112: Unlocking your superconscious potential, ft. Scott Lester Woods

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Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Cani Crystals, the podcast. I hope that you're all well and having an amazing week so far. As you know by now, my name is Mart. I am your host, and this week I've got a guest on the show. So he's walked across fire with Tony Robbins, he's climbed sub-zero mountains with Wim Hof, he's drank ayahuasca with shamans, and he's even lived in a Buddhist temple for 2 years. He recently trained in hypnotherapy and started his own business, The High Performance Therapist. So please welcome Scott Lester Woods to the show. Scott, how are you?

Yeah, very well, thanks, Mart. Really excited to be here.

Oh, amazing. So basically, for everyone listening, when I was at that event, you know, with Fern Cotton a couple of weeks ago, one of the nights everyone had a party and there was a free bar, and we spent so long trying to get served and the music was just too loud that you just couldn't talk. So we found this other bar on the top floor of the hotel instead, and Scott and his friend Mike came over to say hi and we got talking, and I just thought that they would both make for really interesting guests. So Scott, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and just tell us a bit about your journey, why you started The High Performance Therapist.

Sure. So I would say with the hypnosis and hypnotherapy generally, um, I've been doing that, I think it's coming up to about 9 years now.

Oh wow.

Um, so it's been a while. Um, I've trained with lots and lots of different hypnotherapists, trained lots of different modalities. Um, but it started, I think, the way that most stories start, which is generally, especially with the, the wonderful world of comparison of social media, you look around and everyone's having an amazing life. And everyone seems to be having the time of their lives. Everyone seems to have the good genetics and the great brain. And I remember about 12, 11, 12 years ago, I just thought, oh, my brain must be broken. Everyone else got the really, really good genes, got the great brain, and there must be something wrong with mine. And at the time I didn't realize it. Looking back, I now know that it was depression and anxiety, which sadly isn't that uncommon now. But I didn't realize that because even though there's a lot more awareness about mental health, I don't think the solutions are quite caught up. But even 12 years ago, you know as well as I do that depression, anxiety was still— no one really spoke about it. It was weird, it was very, very judged. And so I thought, okay, I'm just broken. So I thought, right, let's see if I can fix this brokenness in me and just started delving down a rabbit hole of books and personal development seminars, events like the ones that we got to meet at. And some of it was really helpful and some of it didn't really do anything. And you already know from the guide, which maybe we can speak about later, a lot of those experiences were extraordinary and powerful, like walking across fire with Tony Robbins, like climbing the mountains with Wim Hof, like even living in the Buddhist temple. And as wonderful as those experiences were, they never necessarily led to an immediate or very long-lasting change. And so I wanted to work out what's actually going on, what's actually stopping me from feeling okay. And then most importantly, that a lot of people don't talk about, being okay about being okay. Because very often if you're depressed or anxious and suddenly you're not depressed and anxious anymore, you would think that would be wonderful. It's not. It's really confusing because you're expecting to go back to that place after a matter of time. And so it was trying to work out what's actually going on. And so after I started to understand that, oh, my brain isn't actually broken, it was just wired from a particular way because of the experiences that I'd had growing up, and there's something I can do about it. Not to mention that actually I've still got the same brain that cavemen had 14,000, 100,000, 200,000 years ago, and that this brain wasn't supposed to live in this kind of society. And realizing that, oh, a little bit like if you took a chimpanzee and out of its environment, away from its tribe, and put it in an isolated room, shone blue lights in its face, stopped it from moving, stopped it from eating well, stopped it from socializing as much, making sure it got worse sleep. Do you think that chimpanzee would start to flourish? And it's like, of course not. It would start to feel broken. I realized, oh, that's what's happened with me. And so I did that, started to train in several modalities like we mentioned. I went to 4 different hypnosis schools. Trained in EMDR, did CBT training, and like I said, I had those experiences that were also wonderful, and then I, I put them on top of each other. But the really interesting part, and if you want I can explain why High Performance Therapy is different, and High Performance Therapy itself, you said I recently became a hypnotherapist, I recently became a High Performance Therapist, and it was all based on one lecture that I heard from a guy called Dr. Richard Bandler who I trained with in, in 2015. He came up with Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and it wasn't actually NLP that changed the game for me. It was this realization. He was speaking about a chiropractor called Moshe, and you might know most chiropractors, you go to see them and they will jam your spine back into place. People get off the table and they go, oh, I've been clicked all over and now I feel like I can breathe differently. I feel like I'm walking differently. I feel like I'm standing differently. And they'll go on their way. And then what happens? A week, a month goes by, they need to go back to the chiropractor. What this guy was doing, Moshe, is he would take them more out of alignment so they'd get up off the chair and they weren't suddenly corrected. They'd be walking almost in circles because they were so uneven. Then slowly their body would start to correct itself and they would walk and they wouldn't need to come back to him. I thought, "Huh, that's really interesting. What if the body and what if the mind knows how to correct itself and actually it doesn't need a therapist like me to be a chiropractor to jam things back into place? What if it just needs permission to go back to its state? Because I wasn't born with the feeling or the thought that I might be broken. Most people who are listening to this who have limiting beliefs, they weren't born with that, they were taught it. And so what if this is just a matter of unlearning those things? What if it's a matter of just taking someone back to their original baseline? And that's what the difference is. As opposed to most hypnosis trying to correct someone's limiting beliefs, we actually take your brain back to the ideal state that it was born in, if that makes sense. I'm more than happy to unpack that.

