Paul Wilson: Debunking Hypnotherapy Myths

The biggest issue that people face though is what I call the root cause. Yeah. What is causing this behavior? Where is it coming from? Because logically, consciously, he knew that this wasn't appropriate, but he wasn't able to kind of modify the behavior himself. So by coming to me, we did the work together to find out what was going on, what was the root cause. And quite often it's stuff that's from childhood, early childhood, early youth, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. It can be something that happened 5, 10, 15 years ago. It's different for everyone. This is The Chris Project, where we discuss mental wellness, self-awareness, and mindset with entrepreneurs and experts. Set your perceived ideas and biases aside and let's go on our journey for yourself, for your family, for the world.

Welcome to another episode of The Chris Project. I am your host, Christian Brim. Joining me today is Paul Wilson.

Paul, glad you're here. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you are in the world.

Yes, and what time you're listening.

Absolutely.

Now, I can tell by your funny words that you might be from across the pond, would be my guess.

Ah, yeah, I am about 70 miles southeast of London in the UK, a very small fishing village called, well, a town now called Folkestone.

Folkestone. When I visited the UK in third— 31 years ago, only time I've been there, uh, we stayed with some friends, uh, in Henley-on-Thames, which I think is nowhere near where you are, but, uh, you know, it's a small island.

It's a beautiful place, Henley-on-Thames. And yeah, it's, uh, it's about 80, 90 miles away, I'm guess— I would guess.

Not too far. Yeah, I was enchanted. I, as a matter of fact, I still say this. There are only two places that I have visited that I would live other than where I live, and that is San Diego, California, and the English countryside.

So yeah, we still, we're still quite lucky. We have quite a bit of countryside. They're doing their best to kind of get rid of it all by building on it, but we're fighting back and we still have plenty of lovely lush green countryside. I've only ever been to the States once, and that was to go to a conference in, uh, Tampa Bay, Florida. So I was there for like 3 or 4 days, didn't see much greenery, but the thing that got me was the heat. Uh, yeah, just getting off the aircraft and whoosh, you know, just a waft of really warm high humidity. It was interesting.

Yes, yes, Tampa is a beautiful city, but you got to be careful when you visit, for sure. Well, uh, Paul, we didn't, we didn't get on here to talk about the weather, but Tell me what it is that you do. You said your company's name is A Happy Head, which I love the name, but tell us what you do.

Well, I'm a coach who uses hypnotherapy or hypnosis to help the clients achieve the goal, whatever it is they want to achieve. I quit the corporate world, my goodness, back in 2017 and kind of fell into this by mistake. Became a hypnotherapist, and I love hypnotherapy. But I found the way I was using it, I was only kind of helping a person with one specific aspect, like say, for example, a fear or a phobia, that kind of thing. But when I was able to adapt this into my coaching work, I was able to help people in a much broader sense. So I would help them to, to find, uh, build a legacy or find their way forward, or to get rid of lots of unwanted beliefs, behaviors, bad habits, unwanted habits, unwanted thoughts, a whole range of things, rather than just kind of being laser focused on one particular aspect.

Well, I want to, I want to, uh, address the, the naysayers that I know that are in the group, because I used to be one of them. When, when I heard the term hypnosis or hypnotherapy, I thought that was not real until I actually experienced hypnotherapy, and I was shocked. So I want to stipulate for those that are listening that think that hypnotherapy is, is, I don't know, pseudoscience or something that, that is quackery. It's not. So, but I would like to know how, Paul, you got into hypnosis and hypnotherapy.

