Elliot Roe - How to Discover What's Holding You Back (and Get Over It)

If you have a self sabotage that says every time you try and make the sales call, you feel sick, or every time you try and ask out the woman, you sort of go off into the distance and find an excuse, you've learned that behavior at some point in your life. You weren't born with that. You've learned that it's risky and it's scary to do that. And with hypnotherapy, it brings up those moments from the past so that you can start seeing them from your adult eyes. And as you see the things that happen in childhood from your adult eyes, you can resolve those issues and let go of the triggers. And that's basically the work I do. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Wiki wiki wiki. Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Today we have an amazing guest.

His name is Elliot Rowe and he is a world renowned mindset and performance coach who helps those in highly demanding industries unlock their full potential, perform on demand, and live a limitless life. That's a kind of a tongue twister.

You read well, Matt.

I made that up off the top of my head. His clientele includes professional athletes, Olympians, UFC champions, esports competitors, Hollywood actors, high stakes poker players, Wall street traders, entrepreneurs, founders and executives.

All right, so let's.

I just remembered that all of that.

Let's just cut to it. Elliot is a badass. All right? Elliot is going to basically show you how your mind works and why you're doing some stuff that's just kind of crazy stuff, but might not realize it. You might realize it and just think you're crazy. Well, you're not actually crazy. It's just some. Some stories, some stuff going on, you know, but like, Elliot, you're gonna learn a ton from this guy. And he's helping. Yeah, he's high athletes, top athletes of the world, you know, poker. He said $150 million winnings from his clientele. UFC fighters. UFC fighters, Olympians. I mean, the list goes on. So. And he also has a cool app. It's free. There's some paid stuff to it, but there's a ton he gives away for free. It's called Primed Mind. It's a mobile app, Apple and Android.

So we'll check about that more in the episode. It's pretty cool app. And go to flowchartgroup.com grab the action guide for this episode. You gotta do it within two weeks of this episode going live. And we'll hook you up with all of the stuff that we talked about in this episode in a nice, concise action guide. So flowchartgroup.com go there and let's do this thing.

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All right, Elliot, we're live. We're recording as Zoom. Just let you know with the robot voice. Oh, man, it's great to have you here. It's actually kind of weird because, like I told you, I've been using your app Primed Mind for a while. Well, I think since you booked in. So for a month.

Ish or so.

Yeah. And yeah, now you're here. So I'm like, I hear you.

So you're going to hear my voice.

When I fall asleep, I'm like, all my anxiety's gone. I turned all the knobs. I did all the things. I walked a lot of stairs. Yeah.

I haven't actually experienced the app quite yet, so maybe just as a good starting point, maybe give us a quick run through of what the app is and how people use it.

So the app is a hypnotherapy based app. So the idea was we wanted to create something which was like meditation with a purpose. So there's a lot of meditation apps where you'll focus on your breathing and there's sort of a general.

Focus towards made of meditation to reduce anxiety overall. And I was looking to create something that was very specific, using hypnotherapy for individual situations. So it's like audios for before you give a public speech, before you go to a networking event, before you make a sales call, and then sports related ones, confidence courses, confidence on winning, mindset, sleep courses, things like that. So the best way of describing it is like meditation with a purpose.

So it's kind of like before you're about to enter a situation, it's kind of like a state change. You kind of change your state right before getting into it.

Exactly. So I mean, we call it Primed Mind because they're priming themselves before a specific activity. And that's a sort of. That's where it differs from some of the other products on the market.

Gotcha. Yeah. That's where I don't think I understood that fully once I jumped in, but I think once I really did more, I was like, oh, yeah, it's very intent based. Occasionally I'll feel kind of a tinge of anxiety in my stomach and not totally know why. Yesterday was one of those days. I literally turned it on and I think it was an 11 minute audio. And I referenced turning the knob. That was part of the visual.

Turn down the anxiety.

Yeah. And I was like, I'm in the control room of my mind.

It's weird to say, but it actually worked and it was really, really interesting. Yeah.

Well, thanks, man.

Thank you. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Well, I know some folks might have been hypnotized before. I know I've only been hypnotized once. It was a stage hypnotist. We've had him on the show here, the hypnotist himself. But it was totally different than everything you do. But before we get to that, I know you have a story kind of leading up to it. So I guess how would you define what you do? And I know the story that got you here was kind of life changing for you as well.

Yeah. So, I mean, I'm a mindset and performance coach and the modality I use is predominantly hypnotherapy. So I'm typically working with high performers in different industries. Like I've mentioned professional poker, professional athletes, UFC champions, guys on Wall Street, CEOs of companies, people looking to get like that final 5%. So typically they're coming to me, they're saying, you know, I'm successful, I'm top five in the world, but I know I'm doing this thing that's holding me back from being number one. And for everyone, everyone's got something and they'll come to me to work on that. And then I utilize hypnotherapy. Like you said, it's very different to the stage hypnosis. So there's no collapsing, there's no dancing. You know, I'm not trying to make anyone do anything. We're just using a natural state of the mind to make the subconscious dominant over the conscious mind so we can understand where programs are coming from. So if you have a self sabotage that says every time you try and make the sales call, you feel sick, or every time you try and ask out the woman, you sort of go off into the distance and find an excuse, you've learned that behavior at some point in your life. You weren't born with that. You've learned that it's risky and it's scary to do that. And with hypnotherapy, it brings up those moments from the past so that you can start seeing them from your adult eyes. And as you see the things that happen in childhood from your adult eyes, you can resolve those issues and let go of the triggers. And that's basically the work I do.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's really cool. And experiencing bits of it here, it's, it's interesting how like you said, that's the 5%. I'm sure your app is that geared to more. The broader audience.

