You’re Working Way Too Hard
That’s what my mentor, NLP Master Trainer Derek Balmer, told me years ago. He was the one who brought me on as his “Hypnosis Hired Gun,” giving me the job of designing and teaching all of his hypnosis courses.
I studied NLP under Derek back in the 1990s. He had a rather irritating habit of smacking me on the side of the head to get my attention. That is, until I gently reminded him that I was a hand-to-hand combat instructor. The smacks ended immediately after that conversation, never to return.
But Derek was right. I was working too hard. Way too hard.
It’s a curious part of human nature: we have this strange tendency to complicate things that are already working just fine. Maybe it’s an unconscious attempt to feel clever, or maybe it’s just habit. Either way, it’s everywhere.
Martial artists are notorious for this. Take a basic wrist throw, for instance. It works beautifully on its own. But someone inevitably decides to dress it up. They’ll add a pressure point or two, spin in a needless pirouette, throw in a dramatic leg sweep, and end up right where they would have been with the original technique: their attacker flat on the ground with a broken radius. Mission accomplished. Overkill included.
I’ve said it for years. The mark of the novice is that he mistakes complexity for cleverness. But the true professional aims for simplicity. The minimum effective dose.
Real mastery doesn’t ask, “What else can I add to this already functional method?” It asks, “What can I remove and still get the same (or better) result?”
I see this same pattern in hypnosis students all the time. They’re so focused on achieving an outcome that they keep layering on technique after technique. They don’t realize that the client’s issue was resolved twenty minutes ago. The problem’s already gone, but the student is still hard at work.
And of course, the irony is that continuing to illustrate this with more and more examples would only demonstrate the very thing I’m cautioning against: adding unnecessary complexity to something that should stay simple.
But this habit of overcomplication is everywhere. Put a human in any situation, whether it’s a street fight or a therapy session, and they’ll almost instinctively try to “improve” what works by adding more to it. More steps, more tricks, more jargon, more fluff.
So how do we stop this? How do we avoid drowning in layers of methods and strategies we simply don’t need?
The key is to shift our mindset from addition to extraction. If what you’re doing is working well, there’s no good reason to pile more onto it. The better move is to look at the process and ask: “What can I strip away, without breaking the outcome?”
Let me give you an example.
Years ago, I was a dedicated runner. I wasn’t doing it competitively, but I had the right build for it and enjoyed the discipline. I worked my way up to running six miles, four times a week. I especially loved running outdoors in the rain, but every now and then I trained indoors on a high-end Trotter treadmill. I usually set it to a steep uphill incline to push my endurance.
The treadmill had ten levels. Level 10 was meant for elite athletes. I had plateaued at Level 6, and no matter how I trained, I just couldn’t get any fitter. That’s when I began experimenting with Matt Furey’s Combat Conditioning program, a bodyweight training system that focuses on building real-world strength, flexibility, and serious cardio capacity.
I added Combat Conditioning to my training routine, but after a while, the sessions got too long. So I dropped the treadmill for a couple of months and focused solely on the bodyweight training.
Several weeks later, during a sudden thunderstorm, I sprinted about half a mile through a lightning blasted forest to reach my car. I wasn’t even breathing hard. That surprised me. So I decided to test my fitness again on the treadmill.
To my amazement, not only could I still do Level 6, I could now comfortably run at Level 7. And mind you, this was in my early sixties.
That’s when the treadmill went out the door.
The Combat Conditioning alone was doing the job, and doing it better than ever.
A similar thing happened with my card magic. In the beginning, I tried to learn every complicated sleight of hand move under the sun. My goal was to impress both lay people and magicians. I chased cleverness through complexity.
Eventually, I pared it all down to just a few essential techniques. What I discovered is that with a handful of well-mastered principles, I could perform over a hundred powerful effects. And the result? More impact, with much less effort.
So now I’ll turn the question over to you.
Where in your life are you making things needlessly complex? It could be anywhere — from the way you write emails, to how you prepare meals, to how you organize your workspace, pack for a trip, or even train your dog.
Look closely. Simplicity isn’t laziness. It’s elegance. It frees up energy, time, and attention for the things that really matter.
Because when you strip away the unnecessary, you’re left with what actually works.
And that’s where the magic is.
- Mike Mandel
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