Unconscious Phenomenon: Why Their Decision Gets Made Before They Say No
You handled the objection perfectly. You had the answer ready before they even finished the sentence, you said it calmly, and it was true. Then they said no anyway, or worse, they hedged and said they needed to think about it, and you watched a good, logical case do absolutely nothing to a mind that had already decided.
That’s not a script problem, and it’s not a you problem either. Dave Wood built the unconscious phenomenon training inside the Mass Influence Formula around a single claim that reorganizes how you think about every conversation you’ll ever have with a prospect: the decision was never sitting in the logical part of their brain to begin with. As Dave Wood puts it in the Mass Influence Formula, “Most of the time you don’t control your decisions at all. They’re happening unconsciously all the time.” He’s just as specific about what happens next: “And then you have this logical brain that sits there and justifies and justifies and justifies and warps reality to fit what you’d already decided.” The logic shows up afterward, to explain a decision that already got made somewhere else.
As someone who’s tried to talk a prospect into a decision using nothing but better reasoning, you already know how that story usually ends. Dave’s answer isn’t a better argument. It’s learning to recognize the handful of things the unconscious mind is already doing in front of you, and aiming them somewhere useful instead of ignoring them.
Why does someone’s body decide before their mind catches up?
Dave points to something ordinary and easy to miss: the moment before somebody joins, buys, or agrees, their body usually shows it first. Palms go cold and clammy. Heart rate climbs. They’re sitting there telling themselves they’re just getting into this thing, not even aware they’ve made the decision yet, because the decision happened underneath their awareness, not inside it. Then the justifying starts. Well, it’s the right move because of this, and this, and this. You’re really good at explaining why you did something you decided to do before you ever thought about it.
That reframes the whole job. If the decision is unconscious, arguing with someone’s stated objection is arguing with the wrong layer entirely. You’re negotiating with the press release while the actual decision got made in a closed room upstairs. As Dave Wood puts it in the Mass Influence Formula, “your unconscious mind is paying attention to more than you are”. It’s running its own communication constantly through phenomena that have been studied for a couple hundred years in psychotherapy and hypnosis. Once you can name what you’re looking at, you stop guessing and start aiming.
Why does a story about your own past move someone faster than a list of your qualifications?
The first phenomenon worth knowing is age regression, the mind jumping backward in time. Tell somebody a story about a decision you once made, and their mind doesn’t stay a polite observer. It jumps to a point of relatability, usually the nearest matching decision in their own history, and when it lands there, they recreate the feelings in their body of making a decision. That’s the whole mechanism. You’re not just telling a story. You’re routing someone back to a moment when they said yes to something, so their unconscious mind rehearses saying yes again, right now, in the room with you.
That’s why Dave leans on real moments from his own life instead of hypotheticals when he’s teaching this. He tells the story of his son’s complicated birth, a moment that turned frightening fast, and the exact instant he chose to change his own state in the middle of it. As Dave Wood puts it in the Mass Influence Formula, “I reached down and I made a different decision. And I smiled, and I let the warm energy come out, and said, it’s going to be okay.” The specifics aren’t decoration. They’re what gives the listener’s mind something concrete to land on. Vague stories send people nowhere. Specific ones send them straight to their own memory of a good decision, and pull the feeling of that decision into the present conversation.
What happens when you tell someone which future to picture before they’ve pictured it themselves?
The mirror phenomenon is age progression, the mind projecting itself forward, and it happens constantly whether you’re steering it or not. Most people do it badly and automatically. Ask somebody to prospect a new contact and their mind jumps straight to rejection before they’ve dialed the number, imagining an outcome that hasn’t happened and never will unless they build it themselves in their own head first. Dave is specific about the mechanism hiding inside ordinary language. As he puts it in the Mass Influence Formula, “the word try is a presupposition of failure.” Say you’re going to try something and you’ve already told your own unconscious mind how the story ends.
He gives a plainer example from his own business. On a webinar, he aimed the whole room’s attention at recruiting leaders already running organizations, instead of the default most people default to, which is just needing anybody to join. Leaders join faster and easier, not harder, because the decision is smaller for someone who already understands the mechanics of building a team. But nobody’s mind goes there on its own. You have to put it there, on purpose, in the language you use. As Dave Wood puts it in the Mass Influence Formula, “Wherever you aim people’s minds in the future, their mind will kind of stay in that direction”. That holds true even after you stop talking about it, which is exactly why the direction matters more than the volume.
Can ten minutes of conversation undo something years of therapy couldn’t touch?
Dissociation is the third phenomenon, and Dave’s proof case comes from research done by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, back when the standard psychological position was that phobias were permanent, hard-wired into the nervous system and untreatable. Bandler and Grinder ran a newspaper ad instead of arguing with the textbooks. As Dave Wood puts it in the Mass Influence Formula, “we will give you $200 if you had a phobia in the past and now it’s gone.” Two to three hundred people responded from one city alone. Person after person described the same spontaneous shift. Mid-panic, they’d suddenly imagined themselves standing across the room, watching themselves have the reaction, and thought some version of how stupid that looked, and the fear that supposedly couldn’t be cured just stopped being there.
That’s dissociation doing the same job it does when you help a prospect step outside a fear they’ve been carrying around a decision. Have someone imagine watching themselves from outside their own body while they feel afraid, and most fears, because most fears really aren’t as severe as they feel from the inside, will simply dissolve. It’s not therapy. It’s redirecting where somebody’s attention is standing while the fear is happening.
A handful of the other phenomena Dave names show up just as often once you know to look for them:
- Amnesia, the mind quietly deleting whole categories of memory, which is why some people can only remember what went wrong and forget every time it went right.
- Positive hallucination, the mind supplying detail that isn’t actually there, the same mechanism behind a vivid daydream or a story that feels more real the longer it’s told.