Yeah, it does, because I was going to ask, like, you know, with EMDR and NLP, like, a lot of, like, hypnotherapists and stuff, and just psychotherapists even, would say, oh, trained in EMDR, trained in NLP, and I don't use it anymore. And I know you said that in a recent podcast episode because I listened to it, and you were like, oh, I don't really use NLP anymore. So how can we utilize things that we learn like that to change our emotional state, like EMDR and hypnotherapist, how can that all change our emotional state? You mentioned there about limiting beliefs. So how can we erase those and start fresh?

Okay, so there's a few different ways to go about it. I can explain that really there's only 4 ways to really change the brain. Okay. The first one is repetition. So people say repetition is the mother of all skill. They say that for a reason. It's true. If you do something long enough over and over again, eventually, because the brain is always constantly changing, it's always trying to figure out how do I just get through another day safely? It's constantly using the outside world as feedback. So if you start to do something very consistently, eventually the old neural pathways that you were using that might have been involved in a negative thought or a negative habit, because you're not using the energy towards that, it'll literally start to wither away and it will transform and mold itself into the new way of being. The downside with that is that depending on the belief, depending on the habit that you want to change, some people say, oh, well, it takes 21 days to change a habit. And then some more research came out and said, well, actually it's 66 days. None of those are true. Depending on the habit that you want to change is going to be depending on how easy it is. If you're going to the gym 3 days a week and you want to go 4, it's not going to take that long for someone to do that versus if they've never trained and they suddenly want to start going 4 days a week. There's a lot more energy that needs to be put into those neural pathways. So the downside to that is that it might take such a long time of someone having to do that habit over and over again and it feels alien to them that they might not do it for long enough to the point that they'll stick with it and allow the change to happen. They might go 30 days when actually they needed 90 days to change the habit. So that's method one. So that's one way that people can start to change things. The second way which you talk about is, and what we're really having this conversation about, is altered states. So meditation, ecstatic dance, EMDR, hypnosis, plant medicines, you name it. Anything that takes your brain into an altered state that allows you to rewrite some of these limiting beliefs. And I can explain how shortly. I know that's the main question you asked, but I want to make sure that people have a foundation of understanding about it. The third one that will change the brain is trauma. And we know this. People say, well, you have these results with people, it can't last. It's like trauma can last. If it's a big enough experience where your brain says, well, I thought reality was different to this, and now I have to reshift myself so that I can, I can make sense of the world, people will be in a traumatic state for a long time. And, and there can be good trauma and bad trauma. So Mike, for example, who I think you might be having on as well, his whole life changed, and he might go into this, when he went through a divorce. That sounds like a bad trauma, but every gift that he has in his life now, that every reason for why he's proud to be the man he is today, is because of that event. It was, I thought my life was going to do this, life suddenly did this, and now I have to adjust. And it took him down a lovely path. Most trauma, though, as you probably already know, it's going to be a negative experience. I went through something, life changed, and now I feel stuck. My brain feels completely changed. I don't know if I can get it back. The fourth one is quite similar to the first one, repetition. It's osmosis. So that's why I lived in the Buddhist temple. If I can hang around with other people who have those shared limiting beliefs, just through osmosis, just through being around them, eventually it's only a matter of time before a change, because we all want the respect and love of those around us. And so we'll do what we can to fit in with that. We will change our standards. So something like EMDR relies on something called bilateral stimulation. It's the idea of can you move a memory or an idea from one part of the brain to another? And this might be a really handy thing for your audience to know. If there is something, especially that's more than 18 months old, that still bothers you, you still think about it, you go, there's this emotional feeling that comes up, there's a rawness still attached to that memory. It means that your brain is going, we don't know what this means, we don't know where to put this. It's almost like someone brought a big stack of books back to the library and the librarian saying, I don't know what shelf to start with here.

