EP 130
Welcome fellow confidence crusaders, neuro nerds and success equalizers. This is your podcast, Real Confidence. I'm your host, Alyssa Dver, and I'll be sharing a bit of basic brain science, some surprising social secrets and a touch of tough love. Why? Because I believe confidence is everyone's fundamental right and choice. So let's get to it.
Alyssa:
Hello again, my friends. This is Alyssa Dver. We're at the Real Confidence podcast, and today we're going to have yet another phenomenal time talking to a special guest. Curtis McCollum has joined me. So Curtis, thank you for being here, first and foremost.
Curtis McCollum:
Yeah, I am excited to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Alyssa:
Well, we are going to talk about a couple of really interesting things today, and I want to level set a little bit, because in your bio, it says that you are a mindset expert, and you use modalities that, in and of itself, is a big word, but NLP, hypnotherapy and mental emotional release, and I would like to start breaking each one of those down just as a level set. So NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming is what?
Curtis McCollum:
Neuro Linguistic Programming is, a science that actually breaks down. Neuro is the mind. Linguistics is language, how we speak to ourselves, mentally, physically, and then programming is actually what actually think about apps. We all have mental apps that runs or programs that run. So what Neuro Linguistic Programming does, it allows us to find out what strategies that you're actually utilizing, so that we could either interrupt that strategy to bring in their strategy or program that you want to actually be programmed.
Alyssa:
Wow, yeah. And I know that there's certifications and programs to learn how to do that programming.
Curtis McCollum:
Yeah, it is basically, yeah. I'm a Master Practitioner in neuro linguistic programming, meaning like so when I talk about Neuro Linguistic Programming, those part of the modalities that I actually teach. When I look at my, my program holistically, my my framework is called legit mindset, or learning, growing, expanding and transforming and went through that we utilize neuro linguistic programming, and we also utilize, I think you're going to ask me next about hypnotherapy.
Alyssa:
Yes, I am.
Curtis McCollum:
And interesting about hypnotherapy. Most time when a person says hypnotherapy, the first thing that comes to mind is woo woo, or stage hypnotherapy, where they have people cracking like a duck or barking like a dog. That's not the case at all. Basically, what it is is that I teach my clients how to utilize the power of their mind so they can do things on purpose, with purpose. Give you an example is that most of us, or all of us, go through trance. Trance is hypnotherapy, is just trance. Basically, we all go through trance almost every 90 seconds where we just, like, zone out and somebody's calling your name, unless Alyssa, and then you says, oh yeah, I'm here and, but you didn't you heard them, but you didn't hear them, or you were driving on the freeway and and you just driving, and you didn't see any of the signs, and all of a sudden your exit is coming up, and you just automatically go off to your exit. Basically what that is that's trans basically, that's your subconscious mind now taken over, over control, and you're there. You see sense and feel things, but your subconscious mind is now controlling. What I do with hypnotherapy is that we put you in that state, what we call almost like a trance like state, so that now we bypass that critical faculty, that part of our minds that give us all that chatter, I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy, or all that talk, that self talk, so we quieten that, so that now we're dealing with the 95% of all our behavior, that is the subconscious mind.
So we have 5% we normally about 5% consciously, according to Dr Bruce Lipton, in the Biology of Belief, and about 95% is of our subconscious mind. So think about it, if we can now help individuals program the part of their mind that's actually controlling their behavior. Then you talk about confidence. Now we can instantly put a person in a confident, confident state without years. I think you said something about 60 years for a person to reach that level of confidence.
Alyssa:
I'm like, wow, that's an interesting statistic. Yeah. Yeah, and unfortunately, it's been proven over and over again. You know, hypnotherapy is funny. I just literally unlocked a part of my brain that I tucked away. But back in my college days, I was trying to find ways to raise money, like literally doing 20 dark jobs so I could go travel to Europe, and I volunteered don't fall off your chair, and my new friend Marty Seligman, Dr Marty Seligman, who is credited with the being the founder of positive psychology and everything, was doing research, and you could volunteer to be hypnotherapy, whatever, Hypno hypnotized. But it was part of this research they were doing to see if they could improve our memory. And, you know, there's a whole audience and everything, and I actually was one of those subjects. So like, I love it. I love what you said. I'm like, Yeah, you know, there is this chatter, noise, all kinds of stuff that's happening. We get through that layer. I think there's so much more in the brain that we can unlock. And he was trying to do that 150 years ago when I was in college.
