Neeti Keswani: Trainings and techniques around this—what exactly are you coaching people on? How do you help them? It's almost like brain surgery in a way.

Ryan Kristenson: So the reality is, we create all these beliefs about ourselves when we're very young, before like four, five, six years old, right? And at that stage in our lives, we don't really have that sophistication and nuance of worldview that we do later on in life. Our rational mind really hasn't come online, so we're drawing these very general conclusions kind of on an emotional level—you know, the patterns, the things that happen.

If you have wondered how to rewire your subconscious mind to overcome limiting beliefs, develop mental resilience for success, and unlock your full potential, this is the episode for you. Welcome back to Luxury Unplugged, where we blend the art of mindful living with strategies for personal and professional success.

In this episode, we are going to be exploring how the transformative power of hypnosis can help rewire your subconscious mind, empower you to break your limiting beliefs, and achieve mental resilience. Now, all this is being done as we talk to Ryan—Ryan Kristenson, an amazing guest that we have today, an extraordinary guest that we have today. He's a professional hypnotist and a successful entrepreneur, and he has dedicated his career to unlocking peak mental focus and performance. With over two decades of experience in the Intelligence Community, including counterterrorism and counter-proliferation operations, he brings unparalleled insights into resilience and success. He's also the author of The War Inside a Peace: How to End Inner Conflict and Make Success Inevitable.

So, get ready to uncover actionable insights that can reshape your mindset, unlock your potential, and set you on the path to inevitable success. A very warm welcome, Ryan.

Ryan Kristenson: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here.

Neeti Keswani: Absolutely, having so much pleasure in having you over here and asking you questions on hypnosis and so many aspects that you are actually doing through coaching and all of your good stuff. So, let us understand, Ryan, how did your journey sort of happen from being in the Intelligence Community to actually being a coach and an entrepreneur?

Ryan Kristenson: Yeah, it's definitely a very unconventional journey, that's for sure. I spent about 23 years in intelligence between the military and as a contractor in DC. And by about 2018, 2019, I was realizing it was about time for a change. I was trying to save the world, and the world rather stubbornly refused to be saved, so it's time to move on.

I was thinking about becoming a psychologist, but I was going to take about six years and about half a million dollars to get my PhD, which is unappealing in your 40s. And in 2019, I was doing some work on myself in some different self-improvement groups and men's groups. One of the guys there was a hypnotist talking about things like toxic shame and emotional baggage. I thought, "Well, sure, got some of that. Catholic, that happens." Did a session with him and just kind of felt lighter afterwards. You know, if you're carrying around 50 lbs of stuff on your back and you get rid of 30 lbs, everything's just easier.

So I got certified as a hypnotist in February of 2020. And right after that, everything shut down during the pandemic, so I had all this time on my hands. I started playing around with a bunch of guys online, realized I had a talent for it, got some more training, some more techniques, started my business in April of 2020, went full-time in October, and it's been full-time ever since.

Neeti Keswani: So when you talk about hypnosis and trainings and techniques around this, what exactly are you coaching people on? How do you help them?

Ryan Kristenson: So it's almost like brain surgery in a way. The reality is, we create all these beliefs about ourselves when we're very young, before like four, five, six years old, right? And at that stage in our lives, we don't really have that sophistication and nuance of worldview that we do later on in life. Our rational mind really hasn't come online, so we're drawing these very general conclusions kind of on an emotional level—you know, the patterns, the things that happen.

Once our rational mind comes online, those things kind of get locked behind a wall. We call this the 'critical factor' in hypnosis. And from that point on, our unconscious mind judges true and false based on what it already believes. So if it doesn't match what it already believes, it's false by definition and gets ignored. That's why these things are so hard to shift.

But the beautiful thing about hypnosis is it allows us to unlock that door to the subconscious mind, get down in there, figure out exactly what's going on, and then do the rewiring and reframing that we need to do. So my whole thing is about going down there, figuring out how we drew those emotional conclusions, figuring out that chain of logic, disproving that old chain of logic, and creating a new one that draws a different conclusion that allows you to do what you want in life.

