[Interview] Nick Cownie: Little Known NLP Techniques To Destroy Limiting Beliefs And Install Empowering Subconscious Programs

Podcast – West Loh on Leverage, Automation and Outsourcing Strategies, 100% Free!

Australia’s #1 NLP Educator, Founding CEO Success Dynamics Institute

Nick is all about accelerating performance and overcoming mental barriers through established and innovative techniques, and it shone through in this hour long blitz where I picked Nick’s brain as much as I could. Having seen successful results in thousands of his clients, Nick is able to quickly teach you how to overcome those mental roadblocks. Don’t miss this!

In this interview you will discover:

– The Three Biggest Limiting Beliefs Nick Encounters With Clients, and How To ‘Install’ new beliefs

– Essential techniques to begin renewing your paradigm and creating a compelling future

– The Little known NLP techniques Nick uses on his high paying clients to get the fastest result in the shortest time

– Specific steps to gain emotional mastery

http://nickcownie.com

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Full Transcript

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West Interviews Nick Cownie

Speakers:
West: West Loh
Nick: Nick Cownie

West: Nick Cownie is the CEO of Success Dynamics Institute. And I met Nick, I believe, on the Gold Coast actually, at a seminar. And we got talking. And nick’s doing some really good things with regard to human performance and maximizing human potential. And he runs many workshops. And I thought that we could definitely add some value from Nick’s experiences. So Nick, welcome to the call.

Nick: Thanks, West. Great to be here.

West: And I’d like to start, Nick, with why don’t you tell us a little bit about your company and what your company focuses on doing in terms of helping people with their mindset.

Nick: Absolutely. So my company’s called Success Dynamics Institute. And I started it in 2006 with my brother Andrew at the time. We’ve both done quite a lot of training in different areas. My background is as a Chinese medicine practitioner; I’m actually an acupuncturist by trade. And I ended up through some interesting circumstances getting interested in how people’s minds work and how they can learn to run their mind better to get the results that they’re after in their life, and formal studies in that area. My brother went off and did the exact same courses that I did and we thought it made only sense to team up and start a company together and take that message out to the world.

West: Interesting. The major clients that you deal with, Nick, are they people from all walks of life, all professions, all socio-economic levels in terms of your client range?

Nick: Our clients come from a few different target markets. We did quite a detailed market analysis when we first started the company to find out the kinds of people that are most interested in this kind of training instead of going ‘this is what we’ve got, who can we sell it to,’ we went about it another way after I spent some time with Andrew Grant at a seminar and he talked about setting up survey sites just to find out what your market wants. And I thought if we can do that on the internet why not just do that in the real worked. And I actually interviewed about two hundred and thirty-ish people and found that the people are interested in our training tend to fit into three quite broad categories:

Those people interested in business communication influenced sales type skills;

People who want the things that we offer just for personal development because we have quite a lot of training around wiping out limiting emotions that keep you stuck and repeat over and over again, patterns that keep coming up for people, habits that they don’t want anymore, all that kind of stuff, and really advanced goal setting procedures;

And the third group would be people who either currently are a practitioner or a therapist or coach in some capacity and they’re interested in up skilling or increasing their qualifications.

So we’ve got three clearly defined target markets. And we market specifically to each of those three and they tell it to different socio economic groups. So sometimes—depending on the program that we’re running—we’ll get people who are paying $10,000 a head, another time they’ll be paying $500-$1,000 per person. So it really depends on what we’re offering at the time.

West: Wow. That’s impressive, Nick, in the sense that you have three clearly defined target markets. I mean most businesses kind of try to catch everyone and try to cater a little bit to a lot of different markets. So I think that’s a lesson in itself for the people in the call.

But let’s talk about some specific areas that you’re an expert in. I mean, what are the biggest issues and problems that you encounter when it comes to people’s mindset and the limiting beliefs that they have on success?

