Allan Blackwell: Welcome to Your 20 Minute Podcast with David Brower, where we do our best to give you useful information in 20 minutes or less. Now, here’s your host, five-time Voice Arts nominee, David Brower.
David Brower: Thanks Allan. This is David Brower with Your 20 Minute Podcast. Our special guest today from Alexandria, Virginia is Jason Linnet. He’s a speaker, author, and hypnotic success coach, and he’s an expert at helping organizations and the people within them create powerful change and sharpen their strategies.
As a speaker, author, and hypnotist, Jason has put in more than 15 years of professional study and on-the-job experience, tracking how top performance in many industries achieve astounding results. His new book coming out, Work Smart Business: Lesson Learned from hypnotizing 250 thousand people and building a million-dollar brand. That’s coming out January 27th. Jason, welcome to the show, Man. Glad to have you here.
Jason Linett: Awesome to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
David Brower: Oh, you bet. I’ve been fascinated ever since I read your bio the first time, because there’s that stereotype of hypnotists, raise your arms, close your eyes, cluck like a chicken. And as I read on your stuff, and I watched your TEDx, it’s obvious that you are doing some magic with business here. How did you get started with this?
Jason Linett: You know, it’s one of those things that I look at it from the perspective that I’ve done all these things in my business, and it’s a world where, as you already mentioned for me, I have to promise some people that I’m not gonna hypnotize them to cluck like a chicken, which, towards that, I’m around about a thousand other hypnotists annually, and I still haven’t met anyone who has ever actually done that.
David Brower: How funny.
Jason Linett: But it turns out that misconception is already a misconception. My journey in all of this was that I was working in nonprofit arts management, and here came all of a sudden, a stage hypnotist doing one of those funny shows.
David Brower: Sure.
Jason Linett: Just something about it peaked my curiosity. It became this quest of learning as much as I could, and it slowly began to become a bit more of a hobby off to the side, and doing presentations for schools and doing a lot of one-to-one clients, and just reaching a place of beautiful burnout in the management career, and deciding, you know what? I wanna do this now.
So, it’s that opportunity to launch something many years ago that I didn’t really quite have a model to copy. There’s not really many people who do the work that I do and simply from refusing to believe that the business had to be slow the first year, getting a lot of things right early on and just consistently scaling up that business and recognizing that this is in a much larger message than just for the people in my smaller community needed, so it’s where over the years, speaking to business groups, speaking in various conventions and various organizations, and just helping people to take control of their own mindset as well as their own success.
David Brower: I think, your term is fascinating to me. The burnout, the beautiful burnout. I’ve never heard it said that way but I trust that is true, because anytime you get burned out like that, or at least that’s my experience is, if you look at it, it’s an opportunity, and what are you going to do with it? You obviously jumped on board and created your own platform, your own design, your own systems that worked for you, and you’ve had great success in a fairly short period of time. How long have you been doing this part of it?
Jason Linett: It was a part-time career from 2007 to around 2008 or 2009, and then full-time ever since then. That opportunity of building out a business that, if you look at the work that we do in any field and there’s that statement that you should have multiple strains of income, I’d say it’s a myth that you have to, instead I would say that you absolutely should, ’cause it’s a much more comfortable way of doing things, which, the benefit of that becomes is that, I have described some aspects of what I do these days as a bit of a three ring circus.
Here’s a week that we’re recording right between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, and here’s an experience of being able to be in the office with a couple of clients, but at the same time, here’s the period of time where I’m able to branch off and work on some classes, work on some product design, do some individual coaching, so that opportunity to be able to increase that reach, where I meet too many people who I would say are thinking a little bit too small about the shape of their business. They’ve kind of fallen into one specific category, when there’s so many options, so many other possibilities that are out there.
David Brower: And they don’t know what they don’t know, oftentimes when they’re a small business, so being exposed to somebody like you that can take the blinders off and give them some well-deserved epiphanies has got to be just delightful for business people that you work with.
Jason Linett: I actually bring it back to a personal change perspective. I think what it illustrates is that when I work with clients one-to-one here in my office, I work with people around the world thanks to video conferencing like Skype or even Zoom, and here’s a day several months ago that two different people came into my office and they both had the same backstory. They both had the same goals. They were both men in their early 60’s, recently retired, who had decided they wanted to make use of hypnosis to help them become more motivated to lose weight.