Okay, well, just one thing before I go on to that. Skeptics are my best clients. Somebody comes to me with an open yet skeptical mind, they become the best clients. The people that are very, very difficult to work with are the ones that are close-minded and not prepared to discover something new. So how did I get into hypnotherapy? Well, I worked in the corporate world for, God, 25 years. And in October of 2017, I had what I call my Independence Day. You guys have, you know, July the 4th. I had October the 23rd. And basically I fell, or I got knocked off my bicycle on the way to work. And I broke my arm in two places, my right arm above and below the elbow, which meant that I was unable to work for around about 6 weeks. And whilst at home, it was like, should I stay? Should I go? Should I stay? Should I go? The usual kind of circle of negative thought. And at the end of the 6 weeks, I was still undecided about my next move. So I go back to the office. And as you do after a long absence, I'm wading my way through all the emails and trying to get into my office. And just by pure coincidence, the head of HR, Nick, he walks past my office, goes, hey, Paul, how's the arm? And to this day, I don't know where it came from. I went, hi, Nick, it's much better, thank you. Have you got a minute? I said, yeah, sure, come around to my office. Long story short, about 8 weeks later, on the exact date of my 25th anniversary, I was out. Now, I was going to become a photographer because photography is a passion of mine, and I made one of the sort of biggest newbie mistakes when starting a business. I quit before doing the research. So I started doing the research. I was talking to people that had been in the business 5, 10, 15, 30, 40 years. And they all pretty much said the same thing to me. They went, Paul, do you love photography? Are you passionate about photography? And I went, yeah. And they went, don't become a photographer because very quickly you'll just be sick of seeing your camera because people literally, the pun intended, people will want you to work for exposure. They won't want to pay you money. They'll want you to work for free. And it takes years and years and years and years and years before you can start making some real money. Oh, well, thank you for that. So I'm sitting here thinking, well, what do I do now? I'd taken on a personal trainer because I was a bit chubby. I wanted to lose a few pounds and put on some muscle. We were working out one day and he said to me, Paul, do you know that my wife and I were both hypnotherapists? And this weekend we're running a trial, kind of try before you buy thing. As you're a client, come along for free. So I went along open-minded as I am, I had nothing booked for that weekend. I ended up working with this lady who had this tremendous fear of snakes and anything that wriggled along the floor. Now, in the UK, this is a highly irrational phobia because we only have one venomous snake, and you've got more chance of winning the lottery and being struck by lightning on the same day than you have of seeing one of these things. And then we have a grass snake, which is completely harmless, and lives in rivers and streams and eats frogs and toads and stuff. So quite an irrational phobia. I mean, if you live in, you know, somewhere where there are rattlesnakes or cottonmouths, that kind of thing, I get it. But no, here in the UK we don't have that. Anyway, we did the work. I grabbed my phone, said, let me show you a photograph. She shied away, started crying. And at the end of the session, I did the same thing. She said, show me a video, show me a video. So I showed her a video of a snake doing its thing, and she was perfectly happy. So I thought, well, that's okay, that's pretty good. But the thing that really got me going was the next day, her family were used to going out for a walk in the woods just by the back of the house. And, you know, husband thinks he's Steven Spielberg, he's got the phone out, he's filming everything, the kids are running around doing their thing. And you hear the husband go, careful, darling, look, there's a big worm in front of you, you'll have to go around it. And she goes, no, no, it's okay. She gets on her hands and knees and very, very gently scoops this worm up off the pathway and carries it and lays it on a patch of grass. Her husband nearly drops his phone, launches a stream of expletives, basically saying he can't believe what I've seen. And I'm thinking, wow, I've got a superpower. So I went back to my PT and said, who trained you? Went to him, worked with him, who trained you? And I did that as far up the ladder as I could possibly go. I bought every book, every course, and I just completely fell in love with the ability to help people, because throughout my entire career, in some way, shape, or form, I've always helped people, whether it's been kind of like one-to-one or one-to-many. So I worked as an emergency, um, response manager in the corporate world, a bit like somebody who works for FEMA over in the US, right? And so it just kind of fit in naturally. And then I opened my practice and started working with people.

So that's a fascinating story to get into. You know, it's one thing to use hypnotherapy. It's an entirely different thing to get impassioned by it and take that on as a career or as a vocation. I think my mindset before I— and I've only used hypnotherapy once, and it was for a specific anxiety that I was having, and it was based upon a recommendation from my business coach who had used this hypnotherapist. And, you know, my wife's response, I remember, was like, are you out of your mind? Because it wasn't cheap, right? This guy was based out of California and had high-end clients. But I think my mindset when I was addressing the, you know, whether to go down that road I thought hypnosis was a parlor trick, right? You know, every time that it had been mentioned, it was in, you know, those vaudeville-type experiences where they get people to act like chickens or something like that. And I didn't really understand that what it was was putting my brain into a different state. And therefore I was more, I had more access to different parts of my brain that I didn't in my consciousness. And as I've looked since then and read about all of the different ways to engage your brain, you know, like beyond the conscious brain, it's actually a fascinating area of study. And there's a lot that is not like accepted by traditional scientists or traditional medicine. What kind of pushback do you get from people looking to, to do hypnotherapy or, or investigating it?