Nick: That’s a really interesting question. I’d say that probably the main things—when it comes to people’s mindset—is first of all, they don’t believe that what’s possible for other people is possible for them. And that’s just not true. We’re all born with the same nervous system, two arms, two legs, two eyes and nose. The only real difference between the results that someone produces and the results that you produce is what goes on inside your head. So that’s the first area.

The second thing, I’d say, is that people allow their past to be a reason why they can’t achieve what they want in the future. So everything’s that come up until this point in your life—it may be fantastic, it may be terrible—but it doesn’t necessarily equal what you’re capable of in the future.

And those are the two main things that I’d say if people could shift those two, they’d have much greater chance of succeeding in their life.

West: That’s powerful. So Nick, I know that you approach clients on a personal level too, am I correct?

Nick: Yeah, that’s right. Yup.

West: And in these calls I like to obviously get as much information from you as possible… so if someone comes to you and wants your help, are they the first two things that you would try to address with them? I mean if I came to you as a client right now and I said, “Nick, you need to help me out. I’m stuck in these areas.” Will you sit down with me and try to address those issues?

Nick: First, what I’d do is I’d really want to get a very clear understanding of where you’re at now, exactly where you’re at now with no what I call hiding behind the mask. Because often, the first time I see someone, they actually want me to think that everything’s okay—unless they’re really at rock bottom or they’re really ready for change. So I want to know exactly where the person’s at now…

West: No sugar coating; without the fluff.

Nick: No sugar coating, that’s right. It’s really important. Because until you know where you are, you can’t accurately assess how far you’ve got to go to reach your goals. So that’s the first thing: find out where they are. Don’t spend too much time focusing on what’s actually contributed to getting them there because often that’s just a story that the person tells themselves to stay stuck.

The next thing that we’d want to know is where is it that they want to go. So what’s the outcome that this person wants for themselves and what’s holding them back? What is it that they need that they don’t have that, are there resources—people, time, money, particular skill sets—that they think they need or they’re not aware of that they need that are going to help them get where they want to go?

And a final and really important thing in that first kind of face to face contact with someone that we need to know is what are they getting out of being stuck where they are? We call that secondary gain. That’s, in any problem or any situation that someone’s not happy with, if they aren’t changing that on some level, they’re getting some kind of positive benefit for themselves by staying stuck. And if I can identify that, that’s where we’re going to get the most leverage to get them to their goals faster.

West: That’s an awesome process, Nick. How long does that initial process take usually for a client?

Nick: That takes usually between 1 and 2 hours to get all of that information. So once we’ve got all that information, we just then design a plan to actually start chipping away through all those things. And it’s usually very quick.

West: So it’s not a matter of you just asking them those questions and them just giving you the answer. Do you continue to facilitate? Do you continue to prod and poke and really massage them to give you the information that you really need? Or do find most people, when you ask them what’s their secondary gain, they just tell you?

Nick: Uh, I don’t think anyone’s ever been able to answer that straight out. It will be great if they did. It will make my life easier.

West: So how do you go about enticing that out of them?

Nick: It comes down to really skillful questioning. So there’s questioning techniques that we use that help the person access this information. Because what’s really important to realize is most of the time, they don’t consciously know what this is. They don’t know what the secondary gain is. They don’t know the reason they’re holding on to their problems. So we use questioning techniques that are going to allow them to access their unconscious part of their mind—or some people call it subconscious—and bring up that information so that it becomes apparent to them. And often, that’s a big eye opener in itself.

West: Can you give us some examples of some of the questions you might ask, Nick, because I know some out there are going to want to try and really suss out some of the stuff that’s holding them back and what gains they’re getting. So they can’t get it out on the first go, what else can they ask themselves or what kind of things can they do to really get to the core of it?

Nick: Yup. I’m more than happy to get into that.

