(Transcribed with A.I. Some errors may appear.)

Hey, everybody, it's Scott. For hypnothoughts Live. We've got a lot to get to. This is this year's Community Challenge. Now, those of you who've been around for a while know what that is. Those of you who are new, we didn't do one last year because we like to change things every year. And so I decided to not do one last year. We're bringing it back and we're bringing it all the way back. This year's Community Challenge is actually a rerun of the very first Community Challenge we did, which, you know, maybe it's just sentimental, but it's maybe my favorite we've ever done. And I'm even going to share, probably in the comments below, my video from the first time we ever did this. The winner of the Community Challenge gets a free ticket to hypnothoughts Live this year.


00:36

So it's worth a couple hundred bucks. All you have to do is make a video. I'm going to explain all of it, how to enter and how to win, and give you a demonstration of my Community Challenge. But before I do that, I want to tell you all, hypnothoughts Live is always fun. You guys know that. But we also have 365, and 365 is about information you're just not going to get anywhere else. And I really, we, Stephanie and I, and we brought in Jason Lynette to help us with 365. And now we're the three partners in 365. We're bringing information like genuinely that just you're not going to get in other places. It's nuances, it's insights. And I did a class for you guys a couple months ago on AI and it was well received. You guys liked it.


01:20

And then more recently, we had Lester Fu come in because he's the most followed Hypnotist on TikTok and he did a whole thing on social media. And we're doing another one end of February. And Stephanie Skiba is the host. Stephanie, not an instructor, doesn't want to be instructor, just happens to have had a front row seat to every job in the industry for the last couple decades. And she just has insights that you aren't going to get anywhere else. And if you listen to her, you're going to get better at your career. And she can give you advice about starting a private practice, scaling into a clinic, becoming an instructor, running multiple conferences. She's done it all online, in person, whatever ceus she's done it. And so she and I are going to run it as a sort of a fireside chat.


02:12

I'm going to kind of help guide it a little bit just because I've facilitated my more stuff like that and just help get all this amazing information out of her. We're going to talk more about this next week with some other updates for 365. But if you guys have. I just want you guys to start thinking about stuff. If you could ask Stephanie anything, what would you ask her? What topics do you want to know from her perspective that's coming? So we'll start sharing that stuff next week. Okay. And the winner of the Community Challenge will be picked at Stephanie's thing, which is the end of February. So. So you've got about a month and a half to get your community Challenge video in so that you can win your ticket. Hypno thoughts live. Here's how that's going to work.


02:51

The top five videos from the Community Challenge. Top five. And that's top five based on likes and comments. Based on likes and comments and feedback. Those top five most popular, we'll put those names into a bag and shake it. The name that we pull out is the winner of a free ticket to Hypnothoughts Live. Worth a couple hundred dollars to you, minimum. It could be worth, you know, depending on when you were going to buy your ticket. Cool. They're worth like 500 now. So 500 bucks, neat. Great. Here it is, the community Challenge. It is the three ha's, and this is just a me thing. There's haha embarrassing story about yourself. Aha. Insight about what's going on around you in your life. Aneeha. Something you're looking forward to. None of them should be about your class.


03:38

None of them should be about your private practice. None of them should be about promoting yourself. Let me back up and say why the community Challenge is to help build community. Many of you know this, but a lot of you who are new don't. Hypnothoughts Live wasn't always the world's largest hypnosis conference. In fact, weren't even a conference for the first seven years or more that we existed. We were an online community and Facebook groups kind of screwed us up a little bit and got us back into echo chambers and feuding tribes. And I'm working on it. But for a long time, what Hypnothoughts did was took all the different camps and feuding tribes in the industry and brought us all into one place where we could respectfully disagree with each other and build community and help and support each other.


04:19

And it was this beautiful thing. And we had thousands and thousands of hypnotists supporting each other. And then, like I said, Facebook groups and economics kind of killed it. And we're going to fix it. But we cared about each other and we still do. And there's legacy from that. And the community challenges is part of helping us kind of pedal that bike and making sure that we do care about each other, we do know each other. And the reason for that is a few things. Number one, getting the big names to participate in this makes them one of us. Makes us all more equals, which means we can learn from each other better. And it breaks the distance that's between a big name and a new person. It brings them closer to each other. And we do this with the ha, aha and yeehaw.