- Negative hallucination, the mind deleting something that’s sitting in plain sight, the reason you can walk your own house for ten minutes looking for keys that are already in your hand.
- Time distortion, the reason five hours can feel like fifty minutes in a room that’s truly engaged, and fifty minutes can feel like five hours in one that isn’t.
How obvious can a suggestion get before someone notices you’re making one?
Sensory distortion is the highlighting or dimming of what someone’s nervous system lets through, and Dave has tested how far it stretches. On a yacht, in a group of thirty people with loud music running, he told a story, lowered his tone, and then dropped his voice to a near whisper. Everyone in the group still heard every word.
isn’t it interesting how you just didn’t even notice that the whole sound of the music disappeared?
Ten people in that group had the sound of the music snap back into their awareness the instant he named it, because they’d deleted it out of consciousness entirely without realizing it. That’s the same wiring behind post-behavioral suggestion, where genuine rapport lets you point somebody’s future attention at something specific. Dave describes building exactly that kind of suggestion at a company event. As he puts it, “When you see the color blue on Facebook, you’ll remember how much you want to succeed, and you’ll immediately close Facebook and go back to work.” It only works on something the person already wants for themselves. It won’t move anyone toward an outcome they don’t want, no matter how the suggestion is framed, but for the outcome they do want, it removes the friction standing between wanting it and acting on it.
The full lesson goes considerably further than what’s above: dream suggestion, the full mechanics of post-behavioral suggestion built on real rapport, how memory itself gets rewritten every time you access it, and how Dave ties every one of these phenomena into the language patterns and presentation structure covered in the rest of the Mass Influence Formula. The entire course, including this lesson and everything built on top of it, is available for $99 through the Mass Influence Formula course.
Get the course, pick one phenomenon from this list, and start watching for it in the next conversation you have.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
So, we're just going to go ahead and get right back into things. You guys got some value out of this morning? Okay. Now, all that stuff is essentially a pre-frame, right? And they're useful ways to think.
They're useful things to think, okay? And they're useful ways of thinking about people, right? And the best thing that we can do is whatever you're doing, whatever business you're building, whatever you're trying to create, the best thing you could do is to legitimately deep down love people, okay? Legitimately deep down love people. I was just seeing if there's some sort of secret message for me there.
Sometimes they're like, David, you're going over time. Again, I'm tired. No, they've actually never done that. But the clock hits zero, and then it flashes and just flashes and flashes, and I delete it out of my consciousness. We're going to talk about that.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, right? So these are useful things to think. They're useful things to think. You're not better or worse than another human being, right? The map is not the territory.
People work perfectly, right? People are doing their best all the time, all the time. You have all the resources inside of you. You need to succeed, and so does everybody else, right? The meaning of your communication is not what you say.
The meaning of your communication is the response that people are creating inside. Right? It's different. You can't not communicate. Every behavior is a positive intention, right?
There is no failure. There's only feedback. Body and mind are connected all the time. What's possible in the world is possible for me, and whoever's the most flexible controls the communication, okay? Useful things to think, right?
Now what we're going to get into, a handful of things. We're going to get into unconscious phenomenon, and then we're going to get into systems and patterns of communicating to produce certain outcomes, okay? And then I'm going to tie that back into language patterns, and then it's going to all tie back into what we've learned over the last three months. Those of you here have been here for all of it, and those of you who haven't, it's fine. You can buy that stuff when it comes out.
And if you're watching this, and you're watching the recording of this one before the other ones, stop and go back to top producer formula, right? More useful place to start. So in any case, in any case, let's talk about unconscious, unconscious phenomenon. Okay? Okay.
So unconscious phenomenon, right? And these are things that are happening inside of people's heads, and you've got to kind of learn to look for it on their faces. But there's two things that this is going to be useful for. One of them is going to be influencing people externally. And the other way, the other thing that these are useful for, useful to understand and know what to look for, is to be able to recognize internal unconscious communication from your own mind, right?
Like a lot of people, they think unconscious communication is like only a gut instinct. Not true, right? People sometimes get a feeling that something's the right way of doing things. But your unconscious mind communicates with you in all sorts of different ways, right? And a lot of times, we don't know what we're looking at.
Now, unconscious communication isn't necessarily right. It's not necessarily God speaking to you or something like that. Sometimes people say, I got a feeling about it, but their feelings are actually all messed up. Right? Because they've got feelings about something that they've never had any training in, they've never been around somebody in.
But sometimes people's responses internally, they get trained over time by learning things. You need to learn to pay attention to your own unconscious communication. And you can actually learn by learning to pay attention to this stuff. You could learn how to kind of control and recreate phenomenon like inspiration, kind of knowing who to talk to, where to be, when you're in the right place at the right time, and stuff like this. Because your unconscious mind is paying attention to more than you are.
And that's the thing to understand is your mind has the capability and the capacity to deal with all of the information coming into it in one way or another. Right? Your conscious mind does not have the capacity to do that. It only has the capacity to really direct it and to think about a few things at once. However, your unconscious is back there processing your heart rate, your breathing, the way you're feeling, what you're paying attention to.
It's directing attention to your ears because you're sitting there paying attention and listening, and it's not directing attention to, for example, the feeling at the bottom of your butt from sitting on the chair. Or did it just go there when I mentioned that? Because that's what your mind does, right? So your conscious mind directs things and your unconscious mind kind of pushes your attention there, right? But if you learn to pay attention to unconscious phenomenon, you can kind of control your own inspiration and you can learn to recognize when you're receiving kind of a positive inspiration or communication.
