Lisa Ludovici wrote her resignation letter in three minutes.
At the time, Ludovici was an advertising sales executive with 17 years of experience at a national media company. But as the years went by, her work environment began to deteriorate and the joy she once found in her high-pressure job faded away. A tense internal conference call with a colleague was the final straw.
“I noticed the industry was changing, and I was changing too,” recalls Ludovici, 51. “Everything seemed to be falling apart around me, and I became increasingly frustrated. Even though I was doing pretty well, I didn’t feel like I was doing well. Abundance without fulfillment is essentially failure.”
Ludovici, who lived in New York City, didn’t know where to go after quitting her job in 2009. But she found her new calling through a local Manhattan TV show. After she quit her job, she canceled her cable subscription and started watching this channel exclusively because, she jokes, “it was the only channel without static.”
Ludovici was fascinated by a hypnotherapist from the International Coaching Federation who spoke on a panel on the show, so she tracked him down, contacted him, and after a three-hour conversation, Ludovici decided to attend hypnotherapy school.
She was immediately interested in the topic, as she already knew about the subconscious mind and its influence on human functioning. Of particular importance was the fact that the speaker, like Rudsibi, had worked in corporate America before embarking on a career in hypnotherapy.
“It’s a cliché, but my fear of remaining the same was greater than my fear of where I was going, so I took the plunge,” Ludovisi says. “I took the plunge, and on the way down, there was a net.”
The beginning of healing
Ludovici developed a migraine headache during her second week at the American Academy of Hypnotherapy in New Mexico in February 2010. She had been diagnosed with chronic migraines at age 3 and had suffered frequent migraines ever since.
During her morning break from classes, Ludovici would press her fingers against her right eye, a movement that had previously relieved pain. When the program director noticed, she invited Ludovici into her office for a guided hypnotherapy session. “She used metaphors to help me get my body to function the way it was meant to,” Ludovici said. “When your body is functioning optimally, you don’t get sick, you don’t have disease, and you don’t feel pain.”
That brief session helped Ludovici feel some relief, so she sought out additional hypnotherapy sessions to treat her own migraines while also learning how to use hypnotherapy to help others. “The day I went into the director’s office and had that session was the last day I had a migraine, and that was 11 years ago this February,” Ludovici says.
Start again
After 10 weeks of full-time crash course, Ludovici completed the hypnotherapy program and had all the skills she needed to help people. But she didn’t have any clients. What she did have was her personal experience using hypnotherapy to heal her own body, and 17 years of corporate sales training. Amazingly, this was extremely helpful in getting her new business off the ground.
Ludovici started in a very grassroots way, emailing friends and family to tell them her story of migraines and training, and offering free hypnotherapy sessions to anyone who “felt called to heal an area of their life.” In August 2010, when her client list began to become “friends of friends of friends,” Ludovici decided she was ready to open her own practice. Starting her practice required “a lot of cold calling,” she says.
Although Ludovici enjoyed working with patients individually, she felt she had to share hypnotherapy with physicians as an “adjunct” to patient treatment. To network with physicians, Ludovici attended the Mount Sinai Physician Lecture Series at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Impressed by one speaker, Dr. Hooman Danesh, Ludovici says she waited until the crowded room cleared. “Then I walked up to him and said, ‘The information you shared about pain management was great. And maybe there’s something you can add to it: hypnotherapy. My name is Lisa Ludovici, and I’m a medical support hypnotist.'” Dr. Danesh grabbed her hand and said, “I need you.”
“From that moment on, he remained the most important person in my work and remains so to this day,” Ludovisi said.
After that meeting, Dr. Danesh began referring his patients to Ludovici, and his colleagues did the same. She helped her patients with everything from overcoming their fears of needles to managing post-operative pain. Referrals led to lectures and grand rounds at Mount Sinai. One of the fellows who attended Ludovici’s lectures eventually became medical director at a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital in Manhattan. He asked her to visit the hospital to continue much of the same work she’d done at Mount Sinai.
Cheer yourself on
Success didn’t come easily for Ludovici. When she said she was going to hypnotherapy school, everyone from her orthodontist to her apartment manager were skeptical. To counter those negative messages, she said, “I had a lot of conversations with myself to keep moving forward. [I told myself]”‘Just take a step and keep going.’ It was just like really cheering me on and believing in myself.”
Many senior managers considering a career change worry about “wasting” the years they’ve put in, but Ludovisi found her corporate experience to be vital to her success in an entirely different industry. She says, “I used the skills I gained during my 17 years working in corporate America – selling, building relationships, networking, solving people’s problems – to build my hypnotherapy clinic – doing the same thing, but in a different way.”
Ludovici says it’s never too late to change your life: “Make a change at 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65. Time passes anyway. Dream. Dream big. Take the first step. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how it’s going to end. It’s not over until your time on earth is over. Until then, have experiences that ignite your soul.”