To be perfectly honest with you, Christian, I get very little pushback these days because people here in the UK actively seek out help in some way, shape, or form when they've got a problem, like say a phobia, or if they're drinking too much, or they want to lose weight. And hypnotherapy is just one of those alternative therapies that's available to people these days. I know there's talk therapy and CBT and all kinds of different things. In the early days when I first started, you know, 6, 7 years ago, there was lots of pushback from people. And people would often ask me, are you going to make me cluck like a chicken? Because they've seen stage hypnosis And I used to say to people, yes, but it will cost you more, right?

Because I can't get you to lay an egg.

But I go, that's right, well, I probably could do, but the wrong kind of egg, you know what I mean? And, and people kind of confuse the thing, but stage hypnosis is still hypnosis, still the same kind of thing that I do. The difference is that stage hypnosis is entertainment. So they still get people to go into this state that you mentioned earlier And from my perspective, what happens is we all have these inhibitions. And what happens on stage is essentially the hypnotherapist or the hypnotist gives you permission to give yourself permission to have some fun. So maybe you would love to dance like a crazy person, but your inhibitions prevent you from doing that because it's not socially acceptable, or people might think you're crazy. But you go on stage, the hypnotist does her thing, and suddenly you're allowed to dance like a mad person. And when they come off the stage and go back with their friends, the people go, 'Man, look, you were crazy, you did crazy things.' They go, 'Oh, I don't know, the hypnotist made me do it,' right? Because they're putting it onto the hypnotist because they just went away and had fun. But the hypnotist is using the same kind of techniques to get people into that alternate state that I use. Just that I use it for therapeutic purposes rather than for entertainment. I mean, I do— if I'm at a party or something and people ask me to do a demo, then yeah, I can make people laugh with things. But I use my skills to help people in, in a different way than a stage hypnotherapist. And the biggest issue I have these days is there are Around the world, there are lots of different schools producing lots of different therapists, and all of these trainers say to people, build it and they will come, because it's easy to teach someone to become a hypnotist. The difficulty is to teach people, to show people how to build a sustainable business. So these people come into the market, they make a bit of noise, they realize that it's a lot harder than they anticipated, and build it and he will come does not work, and so they quit. So there's this cycle of new people disappearing, new people coming and disappearing. And what I have to do, I spend most of my time marketing to let people know I'm still here. This is all I do. It's not a hobby, it's not a side hustle, it's not something I do to, you know, to compensate for my poor-paying full-time job. I do this full-time and I love it.

I'm curious about something. So have you worked with entrepreneurs or business owners? And if so, what have you helped them with?

Okay, my main clients tend to be business owners or high-level consultants, those guys that kind of command six figures. And the business owners tend to be high six, seven-figure business owners, and they come to me for a number of reasons. Several come to me— well, there's a certain percentage that come to me because they want to know what's next. They've got the toys, they've got the holiday, they've got the fancy car, they've got the house and all that kind of stuff, but they feel like something's missing. And so with these kind of clients, we talk about legacy. What do we want to leave behind? What do we want to give to the world? And we're not talking about having your name above a school, which is very nice. We're talking about leaving something tangible. Say, for example, a scholarship for underprivileged kids, or building schools in an underdeveloped country, or helping underprivileged kids in your own country, that kind of thing. That's one side of what I do. The other side tends to be helping people overcome mental blocks, dealing with mindset issues. So the big ones: procrastination, overwhelm, imposter syndrome occasionally. Just people getting stuck in their own way, that they'll come across a problem, they can't solve it, they think it's their fault, and they kind of spiral down. So they've been incredibly successful, then they hit this hurdle, and this hurdle just, you know, just smacks them out of the ballpark, and they just become lost and befuddled and don't know how to get out of it. So they contact me and I work with them and we figure out what's going on. We unravel the mess and point them in the right direction and getting rid of the stuff that they don't want. One example I have is a very successful client of mine who runs 4 or 5 7-figure businesses and he does most of his business through networking at large events. The challenge was this particular person would drink too much, basically, because these big events they're going to, lots and lots of booze flowing, and the person that would kind of end up slumped asleep in the corner, which isn't a good look when you want to promote your business. No. And so that particular person is not the only one. I had several people come to me like this. They wanted the ability to control their intake. 'Cause you know, when stuff's been thrown around, it's very easy to go, oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Would you say that this person had a compulsive personality?

