Hi, and thanks for being part of this community of Resilient Entrepreneurs. Today's conversation is with Karim Boktor, a master hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner. We're chatting about how to identify blind spots within ourselves and our team to get breakthrough results, the ones that we are going for. It's about understanding and leveraging the subconscious mind for success, and Karim's delivered a TEDx talk on this very subject.
We're Resilient Entrepreneurs, your go-to podcast for business brilliance. We’re Vicki and Laura, your co-hosts and the duo behind Two Four One Branding, dedicated to empowering new entrepreneurs like you. We're about to dive into a fascinating episode.
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Karim, welcome.
Thank you, thanks for having me.
We're excited that you're here, thank you so much. We were just saying before we started recording that I just watched your TEDx talk. So congratulations on getting a TEDx talk and getting one published. Because now I understand that that's another honour for sure to be on that stage and shared publicly like that. So we usually start this podcast talking about your backstory, who you were, if you were an entrepreneurial kid, that sort of thing, because it often does give us an insight into how you made the journey to where you are today. And your TEDx talks about growing up with a stutter, which overcoming that is an incredible story of resilience right there. So I would love if you could tell us a little bit about that story, what that was like growing up and what that childhood experience was like for you?
Yeah, sure. So prior to us coming to Australia, my parents were persecuted in Egypt. So we were told my dad was a successful entrepreneur, wholesaling petrol, and was told that he needs to leave Egypt because he was too successful. Our family was pretty much kicked out of Egypt. He was really worried about his family getting hurt or killed really. There were men on the streets yelling out names of people who they were going to kill. One of them was my dad. So it was very out of control. We left Egypt without a job or the language or even money. And they came here with pretty much nothing because his accountant that was meant to send him his life savings didn't. So my dad and my mom were in another country with three kids with pretty much nowhere to go. So we stayed with some family and friends initially, and then the government gave us a place to stay in a housing commission.
The housing commissions at the time or still is, very rough. I was two at the time. I probably saw things that I shouldn't have seen, experienced things that I shouldn't have experienced. And then three years later when I went to school, it was time for me to be in a classroom. By then I was an Australian kid. I was more Australian than I was Egyptian. I couldn't really speak Arabic, it was more Australian. But the problem was is that I had a stutter. So I didn't like the way that I sounded, so I chose not to speak at all.
I was also bullied because of my weight and because I was the only Egyptian in the classroom. So there was a lot going on. The teachers thought that I couldn't speak English. I probably had other learning difficulties too, like ADHD and dyslexia but they just put me in the too hard basket. They said, right, this person can't speak English, we're going to put him into a class where the kids called ‘where the dumb kids go’. They put me into ESL. ESL is English as a Second Language. So I grew up with this chip on my shoulder, this belief that I was never going to be deserving enough, that I was the dumb kid.
The thing that killed me, it wasn't my verbal stutter, it wasn't my inability to speak and to communicate and to tell people what I wanted, even though that was a really hard thing. The thing that really broke me was my inner stutter, was my inner beliefs that I told myself that I wasn't deserving and that I couldn't do things because I believed that myself. So a long answer to your question, but yeah, so I grew up with having this verbal stutter, but more so, this internal stutter that I carried as a child, as a teenager, all the way through to my adult life.
So heartbreaking. We can't even imagine having a life like that and being resilient to the point where now you're a successful man in your own right and following your father's footsteps of success. We're pretty sure that you won't face the same challenges. Yeah, what a thing to go through. And how has that fed into your entrepreneurial journey, Karim?
Looking back, so I then opened up later on in my career I went into pharmaceutical jobs and then I went into medical devices. So then I was in the theatre, I was in surgery with doctors coaching them on how to use their products. And the surgeons would often assume that I have some type of medical background or some medical degree for me to be inside theatre. And when they learned that out of school, out of high school, that I'm just a massage therapist, they’d look at me and think either what the hell are you doing in here, or good on you for making your way all the way up here. And I contribute that to my resilience as a child. Everything that I'd gone through as a child, the grit that I had learnt, the persistence that I had learnt and everything also that I had been taught by my parents had got me to this stage. I remember interviewing for this pharmaceutical role because I thought it was a really good job, I interviewed for three years being told no before I was invited to work for Australia's biggest pharmaceutical company at the time and I didn't believe them when they said yes! I'm like, “Are you sure you want to hire me?” because I've been doing this for so long and especially when they gave me a car and they gave me the laptop and they gave me this big salary. I would be in the car driving and I'm thinking, “They're going to take this car away from me anytime now”. I could just feel it. So, it's been a journey.