Yeah.

And, and what we do through hypnosis, or, and you can do it through meditation as well, is you can finally give the brain permission to start sorting those books out. There's a real secret though that a lot of people don't speak about. Your brain is trying to do this every single night when you're sleeping. So when you, when you're going to sleep, there's a particular phase of sleep called REM sleep where your brain is literally trying to do that. The problem is, is one, if you're not getting enough sleep, or two, if the pile of books that's come back is way too much to deal with, you're not going to be able to process that. Which is why sometimes these other modalities can be helpful, because they give the the librarian another tool or a bit more time to say, right, where are we going to put these books?

It's a really good analogy, actually, because usually when I go to bed, I will put subliminals on or something like that. Because when you're in that theta mode just before you drop off to sleep, you've obviously got your subliminals going on, you've got your affirmations being played into your head. So is that going to affect us being able to put those books away on the shelf? Because otherwise occupied?

Truth is, I'm not sure. I know that when you're going through that phase of sleep, you're going through a phase of hypnosis to get to sleep all the time anyway. So when you're putting that on as you're going to sleep, you can do it any time of day, but that is absolutely when you'd get the most bang for your buck. Whether it conflicts with wanting to put your books away, I don't know. The reason for that is because REM normally happens in the second half of sleep. So the first half of sleep, your body is basically saying, hey, we're going to try and physically repair you first. Because if you wake up in the middle of the night, there's a saber-toothed tiger there, I don't need you to be emotionally well, I need you to be able to run. Yeah, I don't know. I know it's a great question, something I'd love to find the answer to though.

So what's superconscious coding? Because I know you've mentioned this before, and I tell like my followers that, you know, to enable us to manifest what we want in life, we need to be in such a good headspace, you know, in terms of mental well-being. So what is superconscious coding and how can that does coding kind of allow us to change these limiting beliefs?

Sure. So the difference between Superconscious Coding and most conventional therapies— and if someone's listening to this and they're not watching, I want them to imagine, uh, like a big iceberg. And on the surface of this iceberg, you've got the conscious mind. It's the part of the brain that we're using right now. It's— you can really only think about 7 things, plus or minus 2, when you're sort of consciously aware. And But then below that, you've got the subconscious mind, or you've got the, the source, you've got the innate intelligence within your body that is responsible for 97% of your thoughts, beliefs, and actions. What most therapy does is, let's say we take counseling or psychotherapy, it's about saying, can we try and get stuff from the subconscious up past the surface to the top bit of the iceberg so that we're consciously aware of why we're doing what we're doing? And when we talk about it, hopefully that's going to be able to change the direction to where we're going. What most conventional hypnotherapy will do is it will say, let's try and go into the subconscious and let's rewrite that program. Let's rewrite that limited belief. You've got this limited belief, let's change that. EMDR, you've got this memory, let's, let's neutralize that. There's a downside to that though, because what you're consciously aware of is so minimal compared to all the subconscious aspects. What I mean by that is someone can go to a counselor and every week a new realization will pop up, meaning that when the hypnotherapist goes in to try and change a limiting belief, how do they know that's actually the right limiting belief to deal with? When someone says, "I know why I feel this way because of this thing that happened when I was 8," how do you know that's the only memory? You're using the conscious mind in an attempt to be able to completely guide where you're going, but your conscious mind has no idea as to what's really down there. So what superconscious coding does is it says, hang on a second, there is an innate intelligence in your body, in your mind. So a newborn baby, when it starts to— when it's just a cell in the uterus, then it starts to replicate. No one knows why is it that when it's been replicated as the same cell, why is it that cell 16 up here knows later on to become part of a baby's head Why is it this cell here knows to become part of a baby's foot? The information is spread throughout all of it, so why does this one know how to be different later on? No one really knows the answer, but the idea is that there is this innate intelligence in your body that knows how to make the blueprint of Mart, that knows how to make the blueprint of Scott. That innate intelligence knows what harmony is for you. And what disharmony is for you. It knows what, um, your ease is, and it knows what dis-ease is. And so what I do, what superconscious does, because I just refer to it as the superconscious, is we speak to that part and we say, hey, Mart's currently got these limiting beliefs. He might know some of the reasons. I certainly won't know all the reasons. We might know some of the limiting beliefs, but we won't know all the limiting beliefs. Can you go find all the memories related to this? Can you go find all the beliefs, all the parts? And this might be— I'm not sure if I believe in it, but this might be memories from a past life that we didn't know. It might be a part of the personality that we didn't even know existed. It might be a memory that you have no idea of because it's lost somewhere in the subconscious. We ask that to go find it all. And when that happens, that's when you can make true transformations, because that will know what to heal much better than you consciously do, much better than I would as an outside therapist. That's what Superconscious Coding does. It's speaking to that innate intelligence to say, "Hey, you know what harmony is for Mart much better than I do. Why don't you open the doors to be able to do that to bring him back to his ideal state?" We've had this clinically tested now and it literally, you can see before and after brain scans where the brain returns to what basically the technical director of this institute said is the ideal state. It's, "Wow, I can suddenly see the world through the eyes of how things are. Actually, everything's okay. I'm no longer loaded with the baggage of the past because this thing was able to find all the right places to put these books in the, in the library for me.

