Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com To learn more. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a fun one today on the show, we have Joshua Peters with X Factor Hypnosis. Welcome, Joshua.

Joshua Peters: [00:00:43] Thank you, Lee. Glad to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:45] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about X Factor. How are you serving, folks?

Joshua Peters: [00:00:51] I am helping mostly entrepreneurs and business owners or even creatives who are getting stuck with self-sabotage. That’s these things like feelings of anxiety that are stopping them. Or maybe they procrastinate, or they might have a fear or a phobia that’s stopping them from from blasting through the plateau that they find themselves at. And I use hypnosis and different types of NLP processes to help them get past those, those subconscious habits and beliefs and behaviors that hold them back.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:27] So what’s your back story? How did you get into this line of work?

Joshua Peters: [00:01:31] Well, I’ve had a strong interest in hypnosis ever since I was a kid. And use some simple techniques that I learned out of some books that I found in my school library. But then I found myself at this point in my life where I was just really stuck and I was in a in a marriage that didn’t work in a job that was destroying my soul. And in a place where I didn’t even want to be. I started changing my life, and I did it in a very slow, methodical way. And I got to this place where I remembered hypnosis, I realized hypnosis is a thing. And I used it to help kind of get past the last area that was blocking me, which which let me move out, move to a new place. And I just decided if I could help other people get past these blocks faster than it took for me and I could get paid for it. Well, what more empowering way could you possibly live? So then I jumped in. I did the training. I started seeing clients.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:36] Now, when you were younger, was your career path along the lines of coaching or did you have more traditional? I’m going to get go to college, get the job, start working and then you got kind of frustrated and then made this move.

Joshua Peters: [00:02:52] Yeah. When I was younger, I was into, I was in a creative space, so I was a graphic designer for many years. And as I was shifting my life around at that point where I was just really stuck, I moved out of that into a career in in the organic food industry where I could feel like I was making a difference. And I actually went into food packaging regulations. And I was in the corporate world there for about 14 years before I did this training and started coaching back in twenty fifteen.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:31] Now, when you were in the corporate world, were you getting coached yourself like was coaching part of your experience in business?

Joshua Peters: [00:03:39] No, it wasn’t really at all. I mostly. Well, actually, that’s not actually true because the company that I worked with, they actually did a lot of training. So, you know, all the corporate, many of the corporate businesses out there know that you need to keep your. You need to keep the employees growing. And so they had all different kinds of trainings that you could do. So outside of the the trainings that were offered to the employees, I wasn’t really doing much coaching with anyone else I did do. I did go down a whole different path of performance for for many years. At the same time as I was in that corporate life, but I don’t know if that’s exactly coaching.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:31] And then now you feel your role is with kind of solopreneurs and individuals rather than like, do companies hire you and say, Hey, let’s do some executive leadership coaching or things like that? Or is it mostly individuals or in solopreneurs and small firms that hire you?

Joshua Peters: [00:04:48] Yeah, I’m mostly working with with individuals. I do also do some trainings that are, you know, more interesting than your typical kind of corporate training. So sometimes I’m hired to come in and do a little bit of an interesting type of team building or training for people. But the bread and butter of what I do is really one on one coaching. It’s really where you get the best bang for your buck and and can really make the most changes in your life the fastest.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:17] Now, the folks that are kind of drawn to hypnosis or open minded enough to explore hypnosis is that like what percentage of the population is that? When I think of hypnosis, a lot of times I think of, you know, on stage, performing more for entertainment, but not really for, you know, to improve performance.

