Confidence! Overcoming Past Trauma with Matt Kendall Ep #73

I am Suzi B. And today we have a phenomenal guest who's going to teach us about confidence, confidence. Imagine your life, how it would be different if you feel confident in your ability to overcome past trauma, past difficult experiences, past things that have happened to you, or even the pressures of the future.

By understanding yourself differently, by using your subconscious mind a little bit differently and by using some of the tools that an incredible guest today has for us. Matt Kendall, welcome to the show.

Oh, hello. Thank you very much for inviting me on. It's going to be fun.

This is going to be fun. So Matt, you just talked about on our Facebook group, how you are going to be super real.

So let's just get straight to the good stuff here. We're going to not beat around the bush. What are your three keys to confidence? Let's just jump right into the juice.

My three keys, and I'm going to be going over them in quite a bit of detail, is in the thing which we called IEMT, which is I, which I'm a trainer of it's to, that's reprocessing trauma from where you are now, as opposed to the person who I happened to when it was encapsulated.

That's part of what I do. The other part of what we call patterns of chronicity. So why you stay stuck, why you aren't able to get past these things. And the three things that I'm going to be talking about and giving demonstration, not demonstrations, but information. And then I'm going to give you an actual thing that you can use We'll do a quick demo.

Actually, we'll do a quick demo and then you can use this and you can use this forever really. But the three things are positive toxicity that I like talking about and what I call the great mindset conundrum. So I go into a lot of that because I know there's a lot of mindset stuff around there, which is fun.

Then we're looking about cause and effect. So this is blaming other people for your situation. And then we're going to look at something which we'll testing for evidence of the problem. Okay. So just a little bit, so a little bit about me. So my background's in hypnotherapy. So I started doing hypnosis.

How old am I now? About 20, nearly 20 years ago. And I didn't mean to do it. I went to a networking event. I was running a print and design studio and online print design studio. And I met a hypnotherapist who asked me if I wanted to be hypnotized. And I said, yes, I do. So he hypnotized me. And at the end of our sessions, because obviously I needed sessions, he said, go and train to be hypnotherapist.

And I had no intention of being a counselor or psychologist or anything like that. I did quite a technically based degree. I went, okay, fine. And so I did lots of hypnotherapy training, lots of different hypnotherapy schools, private tuition, online courses, virtual. I did loads and loads and loads.

And then I started working with loads of people straight away. And most hypnosis in NLP is not great. But some of it's really good. It's really good tools in there. which create real change. I don't the just think your life's going to be great, like the law of attraction and just wishful thinking kind of thing, because it's either going to work through coincidence and then you have survivorship bias, basically.

Or it's not going to work, which is more likely to be the case, but then you can, but the case is if it doesn't work, you don't believe in the universe enough or something like that, but generally, if you think that, okay, I've got in trouble at work. I used to work for a telecommunications company. We had a woman come in to do a goal setting course.

And so we got a piece of paper and we wrote down 10 goals and she goes make them as big as you want. There's no such thing as a goal that's too big. So I wrote down 10 goals. We then sealed them in an envelope and put a date for next year. And she goes, okay, so next year when you open this envelope, just notice that your goals have come true.

And I went, is this kind of some sort of joke?

This witchcraft wizardry, what are we talking about here?

I said, is this, I said, is this, what do you mean? This, I said, this is, I said, what's the structure? What's the actual plan to achieve this? If you put your mind to work, it'll come true. So I had to go for some diversity training because apparently saying to somebody this is just insane is not, it was quite frowned upon.

I never got to open that envelope because I'd left my job by then. I was, I got told to leave the job because I was running my own businesses from there. And actually, to be fair, to her credit. One of my goals was to leave that job. In a way, one of them did come true. To an extent, I've been very interested in self development.

And again, I don't like a lot of it. Now, I have absolutely no problem with people wanting to better themselves. I think it's very admirable. What I don't like is the institutionalized exploitation of people. Which is what we see on a grand scale. a grand scale in the self development industry and there's a big difference between self development and therapy.

However, a lot of people in self development think they're therapists and it can be a very dangerous and toxic environment. I won't name any names. Okay. But there's some big people who shout along stage and get you to walk on hot coals like that's going to help psychosis or something. It's not anyway.