So the app is for, for everybody. The idea was obviously I'm working with high performance and I only have so many hours in the day, so, you know, I can only help so many people. And one of my cl, he had a lot of success and he put some of it down to the work we'd done and was saying, hey, I want to share this with the world. What do you think the best way of sharing this with the world would be? And we worked together on building that app so that really we could. Anyone can afford it. I think about 40 of the audios are completely free. So there's stuff in there like helping kids with studying for exams and things like that. We just have all of that free, you know, just to help people. And then There are about 300 audios I think overall if you did the paid package. But we just wanted to put something out there where it's like this is a really easy way to help people improve their lives. Like, why not have a product that's there to help?

Yeah.

Now, what got you into hypnotherapy? Was that something you went to school for or was it.

Yeah, I mean, it was a very like, interesting change of life course. Oh yeah. So I had a severe fear of flying. Um, so I wouldn't take long haul flights and short haul flights would ruin, like, ruin my vacation knowing I had to fly. So I'd fly somewhere, I'd be freaked out two weeks before the vacation, worried on the beach, and then get back on the beach and have another anxiety prone flight on the way home as well. And you know, it was holding back my life. In honesty, you know, I couldn't. I turned down, literally, trips to America with friends because I didn't want to face a 12 hour flight. And someone recommended a hypnotherapist. And I was working in investments in the time, completely different, you know, renewable energy investments, things like that. And she resolved it in an hour, which to me was literally magic. And she resolved it by going to that subconscious state that I was describing and digging back into memories from my past. And I had a memory come up of being a child at my granddad's house, being shown a picture of a small plane and then being told it crashed and killed one of his business partners. Right. So she worked through, you know, there's no reason for this to be scary, the child is scared, you don't need to be scared, etc. Etc. But what was really interesting for me is that that wasn't a conscious memory. And I went home and I spoke to my parents and I was like, look, you know, this thing came up, is it real? And they were like, yeah, you remember that plane crashed and that guy? So I was like, wow, something has come up that I wasn't aware of. And I just feel differently about flying now. So that was a huge shift. And then I started flying. I was much more comfortable. And then after a while I was like, I want to learn this because it's just a cool skill to have. And it's like you can solve someone's fears very quickly. Like it's just a cool thing to be able to do. So went and got trained as a hypnotherapist, thinking it would be a hobby, and then started helping friends and family. And they would ask me to help their friends, who would ask me to help their friends. And then I was finding it much more fun than the sort of work I was doing. So I just reached this stage where I was like, hey, I'm just going to move into this as a business. And then, then from that, someone recommended, hey, if you're helping people with stress, you should try helping poker players because if they get stressed on a final table, it can cost them millions of dollars. So started reaching out to poker players, started working poker players, they had an awful lot of success. It's over 150 million clients of mine have won now in poker. So really successful. Then from there they started introducing me to athletes. I started working with the UFC fighters, had people win the belt, things like that, that went really well. And then they introduced me to business people who introduced me to stock traders.

It was just like full circle, you're back.

You know, this, this, yeah, this career that I never. You could never plan out something like this. It's just these different steps happened along the way. And I've just been fortunate to be involved in lots of these fun stories from, you know, Olympics to fighting to stock traders and things. So that's the sort of the two minute version of my career.

Well, going back to a piece in the story, with the, with plane story, with the plane crash story, is it just the bringing it to your awareness that sort of fixes the problem or was it like you're aware of it but then you did additional work on top of the awareness that helped clear the problem?

Yeah. So it's actually changing the memory.

So the way that it works. So if we take that sort of example, so it'd be like, see the child. How are the child responding when they're being told this has happened? And it's going to be like, oh, I look scared, I look uncomfortable, whatever it might be. And they'll be like, okay, go back. I'd like to give that child a hug, tell him that he's safe, that he doesn't have to worry. And as you do go through that process, you usually feel a physical release, like a lightness comes off your body and what's happening is what you remembered as a very stressful moment. You're sort of overwriting the memory with a comforting moment. So by overwriting the memory, because our memories are malleable, they're different. Even if you think back to yesterday, it's going to be different in two hours if you think back to yesterday again. But when there are these big traumatic events, it locks in emotion. So what we're looking to do is go back, turn it into something more pleasant, remove the emotion, and then when something comes up so in my case, the flying was a trigger.

My memory starts searching for like, is it safe, is it safe, is it safe? And instead of it reaching a no, this is really dangerous. People die. Your granddad could have died. It goes back to, oh, yeah, it's fine. There's just not the same emotion thing there. So the trigger doesn't fire. So that's how that process works.

Yeah. So the memory never goes away, it's just the meaning of the memory and how that applies to your own life right now changes.

Yeah. So like a good example is if you think about school bullying, so many of us, including myself, you have moments of school bullying and a lot of the time an adult in their 30s and their 40s will think back to their school bully and feel physically sick or like attention, like, oh, you know, James was so bad, I mean, whatever.

Right, right.

We go back to those moments in hypnotherapy and if you look at it through your eyes, James was a seven year old boy.

Who was having a rough time with his parents or his big brother was beating him up or whatever it was. And as you start seeing this from the outside and this terrifying moment of when you were threatened and this kid said he was going to kill you, but then you start viewing it through your adult eyes and you know, a seven year old pushed you over and said, I'm going to kill you. Two seven year olds doing that isn't a scary thing. So you start reframing it to the truth rather than the sort of the fictitious thing that the child has created that's given it so much weight. Because we're designed to learn these fears in childhood because evolutionarily it's really valuable. So you, you know, you're out in the jungle and your mum sees a tiger and starts screaming. It's really useful for that to be something that you learn is dangerous instantly from that. And mum screamed, tigers equal danger. Like very useful. Or in a very small tribe, you know, asking out the woman being rejected might mean you don't have kids because there's two women.