I find stuff like this fascinating, you know, and I've always been like really, really interested in it way before I was interested in spirituality or manifestation or anything. So can you tell me then, Scott, like how does neuroscience kind of link with the principles of manifestation, you know, in terms of manifestation as in like You know, I'm not thinking like just sit there, wish for it, and it's going to drop out the sky, because shit like that just doesn't happen, you know what I mean? Like, but I always say to people, like, visualize it in your mind. If you can visualize it in your mind, it's possible. So that gives you a booster, and then you're obviously going to take that inspired action, because no one sat at the front of a marathon is going to imagine themselves winning unless they start moving the feet, do you know what I mean? I'd say you've always got to put in that inspired action. You've always got to meet the universe halfway, so to speak, and then you'll get to where you want to be. But I do think it's all to do with determination and focus and being motivated and getting yourself in the right mindset. So how does neuroscience link with that?

There's a few different avenues that we can go with that. First of all, if I was to put you in an MRI machine, so magnetic resonance imaging, which basically looks at which parts of the brain are lighting up right now, and I said, Mart, I want you to imagine going into the kitchen, opening up the, uh, the fridge door and just looking and counting how many shelves you have. And then if you were to actually do it, the same parts of the brain would light up. So there is a sense that when you're visualizing that stuff, the mind can't really tell the difference between fiction and reality at that point. Which is why, by the way, people have the ability to feel anxious. No one has ever felt anxious while just sitting there being present. It's impossible. The only way that anyone can ever feel worried, anxious, depressed is if there's a part of their mind that leaves the present moment, goes into a future that hasn't happened, that doesn't actually exist, play the worst-case scenario, and then their body is starting to say, "That's happening now," and the body starts to act. So what you're talking about, the neuroscience behind that is the alternative to that. It's your body being able to accept that, "Oh, this isn't too unfamiliar to us," because we've kind of been here before, because our body and our brain has gone through the same steps. It's why when someone feels anxious about going to the party and then they go to the party and they actually feel anxious at the party, it's because the brain said, "Ah, we knew this was coming." And so the idea of being able to do that on the flip side of, "No, I went to the party and I imagined what it was like just being in flow and having the best time of my life." When you go to the party, the brain has an extra permission to go, 'Oh yeah, it's okay, we've done this before.' I love like hearing all this science. So I can tell you what happened in our before and after brain scans, if you liked.

Yeah.

So I don't want to get too technical, but right now people might have heard of an ECG. So basically a device that looks at the electrical rhythms of the heart. And there is also something called an EEG or a QEEG machine, and that looks at the electrical rhythms of your brain. And so right now, as we're having this conversation, Mark, you would see that there'd be a high level of an electrical rhythm called beta.. When someone's in a really nice meditation, they see another wave that's a bit slower. That would be an alpha wave. When people are in the shower and they suddenly go, "Oh, that's what I should do," it's because they're in a high level of alpha activity. Hypnosis is when someone's in quite a deep level of what's known as theta. So it's almost like a really deep daydream at that point. And when you're asleep, you're going to get a big part of something called a delta wave. So when I'm working with someone, I want them to be really low alpha, theta, sort of in that really deep daydream where we get access to the subconscious. What we showed though, and this is something that I learned for the first time as we went through the experience, looking at sort of brain maps before and after, is not that we want to judge brainwaves. So not that we want to say that there's good alpha waves and bad alpha waves, but when someone is worrying or when someone is daydreaming about the worst-case scenario, they can still have levels of alpha. They can be in a light trance imagining the worst-case scenario.