Not at all, no. No? Okay. Most people that I work with don't have compulsive personalities. It's that they get themselves in situations where it's almost customary. Okay. In fact, in the UK, it used to be that you'd go down the pub with a bunch of friends and you'd drink yourself stupid. That, thankfully, has kind of dwindled down right now, apart from kind of the young man's, young person's game, sort of 18, 19, early 20s. So generally they come to me for these reasons, reasons that mean that this stuff is getting in their way. They are being blocked by a behavior or by unwanted thoughts and beliefs, and they need my help to get unstuck.

So, so this person had, had self-identified that he had a problem. It wasn't like he didn't know what the problem was.

If I had a pound for every wife and girlfriend that phoned me and went, Paul, my husband's got a problem, can you help him? My first question always is, does he know he's got a problem?

That's the problem with women, they're always trying to fix us. I don't get it. Anyway, sorry. Yes, so in those cases, in this case, did he know that he had a Yeah, because he came to me of his own free will.

This is a situation, can you help? And I went, yes. And we did.

So it sounds like that the hypnotherapy is only a part of what you're doing. So in this case with this gentleman, was he clear up front about like, this is the belief or the behavior that I'm struggling with and I need help changing?

Yes. The biggest issue that people face though is what I call the root cause. What is causing this behavior? Where is it coming from? Because logically, consciously, he knew that this wasn't appropriate, but he was unable to kind of modify the behavior himself. So by coming to me, we did the work together to find out what was going on, what was the root cause. And quite often it's stuff that's from childhood, early childhood, early youth. But it doesn't necessarily have to be. It can be something that happened 5, 10, 15 years ago. It's different for everyone. The Chris Project is sponsored by the Rupp Group Coaching and Consulting. If you are interested in implementing some of these suggestions that you've been hearing about, or in general you feel like there's parts of your mental game or actually your implementation strategy that you feel is lacking and you love the opportunity to actually start to build yourself into the person that can create the success that you're looking for, please reach out vis-à-vis the link in the show notes to grab a free consultation with us to see if we can help elevate your mental or your business game. Thank you very much.

I have a, a sidebar question. In the UK, do you have to be licensed to do what you're doing?

No, coaching and hypnotherapy, uh, is not licensed, and I think that's a good thing because it gives more people more opportunity to, to practice. I, I disagree with licensing because I think it's just a form of revenue generation, to be perfectly honest with you. Because if you take, um, Complaints Against Professionals, one of the biggest organizations that complaints thrown at as the, the Law Society. This is the, the governing body that governs lawyers in the UK. And lawyers have to go to school for years and years and years. They have to pass the bar exam, I think it's called. Then they have to do an apprenticeship, but it still doesn't preclude them from making a mess, right, and being sued by people, you know. So I think licensing, in the case of hypnotherapists and coaches, It's just revenue generation.

And I would agree with that. The reason why I ask you that is the hypnotherapist that I worked with was very careful as to not be either holding himself out or in, in his work to cross the line into what could be in the States would be like psychotherapy, something that would require a psychologist and a licensed counselor type, you know, license.

So absolutely right, absolutely right. I completely understand that. And from my perspective, it's common sense. You, you don't work above your pay grade. Meaning that— I'll give you an example. I had a lady contact me once. She said, um, Paul, I'm hearing voices. I went, okay, and what are the voices telling you? And she said, the voices are telling me to go and kill someone. So that's way above my abilities, my training, etc. So I said, look, let's stay on the phone with me. Give me your GP, your doctor's number. I'll call your doctor and you need to talk to her now. And she went, okay. I put her in touch with the doctor. The doctor then went and dealt with the situation because that was a clear psychotic psychosis kind of situation, and that needs proper medical psychiatric Okay.

Yeah, and the reason why I asked is because you, you mentioned root causes and going into childhood trauma, etc. And do you ever run into situations where, like, I, I can't, I can't solve this for you? Like, you, you need more professional care from a psychologist, psychiatrist standpoint?