True.

So you know, these really highest high risk situations 10,000 years ago, not very high risk situations in 2021. And we're still running old programming, so all it is is going back, reframing it, relearning these things so that, oh yeah, I don't need to feel this way. This trigger doesn't have to be there.

So when you're working with, I guess the high performers, the 5%, you said is like this piece that they haven't achieved yet. How do you identify that? Because I would assume that there's some like the flying one, I think I was kind of learning about you that was pretty easy to identify. You know, it's the fear of flying. Okay, boom. Like I guess how do you approach, you know, these kind of more known fears or patterns that we have as compared to like a high achiever. And there's like these like maybe subtle.

Things I'm imagining and that's much more the nuance of my work. So there are loads and loads of hypnotherapists. There aren't many hypnotherapists with a lot of experience in dealing with high performers. So my work is much more fine tuning than someone has an extreme anger issue and we know we're working on anger. Like those people typically haven't reached the top of the world in what they're doing generally. So I have a very long intake and what we're looking for are any, anywhere where their behavior is differing from what their logical how they would solve it for someone else.

So, so you know, if you're looking in at yourself, what would you tell yourself to do? And if there's a big difference between what you would tell yourself to do and what you're doing, there's something going on emotionally because you know the answer, but you're not able to follow that system. So, so we're looking for that in their lives. And a lot of the time there's self sabotage issues, self worth issues, fear of failure, fear of success is a very real thing. And it's, it can often be enough for the person to not want to reach that final level. So you can be very comfortable being top 10 in the world. You're going to have a lot more eyes on you if you reach number one. And that can be a really scary thing. The truth is the rewards are also dramatically different.

So it's really trying to almost negotiate with the subconscious to hey, you've worked on this for the last 20 years. Don't you think it's a good idea.

That you give it a percent?

Yeah, yeah. And when you look back when you're 50 or 70, you're actually proud that you, you gave it 100% and tried everything that you could. So we're really looking, but it's really this fine tuning, it can take a number of sessions to try and get an idea of exactly where the issue is. But if someone's reaching out to me, oftentimes they have a, they have a sense that something's off. And they might say to me like, I don't know what it is, but I know there's something inside my mind holding me. Um, I think an example most of us can resonate with is this feeling of like there's an invisible force field. It's just stopping you doing that thing that you know you should be doing and that's self sabotage. And you know, for us in our more normal lives, that might be expensive, it might not be particularly expensive, but when you're trying to compete at the highest levels in business or sports or whatever else it might be, that one thing might be worse. Very substantial financial returns. So for them it's working on that's really important.

Yeah, I'm just thinking of, well think of how I feel through things obviously. But like through business owners, a lot of us, the self sabotage thing I totally relate to. Like just we talked about it, like mundane things like even you know, emails and stuff. It's like, oh, well, you know, later, you know, it's like, yeah, but I'm like, but why am I doing that? There's no reason, reason to push this off. I'm just like. And maybe it's like a fear of what's. The actions I'm going to maybe possibly take afterwards or I don't know. But like little sticking points like that might I experience those and I'm imagining those listening can probably relate to some piece of their life.

And I also noticed there's a lot of stuff around money and how you're brought up around money and your narratives around money. And there are so many people who reach out to me and they're hitting the same financial point year after year after year and it doesn't make any logical sense. So there's no reason for their business to stop growing at this level. And you know, things start getting better and they just sabotage it and they make a terrible investment or hire the wrong member and they just drag themselves back and they're like, you know, my bank account keeps hitting half a million dollars. Like it doesn't for the last five years. Like I keep. And whatever it will be. And oftentimes like we go through these patterns through childhood and there's a reason why there's, they're uncomfortable getting to the next number. So the way parents have spoken about rich people, what it means to, to reach a level of success past the richest person you knew as a child, things like that. So there are these patterns that people don't, don't like being front runners a lot of the Time. They don't want, like, to be the first person because they feel it's going to isolate them. Their family's going to judge them in some way, their life's going to. And they get to this comfort level, and then every time it looks like they're going to rise, they drag themselves back. And that's another thing that comes up frequently in this type of work.

That's interesting. I mean, just explaining that it makes so much sense because you're almost comparing yourself to, I guess, the statuses or tears from your childhood from people that you probably. Who cares? It's like your friend's parents or something, or your own parents, maybe.

I mean, one of them, like, the most money your dad's ever made. That's. A lot of people get stuck there.

Wow.

Like, they just can't get past, like, when their dad was like, hey, man, you know, son, I'm rich. I'm making $100,000 a year. I'm a rich. I'm rich, son. A lot of those guys, like, that's. That's the. That's where I can get to. And they're just like, they'll be saying to me, yeah, I'm just stuck at this number. I can't work out where I. And then I'll. We'll get to the question, so how much money did your dad make? Yeah, exactly the same. Okay.

Wow.

That's a surprise. Yeah.

I'm kind of curious because, like, now I don't know, what are some other. Well, so fear of success, I think, is a huge one, and that's probably something that's not commonly thought about either, but I could see that showing up in probably more people than not.

Yeah, I would say that the other one that I feel like pops up quite a bit through the course of doing this podcast is the imposter syndrome. Right? People.