So I was doing hypnotherapy. Now the problem is with hypnotherapies, people come to you and they want you to change them. They want, like going to a dentist, that you go to a dentist because they're going to work on you. Self development and changing your life doesn't work like that. So they come to you and go I want you to hypnotize me.

And when I wake up, I don't smoke, right? It doesn't quite work like that because if you want to change smoking, you've got to change so much in your life. As well, or drinking or any habit like that. Yeah, there's a

lot of habits that are involved there, a lot of environmental factors. Seems like it would be a bigger task than just one hypnosis therapy.

It really is. Now, I've never done, I have helped people stop smoking or help reduce their drinking, things like that. I really like people who have been through really horrible stuff. The worse you've been through, the more I can help you. It's harder to help people just low self esteem or confidence issues, because what they need is 15 years of, exposure to social situations and so much other stuff.

You can't just go from being shy to being super confident. It's just going to go wrong. So you don't have the socials. This is a skill set and people don't realize this is a skill set. It does. And you can't do that by reading a book or watching a YouTube video. You've got to do that. It's too you could. I know.

But people get sold. That's why so many courses are sold, but nobody gets to the end of it or go and do anything. Then you buy another. So we have what we call shelf help loads of books that you just don't read. Or you read the first book. Shelf help. Shelf help. It's a great, it's a great term.

Anyway, I love getting people over trauma and I met this guy and we went to a a development training. So it wasn't, he didn't even have a name called IEMT, it was just called eye movement thing. And I went in and met this guy called Andrew Austin and he said, do you have a memory which just stands out?

I went, yep. So he just moved my eyes in a very simple way and it completely changed my interpretation of that memory. I saw it from who I am now, not the person who it happened to when I was 12. And I thought that's going to change my whole career. So I took this one little eye movement and started using it straight away, getting phenomenal results.

It then became a practitioner course. I went and did that course. And it's a lot to do with identity and so much other stuff as well. I was then invited to become a trainer. And so that was in 2013. And since then, I have trained hundreds and hundreds of people in this amazing technique called IEMT. My next training, 26th and 27th of August IEMTacademy.

com. Just go on there, you'll find all the details, or just message me. I'm not hard to find. I have hundreds of hours of videos on YouTube, IEMT Practitioner, and I'm on Facebook. You just Google me, Matt Kendall. I'm all over Tinternet, that's an English saying I'm very easy to get hold of. Just Matt at IEMTacademy.

com. And like I said, the next training's in a few weeks time. So IEMT is a way of reprocessing negative experiences because once having a hold of your decisions at the moment, now you don't know they are because you don't go I can't go speak to that person. Cause when I was seven, I was rejected by a girl who I gave a Valentine's card to, cause that sounds crazy, but it is.

And so doing a lot of self-help, you will never get to what we call the imprints of the problem. The how did you learn how to feel this way about this thing? I e EMT is a very articulate way of breaking down the problem into its components and reprocessing these imprints. So now when you want to go do something, you are not fighting against the emotion of it.

Fascinat. So you can go and redo it. And I could talk for hours on this because I want to get in to some practical stuff that we can

do. Appreciate that. When you guys want more of this, know he's doing that conference in a couple of weeks. You can get all the details.

It's online. It's a practitioner training online two days.

So the first thing we talk about, I talk about is what I call positive toxicity. And this is people who want to feel good. All the time and for no reason. You know these people who think I des, people who use the word queen and stuff like this and who say things to themselves in the mirror, you are amazing.

You are fabulous, you're great. If you're having to say that you don't believe it, I can say, this chair here is a table for as long as I want. It's not gonna make it table, I'm just lying. So people often get, say affirmations. You only have to say an affirmation if you believe. it not to be true. I don't have to look in the mirror and say I'm great.

And so because I just believe that so I don't need to say that. Okay, so If people want to feel great all the time, chances are they're trying to get away from something. That's where the meat is. That's where I can help, or that's what you should be focusing on by wanting to feel great. What does it allow you to avoid?