First of all, we just take a step back. We operate on the assumption that every behavior has a positive intention either for your self or someone else. So even these potentially negative behaviors or ways of thinking—at the deepest level, way down inside—they do have a positive intention. And that’s what we try and uncover. So a lot of the time, we could ask the person ‘why do you do that,’ but then they just turn back to looking at the problem. Usually when you ask someone ‘why,’ they really get stuck in going back over their reasons and excuses and who they’re going to blame and point their finger at. So instead, we phrase the question: ‘What’s the highest positive intention of this (insert behavior here)?’ So it could be someone who’s a compulsive spender when they’re trying to save their deposit for their first home. And so: ‘What’s the highest positive intention for your self of spending that money when you tell yourself that you want to save it?’ And most of the time that we ask that one sentence, it doesn’t get deep enough because you need to ask three or four times to get past these conscious responses that they’ve—it’s the sugar coating again—they’re sugar-coated, so that it’s more acceptable to themselves. After we ask a few times ‘what’s the purpose, what does that get for you, what does that allow you to do or be or have,’ these are the kind of questions that really start to go to a more abstract level. And this is where the answer starts to come from the person’s unconscious.

West: Now that’s awesome. And I guess over time, the answer will eventually come out. And as you were saying before, that’s why it’s a lengthy process.

Nick: Yeah, that’s right. I mean just one of these points—like the secondary gain and the questions we’re talking about here—you can spend probably half an hour on that to really reach the point where the answer is going to shift it for the person. And if you stop—perhaps after twenty minutes—it’s still going to have an effect but you haven’t reached that leverage point that’s really going to tip the scale.

West: It sounds like it’s really crucial. And the other thing I wanted to mention is many people over time have possibly suppressed these reasons so they’re not able to immediately verbalize them when you ask them.

Nick: Definitely. That’s a big, big problem. I mean that’s one of the main reasons why people stay stuck is you’re fully aware that it’s all the unconscious programming and the suppressed emotions and experiences from their past.

West: Definitely. So Nick, once you’ve got all the information you need from them as a preliminary stage, then what kind of things do you do with them after that?

Nick: So once we’ve got the information, we turn our attention to what was it that this person said they wanted and how are we going to get them from where they are to their goals in the shortest, possible time with the minimum intervention. So we have the person asses—what do you think it’s going to be, what’s the biggest thing for you that if you were to shift that, would allow other things to begin to shift on their own. And perhaps we only need to focus on the top two or three things. And shifting these, we use techniques such as conversational hypnosis, neuro linguistics and a range of other processes. Some of them is just questioning, other times we have the person lie down and close their eyes and we use some guided processes where we talk them through specific techniques to get resolution on whatever the problem is and then turn their attention back to what they do want once we’ve wiped out those unconscious problems.

West: Wow. So you’ve got a whole gamut of tools that you can pick and choose from, depending on what you’re trying to get the client to do?

Nick: Yeah, definitely. I used to describe it as a toolbox. But now I think it’s more closely related to, say, a Bunnings Warehouse.

West: That’s pretty significant. So would it be fair to say that someone who knows or maybe have heard some of these techniques, might be able to work through some of the stuff on their own, basically if they the general fundamentals or do they really need to work with somebody—obviously the preferable option to work with someone like your self who is fully aware of how this psychological processes work—as opposed to on their own?

Nick: You’re going to get a different class of results either way. So if you work with someone like me, generally it’s faster. I’m very experienced and I train people in how to do this. So you work with me, we find out exactly what the problem is and there’s no sugar coating it from yourself. That’s the main problem with trying to do this on your own…is that, often, it’s harder to get past your own sugar coating as you’ve termed it. It’s more difficult to put that aside. It’s not impossible. Many people do it. Now, I do that with myself all the time. I very rarely actually see someone else to work on my stuff if and when it comes up.

But my preferred option would be see someone for a short, sharp burst when you need it. And get the problems sorted out. And then move on to the next thing. You can learn these techniques and use them on your own. But I see that more as a follow up support for your self.

West: Okay. Very interesting. That’s actually a really good alternative and a good solution for people who are looking to gain that balance. Because obviously, a lot of our listeners on the call are people who desire to improve themselves and are always learning and are always consuming information. I think, to be able to get that good balance of information that you take in and from an expert such as your self, is always the best way to go.