People feeling like, you know, they don't belong in the group. The, you know, the peers that they're among, they don't feel like they belong among those peers sometimes. And, you know, I struggle with it sometimes. Right. Depending on the room I'm in. So I'm curious, you know, how. How do people work through that? Like, where. Where does the root typically live for. For that kind of thing?

It's self worth. So in almost all of these things.

You know, in terms of the self sabotage is fear of success, fear of failure. It comes down to, am I lovable? Am I good enough? Like, real early childhood stuff, that's really the theme. And when it comes to imposter, syndrome. It's, you know, I was. I was always that I wasn't the cool kid at school. You know, my mum said that she loved her sister, my sister more than me, or whatever. Whatever you created as a child. And that's at the very base of all of it. But the thing that I found really interesting, and I'm lucky to be in this spot of knowing so many of these people who are top in the world, but I'll run events and I'll invite a load of clients to it and there'll be some Olympian and there'll be some business owner and there'll be some stockbroker or whatever. All of them will come up to me and be like, I don't deserve to be in this room. I'm uncomfortable. I'll be like, you've got an Olympic medal and you're fine, I promise you. And they'll be like, but what's that? Like, these people are rich. And then someone else who's wealthier will say, hey, but, you know, this is an Olympian here and there's some boxing champion and everyone has that imposter syndrome because we undervalue what we're doing as an individual. So the Olympians, I mean, a good example was, I had a comment from one is like, I was like, look, you have an Olympic medal, you really don't have to feel. She's like, yeah, but all of my friends have Olympic medals. I was like, yeah, but other people's friends don't.

It's like, like in your social scene, it's really normal to have Olympic medals, but in the rest of the world, it's a really cool thing to have an Olympic medal. And, you know, all the stockbrokers, their friends are stockbrokers. There's people running E commerce companies, all their friends are running E commerce companies. And we don't sort of factor that in. And we're always like, yeah, but there's someone more successful in my scene. But, you know, but we're all feeling imposter syndrome in those moments. And everyone's the same, everyone has fears. And, you know, I'll have them do an exercise where everyone talks about their fears at the beginning. They'll look around like, oh, everyone's scared and it's completely unnecessary for everyone.

And I'd imagine it's a lot of related things. So when you get. I don't know if you do group environment stuff, but I know we've done some work like that. And then you start to hear stories and patterns from childhood, past you know, and you're like, oh, wait, that's just that thing. I have that same thing. It's a different story, but.

But it's the same. It's always the same. Yeah, it's always is the same stuff.

Wow. How about just like rattling all, like guilt, you know, in general is, is maybe that's broad, but what would you do with guilt? Like the feeling.

Well, let's share the like. So an example, an example. I feel like we've gotten over this over time, but an example for us is in our own business times when we weren't working in our business, we felt guilty about the fact that we weren't actively working on our business. It was almost like the time spent with family or the time spent not pursuing the growth of the business. There's almost a guilt attached to. I really should be focused over here as opposed to being present right here. And so I know that the conversation of guilt has come up quite a bit on our show over time about like, you know, why do I feel guilty when I'm not pursuing growth in the business?

Yeah. So I mean, the first thing, the things that stand out around that one is you just have to forgive yourself in the different situations, like forgiveness of, you know, and everyone else. Like, if your parent was a bad parent, forgive your parent at least internally, because the truth is they were doing the best they could at the time with what they knew. In the same sense that you're doing the best you can, that you know how to do or you're capable of doing if you're spending more time with your family or whatever else it might be, you might need a break, etc. But the other side of this is, let's be honest. If you had spent all of your time on your business and hadn't spent time with your family, would that have been guilt free? Yeah, you would be like, oh, we've been spending time. I feel so guilty I haven't spent time with my kids or whatever else it might be. So you're setting yourself up for an impossible situation of whatever you do, you're going to feel guilty about it. So, you know, with. Through the hypnotherapy, it would be a case of, okay, when you go back to those moments, I'd like to forgive yourself for making that choice. Let go of the stress and tension, however you're holding in your body, those sorts of things. And then I'd like you to plan out and start to schedule something that you think is fair and that you could repeat for the year and it's going to feel balanced and going to feel good for you. So let's design a schedule where you're seeing a family, this amount, you're working on the business, this amount, this time block here, this time block here. And it's a sustainable amount of work that you're not going to burn out and you're not going to damage your relationships and for everyone that's going to look different. But you can actually design something for you that works in that way. And then you try it for a month and you have to say, okay, well, perhaps actually I need another three hours of work or I need more time with my kids or whatever it might be. And okay, so we've learned a lesson. We don't need to feel guilty about the first month we were testing something. Let's try the next month. And then you're basically just crafting a life that you can feel good about. But the idea of like just feeling guilty the whole time, like, I did too much work this month. I'm so guilty. I haven't seen my family, I'm seeing my family. You're just gonna be in this constant state of energy burn. So it's like taking, taking the pain out of it and just saying, okay, well how do I solve this rationally? And that hits pretty well with what I was trying to describe as, you know, the rational work. Like, you probably know that rationally already without me telling you it. But you're not following through with that. And this is the sort of thing I was trying to describe earlier.

Follow. Yeah, this is interesting. Now I'm thinking back to things like the exercises in Primed Mind, the app, and I'm kind of curious on some of these things because you mentioned the feelings, because sometimes some of these guilt feelings are emotions, anxiety, we feel it in our body. But I think not everyone knows how to feel those things to identify what's happening. And it seems like through the course of your work in hypnotherapy, you almost enhance that feeling, but with a focus it seems like. So you can then do something with it.

