Visualization is becoming more and more popular as a method to making dreams a reality. Claire Aristides, a hypnotherapist and entrepreneur, is passionate about sharing these techniques with the world. Entrepreneurs in particular are bombarded with decisions, risks, questions, and unforeseen challenges. Navigating these stressors can be intimidating, but Claire believes that hypnosis can help business owners forge a path to success. Listen as she discusses her work and how these techniques can help anyone achieve their goals. Claire has combined these techniques into an app – Mindology – one easily accessible platform on both apple or android. By creating a habit of listening to the empowering audios, you can create new habits in your life. Learn the techniques to shift your mindset, to create new beliefs and more positive outcomes in your life.
Claire Aristides: [00:00:00] Hypnosis, self hypnosis, and visualization tools to help you kind of navigate your journey the way you want it to go.
Sam: [00:00:12] Welcome to ideamix radio, I’m Sam Jayanti and every week I chat with entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, career changers, experts, and enthusiasts for insider tips that you can apply to turn your idea into a business. So sit back and enjoy today’s show. We all have goals, but it’s hard to understate the power of actually visualizing yourself, achieving that. Recently, Bianca Andreescu, upon winning the U.S. Open women’s title, talked about how it was self visualization that had gotten her there. Claire Aristides is a hypnotherapist and entrepreneur. She works with our clients to help them visualize their goals and achieve them. She’s been an entrepreneur before, but in a very different industry with her Aristide’s jewelry brand. And now she straddles both businesses. Claire, welcome to the show.
Claire Aristides: [00:01:07] Hello, welcome. Thanks for having me.
Sam: [00:01:10] So, Claire, let’s start at the very beginning. You made a, you know, in a sense, a pivot, but you haven’t walked away from your original business and now you’re kind of straddling these two worlds, which are quite different. Tell us a little bit about what inspires you to do both things.
Claire Aristides: [00:01:32] So my fine jewelry brand was running beautifully, I was very content. But I had experienced hypnotherapy in my life about 20 years ago. And I noticed I was drawing a lot on it for self-confidence, changing my mindset, stress, I was a workaholic, really. And I was just obsessed with my brand. And it was affecting my health. And, you know, personal implications. And I started to see a hypnotherapist again and saw changes in me. And as time went on, I thought, this is you know, I know it’s an incredible therapy/tools/techniques. I want to understand what is involved in being a therapist myself. So I trained and qualified as a clinical hypnotherapist. And I’m passionate about sharing those skills and those tools and techniques with others, because once we believe something in our mind, our body, our sort of universe. And I know people sometimes get a bit confused or think that’s all a bit wacky, but things do work to make what you want happen once you shift your mindset. And I think as an entrepreneur, you’re bombarded with challenges, questions, stresses, finances, cash flow, staff. So if you have your mindset in a place that’s right for you, you know the consequence that the results are going to be, you know, great.
Sam: [00:03:25] That’s so true. You’re always faced with a lot of reasons not to do things as an entrepreneur. And you have to sort of find your pathway to actually doing that.
Claire Aristides: [00:03:35] Absolutely. And you also don’t, I mean, more and more people are having mentors. But as an entrepreneur, you’re often alone. Sure, you might have, you know, copartners and things like that, but you’re making– you’re bombarded with decisions, really. And if you there’s a lot riding on it if you don’t make the right decision. So you have to have, you know, confidence. You have to have inner self belief. And you have to know what is right for your brand or your business and trust your instincts. And hypnosis, self hypnosis and visualization are tools to help you kind of, you know, navigate your journey the way you want it to go.
Sam: [00:04:17] So tell us a little bit about– one of the things that we find aspiring entrepreneurs struggle with a lot is taking the seed of an idea and then actually turning it into a business. And you’ve done that twice effectively. Talk a little bit about what was hard about that. What was easy about that? What are some of the challenges of basically doing two things at the same time as you do?
Claire Aristides: [00:04:47] So firstly, I think it’s really important within being an entrepreneur, in this business do the elements stack up? So, I mean, because we can visualize and visualize. But if you’re– I’m trying to think of an example, if you have no aerospace experience at all, you’re not necessarily going to invent something to take you to space. So you have to have an element of realism with the tools and techniques of visualization and hypnosis. So make sure your business idea stacks up. Make sure you have the tools. Make sure we have the tools. Have to have people around you. If you’re not particularly strong on finance and numbers and accounting. Have someone that can fill that gap with you. If you’re not so good at marketing, you know, call on that. So there’s an element of common sense about building your business. But I also think with being an entrepreneur, it is about a reflection of you. You’re creating something. So it has to resonate with you. I mean, for me and the jewelry, I’ve been obsessed with jewelry since my, you know, my mom when I was very young with my mom and going through my mom’s jewelry, jewelry box. So it’s something that is like the DNA of me or the essence of me. And I wanted to be surrounded with diamonds and gemstones and jewelry because it makes me happy day in, day out. And turning that into a business and a brand in retail has had its challenges. So I’ve worked, pulled in skill sets when I’ve needed it. But I’ve also used the tools and techniques of visualization to see myself, push myself and the brand to approach you know, when you start up seeing magazines about public relations for your brand and and pushing yourself belief into, you can take this further and further if you dream.
Sam: [00:06:57] And so you decide to begin this additional– start this additional business of hypnotherapy, how did you find your first customers?
