Podcast #89: An Interview with Steve Roehm

Welcome to Episode 89 of Brain Software with Mike Mandel and Chris Thompson! There’s a storm raging worldwide. It’s sweeping away poor technique and helping people live a more awesome life!

This podcast is a great interview with our friend, Steve Roehm, a hypnosis trainer we describe as “intensely laid back”.

His story is fascinating. He talks about hiring a “Redneck from Kentucky” to help him quit smoking and then becoming fascinated with how hypnosis works. He’s helped over 4,000 people quit smoking and drops all kinds of awesome knowledge on us in this episode.

Check out the show notes below while you’re listening. Keep sending us topic suggestions and show feedback. We love hearing from all of you!

Here are the show notes for this episode:

  • Steve approves of our description of him “intensely laid back”, which is good.  Rapport begins.
  • Hypnosis found Steve about 18 years ago when he was living in Kentucky and had a baby on the way. He talks about how poorly he was taking care of himself and used hypnosis to quit smoking.
  • Steve was convinced, beforehand, that hypnosis was a bunch of BS.  But it worked, and he got very curious about how the heck to do it himself.
  • Was he at threshold before quitting smoking? Yes. Steve reveals what else might have helped him stop that same day.
  • Steve has helped about 4,000 people quit smoking so Chris points out that he obviously hasn’t been charging enough or else he’d be a multi-millionaire.
  • How one book appeared in front of Steve just as he’d become curious, and how that cascaded into much more learning.
  • Steve used the saturation method of learning hypnosis by watching VHS cassettes over and over. But at this point he’d never even done hypnosis on a real person before.
  • How NOT to begin a hypnosis session for the very first time … but it worked anyway.
  • Game on! Steve becomes a hypnosis machine. “If you were going to slow down long enough to sit down in front of me, I was going to put you in trance.”
  • The only way to learn anything is to screw up a lot. Practice so you can learn to recognize the nuances.
  • Give yourself permission to fail spectacularly and regularly!
  • Fast forward to 2005 and Steve came across Igor Ledochowski’s work. He really loved the conversational approach to hypnosis.
  • Consider how much you can learn today using only YouTube! Today’s learning opportunities to get started in hypnosis are incredible. There is no excuse. If you want to get good at this stuff you can.
  • Chris mentions the “so what” reframe he picked up from a book written by the awesome Melissa Tiers.
  • Mike recounts a horrible stage hypnosis scenario where his suggestibility test utterly failed. If he’d let that get to him he’d never have become a successful stage hypnotist.
  • Steve is not a fan of using scripts either.  They’d be good training wheels or study guides, but not for reading AT people.
  • The moment Steve charged someone money for a session he realized this could be a legitimate business.
  • What ONE state has driven his career? He reveals this at 17:40
  • Hear him explain why he does a 1 hour pre-talk during his hypnosis sessions.
  • Chris makes a horrendous error and is nearly fired by Mike (again)
  • Steve doesn’t do free consultation!  He hates the idea of having to “drag along” the client.  He wants people who are serious about change.
  • Be very serious about your time and look for clients who are serious about their time.
  • Chris asks Steve to explain how he knows someone is serious about making changes
  • How to get fired “on the spot” as a client? Steve explains some of the really bad reasons for wanting to change.
  • In his experience, people who “have to” quit smoking for their health (surgery, cancer treatment, etc) are not good candidates. His reasons make perfect sense.
  • During his presentation at HTLive 2017, Steve did an awesome class about people-helpers (therapists, hypnotists, coaches, etc) who don’t do a good job of taking care of themselves.
  • We should be congruent models of what we teach our clients!
  • How do you deal with people who keep postponing change? Steve says “Get off your ass”.  When someone isn’t taking action it means they don’t care enough. Steve pushes people to be honest about what they really want and how badly they want it.
  • How can you start self hypnosis, exercise, meditation or any other daily habit? Baby steps!
  • Avoid screens first thing in the morning because people tend to get immediately reactive, which screws up their plans.
  • You can’t implement what you don’t know!
  • Steve explains why he uses a celebration journal.
  • Not every celebration has to be big. Celebrate the little things too! It might just be opening the door for a stranger or letting someone into your lane in traffic. Train yourself to recognize small successes.
  • To work with Steve visit http://SteveRoehm.com or for his hypnosis training go to http://TrainingHypnosis.com
  • Last chance to attend our UK Master Class November 6-7.  For details click here.

Empowering Question: What is your life a metaphor for … 

Ending: The Hut-Sut Song plus freestyle chanting.

Please leave a rating in iTunes, and send in your questions by email to info(at)mikemandelhypnosis.com

Important Reminders:

Registration is open for our May 2018  Architecture of Hypnosis training in Toronto. It’s filling up already, so if you’re serious about attending get on board quickly. Click here for details!

Our first UK training is also coming up in November! It’s a hypnosis Master Class, so come on out! You get full certification in MINDSCAPING too…Go to the this page for details!