Neeti Keswani: So do you think that you discovered it only like a couple of years back, or has it been subconsciously a part of your training in the Intelligence Community as well?

Ryan Kristenson: Now, I was much more on the analytic and operational side rather than doing, like, interrogations and stuff like that. So my work was much more around mapping out networks, mapping out systems, figuring out what people are kind of doing. So it's all about... think about if you had like five different puzzles, a couple thousand pieces each, you throw them all in a trash bag, mix it all up, dump out half of the pieces, and try and put it all together. That's what I was doing on a day-to-day basis.

Which actually helped me a lot in this work because it gave me the skills and tools I needed to figure out what kind of questions I need to ask to get the pieces of the puzzle so I could put that thing together and understand how things were wired. And once I understand how things were wired... I spent 23 years breaking stuff. It's the easiest kind of thing to transfer in the world. You know, they talk about transferable skills—very transferable skill.

Neeti Keswani: Absolutely, that I can see. But I also understand from your background that you have had a challenge about autism and bipolar disorder. So the journey from there to military to this coaching business, how has that been for you? Like, how did you first of all overcome your challenges?

Ryan Kristenson: Well, the interesting thing is I didn't find out about the autism and the bipolar disorder until last year when I was almost 48 years old. So I grew up... I grew up in Kansas, and all I really knew is that the world works for everybody else. Everybody else can get along fine, everybody else can get what they need, and I can't. There's something wrong with me, don't know what it is, can't figure it out, nobody else can figure it out either, so I'm just kind of on my own.

And so, by the time I was 9 years old, I had already basically given up on life. The first time I wanted out of my life was around 9 years old. So that's been something I struggled with throughout my life. And the way I kept myself around was giving myself this mission of "save the world." You know, become that person serving a greater good. And that's what led me through the military and into the intelligence community.

Back around 2019, 2020, that wasn't working anymore. The world doesn't want to be saved, so I can't use that as an excuse to keep myself alive anymore. So when I started transitioning to working with people one-on-one, because that gave me that feedback loop—still helping people out, still serving a greater good—but I still wasn't able to get what I need in life. If I couldn't figure out how to get what I needed in life, life was not worth living, and I was done suffering.

That's what led me on about a 4-year self-improvement journey where I did basically everything under the sun. Anything you can think of to fix yourself, I've tried it all. And I realized that nothing really delivered the results that they said it would. Everything helped, everything got the ball moving forward a bit, but it was always this endless cycle of one more thing to fix. Which led me down the path of hypnosis to figure out what was actually going on in the subconscious mind, because that's where all the problems were. So I had to develop a toolset and techniques and theories to actually help me fix that stuff once and for all. Otherwise, it just wasn't going to be worth it.

Neeti Keswani: So using hypnosis to rewire the subconscious mind for success, how do you think can be achieved? I mean, yes, we all understand hypnosis is a way of getting into that stage, into that state of mind where you are... if you would explain that better, that would be nice.

Ryan Kristenson: Actually, sure, yeah. So everybody thinks that hypnosis is about, "Oh, I'm gonna wave the watch in front of your face and now I've got control of your mind. I'm gonna make you do whatever I want, you're gonna cluck like a chicken, give me all your money." That's not actually what happens.

Hypnosis, quite frankly, is just a simple set of techniques that allow us to get more access to your unconscious mind. It's kind of like a guided meditation; we're just taking you another level deeper into your mind. But it's a voluntary process. You're allowing me to lead you through that process to get you down there. If you don't want to go, if you don't want to dance, there's nothing I can do. If you're down there and you don't feel comfortable, you can bring yourself right out at any time. I've had some clients where it's just like, too much, they brought themselves out, no problem at all. We have to do some different work to make them comfortable.

But the key is, it gives us access to those parts of your mind that are actually generating the emotions, generating thoughts, interpreting your reality, which allows us some very, very powerful tools to change, on a fundamental level, your experience in life.

Neeti Keswani: So how can I program myself for peak performance and ultimate success through rewiring my subconscious mind?