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Okay. But when someone is thinking about something really positive and they're completely present and they're in that light trance, just being able to open up their vision and see everything for what it is, and just know that it's okay, you'll see an alpha wave, but there'll be a particular resonance to that wave that you don't get when someone's picturing something negative. No one knows why that is, but they do know that that is a distinct pattern. What we were able to do is we were able to increase that alpha resonance by 400% through this process, which you don't normally see unless you've been meditating for 20 years. Mike was one of the people that we did this on, 15 minutes. Mike will tell you himself, he can't really meditate. He doesn't like it. A lot of people who jump into meditation, it can be hell for the first 3 months. It certainly was for me because it's like, hey, do you fancy just sitting and being with all the shitstorm of your thoughts coming after you one at a time? Don't worry, it'll clear in 3 months. For a lot of people, they think, oh, that's really challenging. But this was able to take that brain state to a place of someone who's been doing this for 20 years, And that was with someone who couldn't meditate very well. So that seems to be what's happening in the brain, that the alpha resonance is just going through the roof and that's allowing you to be able to see the world without the panic. Because we're not being chased by saber-toothed tigers anymore. Actually, when you look around you in this moment, if you're able to listen to this podcast, you're safe. And so for your brain to really connect the dots and go, "Oh yeah, we're okay right now." we can give ourselves the permission to be okay, that can be really powerful.

It is kind of generational trauma, isn't it? And it's like just how we've evolved over the years. Like you say, from caveman times, like to imagine this saber-toothed tiger being like in our face when we wake up, because that's what our ancestors probably had to deal with like many years ago. But we've evolved from that now, but we've still got that generational trauma because we've carried it on. Um, can I touch back on what you said at the start about, you know, living in a Buddhist temple for 2 years drinking ayahuasca with shamans. What was all that like? What did you learn from those? Because I know in reading your book, you said that you'd felt like you'd pissed the money up the wall from doing those experiences. So I just thought, surely you learn something about yourself.

You're right. I think it was a bit unfair. And I think I did also say in the book, these were wonderful experiences. They really were wonderful. But if a year went by and I look back, would I say, oh yeah, I'm a different person? From that. The answer was sadly no, and it took a while to have to admit that, by the way. So I can talk you through both. The Buddhist temple, that started because I went traveling and I just learned to scuba dive and I ended up being completely deaf and I was stuck on this island in Thailand called Koh Phi Phi. It's near where they filmed the film The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio. I remember sitting on the beach and I was journaling a lot at the time and I was journaling on a tablet And then there was this screensaver and the screensaver had 3 sort of big pillars, big rocks in the middle of the water. And I looked up and I realized I'm sitting in the exact same place where this picture was taken. That was a screensaver. It wasn't a picture that I'd taken before. It was just like the perfect shot. And I realized, oh no, I've traveled 7,000 miles and I've brought the same miserable guy with me because I'm in a picture-perfect destination. Most people would be at home working, they'd see that screensaver and they go, "I'd love to be there." I am there and I still feel absolutely miserable. And so I realized, okay, if I really want to change, it's got nothing to do with trying to just build the life I want. It's about trying to build the internal life I want as well. And so I went back to the UK and that's where I joined a Buddhist temple. I was very upfront and I said, I'm not a Buddhist. To this day, I'm still not a Buddhist, but I'm fascinated by the philosophy. Again, going back to that fourth way of how does the brain change, osmosis, I thought if I hang around with people in a Buddhist temple, what will happen? The answer was a lot can happen. It didn't make me wealthier, it didn't make me healthier either, but it certainly allowed me to be one, more resilient, and two, it gave me an internal sense of peace. I can give you the perfect story that I suppose it gives that away, if that makes sense. Yeah. It was my 25th birthday and I was seeing my girlfriend at the time and I suddenly got a call from this Buddhist temple and they said, Scott, I'm so sorry, someone's come into your room and they've stolen everything. Someone's broken into the temple. And I thought, I know what's going on here. They want me to come back. So there's a surprise party.

Yeah.

Cheeky nuns. Cheeky monks. Let's go back. And very kind. And so I went back and I walk through the door and I say to the main nun, Maitre, I said, okay, you've got me. Where's the stripper? And quick as a flash, she said, he's in there dressed as a police officer. I went, oh, okay. So I walked in and suddenly this— it turned out that I had actually been robbed. Pretty much everything had been stolen. My laptop, some clothes, even some birthday presents that someone had left outside the door, all been taken. Thankfully, I had my wallet and my phone on me, but tablet, computer, anything else of value, all gone. The Buddhists weren't sorry for me at all. They didn't really care. What they did say was, "That's really bad karma for that guy. I hope he's okay." The reason that they did that wasn't because they were heartless or had complete lack of empathy. It was because they thought, "Why on earth would anyone let things dictate their happiness. It's just stuff. So you can own as much as you like, but why on earth would you let it own you? And so it was really interesting that I had lots of other people saying, "Are you okay? Oh, that must feel so bad. Someone went into your personal space and they took everything." And these guys just said, "Hey, thank goodness it's a problem that could just be solved with a bit of money if you work hard." And it was this wonderful realization to go, oh yeah, I have a choice. I could allow myself to suffer right now. And it's not like, oh, I'll take it on the chin, but it's actually, I might finally give myself the permission to zoom out and recognize that, oh, it was just stuff.