Similarly, I used to personally train people. And it’s good to do it on your own but you’re going to get much better results in a lot quicker time when you’re working with a professional.

Nick: I think of it like pushing a car up a hill, you know. If there’s one person pushing the car, you might get there. If there are two people, you’re going to get there twice as fast.

West: Definitely. Great analogy. With regards to some of the modeling you were mentioning before… I’m a big fan myself of finding people who are doing what you want to do and essentially copying them, is that how you use the term modeling or…?

Nick: That’s pretty accurate, yeah. The way we use modeling is it goes a step beyond just copying people. So you can look at someone, copy what they do, check out their strategies and their approach. What I do goes a step further in terms of if you find someone who’s really producing excellent results in any area—the area that you want to really excel in—the thing that I mentioned before that separates them and their ability to produce those results and us and perhaps not getting there yet is only what’s going on in their minds. So we go straight to creating a model of what they’re doing in their own conscious mind. And we do that through various means: we examine their beliefs, their values, a range of what we call metaprograms which are the unconscious programs sitting above the ordinary programs that we normally think of, and other things like how they actually use their body physically. We put all of that together in quite a specific format that is actually designed by my brother and myself and then we’ve got a reproducible model that we can directly and hypnotically install into someone else’s subconscious mind to allow them to produce the same class of results in a fraction of the time it took the expert to do it originally.

West: Wow. So you essentially bottled the essence of all these successful people and created a model where you can essentially transfer it to someone so they can soak up the best bits.

Nick: Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly it. We’ve got the process.

West: So when you talk about modeling and someone comes to you and asks about, “How can I be successful? How can I model what someone else who I really respect has done,” you’ll essentially just tell them about that process rather than getting them to go through all the hard yards themselves and getting them to study it all themselves and try and copy things bit by bit.

Nick: Yeah, that’s spot on. There’s only really two ways to learn. And one is you learn by trial and error. Or the other way is you learn by other people’s experience. And this takes the other people’s experience school of learning and just accelerates the process.

West: I’m interested to hear more about how you actually go about installing that into someone’s—is it subconscious that you install it into?

Nick: Yeah, that’s right. We go straight into the subconscious mind. There are quite a few techniques that we use.

First of all, we can do that through conversational hypnosis. So we’ll guide the person into a trance, and through suggestion, help them shift their beliefs. We have a range of processes where we can teach the person—this is often more useful because this is something they can do afterwards when and they don’t need it, I hope—we teach the person how to identify their own beliefs and values and programming; and through particular processes, how to take their belief out and install the new belief, which perhaps come from the person they’ve modeled. It’s very similar to reordering your files in a filing cabinet, you know. If you’ve got a drawer that says ‘Great with money beliefs’ and another drawer that says ‘Terrible with money beliefs,’ you take the belief out of Richard Branson’s ‘great with money beliefs’ and put that into yours and take your beliefs from the ‘terrible with money’ drawer and stick those in the bin because their probably not doing you too much benefit.

West: Wouldn’t it be easier to take the money out of Richard Branson’s account and put it into yours? I’m kidding. Carry on.

Nick: [Laughs] If you find out how to do that, let me know.

West: Carry on. That’s really interesting, Nick.

Nick: So once we’ve told the person how to elicit their own values and beliefs in their unconscious programming—it’s really a matter of learning the really simple processes that teach you how to shift those things. And we also have processes where we look at the—we call it a strategy; it’s the order or the sequence of thoughts that someone goes through to produce a specific result. And often, we can tell exactly what that is by the words they use when they describe the process and where their eyes move, because your eyes move to different areas. For example, if you look up into your right, you tend to be accessing visually constructed images. Or, in other words, you’re making up pictures in your mind; whereas if your eyes move up into your left, with most people, then you are remembering visual images, so accessing visual memories.

