The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Winner Peace: How to End Inner Conflict and Make Success Inevitable by Ryan Christensen

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

Winner Peace: How to End Inner Conflict and Make Success Inevitable by Ryan Christensen https://amzn.to/4es6EJ9 Ryanthehypnotist.com When we stop beating ourselves up and start helping ourselves instead, we find the peace we’ve always wanted—but never thought possible. Most of us are trying to succeed our way out of insecurity. But it never ends. This is the fundamental problem of all high achievers: our desire to get more, win bigger, be better, and prove once and for all we’re good enough is not enough. Proving anything to your satisfaction is a rational process. But feeling like we’re not good enough is an emotional conclusion. And the emotional mind ignores rational proof. Feelings don’t care about your facts, so no matter how hard you push or how much you win, victory is only fleeting. Ultimately, this creates obsession, then exhaustion. It doesn’t even feel good to finish anymore. It only feels good to work. That’s not good. Winner Peace brings your thoughts, feelings, and efforts into alignment. Author Ryan Christensen’s new model of belief formation and emotional impact harmonizes the rational and emotional minds so that you can live a life of peak fulfillment. This book is an urgent read for any high-performing individual stuck chasing the moving goalposts of success and meaning.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are at least things that makes it official. Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. For 16 years, 2,000 episodes, we've been bringing you the smartest people on the planet. I'm so terrible. through their stories, their lessons of life, and share with you to make your life better. And if your life's not better when they're done, well, then you're doing it wrong. Go back and listen to all the episodes again. He's the author of the newest book that's going to be coming out October 10th called Winter Peace, How to End Inner Conflict and Make Success Inevitable by Ryan Christensen. We'll be talking to him and his insights on his book today. He is a professional hypnotist specializing in peak mental focus and performance. He hypnotized me to say that. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just reading the Bible. shift their subconscious beliefs towards inevitable success. Ryan's analytical skills and deep insights into the human mind help him discover a new networking model of belief construction

detailed in his first book, Winter Peace, How to End Inner Conflict and Make Success Inevitable. He's got nearly 23 years of experience in the intelligence community, specifically in counterterrorism and counterproliferation operations. He's also a veteran of the Marine Corps and Air National Guard. Welcome to the show, Ryan. How are you? Doing really well.

Thanks for having me on. It's an honor. Thanks for coming. We love it. Give us a dot com. So where can people find you on the interwebs? Sure. So my website is www.ryanthehypnotist.com.

You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram at Ryan the Hypnotist. So Ryan, give us a 30,000 overview. What's in your new upcoming book? Sure. So one of the biggest things that people struggle with pretty much across the board is self-esteem issues, feeling like you're not good enough, like there's something wrong with you that you never measure up, that you just don't deserve, right? And almost everybody, especially in the high-performing world, entrepreneurs, athletes, and so forth and so on, try to succeed their way out of that insecurity, try to prove it from the outside in. But the difficulty is that our beliefs are emotional constructs and they don't really care about facts, right? Ben Shapiro has a thing of feelings don't

care about, or facts don't care about your feelings. The opposite is also true. Feelings don't care about your facts. So you have to go about fixing, yeah, feeling don't care about your facts so you have to go about fixing yeah feeling don't care about your facts it doesn't matter what the facts are you're going to feel what you feel no matter how much you know these people try to succeed their way out of their insecurity no matter how much money they make it just never really changes how they feel so you have to go about it the other way you got to go about it from the inside in rather than the outside in inside out rather than outside in yeah it's it's all the all the works pretty much on the inside i think when it comes to life and different things.

Really is, really is. Yeah. Most definitely. Tell us a little bit about your hero's journey, how you became down the road you went to, how did you get into hypnosis, et cetera,

et cetera. Oh, a hundred percent. So the story actually starts pretty young. It turns out I'm autistic. I didn't figure that out until last year, but it meant that I was always, yeah,

it didn't, I mean, I, you know, the world just never really worked for me, right? It works for everybody else. Everybody else has got it figured out except for me, right? So just the way it is, right?