Ryan Kristenson: Well, there's a little bit of a problem because it's very difficult to do on your own. And there's two reasons for that. Number one, the problem is that all these emotional conclusions—you know, looking at the forest rather than the trees—since we look at everything mostly from a rational perspective, individual events and individual problems, it's very difficult to extrapolate from that to what the emotional conclusion actually is. So it's hard to get there from where you're at now.

The second piece is, if you're trying... if you are at war with your mind, if there's that friction, then your mind doesn't trust you. So why would it let you change it? All the things you want to do, all the changes you want to make, are to let you do stuff that it thinks are dangerous or bad in some way. So it's not really going to let you change that much on your own.

There's some stuff that you can do to adjust things. There's some things that you can do to say, "Okay, this is really important to me, I need this in my life." You know, affirmations and things like that to really add that in there. Also, focusing on the lack of it in your life kind of adds that pain point to push you into motion. But when it comes to shifting the big stuff, that's very difficult to do on your own.

Neeti Keswani: Kind of do you think a third party needs to come in and do that for you?

Ryan Kristenson: Now, there are a lot of hypnosis videos on YouTube and so forth that have all things around like sleep, success, procrastination, stopping smoking, weight loss, and stuff like that. Those are all really pretty effective at getting that additional stuff into your mind, giving you new frameworks. But if you're dropping in a new belief set and you still have the old belief set there, now these are two competing belief sets. The old one is pretty much going to win every time.

So the better way to go about it, the way that I kind of approach things, is like, "Okay, let me take this old belief set, take it away, disprove it, that way you can drop a new one in and there's no conflict." Does that make sense?

Neeti Keswani: Yeah, it does, it does. And you say that old beliefs are having a stronger hold because they have been there in your mindset and in your emotional body for a really long time.

Ryan Kristenson: Well, yeah. And quite frankly, it's like your emotional mind is faster than your rational mind, so it's always setting the frame. It's always coming to its conclusion first, which is why it's already had the answer before you start doing your logical work. That's why you can't prove things wrong or you can't prove your emotions wrong.

But the other thing is that you created this conclusion, and now it has an entire lifetime of evidence to support it. It has a whole mountain of evidence of all the things that happened in your life that confirm this old conclusion. So trying to disprove an entire lifetime worth of proof and evidence is very, very difficult, which is why you have to disprove the conclusion in the first place, which allows you to reframe all that stuff. Then you have a lifetime of evidence and support for this new belief that you've created once you reframe that old one.

Neeti Keswani: So, what are the sort of mindset techniques that every entrepreneur could use, perhaps just because they have come across this episode? What are the kind of techniques we can give to the audiences, to people?

Ryan Kristenson: Well, there's a few that I really like. And number one is this idea that negative emotions are not pain; they're actually signals. Every emotion has a question it's asking you, to help identify a problem in your environment so that you can figure out what the problem is and fix it faster.

So, number one: instead of disengaging, running from, and trying to medicate away all those negative emotions, turn around, face them, engage with them, and ask, "Okay, what am I missing?" It's the number one best question you can possibly ask yourself anytime you run into a problem: "What am I missing?" Because if you did things correctly, if you were right about the situation and you understood it, you'd have figured it out, you'd be on the solution, you wouldn't be running into problems. So there's something wrong with how you're viewing the situation, your assumptions, or something like that. So the best thing you can do is just take a step back for a moment, pause, and say, "Okay, what am I missing?" Just get curious. Because your mind is trying to tell you what you're missing; all you have to do is ask it to help you.

The second thing that most entrepreneurs struggle with is procrastination. They think it's a bad thing. I personally love it because procrastination means one of three things: I) you're doing the wrong thing, II) you're doing it at the wrong time, or III) you're doing it the wrong way. Either you should be doing something else at that point in time, it doesn't have to be done right now so you can do it another time, or you're doing it the wrong way.

When I was trying to write my book, I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to get it structured and just couldn't get it to make any progress. Once I realized that there's this ghostwriter out there that can actually help—a hypnotist can help me write—it's like, "Oh, easiest thing in the world." I was trying to do it the wrong way, which is why I was procrastinating so much; it wasn't working that way.