Joshua Peters: [00:05:42] Sure. And that is what most people have in their mind when they think of a of a hypnotist. And because of that, at at first, when I was starting to work with clients, I called myself a hypnotherapist and I would go out and do these networking events and I. Introduced myself as a hypnotherapist, and I noticed that people’s eyes would glaze over and they would immediately in their mind tell themselves they don’t need a therapist. So I started playing with with this because, you know, you go out to all kinds of networking events. And I started calling myself a hypnotist. And what I noticed was when I would do that, more often than not, their eyes would light up and they would get excited and tell me about an experience that they had where they saw a hypnotist at a show. Or they had an aunt who quit smoking using hypnosis or their mother lost a bunch of weight using hypnosis. So almost everyone has a story of a hypnotist. That that resonated with them. So back to your question. Most people have some experience with it. And. Now, I would say probably half of the people that I talked to might be interested in exploring how that it could, how it could work for them on there and an individual level or with business. And the other half are just not very interested, and that’s fine.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:17] Now when you’re working with somebody, how different is it for like a stage hypnotist can encourage someone to eat an onion and think it’s an apple? Are those transferable like now? Can you make me not want to procrastinate because I like procrastinating, you know, like, is it a similar thing that’s happening in both cases, or are these totally different things?

Joshua Peters: [00:07:46] They’re pretty different. The underlying mechanisms that happen in our brains is the same, but the way that we’re we’re getting at it is a little different. So, for instance, for someone who is a procrastinator, there’s usually an underlying reason why they’re why they’re doing that. For a lot of people, you’re procrastinating because you might worry that if you do something wrong, you’re going to be judged by, like, kind of like a perfectionist kind of personality. Many times they they have a parent, maybe who has pushed them a lot when they were a kid. And there’s almost like this internal rebel who who comes out so with hypnosis and with the the hypnotic coaching that I do, we’re able to. Go back to those moments when these events have created the response and and shift them, change the way that you’re thinking so that you can access a a resourceful part of your brain. It’s taking the, for instance, the trigger of sitting in front of a computer and instead of working on the document, flipping to the browser and going onto Facebook. Rather than doing that, we shift that trigger of looking at that computer into that resource for you who’s excited about creating and confident that whatever they do, it doesn’t even really matter what anybody else thinks because they’re putting their best into it. So do you. That’s what I do. But as far as what a performer do, does is they they’re using all the same hypnotic techniques, but they’re basing it into something that’s entertaining. And most performers will put a piece of change work at the end of their show. But for the most part, it’s all just about. Creating a image of something in their mind that’s not actually there.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:03] But is it kind of leveraging maybe just human nature in the sense that there’s lots of facets to everybody and maybe they’re all in there somewhere and it’s just a matter of releasing them or reprioritizing?

Joshua Peters: [00:10:18] That’s a really great point lead because yes, we all have all of these different aspects, like we’ve all been successful in lots of different areas of our life. But then we tell ourselves, Oh, we aren’t good at this one thing or or we label ourself as a procrastinator. But the truth is, there’s plenty of times in your life when you don’t procrastinate. So there’s contact, it’s a contact thing. In some contexts, your procrastinate. In some contexts you don’t. So let’s just take the context where you don’t and how that feels and everything that’s based around that and and attach it to the the problem context.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:59] And then your role is kind of helping the person realize that and they become aware of it. And then they can just more seamlessly procrastinate less or they can catch themselves when they are procrastinating, procrastinating and then kind of get back on track faster.

Joshua Peters: [00:11:18] Yeah, there’s there’s basically three ways. So short answer, yes, but there’s three ways that I’ll do that. The first thing that I do is I give my clients a whole set of tools, tools that can interrupt the the patterns of thought. Often it’s a fight or flight response that’s popping up. So I give you these different physical things that you can do to interrupt that flow. That’s step number one. The second thing we do is we get at the root what is happening underneath that is causing the behavior in the first place. And then we release that we take the non resourceful state and change it into a resourceful state. And then step number three is we update your identity. We create a version of you who. Is so far in the future or so far beyond the problem that the problem is a distant memory. So maybe like a year in the future and then we let you step into that. So now you’re already that person.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:24] And then when you’re already that person, then when that thing bubbles up again, you’ve already kind of conquered it so you don’t have to really spend as much emotional time on it anymore.