I definitely understand how one learns to overcome an external stutter with speech therapy of course, there are people that are helping with that. But how does one overcome their inner stutter?
Great question. And it wasn't until I overcame my inner stutter that my verbal stutter was gone. I had gone to a lot of speech pathology and although it helped, it was still there. And it was more of a coping mechanism for me just to try and get by. I'm not sure if you know this about us stutterers, but I would sing a song and I couldn't stutter, I wouldn't stutter. I would act out a scene from my favourite movie scene and I wouldn't stutter. So I would ask myself, why didn't I stutter? And I would think that while I was singing or acting like someone else, I wasn't me. So what was it about me that made me stutter? What was it that when I acted like me, made me stutter? And that was the question that I asked that put me into the rabbit hole. I started to look internally within me and I started to understand that all these times growing up that I had been bullied or teased or being told that I was never going to be anything more than what I was as a child, when I thought about that as myself, it made me stutter. So I did a lot of internal work to try and heal and resolve those times. And whenever I say this, a lot of people tune out because they think that I just want to make money and it's a mechanical thing like I just need to know the strategy or the marketing behind this. It wasn't until I got out of medical devices and I wanted to start a new business, this was probably my third business and I was very confident and I went in there and my wife had just given birth to my first child and it felt like a ton of bricks had hit me. Because as I was going to work, I was always on the back foot because my son wasn't sleeping. He had colic. So I was going in their sleep deprived and slowly but surely, I had a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression because I wasn't sleeping. I couldn't cope. And I used to sleep a lot and I didn't realise this then but I was using sleep as a coping mechanism. But because I didn't have that anymore, all these things from the past as a child crept up. And I had the best business systems, I had just finished my MBA, I had gone to counselling, gone to therapy, and still my business was spiralling out of control. But it wasn't until I started doing this internal stuff, which people may call woo woo or call that it's not important for their business or for their bottom line, this is when things started to really change for me, because this is when my business started to thrive again and I became a completely different person as well. So I got a two for one. I ended up selling the business because I knew where my life path was and what my life journey was, and what I really wanted to do in life was to go all in and learn more about this human behaviour so I can go back with another offer to help other entrepreneurs complete this missing link. This missing link is not another marketing strategy, it's not another business strategy. The missing link is you. And here we are, I'm telling the world about this, how this inner stutter really affects us in business.
It’s brilliant and you articulate it so well, because I really hear you. I think there is a mainstream school of thought that all this inner work is what you do when you retire, or what you do when you're really messed up, but actually it's not for people who are really messed up. It's for people who want to succeed or are already successful and can't work out why they can't get to the next level. And I'm not always talking about more money, I'm talking about inner peace and happiness, fulfilment in your work, doing something that you love, being able to connect with your family. What about the people who are so successful, they're spending all their time at work, but part of that is not because the work needs them, part of them is because they don't know how to connect with their family. And what if they had that as well as the success? So this is such a beautiful message and it's a necessary one and as we're entrepreneurs growing, a lot of our audience is new to entrepreneurship or at least they're starting a new business, and even if we've been doing this for years, every new business brings something new up in us, doesn't it?
Yes, yeah. And I speak to a lot of early-stage entrepreneurs. They sit there and they feel, a lot of them feel like they're frozen and they're like paralysed. But they've got all the tools, they've got all the information but there is just something there within that they can't do it, so they procrastinate, right? And that's why they say, “I just procrastinate”. It's what lies underneath the procrastination. It's the inner beliefs. There's a lot of fear that sits within these early stage entrepreneurs that paralyses. They've got access to amazing programs, they've got access to what the next step could be, but they don't take it. They hesitate and they stutter. And this is because everything that they believe is stopping them from moving forward because it's sitting at a deeper subconscious level. And no matter how many times I can tell them, hey, just do it, do the thing, it doesn't matter because the subconscious is so powerful. There are many journals and many medical papers out there to suggest that the subconscious controls 80 to 90 percent of what we do in life. So there's a reason why people feel stuck, they can't get to that next level. And it's not just a matter of me yelling in their ear and just saying, hey, just do it. It doesn't work that way.