Curtis McCollum:
Come on. Come on.
Alyssa:
Yeah, well, it was a long time ago, but needless to say, it's nice to know that it's still kind of active. So the last one on that list, and I this is really kind of the center of what we want to talk on this pod, is mental, emotional release, which I believe is a majority of what you practice and do. Can you tell us what it is? And let's, let's get into it.
Curtis McCollum:
Yeah, really, absolutely mental, emotional release is a science. Is part of what they call timeline therapy. It was formulated by Dr. James Ted. James formulated timeline therapy, and his son, Matt James, went back and did a dissertation and and kind of call it mental and emotional release. So the foundation of that is to allow us to instantly go back to a time and reframe that time with new learnings. To give you an example of that is that few weeks ago, I'm saying three weeks. I'm from Mississippi, so time is we don't have a time factor here. But a few months ago, I was still suffering from a belief that success is hard and difficult. Success is hard and difficult. So we do a mental and emotional release Is that we ask ourselves the question. Mike, the person who took me through it, is, is it okay for us to release this feeling, or emotion of success is hard and difficult. Yes. Then he asked the next question, when was the root cause the first event, when that feeling of emotion happened? And I said, my subconscious mind came up age two. Didn't know where it was happening. At age two, I just went to age two. So we which in mental emotional release. We float on our timeline above that event, looking down on an event, and then allow our subconscious mind now to get some learnings. The subconscious mind loves to learn. Once it learns what it needs from an event, it usually releases the emotional intense around the event. So my learning was that I'm strong, I'm confident, and I'm very resistant or persistent.
So you give that learning back to all the subsequent events where that feeling of emotion happened, all the way back to now. Now this is the catch, is that I didn't know what happened at age two, but I was curious, so I picked up the phone. I called my mom. I says, mom, what was happening in my life at age two? She says, Oh, sweetie. She's from Mississippi. Oh, sweetie, around 18 months, when you're around 18 months, around two years old, your sister was about to be born, and you were being potty trained. This is the thing she said, and it was the exact same word. She said, it was hard and difficult for you to be potty trained around age two, so that even though I didn't know what happened at age two, my subconscious mind along my timeline knew what that feeling and emotion route was, and allowed me to go back to remove it. So that's what I do with my clients. One of the things we do, what I call a one day mindset reset. If you go to my site, you'll see it. It's a one day intensive where we spend about three hours together, where we get rid of all the anger, guilt, sadness, fear, and any other limiting beliefs a person may be suffering, so that now we can build a strong foundation to for them to be whoever they want to become.
Alyssa:
Alright? Well, you said this before. It's not woo, woo. It sounds a little woo woo. True. True exactly like, you know, it's like, you know, you're exorcizing in some ways, you know, getting rid of those demons that that are eating us from the inside out, and we don't even know they're doing it. But there is a lot of science behind this. There's a lot of neurology behind it. So maybe, can you tie a little tighter for this audience who really appreciates this. Why is this? How does this work, in terms of the neurology our brain, and why? Why does the release actually, you know what is about it?
Curtis McCollum:
Basically, what happens is, think about it like this. Alicia, is that if something happens in my life, we'll just say this mic thing. It was an air pot, like an air pod, air pod, whatever. Yeah, so now it's here if I go 15 minutes before I picked it up. It's not there, right? So when we when, when you're in a light hypnotic trance. Basically, we're going 15 to 20 minutes, or sometimes further up and further back before the event actually started. So the sub, once it goes beyond be before the event starts, it releases the energy around the event, so that now when we go back into the event, the emotional energy has now been released, and you don't have that feeling of emotion anymore about that event.
Alyssa:
And you're seeing the event just as an event, not as a feeling. You're not tying it to any emotion that you say, oh, that sucked. You're just like, This is what happened, period.