Last but not least, I would say that one of the big things that high performers tend to struggle with is this constant need to go higher and better and faster and further. One goal, the next goal, the next goal, the next goal. That constant comparison to somebody above you. And what you're really trying to do there, fundamentally at your essence, is prove to yourself how valuable and how good you are. You've got this thing about, "I'm not good enough, there's something wrong with me." There was this intolerable Batman... you know, the Batman origin story of the way that you grew up, where it's like, "I've got to get away from this every way I can."

But the problem is that never works and never ends. There's a great book by a guy by the name of Andrew Wilkinson, he's an entrepreneur up in Canada, called Never Enough. His journey from being a barback making six bucks an hour to being a billionaire. He thought that money was going to solve all his problems, sitting there with a billion dollars going, "I still feel just as anxious and insecure as when I was broke." So if a billion dollars isn't enough, it doesn't work that way.

The better thing to do is take a step back, actually sit down, dig into the origins of those ideas of "I'm not good enough," that insecurity, fix that from the inside out. And now, all your efforts can be done a different way. As opposed to putting points on the scoreboard, you can go for things like impact and things like that.

Neeti Keswani: But I have a question over here. I mean, there's a contradictory thought to your first point that you mentioned about the mindset techniques, which is: when we handle something head-on... you know, I'm already in a turmoil, let's say, and I handle it head-on, I see what is the problem, I try to find it. Because I'm in that kind of an emotional turmoil, won't I get further deep down in the ocean rather than coming up?

Ryan Kristenson: It's actually the opposite. The reason why you're deep in that turmoil is because your mind is asking you for help to solve a problem and you're not listening. So it has to crank up the volume and crank up the pressure. You're not listening, so it has to scream louder.

Neeti Keswani: I see.

Ryan Kristenson: Okay? So once you turn around and engage with it, you're like, "Okay, okay, I'm listening. Like, what's the problem?" It doesn't have to scream as loud anymore. It doesn't have to put that pressure on anymore because you're paying attention, which is what it was needing from you in the first place. The turmoil and the pressure and the intensity increases when you're trying to avoid the problem, not when you're engaging with it. Does that make sense?

Neeti Keswani: Yeah, it does. But if a person is going through turmoil, chances are that if they are spiritual, they would go and meditate and try to calm down and try to understand and go through that route. But in the normal way of life, usually people are not like that. And then if you are trying to solve something with that kind of turmoil, it eventually leads to further downfall.

Ryan Kristenson: It can, it can. I would say a couple of different things. Number one, if you are in massive, terminal, massive emotional response, yes, take a step back, calm yourself down, crank down the intensity of that the way you need to. But instead of cranking down the intensity and then moving on with your life, crank down the intensity and then engage with the problem.

The difficulty is, or the mistake I think a lot of people make, is like, "Okay, I've turned the volume down, I don't hurt as much, now I can go about my day." No, you still have that problem. It's still in there. It's going to still blow up in your face.

The other thing I'll say is, once you start reframing emotions away from pain—if emotions are no longer pain—then you don't have to avoid them. They don't trigger that survival response. And that association with emotions and pain triggering that survival response is what makes it so hard to engage with these emotions, which makes that turmoil and everything else so intense, because it's actually triggering your survival response where this emotional strain is essentially treated as a threat to your physical survival.

Neeti Keswani: Right. So that brings me to the question about your book, The War Inside a Peace: How to End Inner Conflict and Make Success Inevitable. Tell us about it. What do you recommend through that book? What is it about?

Ryan Kristenson: So the book is actually the entire process I work with with all my clients, start to finish, plus all the theory behind it. And it's basically designed to take you from wherever you are right now to a place where your emotions are no longer pain, your self-esteem is 100% solid and 100% your choice, to where your mind is operating as a unified team, everybody on the same page moving the same direction.