I like to get in and talk a bit more about the fear because absolutely, like you, we talk to a lot of entrepreneurs in the early stage. And the one thing we learned and the main reason we started this podcast in the first place was that mindset was such a huge part of the entrepreneurial journey. And there is no better personal development than becoming an entrepreneur because
boy, do you have to figure out your strengths, your weaknesses, and you're right, in everyone that I've seen hesitating or stuttering, as you say, it's usually some mindset thing, their imposter syndrome kicking in, their worthiness. It's not the tools. It's not what they're good at, what they're capable of, because that is why they're an entrepreneur, because they're doing the thing that they love and they're passionate about it, they're capable, but they're afraid to take that action. So we’ve gotta help people to just work on themselves and know that internal work is so key. I know for me, I try to journal more and more these days that helps me to clear my mind and to get things out, something I've been doing new. There's so many ways to tap into our internal resources and build up our resilience that way so that we can be braver to take the action. Because we do know entrepreneurship comes with a lot of risk. Are there some tips that you'd recommend through either how you help? I know you have a method. Would you like to share a bit about that?
Yeah, yeah. So I'm the founder of the Boktor Method. What my journey was around that is I learned all these cool, different techniques from all these great doctors and leaders within the industry and I wanted to mix it, I wanted to blend it all together to create an even more powerful way of really breaking those glass ceilings.
Number one is we have to look and identify what this actually is that's holding you back. So getting into our own emotions. Now for the listeners at home, they probably don't know, I'm an Arab guy on screen - and me talking about my own emotions if you were to ask me 10 years ago to ask me about my own emotions, I would say, I'm not doing it, you're crazy, it's not happening.
But what I've learned is that our emotions play a big role in how we decide things. It's the reason why a lot of us stop from doing things. So as an example, why are you stopping? And then you would feel the fear. So we need to feel and move through that fear, not just push it aside and numb it with something else, with trying and distracting yourself. That's the reason why people tend to stumble, but sit with this fear, what is it trying to tell you? Usually it's trying to protect you because it thinks that it's trying to keep you safe. It's trying to keep you safe because it's not familiar. This area that you're trying to move into, this new space, this new entrepreneurship is not a familiar space for you. So the number one directive of the subconscious is trying to always keep you safe. So it's always trying to hold you back from what it knows best. So if you grew up like me with a lot of scarcity, with not much, getting to that next level may seem like your body's just freezing. Although you consciously want to get to the next stage, the bigger thing inside of you is telling you no. So what I would like you to do is, just to sit with it, acknowledge it and thank it that it wants to protect you, but also let it know that you want to get to this next level. And sometimes you may need to cry it out, sometimes you may need to just feel the fear, cry it out and tell yourself, give yourself permission that you are so deserving in moving to the next stage. That whether it's this imposter syndrome, whether it is something else, not being deserving enough that you are in fact allowed and so deserving of moving into this next field. You are so deserving of being successful, you are so deserving of this different identity, you are so deserving of coming into a lot of money. And I think that's just enough to get you to the next level.
Yeah, I feel like you were talking right to me just then. That was so powerful. It is so important to talk to ourselves like someone we love as well, right? Like that's what you would tell somebody you love who came to you and said, I don't think I'm worthy. There's this promotion or this idea that I have and I don't think I should go for it. And they say, no, you're of course you deserve everything. And so talk to yourself that same way. That's exactly what I'm hearing. That's really important.
It's so hard. Entrepreneurship is really one of the most difficult things anybody can take on because it's so personal, it's so you, it's so vulnerable. And as probably the Western society mostly is, being vulnerable, sharing emotions is not always looked upon as like a positive. You tell your boys not to cry, you tell your girls to get tough like boys, all this stuff. And we suppress, suppress, suppress. And yet it's when we share that vulnerability and when we do things like this and have conversations like this, so that other people can then go and have conversations with others or internally with themselves that helps them to feel free enough to become vulnerable themselves. I think it's so powerful to change the world and to change the mindset. I'm really excited that you're in this space, and tell me more about hypnotherapy, because that's the next thing I'm curious about. Because I'll be honest, the only thing I really know about hypnotherapy is like the guy on the stage that makes you cluck like a chicken.