05:04

So the haha, especially the HAHA is an embarrassing story about yourself that really brings you down a peg or two. It really makes you more likable. I mean, for lack of a better term, I'm thinking like a Martin Scorsese movie. One of the first things he does, he gets these big, powerful mob boss guys, you know, Robert De Niro, Ray liotta, whoever, Leonardo DiCaprio, he makes them vulnerable first. He puts them in a difficult position in the beginning, so that no matter what happens and how they get bigger and better, you still relate to them and connect with them because they're human. It's because they've humanized them. So the haha does that. It humanizes you. Then you get the aha. The aha is an insight that you have that you would like to share with the rest of our peers.


05:44

And that aha just helps you kind of like think about what you're thinking about. The yeehaw. Really? Ghost of Christmas Future, that's something you're looking forward to. And again, don't say, I'm looking forward to seeing you all at hypnothoughts live and come into my class. No, this is about really getting to know each other. So also social norming. This is another reason why we do it. You know, our industry doesn't have regulation. Really. What we have is the ability to social norm each other. But you can't create that until you have a social norm contract and a social dynamic with each other. And so helping support each other, hold each other accountable, guide each other, lead each other before each other starts with, you know, people don't care how much, you know, until they know how much you care.


06:31

And so these videos are how we can show each other that we care. So that when we talk about what we know, it has impact. Cool. Fun. Okay, so this is my example and entry into this year's Community Challenge. The Ha. The Aha and the yee haw. The 3ha challenge. My ha is a story about me and my son. He was seven years old and playing tee ball, or excuse me, not tee ball, a machine pitch. He had skipped tee ball. He didn't want to do it that year. So were just playing baseball and it was a game one morning and I just happened to be the first base coach. You know, it's a real important position in little league. You have to help knock down the balls to get thrown to the first baseman and then just totally misses them.


07:19

So, you know, just keeps the game moving. And also you tell the kid when to run and when to stop. You clap, you hit him on the helmet or you pat him on the butt and you encourage them. End of list. That was my job and I thought I could do it. Turns out it's harder than you think. A couple innings in you, everything has gone great, gone there, you know, when our team's on offense, I go stand there, I talk to a couple kids, tell them to run, tell them to stay, congratulate them, Good hit, good work, buddy. Fist bumps, cool. Right around the third or fourth inning, I'm standing there, got a kid on first base, he's done a great job.


07:53

I give him the clap, tell him to run on a ground ball, tell him to stay on a pop up, which is what happens. Our kid hits a pop up and I'm going to tell this story in the pace that happened to me because this all happened very fast. The ball gets popped up and everyone, all our kids in the dugout who are waiting watch their friend hit a pop up. All the parents on our side of the dugout, behind the dugout, watch from the bleachers as the kid hits a pop up. And all the kids on the field watch. And all the parents watch this ball go up and start coming down basically in the direction of me. And as the ball descends, I along with the rest of the crowd realize that the ball is coming directly at me.


08:36

And it's at that moment that I kind of freeze for a second and go, I should do something. And that's when I feel the body of a seven year old first baseman holding a glove and trying to get me out of the way. And I snap into reality. And get out of the way badly and too late. And do so in a way that this poor seven year old boy who I've never met in my life, who's not exactly a Golden Glove candidate, I didn't see what happened. I got out of the way and this poor boy takes a baseball to the dome. All right, he's hurt a little bit. I'm awfully embarrassed. That sucks. We've hurt this kid. And I go to try to help him. Their coach comes over and talks to him and basically like you've done enough.


09:19

Like yeah, could have been right there. Embarrassing. But then a dad from the other team who's been a friend of mine since high school and I've just known him for, you know, 20 years yells that dad's name is Scott Sandlin and he's been doing crap like this our entire life. He's a cheater. And all the crowd on both sides booed me, you know, ironically and joking and mocking me, but all the dads booed me for getting this kid hurt and obstructing the game on purpose. And I just had to sit there and take it. And then for the rest of the game I had to stand there by first base while parents made fun of me. A sentence every now and again. I wasn't the star of the show, but I just had to stand there and take it.


10:04

And anytime there was another pop up they would yell Scott, move. And stuff like that. Fun. That's my haha. My aha is actually from when were packing to move here to Seattle. Some of you guys know my wife got a new job and we moved to Seattle about six months ago and I didn't know anybody here. But we'll come back to that. We were restarting our lives and packing everything up and you know, just the normal wear and tear of life, you know, aging parents, economics, all this stuff happens to me too. And it was. And I knew I was moving to a place I had never been where I did not know a soul and just starting my life over in my mid-40s.