Not often, because I don't deal with what I would call severe traumatic cases. For example, I don't deal with sexual abuse, right? That's right. From my perspective, you need professional medically trained counselors or psychotherapists to deal with that situation. I deal with all the other stuff, okay, that generally doesn't have a highly traumatic— most of the people, most of the times when people, you know, work with me, we find the root cause and they often, they go, oh my God, it can't be that. That's ridiculous, right? That is so stupid. So the root cause is often something incredibly minor. So this misconception that it's only severe trauma that causes problems, it's not, because our brain has one function. Our brain has one function. That function is to keep us alive so we can procreate, then help the next generation, you know, do what they need to do to procreate, and so on and so on and so on and so on. And although we like to think we are a very advanced species, we're still very primitive because we have the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses to any perceived threat. Our mind still believes there's a saber-toothed tiger behind every bush.

Yes.

And so when you go into the office and your boss says, come in here, and then the boss chews you out for either a justifiable reason or non-justifiable reason, you will respond in one of those four ways. You will stand there and you will fight back. You will argue vehemently with your boss. So that's the fight mode. You could go, you know what, I can't take this, and you'll just run away. That's the flight mode. You might just stand there like a rabbit in the headlights and just completely freeze. Or you might go, God, yeah, I'm really sorry, boss, I'm a complete idiot. Yeah, I'm 'Can I lick your boots for you, sir?' Or you, you will fawn. Yes. Then they're all— for these are defense mechanisms. Now bear with me. So let me use myself as an example. Back in the early 2000s, I was working in health and safety in the corporate world, and my boss came to me one day, said, 'Paul, here's a whole load of stuff about behavioral, uh, health and safety. Go and prepare a presentation for your peers, your supervisors, your your directors. Me being a very lazy person at the time, I did the minimum I could get away with. I'd never done a presentation before. I did every single mistake. Anybody who does presentations today will, will cry with laughter in a second. So I did no research. I put this PowerPoint presentation together with a million slides. Every slide had War and Peace written on it, no photographs or anything. When I get scared, when I get excited, I, I overheat, yeah, and I perspire very, very profusely. So I go into this room which is designed for about 20 people, there are 40 people in there. I'm wearing a pale green short sleeve shirt, then about 5 minutes that shirt is black with sweat. My face is like I've been in the shower, it looks like I've just come out of the shower and not towelled myself off and I'm making every mistake you can. I'm standing with my back to the audience. I'm trying to read off the slides. It's a nightmare. And I'm just really, really suffering. It's horrendous. My boss takes pity on me, goes, Paul, I'll take over now. I am not ashamed to say I ran out of that room into the bathroom and I cried my eyes out. Right. With, you know, and then from that day onwards, I didn't put my hand up for anything. I didn't answer questions, I avoided meetings, I didn't go for motions, I didn't do anything where I would have to stand out. Now what happened was my brain went, oh my God, that was terrifying, we just got mauled by a saber-toothed tiger. That scenario is very, very dangerous. And so as time progressed, when it recognized any similar kind of scenario, it pulled me away from it to protect me. This is why I hate the phrase self-sabotage. It wasn't sabotaging me, it was protecting me from being harmed by this saber-toothed tiger called the presentation. And so for 7, 8, 9 years, I did nothing. I did not put myself in front of anyone in any way, shape, or form. Then in about 2008, we had an incident at work, and I was there kind of before the incident, during the incident, after the incident. I put all the debrief reports together. I was heavily involved in this material, in this, this event. And there was a meeting organized in the local county or the state with all the kind of the emergency services and local authorities who discussed big events throughout the year in on their patch. And I was invited by a person to come and present my company's view of this incident. And I went, no, I'm busy. I didn't even know what the date was. And again, I did everything to avoid attending this thing, but the guy who was the chief fire officer— you don't get to become the chief fire officer by taking no for an answer. So he went to my boss and said, we want Paul to come present. So my boss said, you go and do this or you quit, I'll fire you. So I had no choice. So I'm now sitting there thinking, oh my God, Sabretooth Tiger. I'd forgotten about what happened 8, 9 years ago. This is my unconscious mind working now, and my unconscious mind made me research. It made me look at what a good PowerPoint presentation was. It taught me about public speaking. I did research about public speaking. I did all of the right stuff. I knew the material inside out and back to front, and in the end, I put together a presentation of about, I don't know, let's say 15 slides, mostly with pictures, hardly any text. I go to the event and something incredibly bizarre happens, Christian. I just— I'm on the first slot after lunch, you know, the, the slot everybody dreads because people have fallen asleep after the carb intake. So I'm walking up to the stage, they, they mic me up, and as soon as my foot hits the stage floor, something comes over me and my body just completely relaxes. And I go onto the stage and I give this really, really good presentation. Now don't forget, this is a serious subject, but at the end of the presentation, I got a round of applause. And off the back of that, I got invited to present the same thing at 3 or 4 other forums, very similar to this one, but in other parts of the country. And after that, I fell in love with public speaking. And I love to go on podcasts. And talk to people and do presentations, all because of what happened. This tiny little— in the grand scheme of things, me screwing up a presentation 8, 9 years ago is nothing, right? But for me personally, for my unconscious mind, that was a saber-toothed tiger, right? And I ran. Yeah, so I tried to deal with it and I ran. And then for the rest of the next 8, 9 years, I avoided every chance to put my hand up to go for a promotion because my unconscious mind was protecting me.

