confront and own the things about yourself you don't like and wish weren't true. You have to be able to accept to own the things that you wish were not true about your life, right? The thing this idea of like, I'm not good enough, even though I know I am. This is the truth you have to play with, and you have to allow it to be true long enough for us to fix it, no longer right. If you're willing to do those two things, if you're willing to be wrong, if you want to allow yourself to be led through the process, if you want to face or selling things yourself, things about yourself you don't like, we can get you there. It's not even all that hard.

Botond Seres 46:38
Ryan, in your opinion, what's the future of hypnosis?

Ryan Christensen 46:44
Really good question. So I think that there's a few different things. Number one, it needs to be more professionalized and accepted as a valid modality for change, because it's really not right now. But like I said, it's the most effective tool in order to change things down the subconscious mind, and that's the place where is the next field in mental health, and really has been for quite a while. Psychedelics, I think, are kind of opening the door to that, because psychedelics, again, play in the unconscious mind, and we're really seeing some major changes with that, especially for stuff like PTSD and depressive disorders and so forth and so on. So for me, hypnosis is an extra you use after you've gotten somebody through that process. It's like all the techniques we have kind of get you that 20 year that 20 yard line. Kind of end up spinning your wheels. This form of hypnosis kind of gets you in that end zone where you're kind of like done with that, and then you can move on with your life, right? So that's where I see things going. It's going to take a while to do that, 5, 10, 15, 20, years. But with all this stuff in the veteran space, and all this stuff with depression and anxiety and PTSD, this kind of driving the psychedelic revolution, and getting that being a mainstream modality, I think this is a natural effect of like, Okay, we're here. Let's go ahead and take that next step, because you're already starting to play in the right spaces. You're already looking at alternative treatments.

Dave Erickson 47:55
Ryan, thank you so much for being our guest on this podcast and helping us find new ways to deal with the stress of business.

Botond Seres 48:02
Well, we're at the end of the episode today, but before we go, we want you to think about this important question.

Dave Erickson 48:09
Will you explore hypnotism as a way to deal with the stress of business?

Botond Seres 48:14
For our listeners, please subscribe and click on notifications to join us for our next ScreamingBox, Technology and Business, Rundown Podcast. Until then, try a new way to deal with stress.

Dave Erickson 48:27
Thank you very much for taking this journey with us. Join us for our next exciting exploration of technology and business in the first week of every month. Please help us by subscribing, liking and following us on whichever platform you're listening to or watching us on. We hope you enjoyed this podcast, and please let us know any subjects or topics you would like us to discuss in our next podcast by leaving a message for us in the comment sections or sending us a Twitter DM till next month. Please stay happy and healthy.