Cause that's the problem. If you dealt with what the problem is, you wouldn't need to feel great. So what happens at sets of this sort of dichotomy. So you want to feel great all the time. And you can do that by pumping yourself up, walking on a fire thing, going and hugging people and high fiving them and saying, everyone's great and everything's awesome.

Like the Lego movie, everything's awesome, . You can say all this and it's great for a day or two, but you get back to your life and by Wednesday life's bad again because you've not dealt with the actual problem. So how do we feel great about things? We either go back to that thing to feel great, or people tend to turn to oxys.

Alcohol, opioids, other kinds of online things.

A myriad of bad habits that are trying to cover up something that we

don't know how to deal with. Because it allows them to avoid this feeling. So people who are so positive all the time are very likely to be covering much deeper problems. Okay. So when you meet someone who's really positive, just go, are you okay?

But are you okay? Don't because they won't be in the, they'll probably tell you about it. So what a lot of people want to do is they want to feel better about things, but without being skilled in the thing itself. They just want to feel good, they want to feel great, they want to feel confident and competent, but without doing the training for it.

There's a massive difference between therapy and training. And what people want is to get the mindset, right? I want a confident mindset. In what? I always say, in what? Oh, about this? You have to learn how to do it. Think about this. If you're in a plane, do you want a competent pilot or a confident pilot?

A pilot who's listened to some audio tapes, pumped himself up and is now at the steering deck or whatever it is, the flight deck. I want somebody who's competent at what they're doing, not just really confident because they've pumped themselves up. Okay.

Can I push back a little bit there and say that maybe these two things go together?

What about, you want to be confident or competent first, but maybe you need the confidence to create that competence. Or once you have the competence, you need the competence, confidence to use it.

The old chicken and egg situation, right? The confidence will never come first. Okay, that's good. The confidence will never come first.

And the thing is, if you're anxious doing something, good. When you first started driving, were you anxious and stuff? Yeah, because you were learning. But you had a teacher, you had a trainer, you had somebody, a tutor to teach you the actual skills. And it's like that with anything. So when people say to me, so how do you, so I do, I used to do a lot of public speaking.

How'd you become, how do I get to speak like you on stage? I started when I was 14 doing standup comedy in clubs. I then went on to do a band night and I hosted about a hundred events to live audiences. Since then I've hosted 500 meetup groups and spoken all over. I record usually everything I do.

I listen to it all back, make lots of changes every single time and practice. Oh, so it's not just an affirmation you give yourself. No, it's not. It's not just

something you wrote in an envelope and a year later it

happened. So people want the results of doing the work. What you need to do is the work.

The mindset will always follow. It will never come first and if you're too confident doing something then you go to do the thing and it goes wrong. That creates a stronger negative memory because negative memories or memory is created in higher motion. We don't remember everything because we don't need to.

So we can remember emotion in high in, we remember in memory, sorry, in high emotional states. So if you're, so let's say, for example, you want to become a great public speaker, but you don't have a strategy. You don't, you haven't practiced. You've just got the right mindset and you want to share your message.

That kind of thing. I've seen this go wrong so many times. If you just go out there and try and share your message, but you've got no structure in those, like it's going to go really wrong. And that's what you're going to remember for the next time you do it.

That's where the memory base

comes from.

Yeah. If you practice practice, go out there, deliver well. That's what you're then going to take on to the next time. Interesting. Okay. So again, lots of people are trying to sell you a solution by cutting out all the hard work. Let me tell you, there is no shortcut for doing the work of things.

There just isn't. So the better you understand that if you want to be confident, become competent, do it again and again and again and again until you can't make mistakes. You want to be so good at what you do, you can't make a mistake in it. Then you can have confidence and flair.

So that right there is going to overwhelm a lot of people like I've tried this thing a lot of times now I'm frustrated or I'm overwhelmed by this thought because I try to lose weight and then I fall off the wagon or I try to eat healthy and then the weekend comes.

How do we overcome that? I say don't

bother them. Say that again. Just don't bother. If it's too hard for you, just don't bother because you're going to be stuck in this cycle. So you either commit to something or don't. And honestly, the pain is in the middle. I know that sounds bad, but it is. It's true.

Straight

talker man, that's going to get straight to the point here, y'all.