So depending on the order and sequence that people do these things, we can find out what that sequence is—we call that a strategy—and then install that into someone else’s mind with a really simple process as well. When they’re faced with a similar situation, they’re going to go through the same thought process as a successful person.

West: That’s powerful. So you’re basically taking a lot of their nuances and little things that are not necessarily openly and widely noticeable, but you guys notice them because you’re so finely tuned into how the body and the mind works, then you can use that to their advantage in helping them.

Nick: Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly correct.

West: That’s good for me, to just summarize some of what you’re saying, Nick, even for my own comprehension just to make sure. Because obviously, a lot of what you’re saying is really good stuff and can be quite deep at times. It’s good that you’re able to do this as a service to someone rather than letting them do it on their own.

I’d like to talk about emotional mastery and how control of your emotions really dictates your quality of life. So in your experience of emotional mastery, Nick, what are kind of the major reasons that people come to you? Do they come to you to master their emotions to get out of certain states or to control certain states? Where do you fit in, in that spectrum?

Nick: That’s a great question, West. Where I fit in is… first, I don’t know about the idea of controlling emotions. I think that most people try to control their emotions and it’s really a losing battle. When they come to me and they say that they want things like control, in very subtle ways we guide them to realize that control is actually an illusion and they’re better off—I think it was Stephen Covey who said there’s only three constants in life. And that’s: change, choice and principles—so we like to get the person to the point where they realize change is inevitable, they can’t actually control anything, but they do have a choice as to how they respond. And we get them responding rather than reacting. Because when you’re in an emotional reaction, I consider that as no different than a little child’s toy where you press the button to turn it on and press the button to turn it off. So when they’re in that way of being, really, other people are just pressing their buttons and saying, okay, here’s the angry button. You press the button, the person falls off the handle. It’s not a very useful way of being. So we find those buttons, and if you like, snip the cords so that when the button’s pressed, they don’t go into that predictable response. They have a choice as to how they’re going to respond instead of being just a stimulus response robot.

West: Wow. It’s a great analogy. So essentially, you allow people to not necessarily choose their reaction, choose their emotion to a certain stimulus, but you allow people to not react to a certain stimulus.

Nick: We actually do both. See, if the emotional response is coming and it’s not their choice, chances are that it’s just been conditioned into them over a period of time or perhaps even in one really strong emotional event. And it doesn’t have to be that way. So what we do is we find out where and how that was created. And we don’t even need the actual content of that if the person can’t remember. If they can, it’s great; if they can’t, it doesn’t make a difference. We find out as much as we can about that. And through a really simple process, we disconnect the connection that was made at that time.

And we can use the same process that set up the problem for them. We can use to create the solution. Because you can get someone into a very intense, emotional state that they choose to be in such as feeling abundance or peace, calm, happiness, in the flow, anything that they can describe, as long as they can put a name to it, we can get them into that state, pump it right up and then set what we call an anchor or a trigger so that any time they want to be in that emotional state, it’s a simple matter of pressing their own buttons to go into the resourceful state that they prefer to be in.

West: That’s awesome. I was just talking to a friend today, Nick, about that very process, about anchoring. And it is very, very powerful if done correctly.

So you basically teach people how to get themselves into a peak state in whatever emotion that they would like, and then obviously help them create that anchor. It’s very difficult to do on your own, would you agree?

Nick: It’s difficult if you haven’t ever done it before. Once you’ve gone through the process once, maybe twice, for someone who’s guided you through it and shown you how it works, so you can hear all about it and experience it for yourself, it’s something that you can do any time you like and anywhere at all. When I guide clients or students through this, after we’ve shown them how to do it once, about ninety percent of them can reproduce that process for themselves any time that they like.

West: Great. One of the things I found—and you said before—that you want to ramp up the emotion. Do you ever find that people are hesitant to play full out initially?

Nick: Yeah, sometimes they are. The main time that I come across that—not so much in one on one sessions—but If I’m teaching a group of say a hundred people and we’re getting them all into that state, there’s going to be a few sharp people in the crowd who are uncomfortable or feel that they’re going to be judged or perhaps their emotional state that they want to go into is one that they’re not comfortable with in public group settings.

