We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Katelyn Redwood a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Katelyn, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.

Before becoming a hypnotherapist, I was a professional musician and had a side hustle doing website design and online marketing. I was passionate about music, but couldn’t survive on music alone. I was never passionate about marketing, but liked the flexibility and freedom working for myself provided. At a certain point though, I was feeling trapped professionally, feeling like there was no path of advancement that felt fun to me, and so I began a period of introspection that mostly felt like a depression when I was going through it. But I read, listened to podcasts, journaled, and gave myself space to just not have an answer.

Then my sister’s kid came to visit me and without knowing anything about the block I’d been facing they asked me out of the blue, “If you HAD to be doing something else, what would it be?” I don’t know where on earth this question came from, and even more mysterious, where my answer came from, but without much thought at all, I found myself saying aloud, “maybe in another life I’d be a hypnotherapist.”

I had never, ever considered becoming a hypnotherapist. I’ve only been curious about hypnosis. When I first moved to LA 15 years ago, I remember driving on the 101 and seeing the sign for “HMI College of Hypnotherapy” and thinking to myself, “Huh. I didn’t realize you could go to college for that. That’s cool…” But aside from reading a book or two on the topic, I had not given hypnotherapy much thought since then.

So where was this answer coming from? I had been asking myself the very question my sister’s kid had asked me for months, but for some reason, at this moment, an answer came. Fascinated by this response which my subconscious seemed to randomly generate, I began looking into becoming a hypnotherapist. I discovered that the school I drove by all those years ago is not only considered one of the top (if not the top) institutions for training hypnotherapists in the world, but that they had moved their full program online. Over the coming weeks I did more research, talked to their admissions staff, and the more I learned, the more excited I got about the possibility of becoming a hypnotherapist. 14 months after that first question, I had graduated with honors and started my practice. That one question presented to me by my nibling completely changed the course of my career and life.

Katelyn, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Whenever I would hear or read anything about how our mind, thoughts, and beliefs dictated our experiences with the world, it always rang true to me. I’d experienced this in my own life as I worked through personal traumas, negative thoughts, fears, and limiting beliefs. So when I began to look into hypnosis and learned how it used the subconscious mind to gently change our personal narratives, I knew that the work would resonate with me.

The subconscious mind is how the mind believes the world is and how we exist in it. It creates this program based on our own personal experiences, and the associations we’ve made with those experiences. And the subconscious is a powerful force! It is estimated that only about 12% of the mind’s capacity is the conscious mind, whereas the other 88% is the subconscious. This is extremely important, because when we want to make a change in our lives, we decide this in the conscious mind. Willpower is in the conscious mind. Logic and reasoning are in the conscious mind. But our deeply held beliefs about the world and ourselves are in the subconscious mind, so if we attempt to make a change by just using willpower, or any of the other tools in the conscious mind, the existing beliefs in subconscious will inevitably win unless you can make changes to your subconscious beliefs. This is why so many New Year’s resolutions fail.

I see clients for a wide variety of presenting issues including fears/phobias, confidence/self-esteem, weight loss/exercise, imposter syndrome, and so much more. But what a client comes in for is just an entry point to creating spectacular change in every area of their lives Once we learn how powerful the subconscious mind is we can harness that power into making changes in any and all areas that they desire – all the way up to self actualization or spiritual enlightenment. Not everyone that comes to see me is interested in that journey, and that’s fine! I will always follow the client’s lead, and many times I see a client for 6 or so sessions and send them on their way. But more often I see clients return again and again as they continue to transform themselves and their lives for the better.

I had a client who came to me to address a specific fear. Underneath this fear was a variety of causes, all of which we addressed in our work together. And while the fear was the presenting issue that got the client in the door, by addressing the causes, the client began to change the entire landscape of their life. One of my proudest moments came when this client, on the cusp of making a major change to their life, thanked me for our work together and shared that they felt that without our sessions, they would not be where they are today. This kind of feedback from clients deeply moves me, because at the heart of my work, I just want to help people understand their own power, and how once you realize this power, there is no limit in how you use it to give yourself a happier, healthier life.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

The ability to listen and truly hear someone is essential in being a successful hypnotherapist. Not only because, as a therapist, it’s important for your clients to feel heard and understood, but also because when in hypnosis, I give the client suggestions that are crafted based on their own language. A person is most suggestible to themselves and their own words, so when I client is speaking, I am listening intently to find the language that holds the key to their transformation.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

For me, the best way to grow my clientele is to do good work. From a marketing standpoint, staying in touch with prior clients via email marketing and attracting new clients with social media and online ads are all helpful, but my number 1 source of new business is referrals. Referrals only happen when you’ve given someone a good experience, so every session I have, I show up ready to give my absolute all to the person in front of me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.goldmindhypnotherapy.com
• Instagram: @goldmindhypnotherapy
• Other: TikTok: @katelynthehypnotherapist

Image Credits
Lauren Armstrong, Ryan Lee