And what this does is, by teaching your mind how to interpret these emotions in a different way, your mind can now give itself what it needs at a lower level. The reason why a lot of stuff bubbles up to the surface and your conscious awareness is because the teams are in conflict; they can't work together, and so it needs your help to figure it out. Like, if the different management teams and different departments in your company are all fighting all the time, they have to come to the CEO to resolve that conflict, which is why all this stuff bubbles up to conscious awareness. But if they can work together, they don't have to bother the CEO unless something's actually serious, which means your life becomes very, very clear and very Zen very quickly. And the CEO can then do CEO stuff, as opposed to dealing with the stuff down in the departments.

It's actually designed as a hypnosis program in written form. So to the extent that I can give you all the benefit of working with me one-on-one, it's designed to give you as much as it possibly can. There's a lot of tips in there about how to look at emotions and how to deal with these different stressors in a way that actually makes it easier to deal with and helps you solve problems faster and helps you work harder and longer.

Neeti Keswani: Right. So, in terms of the mental resilience strategies—you know, from an intelligence veteran to actually owning a business and coaching people about it—what are the kind of strategies that you could talk about in terms of mental resilience? Because as an entrepreneur, you are actually going through so many challenges which may sound very simple and normal to a person from a military background, but are actually very hard-hitting to the person on the ground, if you may.

Ryan Kristenson: 100%. Yeah. So in terms of those kind of strategies, how can we understand the mental resilience that we need to build up? Man, so I wouldn't say that the entrepreneurship challenges are any less impactful than the military ones, because, you know, switching from that space to entrepreneur, it was just as challenging as pretty much everything else I've done. It's just a different flavor of the same thing.

So what I would say is, number one, if you can develop an attitude of "if it needs to get done, I will do it," that helps a lot. Because if you're faced with these challenging situations, there's a lot of stress, a lot of turmoil, but you're saying, "No, this has to happen, and I'm just going to make this happen no matter how much it sucks." There's that. There's this phrase in the Marine Corps: "just embrace the suck." Yes, it's terrible. Yes, it's painful. Yes, it's annoying. Yes, you're wet and cold. Do it anyway. Just having that attitude of, "It needs to be done, no matter what's in the way, just get it done." And afterwards, then I can wind down and complain, and then I can take my peace. You can recover afterwards, always. But just, if the thing needs to be done, just get it done, no matter how painful or annoying it is.

The second thing I would say is, the biggest thing that will increase your mental resilience and capacity to handle stress and everything else is to learn to frame the situations better.

I found out last year that I had bipolar disorder, found it out the hard way. I had a pretty severe episode. And when that's the case, you have to get on medication; there's pretty much no choice about that. But the problem is, when you're doing that, it's pretty much a trial-and-error sort of thing. So I went through like 14 months of trying different medications before I found one that actually worked and kept me stable and didn't mess me up.

So for 14 months, I couldn't really work on my business. Lost 75% of my revenue. There's a lot of weeks where I just wasn't able to even get out of bed until like 2:00 in the afternoon. It was rough. And if I'm looking at that from the perspective of, "Oh, I'm losing my business, and my business is going under, and I'm going to go bankrupt and all that sort of stuff," that is a massive amount of stress and pain, and it's going to put you in a deep hole.

So I looked at it and said, "Okay, fair enough. I can't actually do this. Fine. I'm on sabbatical. I'm on sabbatical until I get my mental health in order. And once I'm there, then I can start my business back up again. I will start my business over." And so that gave me the space to just deal with this and deal with the stress and focus on that. You know, take the money out of the 401k and put the stuff on credit cards. It's like, it's fine. At some point in the near future, I'm going to be stable and good to go, and then I will be able to restart my business. It's not that this has failed; it's like, no, I put this on pause, start it up again in the new year when I'm ready to go." And that just took the entire pressure off of that, because I don't have to try to do something I'm not capable of in that moment.

So if you can take a look at the situations you're in and figure out how you can reframe that to take away that stress and pain and take away the pressure, now all that stuff is a lot easier to deal with.

Last but not least, just looking at emotions as something other than pain makes a huge difference. Because then, feeling bad actually becomes a good thing. If these signals, if these emotions are just signals your mind is asking you for help to solve a problem, it's actually helping you identify what's going on in your environment faster. So those negative feelings actually become a good thing; they become tools that are helping you rather than something to avoid.

