Teaching led me to marketing, which led to hypnosis. What’s next?

Name: Fally Klein

Location: Boro Park, Brooklyn

Dream: Find my calling

I’ve been on an accelerated track my whole life. When something big shakes your foundations, you never look at life the same way again.

I was diagnosed with cancer at age 16, and forced at that young age to learn and  view the world differently, make different decisions than my peers, and generally take a huge leap forward.

I realized I could be miserable — or I could choose to make life meaningful on my own terms. So I found things that spoke to me and pursued them. And when I pursue something, I give it my all.

My first job was teaching. After a few years, though, teaching stopped making sense for my family. I still continued to speak publicly, under my pseudonym, Tzipi Caton, but I’d had enough of English and history.

As odd as it sounds, my next career shift — into marketing and copywriting — led me on a direct path to my true calling, hypnotherapy. Marketing taught me to use words to ignite people’s hearts and minds, and to understand the blockages or resistance people have to particular beliefs.

Hypnotherapy I discovered by accident. My husband was studying the aspects of chassidus and mussar that deal with connecting with one’s soul, such as meditation, hisbodedus, and dveikus. Wanting to learn more, we visited Orli Katz, an amazing hypnotherapist. It was a profound experience. I walked out declaring, “More people need to know about this.”

I’d already spent time in talk therapy, but I'd found myself hitting walls. Traditional therapy is very cognitive, but understanding my problems wasn’t getting me anywhere. It wasn’t enough to tell myself not to feel anxious; I needed to penetrate my subliminal consciousness. Hypnotherapy did that.

I was eager to go back to Orli to repair all my rough edges, but she and my husband teamed up against me, saying, “You’d make a great hypnotherapist yourself!”

I resisted. I wasn’t interested in working with clients one-on-one.

One morning, an advertising colleague mentioned in passing that he didn’t intend to stay in advertising, but planned to go to law school. “Me neither,” I found myself saying, much to my surprise, “I plan to study hypnotherapy.”