Joshua Peters: [00:12:35] You hit the nail on the head.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:38] Now, so is the work, are you hypnotizing the person every time, or is this something that the person can learn how to hypnotize themselves so they can kind of accelerate the learning? Or like how does it work from that standpoint?

Joshua Peters: [00:12:53] When I’m working with a client, a typical session has probably about two parts, the the first part is very conversational, but I’m leading them through hypnotic processes within that conversation. So it’s conversational hypnosis. We’re making changes happen towards the end of the session. I I guide them into a deeper state what you might think of as a trance state that you’ve seen at the shows or on TV or whatever your eyes are closed, you look pretty relaxed. And we we go through some different processes. Add in those positive suggestions like you talked about only I don’t tell them that the onion is an apple, but we give them positive suggestions based on their goals and the as clients are going through this process. You know, as we go through multiple sessions, they’re learning what that feels like to go into that state. They’re they’re learning how they can take themself into that state. And I have many clients then who basically take what we do and they just run with it. They learn how to put themselves into a hypnotic state and give themselves suggestions. And then a part of the part of the tools that I provide to my clients is a whole series of audio programs as well that supports them between sessions kind of on an as needed basis.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:20] Now does this technique work just across the board? Like will it work equally as well as you know, for, like you mentioned earlier, weight loss or smoking? Does it work for that as well as it does for, you know, let’s we’ve been talking about procrastination or procrastination or what about like I’m an alcoholic like or does it work for all kind of challenges that you’re having?

Joshua Peters: [00:14:45] It can definitely support them. I don’t work with addictions, so when someone comes to me with that as their challenge, I have other hypnotists in my network that I refer them to. So many of us kind of find different specialties. But to answer you again, it’s basically we’re taking a non resourceful state and changing it into a resourceful state in the instance of an alcoholic. There are there are patterns that they’ve created in their mind, so there’s probably some kind of traumatic event that’s happened to them. And a traumatic event is one of the most powerful ways to create a subconscious habit or belief or behavior. That’s the thing that’s underneath. And in the instance that I was talking about, that’s it. We’ll go to. That’s what we’ll resolve and let go of, figure out whatever it is that the that the subconscious part of you is trying to get you to learn so that you don’t have to keep going back to this anymore. I find that for alcoholics, it’s really helpful to have some other kind of system that you’re working within as well, and then the hypnosis just really helps to amplify that the whole process.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:06] Now when you’re working with clients in business, is this something that it takes a long time to really kind of work through all these issues? Or is business kind of maybe you can accelerate the the process?

Joshua Peters: [00:16:19] Well, let’s bring it back to that to that onion. I have found that most people will come to me with their issue. So say it’s procrastination, and that issue is the outside layer of this onion. So we’re going to peel that off and they’re going to find underneath that layer. There’s something else that they hadn’t even realized because they were so focused on that outside layer. So I work with clients for a limited length of time, usually about 90 days. And through that process, where we’re peeling back those layers to release whatever the challenges are that are blocking you. And then we’re really building up this a new identity and helping you get better at what you’re already good at kind of ramping up your your positive as well as eliminating the things that you might think of as negative.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:24] And then at that point, then they’re kind of on a maintenance program or they have those audio that you mentioned that can help them kind of maintain this over time, for sure.

Joshua Peters: [00:17:36] So most people will I do two kinds of maintenance, I do a maintenance where it’s like an ad hoc. So sometimes I see clients quarterly after our initial sessions. I do have some like that enjoy the process so much. They just sign on for another 90 days and then I have some that. I think the most effective is just to do a monthly a monthly session. It’s what I do with my own hypnotist. We just have a a monthly meeting booked. I don’t even know what we’re going to work with work on, but I’ve always I always come up with something. There’s always some kind of challenge that comes up in your life so that that works. I think that works. The best is to have that monthly maintenance kind of like a chiropractor.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:23] Now is there in your experience for a person working with this kind of methodology? Are you also kind of digging into like tactical business things or you’re this is primarily focused on this mindset and getting your thoughts on working more productively rather than, oh, I need more sales this month.