And that's important for a lot of reasons. I mean, most of the greatest inventors through history invented what they've invented and had the breakthroughs they did, a lot of them from dreams and stuff, you know, because they were paying attention, right? A lot of them, you know, they had a feeling and they had an image pop in their head and they just ran with it. And Power Network popped into my mind like that, right? It's walking through the mountains questioning things for months and then it was like, bam!
Right? Well, people have inspirational communication like that all the time. But they just don't take action on it for whatever reason, right? It's a good thing to learn how to recognize it and to take action on it, right? But it's also good to learn how to recognize it in other people and to utilize it.
So this is actually what I believe influence actually is, okay? If you're going to say, what's influence? What is it? It's influencing people's unconscious processes, right? Unconscious processes.
Because all decisions happen unconsciously, right? People think they control who they fall in love with and stuff like that. Bullshit, right? Most of the time it starts like this, you know what I mean? And you didn't even control that.
It just happened, you know? Most of the time you don't control your decisions at all. They're happening unconsciously all the time. And then you have this logical brain that sits there and justifies and justifies and warps reality to fit what you'd already decided. You know what I mean?
Well, it's the right move because of this and this and this and this. I'm logical. Yeah, you're really good at explaining why you did something that you decided to do before you thought about it. And that's true with almost every decision we make, right? When people are on a buy page or they're on a join page and they're watching a countdown timer and a sales video is playing, they've made a decision to join before they're aware of the decision, right?
All the time. People are sitting in a room, their palms get sweaty, maybe their forehead gets sweaty, their palms get cold and clammy or something like this, and their heart rate is beating and they're like, I'm just getting in this thing. And they're not even aware they've made the decision yet. But they've made the decision to do it because it's happened unconsciously. I actually kind of think most of this stuff is kind of built into kind of ancient responses to stuff.
You know what I mean? I'll talk about that in the future. But for now, just realize that most of this stuff is built into kind of ancient responses to stuff. But for now, just realize that most decisions, most decisions, most things that we do, at least most, and I actually think all, are unconscious, right? And then we can control those unconscious processes.
We can learn to direct them by paying attention to them and what we focus on with our conscious mind. But also in the people that are listening, people we're influencing, the aim is to control, not really control, excuse me, wrong word, the aim is to influence their unconscious processes. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay.
So what are they? Well, these are phenomenon that have been studied for a couple hundred years in psychotherapy and hypnosis, things like that. Things that the unconscious mind produces when people are making decisions changing, when they're communicating unconsciously, these are the things the mind do. And there's a whole range of these phenomenon, and I'm not going to list all of them today, but I'm going to talk about some of them, and they're really useful to understand. So first phenomenon we're going to talk about today, age progression, right?
And this is essentially projecting your mind into the future, and it happens spontaneously all the time, right? Now the researchers believe actually age progression comes from when babies are young and they experience pain as a defense mechanism, they project their mind into a place where they're safe again to stay alive, right? And then it kind of just develops as we age. That may or may not be true. But age progression is something people do automatically and spontaneously all the time, and there's varying degrees of it.
Now there's problematic ways we do it, and there's beneficial ways we do it. The problematic ways we're doing it like they're always imagining some awful future or something like that, you know? And it's not just imagining, it's like your mind just jumps there all the time to this place, you know what I mean? Successful people don't tend to do that, right? They just don't do it.
And when you do that, you're directing your consciousness and your mind towards creating something that's really not very cool, right? And a lot of you all the time, you're thinking about like how hard it's going to be, right? Or how hard is it going to really be? How hard can I imagine it's going to be? And you're not even really doing it consciously, it's just every time like you, let's say you're prospecting, every time you think about doing it, your mind projects itself into, oh, they're going to reject me.
And you haven't even talked to anybody. You're totally hallucinating it. You're imagining it, right? But that's future progression. And so what's the usefulness of being able to, what's the usefulness of directing somebody's aim there in future progression?
Learning how to direct the future of somebody's mind towards what they want, right? Learning how to do that, learning how to aim your language like that, and a lot of you guys, I mean, I talk to you guys and I've heard a lot of people in this room talk about, like, bad futures happening, you know, oh, this is going to be, you know, like the worst thing ever. And stuff like that, right? Because what's on the inside of your mind just kind of comes out, you know what I mean? So if we can learn to aim that, right, it's amazing what we can do, right?
Let me give you an example of utilizing this in business for a second, okay, because this is all tying into some place and this is all doing something. You know, I got on a webinar a few weeks back and I aimed everybody on the webinar at, well, not recruiting leaders in the MLM profession, right? Why did I do that? Well, because if all of our minds are aimed at it, when you're thinking about who you're going to be prospecting and marketing to, your mind gravitates towards the successful influential people if I put it there. Whereas if I don't put your consciousness there, where does it direct to?
I just need somebody to join, right? Okay. It's just as easy to recruit people that have organizations as it is to recruit people that like have no money at all. Actually easier. They join more.
It's like easier to get them in. You sit down, show them and you're like, they're like, oh wow, this is better. And you just say, well, you know, how do you want your name spelled on your checks, Peter? How is Sorenson spelled again? And what's the address on your credit card?
You know, I mean, it's not that hard to do, right? Wherever you aim people's minds in the future, their mind will kind of stay in that direction. Right? Even after you stop talking about it. And the better you get, the better you can do that.
And we're going to talk about patterns of doing that today, right? So if you want to influence a group of people, aim them towards a future that they want, right? And that's the usefulness of age progression. And there are varying levels of it. There's like spontaneous age progression where people are sitting there and they just start daydreaming and their mind just goes somewhere.
And that stuff is actually kind of the most revealing because when somebody is sitting there and they're meditating and they're staring at the wall or something and they're like, okay, I'm thinking about this amazing positive future, right? Well, that's a little bit different than what their mind sort of automatically does when they're not paying any attention, which is actually what their unconscious mind is usually creating, right? Oh, it's hard to talk to girls, right? I look at him because he's like this, you know, player, you know? But he's like, oh, it's hard, right?