Neeti Keswani: Wow. Both... they're very beautiful. I think the first aspect especially, I was absolutely blown away with that—when you reframe, and the way you explained the example of it in your particular scenario, how you have reframed your mindset thinking that you're on a sabbatical, and that's taking the pressure off. That is humongous, especially for the startup entrepreneurs when you're just starting off and you are facing everything in the world on your backside. I mean, that's beautiful what you have just mentioned. So reframing that sort of a thing, that sort of a situation—either family pressure or your business situation—can help you, and then you start off whenever you have the energy to do that.

Ryan Kristenson: Exactly. Exactly.

Neeti Keswani: Amazing. So in terms of building up that resilience, building up... it is not only mental and emotional, it is also physical to take up the burdens that may lie ahead, because you have taken that kind of a sabbatical, right? Correct. So it has to be physical as well, which has to be focused on.

Ryan Kristenson: Yep, yep.

Neeti Keswani: So, when you... so supposedly you're taking somebody through a hypnosis. Let's say an entrepreneur, a startup entrepreneur. So you are helping them unlock their power of how to get that peak performance. You are helping them with the physical aspects as well? Do you do the hypnosis for that also, so that they have to get up and... I mean, if it's required, is there any sort of...?

Ryan Kristenson: It's a bit of a different approach. The way that I look at it is, you already know exactly everything you need to do. You know everything exactly how to do it. You already have all that stuff. You don't need me to tell you that stuff and program that stuff in your head; you already have it. What you need is to get out of your own way so you can do the things you already know how to do.

So my goal with my clients is very programmatic. You basically pay me a flat fee, and I take you to a particular place. And the belief set that I create for you—that I help you create—is a belief set that says, "There's nothing wrong with me, and there never was. There's nothing to heal, and there never was. I'm good enough as I am to deserve whatever I choose. I don't have to prove it to anybody, not even myself."

And what this does is it reframes things where, instead of trying to fix yourself and work on yourself and heal yourself, "This is fine. Given how this is wired, everything's perfect. It's how do I deal with the outside world?" It also creates this thing where you have perfect self-esteem. You always have high self-esteem that doesn't have to be proven any way, shape, or form. So what happens out there in the outside world never shakes how you feel about yourself.

It's part of how I was able to get through that period where I wasn't able to work, because that didn't have anything to do with my worth and my value. It didn't have anything to do with who I am. It's just a situation I'm dealing with. And because my worth and value wasn't tied to my net worth or my business revenue or my physique or anything like that, I could remain with that perfect self-esteem in spite of all the troubles out there. So it's about creating this space where you have that solid self-esteem, you don't have to prove anything, nothing can touch that mindset, every negative emotion helps you. And when you're in that space, everything becomes infinitely easier.

Neeti Keswani: So, inside the mind of a professional hypnotist, are you going through certain transformation techniques for yourself as well while you are helping out the other people around?

Ryan Kristenson: So, I don't do a whole lot of work on myself these days. What I've realized is, once you've kind of fixed all those major problems and you get to a place where there's nothing wrong with me and nothing to heal, the vast majority of stuff that we have to do to kind of keep our mindset right don't really have to be done anymore. Like, I don't have to do the meditation, the journaling, the gratitude work, the cold plunging... it's not necessary because my mind is clear. My baseline state is like clear well-being, kind of in space, from the beginning when I wake up in the morning till I go to bed at night. I don't have to do anything to maintain it.

There's a lot of work that I'll do to explore and add new skills and stuff like that, where I'll do like semantic work to kind of figure out what's going wrong. I'll play with psychedelics on occasion to get some new insight into the world and things like that. But in terms of fixing myself, I don't really need to. In terms of maintaining itself, it's not necessary.

A lot of times I'll use a couple of hypnosis audios to kind of just reinforce some lessons and reinforce some tools, give myself a way to do some integration tools, techniques. And those are things I give all of my clients. But for the most part, a lot of that maintenance work isn't necessary once you fix the big problems.