Yeah.

What did they really take away from me? And obviously I made the joke saying, oh, does this bad karma going to get my laptop back? Is that what that means? But that was really powerful to recognize that, oh yeah, I really can give myself permission to own anything I want., but I never need to let anything own me.

We do have quite an emotional attachment to objects as such, don't we? And like what you were saying earlier in terms of Instagram, we see everyone else living the high life and we think that that's what we've got to do to achieve happiness as well. And sometime last year I went and test drove a Range Rover because—

nice.

Do you know what it is? I was looking at them. People on my estate have them. And I was like, they seem really happy. I'm going to get a Range Rover. And don't get us wrong, I'm a really happy person. It's now sat on my drive, do you know what I mean? I actually got it, but it didn't make me any more of a happier person for it. I thought it would be like, oh my God, living the life, driving around, windows down, blasting music, arm out the window. It's not. It's just like I get in the car, I go to work, I come home, and that's it. I go and do my food shopping once a week in it. It's not like it brings me any internal happiness. I think I was just looking for validation in all the wrong places, if I'm totally honest.

And it's so trite to say this, but even when people say, that's it, I'm going to get the car, I'm going to grow my business to this, there's this weird contract that one part of your brain has set up with another part of your brain, which is when this thing happens, because it's never the car that ever gave you that feeling, even when you test drove it. It was you that finally gave yourself the permission to say, I'm going to be present and happy right now. So there's this weird contract that a lot of people set up with themselves. I've absolutely done it before. I did it with my business. I said, "When I get to over 20K per month, I'm going to be so much happier." It's like, not even close. If anything, it was quite a downer because it was just another enforcement of, "Oh no, it's only you that ever gives yourself that permission." So it's really easy to get lost in that. That, "No, I know that money doesn't make me happy," or, "I know this thing won't make me happy." But what if this thing does? What if the Range Rover is the one thing that does slip through the net that actually does make me happy? But it always goes down to the same thing of it's always your choice. It's always the permission that you're giving yourself. It's a weird game that we play with ourselves.

Yeah, I love that analogy. So what does a typical session look like with you then, Scott? Talk me through what you would deep dive into.