Well, Peter just goes and he talks to the hottest one. You know? And he's like, and like it doesn't matter to him at all. And somebody else is like, I'm nervous. And Peter's like, what's up?
You know, or whatever he does. Some ninja tactic. There was a long period of time where I saw him with a different gorgeous woman like every time I saw him for like this huge stretch of time, you know? It didn't make any sense. We went to like this nightclub one time.
In English, if you speak Spanish, we went to a discotheque. But... But, you know, so we go to this, I got to be specific on that one. We go to this nightclub and like Peter just like, there's like these five gorgeous women sitting there. And Peter just went out and started kind of flirting with all of them at once.
He's like, hey, what's up? I'm Peter. You know what I mean? Some people, like some guys, they're just like, you know, they're going to reject me. It was like, really?
What are they going to do? You know what I mean? Saying, yeah, I don't like you. You know? I mean, it's like, it's like the, like the, sorry, the ladies probably want to kill me.
Kill me for that one. But, you know, I can't help myself. The point is, people do that in business too, right? They start a business with the intention of failing it. They're pushing themselves out into a negative future.
When does that come up in language? People say things like, you know, oh, I'm going to try it, right? That's actually a linguistic phenomenon coming from people's presupposition that they're going to quit because it's not going to work, right? I'm going to try it. No, you're not.
You're going to get in and then quit and then go do something else and blame this. Let's be real. You're not going to try anything, right? Because try is a presupposition in English. I don't know if it's like that in other languages, but I do know in English, the word try is a presupposition of failure.
I'm going to talk about presuppositions a little bit later on. Age progression. Then you got age regression. Age regression is your mind jumping back in time, right? Now this is, how do you influence these things?
Stories of failure. Things in your past, the easiest way to do it, right? Like if I tell a story about my past, about the time I was struggling, where does your mind go? It goes to a point of relatability depending on how ambiguous I am when I'm talking, right? I tell a story about me living in a van and struggling and I tell a decision.
What if I tell a story in the past that happened to me of some point in time when I made a decision? Where does your mind go? It jumps to the past to a time when you made a decision. Doesn't it? Well, what happens when your mind jumps to the past and to a time you made a decision?
You recreate the feelings in your body and mind of making a decision. Your unconscious mind goes back to a time when you made a decision in the past, right? Why is that useful when you're telling stories and talking? It's useful because when people's minds jump back to a point when they made a decision, they make a decision again, you know, and that's what you're trying to get people to do, is make decisions. It's what you're trying, right?
Okay. It's what I'm trying to do. I'm going to try to get them to make a decision, Dave. Okay. Whatever.
You know? So in any case, that's what you do, right? Like let me give you an example of using a story to jump back to the past and just let this work on you. You know, it's not like I'm actually not going to get you to buy anything right now, although you're welcome to pull out your credit card, just sit on your leg for a minute if I decide to sell something. Or you can just throw money at me if you really want.
But no. Just watch the effect that this has on you by just telling a story. Okay. It's free, right? It's very non-intrusive, right?
If I tell a story, let's see, decision. I've got to think of a time when I made a decision in the past, right, which I've made lots of them. I've made lots of them. Oh, here we go. Here we go.
So you know, you guys have all met my son now this weekend. Held him up like, you know, did the Lion King thing. Right? That's what Priscilla told me. She says, this looks like the Lion King, you know?
I can't remember what she called that in Spanish. It was like the, what do you, it just sounded neat when she said it. I was like, I am the Lion King, as a matter of fact, you know? And this is my lion, you know? But in any case, you know, when he was, when he was being born, I was there.
And God, that was awful, ladies. I'm sorry. You know? I was just, oh my God, you know? Sometimes I get age regression.
You just go like this. There's some complications and stuff, and I got real freaked out by something. I told this story in the video, actually, and it is true. I was super freaked out. You know what I mean?
Like, I mean, you know, I think this woman I love is going to die in a minute. Kind of freaked out. And you know, I could have looked really freaked out. Right? But that's not very nice.
Especially to an awake woman sitting there asking me if it's okay, you know? So sometimes what you've got to do is you've got to just reach down inside and make a decision to control your energy. Make a decision to do something different. And all of you in here have made a decision to change something before, to take a new path. So I reached down and I made a different decision.
Right? And I smiled and let the warm energy come out and said, it's going to be okay. Right? What did that do? Well, the same thing I just described it does.
Your mind just kind of seeks to a point where you connect and relate with it, even if you've never had kids or anything. Right? Those of you who have kids, you might relate to that more. Those of you who had an exact experience might relate to it more. Right?
Does that make sense? So age regression is actually an unconscious phenomenon. It happens all the time. And you should probably pay attention to where your mind is jumping in the process. Right?
Where your mind is jumping in the past. Right? What's the usefulness of understanding that people's minds do that automatically? Right? Well, you want to aim people towards good points in the past, right?
Where they can pull out resources where they've accomplished great things, where they've made good decisions. Right? Where they've bought things that they felt good about. Right? Because everybody's bought something they've felt good about.
If you guys actually remember a time that you've bought something you felt good about, it's a different feeling. Right? It's a different feeling than when you don't feel good about your decision to buy. Right? Some of you thought that was funny.
Right? But in any case, your mind jumps back. It can grab resources, and you can use those resources to solve current problems. Right? Even if the problem isn't the same.
Right? Like somebody running into a problem, you can just really quickly, through a story, tell them of a time you ran into a problem, and then you tapped into some sort of creative resource. Right? And then you solve the problem through your creative resources. Right?
So you want to aim people's minds where they want in the future. Aim people's minds where they want in the past. Right? And connect that into your process of selling. Right?