Neeti Keswani: And in terms of your personal journey, you have also mentioned in your background that you have overcome depression and suicidal thoughts. Is that a fair statement?

Ryan Kristenson: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah. Like I said, I gave up on life when I was young. The first time I thought about ending my life, I was nine. I was dealing with that up until probably September of last year. Once or twice a year I'd have those thoughts. I'd had a loaded gun in my hand several times in my life. And it was just part of that situation where, if I wasn't able to figure out how to live life and get what I needed, it's just really not worth it.

And I've been dealing with that pain and suffering from the very beginning. And at some points in life, you're just like, "I'm done dealing with this." But once I got to that point where I realized, "Okay, that idea that there's something wrong with me, that I'm the reason why I can't get anything I need from the world, that is the most toxic belief ever." Because it means you're broken, and until you fix yourself, you can't live.

But once I realized, "No, this is just how I'm wired. Given that I'm autistic and given that I'm bipolar, everything is working the way it should. I'm getting exactly the results I should be getting given the way I am." So since there's nothing I can do about being autistic and there's nothing I can do about being bipolar, those aren't the problem—because problems have solutions. I can't solve those things; I can't change those things. Therefore, not the problem. The problem is, "How do I navigate the world given how I'm wired?" And now that I understand how I'm wired, it's a lot easier for me to compensate for that and actually figure out how I need to move through the world to get that stuff that I need.

Neeti Keswani: Wow. So apart from business entrepreneurs, are you also helping men in relationships challenges?

Ryan Kristenson: A lot of the stuff I do there, again, a lot of that stuff is self-esteem related. And I'm not a dating coach. I've been divorced twice; I'm not the guy to ask to figure out how to make that stuff work. I'm the wrong man to ask; somebody else is going to be able to tell you how to do that stuff a lot better. I hired a matchmaker recently to help me find somebody. I am not the man for that.

But a lot of that stuff, a lot of the relationship problems, come down to self-esteem and self-worth issues. If you're insecure about yourself, if you're insecure about how you place in the world, that's going to make relationships so much harder. If you think there's something wrong with you, you have to be somebody else, which means you're always playing this game of projecting a persona and trying to keep that mask up, and that never works long-term.

So the best thing you can do for yourself is figure out what's going on inside yourself, fix those things so you lose that insecurity, so you're actually comfortable with who you are, so you actually accept and love who you are, so that you can accept love from other people as well.

Neeti Keswani: Okay. So, what are some of the practical tools and exercises that audiences can have from you and from this episode? How do you break down some of the practical tools or exercises—like, three, you know, just to get started?

Ryan Kristenson: Sure. So the first one I would say, again, procrastination. Anytime you're running into a wall of procrastination, take a step back and figure out which one of those three it is: Am I doing the wrong thing? Am I doing it at the wrong time? Am I doing it the wrong way? That's going to solve a lot of stress and pain.

The second thing I'd say is, again, negative emotions are tools. They're signals. They're helping you understand the environment to figure out what the problem is. If you're running into these negative emotions, if something's wrong, take a step back and get curious. Ask, "What am I missing?" Your mind is trying to help you solve that problem, trying to help you find that solution. And as soon as you start engaging with it, you're starting to do the right thing. And doing the right thing feels good; it doesn't feel so bad anymore. So the best way to reduce that negative emotion is to engage with it. Ask, "What am I missing?"

The third one I would say is, instead of focusing on individual problems in your life and everything else, look for patterns. Look for patterns because if a pattern is repeated over time, then there's a deliberate process that's driving it, creating it. It has to be; otherwise, it wouldn't be a pattern. So if you can figure out that there's a pattern and understand where that mechanism is driving it, you can fix that mechanism and the entire pattern goes away, which means all these individual problems go away as well. Instead of having to play whack-a-mole, doing all this stuff, instead of playing whack-a-mole, take a step back, see if you can identify a pattern. Because if you can fix that thing that drives the pattern, all that other stuff is unnecessary.