Yeah. So what we're trying to do, as I say, the hypnosis, there's nothing magic about hypnosis. It's just you're just getting into a relaxed state and increasing visualization. But when we reach that very relaxed state, that more trance like state, we can dig into those emotions and just have intense focus on one thing.

Thing.

So if you were saying, hey, Elliot, I feel guilt at this moment, you might not know what Guilt feels like right now. But if we spent 5 minutes, 10 minutes trying to get you very relaxed, and then I said, I want you to think about one of those moments you felt that guilt, right? Where do you feel it in your body? Is it in your stomach? Your chest? Your face? How do you know you're feeling guilty? And you'll start to be able to feel this feeling building up. Okay? I want you to dig into that feeling, that pressure in your chest, that heat that. That whatever it might be, and then I want you to connect that back to another time in your life. You felt a similar way. When else have you felt this way? Five, four, three, two, one. And you'd be like, I'm eight and I stole five bucks from my mom's purse. Or, you know, whatever. Whatever it is that's happened when you're a kid. But most people are sort of on the go the whole time, and they're not really aware. They're not being present. They're not feeling the things that are happening physically, but they know those things there, and that is burning energy. So it's like, I feel anxious. Okay, what is anxiety to you? How do you know that you're anxious, but in normal everyday life, people just don't have the time to dig into that.

Yeah, I think that was one of the bigger aha moments, probably in the last year, is really tapping into that. But I feel like the app, really, once you are able to identify that, then you can really jump in and dive deep and actually experience what that feels like. And like I mentioned earlier, it's like, turn this knob. And for me, it was like this anxiety level just. Literally just sank. And I was like, that is wild, man.

Well, the thing is, it's. The anxiety is psychologically created. Like, there isn't a pressure on your chest.

The pressure that you're feeling or the sickness you're feeling. It's in. It's created by your own mind. So in the same way, if your mind can create this feeling of pressure, your mind can remove this feeling of pressure. And I think that's something that a lot of people, you know, that they're like, yeah, but I have all this tension in my shoulders. It's like, yeah, but your body's creating that. There isn't. You're not physically carrying anything. And once you start to understand that, hey, actually, I can put myself in a relaxed state. I can actually control this. This is something. It might be on automatic, but I can take some level of control.

Then you have a lot more control. Over your life, just in general.

I want to go back to something that you were talking about a few minutes ago about how we. With your story in the plane. You said that the memory was sort of subconscious or unconscious. You didn't actually remember it. How can. Is there an exercise people can do to kind of uncover these memories that maybe are hidden? Or is that something that really could only be worked through with a therapist? Like in.

I mean. Yeah, with the repressed stuff really, I think. I mean, mine was sort of a semi extreme case. It's not that rare for it to be fully just forgotten memories. That's pretty rare for it to come up. But if with repressed memories like that.

Usually you need to be working through it because your subconscious is trying to keep it there. So, like, I'm what, I work with a hypnotherapist because I can't work on myself because any of my blind spots are blind spots to me.

Interesting. Yeah.

You know, it's just I can't push myself through. I can't find it. And we can all solve someone else's problems. Like, you know, Joe, you can say to Matt, hey, you should be doing this, this, this. Different Matt, you could say to Joe, yeah, you should be. We can't see our own stuff. So for the bigger stuff, for the blind spots, we need someone else to help us. And as I say, so do I. For more. Just like working through, learning meditation, trying to be kinder to people, trying to be kinder to yourself. You can do a lot of exercises like that to take pressure off. But for really keystone blind spots that you might have, I would say if you're getting triggered listening to this call and you're like, oh, there's this and there's this and there's this. It's like, like you're going to struggle to resolve that all on your own. It's going to be much faster to just find someone in your local area that you can go and talk to who's used to dealing with this.

I guess. Yeah, I'm thinking of. Are there visual elements to this? Because I've heard of things like EMDR therapy and I think that's the Irapid movement. I don't know all the acronyms, but it seems like you're almost doing that but with a visual memory then. Right. So it's instead of.

So. So yeah, all of mine is eyes closed, eyes closed.

Okay.

So everything I do is eyes closed. And all the, all the vision, it's all visualization. So people are seeing these memories they're coming up in their mind. It's much clearer than it would be in a talking. Like if I say, hey, remember, back to your school building. Now you can sort of remember it. In hypnotherapy, you'll be able to get a much clearer picture because we're focusing in so intense. But all of mine is a nice closed process. There's no swinging watches, there's no magical picture on a screen or anything. And you know, EMDR is to some extent, I feel. I'm not trained in emdr, but I feel there are a lot of similarities in the way that it works. And I sometimes question if the sort of the movement that they're using in EMDR and the eye movement is to some extent close to a hypnotic trance that's being created.

That's what I think.

It's a very, very similar mechanism that's being used. And you know, in, in a lot of ways, all of a lot of these modalities are just trying to get to the same thing. So nlp, hypnotherapy, emdr, they're trying to get to this stage of there's a reason you're behaving like this. You don't need to continue behaving like this. And for different people, different modalities are going to be more, more effective. And they're going to accept that them differently depending on how they've been set up.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. There's an application for everyone, basically.

Yeah, basically.

That's the cool part of it all. Because I'm like, yeah, we definitely. This probably isn't the first time folks are hearing it, but it's the process and understanding what to do with this thing that might have felt untouchable or uncurable for folks, because I think that's what can happen. And then you just kind of go in the spiral mode.