Does that make sense to everybody in here? Yeah. Age progression. Age regression. And then you've got dissociation.
Now, dissociation is really interesting, and I could go on and on and on about different things you can do. Because your body can do really neat stuff, like dissociate from pain in different parts of your body and things like that. But on a mental level, like you take something like where somebody has a really negative emotional response, right? There's some guys, Richard Bandler, John Grinder, they did a bunch of research into, they were trying to find a cure for phobias. Right?
Because at the time, this thing is the 70s or 80s or something, the common psychological research said phobias can't be cured. They're like hardwired into the nervous system. Right? And a phobia, so you guys know, is not like, I'm scared of heights. It's, you walk towards a ledge and your heart like feels like it's going to explode from a panic attack.
They're different. Right? So what these guys did is they put an ad in the newspaper and they just said, we will give you $200 if you had a phobia in the past and now it's gone. Right? And if you come in and you're willing to answer questions about what happened to it.
Right? And even though the common research said phobias can't be cured and people were going to like psychotherapy for like 50 years for it. 50 years for them. What happened was, is they had like 200 or 300 people just from their local city who responded and said, oh yeah, I used to have a phobia of this. I used to have a phobia of that.
I used to have a phobia of this. And so they brought all these people in, they asked them questions and here's what they found happened to most of these people spontaneously. Somebody have a phobia of an elevator and then they said, and I was sitting there and I was having a panic attack and all of a sudden I imagined myself across the room staring at myself and said, God, that looks awful. God, that looks stupid, right? I'm scared of that person is scared of an elevator and when I realized how stupid it looks from the outside looking at it, like I just couldn't be afraid anymore.
Right? Well that's actually a unconscious phenomenon, dissociation, right? Like a lot of our memories, if you guys think back, a lot of our memories, like the memories when we play them in our mind, we're looking through our eyes and feeling through our body that's being associated in the memory. But a lot of our memories. And this like a lot of my memories, I'm like sitting there watching myself in the memory.
Now I know I don't have magical powers and can't project myself out of my body and watch myself. So there's like, it's not like I have a memory where I'm like this angel watching myself from the corner, right? My mind is creating dissociation from certain events. We do this sometimes to protect ourselves from things, right? But you can also utilize dissociation to change the energy and the direction and the focus of people's minds.
Okay. from one thing on to another thing, right? If somebody's like really afraid of doing something, you want to know the easiest way to get rid of most fears for people? Because most fears really aren't that severe, even if you don't know what you're doing. It's just to literally, you could take almost any fear and have somebody just imagine themselves standing outside of themselves, watching themselves be afraid and just kind of laugh at it, right?
Most people's fears will just dissolve from that. And it's really interesting and really fun to do, especially with people that like think a problem can't go away, you know, and you can kind of mess with it a little. It's useful for selling too. I'm going to get into that a bit. So you've got dissociation.
You've also got amnesia. Now, amnesia is an unconscious phenomenon that's way more common than you think, right? Way more, right? And I'm not talking about forgetting who you are, although that's extensive amnesia. What I'm talking about is just forgetting things.
Right? And some people are like, well, I don't forget things like that. Sure you do. Sure you do. Right?
Everybody forgets stuff all the time. Right? And it's a way of sorting through information in our mind. There are people that forget all of their successful experiences in their life and just remember the awful things. Right?
What an awful way to think. You know what I mean? If you'd ever thought about that, it's like, that's really silly. Right? I remember a time in my life when, this was an amazing experience.
I told this story actually at an event. Kevin was there. I told this story. I had this time in my life where all I remembered was these awful experiences. And then I thought about it and I was like, I keep remembering this time and it's awful.
And I was like, this isn't very useful. And I said, I wonder if this time was actually that bad. So I sat down there. I put on some meditation music, closed my eyes for a few minutes, and I concentrated on the time. And then I said, now, I'm going to open my eyes and remember everything beautiful that happened in that time.
And I just started writing things down. Right? Now, I couldn't remember anything good from that time. All I remembered was this bad stuff. Well, I started writing and it started coming out slowly.
But then I kept writing and kept writing and kept writing. And then I started having these vivid whole day recollections come back of some of the most amazing things that I've experienced in my life. Some of the most beautiful sunset, beautiful ocean. Waves roaring in, right? Birds chirping in the background, right?
Times when I saw things that were some of the most beautiful things that I've seen in my life. And I wrote pages and pages and pages and pages of all this amazing stuff down, right? So my mind was kind of deleting one thing and highlighting another thing, right? Well, wouldn't it be nice and isn't it useful to just change what people are highlighting, right? Because you don't need to remember things that weren't good.
You could just choose to bring out all the memories of your past where you were successful at things and feel good, right? It's easier to do, actually. And you feel better doing it. And if you remember successful times, you're more likely to recreate success as long as you're still learning from the failures. You don't want to forget that stuff, right?
But you can actually cause amnesia for stuff through language. I'll talk about that a little bit later. So you've got amnesia, right? Who in here thinks this is kind of interesting? Yeah?
Okay. So you've got amnesia, right? And memory is actually really interesting in and of itself. There's this really neat study done I was reading the other year. And I'd quote the date and the name of it.
I think this was Stanford. It was done on memory, right? Because memory, the way you remember things, is not actually what happened, right? We distort and change memories literally all the time. And so the way the study goes is like this.
They brought a bunch of students in with the permission of their parents, and they did a little experiment. They really clicked on them, right? Took a bunch of photos from the person's childhood, kid's childhood, right, college kids. And they say, hey, you remember this time when you went to the beach? And they're like, yeah, I remember that.
Hey, you remember this time when you went on this hike? And they're like, yeah that was a lot of fun. They're remembering, you remember this time when you went to this park? They're like, yeah, I remember that. Do you remember the time when you graduated?