Yeah, and, and I think that was one of my personal revelations along my, my journey, was that your brain is wired to protect you, and, uh, it does it beyond or below the conscious level. And to your point, stress whatever those stressors are, are all relative. Like, it doesn't really matter that that would not be stressful to someone else. It was stressful to you. And I think that it's, you know, just understanding— for me, the journey was, okay, I don't want to be acting, doing whatever anymore and trying to understand why I was acting, doing, behaving the way I was. And that type of self-reflection is, you know, I think we're hardwired not to do it, right? Like, because our brain knows, no, I've got this program down, right? Like, I don't need to change anything. I've got the saber-tooth tiger at bay. I don't need you to do any more work. But it's probably not like that because it's a subconscious. But, but like just going into that reflective mode of, all right, why did I say that? Why did I, why did I do that? Why did I not do that? Is, I think, a very important skill to master.

Absolutely right. Taking the time to, to self-reflect, especially when you're in business, because quite often when we're running our own small business. We're working alone most of the time, and we are the, the owner, the chief dishwasher, the front of house, back of house, every part of the house. And it's really important to actually take time out to actually sit down and reflect on your day. Good day, bad day, indifferent day. What can I do to improve things? What do I need to change? Because if you don't, you can just end up either digging yourself into a big hole and only realizing you're in that big hole when you look up and go, ooh, where's the sky gone?

Right. No, I think that's exactly right because I think as business owners, we control the variables, right? And one of my colleagues who's a previous guest on the show, we discussed how in a way the business becomes a coping mechanism. And we, because we control the variables, we start moving things around, oftentimes unconsciously, to accommodate our behavior, like, and those stresses, not realizing that the things that we're doing are actually avoiding the problem. And to your point, and sometimes making the problem worse.

Absolutely. When you start to avoid something, you are making it worse automatically. I've helped a few people deal with debt situations, and one of the biggest issues that actually compounds the debt problem is the fact that when they start to ignore the warning signs, when they get the letters with the red notice on the front and they just slip them out of sight until the day comes when somebody knocks on the door and goes, 'Can we have our money back, please?' It's so simple to actually deal with that, but it's so difficult from a mental perspective because, oh God, I'm hopeless, I'm useless, I've got into debt, I should never have done this, blah blah blah. Instead of saying, okay, yeah, I have a situation I need to deal with, but we run away from it, we pretend it doesn't happen, it doesn't exist, we sweep it under the carpet until the very last minute And if we're lucky, we get to deal with it. If we're unlucky, we suffer all the negative consequences. And particularly in business, it's the same thing. You might be thinking, okay, I'll get a client next month, I'll get a client next month, I'll get a client next month. But if you don't change your behavior or the work that you're doing to generate leads, you're not going to get a client next month. And before you know it, you're sitting there thinking, I'm going to have to shut the business and go back to a job because I don't have any clients. Simply because we ignored the fact that we had a problem and we chose to ignore it and not face up to it and deal with it.

