Thursday, August 29, 2024
(Transcribed with A.I. Some errors may appear.)
Hey, everybody. This is Scott Sandland for HypnoThoughts Live. This is a video about applying to present at Hypnothoughts Live 2025. So if you want to be a presenter next year, this is the video that explains all that. There will be other videos that explain all the feedback and all the other stuff we've been getting from all of you guys. It's been wonderful. I will talk about that later. This video is about how to be a presenter next year. So there's a few things that I want to cover. Number one, applications open on Labor Day. On Monday of this coming week, we will open them up and they close on Halloween, end of October. We've always done it about that. That two month window is when applications go in. It's because we have a ton to do. It's just how things go.
00:45
So I want to cover a few things that you guys want to know about and do this in a way that makes sure that we continue to have the best conference in the world. So the first thing I'm going to say is if you did a 20 minutes talk and it was your first time as a presenter last year, thank you. We got a bunch of great feedback about a lot of those talks. It does not guarantee that you will be a presenter with a one year, 1 hour talk this year. I know some people were confused about that, but first time presenters must do a 20 minutes talk. Thank you guys for being patient and understanding with that. We just have a lot of people.
01:17
Second thing I want to talk about is there was a miscommunication on something that people had questions about. We got this in. The feedback was we told everybody only one talk person. And then this last year, some people had two talks. Why? Let me explain. We gave everybody one talk like we said we would. We followed that rule. And then this last year, we had a two week window where a bunch of people had to drop out all at once. And it was for, you know, kids being born and people being married or people breaking bones or getting hospitalized. It was construction projects and moving kids into college. There's a whole bunch of things that happened in that two week window where a bunch of people dropped out.
01:57
And so what we did was, rather than go find new people, we just said, well, this person already has a plane ticket booked and we know they've presented on other stuff in the past. Let's just give them a second one. So those were substitutes and fill in. So that's how and why that happened. And that will happen at every conference, every year. It's just especially when you have as many presenters as we did, we had to do a little bit of that, especially when people couldn't get there because of cloud strike. So that's why that happened. Here's what's going to happen this year. Number one, we are going to do 20 minutes talks, 60 minutes talks and 120 minutes talks, just like we did last year. We might shift the ratios of them a little bit.
02:37
We're still playing with that, but we're not going to bring four hour talks back this year. We didn't miss them and I think the conference worked better without them, actually. So we're going to do 2060 and 120 is still going to be what we're up to. Second thing I want to say is the number one piece of negative feedback we got, and we got a bunch of great feedback. I'm going to talk about a lot of that later. The number one piece of negative feedback we got was too many 1 hour talks for sales pitches. And I want to be crystal clear with presenters, hypnothos live is not a place to do a commercial period. Our attendees fly from all over the world and pay their registration to come learn things that can improve their careers.
03:19
It is not a place for you to just pitch something and waste an hour of their time. And if you're saying, well, I give them a taste and if they want all of it, they can take the whole class. Don't do that here, we don't want it. If you say, well, I can't teach this whole technique in an hour, don't apply to present it, you can take that somewhere else. This is a place for real quality being transmitted, not teased, not hinted, and not a. And if you sign up for this, and if you do this and you get on my mailing list, I'll give you, no, they don't need that from you. That is not what we're doing here. We're doing something better and I'm demanding it of you. So let me be very clear.
04:04
When Stephanie and I pick our presenters, anytime there's a tough decision to be made and there are always tough decisions to be made because there's so many great topics and there's so many great presenters when we have to make tough decisions. Every single person who got negative feedback for doing a sales pitch has a mark next to their name. And if they got more than one of those marks, it's really not good for them. But anybody who has a mark next to their name for being told that their class was a commercial. If I have to make a choice, I will always choose the other person. Even if they had worse scores, even if they have worse numbers, even if they have comments like disorganized, I will take disorganized over sales pitch every single day. Are we clear about that?
04:49
I just have no patience for anybody turning our conference into their commercial. That's such a huge downgrade for the world's largest hypnosis conference. Something that we're really trying to grow and build the profession. Do not minimize this into a sales platform for you. It pisses me off. But let's get back to the good stuff. That's enough of that. Okay, so other fun stuff we're doing, there's not gonna be any pre or post application this year. Pre and post conference is totally going to happen, but we're really excited about how we're going to change it. You guys know we like to experiment with things. Every year I'm going to do a lot of experimenting with pre and post. Number one, we're going to cut the number of pre and post conference talks in half. There's going to be way fewer of them.
05:36
They're going to be really high quality, and we're going to pack these rooms. I'm going to be working with these people very hands on, and be experimenting with them as we do every year, to try to make the conference better and better all the time. And that means we are only going to pick people that have done pre and post in the past and that I can work with. So that means that they have to have good content, they have to be established, and they have to be a good listener. That's it. And people that we've said like, hey, do this, do this, and they just don't. And then they complain we're not going to bring them back.