They're like yeah. And they're like, do you remember this time when you were on a hot air balloon through the zoo? And they just like photoshopped this photo together. Right? I remember that, right?
And they're like, okay, do you remember this one? They're like, yeah, I remember, I remember, I remember, right? So here's what they did. Brought them back the next week, right? Went through a bunch of photos again, and then put another photo in there of them at the zoo.
And by the second or third time, they not only remembered going to a zoo they were never at ever, but they were telling stories about all the neat things they saw from the hot air balloon, right? That they never saw, right? And sometimes people are like, oh, I remember it, and I'm right. But really, you are remembering a distortion of it. If you question it, just go look at, like, courtrooms, you know?
Well, I'm right. No, I'm right. And it's like, neither of you are paying attention to anything. Let's be real, you know? So you can change what people focus on.
You can also change the energy of somebody's mind to focus on what you want them to focus on, which is much more useful, right? Much more useful. Usually when people have a problem, and they're constantly stuck in a problem, what are they doing? They're usually deleting all the good experiences that they're having around that problem, right? So that's something that people do, amnesia, right?
And it exists at all kinds of different levels. I've played with this at event conferences. I have this guy that writes articles for me and stuff in Costa Rica. His name's Jamie. And I remember I was playing with this and just seeing if I could, like, do a big speech and then have people not really remember what I talk about.
But still have the effect that I want. And he's like, dude, I just listened to you for, like, four hours and that was the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life, but I can't remember a thing you talked about. Because I just implanted forgetting suggestions to the whole thing. And he's just playing around, you know? You know?
So anyways, that's fun stuff. So amnesia. All right, so you've got amnesia, and then you've got positive hallucination. Now, once people think about hallucination, this might not be the best term for this because you're thinking about doing drugs or something, right? And I'm not talking about drugs.
I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about the way that the mind perceives things that aren't there, right? And we do it all the time, visually, auditorily, right, kinesthetically. We're constantly creating things that aren't there, right? All the time.
And an example of this is, you know, I remember I was a kid and I was walking through the forest in Fairbanks, Alaska, not smoking weed at the time. And I saw a snake out of the corner of my eye, and it went like this, and it just turned into a stick, right? Now, and you'd be like, what were you on? Nothing. I've actually never done hallucinogens in my life, right?
And I haven't really done a lot of drugs in my life. I did a couple when I was like 13 or 14, and then I actually stopped, and, you know, I don't do drugs and stuff. You know, sometimes people think I do, but I just look funny, trust me. But in any case, in any case, that kind of thing happens all the time where people, to one level or another, you see things that aren't there, right? On a higher level, that's like dreaming, right?
Dreaming is a hallucination process in the mind, right? If you visualize something and you kind of see the outline standing out a little stronger, that's an example of visual hallucination, but you can also hallucinate kinesthetically, right? And to one level, the small levels or another, people are constantly hallucinating things and seeing things that aren't there at all. It's a part of the way the mind works, and it's not negative. It's just something to be aware of.
Sometimes an image will pop up really powerfully in your mind. You know, in fact, Kristen and Susan Beasley, I think it was Susan, actually. She's here. I don't know where you guys are sitting. They're sitting over there.
Yeah, they're sitting over there. She was like, I don't experience any of these unconscious phenomenon, but she's a visual processor and mostly experiences visual phenomenon. Right? And some people, they're like, I don't feel these weird things. It's like, not about feeling.
There's all sorts of ways your unconscious mind communicates, and there's all sorts of ways people experience this. And that's why you've got to understand it, because you can communicate to everybody's style of learning. Does that make sense to everybody in here? All right? You've also got negative hallucination, which is not seeing something that is there, right?
Or not experiencing something that is there. Now, this one happens way more frequently than you'd imagine, right? About a week ago, I had keys in my hand, right? In my hand, right? Like this.
And they were hanging, like, here, right? And I walked around for at least 10 minutes looking for my keys. And they were literally right there in front of my face. You know what I mean? And I did not see them at all, right?
And I was looking like this all over my house. Walking around with my arm in a catalepsy, right? Extended out like this, looking around for my keys, right? And Purcell was like, they're in your hand. And I saw them, and it's like they appeared, right?
But you actually constantly delete things that are there out of your consciousness, right? It's a really artful thing to pay attention to everything. I mean, let's not pretend you're some Zen Buddhist, or something like that. Or something that just meditates in a mountaintop, right? People do this all the time.
And if you don't do it visually, you do it kinesthetically, you do it through your other senses, right? Deleting things that are there. It's an unconscious phenomenon, and it happens all the time. Time distortion. It's the next one, right?
Time distortion is by far one of the funner things to play with. But also, it's one of the easier things to recreate. Because your unconscious mind can distort time to a level that's almost unimaginable. Right? And this is like one of the things, I'll give you an example.
A lot of times when people have near death experiences, they'll relive their entire life in like 10 seconds. Right? And they actually do. Like if you, you know, go through the stories, like a person's like out for 10 seconds, they relive their entire life. One time, Milton Erickson was with a patient, he's a hypnotist, and he, this lady had a problem where she had never had a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, like a, childhood where, you know, with good parents who loved her and stuff like this, so he recreated a string of memories, put her in a deep trance, and had her relive her entire life in seven seconds.
Rearranging her memories. The unconscious mind has a powerful ability to contract time but also expand it. Alright, but we experience it at smaller levels all the time through the day. If you've ever had a dream that felt, I've had dreams before that felt like they're five years. It works like you live through five years of experience but you wake up.
up and you've been asleep for two hours, right? That's an unconscious phenomenon of time distortion because your brain has the ability to process lots of things at the same time, right? And a lot of times what happens as you get older, right, time compresses more. You guys notice that, right? And why is that?
