All Seminars brought to you by Mark Patrick Seminars & Associates LLC, Mark may not be the presenter at your seminar. Testimonial results from programs are based on individual effort and other factors. Such results are exceptional or atypical and are not to be expected by the average person using these programs or methods. No one has been paid for their testimonial. © 2017 Mark Patrick Seminars & Associates LLC. All Rights Reserved.

HOST: Good afternoon. Welcome into another addition of the Talk of the Town. Today I am joined with—joined by Mark Patrick from Mark Patrick Seminars. Mark, first of, just want to thank you for being here with us today on Talk of the Town.

MARK: Thanks again for having me on.

HOST: Let's remind everybody. Mark Patrick Seminars coming to the Royal Inn, Tuesday March 15th. You guys have two seminars. You have a weight loss seminar from 5:30 to 7:30. And then there is a stop smoking seminar right after that from 8 until 10. Did I get all that right?

MARK: I believe so, yes.

HOST: All right. Mark you guys have a big platform. You do seminars all across America. How did all this get started?

MARK: Well, I think I started using self-hypnosis when I was 16 years old, will before I ever hypnotized anybody. I was a troubled teenager going down the wrong path and I learned about self-hypnosis and how that changes your image of yourself. And when you change your image that makes you attract behaviors automatically and repel behaviors you don't want automatically, instead of having to think about what you have to do all the time or use willpower for something. It just causes it to happen automatically. So, I've kind of used in the beginning for myself.

HOST: Why do you think it's so hard for us to change our image just by ourselves. You can't just wake up one day and decide that?

MARK: Well, you can. There's three ways you can change your image. You can change it consciously through doing repetition over and over and over and over again. Enough that out of boys or out of girls eventually something sticks in your subconscious mind. The number one way to change your image is through a life changing epiphany moment. As a matter of fact, when it comes to smoking the number one method to stop smoking is actually a heart attack survivor. So, sometimes a little painful experience can shift somebody's image of themselves and get them kind of subconsciously motivated. It's kind of reactive instead of proactive so I'm not a big fan of that because you got to sit around and wait for something bad to happen. And the third way is through hypnosis visualization.

And what happens is this. A lot of people don't know this, but our subconscious mind, we can't see it, but what is does is it runs our lives. Automatically. Every time we breathe, every time our heartbeat, every time our eyes blink. That is controlled through our central nervous system and our subconscious mind is telling our body to do all those functions automatically. So, it kind of works with the hypnosis or visualization side when you have an image of yourself doing things properly subconsciously again, they become automatic.

HOST: I don't know if you've heard about it. There is a new product that is owing the market. It's basically like a shock watch. So, every time you do something that you don't want to do you can shock yourself or sometimes it might automatically shock you depending on the situation. Is that sort of the same type of thing that's going on there?

MARK: No. But I did hear about that product and I saw—I think I saw it advertised online somewhere. And here is what they're doing is they're basically association a painful experience towards something you don't want to do. And obviously, you know—I can date myself growing up back in the 60s they did all that kind of electric shock therapy and pain therapy for people with depression and all these different behaviors. But what they found out later is that is not as effective as they would like it to be.

There is a certain percentage of people that will respond to negative imagery or what's called an aversion therapy. It's a very small percentage of people that respond to need it. What tends to work the best is your subconscious takes you towards pleasurable, positive images and it wants to avoid painful images as much as possible. So, what happens is if you focus more on the positive imagery your subconscious mind tends to want to gravitate towards that a lot more than kind of an approach-avoidance or painful experience.

So, you know there's always a new way to package something up, but I'm not a big fan of the pain association that you might create to something as slight as it might be.

HOST: Interesting. And your hypnosis if of course, completely pain-free.

MARK: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It’s the most pleasurable thing you can imagine yourself experiencing. And a lot of people think that hypnosis makes them bark and cluck and do things against their will. It’s the exact opposite. What hypnosis does is this. Is that it makes you subconsciously do the things automatically that you want to do consciously. When we use our conscious part of the brain we’re now using what’s called willpower. And everybody’s been on diet, everybody’s tried to stop smoking in the past. And they go out there and make a conscious decision to do healthy changes. And they always go back to the old behaviors and patterns.

The habit is a thousand times, somewhere in that neighborhood, more powerful than using willpower. So, that’s what hypnosis does. It allows you to tap into that source of where the power exists as crazy, kind of as deep as that gets. Your subconscious definitely dictates your behaviors.

HOST: How long have you been doing these seminars?

MARK: Well, last month I entered my 20^th year of doing these programs.

HOST: Whoa. Congratulations. That’s a lifetime of work.

MARK: Yes. It’s pretty crazy. I mean, it’s been an amazing, amazing experience. First of all, I’ve been everywhere in the country, every small town, every large town all over the country. So, I’ve got to meet some great people. I have relationships all over the place, but the best part is this is even after doing this for 20 years you know, it never, ever gets old when somebody comes to your seminar or they email you, they call your office and they say, “You know what? I’ve smoked for 35 years and I stopped. You saved my life.” And I don’t take credit for that because you know, it’s a two-part thing.

