Elliot Roe: Inside the Mind of A-Game Performance Hypnotherapist to the 1%

Many people have a set number that they're comfortable with and they bring themselves to that number over and over again. For some people it's $100,000, for some it's a million, for some it's $5 million, but they find themselves floating around this notional number. And if they go above it, they start making crazy investments or gambling incorrectly and they just hemorrhage the money. But also if they go below it, they find a way of getting it back. So we know that there's this like fixed point their subconscious is comfortable with that it's fighting against. I, I call that sort of the wealth thermostat. What I've seen there is it's usually linked to something from childhood where the rich people in the street, that was the number, or the most money their dad ever made is the number that they can't get past. And that's because they're scared about, at a subconscious level, of changing the power dynamic of the family. If I start making more money than my dad ever made, what does that now mean about our relationship? And these are the sorts of things that come up in the hypnotherapy. So I'd say anyone out there, if your company has hit a million dollars 8 years in a row, probably, yes, probably there's something going on in your mind that's keeping it at $1 million. Unless that's a conscious choice. You know, if you, if you believe it should be growing, it should be growing. Other situations I've seen, obviously with the gambling and the trading, is erratic behavior when they're having a down day. So effectively they're looking to turn off the feeling with a win and they're not following the process. So with gambling and trading, the vast majority of people lose, the professionals win, They win by following a process that's repeatable, that allows them to have an edge over the market. In down days, which all of them will have a decent percentage of the time, maybe 40, maybe 45% of the time they might be losing. That's when I see traders increase their clip size or place more trades than they want to place, make erratic non-process-based trades because they want to finish the day in the green so that they can turn off the feeling of failure. and a lot of people in those industries, it's all about, I want to go home and feel like I didn't waste my day, that I'm still enough. I'm a profitable trader, and they'll make negative EV decisions to try and make that feeling go away.

You know, I imagine there's a tie-in to loss aversion. We feel the pain of losing 5 times more intensely than we feel the joy of winning.

Winning. Yeah. And, and I think it's also a, their expectation is I'm a professional, I should be winning. Even if you have a rational conversation with them, you know, outside of the battle that they know they have to be losing 45% of the time, there's still a part of them on the day that, wait a minute, I'm a, I'm a winning trader, I'm a winning gambler. This shouldn't happen to me. And they try and fix it. And the fixing it is what creates the big downswings in, in both of those industries.

And what, what are some of the other self-sabotaging behaviors that you see show up routinely around money?

Around money, especially, obviously there are some spending issues. I would actually say one of the most interesting self-sabotages around spending is actually not spending enough. So there are a lot of very wealthy people who still live in scarcity, and I believe it damages the quality of life that they can have pretty substantially. And that's, you know, again, comes back to, you know, what, what would my dad say if he knew I flew first class? And I'll be like, well, you're running a $20 million company. It's not really relevant what your dad would say. If you spend an extra $200 on a first-class flight, if you manage to get sleep on that flight, how valuable is that to your team? And it's this sort of, the sort of saving pennies and costing themselves pounds in those different situations. So we have the scarcity side. And then obviously the other side of spending is the new toy will make it better and it makes it better for a week. It's one of those things where it feels good in that moment. Generally, you know, the wait for it is the most fun. If they don't let you take delivery on the day that, you know, that 2-month wait That's the exciting part of buying a luxury item. Um, but in the same way that selling the company doesn't fix the problem, the car delivery or the new sofa or whatever it is that you felt might change things also doesn't solve the problem. Another one is investing out of guilt. And we've had this discussion. One of my pet peeves is, um, when clients exit, really trying to get them to not make any investments for 6 months, especially in friends' companies out of guilt. So when you have a large exit, especially if it's public, a lot of people are going to have a lot of good ideas and they're all going to reach out to you, especially over that initial period. And a lot of the time the guys are feeling this guilt of, I've just made all this money. I want to bring my friends along for the ride. This is my opportunity to pay it back and bring them along for the ride. But I don't think I've seen anyone have any success in any of those investments over the years. So I I really recommend to clients like 6 months, tell everyone no, really dig into what you want your investments to be. If you do want to invest, have a thesis that you're going to follow and you can say yes to things that follow that thesis. But I think it is a guilt moment and a real want to bring up those who are around you so that you can keep that same community. And in most cases, it's just not available. It's not reality.

These are all, I mean, these all map to my work 100%. And you know, even your, some of the fundamental beliefs we get in childhood, like rich people are evil. If we fundamentally believe rich people are evil, we'll hit that thermostat and then we'll do anything that we can to get rid of that money.

To make sure that we are not the evil one because that's our belief.

Yeah. And as you start to help people rewire these, do you think that we can ever fully get rid of these patterns or how does that start to unfold?

In my mind, I, I like, I've got a screen in the talk I give that shows us, but we're trying to get like, there's a cube turning into a sphere and there's the different stages of that. And you never become the smooth sphere with nothing having any resistance, but we are gradually shaving down the edges of the cube further and further to try and get as smooth as we can. So I don't believe any of it's completely binary. I don't think there's an on-off switch where you used to feel this way and then tomorrow you don't feel this way. But hey, it was a 9 out of 10. It's now a 7 out of 10. It's now a 3 out of 10. It's now a 1 out of 10, but it's still there and I can still bring up that feeling. A good example of it is for anyone who's suffered with grief. The initial stages of grief are a 10 out of 10, and then over time that grief reduces and reduces in general, especially if you're working on it and processing it. But the truth is it never completely goes. There'll be a time 5 years after the parent's death or partner's death, when you get reminded and it, and you get a spike and it comes back. But we are looking for those spikes to be as infrequent as possible and the emotional level of them to be as reduced as possible. So as I say, I see it as like sharpening a blade and it can never be infinitely sharp, but we can sharpen it substantially from blunt.

And outside of money, what are some of the, the biggest reasons people engage in self-sabotage? And, and I'll start you with one. That was wildly impactful for me, uh, which is the program you call Too Smart to Try. Can you, can you dive in on that one a little bit?

Um, so Too Smart to Try, again, I've had a large, large number of clients with, with this specific issue that we've seen through their childhood. And that's at school, they were a high achiever, especially if it's early on. Um, so they find out that they can go into the tests and they can pass all of the tests because they're relatively easy. And they get a lot of attention from friends and family that they're the clever kid. So everyone points out, you are really clever. That becomes their identity. As they go through school, typically what happens is they stop studying because if they study and they fail, then they're no longer the clever kid. But if they refuse to study and they fail, they're the clever kid who chose not to study, right? And this is what we see. Usually you get caught up around university age. Where you actually have to study to be able to pass, even if you are really clever. And this is where usually you find, hey, yeah, I dropped out of college, or I didn't get the grades I should have got, but I chose not to study. And that's the story that gets told. Then in adulthood and in business, they find the same pattern running again, where they're holding themselves back. They're giving this 80% because the ego can tell them, hey, we would have been successful if we'd given 100%. So that That 20% keeps them safe, but also means they never really reach truly elite because they're holding themselves back. Um, so that's why we call it too smart to try. It's because you're risking your identity. And, and that's something that we have to work through. So we see that actually, you know, we need a growth mindset. It's okay to fail. When you fail, we get feedback and then we implement that feedback and become better and better and better. Um, but those stories, they just, you see them over and over again with you know, high-performing clients, because obviously typically high performers are intelligent and these are the sorts of roadblocks that they've built for themselves.