10:52

And it's an unusual thing, you know, just you're going to move to a place where you know nobody in 20 square miles and you're just going to start from scratch. You have no job, you have no connections, you have nothing flat footed. Just your wife, your dog, your kid and a can do attitude. All right, cool. So I'm packing stuff up and getting the house ready, you know, just packing and organizing and just that stage. And I find you Know, as I'm doing it, just stuff that I'm figuring out, I find an old set of recordings of mine, like, oh, I wonder what these recordings are? And they happen to be the recordings I made at a drug rehab center over the course of a few weeks. See, I had a staff at the Newport Clinic of Hypnotherapists that worked for me.


11:34

And then I would let them shadow me, and then I would take them to drug rehab centers and they could do groups and one ones and a bunch of drug rehab centers. And we did that for a few years. It was cool. And so in addition to shadowing me, they could listen to my staff, could listen to recordings of me doing work. So with permission from the rehab centers, I recorded me doing group sessions. And I listened to those group sessions just because I was like, what is this? And it was me giving advice about how to start your life over after you're getting out of rehab, which turned out to be really prescient. You know, it was what I needed to hear because I was getting ready to do exactly that.


12:10

But also, I really listened to multiple of these recordings, not in a row, back to back, but just over the next couple days while I was getting stuff packed, I listened to my own recordings. Not because my stuff is better than everybody else's or because I think I'm superior, but because my stuff was made by my brain with my values, my biases, my strategies, my values. And so it was really coded for me and my brain. I really was the best audience for this recording. And I was in the. Exactly. I mean, not rehab, but I was in a similar position in this temporary holding period before I started my life over is where I was. And so I listened to the recordings and they really helped me get in the right mindset for the relocation, for the move.


13:04

And I've listened to a couple of them, you know, as I was unpacking, and they really have helped me. And so my point isn't you should listen to my stuff. My aha is we should all take our own advice more. Because those recordings were the best version of me. They were iterated. Like, I had worked on those lectures a lot, and they tied into there's a bunch of stuff like they were very well stacked. I'm very proud of these recordings. So it was the best me talking to the real me. And so I'd like you to think about if the best you, the most effective clinician version of you had the person who's watching this video as a client, what would you say to that version of yourself, what would the best you say to the actual you? Maybe take your own advice.


13:55

And I did. And it's helped me. So I'm learning to take my own advice. And so that's my aha. My yeehaw. My yeehaw is connected to this. I now live on an island in a place where six months ago I had never met a soul. And I have found this cool little place with my wife and son where we get to, you know, raise the kid and the dog, make new friends and build a life and create it on purpose. And to not have any legacy garbage, but to just decide what we pack and what we unpack and what we leave in storage and what we donate. And it's not about the things. It's about the things that come with the things. So the beliefs, the habits, the patterns, I mean, who gets a blank slate with their two favorite people in their mid-40s?


14:53

Like, what an amazing gift I have. What an amazing opportunity. I'm just so grateful. So that's my yeehaw is building on purpose and creating an intentional life. So I'm also reading, like, rereading books and things like that. Like Siddhartha know something like that and Purpose driven Life, I guess, little pieces and all sorts of like the self help books and you know, like all that stuff. I've been grabbing a bunch of that stuff and I'm so looking forward to what, the next couple years and this stage where the kid's, you know, just learning what he likes and figuring stuff out. It's just such an exciting stage of life to be starting fresh in a new place. I'm from the beach and. And I live in a place with rain and snow. It's just so different.


15:43

I live in a place, I came from a place that was perfectly manicured and everything was master planned. And now I live in a place that has gravel and doesn't even have a lot of street lights. Like it's just very different. And it's such a cool, exciting thing for me and I'm here for it. So that's my yeehaw. You know, we have nature, we have bald eagles and deer and raccoons and stuff just around. It's such an exciting thing. So that's my yeehaw. And that's what I'm excited about. Ha ha. I had to stand in front of a whole bunch of people after hurting a little boy because I didn't know how to get out of the way of a pop fly. Aha. Take your own advice. Yee haw. Building a life on purpose with my favorite people in a new land. How cool.


16:27

I'm looking forward to seeing all your Community Challenge videos I've watched. I think every Community Challenge video all of you have ever put out. I bet there's one or two I've missed. But in general, I' really made the intention and you guys watch each other's videos, comment on these videos, get involved. This is what we make out of it. So let's have fun with this year's community challenge. The 3ha challenge winner gets a ticket to Hypnothoughts Live. And stick around for more information about 365 Stephanie's class. Let us know what you want in there. And there's a bunch of new upgrades coming for 365 this year, so stay tuned on that. We will see you all very soon. Thanks and happy New Year.