West: Interesting. And that’s great because I had a similar experience about where I was in a Tony Robbins seminar and there was five thousand of us trying to get into a peak state. And obviously with Tony—if any of you heard of him, he’s really an awesome advocate of what Nick’s talking about—but the audio and visuals, the music, everything in the entire stadium was geared towards up when you reach the emotions that he wanted you to get into. So it’s very powerful if done correctly.

Nick: That sounds fantastic.

West: And I can say that the anchors that I created is still far off very well to this day, some of the powerful emotions that I wanted to associate with.

Just as a continuance, Nick, how do people let their emotions sabotage their financial business and relationship success? Is that something that you deal with, with clients?

Nick: I do. Definitely. Yes. Really, it all happens in the same way. So the only time emotions are ever a problem for someone is if they repress it. As long as they’re expressing that emotion and it’s not excessive or unnatural or causing problems for them, then it’s fine to express the emotion. But we’ve been told over and over again in society that there are certain emotions that are okay to feel and there are certain emotions that re not okay to feel or express or show in public. And what happens is people push these down inside themselves and it never actually gets to get out so it finds somewhere inside you that it can get expression enough and that’s through creating some kind of physical problem or it might manifest as always being argumentative. In business, perhaps it could be fear causing someone to procrastinate and not make the necessary decisions. In terms of finance, often it comes back to fear again, people not prepared to take calculated risks in terms of investments or make the right moves when everything points at the timing being right, there’s just something inside that won’t let them take the next step. So that’s a few ways in which what you’re talking about, really affects people.

West: Yeah. And I mean there are obviously some telltale signs and symptoms that you must look for in order to tell that that’s happening to a person. And I’m sure you have a list of those. Would that be fair to say?

Nick: It’s not so much a list. It’s more how the person is interacting with other people and how they talk to people, how they use their body. So we look at their body language. We ask them questions about the emotional states that they feel most of the time, the kind of language that they use with themselves as well, their internal self talk. And obviously this comes down to whether or not people are happy to tell us this kind of stuff. I’m sure you’ve met people who use the words ‘can’t,’ ‘don’t,’ and ‘won’t’ all the time. And those are probably not the people that are going to reach the heights of success that they’d like to.

West: For sure. That’s really interesting. And I’m really curious, Nick… so someone, you find out that they have emotional repression for many years or decades or how ever long they’ve had suppressed them, do you actually facilitate them in expressing it or do you give them an outlet to open the force and not continue to hold it in?

Nick: What we tend to do—it’s a very interesting approach in that it’s quite gentle and non invasive and we don’t need to get the person to yell and scream and go and kick a punching bag or anything like that. I mean, that all works and that’s fantastic. The way that I like to work is we get the person to go back—some people call that regression; I’m not real keen on that word—we get them to go back to where it started. Because when that situation first became a problem, if you think about it every single second of our lives we’re in some emotional state—so right now, you know, you could be feeling calm and happy, other times you’re grumpy—at any point in time there are three things that are possible for us to experience. And that’s the emotional state that we’re in; the actual experience that we’re having—so what’s taking place; and what we are capable of learning at that point in time. Those are the three main things that are tied up in our experience of any particular time or thing.

If something has caused a problem for someone, let’s say the emotion became so overwhelming at the time that they were incapable of learning what they needed to learn at the time to allow them to move on so that it wouldn’t be a problem for them in the future, we’re not learning that lesson, they’ve created a pattern for themselves because your unconscious mind or subconscious locks those three things together: ‘Okay, this was the experience that created this emotional state where I was supposed to learn something and I didn’t get a chance to learn it; so I’m going to lock all of that together and then bring other experiences into my life, related and unrelated, where I can—and this is most important—where I can feel that same emotion again because the emotion is the key to learning the lesson.’