Yeah. And what I like to say to people around this is you're not your issues. Like so many people say I'm an anxious person, I'm an angry person. And it's just like you're someone who learned to be anxious because it kept you safe. You're someone who learned to be angry because it kept you safe. And if you, if you can change even the way they talk about it themselves, they change the way they talk about their own behavior, then it becomes much easier for them to change. But if they define themselves as this personality trait, then that's in their mind. This is just who I am. I'm Just anxious. It's like, no, but you probably had a rough childhood and you learned that the world's a scary place. Like, why don't we try and unlearn that? Because although it might have been scary when you're eight, perhaps it's not so scary at 35.

Yeah, yeah. It's the whole adult and child. You're speaking with that perspective as an adult. And I think that reframe is like a lot of us are just walking around with this mind of 6 year olds still and. Yeah. Thinking about Jimmy on the playground.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't want to get punched again.

It's like, dude, just, he got cut off, don't worry. On the freeway or something.

Yeah. I don't see a 7 year old in curl in fear when I see him walk by anymore.

That's good. That's good progress, Matt.

So I want to, I want to take the conversation to like the top of the top, like high achievers. I know you work, you've worked with a lot of poker players. I think you said they've earned like $150 million plus, you know, after working with you. I'm curious what kind of things people at that sort of level need to work through because I imagine you're not teaching them how to be better poker players through hypnosis, right?

Certainly not.

Those are sort of skills that they've built up over the time. So what sort of struggles do the top of the top high achievers typically need to work through? Because now we're probably talking like marginal improvements. But those marginal improvements just put you over the top of the rest.

Oh, completely. And what happens as you move up in the stakes in poker? Obviously the money pressure becomes more severe. So, you know, these players, the reason they're winning so much is because the buy ins are so big. So I've had players play in tournaments where it's a million dollars to buy into the tournament. So, you know, most people are losing a million bucks and then you get to a final table and you might be playing for the, you know, 3 million, 5 million, $16 million, depending on what place you get on the final table. And that it doesn't matter who you are the first few times, even if you're very wealthy, like there's going to be substantial pressure. And a lot of the work I'm doing with the guys playing those very high stakes is helping them turn it into just another day at work. So instead of seeing it as, you know, this is money on the table. How many Ferraris is This or whatever houses, it's a case of it still a number of big blinds you have in front of you. And they've all played millions of hands of poker. And if you can get someone to take out all of the stress and instead of seeing it as money, seeing it as just, this is just a number of big blinds. I have, I have 30 big blinds, he has 50 big blinds, you know, and remove the emotion from it, they're able to play better. And the emotions don't get in the way because very subtle mathematical mistakes can mean the difference between winning and losing.

There's also, in poker, it's a strange game in that there's. You can be the best player on a day and you can lose. And most people in most sports, if you go, if you play chess, which is another mind sport, if you're the best player and you make all the right moves, you win. Like that's just how chess works.

Right.

In poker, you can turn up, you can make all the right moves and lose.

Yeah.

And it can be millions of dollars.

Still luck involved. Right. There's still the turn of the card.

There's the luck. Yeah, there's the luck factor, which means that there's a lot of entitlement that comes up. So you're also working with the ego because the person who just beat you is a businessman who doesn't even know how to play poker. He's just beating you in this hand and how do you make sure you play the next hand correctly when this ridiculous thing has just happened and he's just played terribly and he still ended up with your money. Money. So we're working through a lot of the ego stuff and turning it into a very long term game for them. So I'll have them picture themselves as their job is being the casino. So we know that gamblers go in a casino and they win on roulette and they hit their number and they might go home with some money, but the casino doesn't care because over the year the casino is printing money. And in poker it's very similar. The edge is high for a professional player who's highly skilled. But on a Tuesday night, they might lose or they might lose for three months. But if they keep playing their best poker over the longer term, they'll profit so long as they're a winning player. So it's taking them from a short term hand to hand, night to night process to a. What is our process? What is our strategy? How do we make sure we play the best strategy? We can every Time we turn up to the table, whether we're on an upswing or a downswing, my job is just playing the hand in front of me, me. And that as an edge against players who aren't following that philosophy is pretty extraordinary.

Yeah, that's interesting. It's actually very similar to a conversation we were having earlier about like, venture capitalists.

Right.

In the venture capital game, that a venture capital company might invest in 100 companies knowing that, you know, maybe 10 of them will be winners and only three of them will be huge winners, but those three huge winners are going to cover the losses of everything else. Right. And it sounds like it's kind of a similar philosophy with poker is you, you know, you know, you're going to have bad nights or even bad weeks or possibly even bad months, but as long as you keep on playing, you're going to, you're going to average ahead of everybody.

And, and then to the other extent, if you start going, getting really angry, you're going to get crushed and you're.

Just another gambler, resentful, whatever it might be.

Exactly. Because you're going to try and win hands, you know, you shouldn't really be trying to win because, hey, I keep getting, getting unlucky. Maybe I should try these, this style as well.

Yeah. And, you know, and even high level professionals can have those moments. And yeah, I sort of come into this field as I'm trying to get everyone as professional as I can, to some extent robotic in their thought process around it to. This is just a process I'm following rather than something I need to take personally or emotionally.

Now, I'm curious, how does this relate to UFC fighters? Because these guys fight what, twice a year? I know they're training all the time, but everything is like on this fight.

So, I mean, if you think of that from an emotional basis.

Yeah.