What's the point of, again, that's just positive toxicity. I just need to believe in myself. I'll start on Monday and until Monday I'll eat myself. I'll eat loads and loads of food. Let's start now. You need to commit to things.

It's if you want to lose weight, you don't need a personal trainer and a dietitian. You need common sense. You need self discipline.

Self discipline. That's so big. So big. I

want, if you remember anything from what I say today, I just want you to remember this. No one is coming to rescue you. So enjoy your life.

Just want to get on with these other things. Lots more positivity. What I call effect and cause, or cause and effect. Are you causing your life, causing change, or are you to effect? A jellyfish, okay? A jellyfish. A jellyfish has no control over where they go because they don't have much power.

They just, they go where the tide takes them. Okay. Most people are jellyfish. So where you are in life now is not through choice. It's through what you've let happen to you or what has happened to you. So many people are in jobs they don't want to be in. They just kept getting promoted in a job they don't like.

And now they can't leave because of their financial dependence. Okay. And this is how most people live their life. Okay. So you have to think, am I causing the changes in my life or am I letting life happen to me? And think about it like this. Are you happy with what's going on in your life? And are you telling people about your problems?

If you are constantly telling people about your problems, because we all have that friend who, you know, when you have a friend that when you see their name appear on your phone, they know they're just going to call you up to moan about their life. If you don't have this friend in your life, Then

it's you, right?

It's true. So if you're just complaining about everything, okay, you need to stop complaining and actually do something about it.

Effect and cause, not cause and effect. Oh, I love

that. I love it. It's life happening to you or are you doing life? You've got to think of it like that. Are you a jellyfish or are you a shark?

If you like a shark controls where it wants to go, maybe not a shark, I don't know. But basically a jellyfish just goes where the tide takes it. And if you're letting life happen to you, then you can't really complain where you end up. Sort

of a choice,

a choice to end up there. It's the absolute wealth.

It's a choice to take out, to take control of your actions. Not taking any choice is just, you're literally going wherever you're literally going wherever, but then you'll complain to everybody and you're the person that will end up in therapy saying how bad your life is. Don't think about how bad your life is.

Think about how bad your continuing decisions are. That's all. When people say I've got my due

today, that

makes it better. That I always say to people, I learned this from somebody in the SAS, right? They always ask them why not? Why me? What can I do? What can I do?

Beautiful. Not why me, but what can I do?

Put that on, put that on your bathroom mirror and read it to yourself.

Or a stone instead of your fabulous what can I do? Okay. And the last thing I just want to go on before I share this technique is testing for evidence of the problem. Okay. So people will spend a lifetime working on their problem instead of living their life.

Some people's problems become their whole life. And the thing is, they probably don't have any kind of future plan because they're waiting till they're fixed before they get on with their life. So people who go from therapy to therapy, people who if you talk about losing weight, they'll have every diet book, but nothing's worked for them.

Why's that then? So people are testing for evidence of the problem. I'm actually back at home in the north of England here at the moment in York. It's very sunny and hot here today. Now I haven't lived here for a number of years, but when I was like 16, 17, my mum used to say go clean your room.

So I'd go clean my room and there'd be like one sock left. And my mum would come in and go, I told you to clean your room. But although 99. 9% of the problem has gone, they look at the tiny little thing that remains. Okay.

Anybody else get a reality check there? I'm pretty sure I said that to my kids yesterday.

Interesting.

What we need to do, the more progress the more progress you will make. Okay. Beautiful. So you are never going to be fixed. You're never going to be fixed. You're going to learn how to manage your problems. That's all. Don't wish your life was better. wish you were better at life. Okay.

People want their life to be better and think stuff's unfair. It is life's unfair. Just this. So how can you be better at life to try and get the odds more in your favor?

Beautiful. And it's not going to be complaining about the fact that life is unfair. It's going to be taking action and focusing on the good things that you do have.

I love this concept. And this is one of the things that I preach often and teach in my programs is just that you want to track the progress, whatever it is that you're moving toward, whether it's building a business or whether it's a losing weight or whether it's, improving your fitness routine, whatever the goal is that you have for yourself, track the progress, write it down, tell yourself, Hey, these are the awesome things that I did today.