In comes the 10 a.m., and he explains, “Now that I’m retired, this is gonna be so easy. I’m gonna have all this extra time for exercise and cook for myself. With my old job it was so difficult to keep track of my health. This is the perfect timing.” In comes the 1 o’clock. “Now that I’m retired, this is going to be impossible. I’m going to want to sit around my house, I’m gonna want to dine out more frequently. I’m gonna be taking more vacations.”
To be quite honest, it was an interesting experience ’cause he was generally successful to a point, yet struggling a bit until I finally just went, “You know, funny story. Someone else came in and just had to reveal, here’s what the other guy said.”
It’s to look at these opportunities that we can look at a possible conflict as a bit of a brick wall, a bit of a challenge. I’d shared right before we jumped onto the recording, I had mentioned that yeah, currently, Alexandria, in the process of moving my physical office just ’cause of some ongoing maintenance issues and realizing that, okay well, I’m gonna move. Yes, it’s going to be slightly more rent but then again, it was a new space, I can hire additional staff once again, I can do more video production, so rather than focus on the conflict of why I had to move rather abruptly thanks to what they described as a water event-
David Brower: Oh, a water event! I like that.
Jason Linett: Yeah, water was leaking, it was time to get out of here. Again, for the opportunities in business, the worst business advice I ever received was part of what made me an instant success at it, where I was listening to everyone saying, “It’s going to be slow your first year. You’re not gonna have any referrals the first year.” Just going, “What can I do differently to make that happen instead?”
David Brower: Exactly right. The water event is not unlike the beautiful burnout. It’s another major opportunity for you to jump forward. I remember my own personal experience in May of 2008, I had been working a corporate job and marketing for a large automotive group and I’d been terminated. My last day on the job was April 30th, and so, I took a leap of faith on May 1st and opened up my business and by the end of the year I was making … actually by the end of the first day, I had three contracts, so I was already making good money, and then all of a sudden I had 62 percent referral rate and I’m going, “Wow! Timing is everything!” Again, thank you for the beautiful release!
Jason Linett: I keep coming back to the quote from the longtime producer and creator of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels, the quote being, “Whether we’re ready or not, the show goes live at 11:30.”
David Brower: Love that. Love that. Absolutely love that.
Jason Linett: In the course of their production, they’ve been writing, they’ve been rehearsing, so there’s always gonna be an element of the appropriate preparation. As I was sensing the end was near in the old career, I was using that timeframe to work on my website, to continue my own education, my own learning, so by the time it became an opportunity to launch, things were already lined up and ready.
So it’s where anybody in business can look at what are the, I talk about everything as being an asset and how do we leverage it, so what are the current hours that I have available? What are the current skills that I already have in motion? How can I leverage these in such a way that now it becomes the ideal scenario to make this work?
David Brower: Absolutely, and by doing that and having such a cross section, if you will, of different opportunities and different people and different businesses, that goal of having multiple revenue streams just kind of grows organically, I would think.
Jason Linett: And I’d say that too, that the main intention though is beneath us. Yes, it’s important to have a business, yes it’s important to be able to earn an income that’s respectable, but at the same time, it becomes that crossover that if we approach our own personal lives in the same way, so it’s where the years of working with private clients, I see a number of executives with fear of public speaking, or some performance anxieties when they’re in front of their team, working, even with a private client.
I mentioned the weight loss client. I see people for stopping smoking, and it’s where we create these stories. We create these patterns in our minds as to why we can’t. So, to recognize the word because, could become the most inspiring word in our language. It could also become the most challenging word. With a little bit of creativity, we can flip that because, so we have that balance between our work life, our personal life, which is very important to me as I’ve also got two small children under eight years old, and the opportunity to continue to grow the success, but also leave the job behind and go home.
David Brower: Well, you’ve struck a balance with everything that I’m sure wasn’t easy in the beginning, but I may be wrong. Maybe it was a balance that was already there and you just let it flourish while you were growing all these other things. How do you feel about that?
Jason Linett: I share to remind some of the personal story back, I was working as a stage manager in professional theater. That was a job that required that I wasn’t the creative one on stage, I wasn’t designing or directing, it was my job to track everything in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, to deal with contracts, to deal with some of the union regulations and to balance all these creative people at the same time.