The person coming in the door wants to live a healthier lifestyle and we just show them how to make that path a little bit simpler.

HOST: So, without I guess revealing too much, how exactly does the hypnosis work?

MARK: Well, first and foremost, let’s explain the perception. Barking and clucking and being out of control. We are actually in full control and incredibly relaxed during hypnosis and we actually during hypnosis, a lot of people don’t realize because they don’t call it hypnosis, but we go into hypnosis every single day of our life.

The easiest way to hypnotize yourself is highway hypnosis. You know how when you drive for a long distance on the PA Turnpike or 80 and all of a sudden you zone out and you don’t remember the last 30, 40, 50 miles. It went by like the blink of the eyes. And you weren’t even concentrating on the road. Highway hypnosis.

Before we go to bed we go into hypnosis state. It’s called the alpha state of brain activity. That’s kind of right before you fall asleep where your mind kind of drifts and wanders off. That’s actually classified as a highly suggestible state. We’re in that state in the morning. So, the best time to actually hypnotize yourself, the best time to tell yourself new positive information is right in the morning when you first wake up and right before you go to bed at night.

HOST: Interesting. Now, are there different types of hypnosis? Like is driving hypnosis different from the hypnosis that you guys do or how does that work?

MARK: It’s a little bit different. What we do is we use a very simple, very effective, progressive relaxation technique and a visualization process to get people relaxed. And the great thing with relaxation is a person—some people are high strung. You only need to relax to the best of you ability during hypnosis. So, as long as you get nice and relaxed, you come in with a nice, open, suggestible mind meaning this: you want to live a healthier lifestyle.

You can come in skeptical, you can come in not even sure if you can be hypnotized. That’s okay. We get plenty success stories that are very skeptical. They’re usually analytical personalities by the way. You know, sometimes if you’re analytical your conscious part of your brain over-analyzes information at a very rapid pace. So, a teacher could be highly analytical, somebody who is law enforcement. Their brain is trained to analyze information, situations all the time. They’re actually some of our best case studies and our best success stories. We actually teach all different personalities during our sessions how to get a good hypnosis session so they can get some results.

HOST: Now, do you use the same technique for both the smoking and weight loss seminar just with you know, minor tweaks depending on you know, what you’re trying to have them do?

MARK: It’s a little bit different. Both of those work on a subconscious image of yourself. Imagine this. Under weight loss hypnosis you do this. You come out of hypnosis, you have an image of yourself six months from the date of our seminar as a slimmer, healthier person now anchored into your subconscious mind. So, here’s what happens. Your subconscious mind now starts attracting all the habits in line with that image.

So, instead of going to the buffet and overeating if your subconscious image of yourself as a healthier person imagine just walking into a buffet eating a small amount of food filling up quickly. And imagine for example craving only healthy foods, not even wanting to eat that food at what would be considered the probably worst thing, to go to a buffet because we tend to overeat.

And if you did something simple like that then you wouldn’t have to think about it how easy would it be to lose weight. And that’s one of the things we focus on during the weight seminar.

With the smoking, it’s a little different. Smokers, if you’re listening to this right now to this interview you love to smoke even though you know it’s killing you. You know that. I know that. We do not focus on the negativity of starting smoking, what we focus on under hypnosis is we’re going to do two things. The first thing is we’re going to do this. We’re going to break all the scenes that you smoked during the day right now. The cup of coffee and a cigarette, that break, that walking out of the building, that driving and smoking, stressful situations, finishing—whatever the scenes may be. We’re going interrupt those patterns, break those connections.

And then the other thing we’re going to do, the second part is this, is under hypnosis we’re going to change your image from that of a smoker, who attracts smoker behaviors automatically to that of a non-smoker who attracts non-smoker behaviors automatically. I mean, think about it. When you hang around with a non-smoker what happens is this. They don’t have to think about not smoking, they just do it automatically and that’s the same process that will take place after hypnosis.

HOST: How often do you get comparisons to the movie Inception and what are your thoughts on that

MARK: Well, I don’t know if I’ve seen the movie Inception. If I did I don’t remember too much of it. But I think is that the one with Leonardo is name, DiCaprio?

HOST: Yes. Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah.

MARK: Okay. Actually not too much. I think most people right now at this point know somebody that’s been hypnotized before or have seen it on a talk show. There're so many different, great studies on hypnosis and mind control right now as far as subconscious behaviors tied into your nervous system. More and more every day there’s always new studies coming out, so I think maybe 20 years ago it might have been a little different perception.

HOST: What made you want to turn this into a business.