Curtis McCollum:
But basically so, so just give it this. Just give us tangible. I was working with a young person yesterday, and we were doing anger. So we went. We flowed above their timeline. Went to the event where they haven't he felt that the anger was initiated. We went. He looked down on the event and says, what did you learn from that? He gave me some learnings from that event. Then I then I told him to take in the learnings, because, like I said before, the subconscious mind loves learning.
Learnings is part of the release of the emotions around most things that happen in our life that I mean biblically speaking, I think there's a passage in the Bible, in the book of James says, he says, Confess your faults, one to another, that you may be healed. What he's saying is that once we acknowledge that something is happening in our lives, the emotional ties and the emotions that tied to it is now start to dissipate. So we did was we get the learnings. Then I tell them the second part of it is that now go to B, B is before the event and before any chain of events, and go up, farther up and further back on your timeline. And then I asked them the question, Where are the emotions?
Now, what I'm asking is that, because on a perspective level, if I go before the event, then the emotions of that event is not there. It can't be because it didn't happen yet. Then once the emotions are released, then they can go back into the event and they'll find out, like, wow, he's like, I was sad about what my mom said? But I don't feel it anymore. I feel the learning that that came up. It's such, it's just, it's kind of hard to explain. I think on my site too, I have a case study where a young lady talks about it, because it's kind of hard to even really put into words and the power of it. And I got a text this morning from him, which he's like, Curtis, thank you for what happened yesterday. And I have a new lease on life, and I'm always still amazed, even though I see it and I feel it and I go through it, individuals, weekly, sometimes daily, I'm still totally amazed at the power of it.
Alyssa:
That's cool. That's really cool. So this is what I like to do, Curtis, because we're certainly going to talk about how to reach you and some of the resources that you offer in just a minute. But I also want to give people an idea like, if, if they are feeling like, oh, this might be something that I could do or take advantage of. I want to give them some tangible things that they can start right now, yes, with really identifying and subsequently maybe addressing some of these issues that may be holding them back. Limiting beliefs is a phrase that we use a lot on this podcast, you know, and sometimes people don't even know they've got them. So bear with me. We're going to give a little sponsor love, and we'll be right back.
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Alyssa:
Curtis, my new friend, I am really digging what you're talking about, because I feel like it's a whole different approach to things of that people may not even know that they're carrying around, right and you're talking about these kind of deep seated, rooted beliefs created by events, created by subsequently, emotions that get tethered onto it so short of enrolling from your workshops or reading a book, is there something that somebody you can recommend they do right now? And it could be both, how do they realize or figure out, if it's there's something they're anchoring them down, and then what do they do about it?
Curtis McCollum:
Yeah, the first, the first thing is, I like to always explain that a feeling is an emotion. A feeling is an emotion that wants to communicate with us and leave so if a person kind of wrap their hands around that so, but just use sadness for sad for a second. So now I wake up this morning, I'm feeling this feeling of sadness. What? What? What? What my my body and my mind is telling me that it wants to communicate something with me and leave. Most of the time what we do is press it down, or push it down, and so it's not, I don't want to deal with that right now. Well, then it's going to continue to come up. And normally it's going to come up in one more than one way. It could come up in our bodies. It come up in our mind. Now we have headaches now we have backaches because of this, this feeling or emotion that wants to be released, but we're not paying attention to it. So the first thing I tell individuals to do that they can do right now is stop and be honest and say, I am feeling sad, I am feeling afraid. I am feeling. Listen to my words here, guys, it's so important. That's part of the neuro linguistic programming is how we speak to ourselves. Is so important. I didn't say I was sad. I am sad. I said I'm feeling sad. I am feeling like I'm not worthy, right? I'm feeling that I'm not saying I'm not worthy. I'm feeling that that's the feeling or emotion that's actually a state. So now, once I acknowledge it, what I tell people do they can do now is take a couple of deep diaphragmatic breaths, and what the diaphragmatic breath, does it puts your body in it ignites the parasympathetic nervous system, so let the body knows that it's safe and it's okay.
And I tell people also, I tell people all the time, is that it's okay not to be okay, but it's not okay to pretend that you're okay.