Because I've got a few different clinics and I teach other hypnotherapists how to do this, I realize that this is one thing that I don't know how I'm consciously doing it anymore. It's just you do it for 9 years, you do anything for 9 years, it's quite difficult to stay bad at it. I'm very good at listening to what someone has to say and then being able to find the root story, the root belief, but more importantly, something we haven't spoken about, the root identity that they have for themselves that needs to be shifted. So people talk about limiting beliefs a lot. I talk about it a lot in the book. Something that a lot of people don't talk about is identity. Which is all the stories that you say about yourself, about who you are, not what you can do, about who you are. It's not that someone has anxiety, it's that someone's an anxious person. So, yeah, I've always been an overthinker. I've always been a worrier. So that there is a statement that someone says, you know, this is who I actually am. And so what can happen is, well, let's say someone says, yeah, but I'm just poor. Or someone says, I work with a lot of people for their health and well-being, and they'll say, I've always been the big girl. That's just me. And so what happens, I'll use an analogy for weight loss because I think it's the one that will hit home the most, is let's say someone says, no, I'm at this particular weight. Let's say I am 13 stone. And what can happen is they might start to lose weight and they get down to 12 or 11 stone. And then they say, for some reason I start self-sabotaging myself and I go back to being 13 stone. Or what happens the other way is they put on lots of weight from 13 stone. They get 14 stone, 14 and a half, and they see a photo of themselves and they go, well, that's not me. I'm a 13 stone person. And they go back to that. And so very often it's because it's that root identity of this is who I am. And I think Tony Robbins says there is nothing more powerful in the human universe than trying to stay aligned to the identity that we have for ourselves. And so what I want to do is I want to shift identity of, as opposed to being an anxious person that doesn't have anxiety anymore, what if you just weren't an anxious person anymore? Or someone who says, "I'm poor." It's like, actually, what if you were someone who had the capabilities of being truly wealthy and because of that, you're someone who is already a millionaire that hasn't actually had their check given to them yet? That could shift. Or a lot of business owners, they have a real difficulty getting over the 6 or the 7-figure mark in their business. And it's like, "Oh yeah, but if I'm a millionaire, that means this about me." That's not, that's not true. So a session with me, normally the first half is being able to just listen to them, find out what's the identity that's holding them back, what's the several stories. The second half is when we do that Superconscious Coding. It's putting them into— sometimes it doesn't need to be a deep trance, it could be a light trance— and it can be getting that superconscious to just slowly take that brain back into harmony so they realize that one, they don't have to judge themselves anymore, two, they're enough, three, that they're capable, and four, if there's any other memories that need to be treated, we can we can treat those as well. And I've seen PTSD for 12 years disappear in 17 minutes with this process. Wow. It's— you get to see some wonderful things because a lot of people will know why they— why something happened, why they feel the way they do. This time, almost the day last year, I had a lady who came to see me who was sexually attacked, and she had 2 years of psychotherapy. She was journaling every day. She was considering getting chemically castrated. 15 minutes, we were able to deal with that because that superconscious realized, oh yeah, I'm not I'm not in a state of harmony, but I know how to be. And so we finally gave permission for the brain to, to return back. So it's, in short, it's what's the identity, what's the main story that's holding you back? We don't need to know why, we don't need to know all the memories because our subconscious will do that for us. I just need to know what that key story is so that we can safely take you out of that trance. Because like we said, people weren't born with that, they learned it. They were put into a trance. Most 6-year-olds, 6 to 7-year-olds, are in a perpetual state of hypnosis. So that's where they start to learn a lot of their habits, they start to learn how how the world works. They start to learn who they are in conjunction with other people. And so it's, what's the identity that you were put into a trance to receive in the past? And then let me help you take you out of that trance. That's the way they would normally look like.

Stuff like this absolutely fascinates me. And I think I told you on the night as well that hypnotherapy in particular really fascinates me. Like, I've always been one for watching Derren Brown, that kind of thing, you know. Do you watch Derren Brown?

Yeah, I went to one of his live shows and I then went the second night because I was just obsessed. I got to go on stage. It was That was awesome.

I find watching him, like, mesmerizing almost. It's almost like you're in a trance while you're watching him. But I think just some of the things that he does now— I've read his book as well, and hypnotherapy has just become so much more mainstream nowadays. You used to think about it in the olden days of someone, like, swinging a little pocket watch, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Dancing like a chicken, eating a raw onion, or like, look into my eyes.

Into my eyes. Yeah. And I mean, that was all bullshit, really, wasn't it? It was just a way of relaxing someone and getting them into a state of trance. But what kind of techniques do you use on yourself to ensure your optimal mental well-being and live in your daily life? Do you meditate, or do you kind of put yourself in hypnosis? Do you listen to your own YouTubes? What do you do?

I don't do that. And even the idea of that seems weirdly narcissistic. I know if I listen to this guy, For this sultry voice. So I do self-hypnosis on myself every single night. I used to meditate. I mean, living in the Buddhist temple, you can't live with Buddhists and not meditate daily. There'd be a lovely room where you would go there and you'd meditate. That was extraordinary. But no, I find that hypnosis is almost like meditative surgery. Meditation is more about normally just being there and just understanding all the things that are coming up and expanding your awareness. Hypnosis is normally a little bit more goal-oriented. And just quickly, Mark, going back to something you mentioned a second ago, just to debunk some myths. Hypnosis, people still feel like, oh, am I going to be hypnotized? Can I be hypnotized? And will I lose control? And that's why people come to see me. They have to be at a particular place in their life. They have to be at a threshold. And because me, there is no hypnotist, hypnotherapist that can make you do something you do not want to do.. It's a little bit like breathing. Most people go into hypnosis every night when they go to sleep and they wake up. But no, I only discovered a year ago that that superconscious coding, you can do it on yourself, which I really thought wasn't possible. So I want to do more clinical studies on that, to be honest. But I do it every night almost without fail, and that seems to have served me really well. Yeah, it's a great process. And then there's other things. I've been dubbed the Sleep Nazi. I'm very particular with making sure that I get the right sleep. And I've got all sorts of hacks and tricks that I do to be able to sleep well. Because it's the whole thing of, I know how important REM is, so I want to make sure that every night that librarian is putting the books in the right places. So I do everything I can to make sure that's optimal, which it normally is.