I'm 100% different than everyone else around me. I grew up in Kansas, you know, and as an autistic guy in the 70s and 80s, nobody had any idea what was wrong with me, right? You know, early on, I kind of gave up on life. I figured I was never going to be able to get what I wanted in life because it works for everybody but me. So I sort of dedicated myself to serving that higher power, serving for the greater good. I joined the Marine Corps, ran off to the Air National Guard, started working in D.C. doing counterterrorism and counterproliferation. And that worked for me for quite a while, right? Having that purpose and so forth and so on, saving the world. But after a while, it became very obvious that all this work I was doing to save the world isn't really saving the world. The world rather stubbornly refused to get saved no matter what I did. So I lost that kind of thing that was keeping me alive, that purpose that I had.

And so I started doing some more work on myself, especially back in 2019, after my second divorce, really got into self-improvement work. And one of the groups I was in, there was a hypnotist talking about toxic shame and emotional baggage. It's like, all right, fine. You know, raised Catholic, got some of that. So I did a session with him and it really kind of felt like just cleared some stuff out. I was at that point in my career

where I was looking for the next big thing. I was thinking about becoming a psychologist, but that's going to be six years and half a million to get my PhD, which was unappealing, which is one appealing prospect in your 40s, you know? Yeah, it definitely is. Exactly.

I wouldn't even be able to get started working with people really until my fifties. And that just wasn't really for me. So I realized that I could get certified as a hypnotist in about six weeks for two grand. So I figured I'd go ahead and give that a shot. See if I even really wanted to start working with people one-on-one. Yeah.

This is right. This is, this is February, 2020, right before everything locked down for the pandemic. Right. So all of a sudden I've got a bunch of time on my hands, start working with people online.

Find, I got a little bit of talent for this. So I did some more training, launched my business in April, May of 2020, went full-time in October, and here we are. And here you are. Was there something about hypnosis that drew you to it? Was there something about it that kind of sparked in you? Yeah. There's a few different things. Like I'd been in now therapy for about a decade between some major depressive episodes I had and like marital counseling and so forth and so on.

So I'd done talk therapy off and on for years and it was helpful. You know, it helped me navigate some situations and stuff like that. But I never really got down to the core issues. It never really changed that stuff on identity level. It never really shifted the big patterns. You know, it's kind of like fiddling around on the edges, selling small stuff, helping me navigate things in the moment. And what I found with hypnosis is you get a lot deeper into the mind. You got your conscious mind, your unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind is running about 90, 95% of your life. If you're really looking for the root of the problem, you kind

of have to get down where the problem is. And that's what hypnosis allows you to do. And as I started exploring things, I was realizing you could get deeper and deeper and do much more targeted work on why things happen, right? Because every behavior, everything you do has a purpose. It's deliberate. If it wasn't deliberate, you wouldn't see patterns in your life. It would just be random. So if you start having these patterns like self-sabotage or things you're getting in your way or things are not working, it's happening for a reason.

Your mind is trying to accomplish something. It's trying to solve a problem of some kind. So we have to figure out what that problem is so we can solve it in a different way if we're going to get you different results and be able to move through the world in different ways. Yeah, because if you keep doing the same things,

expecting different results, you're not going to get any new things. It's amazing how many people do that. And I've been guilty of that too. Where you're like, I keep doing the same thing over expecting different results. And the problem is the same thing I'm doing over and over again. It's how I'm a blogger and stuff. Tell us about your new book.

What are we going to find inside it when it launches? And I think there's some special ways people can get a hold of some chapters and different things. Tell us about that. Yeah. So if you go to my website, www.ryanthehypnotist.com book, you can go ahead and sign up for my newsletter there. I'll go ahead and email you the first two chapters of the book for free. It's going to be available for pre-order in the next couple of weeks. I'll also send you a notification for that. Basically, this book details my entire belief system and methodology around how we form beliefs and how we need to change them. Okay. So this walks you through everything that I do with my clients start to finish so that you can get as much of benefit of working with me as is possible by reading the

book, all the stuff you can do on your own. You'll be able to do with this book. Yeah. Like I want everybody, I want as many people as possible to be able to make these shifts, right? Because everybody's got these issues. They're all trying to do different things to fix it. Why not give them another set of methods to do that I've found to be much more effective than anything else? And I kind of walked through, okay, this is how your mind really works. This is how we process the world. This is why all the other stuff we've been trying doesn't really work on this level. Because if talk therapy is just playing with the rational logical constructs it's not getting to those emotional ones and the emotional ones are what's driving everything we have to

figure out ways to get down to that emotional level definitely it's you know you got your left hemisphere and right hemisphere brains the rational mind the emotional mind the rational mind is really focused on details individual events right the trees your emotional mind is really focused on details, individual events, right? The trees. Your emotional mind is looking at the forest. It's looking at that 30,000-foot view, right? The forest for the trees. Yeah, the forest for the trees, right? And so if we're trying to do all this change by chopping down individual trees, that doesn't really change the forest.