Yeah, this is the main, this is the most common perception that people have, are you going to make me cluck like a chicken? Are you going to make me hand over all my life savings to you? Am I going to walk around naked? All those types of things. There's a lot of other things like my friend went to help her quit smoking or something like this. It's nothing like that, although there are people who can help you quit smoking and all those types of things. All those stage shows stuff is very half true. It's not what you see on TV, and what hypnotherapy is - self-hypnosis.
So I don't actually do any of the hypnotherapy, you do it and I just guide you. So at all times, you guys are constantly in control of where you want to go. That means that it's so safe and at no time can you give away your control to me because I don't have it in the first place. And what I do is I tap into your subconscious and what that basically means is that I get to talk past your critical faculty. What that means is that if I was to talk to you now and give you some suggestions that critical faculty is that thing that stops you from getting through to your subconscious. It's the stuff where you say no, I'm not that type of person or no, I'm not deserving or no, that's too hard or that's too scary. So I bypass that wall and I get straight into your subconscious. So people that are reading a lot of these personal development books want to manifest these new traits because they're wanting more, they're just doing it via the conscious brain. People that are turning up to a lot of these seminars, like a Tony Robbins seminar because they're wanting to change their life, and I love Tony because he's the person who introduced me to this. But a lot of these seminars and a lot of these books are great, but if you're still feeling stuck and you're still feeling like you're in that same pattern of behaviour, it's because you haven't really understood what's happening in the subconscious. And for me, it's an easy thing, right? Instead of reading all these books and going to all these seminars, why don't you just hypnotise it? Why don't you just go in there? Why don't you just rewire your brain quickly instead of trying to travel up this uphill mountain with this big boulder, that pretty much sums up hypnotherapy.
Karim, how long does it take?
The program that I've got at the moment is eight sessions, but it's only follow ups. 90% of the people that I've worked with get what they need after the first results. And that is, two hours. So after two hours, they're like, “Karim, I've tried everything, I've seen the best in the world, but I can't get rid of this thing that I've got”. So what I use isn't normal hypnotherapy just for the people out there it's not normal hypnotherapy. It's advanced hypnotherapy, because I include things like NLP, I embed things like the Dr. Demartini Method. It's the Boktor Method but I call it hypnotherapy because this is how people, this is what the layman would perceive it as, but it's not normal hypnotherapy.
If we can do it ourselves, obviously we need a wise sage, a guide such as yourself, yet is there something that we can offer our audience today that they could take away and do for themselves without a guide? Are there any key questions or is it really very much embedded in the process?
It's embedded in the process but there's always things that I can give people. And the one thing that I give people is, like me, how I sang, when I sang, I was someone else. And when I acted, I was someone else. But when I was being me, I stuttered. I want to invite people at home to ask themselves, when they act like someone else they don't stutter. When they put on this mask, acting as if they're someone else, they don't stutter. But why, when you try and act and be yourself, do you hesitate? Do you stumble? And do you fall? I invite people to remove this mask and allow them to be able to be themselves. But also, at what point in your life, in your childhood, did you decide that you weren't good enough to be yourself? Because once you decide, once you found the time that you decided, or roughly that time, you can go back to that time and you can undecide. And once you've undecided, you can see the new decision that you have decided. And from that point of view, as a child, you can look from that moment on, and you can look at the opportunities that you have now with this new decision. What do those new opportunities look like? Who are you? What role are you going to play in this world? And that's a really powerful tool that I can give the people at home.
Yeah, I appreciate that. I was sitting there thinking exactly my moment. And I think probably most people can find a moment, in childhood, when you think about bullying and often the bully makes fun of who you are as you are. They find the thing to pick that makes you different and that's exactly what they bully you about and whether it's weight or how you look or where you're from, or just something that makes you unique and individual is usually the target, right?
