Hypnosis for High Performers: Training the Mind for Clarity, Confidence, and Innovation with April Norris

0:01John Lee Dumas:Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today, we'll be breaking down hypnosis for high performers, training the mind for clarity, confidence, and innovation. And to drop these value bombs, I brought April Norris into EO Fire Studios. April is a board certified hypnotherapist, master hypnosis trainer, and author of Mind Manual. Train your mind, transform your vibe. She helps leaders rewire subconscious patterns, transform anxiety into clarity, and unlock innovation using rapid change hypnosis and evidence-informed mind training tools.

0:39John Lee Dumas:And today we talk about just that, training the mind, healing and performance, thinking clearly in a noisy world, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to April and our sponsors. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, are you ready to build something special in the next 50 days?

1:19John Lee Dumas:Check out my free YouTube series, 50 Days to Something, short and strategic step-by-step videos by me, JLD. On day 50, you'll have a valuable asset. And the best part is it's completely free. Visit eofire.com slash YouTube and start day one today. April, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Beautiful. Well, hello, Fire Nation. I'm so excited to be here. It's a real honor. And I would say this about being successful. I think that just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess I would say that success is in the heart of the holder or the vision holder.

2:06And, you know, I'm careful to say what I believe about success, because I think that people go wrong when they try to force their ideas of what success looks like on other people. I think that our values, our life experiences, all that comes into play and can really direct what our experience of success is.

2:26John Lee Dumas:April, I'm excited to talk because we're talking about hypnosis for high performers, and that is Fire Nation. That is my audience. That is our listeners here today, talking about training the mind for clarity, confidence, and innovation. So let's start with training the mind because a lot of entrepreneurs, what do they focus on? Strategy and tactics. But you focus on training the mind itself. So what led you to hypnosis as a tool for understanding belief, understanding identity, and understanding subconscious patterns? Yeah, well, what led me to hypnosis was realizing that most people were trying to change their results at the surface level without addressing the subconscious patterns that were driving them.

3:08and hypnosis really stood out to me because it gives direct access to that deeper level where beliefs and identity and patterns are actually formed and that's where real change happens and my first experience with hypnosis interestingly was at a stage show at a theme park right out of high school and I was accidentally hypnotized in the audience so yeah so I started you know going along with the suggestions that the hypnotist was giving and when I came out of that state, I was just wowed. I didn't understand it. And it just planted a seed that later, you know, I eventually took my first course right out of university.

3:49I was studying psychology at the time and found an ad in the newspaper. And I was back in the nineties. I'm dating myself a little bit here, but took my first course and that class opened up a world of really unusual transformational techniques and I was totally hooked. So after that, I went to study with a mentor who was working with terminal cancer patients actually. And, you know, the intensity of that work informed my healing model and it helped me create a framework now that I used to treat all manner of mind body issues. And what I've come to understand, you know, over the last 30 years practicing is that hypnosis isn't really the point of what I'm doing.

4:35It's the, you know, hypnosis is really a state of focused awareness with heightened suggestibility, but the state itself doesn't recode or reinterpret anything. That's where the, you know, the model, the healing model comes into play. But hypnosis is a great access to the subconscious and hypnosis can also create like a super learning environment, I like to call it, where all the functions of the subconscious mind, memory, emotion, imagination, intuition, and beliefs, they all interact. And beliefs, boy, that's a whole topic. I'll just say one more thing on this. I could do an hour or two on beliefs, but being the building blocks of reality, you know, our beliefs form blueprints for our patterns, our behaviors, and ultimately our results.

5:23So if we want to change performance, we do have to work at the subconscious level of belief and identity, not just strategy.

5:30John Lee Dumas:This is incredibly powerful stuff, Fire Nation. I mean, I can tell you that, you know, I've met people and they're skeptical of hypnosis and that kind of stuff. And I will tell you, it just reminds me of a story of my first year in college, my freshman year. It was about a month in, we had a hypnosis show. And so I went to just attend. And one of the girls that I'd met, I'd become friends with, um, got up on stage and she was hypnotized. And like, I'll tell you the things that happened while she was on stage. I'm like, that is not what she would do if she wasn't hypnotized. And yeah, for the next four years to like, it stayed that way.

6:07John Lee Dumas:Like I was like, okay, that was one unique. I've never seen that. I never saw that side of her before nor afterwards. So it was like really, for me, just like, okay, there's absolutely something here. So I don't know, Fire Nation, what your experiences with hypnosis, but I've had a few now where I'm like, okay, this is legit. And I want April to talk about healing and performance because you actually say that healing is part of the creative process, which I love, but why is it so important to address the root causes of issues like anxiety and stress and what actually changes in the clarity, the decision-making, and the innovation when you do that stuff?

