The Mystery Man Behind My $150 Million Empire.

I Studied Him 1000+ Hours. Here Are His Best 3 Secrets to Near-Instant Results.

I was having a panic attack in a room of 57 multimillionaires.

Good thing Michael was there. I pulled Michael aside and said I need help. 7 minutes later not only was my panic attack gone, I felt better than I had in ages. See Michael had studied this mystery man, too. But for different reasons.

My motives were selfish. I studied the world’s greatest hypnotist to see…

If I could put people in a trance to buy my stuff.

What I found will shock you.

Specifically you’ll discover 3 secrets I teased out from over 1000+ hours of studying so you can skip the study and jump straight to profits. Plus, these secrets will help you better serve your customers and may even improve other areas of your life beyond business.

First though, who is the mystery man and why did it take me thousands of hours to decode his secrets? 

His name is Milton Erickson. He is not a business person. He didn’t pursue wealth or fame. He was a medical doctor who became a therapist and is credited with inventing conversational hypnosis. That’s one reason his stuff is hard to figure out how to use - because it wasn’t designed to be used in business. 

Plus Erickson was cryptic.

He didn’t make it easy to figure out what he was doing. So I had to first study him, decrypt his techniques, rebuild them to try them in business, test them in the real world, and then make adjustments. 

Most things I tried didn’t work and couldn’t work even after many attempts. Only a few techniques were left, but those techniques gave me an edge in business that helped produce millions of dollars. 

And while I can’t teach you EVERYTHING I learned from Erickson in one article, I can give you three secrets I gleaned from him that have had the most impact on my bank account and on bettering the lives of my customers. 

Secret #1: Models of reality

There is a single question I can share with you that if you get it, will completely revolutionize your ability to influence and persuade.

It has to do with how we make decisions and whether you realize it or not - there is a process to every decision you make. If I can uncover how you make decisions, I can help you make better decisions.

I want you to think about the difference between a territory and a map. The territory is exactly reality as it is. The map is just a model of that reality. and a map does the same three things we ALL do with information:

Delete, distort and generalize. 

A map may omit topographical details. It will distort scale - miles down to inches. It will generalize features for the sake of consistency at the cost of accuracy. 

And you do the same. 

With every decision you make, you have a “map” you subconsciously consult before making the decision. It is unlikely you even realize it because the speed of the mind is faster than the speed of light.

What I learned from Erickson is that if you want to help someone to change their reality, you must first understand their reality as it currently is, regardless of how much or little that reality is logical or makes sense.

Also, there is no deeper rapport you can gain than entering someone’s model of reality and rapport is everything when it comes to sales and coaching. 

How do you do it then?

Well once I had a client who was afraid of public speaking. So I asked her “how do you know when to be afraid?” No one ever asked her that before, which is a lesson in itself. Others before you have already tried the obvious techniques and if those were sufficient, the clients wouldn’t need you. You get paid real big bucks on these edge cases.

At first, she didn’t know how to respond. So I prompted her - “If you were at a table with 7 friends and an 8th pulled up a chair, is that now a public speaking situation or is it still private?”

And she mulled it over and then she told me:

“I get scared when I can no longer read the expression of every face in the audience.”

Interesting. 

My response: “Yeah, I’d be scared, too. That sounds so overwhelming!” I then suggested if there were other ways she could feel safe when speaking besides relying on reading every face in the audience. And that was it. Several months later she texted me a pic of her looking like a boss…

Speaking at a big event in front of hundreds of people. 

What do you say if you’re selling and the person responds with “I need to think it over?” My favorite close is this: “That’s great! How do you know when you’ve thought it over well enough to make the right decision?”

With coaching clients, when we’re working out their goals - “How do you know when you’ve succeeded?” Or, if I sense a lack of confidence - “how do you know how much confidence you need to move forward?  is it 32.7% or is it 44.1%?” And how will you know when you’ve reached that percent?”

The one single most powerful question you can master is the “How do you know…?” question. I learned this from Erickson because he had a compulsive nail biter come to him once, a young kid and Erickson asked him “how do you know which nail to bite first?” And he had another client, who was afraid to be in a room unless the door was wide open. So he asked her “How would you know the difference between a door wide open vs a door 1MM shut?” 

By entering into someone’s model of reality you get the deepest rapport you could ask for and you get it seconds, and once you’re in the interior of their mind, helping them redecorate it becomes infinitely easier.

Especially when you pair with the second secret:

The Power of Utilization

The best worst way to change something is with massive action. I know, controversial.

The reason I said “best worst way” is because it works just enough so that people believe it’s effective. It really isn’t. Quitting cold turkey, going to an extreme, burning the bridges, no plan b, monk mode, these are all easy concepts to understand and occasionally, rarely they work and because they are so DRAMATIC in their implementation, people over-value this approach as a strategy.