Then that's exactly why we put on, this is really giving me an aha moment, put on the masks to be something else that is more socially acceptable, therefore you can assimilate back in the crowd. I mean, evolutionary, I see why it's so important that we are part of the tribe, because if you're not part of the tribe, if you are that individual, you're excluded from the tribe and you wouldn't survive. So being a part of the tribe is evolutionary important to us so that we survive as a species. So I think inherently we do the things to be part of the tribe, whether that be faking something, wearing something, acting different, changing, whatever we need to do to just fit in.
But yet all those who are the most successful are the most unique individuals when you really look at it and look at them in a different way. And that's what I love about entrepreneurship because I have this big thing now, I'm going on about education for younger people about entrepreneurship as a pathway in life, because I think most entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs much later in life, we become entrepreneurs in our 40s and 50s. Why aren't 19, 20 year olds becoming entrepreneurs? They are a rare breed that do, because they're not shown that path, right? They're not shown that path. And yet all the great entrepreneurs, when you hear their stories, and we've talked to so many amazing ones in this podcast, they've all had some trauma or something that made them really different or ADHD, dyslexia. You look at all of them and their stories and there's always something that made them different, but that was their superpower, and they didn't see it. And now I want to educate young people that their differences is what makes them amazing. How do we help get that message out so that they can avoid the years of shame and hiding and masking and trying to just fit in, fit in the tribe.
I say that people that have a story have an unfair advantage because they have built this life skill that they have. It's a gift. I could never have been where I am at the moment, and this includes every other entrepreneur that I speak to, everyone, like you said, Laura, has a story. And they thank that thing that happened to them, because it gave them this unfair advantage. Often we flip the script and say, “This happened to me and I am therefore disadvantaged”. But it's totally the opposite. This happens to you, therefore you now have an unfair disadvantage. That you have this gift that you're able to live, that you've learned within you, that's going to be able to catapult you into the next stage. Now that you've got this story or this thing that's happened to you, use it. Use it to your advantage as a stone to leap from.
And this really brings me back to resilience and what resilience means, Karim, because everything you're saying, I'm getting that resilience is about authenticity. It's about knowing who you are and being good with who you are, without the mask. It's a very different concept of resilience to what we often would hear or imagine.
Yeah, it's having that inner belief, that groundness that everything's okay. That no matter what happens in the world or in the universe, that it's your choice to choose being okay. Because everything, as I was saying before, is that whether people call you names or whether people say things about you, it only affects us when we decide that they are right. When we accept it as being right. So it has nothing to do with them, it's all about us. So what if I didn't decide or didn't agree with everyone else? What does my world look like now? No one can mess with me. I'm walking around with this shield, right? Smiling, laughing, if I want to cry, I can cry. Because internally I know that I am okay. Yeah, it's that having that strong resilience, like you said, Vicki.
Yeah, and I think it comes with a sense of peace versus what might be considered arrogance. If somebody's saying something about you and you think, no, I'm good. I'm not going to listen to what you have to say, that's your opinion, not my opinion. That could come across as cocky or arrogant, but I think it's a different energy. It's really just a sense of peace that you can have your opinion about me, that's quite okay, that's your opinion. I have my own opinion about me. And if you're doing that, how could you not be successful in business? Using all the tools and marketing and everything else that you have available to you at your fingertips?
But what you're talking about is the one thing that gets in the way of being able to use those tools and resources.
Yes, use it to your advantage instead of a disadvantage.
So at what stage of the business journey does one approach self development or really understanding, doing what we're talking about today? Is this step one or is this, get the skills and resources, tune into what you want to do, have your business plan, and then this is step three. What's your view?
My view is, if you've started a business and Simon Sinek talks about, find your Why, but more deeper than this cliche thing is why are you wanting to do it? Because what I find is that people get into business because they want more money, which is good, but the problem with that is that as soon as the wind blows the wrong direction for them, they're out of there. Because there's not enough purpose for them to stay within that business. Their why isn't big enough. If their purpose is, Oh my gosh, the same feeling as, Oh my gosh, I've just found the cure to cancer. And no matter what happens in my life, the economy is down or I have to work all throughout the night because I really need to get this done, or life isn't working for me, then I'm not going to change ship and jump ship and change to something else that looks more shinier and that looks more lucrative. This is the trap that people get into.
That never works. That never works.