Well, yeah. And I think to that point, I think a lot of people and business owners probably more so think that they're making rational decisions. But the thing that I've learned is how little control my cognitive brain has. Like the the, the subconscious or the preconscious, or, you know, those things are beneath the surface, but they are very powerful. And, you know, the, the, the rational person would say, no, I'm not going to ignore this sign, right? That's the rational person. But what happens is, in my experience, is that your subconscious, uh, maybe without even your conscious knowing it ignores the red flag. And you, if you do realize that you're doing it, that you're slipping that red notice into the trash, you rationalize it. Like, if you do notice it, you don't acknowledge that you're doing something irrational. You're just rationalizing the irrational behavior.

We are incredibly simple creatures and we don't like change and we most people want to avoid confrontation. So once— one way, one very simple way to avoid confrontation, so we think, is to avoid facing it, to avoid dealing with it. So we literally sweep it under the carpet. And we are very emotional beings, even though guys like to think, you know, I'm not an emotional person, I've got an emotional bone in my body. But we still are, because we're dealing with the the scary thing, which is an emotion, of having to deal with this issue.

Yeah.

And then we only end up dealing with it when it's like standing there facing us like a bear on its hind legs ready to maul us.

Yeah. I mean, obviously there's a continuum of rational thought and emotional thought. And, you know, like autism, you know, are people that don't have a lot of emotional capacity, but they still deal with emotion. You know, those people, my brother's one of them who still at 46 years old thinks that he doesn't act out of emotion. And I'm like, that's a dangerous spot to be. If you really think that you're a completely rational being, you're setting yourself up for some hard, hard times.

Yeah, but Christian, most people would say they don't act on emotion. Look at road rage. Right, so somebody cuts you up, so what? But people get so wound up, so angry, so furious over the fact they've been delayed by a minute, maybe 2 minutes, that they've actually been shootings and assaults because of road rage, which is emotion. But you talk to that person, oh no, I'm a very rational person, they just did this stupid thing and put me in danger. No, no, you reacted emotionally to a very simple situation. Well, you could have just ignored— you could have gone, you know what, blah blah blah blah blah, he's in a hurry, I'll just let him go. But no, we, we fight, we chase, we get out of the car, and we, you know, we get into a confrontation with that person because we suddenly become the orangutan or the gorilla who wants to defend his territory, and people will not get in my way. And so we act on an irrational emotion, even though 5 minutes earlier, nah, I don't deal with emotions.

Yeah, I'm not an emotional person, right? And, and, and I, I, to me, the red flags would be when you're having those emotions uncontrollably. And not that you can really control your emotions, but like it's happening with more frequency or more intensity, and, and you really just are not, not sure whether it's anger, rage, fear, sadness. Any extreme to me is like kind of a warning sign that there's something there that you need to address and deal with?

Not necessarily. I mean, why do people have affairs? You know, they've got a perfectly attractive partner in the background, yet they go chasing somebody else for emotional reasons. Yes. Rather than sitting with their partner, go, you know what, darling, we're missing some X, Y, and Z. Can we talk about that? Instead of having that, that, you know, conversation, that confrontation, perhaps they go looking for the thing that's missing outside of the relationship. And that is purely emotional. There's no— any rational person could look at it and go, Christian, no, having an affair is the worst thing you could ever do, right? Rationality gets kicked into touch and the hormones and the emotions stop, push us forward into having an affair. And it happens all the time because we are emotional creatures. We are still— I think there's only, what, 3 or 4% difference in the chromosomes and DNA between ourselves and chimps, right? We're still very chimp-like in our behavior. We like to think we're vastly different, but when it comes down to it, we're not. Yeah, I would still want those things.

Yes, our brain has, has some significant hardwiring that I think that as, as a business owner, as a human, I think you, you need to understand that hardwiring and how it affects what you do. Paul, this has been, uh, very informational, very helpful. Where do people find you if they want to learn more about what you do?

Okay, I'm all over social media, but the best place to find me is probably my website, which is coincidentally ahappyhead.co.uk. That's ahappyhead, all one word,.co.uk.

Perfect. We'll put that link in the show notes. Thank you. Absolutely. And thank you for your time today. Listeners, if you like what you heard, please subscribe to the podcast, share the podcast, rate the podcast. If you have some future topics that you would like to discuss, shoot us a message. Until then, remember, you are not alone.

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