And when you have those days where you're like. I am not good at life. This is not going well. And you want to complain, go back and look at that reference list and think, you know what? I was already doing these things. And I know that you have a concept about that using your own experience to improve your own experience.

Tell us a little bit about that. And then we'll go.

So this is what we call episodic time. So in the IMT training, I go through this in obviously much more detail, and I'm actually developing a whole mini workshop around this concept, which will be, I'm still writing it, but it's going to be a whole two or three hour workshop.

Now we call it episodic time. So basically the simple thing is what's the bad thing that's happened? What did you then do afterwards? So when I first started this concept, or when I was first trained in it, It used to be, what was the thing that happened, then what happened next? However, what I found is that people would often tell me the consequences of the problem, rather than what they've actually done and achieved.

Say for example, Not so much action based, yeah. Absolutely. Let's say that somebody was in a car crash, and it changed their life. What happened next? My car was written off. What happened next? I lost my job. What happened next? My cat died. Wow. And so you get into a very negative spiral and people become uncoachable.

So what I started doing is instead of started saying what happened next? I said, what did you do that was good for you next? And we do them in consecutive order in like historical order. And so we start off with what, so say that you had a car accident or something, you got fired, dumped, whatever happened, let's say it was a year ago.

I like to get between six and ten positive actions that you did that brings you right up to today.

Six to ten things that we've done that are good since that episode.

Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. In consecutive audience in literally like a timeline. So it could be so I worked for somebody the other day and they got dumped though.

They found out their partner in, in a compromising situation with somebody. Okay. And so their relationship ended. Yeah. So I said what did you then do afterwards that was good for you? I got my own place after then what's something good that you did for you? Oh, I got a cat. He was actually allergic.

Brilliant. What did you then do? That was good for you. I went on holiday with my friends, which he would never let me do because he was too jealous. Ironically. What did you then do? That was good for you afterwards. I started to become an RTT therapist, Marissa Piers thing anyway, it's a therapy kit.

Okay. That was it. I started my own business. Brilliant. Then what did you do that's good for you? I went on match. com or something and I've met this new guy. Then what did you do? And we build it up all the way. And so if you're doing a session with somebody, you end on, say you're at this session now doing this for you.

And what you then do is you actually read this list back to them over and over again. If you're doing this at home, this is what I suggest you do. Write the problem, write the scenario, the dumping, the breakup, the job loss, the loss of a limb. Anything like this, I've worked with so many people, the death of a loved one, I know that sounds bad, but it also works with stuff like this.

Then write down ten things that you've done, and these do not have to be massive things. I've worked with people who've had like stillborn children and stuff. One of the things they did was they managed to go home and make a cup of tea. The next day they saw some friends. The next day they went for a walk.

So it's not, you don't have to all go to Disneyland and start a business. It's sometimes just positive actions that you've done. And I will think in those

times, especially with those things that are like recent, those of us that are like, okay, my traumatic experience just happened. I don't even think I've done 10 things at all since then.

But if you think about those little tiny little things that you did for yourself, huge difference in the way you see the situation, you

brushed your teeth. You went for a shower, because what we're doing here, instead of the problem being circular, we're actually creating an exit for this problem.

When you do this, if you're doing it at home, space it out and actually take a step forward each time. So have your sheets or your laptop and probably a sheet of paper, take a step forward, because when you think of the original problem now, it's allowed you to do all these great things. Wow. That

is beautiful.

The original problem has allowed you to do all of these great things because if you didn't have that problem, you wouldn't have done those things. Shifting minds,

y'all. This is beautiful. It's actually take something which is really negative into a weird kind of blessing in many ways. Amazing.

Without exercise.

I'm actually going to do this. I hope we will all

actually do this. Without being overly positive, we're taking real world examples. When you're working with a coach, so if you're a coach and you're using this with clients, the client can now get to this point where they are now coachable to move forward.

Phenomenal. Phenomenal. So this is for all of us as individual people, and for those of us who help people, whether those people be clients, whether those people be your children, your loved ones, your friends, beautiful. This is so applicable. So many situations.