So what I ask people that if they're in their first stages of entrepreneurship is to understand why they're in it in the first place. Why this? If it's money, it's not big enough because you can always find better opportunities for money elsewhere. Understand that this is the life path that you want to take. That no matter what happens, even if hell freezes over, this is what you're going to stick with and this is what you're going to continue doing. I think that's the first and foremost. Once I'm doing this, why am I hesitating? Why am I stopping? Why am I pausing? And then you can do a lot of self reflection using those tools. But this never stops, Vicki. Learning and self-reflection never stops. I've been doing this for years and I teach this and I'm still doing it myself. It's an everlasting thing. People think that it's a mountain that they have to reach. But at the top of that mountain, it's just the base for another mountain. It just continually grows and you've never reached the summit. So it's this illusion that people think, I've made it. It's not true, it's not true. You're just continuously growing.
I absolutely agree with you. It's so true because we just reach different levels. It's like a video game. You pass one level and you're at the next level, which is a little bit harder, a little bit different, another challenge. You got to pass that to get to the next level and through each level in the journey, it takes a different part of you to grow as well. I love that. I'm going to remember that at the summit of one mountain is the base of another. That's a great way to think about, that's a great way to think about life. It’s a really interesting journey of growing, of growth. And if you have a growth mindset, I think that's one of the biggest, most important parts of entrepreneurship is having a growth mindset because you're just going to need it. If you don't, you're going to struggle. So that's an important one to work on from the beginning.
Okay, Karim , so we've reached the part of the podcast where we'd like to give you as break as the guest and getting all the questions fired at you and invite you to fire back at Vicki and I with a question of your own. So the floor is yours.
Thank you. So, Laura and Vicki, now that I've spoken about what my inner stutter was in my early career, in my journey, what were some of yours that you experienced in your early career?
Vicki, you want to go first?
That's a very deep question, Karim. It might take me a lifetime to discover what that is. I am on a self-discovery journey of my own, which I'm very much enjoying. My initial response and that's the one you go with is, inner confidence. It doesn't make sense to me at a logical level because I was a really confident kid but I think there was definitely an inner confidence that held me back. And the one thing that I've often expressed and shared with Laura is my fear of not living to my full potential, this sense that I'm only ever at 80% and I need to be at 100% and how do I fill that 20% gap? And so there's probably something there that I'm operating at 80%. Yeah, so that was probably my inner stutter.
Mine was definitely, especially in the early stages around worthiness and pricing myself. So when I started off as an entrepreneur, I was pregnant with my daughter, I got made redundant. I've shared the story before, but I got made redundant and I had to kind of figure it out. So I decided to just keep working with some of the freelance clients I had at the time and then build up some more. So that's what I did. But knowing what to price myself at was the most difficult thing. And it wasn't until I made one tiny shift and it was as simple as changing my business title for myself in my email signature. I went from Laura Bell Freelance Designer to Laura Bell Owner DesignLAB. Making that shift was so monumental and I noticed immediately how new people responded to me, the difference in tone of email and responsive email and types of questions I was getting. And I was like, wow. All I did was change a couple of words in my email signature, nowhere else, but it was the change of mindset for me of I'm not just a freelancer doing a gig, I'm an owner of a business. That shift helped me and that helped me to increase my prices over time and grow myself as an owner and step into that role. Because it was really terrifying to fall off the side of the cliff and figure out entrepreneurship and it took a lot. It's been a long journey since then, but a good one. Definitely, I think that was my real inner stutter.
And that's a common thing where people start off, this pricing is Oh My gosh, how can I charge someone, that's huge. I remember even that for me. Yeah. So thank you for sharing that as well, Laura.
Thank you. Thank you for asking a good, deep question that really got us both here. It doesn't often happen, so thank you so much. This has just been an absolutely amazing conversation, Karim. I really appreciate your vulnerability and your sharing with others how they can become more vulnerable and the value of that, because I think we do need to have more conversations like this. We need to be more open about the things that we struggle with, our stutters, our things because by doing so, you give somebody else the opportunity to explore theirs and work on it as we all learn and grow and build together. That's the whole point of this podcast is to learn something new from somebody. So you've certainly shared so much and we're really grateful. Thank you.
Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