Neeti Keswani: Okay. So in this regard, these three nuggets that you've just given us... we'll conclude with them at the end of the episode. But right now, I just feel that since your clarity is pretty evident in terms of the self-esteem issues, would you like to talk about some of the success stories that you might have had in terms of helping somebody come out of a challenge?

Ryan Kristenson: Sure. So there's one client in particular of mine, his name is Vic. He's an older guy, he's a very successful entrepreneur, he had a couple of seven-figure exits. He's in his 50s, 60s. He was trying to be in the dating market, and he had massively low self-esteem to where he had a really hard time even going out and talking with people. He couldn't really date very quality women at all, because he just had so low self-esteem, even though he was immensely successful, good-looking guy, in shape, had everything on paper that you could possibly need. But because his own self-image was bad, he couldn't actually allow himself to go out with people.

So we did some work with him, fixed that sort of thing. And it got to the point where he was so confident that women were actually coming up and approaching him in bars, which almost never happens in the real world. That kind of a 180 shift, from being in the hole to being on top of the mountain, is possible. It doesn't take very long at all.

There was another guy I was working with, he's another entrepreneur, working about 15 to 20 million a year in revenue, he's kind of stuck at that level. So we did some work on him, and again, it's all self-perception, self-worth. "If I don't deserve it, I won't let myself have it." We don't really let ourselves have things we don't deserve. And because he didn't feel like he deserved to have those higher levels of success, he wasn't really allowing himself to do the things he needed to. Got that stuff out of the way, very easy for him to make those higher levels of income.

Neeti Keswani: So basically, you help people even in the case of situations where you are stuck at a particular income level and you're trying to make that next breakthrough. Hypnosis could help with that.

Ryan Kristenson: 100%. 100%. It doesn't take very long at all.

Neeti Keswani: It is all internal wiring, basically.

Ryan Kristenson: Yes. If you think about it, your subconscious mind processes reality and everything around you. It's a part of interpreting reality. So the beliefs you have on a subconscious level determine how it processes reality and the reality it shows you. So everything you believe down there determines the reality you're allowed to interact with and the choices you're allowed to make. So if you change how those beliefs are structured, then you change how your experience is, how your reality is presented to you, and the options that are available to you.

Neeti Keswani: So as I tune into myself, my best version, and I get onto my belief systems, I change them radically. I'm in tune with the right, aligned person with my goals. I'm able to increase my income as per my...

Ryan Kristenson: Wonderful. Wonderful.

Neeti Keswani: So, I think the three key nuggets that I would take from this episode would be... first of all, "I'm not broken." That is the first nugget that I've taken from this kind of conversation—that I'm not broken. You're not broken. We are made in the perfect way possible, and it is just that dust has settled on us perhaps, and that needs to be brushed off. And sometimes we are able to do it ourselves, sometimes we need professional help like yourself.

And two more things, two more nuggets, are going to be about your beliefs. So one is, belief that how you were brought up, that kind of beliefs play on you, or possibly whatever your environment has been. And lastly, it's all about patterns. If something is repeating in your life, instead of beating up on yourself, it's high time that you reflect, get inside, and understand what is really going wrong, and rather than trying to run away from it, get into that turmoil and understand where is the challenge.

Ryan Kristenson: Yes, absolutely.

Neeti Keswani: Anything else that you'd like to add to it?

Ryan Kristenson: Honestly, I think that pretty much covers it. I'm available all the time on my website, www.ryanthehypnotist.com. Got a free consultation; sit down for 45 minutes, we'll dig into what's going on in your life, tell you exactly why it's happening, show you why the other things you tried haven't been able to work, and we'll be able to see if we can't do something to help you.

Neeti Keswani: Awesome. Awesome. All right. So that's been a lovely conversation, a very engaging one, I must say. And I just feel that from this episode, there are so many nuggets for people to take away—from overcoming depression, how to go about it, specifically with the case studies; navigating the challenges of autism, how to go about them; building up mental resilience; and exploring hypnosis and rewiring the subconscious mind.

So thank you, Ryan, so much for all the engaging conversation that we've had today.

Ryan Kristenson: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.