6:44Addressing the root is essential because you can't force a nervous system that doesn't feel safe into high performance. When humans are stressed or in pain, we naturally become a little bit more or a lot more self-focused and contracted. And we know neuroscience is showing that stress reduces creativity, narrows our thinking, slows our decision-making. So when there are unresolved patterns that are running in the background, they're just waiting for a trigger. And then those actively sabotage our performance or health or happiness. So for me, you know, to define healing, it's really about transforming pain into purpose and also moving into a space of recognizing our potential.

7:29And pain is very useful. In my practice, I use the pain that someone is feeling as a bridge that leads us back to a root cause. And again, that's a whole big conversation there. But, you know, in the case of anxiety, there is something to do with security and safety that at a very deep level needs to be addressed. And then when we do that, you know, it shifts. When we address the root, we naturally move into a more creative and playful state. and that's where innovation is born. So I see this work as a force multiplier. When you're working with beliefs, once you resolve it at the root level, you don't have to deal with that symptom management circus anymore, which can be a lot for people.

8:16And I do see some of my high performers come in trying to rely on their willpower and their conscious awareness of the problem to create the change. But willpower is a really limited mental resource. purpose and emotional alignment are much more sustainable and it's a lot of fun to use those as an energy source so we can only push through for so long before there's a part of us that demands like a reckoning with what's really going on and that's why over time symptoms tend to get louder until we deal with the root and then what happens next is subtle but it's profound when you remove that internal noise, what's left is clarity.

8:59And that's where the best ideas and decisions tend to come from.

9:02John Lee Dumas:Well, I can tell you that I think everybody would agree that we live in a noisy world. I mean, it's engineered to capture attention and shape behavior. I mean, that's what every day, everything that we do. I mean, every time we open up our email or social media, I mean, that's all it is. So how can entrepreneurs develop a high performance mindset and think clearly despite all of this noise, April? Yeah, that's a great point. There's more noise than ever, it seems. So I really believe that if we don't program ourselves, someone else will do it for us according to their own agenda. So developing a high-performance mindset starts with becoming intentional about what's shaping our thinking.

9:47You know, just like we read labels on food most of the time and we try to avoid toxic ingredients, we want to apply that same standard to our mental inputs. So we don't have to ignore what's happening in the world. We just want to be more selective about the sources of information because we do live in a world where a lot of content is designed to capture our attention, trigger emotion, and advertising experts know that whenever we're emotional, we are more suggestible. So if we're not careful our thinking gets shaped and influenced by, you know, these loud or sensational, you know, inputs. And I've personally started refusing, no matter how interesting the idea is, I'm refusing to click on those sensational headlines because I just, I'm not a fan of having my attention hijacked.

10:36And I don't know if you've heard, you probably have of, you know, a writer named Robert Cialdini.

10:41John Lee Dumas:Oh yeah. Love him. Influence. Oh, yeah. So, yes, that is something I would recommend Fire Nation, you know, reads if they're not aware about these levers of influence that affect our behavior. And once we understand those, you can see how often they're being used as a hypnotherapist is to help people influence themselves and sell themselves on more empowering perspectives, you know, that are based off of their goals and dreams instead of, you know, constantly reacting to what's around us. And I do, if it's okay for me to share, I have a little framework here. so for building a high performance mindset i would say it starts with awareness getting clear on what you want and then next identifying and this is also awareness but identifying what's in the way of that like what obstacles um what limiting beliefs are at play and then we want to question those and you know the act of questioning brings some space and uh you know many of those ideas that we have are culturally programmed and we've just accepted them as truth without examining them.

11:53And then from there, it's about setting boundaries, guarding our inputs, you know, doing the work of thinking intentionally. And then one thing people often overlook is our body giving us feedback about our thinking. So if you learn to pay attention to what your body signals are, it can reveal blind spots in your thinking. And then finally, it's about building the ability to return to balance. We're never going to stay in balance all the time. So inevitably, when we do get thrown off balance, it's really about how quickly we can, you know, return to center. And high performance isn't about, you know, losing focus.

12:37It's about, it's not about, I should say, It's not about never losing focus. It's about how quickly we can reset and get back to clarity. Because today, clarity isn't automatic. It's something we have to actively protect.

12:50John Lee Dumas:Well, Fire Nation, we will talk about resetting under pressure, rewiring the subconscious, the bigger mission, and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. If you've ever tried to secure a traditional bank loan for your business, then you know the process is slow, complicated, and it rarely moves at the speed you need. In between increasingly strict lending requirements and a growing number of obstacles, you're often stuck waiting right when you need capital now. That's why I want to tell you about Revenued. Revenued is built for small business owners who need fast, flexible access to working capital without relying on your personal credit score.

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13:53John Lee Dumas:That's revenued with a D dot com slash fire. Apply today and be ready for whatever comes next. Fire Nation, ideas are exciting, but systems will allow you to create freedom. That is where High Level comes in. High Level allows you to build and run your entire business from one platform. Website builder and hosting, funnel and landing pages, email marketing, automation and workflows, calendar booking, payments and subscriptions, even course and membership hosting. Everything works together seamlessly. Plus, award-winning 24-7 support so you are never stuck. And when you go through my link at highlevelfire.com, you unlock my full bonus stack.