You've got to do a lot of chopping down before you start making these shifts, right? So why not just change what it looks like from 30 000 feet and that way everything in on the lower level kind of has to come into conformity with that bigger view kind of be focused in yes exactly yeah so you work with people you've written in the book how they can do a little bit of this on their own of course ideally i know the best thing to do is to work with you um talk about some of the things that you do. I know it's on your website. You can book a call and different things like that.

Yeah. Fundamentally, a lot of stuff kind of has to be done one-on-one. And the reason why is that everybody has their own story about how they came to be not good enough, how they came to be undeserving. Right? We come to these conclusions very early in life, usually because we can't get what we need early in life. And they become these emotional constructs that then drive us for the rest of our life, right? We have to figure out how those things came to be in the first place and just prove that before we can add anything new. One of the big mistakes that people make when they're trying to do belief work is they just try and shove in new stuff, right? Think

about like affirmations. I'm just going to tell myself how awesome I am day after day after day, right? And try and force a new belief through repetition, right? So the problem is that you're basically dumping in a new belief and now it has to compete with this old belief. And your old belief has decades of evidence. Your new belief doesn't, right? So eventually that old belief starts taking over.

So in order to really create a new belief, you have to take the old belief, disprove it to make it untrue so you can get rid of it and then have a new belief installed. But that new belief also has to explain your life up until now. You can't just pretend things were different

or things would have gone different if I was this way because I didn't. You know that, right? So the new belief has to still explain the way your life turned out the way it does while giving you the capacity to do something else with your life, to do different things. And that's hard to do through a book or a recorded course, right? Because everybody's different. One of the aspects you talk about in the beginning of the book and the intro is there is no needle. Tell us what that means. Oh, so one of the core beliefs, one of the biggest

problems that everybody faces is they think that they are the problem. They are the problem that has to be solved. Okay. I mean, that's mainly what my last 10 marriages told me. Yes, exactly. Exactly. There's this whole thing about, oh, I'm the common factor in all these things. So it has to be me.

Right. But one of the things that, there's a couple of problems with that. Number one, it's really hard to change who you are as a person. You can put on different masks, try on different personas, do different things with your life, but it doesn't really change who you are at your core. Number two, it's never really who you are.

It's how you're navigating the world. That's the problem. And so one of the things that I work through with my clients is this idea of, hey, you've been trying to figure out what's wrong with you your entire life, trying to fix all kinds of stuff.

You've been doing this for decades. Right. And it's almost like you're trying to find a needle in a haystack. And it's almost impossible to find a needle in a haystack. Yeah. What's even harder is, yeah, what's even harder is to try and find a needle in a haystack when there's no

needle in the haystack. So is, is the fallacy that there is no needle the fallacy is that you are not that the fallacy is you are not the problem who you are as an individual is not the problem how you're navigating life the beliefs you have the conclusions you've drawn about yourself the conclusions about you've drawn about the world that's the problem and those things are not who you are so once you disconnect those things, now you don't have to change self.

Self becomes fine. And it's just a question of, okay, what techniques, what frameworks, what processes do I need to use to navigate the world in a better way? So basically, is it like the matrix? There is no spoon? A little bit.

A little bit. A little bit. One of the tricky things about this is if you feel like there's something wrong with you, then there's something to with you then there's something to fix if there's something to fix that means you're broken right what if you think you're broken is that another part of broken another way of being broken it can be it can be because again unless you're perfect and so unless you are unless you are i haven't met one of those yet but i'm assuming that there's got to be at least one of them out there there's a book on somebody that was so sweet when i'm not sure what

whatever became of it anyway it could have been like the bible something like that i don't remember like that we know how that turned out that's why that's why i don't strive for perfection i i don't want to like the other people but i'm close or i think i am or i'm delusional. Why do you think hypnosis, I mean, you've kind of touched on it a little bit, but do you find that people, you know, they've tried other different forms of work and therapy and help, and hypnosis just really clicks for them. Why do you think you find it clicks for people? I had a mentor of mine that used to say that people come to a hypnotist because they can't find witch doctor in the phone book. To the back.