It was where you would often, I can flash back to having to call a lighting cue one time, off of an actor raising his eyebrow. It means that it was that specific of a moment, yet it was this one actor that was so clinical in his performance that he would always raise his eyebrow at that exact moment, and you can count on that for four months of shows, eight shows a week, he was that consistent.
David Brower: Oh my gosh.
Jason Linett:: And it always felt fresh. It always felt like it was a genuine moment, ’cause he’s just an amazing actor.
David Brower: Yeah.
Jason Linett: To bring that same thinking into whether it’s our personal lives, whether it’s our professional lives, I keep coming back to the statement of just to work smart. To make that statement as if it’s in the command form, which is to work with intention, to work with purpose and with focus. There are moments, let’s say where, up until a couple of years ago, I was only working in an office away from home maybe four days a week, yet suddenly, okay now both kids are in school from Monday through Friday. Okay, I guess I gotta go in on Mondays again.
David Brower: Right, right, yeah.
Jason Linett: Here’s a period of time where I refer to it as BC, but not like of the years, but instead for me, it was before children.
David Brower: Exactly.
Jason Linett: And recognizing that here was the time frame that my life was commuting a long distance in Washington DC for a job and the joke was, “I’m young. I can deal with these long hours now.” And I was purposely working from eight in the morning to nine thirty in the evening. Where maybe, here’s a moment where, the upcoming book launch, recognizing that, okay, it’s a self-imposed deadline but I want it to come out on that specific date. I have to take away hours from one thing and put it somewhere else. The real lesson over time is that there’s no such thing as finding the time. Instead, there’s only making the time.
David Brower: Exactly. Yeah. Well said. I think the other thing that really comes through really simply in the way you communicate, the way you talk, your interviews, your website, all those kinds of things, is your transparency and your integrity. I think when you do a business for the right reasons and helping other people or helping other businesses or whatever, the financial payoff comes … just comes.
The payoff is working with those people and with those businesses right?
Jason Linett: It’s where, to look at everything from the mindset of, rather than approaching a group of people and thinking, “What can I sell these people?” Instead, “What can I give them? What can I give them? What experience can I provide?” Whether it’s one of the hundreds of videos I already have that are floating around the internet, whether it’s appearing on a program like this and just sharing some insight, sharing some strategies, it’s where people can get that first taste of something and they’re able to decide if this is a fit for them.
This is incredibly helpful for people in business, because so many people who, whether it’s an amazing service that they can provide, whether it’s an outstanding product that could really simplify or change people’s lives, I keep meeting people who say, “Yeah, but I’m not a business person. I don’t like selling.”
To look at a lot of the nature of how we can really revitalize that, to shift that up instead to educating. I can educate along the way. The benefit of that becomes is that there is gonna be a group of people that, from whatever educational resource has now been provided, whether it’s a YouTube video sharing a few strategies, whether it’s a checklist on a website, there are going to be people in that group who end up better off as a result of that brief, indirect communication, whether they become your paying customer or not.
David Brower: Right.
Jason Linett: To be just as satisfied with that one as with, here’s the one who has me come in to their company and do the keynote at their annual convention, or here’s the one who then pivots and says, “Okay, that was great, but can you help me specifically with this personal issue?” So, to be guiding with education allows those people to realize, this is the person who can help me out, and, respectfully for those people who are seeing, perhaps, another option would be a better fit, they’re able to make that decision on their own without having to overtly use a whole bunch of clever closing strategies.
I’m saying that as I receive an email from a student of mine who was just asking, “Hey, can you please confirm your shipping address so I can mail you the thing I promised you?” That’s correct I’m just asking your address, but cool.” To look at it again, how can we effectively communicate a message in such a way that people see the value and they’re now ready and ravenous to move forward.
David Brower: Absolutely. I’m going back to your word ‘because’, because I think that’s so important for people to remember. I read one of your comments, it said, “Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it the rest of your life.”
So many people, I would think, well, here I am. I know I’m not getting the gold watch but this is where I am and this is where I’m gonna stay.
Jason Linett: Right. To look at the possible options that are all around that.
David Brower: That’s part one of our interview with Jason Linett.
Allan Blackwell: Listen to your 20 minute podcast with David Brower on the go. Downloads are available on YouTube, twitter, Facebook, iTunes, iHeartRadio, Spotify, any podcast app, and on our webcast @davidbrowervo.com/your20minutepodcast. Until next time, thank you for listening.