Because when you're looking at a greater span of memories, every new memory seems like less time, right? So you compress time, you expand time all the time, you watch a movie and it feels like it flies by in a minute, right? And here's a great example of time distortion, right? Who in here has ever been driving down a road like going like, the other day actually I was driving down a road, I was going like at least 150 miles an hour. I mean, I was cooking, you know what I mean?
Because I run the police in Costa Rica. I shouldn't say that, I'm joking, I'm joking, right? But I'm going like 150 miles an hour or something like that, right? And then I just want to do a little experiment. I'm going by and it feels like it's normal because I'm going fast for a while, right?
I'm going down the road, that feels like normal. And then I turned off in a road, slowed down to 20 kilometers an hour, right? And what happens is just feels like you're not moving at all, right? Because your unconscious mind gets used to the fast movement and then you move slow and it distorts time, right? To relate the two together.
But on a different level, how is that useful, right? And so I'm going to do a little experiment. How is that useful, right? Well, to professional athletes, you have to distort time or you can't be a professional athlete, right? You can't be.
Baseball players slow down the ball. I mean, that thing's flying at you over 100 miles an hour. You know what I mean? And if you talk to people who hit baseball, right, they see that and that's all they see and it looks gigantic and slows down, right? Because every good athlete is good at time distortion.
And they do it unconsciously, right? If you actually teach them time distortion, you could do that. You could recreate it through a series of things. They become better athletes, right? Good martial artists are good at time distortion too, right?
Time distortion is an unconscious phenomenon that happens literally all through the day. When you're driving, you kind of experience time differently than when you're sitting there filling out boring paperwork than when you're watching a good movie that you're really in love with than when you're driving fast and then drive slow than when you're having sex than when you're sleeping. You experience time different all through the day depending on what you're focused on, right? It's just something to be aware of that you experience. If you notice yourself experiencing time differently and you pay attention to it, right, and you learn to notice it, that's a form of unconscious communication, right?
Time distortion. And you've got sensory distortion, right? Sensory distortion is simply the highlighting or the dimming of senses to one degree or another, right? This is another thing that's just super, super common, right? What's premature ejaculation most of the time?
Sensory distortion. A highlighting of the feelings at the tip of the penis in a man, right? No, seriously. That's all it is. Usually it's a sensory distortion thing that happens in somebody's body and mind, right?
And on another level, though, on another level, though, any time you're communicating with somebody, right? I was doing an experiment, actually. It was a team meeting we did out in Chicago, in Miami, a while ago. And I was doing a training on language patterns. Who was there at that thing?
Yeah. Yeah, you guys remember that? Yeah. One of the coolest things ever, right? I'll cover a lot of that stuff today, too.
I was doing this training on language patterns in that, and I didn't really train on a lot of hypnotic phenomenon. But after that, we went on this big yacht, right? And I was just, like, telling stories and, like, just seeing what I could affect. And I was sitting there in a group of about 30 people, and there was really loud music playing, right? And I talked, and then I changed my tone, and then I told a story of how one time, like, I walked into a bar, but I was talking to somebody really interesting, and the music just faded to zero, right?
And I kept talking, and then I lowered my voice to a whisper that was almost inaudible, and everybody could still hear it. And then I said, isn't it interesting how you just didn't even notice that the whole sound of the music disappeared, right? And I had about 10 people who had the sound of the music snap back into their consciousness. They'd literally deleted the music out, right? Right in front of me.
Why? Because we distort sensory data all the time to survive, right? It's how we make sense of things. Because if you pay attention to everything at once, you can't make sense of anything. You know what I mean?
You can't. This is actually good stuff, because if you try to pay attention to everything going on, you can't learn anything. You can't listen to my voice and see that you've been deleting out the person sitting next to you for the last 10 minutes. Haven't you? Until I just said that, and they pop back into awareness, right?
And that tripped you out. How I know you do that, because I understand hypnotic phenomenon. It's what people's minds do, right? This is just the way your mind operates and works as you're paying attention to one thing, you're deleting something else out. And if you understand that, you can observe those and progress people through different kinds of phenomenon.
Actually, one of my favorite things to do is to go to a church in a language I don't understand, and just watch for this stuff. Because I can't understand it, I don't get trapped up in it, I just see people's faces and how they're responding. You know what I mean? And some of the best people at influencing unconscious phenomenon are preachers and people in churches and stuff. They're like the best in the world, right?
Way better than stage hypnotists, you know what I mean? Because they're not coming from like this place of trying to trick people or something. They're coming from a place of authenticity usually, right? So in any case, you've got sensory distortion, right? So those are the main useful hypnotic phenomenon, and there's some other ones too, but they're not really as useful unless you're doing something that we're not really doing.
Another neat one that I like to play with, but it's not really the most useful thing, is dream suggestion. It's like 85% of the population will have a dream that you suggest them to have if you just suggest it. 85%, right? It's really easy to get people to have dreams about stuff just by suggesting it. And if you tell a story about a dream that you had and also tell people every time I've told this story to somebody, they've also had the same dream, right?
There's like 80% of the population that will literally just have that dream. Now they might not remember it, but if they're paying attention to it, right? Especially, and if you suggest they pay attention to it, then they'll look for it, and then they'll definitely have the dream, right? Because they'll be looking for themselves to have it, which is gonna create the dream. Because it's really easy to create dreams, right?
Dream suggestion is a really hilarious, you know, really hilarious phenomenon. Here's another one, and this is useful, okay? And that's a post-behavioral suggestion. Now I've renamed this a little bit because normally this is called like a post-hypnotic suggestion, but that suggests people have to be in a deep trance in order to do it, and that it's related to hypnosis, which it's really not. So for the sake of this, I've renamed it post-behavioral suggestion, which is when you have connection and rapport with people, you can actually suggest behavior to them and suggest a response to future input, and it'll actually create automatic behavior, right?