Alyssa:
And you're not, oh, wow, it's a mouthful, but I get it, yes.
Curtis McCollum:
So now I'm saying I'm taking my deep breaths. Breath is kind of coming from the diaphragm, and what you take them as many as you need, normally, three or four or five would kind of put the body into this relaxed state. Now ask yourself the question, what is it that I need? Or what do I need to learn? Or how can I now move forward from this feeling, emotion or state that I'm in? Hear me closely, guys, do not. And I had to say, do not, because not the subconscious mind. Don't get knots, but do not, do not ask why questions. If you ask your subconscious mind a why question is going to give you all the freaking reasons why you're not worthy, all the reasons why you're sad, all the things that's actually bringing on that feeling or emotion or state, you want to ask yourself, what do I need to do? How can I move forward? What is it that I need to learn from this? Then what it's going to do is going to immediately start to give you reasons and understandings of what it is that's actually holding you back. That's the learning. Write that out, whatever it is, whatever comes up to you, that that reframe of that state that you have is going to be a reframe. And then what I tell people immediately take inspired actions based on what you what came up. One of the things we do, we get these Inklings, we get these intuitions, and all of a sudden we just let them fizzle out, go away, instead of like, wow, your intuition told you today says, hey, make that call to the person that you've been thinking about calling, and you says, and it goes and but that was the time that they knew that the energy was there, and if you just made that one call, that one more dial, that that pick up, that whatever you know, that one more email was the what you needed to move forward and that, and that's what happens, is that take inspired action, and then, however often you need to do that, you can do that.
So that's one of the things I tell people all the time, is that you can start this today. You don't have to wait for me, because people have been getting rid of problems long before me. And one of them, one of the philosophies in the Hawaii, Hawaiian philosophy, is that all learnings are not or all wisdom is not in my school, meaning like, I don't hold the Holy Grail, and I do have a special gift that that allows me to help you move faster, quicker than you can on your own, for sure, but well, how do people get a copy of that gift? Because you're giving things to this audience, and I am very grateful for that.
Alyssa:
So how do they find you and what's your gift?
Curtis McCollum:
Basically, what they can do is they can go to my site, and basically on my site, there's going to be an area where you can sign up for a free 15 minute consultation, if you just want general if you're not quite sure where you are in this journey, you know, I don't, I'm not quite sure, then there's another one on there too that they can do a 30 minute with if they want a personal transformation. And all the stuff on my site. You can get the science and the site and the science of what I do. You know, with Neuro Linguistic Programming, I practice of hypnotherapy called integral hypnotherapy. It's been, it's been documented and scientifically proven. It's client based, evidence based. So basically they can go into my site, and that thing is the science and systems around what I do, so they can read about it, to kind of get familiar with it. I have some free downloads on the site. They can also go to my YouTube channel. Have a lot of videos on there, so they can kind of get to know me.
Alyssa:
That's great. Yeah, so we're going to put all the URLs because they're kind of long. And there's a couple of them here that you provided us the YouTube site. What's, what's your YouTube handle? Because that would be an easier one, Curtis McCollum, okay, so C, u, r t, i, s, m, c, c, u, l, l, o, M, my friends. And of course, we'll put that in the links too. Curtis, it's been a joy. And you know, I get the benefit of seeing you on screen, and your energy and your positivity is very radiant. So thank you for sharing it with me and the listeners today.
Curtis McCollum:
Oh, you're welcome. It's my pleasure.
Alyssa:
Before we totally wrap up, I want to let you know that full transcripts and show notes for this and other Real Confidence episodes can be found on www.AmericanConfidenceInstitute.com/podcast. I also want to remind you once again that the best way to get confidence is to give it to others, and you can do it just by liking and sharing this episode on your preferred podcast and social media channels. You can even give me some confidence by noting topics you'd like me to consider for the future. So for now, this is Alyssa Dver. Thank you for helping to bring more confidence to the world.
Master editing done by Ben Weinstein with original music performed and composed by Jeff Mitchell. Real Confidence is a production of American Confidence Institute, All Rights Reserved.