And these days, yeah. And these days you can even do that. You know, ayahuasca journeys in the jungle and all that sort of stuff. But fundamentally, people don't really talk about hypnosis much. And every time you see hypnosis is either a trick in the movie where somebody's trying to take over your mind or it's a stage show where they're making you like run around clucking like a chicken. Right. either a trick in the movie where somebody's trying to take over your mind or it's a stage show where they're making him run around clucking like a chicken, right? So for most people, for the vast majority of people, they don't consider hypnosis a real tool for self-improvement or change. So that's one of the biggest problems. It just has a bad rap. But after you've tried

everything else, if you've done the therapy and you've done the self-help courses and you've done the spiritual retreats, you've done the energetic stuff and you've done the somatic work, you've done the psychedelics and you've already done all that stuff and you're still not fixed, then you're always looking for, okay, what's next? And for a lot of things, like a lot of these things, pretty much everything I've done, because I've done all that stuff and every single thing I did helped me in some way. It made my life a little bit better, made things a little bit easier, right? But fundamentally, it never got down and really changed those core beliefs that really were running my life, okay? And the difference between hypnosis and everything else is two different things. Number one, it gives you that direct access to your subconscious mind where those problems are actually at.

You have to solve the problem where it's actually at. If you've got a problem with your carburetor in your car, changing your tires doesn't do anything. So you have to actually go where the problem is. Number two, you get to do it in a very targeted, directed, and controlled way. So I actually get to go after exactly what I'm looking for. A lot of people go for psychedelics in order to do this kind of work because it does open up your unconscious mind. It gives you all sorts of access to it, gives you all sorts of insight to it. You come up with all these interesting things you've never seen before.

But the problem is you don't have any control over where you go. So you don't get to work on what you really want to work on. And number two is very difficult to make any really purposeful shifts while you're in the middle of a psychedelic trip. If you don't have someone there facilitating and walking you through changes while you're doing it, then you're kind of on your own with what you bring with you. Yep.

So this is just that. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. In your book, you talk about working with men and how they try everything, but sometimes things just doesn't work for them. Is it maybe men respond better to hypnotherapy maybe than men? What I found is that men tend to be much more driven in their pursuit of trying to fix themselves. Right.

For men, we have this, it's kind of overarching narrative that it's always on us. It's always our responsibility. Yeah. So if there's something wrong with us, if something's not working, we're the ones that have to do the work.

Yep. So I find that for the most part, men are a lot more willing to dive deep and face the parts of themselves that are uncomfortable, that they don't like about themselves. It's just a part of us where we're just a bit more driven to face that darkness. Yeah. Self-accountable, right? We're expected to be self-accountable. We don't get that.

Expected. Yeah, we don't really have a choice. Don't really have a choice. Yep. Don't have a choice. If we don't carry the world, no one will. It's just one of those things. What are some other aspects we can tease out from your book to people that people should maybe know about or you talk

about in the book? Yeah. One of the other biggest things that I find is one of the most destructive beliefs that are out there that pretty much everybody has is this idea that emotions are pain. We talk about heartbreak. We talk about our hurt feelings all the time. There's this whole narrative around trauma and emotional wounds and so forth and so on. And the difficulty is, the way I look at the mind is you've got a conscious mind, a rational mind, an emotional mind, and an instinctive mind. Your instinctive mind is responsible for your physical survival. When you define emotions and negative emotions as pain, you're telling your instinctive mind to treat

your mood and your emotional state as a threat to your physical health. Okay. And this is what triggers all those massive fight or flight responses. Okay. This is why, you know, we talk about deaths of despair, you know, drug overdoses and alcoholism and, you know, ending your life, all this kind of stuff is driven by this physiological response to your emotional state. But the reality is every negative emotion you experience, every emotion period is just a signal from your unconscious mind about how it's viewing the world and what it means for you in response.

Okay? It's your mind asking for help to solve a problem. Okay? And so when we make the shift from looking at emotions as pain to looking at emotions as questions, now we don't have to have that same physiological response. We don't have to run from them. They become useful tools that help us navigate the world.

