The Most Important Book About Success You Probably Havent Read – Forbes

LAS VEGAS, NV - DECEMBER 15: (L-R) Kimberly Friedmutter, Friedmutter Group Founder and CEO Brad ... [+] Friedmutter and Related Companies Development Manager Ron Wackrow speak during the opening celebration for The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas December 15, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images for TCOLV)

The biggest readers of self-help and business books often get the worst results.

Heres why: Human beings are notoriously bad at willing themselves into making lasting changes.

People typically buy these kinds of books to learn a formula for getting everything they want out of life. What they miss is that steps, tricks, and tools are the smallest part of personal improvement. The real challenge is altering your mental state in order to become able to easily build permanent positive habits.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, author Kimberly Friedmutter does not believe you can consciously will yourself into changing your life. In fact, Friedmuttera hypnotist whose methods have been championed by celebrities like Sharon Stone, Jennifer Hudson, Martha Stewart, Mike Tyson, and Quincy Jonesholds that the reason so many well-meaning people fail in their self-improvement efforts is because they rely too much on their conscious minds.

It was precisely to provide a counterbalance to well-meaning but largely ineffective personal improvement books that Friedmutter wrote Subconscious Power: Use Your Inner Mind to Create the Life Youve Always Wanted. In its pages, she draws from the methods she has used to help her clients achieve superior performance. To help readers get what they want, she teaches them to stop focusing on trying to tame their surface-level thoughts and to instead work on unlocking the subconscious.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Friedmutter. What follows are some key excerpts from our conversation.

Michael Schein: The central claim of your book is that hypnosis is one of the most powerful ways to use the tap into the subconscious to achieve success. How can someone take advantage of hypnosis if they dont have access to a professional hypnotist?

Kimberly Friedmutter: People think of hypnosis as this mysterious, inaccessible thing, but really, its exactly the opposite. Hypnosis happens every day all day to everybody. Every time you look at your phone and get sucked in and lose track of time, you're hypnotized. The flashing colors and images and sounds of your TV are hypnotizing you. If youre at an Adele concert and you're waving your hands wildly and she hits that note and you get goosebumps along with everybody else in the arena, thats mass hypnosis. In all these examples, you are in trance. It's very easy for us to be hypnotized. Why? Nature wired us this way. If we didnt have this trance function, wed be conscious 24/7, and wed burn out. Trance is a tool that we have built into us.

With that in mind, there are a few simple ways to harness the power of trance, which is another way of saying the subconscious. Write down your top five priorities. Five things you care about most, that you always come back to. You might say, music, laughter, work, or whatever. Those are your hypnotic triggers. Theres a reason you always come back to them. You are using them to self-hypnotize. The trick then becomes using these triggers as a starting place to becoming conscious about your unconscious, so you can take agency over your own thoughts. The idea is to literally re-hypnotize yourself to get reoriented toward your priorities. A big reason I wrote the book is to give people who may not have access to a professional hypnotist a step-by-step method for doing this.

Schein: Hypnosis has gone in and out of fashion with the scientific community over the years. What would you say to people who mistrust hypnosis?

Friedmutter: Its funnythe same people who say they dont believe in hypnosis are the ones who run immediately to the store when a commercial tells them about a limited time offer or a Black Friday sale. Every advertiser uses hypnosis. They use your subconscious to get you to take action. The question is, are you going to let people use your subconscious for their own ends or are you going to take control of it and use it for your ends?

Schein: Your book focuses a lot on how to self-hypnotize to have a more fulfilling and successful life. At the same time, Im sure a lot of readers of this articleespecially those involved in sales and marketingare curious about how you can use some of these techniques to influence others. Is that possible, and if so, how?

Friedmutter: The short answer is yes. But its not about black cloaks and swinging amulets and turning people into zombies. Its more subtle and nuanced than that. For instance, we're primally wired to follow a leader because throughout time our survival depended on having someone who was competent and powerful enough to guide us to safety. On the negative side of how this plays out today, you can look at cults. On the classical side of it, you can look at government. Even on the family side, theres often a parental figure who fulfills this role. Creating the perception of leadership is a hypnotic technique. We follow those that we are in rapport with. We follow those we aspire to be like.

Rapport is the foundation of everything I do. And to get there I use all the tricks. For example, if Im working with a man who is used to seeing women in dresses and skirts, I'm in dresses and skirts. If it's a woman who is a business woman in pantsuit, I'm in the pantsuit. Thats one small example, but it just shows how important details are in rapport building.

Schein: Is there anything about hypnosis that might surprise people and that people can use in their own quests for success?

Friedmutter: One thing thats really interesting about a skilled hypnotist is how quickly they can start to influence a client and get them to change by using strategic confusion. Anytime you break a pattern that people are used to encountering, their subconscious gets shocked and they open up to influence. This is something anyone can do. Respond to people differently than what the norm is, differently than what theyve come to expect. Its very powerful.

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The Most Important Book About Success You Probably Havent Read - Forbes