06:11
This year for pre and post conference, I'm going to be working with people that I know, that I need to know, I can count on to deliver. And so it's going to be invite only this year. We've never done anything like that. It's very unusual. But with the amount of change that I want to bring to make sure the pre and post conference is insanely valuable for you means that we need to do stuff a little bit different. And this year, invite only for pre and post conference to really make that live up to its potential, which is awesome. So, like I said, 20 minutes, 60 minutes and 120 minutes. And by the way, if you did a 20 minutes talk last year, that doesn't mean, you are guaranteed to get a 1 hour talk this year because, I mean, just math.
06:54
Like, we just can't do that. And that's okay. Now I just want to be clear on that you have to do a 20 minutes talk the first time you present a hypnoths live. That doesn't mean you get a 60 minutes talk that the second time you presented hypnothots live. It might, it might not. We'll figure all that out, but we're still going to be doing a bunch of great 20 minutes talks. The standard people ask, so wonderful, well intentioned, enthusiastic, excited people. Multiple came up to me at the conference and said, I just got certified a couple months ago. This is my first conference, my first hypnothoughts live, and I can't wait to come back next year as a presenter. Pump the brakes. Hold the phone. Also, people are like, hey, I'm just starting to get into this.
07:39
Do you think it'd be an interesting talk next year? Kind of irrelevant when you understand the standard. Here's the way I think of the standard for presenting. You should be doing it for two years or have had 100 people pay you professionally for this thing before you start teaching it, before you start presenting it. I want you to teach from a place of experience, not a place of interest. Your curiosities and interests are fantastic. Build them up and then teach about it. We got feedback that there were a handful of people who were teaching about something just because it's a passion of theirs, which is a great start, but they didn't have the experience and the background to really be able to answer good questions. And we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard than that.
08:27
And so this is not something I can enforce or police, but this is something for you. If you applied to presented something at hypnoths live, the rule of thumb that you should be thinking about is, do I know this? Like, I know something that I've done professionally for two years. This technique, this process, this approach, this philosophy, this whatever, is this something that I've been playing with for about two years or had 100 people pay me to do it? That means you've really done it. That means you've really lived with it and you can talk about it from a place of experience. Imagine if I was going to do like the new iPhone review and I pulled the iPhone out of cellophane and then before I turned it on, gave you my full review.
09:11
You'd be like, oh, that guy doesn't know anything about the phone. He hasn't even turned it on yet. We need to make sure that our presentations don't start looking like that. I think that's fair. So we're really excited about hypnothoughts live. The talks were great. I know I'm kind of pushing rules right now, but we had a bunch of really great content. We also had a bunch of first timers that crushed. So I just want to say that if you were a first timer, we got a bunch of really great feedback from you guys. And we're going to keep that on ramp for first time presenters because people liked it so much. So that was really cool. And yeah, we're excited to have another year. Oh, also we're probably going to reduce. Well, we are.
09:58
We are going to reduce the number of co presenting. Some of the co presenting was really clean and really good and some of the co presenting got a little sloppy and so we really want to have one person in the front of the room. There can be exceptions to that, but you got to really deserve it. It can't just be, oh, they're my friend and I want to present with them. No, no, they're my friend so I can sit next to them in someone else's classes. Great. But don't sit at the front of the room with them. Sit in the back of the room with them. Cool, cool. So to review speaker applications will go up Monday there for 2060 and 120 minutes talks no, 4 hours. There will be no pre or post conference applications this year. We will be handling that later.
10:43
No sales pitches. Man, if you sales pitch in your talk at HT Live 2025, I'm going to shake you. I'm just going, just know we're going to be really aggressive about that and teach what you're ready to teach, what you know, what you've been doing in the field, what you've been doing with real people. That's what we want and we're excited about it. You'll be able to get more than 1 hour talk this year. There's going to be a lot of other changes to hypnothoughts live. You guys know that we're always looking to make it better and better. I will be making videos and one of the changes I'm going to be making this year is we're going to be setting updates so you don't have to watch all these videos.
11:26
Of course you're welcome to, but there will be easier bullet point things for people to read who aren't video inclined or just don't have eight minutes to spend with me, you know, twice a week. So applications are open on Monday@htlive.net. Dot make sure you tell everybody. And we're going to keep going bigger and better and bigger and better, like we've been doing for the last twelve years. We're just going to keep up the pace. So thank you to all of you who keep making hypnothots live. Great. Thank you in advance to people who are going to apply to be presenters, and thank you for your patience through the selection process. As always, I will be as transparent about that as possible. If you have any questions, post them below this comment and we'll see you soon. Bye.
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