In this episode of Sixty Plus Uncensored, host Seb Frey talks with Elisabeth Villiger Toufexis, a Swiss-born former tour guide, conference interpreter, hypnotherapist, life coach, author, and podcaster now based in Cyprus. Elisabeth’s life reads almost like a list of separate careers, but she describes it as one continuous thread: an early decision to leave a difficult childhood behind by seeing the world, and a lifelong habit of turning what she learns along the way into something she can pass on to other people. Over the course of their conversation, she and Seb cover the mechanics of how hypnotherapy actually works, why she believes so many people spend their lives on autopilot, the family history that shaped her own belief in personal responsibility, and a long, winding tour through some of the destinations she considers essential for travelers over sixty, from the Serengeti to the Nile to Petra.
From a Swiss Village to a Life of Travel
Elisabeth was born in Switzerland and spent her childhood in a small village, raised largely by her grandparents after being born to a sixteen-year-old mother who, Elisabeth says, never acknowledged her as her daughter during her lifetime, introducing her instead as a sister. Her grandfather, whom she describes as a steady and caring presence, died when she was ten, leaving her grandmother, a loving woman but one who struggled to guide her, to raise her alone. Elisabeth says she was bullied badly at school during this period, not only by other children but by teachers as well, and that living in a small village where everyone knew everyone else’s business left her feeling chronically excluded.
That sense of wanting out took a very practical form. At thirteen, she began working, first clearing tables at a ski lodge and later cleaning rooms at a summer hotel, specifically to earn money for language lessons. She understood early on that speaking foreign languages would be her way out, since in that era, before the European Union existed, a work permit was required in nearly every country, and one of the few paths around that requirement was to become a flight attendant or a tour guide. At nineteen, too young to be hired by a Swiss tour operator, she instead applied directly with a local agency in Rhodes, Greece, and that was how her career as a tour guide began. She describes the decision as a mixture of curiosity and escape, a desire to see the world that was inseparable from a desire to leave her own circumstances behind.
Eleven Years on the Road, Before GPS
Elisabeth spent the next eleven years working as a tour guide across the globe, during an era that looked almost nothing like travel does today. There were no cell phones, no GPS, and no way to preview a hotel room or a city tour online before arriving. Reflecting on how travel has changed since then, she tells Seb that the element of surprise has essentially disappeared; a traveler today can look at photos and videos of a destination in advance, something that simply wasn’t possible in the 1980s. She’s careful not to frame this shift as purely a loss, though. Asked directly whether travel is better or worse now, she says she honestly isn’t sure, and the only concrete improvement she can point to involves the long-distance bus tours she used to lead across the United States, where she often spent hours in her hotel room afterward making phone calls that, with a mobile phone, she could have handled during the drive itself. Beyond that practical convenience, she says she’s glad she did the work she did when she did it, even though she still occasionally leads hiking tours today in Greece and in her current home of Cyprus.
It was during this period of travel that she ended up being sent to Cyprus to help take over a holiday destination for her employer. She arrived at twenty-two with almost no knowledge of the place, she tells Seb, not realizing it had been a British colony, not knowing cars drove on the other side of the road, and generally stepping into the assignment blind. It was there that she met her husband, whose family came from Famagusta, a city in the part of Cyprus occupied by Turkey since 1974; his family, like many others, was forced to leave at that time and never returned to live there.
Interpreting for the Police, Then Training as a Coach
After raising two children, Elisabeth spent seventeen years working as a conference interpreter, much of it for the police. The work exposed her to an enormous range of people and situations, and she says it left her with a kind of accumulated knowledge about human behavior that she eventually wanted to put to more direct use. When her children left home to study, she decided to train formally as a life coach and hypnotherapist, specifically because she felt she needed structured tools, not just instinct and experience, to genuinely help people work through fear and other obstacles.
She found her training through Robert Simich, an institute based in Dubai, a three-and-a-half-hour flight from Cyprus. She completed a ten-day basic training program and later a two-week master coach training, building on years of prior reading in personal development and self-help. The funding for that first training, she tells Seb, came from an unexpected and emotionally complicated source: in 2014, her mother passed away, and despite never having publicly acknowledged Elisabeth as her child, she was legally entitled to a portion of the inheritance. She used that money to begin her formal training as a life coach, turning a difficult family relationship into the starting point for a new chapter of work meant to help other people.
How Hypnotherapy Actually Works
Much of the conversation centers on demystifying hypnotherapy, a field Elisabeth says is widely misunderstood. She pushes back firmly on the popular image of stage hypnosis, the Las Vegas-style show where people appear to be put to sleep and made to perform embarrassing tricks; she’s clear that this is theatrical performance, not clinical hypnotherapy, and that participants in those shows are simply following instructions, not genuinely losing control of themselves.
Her explanation of how real hypnotherapy works centers on the idea that roughly ninety percent of daily behavior is driven by the subconscious mind: beliefs, habits, and childhood memories that accumulate over a lifetime, some of which are no longer useful and quietly keep people, as she puts it, riding in the passenger seat of their own lives rather than driving. To move into the driver’s seat, to set goals, recognize opportunities, and take responsibility, sometimes requires changing the content of that subconscious programming, because the subconscious mind’s main priority is keeping a person inside a familiar comfort zone. Elisabeth describes that comfort zone pointedly as “the place where all our dreams go to die,” since safety and comfort aren’t always the same thing as growth.