Yeah. So it's really good for for people who nearly died in car crashes.

I recently, I've just done somebody who had a near fatal car crash recently. And then what did you do? I got out of the car. Then what did you do? First responders came. Then what did you do? I went to hospital. Then what did you do? I went home. Then what did you do? Some friends came around. Then what did you do?

I went out. Then what did you do? So when you repeat it back to somebody. What happens? It puts time and content between you and the thing. So the thing's not immediate in your life, it puts it into your timeline instead. It's just something that happened. That's

beautiful. Can you do this with yourself or do you have to hear those words spoken back from someone

else?

You can do it to yourself, absolutely. Awesome. We write it down. Write the problem, then write 10 things you've done, then get up and literally pace it out. And when you think about the original problem now, it'll just seem so far away in life. It'll just seem something that's insignificant, something that's just part of your past, something that's just, but look at all the great things you've done since then and taking all of these great things.

Now let's build some goals for the future. Oh, I

love this so much. I've just. It's running through the list of people in my mind that I'm like, I am sending this episode to this person. You do such a useful for people who have had multiple experiences like this, where, when we complain about our problems and tell people about our problems, we're like, Oh, it's actually this and this, we do this event, or do we do this activity several times with each individual event or it

depends on what you'll find is a lot of people have a lot of problems tend to have a very strong theme.

I keep going out with the wrong guy. What's the problem here? What's the thing that connects these things? It's you,

right?

Do you keep choosing these wrong guys or do you keep attracting them? Okay. When people are in vulnerable positions, especially women, it will attract men who are abusers and just, they're like vultures. Okay. So when you're in a really bad state, it's like you shouldn't go shopping when you're hungry kind of thing, so if you need to be with a partner in that state, ask why it's usually because they can't be alone. What's the problem about being alone? What? And then that's where you do the therapy intervention on that feeling of being alone. Where does that come from? Let's be honest. It's probably something from childhood.

Neglect or something. Yeah. Yeah.

It always usually comes back, I don't deserve love. I'm unlovable. Usually everything comes back to that in some kind of sense. Wow. That's very broad psychiatric brush strokes.

Does it necessarily have to lead back to one specific traumatic event? No, it can lead back

to usually periods of time.

But the way that the brain works, say that your parents went through a divorce. Okay. When you were young, you're not going to remember that four month period. Like it's CCTV. You're going to, you're going to remember about five or six key memories from that time that mean the most.

And that's the kind of clump those together.

And that was your starting point. And that's where you start

your timeline. And then IEMT, we break that out and work on the individual memories itself.

Okay. Beautiful. So IEMT, you are doing a IEMTacademy. com. This is where your event is being announced here, correct? You guys, I'm loving this conversation.

I'm definitely going to this event. I hope you guys will too. Matt, how can people reach out to you if they have questions between now and then, or down the road?

If you want to email me, Matt, M a double T at I E M T academy. com Facebook. I'm on my private pay. I think I'm IMT practitioner on YouTube.

It's IMT practitioner. I'm pretty sure if you Google Matt Kendall IMT, I'm on lots and lots of different. Platforms and things, but I MT academy, just go on there. Or if, you've got my details, I suppose if people want to, but yeah, you can email me matter iemtacademy. com. Yeah, or yeah. That's it.

That's where I am. I'm on LinkedIn as well. Matt Kendall. Beautiful. I think I am. Yeah, I am.

Just Google him. Just Google him. You'll find him. Google me. Google me. All right, you guys. Thank you so much, Matt. All this was absolutely brilliant. This will all be accessible for all of us on the podcast, all over the place.

You guys can definitely catch these replays. Those of you that are here live with us, we are going to open the room for question and answer. Now, if you are catching this on a replay or some other platform, and you're not live with us, please join us next time, live Thursdays, 9 AM mountain standard time.

Get in here and get your questions answered live face to face time. This is an absolutely free platform for everybody. So bring your friends, bring your family and come get your questions answered right here on the habits and humor podcast. Matt, thank you so much for being here. You're genius. This was absolutely phenomenal.

I can't wait to hear what these questions are. All right, you guys, thanks for being here. And we'll see you next time on habits and humor.