Joshua Peters: [00:18:44] Yeah. I don’t work with the tactics much. But why are you having a problem with sales like what’s stopping you? For some of my clients, that’s that’s exactly what they come for. They have a one particular client who she would drive to the the sales call, and she’ll sit in her car and distract herself, get on her phone, go over the things she’s going to say, amp up her anxiety and her worry about how the call is going to go, sit there for an hour and then drive away. So she’s not making sales because she’s not actually getting into the building. So we worked with her to find that identity, find out what it feels like when she’s totally confident and just stepping in to that call or that sales presentation, just knowing that she’s going to give her best that that this client is going to benefit from her. And she starts, she told me the next time I saw her that it was really weird, I got to the to the call. I parked and I walked right in and I didn’t even realize until after I was walking through the door that I hadn’t sat in my car to do any kind of preparation. I just walked right in. So that’s that’s the kind of results that you can get. So again, it’s not necessarily a strategy. I do often share some strategies, but most people know what they need to do and how they need to do it. And something is just getting in the way from them actually doing what they say they want to do.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:28] And then your coaching helps kind of eliminate some of this self-sabotage, and it helps give them tools to kind of just be more productive and get more out of themselves

Joshua Peters: [00:20:42] To be more productive, get more out of themselves. But also what I find is this helps them often in their relationships. It also helps them in their in their physical being. So a lot of people, they’re not just procrastinating at work, they’re avoiding conversations, they’re avoiding working out, they’re they’re eating junk food. And once these are all these different layers that I was talking about, once we can start to get your your life on track, you can shift everything.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:16] Now, part of this show is about sharing with other coaches how to kind of. When and how would you describe your last win, like where did it come from, where did you get maybe your last client? What was something that you did in your practice that maybe you can share with another coach that might help them in their practice?

Joshua Peters: [00:21:42] Ok, I’ll share. So this happened Tuesday, just a couple of days ago. I’m sitting in my office and I had about an hour between clients, so I had some free time and my phone rang. Oftentimes that means somebody calling to talk about booking a call, and because I had plenty of time, I took the call right then and it was a another hypnotist from the East Coast who somehow had found me online looking for somebody else. And she was. She hadn’t seen any clients over the whole time of COVID and was about to see a client the next day and realized she needed her own hypnotist because she was feeling so nervous and worried, and she want to know if I could work with her, and I said, Well, let’s just have a conversation, and then when we get done, you can tell me what you think. So we had a conversation and I got to. I understood it. I understand. Ok, here’s where. Here’s how her problem is working. I could see that when she starts to think about this thing, it creates this problem for her these feelings. And I helped her identify. How it feels when she’s just helped somebody get past something that’s been a problem their whole life. And I helped her tune into that and then we attached that feeling back to this potential or this client that she was about to see just through the conversation. This is what’s so beautiful about this type of of hypnotic coaching. And what was beautiful was all of a sudden she said, Oh, and I asked her, What was that? And she told me there was a shift. Things just shifted. Oh, she she I could hear it in her voice. This whole change and the whole problem was gone. So I just did that in in conversation because I had some extra time and I felt really excited for her because she hadn’t seen clients for a while. And it just showed it just kind of reiterated to me why I love to do this and how powerful it can be.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:59] Well, congratulations on all the success. If there’s someone out there that wants to get a hold of you and learn more. Maybe book a call. Get on your calendar. What is the website?

Joshua Peters: [00:24:10] You can find me at the X Factor coach.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:15] And that’s THG, the letter X Factor 0r Coach the Coach.

Joshua Peters: [00:24:22] You got it.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:23] Well, Joshua, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Joshua Peters: [00:24:28] Thanks, Leigh. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with your amazing audience.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:33] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Coach the Coach radio.