I mean, and even Olympians, it's even worse. It's once every four years. So everything is about that fight for a UFC fighter. And that creates anxiety because even if you're not scared of like, these people aren't scared of fighting, they enjoy fighting. However, they are scared of losing half their wage or looking embarrassed, being embarrassed in front of a TV camera or whatever else it might be. And if they're walking to the cage and their mindset is, I hope I don't lose, that's very different to a mindset of I'm coming here to win. And then you also have the self sabotage issues that can come into place with someone who's a professional. Fighter or if you win, sometimes that means your next fight is against someone that you don't believe you can win against.

So it's a future piece of.

So there can be a future. Like, it can be like, I should win this one, but if I win this one, then the pressure is going to be on me to do this and I'm not sure if I can win this fight. So there's a lot of emotional stuff. Anything that's high risk. So the poker is high risk financially. Stock trading is high risk financially. UFC is financial, but also physical high risk.

So the pressure's on. And anytime the pressure's on, typically that's when the self sabotage will show. So that's how I saw. It's very similar that the work with poker players, fighters, stock traders.

It all comes down to a root cause of. Yeah, I mean really, what you were saying earlier, like imposter syndrome, Am I good enough, do I deserve this, etc. Etc.

Yeah, it's really interesting to think of. Like it's not the current action necessarily or the event, but it's what's to possibly come.

What does this mean after?

Yeah, it's the meaning be after that thing seems to either start or stop whatever action.

There are so many fighters who are outside of the UFC and they'll build a have a few fights, win, win, win. They're told the next fight they win, they'll get to the ufc. They lose that fight, win, win, win, Next fight you'll get to the ufc, lose that fight. I've seen that is they're holding themselves back from the biggest stage.

Wow. Yeah. And same with income goals. I'm sure you know your earnings in business, what you think your worth is in a job, whatever it is.

And that's all just a subconscious thing.

Right.

Like they don't necessarily realize almost none.

Of them consciously know it.

Right. Wow.

Yeah.

And yeah, I mean, it comes right back around to like, you know, the income plateau that so many people hit. Right. Like I can't seem to break past that hundred thousand dollar a year threshold. Right. That you hit that income barrier and maybe one month you finally look like you're going to break out and then something happens, you know, that feels random, that knocks you back down.

Yeah. And even like crazy things like the number of people who like injured, have a sprained ankle the week before a marathon.

Well, because that's a very emotional thing. Right. It's tied.

These sorts of things come up and it's like, oh, it's. Yeah. It could be coincidence but it's happening to a lot of people.

That's a good point because I mean, yeah, emotions are typically in energy. If you're not, you can definitely, like you said, it's all your mind and it can do some funky stuff. Man, this is, this is wild. I'm thinking just to kind of give folks, do you have any other.

Well, I was just gonna ask something fairly broad, but I was curious. Like when like CEOs and high performing, like business people come to you, are there any things that you typically find you're working through with them that maybe we haven't discussed? Are there sort of like common problems that like maybe we're even blind. So blind to that we didn't even think to bring them up.

One of the most common it comes up with a lot of people I work with is procrastination issues. And where it's interesting they're coming from is I'm often working with pretty naturally intelligent people like this just, it's standard. And what's happened is as a kid, they've been the clever kid. They've been told that they're clever and then they learn to not study for exams because if they study for exams, then they have a chance of everyone being wrong. And they're not clever because I studied hard for this exam and I failed. But if they don't study for the exam and they get the B, then they can say, well, I got a B but I didn't study. I could have studied, I would have been the best. And they learn this defense mechanism of not giving 100% because if you don't give 100%, you can't really fail. And the idea of you being super intelligent can't be taken away because now you're a super intelligent person who's just lazy.

That one actually hits home for me. It really does. Like, I was always that kid who was like, I got a B but.

I didn't try, but if I tried.

You'Re playing it safe.

And then like the playing it safe continues in life. And you know, they'll come to me and they'll be like, hey man, like I'm. I know I'm not giving it 100%. And we work through this and it will just be this clear pattern of they're just scared to find out if they're as clever as their ego wants them to believe they are. So it's an ego protection mechanism.

Damn ego.

And that's something that comes up so frequently and it's not widely discussed. And you know, it doesn't, you know, so that, that's one of the things that we hadn't covered, which I just see it so often. And yeah, I was guilty of it as well. Like I could feel it, you know, when different parts of my life, I'm like, yeah, that's the, that's that one coming up again, you know, so how.

Do you, how do you sort of replace that one? So, you know, if it all sort of leads back to a story from childhood of, you know, your parents telling you were clever and then you kind of self fulfilled that prophecy throughout school, how do, how do we go and sort of change that story at this point?

So one of the ways of changing this story is starting to see that none of those things were really pass or fail fail. So if you start to reframe it as every single exam you took was an opportunity. Find out where your weaknesses are and then you can improve. And every business deal that you go into, you know, if your business isn't is firing at 80% instead of 100%. How do you know where to improve if. If you're going in with deficits? So it's shifting it, it's fixed in growth mindset work. There's a book Mindset by Carol Duick who actually covers similar topics. It's just interesting to see that it's come up in my own sessions so clearly to that as well. But it's this idea of if you start to see everything as information and then an evolution. So rather than oh, I got a B, I failed, it's oh, I got a B, where can I improve? Like, what did I learn? I thought I'd studied everything. I thought I should have got an A. What can I learn from this? And if you can then turn things into this constant, just data evolution, data evolution, data evolution. It removes the fear of getting a bad mark because or a failing company or whatever it might be because then you have an opportunity to actually learn from that and be better moving forward. And that's the really key point is shifting it to you didn't fail, you just learned some things to then start improving.

It's like a little mini audit in a way of your progress.

I like that a lot.

That's really cool.

Sorry, didn't mean to derail your question.