So even when we're feeling bad, that's a good thing. Oh, so that's how we should look at it like maybe the reason or you know some people when they feel triggered or when they feel bad it's because that trigger is is sometimes the real world saying them hey you live in a state of delusion you need to wake up at least that's yes i don't know yeah that's like it's a trigger sign that it's oh you're being triggered by that it's somehow you're out of sync with reality and you're having trouble dealing with reality that's facing you.

And it's time to deal with whatever belief systems you have that are contributing to that. Yeah. If I can give an example on that. For example, if you've got this deep down feeling of I'm not good enough, right? And you put yourself in a position where that could be proven true, right? Like where you're starting a new business venture and you could fail. That can be very triggering, not because of the failure, but what the failure means about you. It's proving that thing about you true. And that triggers that deep emotional response, which is so threatening.

So your mind then starts to protect you from those situations so you don't get that emotional response, so you don't have to respond to it as a physical threat. That's how we trap ourselves in so many ways, so many ways. It's one of the most instructive things. It really is, and more people don't realize it. I mean, when I use the, you know, what was the old thing about Abraham Lincoln?

He used to say, that person, I don't like that person for their ideas. That means I should probably get to know them better. You know, a lot of times I've learned that when I'm struggling with something or I feel conflicted or triggered, it's because maybe I'm out of sync with reality. And I need to, it's time to check, do a dipstick check and check the oil and see what's going on. Or just want being a dipstick. There's one thing I used to, I used in my works a lot is this concept of pain points the way if you burn

your hand on the stove, you know, you didn't get your hand off the stove because it was burned. You ain't got your hand off the stove because you're damaged. You get damaged, but now you got a new problem. Your hands burn. So your mind has to call attention to the fact that your hands burn so you

can fix it. Right. So pain is a signal that says, Hey, there's something here that's broken. You need to fix it. So then if you're looking at emotions as pain to begin with, then the emotion itself,

those negative emotions are leading you to the point, you know, to the actual thing that's broken or the thing that's the actual problem. So being triggered is actually a good way to figure out what's really wrong inside the things about your identity, the things about really wrong inside the things about your identity the things about your past the things about your life things about the world around you that are actually the problem for you that are holding you back from success holding you back from being able to navigate the world in a real way so what have we talked about in the book and in your work that we

should tease out to listeners before we go oh boy there's a lot there but you know yeah there really is there really is the biggest thing i think that people need to understand is that problems are actually really easy to solve they actually are problems are extremely easy to solve once you know what the problem is the hard part is freaking out that the problem is in the first place i've got an idea for most people there you go to the mirror in your home and stare at whoever is in that mirror and that's probably the problem right there but if there's no needle then that's not the problem i usually make sure someone else is standing in the mirror so i can point at them it's that person over there it's it's usually one of my huskies that i'm pointing at. It's the husky that's the problem. Yeah.

So what I would say is if you haven't been able to figure this out, if you haven't been able to figure out what's going wrong in your life, that's okay. You just need to keep digging, need to keep going down rabbit holes, need to keep following that curiosity until you get to the point where you do actually understand what the problem is. And so one of the things about my book that I really hope people will be able to take from it is that there's an entire other area of your mind that for the most part, people don't explore. And rather than being something that's locked off that you can't touch, it's actually something where you can open up the door, you can get down and you can explore it. You can actually figure out what's going on and it's not hard. There's no mystery. Your mind knows exactly why

it's doing this stuff. It knows exactly the purpose it's trying to serve. You just have to get to a point where it can tell you. As we go out, tell people where they can get to know you better, where they can order up or get a chance to get notices for the book and then how they can onboard with you. Is there phone calls that they can do, book a meeting, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So again, my website is www.ryanthehypnotist.com. If you go to the Winter Peace book link at the top, you can go ahead and sign up for my email list, get notifications there. Again, I'll send you the first two chapters for free.

You can also have the opportunity there to go ahead and book a consultation with me. We'll sit there, take a big look at your life, figure out what's going wrong, what's not working for you. And we'll actually give you some brilliant insight as to why that's happening for you, and then tell you what I might be able to do to help you get through that quick. Thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, bud.

Thank you so much for having me on. Really appreciate it. And get ready, folks, to order that book wherever fine books are sold. Also go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, Chris Voss 1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that's it.