14:31John Lee Dumas:a 30-day free trial of High Level with full access, a private 50-minute coaching call with me, weekly live office hours with me, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 days to something execution roadmap, and more. Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. April, we're back, and I want to talk about resetting under pressure because, I mean, entrepreneurs, they are under constant pressure. We've talked about this, but I want to dive deeper because you have one practical tool that we Fire Nation can use to reset mentally and emotionally in real time.

15:11John Lee Dumas:What is that tool? The fastest way to reset under pressure is to change our state. And we can do that really quickly. First, we want to learn how to still our mind, And just like restarting or unplugging a device can fix almost all tech issues, stilling the mind can reset our system as well. And an easy framework for that that I've just recently come up with is still mind, fill mind. So first we're going to interrupt our unwanted state. And that can be through breath work or meditation or even some folks like repetitive movement, like running. Second, we want to engage the senses. This is the fill mind part.

15:55So music, nature, aromatherapy, anything that shifts physiology. And I like to think in terms of like high vibe, high frequency inputs. And then third, we want to introduce a thought, either a mantra or a precision question. Because the subconscious mind really responds to the senses and, you know, imagery, emotion, story. You know, using these functions of the subconscious mind together, it's the fastest way to shift how we think and perform. So this is the foundation for a lot of the tools that I create for my clients. I'm, you know, constantly combining hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming and using breathwork, music, aromatherapy to create, you know, fast, subconscious-friendly tools.

16:43so that being said i've put together a hypno breathwork tool for fire nation that i'll i'll share with you you can put it in the links but something they can use to shift their state

16:53John Lee Dumas:in real time yes absolutely please do we love that and we're also all about rewiring the subconscious because if someone wants to start strengthening their mindsets not tomorrow but today can you share just a simple way to communicate more effectively with our subconscious so that goals feel both natural and achievable. I mean, that'd be pretty sweet. If I had to pick one thing, I'd say ask better questions. And the subconscious mind, it responds to questions like a heat-seeking missile. If you ask the right questions, just similarly to AI, when you're prompting AI, the more precise and contextualized your questions are, the better the answers are.

17:35And another one of your guests that I really love and was influenced by years ago Noah St. John, with his affirmations, does a really great job on this topic. You know, the idea that you can ask a question like, why am I getting better and better at this? It has what's called a presupposition in it. So the question presupposes or assumes that, you know, you're already getting better. And then your mind hunts around for evidence to support and build on that.

18:06John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about the bigger mission because I really feel like mission is such a key thing when it comes to entrepreneurs and specifically Fire Nation. And your book, Mind Manual, it dives deep into designing mental and emotional states. So what's the bigger mission behind this specific work? The bigger mission behind my work and the thread that's running through it that's becoming apparent is it's boiling down to, you know, the maximum know thyself. When people, you know, understand and know what they want and also know how powerful their mind is, they start making more intentional choices. And, you know, we move toward more positive win-win outcomes when we're thinking that way.

18:54So I believe we can create a better world by improving how we think and feel, you know, training our mind, designing our mood, because clarity and emotional stability change how we show up in the world. And, you know, we live in systems where stress and reactivity are constantly being triggered off. So part of my mission is helping people step out of that to become more clear, less reactive and more intentional with their energy and attention.

19:21John Lee Dumas:so if fire nation wanted to learn more about what you have going on wanted to check out your book mind manual give us a final takeaway from our entire conversation today give us a call to action about where we can learn more about your book mind manual and then we'll say goodbye yeah you got it well uh you can find out about all my work at mind mood vibe.com and there are lots and lots of tools on there, free tools and resources for folks to start getting into, you know, the world of mind training and mood designing. And yeah, the book is listed there. And I would say one takeaway for Fire Nation would be that learning the language of your subconscious mind is one of the most powerful edges you can develop.

20:11And it can be really fun, you know, getting curious about your mind, just like you learn about the new features on a phone or a gadget, learning how your mind works and all the tips and techniques really can help you optimize that.

20:28John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with A-N and J-L-D today, so keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type April in the search bar. The show notes page will pop up with links to everything that she has going on. April, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. And for that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, JLD. Have a wonderful week. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and April for sponsoring today's episode.

21:05John Lee Dumas:And Fire Nation, are you an entrepreneur on fire who's looking to share your amazing message with the world? If yes, we are now accepting applications for EO Fire. To learn more about becoming a guest, visit eofire.com slash guest. And I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevellfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevellfire.com.

21:41John Lee Dumas:high level fire.com fire nation. Are you ready to build something special in the next 50 days? Check out my free YouTube series, 50 days to something short and strategic step-by-step videos by me, JLD on day 50, you'll have a valuable asset. And the best part is it's completely free. Visit eofire.com slash YouTube and start day one today.

22:12Thank you.