You looked for someone who understands the business and your relationship. There are not many of us.

Any of this sound familiar?

• You have looked for a therapist or a coach who understands running a business and understands your relationship, and kept finding people who understand one.
• You have left the pronoun out of a sentence to keep a business conversation simple.
• Your mind does not switch off. You are working at dinner, in bed, on the one week away.
• You wake at 3am solving a problem nobody else knows exists yet.
• You are respected all day and have nothing left for the man at home.
• Your partner has stopped asking when it will calm down.
• A good month makes you certain. A bad week makes you a fraud. There is no middle.
• You can describe your business strategy in detail and cannot describe what you need.

Why this page exists

I run businesses. I am also a gay man. When I went looking for someone who understood both at once — not one and then a polite silence about the other — I could not find him.

There are excellent therapists who have never made payroll and do not know what that does to a person. There are excellent business coaches whose entire model of a life assumes a wife and a church. Most of the second group never say so in their marketing, and they do not need to; you find out in the language about family and discipline and what a man is supposed to be building toward.

So you translate. You say my partner and watch what happens to their face. You decide it is simpler to keep the personal part vague and just take the business advice.

That works until the thing you actually need help with is the personal part. And it usually is.

You would not be the first founder to try this

The objection I hear most is not "will it work." It is "is this a serious thing that serious people do." Fair question. Here is what is actually on the record.

"I think the word hypnotherapy is a bit woo woo, and maybe it is. It's more like a guided meditation."

I include that quote because of the first half, not the second. Parr is a sceptical, numbers-driven operator who found the name embarrassing and did it anyway, repeatedly, because it worked. That is the most common path into this room.

• CNBC reported in 2019 that Fortune 500 chief executives and entrepreneurs were increasingly using hypnosis for performance and anxiety, and that practitioners had seen a clear uptick in business clients. CNBC, October 2019
• More than one in five professionals report having used hypnosis or hypnotherapy for a work-related problem, according to survey work by the American Hypnosis Association. Worth knowing that is an industry body reporting on its own field — take the number as indicative, not independent.
• The clinical evidence for the thing itself is not thin. A meta-analysis of 17 controlled trials found the average person treated with hypnosis for anxiety improved more than roughly 84% of untreated controls, with the effect holding at follow-up.

Nobody quoted here knows me and none of this endorses my practice. The point is narrower: this is an ordinary thing among people who run companies. They simply do not post about it, for the same reason you have not mentioned it to anyone.

The part most founders have not connected yet

This is the argument I care most about, and it is the reason I do this work rather than only coaching.

When your nervous system has been running hot for two years, it does not politely confine itself to your evenings. It gets into the business. Specifically, it gets into your judgement and your messaging.

You cannot see your own positioning clearly through that much stress. You over-explain because you are anxious. You hedge because you are tired. You chase a competitor's angle because a bad week made you doubt your own. You can hire the best agency available and they will produce something technically correct that does not land — because the thing that makes marketing land is a founder who is clear, and clarity is a nervous-system state before it is a skill.

I am a business coach as well as a hypnotherapist, so I will say the plain version: a calm founder makes better decisions than a brilliant exhausted one. A lot of what gets called a strategy problem is really just someone who has not slept properly in a year.

Different owners, different problem

"Business owner" covers four very different situations, and pretending otherwise is why most support for founders is so generic.

All four are welcome. They are not the same work, and I will not pretend they are.

How the sessions and intensives work