MARK: I think what turned it into a business is it kind of happened is exact opposite. When I learned about hypnosis as I became older I started teaching people about health and fitness and how to control their mind and certain things they needed to do and self-talk. And then you know everybody started saying, “Well, why don’t you teach this to people for a living.” And that’s kind of how it evolved. So, really, you know, if you told me I was going to grow up and hey, you’re going to be a hypnotist I would have laughed in your face. I would have said you’re crazy.

HOST: How many people would you say that you’ve helped to date if you have an estimate?

MARK: As a company, we’ve probably worked with in the 20 years at least a half a million people or more. Yeah. We see quite a few people on this thing.

HOST: Now. I’m sure that there are many other hypnotists out there who do something very similar. What do you think that makes your program so successful, one of the biggest?

MARK: Well, I think what makes us successful is this is we get results. We teach people how to get results, how to use their subconscious mind, the strongest muscle in your body to get it to do the things that they want to do versus you know, struggling with all these different behaviors. And I think we’ve taken 20 years to really fine tune this program and I think that’s—the proof is in the pudding, it’s in the results, it’s in the success stories. And the cool part is so many people have come to our program that they’re recommending it to their friends and family every time we go back.

HOST: Yeah, you mentioned the results. This is your fourth time in Ridgeway. So, what are some of the results that you’re seeing from this area that makes you continue to want to come back

MARK: Well, we always seem to get people who come back to our seminars, who refer other friends and family. So, we appreciate that. And you know, Ridgeway is an area that you’re not going to be able to find a private hypnotherapist. And so, we’re bringing this technology to everyone and I think that’s exciting to be able to get hypnotized locally without having to travel to you know, Pittsburgh or somewhere far to see a private hypnotherapist and spend hundreds of dollars on sessions. I mean, for the cost of, what is it, $50, $49.99, $50 for a seminar you can literarily change your life.

HOST: What would you say is the typical seminar size?

MARK: It varies. I mean, we’ve had seminars—we do seminars whether it’s you know, two, three people or two, three hundred people. So, I mean, we get some pretty decent sized crowds. So, sometimes 300, 400 people in our room. So, you know, we’d like to try to manage it so that our clients have the best experience. You know, too big of a crowd sometimes gets a little bit kind of crazy for everybody, but you know, sometimes the turnout is the turn-up. And we just do our best.

But the hypnosis works the same whether there is two people in the room or a hundred people in the room. That’s the great part.

HOST: Yeah. Do you have any standout stories? Maybe someone’s emailed you, called you, something that just really sticks out in your mind as to why this is so important to make as a life changing, a lifestyle change?

MARK: Well, we had a great story not too long ago. A doctor in Syracuse, actually Auburn, he had an office in Auburn in Syracuse. And he basically was unmotivated and had all these different medications he was taking. And he came to our program, it was a cold, snowy night in January. Ended up losing over 97 pounds, but that’s not the exciting part. The exciting part is he turned his life around. He went from being a couch potato to one day he woke up and he walked around—what is it? The Fingerlakes, something New York I think it is. And he walked around that, which was 33 miles. He woke up one day 5:30 and walked around all day long and decided that that was going to be one of his challenges to himself. To go from being completely out of shape and doing something like that in less than six months.

HOST: That is a pretty great story. Listen, we’re talking with Mark Patrick.  Wrapping things up here. Mark Patrick Seminars coming to the Royal Inn, Tuesday, March 15^th. The weight loss seminar 5:30 to 7:30. The stop smoking seminar is from 8 to 10. And then you want to sign up, what, about half an hour beforehand Mark, would you say?

MARK: Yeah. If you’re going to come to the seminar just show up about 30 minutes prior to the seminar or you could pre-register on our website. But we usually pretty good crowds, so I would definitely get their early because it’s definitely limited seating.

HOST: And your website is?

MARK: MarkPatrickSeminars.com, that’s Mark Patrick Seminars with an s, dot com.

HOST: All right, Mark. Anything that you want to add here before we go?

MARK: No, I just—if you’ve been on this rollercoaster ride of diets if you’ve made New Year's resolutions and time after time they’re not coming true for you just come, invest the night in our program and we’ll teach you how to get into control over the greatest muscle, the strongest muscle in your body, which is your subconscious mind. The habits that you create are not only going to be beneficial to you but everybody who has children and grandchildren in this country they are struggling with so many issues and stress more than ever before because the social media and fast foods and everything else. They’re going to follow in our footsteps and they’re rooting on, rooting us on. So, they’re wanting us to succeed. So, that’s going to be an incredibly uplifting process when you do this.

HOST: All right, Mark. Sounds good. And maybe next time we’ll talk we can discuss Inception a little more. Maybe you can go watch it again.

MARK: That’s sounds great. I’ll make sure I watch it before we speak again.

HOST: All right, Mark. We will you see you here at the Royal Inn on March 15^th.

MARK: Thanks for having me on.

HOST: All right. Bye-bye.