Not at all. That was a much better one.

I was going to kind of lead us towards concluding we want to wrap it up here, but for our audience, primarily entrepreneurs for sure.

Using Primed Mind. I think everyone should go get that because you said there's a lot of free guide.

Yeah, a lot of it's free.

Yeah. So go get it. Just grab it. Primed Mind, I think you're on iOS and Android, I believe.

Yeah, we're on both of them.

Sweet. Yeah. Is there a specific way to use the app for, you know, folks like, who have listened to us, business inclined? Obviously there's everything in there though. How's the best way to get started?

There's some seven day courses. So there are things like confidence, relaxation, winners, mindset, determination. I would choose the course that you think would help you the most and then get it. Dig into one of the seven day courses and see how you get on with the course. And then if it's business people, there is a business section and it's things like before you give a public speech, before you go to a networking event, before sales, because the sorts of, you know, know the normal things that will show up.

Yeah.

So I would check out the business section as well.

Right on. Cool. Elliot. And I know you have a podcast and obviously you take on personal clients. The waiting list is quite long for a good reason, the intake process.

Yeah. So I mean I've got Prime Mind podcast as well. Really original. It's the same name as the Keeping It Easy and then my website, even more original. Elliotro. Com. If people are looking to do personal sessions with me, I've got a load of people I've trained as well. And as you say, I'm pretty booked up personally at the moment. But we can always find somebody to help you who I've trained and it doesn't necessarily. Obviously I've been talking about the work I do, which is predominantly high performers dominant in their industry. But we can help you if that's not where you are right now. There's people who are at different levels of the industry who we can point you in the right direction.

Right on. Wow.

Very cool.

Cool, Elliot. Well, this has been fascinating, man. And now I understand Matt much more than I did before. So this is great.

It all makes sense.

It does. Finally.

It only took us like 13 years. It's all good though. All right, my man. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for having me on the show. Of course.

We'll see you later.

Woo.

That was a good one.

That was packed with a lot of rabbit holes.

Yeah, I feel like I say that every single time I hit the record one. Woo. That was a good one.

Do you mean it, Matt?

I do. I mean it every single time. I always feel like every conversation we have have is really Good.

So, yes. Okay. Is it worthy of getting the action guides?

It's absolutely 100%, 110% worth getting the action guides.

I would agree with that statement. So luckily, these bad boys are free. Frieza Freezel for two weeks of this bad boy going live this episode. So after two weeks, they go away into something that you can join. But let's talk about Flowchart Group.com Flowchart Group.com that's where you get the action, guys, for this episode. Because soon sue wrote all the notes for you based on all the cool, actionable stuff.

I like how you didn't take credit this time. Normally you're like, we wrote notes for you, Sue. Sue wrote the notes for you.

Thank you.

Sue wrote these action guides and you can get them@flowchartgroup.com and also Sue's notes. You also get the awesome benefit of getting into our Facebook group.

Ah, yes, yes, yes, yes. We can all chat. You can pick Matt's mind for all of his treasure trove of thoughts and ideas and strategies and fun stuff. Flowchartgroup.com they get the cobwebs mostly, but the leftovers.

All right, go to flowchartgroup.com, get the action guide of this episode and.

Wow. I like that. I like that. That was good. That was good. We should do that. That's worth it. All right. And so I wanted to also call out Elliot's app.

Oh, this?

Oh, yes, that one. Yeah. Primed mind. You can get it on Apple, iOS or. Yeah, that's the same thing. Android. That's what I was gonna say. Go get it. Because that thing, it's really cool. It's free. I mean, he gives away a ton of it. There's some paid element. I don't know how it works, but I know how those things work. They're cool. So it's like if you want to seek out, like an emotion you're going through, he'll probably work you through it. If you want to sleep better, if you want to wake up, like, really cool. I don't know. He walks you through this cool method.

Well, it's got all the, like, the sort of pre game stuff too. Like, ooh, I got to go speak on stage today. Here's what you listen to before you speak for your mom. Oh, I gotta. You know, I have this athletic event to. Here's what I got to listen to before I go into this event. So it primes your mind for these activities.

That's it, man. So go get it. It's free. And you're welcome. Have fun with that. So, Easy Webinar, we gotta give a shout out to our boys and gals.

Boys and gals.

That's right. So tell me about it, Mr. Matt.

Easy webinar. It does all the good webinar stuff you would want a webinar platform to do.

What are the battles ones, though, the bad ones?

Like, I hate it when my webinar platform punches me in the face and.

Gives my computer a virus and still takes, like, a bunch of your money. Like, way more than all the other webinar things out there that are subpar.

Yeah, they just charge you up the hoo.

Ha. Whoa, whoa. You went there. All right, well, you don't want to be those guys or work with them or trust them with your webinars. Okay, so what does Easy Webinar do for me here?

Easy Webinar. They're going to do the live webinar, the automated webinars, the hybrid webinars. They do the streaming stuff. You could build their landing page. The landing page to register your webinar.

Beautiful. I don't need, like, all this page builder stuff. I don't need it just does it.

Yes.

Cool.

But I'm pretty sure you knew the answer to that already. Okay, yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think I knew that.

Anyway, you got to go get Easy Webinar.

All right?

They're giving you a fatty discount if you go to easywebinar.com hustle. You could just go to easywebinar.Com if you want, but if you go to easywebinar.comb hustle, it's a discount.

It's a much better option. You'll enjoy that option. Easywebinar.com hustle.

Spending less money is better than spending more money.

Yeah. Fair. Yeah, Makes sense. Yeah.

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Yeah.

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