So tell us about your free book then, Scott, because Becoming Limitless: Unleashing High Performance, Conquering Limiting Beliefs and Supercharging Success. How did that come about? Because I read it last week. I really enjoyed it. I think it's only about 80 pages, isn't it? And I love that because I felt like I could get through it in one sitting. And most of all, it's free, like I said. And I will pop the link in the show notes for this episode for people to have a read when they can. So how did it all come about and what's it about?

Sure. So the idea is a lot of people wanted to know, okay, what are you doing and how does it work and is it possible? Because there's a lot of people listening to this, Mart, who are listening to this and they might find it interesting., but there's a part of them that's still thinking, "Yeah, but." And so I wanted to be able to put something together that was actually valuable for someone that could help them really understand, "Why aren't I where I want to be yet?" And because there's lots of different theories out there, I've looked at a lot. I've delved into a lot of rabbit holes from the scientific side, also the spiritual side with the Buddhist temple and the ayahuasca. And as I say at the beginning of the book, like we spoke about before the recording,. So many people will buy a book and they'll go through the book thinking, "There we go, I've read another book." They'll put it on the bookshelf and they won't do anything about it. What I wanted to do is I thought, "Well, I've done that with hundreds of books." Hundreds of books I've read and it became more about how can I just read as many books as possible because I'll feel smarter if I do that. I thought, "Well, most books normally have 3 great points in them, maybe only 1 that you will apply." Most people pay like £15 for that. So I thought, why don't I take the best of 450 books, 8 years of psychotherapy, and just distill it into a 40-50 minute read? Like, so that every sentence, every paragraph has something that you can hopefully take away or understand, and also debunk some of the myths. Because a lot of people will read a book, or they'll read 10, or they read 100. I remember reading 300 and still realizing, oh no, nothing's changed. Um, and people don't really know why that is.. And so the idea was, how can I get something that's really short and digestible for someone, but also explains how they can really take the handbrake off their own life? And that was the reason for it. Can I give something that will take you a tenth of the time to read, but give 10 times the amount of value and charge nothing for it?

I absolutely loved it. Like I say, I read it last week, and I just loved that you could read it all in one sitting. And I know I'm kind of that person that I buy book after book after book, and they'll sit there on my bedside table until I end up just putting them on a shelf because I'm like, I just don't have time for this. Kind of wish that there was a way that you could just extract everything like you were saying and just inject it straight into your veins. And it's kind of like what this book does. It just takes all the best bits like you were saying. So I will put the link for that in my show notes as well. How else can people find you and work with you? Because I know you've got like an extensive YouTube library, haven't you?

Yeah, so what I would say is, yeah, obviously working with me one-to-one is normally very expensive for a lot of people. So I don't have superconscious coding free out there, and just because frankly it needs to be really personalized to actually do what you want it to do. But I do have 100 free hypnosis tracks that people can look at on YouTube that's more conventional, really nice visualizations. They can take advantage of that. They just type in Scott Lester Woods into YouTube, they'll be able to find those tracks immediately. Type in Scott Lester Woods into Instagram you'll find a lot of content there as well. Scottlesterwoods.com. You can probably see the pattern here. So just my name, you'll be able to find me, and hopefully there'll be something free that you can grab and again, find as valuable as Mart did.

Amazing. I watched the Manifest Wealth one yesterday on YouTube, and I think I must have drifted off about 10 minutes in, but that might have just been me being hypnotized, and I woke up just as it was ending.

Yes.

And I took this great big yawn and I was like, oh, you know when you just feel like an energy boost? I felt so lethargic all yesterday and it just gave me such a huge energy boost. So if nothing else, it did that.

To be fair, a lot of hypnosis and also the process that we had. And again, you'll be able to— I keep talking about these brain scans. You can see them in the guide. I feel like a book is a bit generous. It's more like a guide, but it's got the value of a lot of books, is that when you're feeling quite lethargic, that delta wave that we spoke about, you're going to see a lot of that at the very front of your brain. This basically just makes that disappear. So when people wake up, they feel sort of alert and refreshed and they feel like, oh, I feel like I've had a power nap and I'm ready to go now. So it's wonderful that you got to experience that yourself.

Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really do appreciate you being here. And for anyone that is wanting to find out more information on Scott, You can see all of his details in the show notes for today's episode. If you've enjoyed this episode, please feel free to follow, rate, review, subscribe, whatever you'd like to do on whatever platform you're listening from. And I'll see you all next Friday for another episode. Thanks very much, guys. Bye!

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