So we have the person go back. We find out what the lesson was that they needed to learn at the time, we help them release the emotion…

West: Just for a second, Nick. Can I drop really quickly? When you say ‘go back’, do you mean you get them to like close their eyes and visualize the actual event? Is that what you mean by go back?

Nick: Yeah, that’s right. We get them to close their eyes. We guide them back using our language patterns, we give them particular suggestions on where they’re going to go. We leave it quite open so they go wherever they like as long as it’s the very first time that caused that problem. And once we’ve got them there, that’s when that whole process takes place.

West: Wow. So once they go back and they’ve identified that particular event, that’s obviously a very strong foundation in you moving forward with them and getting on top of that particular emotion?

Nick: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And the thing is that most people, when we do guide them back, they may be expecting that they’re going to see something—and about 70% of people don’t actually see anything; 30% of people will see something and be able to describe the actual event to you—but most of the time, people are just very keenly aware of what the experience is, what they’re feeling at the time, sometimes they hear the sounds around them or they can even remember what was going through their head at the time. And this is even guiding people back to two years, six months old, in the womb. It’s incredible how far back people go sometimes and where these came from. And once we’ve wiped that out, you’re right—it’s completely foundational in being able to move forward. Because once we’ve unlocked that emotion, given the opportunity to learn what they need—and sometimes we even ask them to make a new decision about what that experience means to them in their life now—that is really powerful and creates the leverage to change.

West: So they make the decision at the time that it’s happening when they’re visualizing it or they make a decision now about…?

Nick: Yeah. Yup. We have them make a decision as if they were in that time right now. Because if you think about it, any belief that’s formed before it is actually solidified into a belief, you had to make a decision to accept that as true. So if you make a new decision about what that means, it’s no longer true for you and you decide that something else is now true and it changes everything.

West: Powerful. So it’s a new association, new association to that meaning which will result in different behavior.

Nick: Absolutely.

West: This is powerful stuff, Nick. I honestly think I’m going to have to listen to this call 2 3 times with the content you’ve covered today. It’s been really good. And I’m trying to logically sequence some questions and at the same time absorb the wisdom that you’re imparting on us. So I appreciate your time.

Nick: You’re welcome.

West: Nick, it’s been great today. I think that’s really been a jampacked-content call. Are there any parting words you like to say for, you know, bear in mind that people at the Money Mindset tend to want to take leaps in—they might be working jobs and they feel like they’re stuck, they’ve been banging their head against the door—is there any generic kind of advice or tips you can give those people, you know, the moms and dads who have been going at it for a while and not taken those exponential leaps like they feel like they should be?

Nick: So just to make sure I understand your question…is there any kind of ground level advice that I can give to moms and dads who are looking to change the results that they’re producing in their life?

West: Yeah. Yup.

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. First, I’d say ‘stick with your program’ because it’s going to seriously help uncover these unconscious issues that are or perhaps have been keeping them stuck. And I say that because, you know, I’ve received your program for awhile now and it’s incredible stuff. So that’s the first point, in my opinion.

And perhaps, they really want to get clear on that process of where you are at now, even sit down with a piece of paper and say, “This is exactly what’s going on in my life,” with no sugar coating. Once you’ve got that down—and this is the step people miss—they go, “What do I want?” You know, we’ve all seen The Secret and we know you’ve got to put your vision board up and visualize what you want everyday but if you just don’t believe you’re going to get there because of what’s happened in the past and get clear on where you are and what’s caused your situation, then figure out what you do want.

Be very serious with yourself about ‘what do I get out of staying where I am,’ because until you find other ways of satisfying that outcome of getting the good feelings or the good result from being stuck where you are, you won’t have the leverage to change. So I’d say those are the three keys.

West: What’s the key to—I mean, if someone’s getting something out of where they’re at, at the moment, and they’re sort of not happy with it but it’s not enough to take them over—like leverage, as you were saying—what’s the key to really pushing them over the edge?