Erickson had a better, easier, more consistent and effective way to change and once I understood it, it made my sales, marketing, coaching and my personal development shoot through the roof.

Erickson had a patient who was a 15 year old thumbsucker. She sucked her thumb on the bus, at school, at home and everyone complained about it. Erickson told the girl she was wasting her opportunity to really annoy her parents because she was spreading her thumb sucking around to everyone willy nilly. 

If instead, she waited until after supper when her father liked to read the paper, she could suck her thumb loudly then. He even told her he got her dad’s permission to not say a word about it and she was to get a clock…

And suck her thumb for 20 minutes.

And at school, she should concentrate thumb sucking only on a particular boy or girl who she most disliked and only to the teacher who annoyed her most.  and the story goes that in less than a month the girl gave up the thumb sucking because it shifted from a compulsion into an obligation.  

Erickson saw every behavior any client demonstrated as being useful under the right circumstances. 

I love clients who say they have trouble procrastinating because procrastination is so useful under the right circumstances. Let’s take that amazing skill of procrastination that you have and point it at procrastinating on your excuses - you can’t get around to them later. 

Fear is sooooo useful. I just have to make you more afraid of staying the same and change is automatic. For clients who have to be right all the time, I find ways where they can prove me wrong and get a better result. 

Erickson showed me that where everyone else saw as a problem, Erickson saw usefulness. The trick is to take that behavior or belief that limits them now and make a slight change to it to make it useful.  

Which leads me to the third secret:

Breaking Patterns

Most people are great at losing weight. It’s just that they’re better at putting it back on. They yo-yo - lose then gain, lose then gain. They go from keto, to paleo, to carnivore to intermittent fasting. They change the diet but the pattern remains - lose then gain, lose then gain. 

What would Erickson do?

Well he had a client come to him once who had gone through this lose-then-gain cycle so he first made her gain 15 pounds. She hated it. She cried. She begged. Pleaded. But he wouldn’t relent. For the first time in her life she STRUGGLED TO GAIN WEIGHT. NEVER wanting to experience that pain again, she lost the weight this time once and for all.

Erickson had another patient who flexed his forearms constantly. They measured it and found it was 135 times per minute. So Erickson first increased it to 145 times per minute. Then back to 135. Then up to 150. Then down to 125. Then to a range between 50 and 5. Then 25 times scattered throughout the day. Then between five to 35 times per week. Then had the client guess when the first day would be with no uncontrolled movements.

Soon the client was lost of the compulsion and last Erickson heard he was working at a bakery kneading dough, putting those forearm muscles to good use.

Sometimes I encounter clients…

who have already determined they are going to fail

…before they start.

Instead of trying to convince them they’ll succeed, I help them find better ways to fail. I had a client once I could tell was putting too much pressure on himself to succeed. The pressure to succeed was so great he wouldn’t ever follow through because if you don’t put it out there, you cannot fail.

So I asked him how he could FAIL his way to 10k a month. I told him 50k a month was too much for him right now, that was real success and he wasn’t ready for it but he knew exactly how he could fail his way to 10k a month. 

What’s great about this is it removes the pressure so it’s MORE likely he’ll actually make the 50k. Erickson would always talk about how anybody could walk across a thin board ten inches off the ground. But if you took that board and placed it between two buildings 150 feet off the ground, all of the sudden you couldn’t do it.

The reason is the pressure. 

When I give my clients permission to fail - I put them in a double bind. If they fail, they still make more progress than before working with me. But they can also FAIL TO FAIL - like my client who made 50k when I told him he was only capable of 10k. 

I had a client once who came to see me because he had productivity issues. He always ended his day feeling like there was more he could do and that he was always giving up too soon. Now this guy was super successful but it goes to show you how warped our own sense of self worth can get. I asked him “how do you know when you’ve worked too much?” He was confused. So I suggested if he worked until 10pm would that be too much or would he still feel unproductive. He said 10pm would be too long as he starts his day at 6am. I then asked what about 8:47pm. still too much. What about 6:01? 5:47? 3:58pm. Stop he says! 3:58 pm would be too early. 3:59? too early. 4pm? too early? 4:01pm I say and as he hears me he cocks his head to side, pauses for a second and says, 4:01pm seems right. If I could just get to 4:01pm I would know I was productive for that day. Okay, how long do you work till now I ask? He says 4pm because his father says he must end his day at 4pm. ah-ha! Final question I ask - would your father know if you stole back an extra minute for yourself? He said he might even be able to get a few more than that.

Sometimes the difference between feeling good and bad is a single minute. Or even a single second.

We talked individuals, but this works for markets, too. What’s the model of reality of this market? What are their behavior patterns that limit them from making progress? What’s useful about those behavioral patterns? How can we slightly tweak those patterns to get better results? 

That’s the basis of every million dollar webinar I’ve ever created.