Claire Aristides: [00:07:10] So Instagram and Facebook and social media is just phenomenal.
Sam: [00:07:14] Changed the world.
Claire Aristides: [00:07:15] Yeah. I haven’t and I would say that hypnotherapy is very much a word of mouth kind of situation. So I was nervous to at first think, you know, got just a little concerned. Did it seem unusual to have these two roles or two paths now? But it is authentic to me. It is. It is something that’s unique to me and what I’m passionate about. So I shared it with my audience. And the response was really interesting and surprising. A lot of business start ups, particularly female. I have maybe more of a niche kind of customer base in terms of business, career women and business owners that are female, straight away contacting. What does this mean? What do you mean by hypnotherapy? Has it affected you? What have you learned from it? How have you used it in your business? The response was really, really exciting. So that kind of gave me the confidence to go. “This is fine. I can have these two different roles and they actually complement themselves because they’re unique and authentic to me.” And, you know, I’m passionate about how the tools can improve your business skills and your business confidence and your business success. And there’s been a lot of interest in that.
Sam: [00:08:55] Amazing. Is it hard to split your time? How do you juggle both?
Claire Aristides: [00:09:00] Yeah. So I had to be very careful. I took some time out to plan the RCD Fanjul set up and to step away from the day to day operations and manage the team and staff like taking a step back from the day to day, which is not necessarily my style. Again, that was seeing myself as I can delegate, you know, improve my delegation skills. I can manage people in a more competent and clearer and concise manner, because, again, as an entrepreneur, you can often get caught in your you too in the detail. And if it’s going to be a successful business, then often you should be on the shop floor as much as you can. But you know, you need to step back and let people do their job and create the business with you. So it took some planning. It took some time management skills. And I find both roles incredibly rewarding. So I just kind of make it work a little stressful at the start button. But now I have a really good rhythm. How long do you think it took for you to find your rhythm? I’d say a good six months. Yeah, yeah.
Sam: [00:10:30] So as you think about these two businesses, you know, on the hypnotherapy side, the scale limitation is you. You know, on the jewelry side, there really isn’t that limitation because now you’ve built an infrastructure that allows a business to scale. Tell us a little about that dichotomy and how you kind of reconcile it in your mind.
Claire Aristides: [00:10:54] I enjoy the one to one with hypnotherapy. And I enjoy bringing the lessons that I’ve learned from my business experience into the sessions. And it means I can bring some very practical advice and tools set to my client or my my, you know, my sessions. So I see that they do compliment themselves from that perspective in terms of scaling hypnotherapy. What I plan to do is have a series of online therapy workshops. There’s a number of areas that continue to come up with my client’s self-confidence and self belief, detoxing or overthinking. So, you know, for example, one client they haven’t had, but they didn’t make the deal and they’re over and over in their head about that, not making the deal to the point that they’re not making future deals. So you need to also let go of failures in your mindset and not let them affect your AMA and move forward and keep going. So a plan to sort of digitized, digitalize the same therapy sessions on some cok key recurring things that many of my clients have often in either therapy, we can break it down to stress and ego. So stress means we we if you look at traditional hypnotherapy clients, when we’re stressed, you start smoking, you put on weight, drinking too much, angry, etc.. And then ego means how we see ourselves. So do I see myself as a confident entrepreneur that can secure the deal, and finalized the sale approach. You meet new customers, find the right deals, find the right staff. So that’s our perception of ourselves and that is something that is built over our whole lifetime through our experiences. It’s who you are. You take your DNA, but then also your interactions and your experience, the nature nurture environment. So with hypnotherapy, we hope to change that perception for a positive outcome.
Sam: [00:13:40] As you think back on your career and the journey that’s gotten you here. What do you view as the key challenges that you faced? How did you overcome them? What are some of the lessons you learned that are very generalizable to entrepreneurs?
Claire Aristides: [00:13:59] I think you, as an entrepreneur, as I’ve said earlier, you have to be obsessed about your business. You have to be incredibly driven. But you also have to be resilient and you have to sort of step yourself out of the day to day. If you’ve if you if you bogged down in the day to day of the staff issues all the time, the nuances of your business, you have to pull yourself out and see if I want this grand scheme of things to to to work and whether it be I want to sell the business or I want to raise capital. How do I make that like the director of the movie or Bianka? As we said, you know, calm will have gone over and over in her head when Serena sends the ball to me, what am I going to do? And as an entrepreneur, you need to do the same thing, pull yourself out of the game and imagine the, you know, the volley, whatever that’s gonna be thrown out you and how you’re going to react and not take it personally, not let it sink at your confidence, as hard as that might be. And self-doubt yourself, if you believe your business idea is going to make money and be successful and profitable, then you need to just keep getting back up on the tennis court like Bianca did and go for your dream.
Sam: [00:15:33] Go for your dream. I love that most of us struggle with building one business in our lifetime. Claire has built two. And even though they’re quite different businesses from one another. She’s now thinking about how to scale hypnotherapy business and have a greater and greater impact on more people. Claire, thank you for being with us on the show today.
Claire Aristides: [00:15:57] Thank you.
Sam[00:16:00] Thanks for listening today. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you’re there, please do review the show. We love hearing from you, good or bad. So e-mail us at info@theideamix.com or Instagram DM us. Our episode this week was produced by the incomparable Martin Milewski with music by the awesome Nashville based singer songwriter Doug Allen. You can learn more about Doug at dougallenmusic.com.