Nick: I’d say the key to pushing them over the edge is finding something else that is going to satisfy that same—I’ll call it ‘secondary gain’ again—so it’s going to satisfy that secondary gain in a more productive way. So if the secondary gain is that they get to relax on the couch instead of spending hours doing their tax, then we need to find another way for them to be able to satisfy the good feelings they get sitting on the couch but also get the tax done.

West: Right. Interesting.

Nick: It all comes down to the feelings. We’re completely motivated by our feelings.

West: I appreciate the summary. I guess the last couple of minutes you just summarized the whole call into a couple of sentences, which is always good to wrap up on.

So Nick, I wanted to tell the listeners about what you offer. I mean, people who have resonated with what you’ve said—me, being one of them—if people want to come and learn…do people come to you to learn how to do what you do or do they come to you to actually be helped in what you offer or do you offer a combination of both? Tell us a bit about what you do.

Nick: Well, I definitely do both. I offer one on one private coaching sessions where we—this is for people who really want to break through the barriers to success that are holding them back—we do that one on one, face to face for people in the Sydney area or based in Sydney, over on the northern beaches here or over the phone or Skype for people who aren’t prepared to jump on a plane and fly down to Sydney…

West: It’s obviously not as effective but it’s the next best thing, right?

Nick: It’s still highly effective. My opinion is if you can get ninety percent of what you would get face to face without having to leave your home, it’s that good enough.

We also offer short courses. We have, at the moment, four main or key courses that we offer:
The first one is called Irresistible Influence. And this is where we help people become influential and effective communicators. So how to understand the ways that people like to receive information and package your message in the exact way that the audience or even the person that you’re talking to—if it’s one on one—prefers to receive that information so you’re never misunderstood again and it significantly raises your ability to be influential. It makes sales easy. It makes parenting easy. It makes relationships easy. It’s really powerful stuff. That’s a 3 Day program, by the way.

The second course that we offer is called Emotional Mastery. And that’s a 6 day program. We usually do that over two, three day weekends. And this is all the processes and techniques that I’ve spoken about that are actually very easy to do with your self. We have two types of processes. Ones where you need someone else to guide you through them and others that, once you’ve learned how, you don’t need someone to run you through those; you can do them on yourself. And we have all of those in Emotional Mastery. So that’s all about finding your blocks, getting rid of them, figuring out what you do want and getting that yourself.

Mastery, this is all about transforming other people’s lives. So this is where we teach people who are interested in using these techniques in either a coaching or more therapy environment. And often, the people who attend these courses either are practitioners or business coaches, managers, life coaches, executive coaches come to our programs a lot and they want to be able to help other people shift these problems and leverage the results that they’re getting. And often, many of the techniques that we teach here are a little more difficult to do with your self. That’s why we’ve created this separate program so you can learn how to guide people through these techniques. This is the course where we cover conversational hypnosis, which is how to effectively use hypnosis, hypnotic language patterns so that you can guide someone into a trance without them needing to lie down, close their eyes and go to sleep like in direct or clinical hypnosis.

And the final program that we offer at the moment is called Modeling Excellence. And I think of this as the mindset upgrade. This is where we teach the person in three days the step by step processes of identifying, replicating and installing in their own mind the success strategies, belied, values and unconscious programming, behaviors, habits of any successful person that they like. And that takes three days as well.

Once someone’s completed all four of those courses, if they choose to—now that’s not a requirement, they can do anything that they like—but if someone did decide to go through all four of those courses, they’ll also get the added bonus of an international Master Practitioner Certification in Neuro Linguistic Programming because I’m a certified NLP trainer.

West: Wow. That’s a huge gamut of success tools you have there, Nick. And I can understand why you described it as a Bunnings Warehouse of tools. Listen, I appreciate your time there, Nick. And it’s been certainly enlightening for me, listening to Nick talk about the mind and the foundations behind the mind and how it’s all come together and how it really works at the deepest level.

So Nick, thank you for your time.

Nick: Thank you, West. It’s been my absolute pleasure. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to your members and share this information.