A great example of this would be just something we've all experienced, you know, when you're kids. People can tell you positive and negative things that affect you really far out in the future if you don't know how to change your responses to stuff. You know, a lot of times somebody will like tell a kid, you know, they'll tell a kid they're stupid or something like that, you know? It's just the lamest thing ever to tell a kid, you know? Telling a kid that they're stupid because they don't pay attention like the quiet kid, you know what I mean?
They're just different, you know what I mean? But if you tell a kid that, what will happen? Well, they'll start distorting reality. If they believe you, they're gonna do one of a couple of things. Number one, if they believe you, they will actually start distorting reality and look for places where they're not as smart as other kids.
Right? They'll do that unconsciously if they believe the suggestion, right? And kids, right? Kids respond to authority because our brains are kind of built like that, right? So if a parent tells a kid that they're dumb or something, right, it'll actually project itself onto their behavior through their life if they believe the suggestion.
The next thing they could do is they could just completely reject the suggestion too, right? But you can create like, you know, post behavioral suggestions, which is, for example, you could just suggest to somebody, you know, that every time you log into this website, your mind is going to go quiet and you're just gonna pay a little bit more attention and you'll notice it. Right? Something like that would actually create the phenomenon in people that listen to it. I actually, one time I was at an event in, for, for our company and, and, you know, I did this suggestion, but it was really well done, really well framed.
I'll talk about how to frame this stuff in a bit, right? But it was a really well framed suggestion that the next time you log into Facebook, you're going to remember your desire to get a million dollar ring. When you see the color blue on Facebook, you'll remember how much you want to succeed and you'll immediately close Facebook and go back to work. Right? You can create suggestions in the future and if you've got sufficient rapport and you've got sufficient, responsiveness with somebody, it will actually just recreate that suggestion.
Actually, post-hypnotic suggestions have been studied to last for more than 20 years, that people have created. really interesting things. I mean, you can just change the way people respond to something and project it into the future, and is that, does that mean you can go up to somebody and say, Chris Daugherty, pull out your credit card and you're going to buy when you walk back to the computer automatically without thinking about it, right? Now, Chris Daugherty might actually go do that, right? Because I got a good rapport with him and everything I've ever told him to buy is made of money, right?
So he'll go buy it. But the, and the fact is, Chris, you'll want to buy it when you go home. Yeah, but the thing is, is that, you know, you can't just walk up to people and tell them to do stuff like that because, you know, you're not in good state. You're not in good rapport. And also, you don't even know if they want to do it and you can't suggest that people are going to do something that, that they don't want to do.
It just literally won't work. But if somebody wants to change something or they want to do something, you can help them by understanding these things and by paying attention to them, being very careful, being very careful how you frame stuff, right? Because how you frame stuff matters big time, right? And a lot of you, you speak negatively and you're creating really bad internal states with people by the way that you talk without even being aware of it. You don't even know you're doing it.
You don't even know what's going on in the people's heads because you've never been taught this stuff. So you're talking in a way that's basically pushing people away from their goals rather than drawing them close to them, right? Whereas if you learn to aim people's minds, if you learn how to teach people to delete more of the stuff they don't want to experience and experience more of what they want to experience and aim their mind towards the future they want and pull up the good resources from their past and you're constantly doing it in the way that you talk and communicate, you're going to constantly be taking the people around you and kind of shifting them towards the direction they want to go. That make sense? That's a process, you know what I mean?
You can't just like take somebody and like delete all their negative memories, nor would you want to, but you know people change their memories anyways. It's now been proven, memory actually is more like, people used to think it's like a library. You take the book off the shelf and then you look at it, you reference it, you put it back, next time you take it back, you open it, it's the same. Now though, we've learned that it's more like a magical library where every time you take the book off the shelf, it's a different book, right? Just a little, you know?
It's more like the metaphor of how, you know, personal development people say that every time you pick up How to Win Friends and Influence People, it's like somebody rewrote the book, right? A little suggestion there too. But the reality is, is that because you don't remember what was in the book at all, of course it's a new book. You can't remember what's in that. And it's not how memory works, right?
Memory does not work the way most people think it works. We change our memories all the time. And if you're going to be changing your memories all the time, you could just change all those bad memories to be learning experiences, right? And disassociate from them. You find yourself going through a bad thing in the past, you could just imagine yourself standing outside of there, looking down from the corner and saying, well those are two people that just are doing their best, isn't it?
Yeah. You can change the way you perceive about memories gradually, over time, and kind of remold the way your mind functions on the inside. How is that useful for selling, for succeeding, for leading, for influencing? Because if you're going to influence people, what you're really doing is aiming a large group of people at some sort of direction that they all believe in, right? And for them to actually get where they're aiming, they got to be aimed right.
That make sense? So I'm constantly, all the time, reworking the way people are aiming things through my conversations, through my stories, and doing it in a way that's in alignment with who they are and what they want. Because I don't want to aim somebody on accident or on purpose on something that they don't want to achieve. I only want to aim them on things that they want to achieve. So I mean, if somebody wants to quit my organization, and that's what they want to do, I just say, just quit.
It's fine. Which sometimes doesn't work that well, because then they don't want to quit when I tell them to quit. Because they're like, I won't do what you say. But in any case, I'm like, if you don't want to do it, don't do it. Go work at Walmart.
Fine with me, right? Folks, obviously the income examples discussed are extraordinary. The income claims presented are not intended to serve as a guarantee of income. Instead, they're designed to give you an idea of what's possible. Success in this business requires leadership, hard work, and dedication.
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