She compares the process to swapping out a small piece of a hard drive, replacing an unhelpful piece of programming with something more useful. In practice, she says this usually takes just two sessions. In the first, she listens closely and asks a detailed series of questions to understand the root cause of whatever a client is struggling with, whether that’s a childhood event or simply an ingrained bad habit, and builds a personalized hypnosis script from what she learns. In the second session, typically a week or so later, she leads the client through a slow induction into a trance state, which she likens to a theta state, something between sleep and full wakefulness. She’s careful to emphasize that the client remains aware and in control throughout, able to stop the process at any point; nothing is done to someone against their will. Once a client is in that relaxed state, she introduces the specific changes the script was built to deliver, and in her experience, those changes tend to stick.
Elisabeth tells Seb that nearly everyone has experienced a trance state without realizing it, describing it as the same sensation as being completely absorbed in an activity and suddenly realizing significant time has passed without noticing. She’s also clear-eyed about the limits of her work: she is not a psychologist or psychiatrist, and when someone comes to her with what sounds like serious clinical depression or a problem that requires more specialized care, she says so immediately and refers them elsewhere rather than attempting to help. She also raises a more subtle caution, the concept of secondary gain, the idea that some people unconsciously hold onto a problem because it brings them attention or care from others, and as a result may not be fully motivated to let it go.
Readers considering hypnotherapy for themselves should treat it as a complement to, not a replacement for, professional mental health care, particularly for anything involving significant depression, trauma, or diagnosed psychiatric conditions. Elisabeth’s own account of her practice reflects her personal clinical approach and experience rather than a universal guarantee of results.
Her description of subconscious patterns and the challenge of moving beyond familiar behaviors connects naturally with Letting Go of Fear and Embracing Change After 60, which looks at how fear can hold us back from making meaningful changes later in life.
What Hypnotherapy Can and Can’t Help With
Over the course of her career, Elisabeth has worked with clients on a wide range of issues: fear of flying, exam anxiety, smoking cessation, overeating, and general low self-esteem among them. She describes a particularly common client profile in Cyprus, people with a fear of flying connected to a 2005 plane crash on the island, an event so significant in a small country that nearly everyone knew someone affected by it. Even now, two decades later, she says she still sees clients whose fear of flying traces directly back to that single event.
She also offers a useful, if informal, explanation of the biology behind chronic stress. In moments of acute danger, she explains, the body is flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, directing energy toward the limbs to either fight or flee, a response that made sense when humans faced physical predators but that, in the modern world, gets triggered instead by thoughts and worries that never fully resolve. She connects this to the prevalence of stress-related conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, noting that the body’s digestive and immune systems are deprioritized during that fight-or-flight state. It’s worth noting that while chronic stress is indeed linked to a range of health conditions, this is a complex and well-studied area of medicine in its own right, and anyone dealing with persistent digestive or immune symptoms should still consult a physician rather than assuming stress is the sole explanation.
When Seb raises his own struggle with sales call reluctance, half-joking about whether hypnotherapy could help, Elisabeth gives an answer that reveals something about how she approaches her work generally: she would need to understand the actual root cause first, because effective treatment means addressing the cause of a problem rather than just the visible symptom. In Seb’s case, she suggests the issue might be better suited to life coaching than hypnotherapy specifically, a distinction she returns to a few times during the conversation.
Life Coaching, Responsibility, and a Favorite Book
Asked how she helps people take responsibility for their own lives, particularly those carrying the weight of childhood trauma, Elisabeth returns to her own story. She describes growing up bullied, with a mother who rejected her and a grandmother who, however loving, wasn’t equipped to guide her through those years. Her point in sharing this isn’t to present herself as uniquely resilient, but to make the case that everyone has had difficult experiences, and that the real variable isn’t what happens to a person but how they choose to respond to it.
She cites Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning as her favorite book, and returns more than once to a phrase from it: that between stimulus and response there is a space, and that space is where the real choice lives, the decision about how to react to whatever has happened. Elisabeth is careful not to present this as a simple fix for a genuinely hard life. She acknowledges plainly that life is sometimes very difficult, but she also points out a pattern she sees often: people who are in a good stretch of life undermine that time by worrying about what might go wrong next, rather than allowing themselves to simply enjoy it. Worry, in her view, serves no real purpose and is largely wasted energy.
On the state of the life-coaching field itself, Elisabeth is refreshingly candid. She notes that “life coach” has become an unprotected title that anyone can claim after downloading an online certificate, which is part of why she has largely stepped back from formal life coaching and focused her practice on hypnotherapy instead. Her broader philosophy, regardless of label, centers on the idea that everyone is given what she calls a box of gifts at birth, and that most people barely open the wrapping paper. Her goal, as she describes it, is to lead by example and to help people take that box seriously.
Aging, Habits, and a Simple Philosophy
When the conversation turns specifically to clients over sixty, Elisabeth says a common theme is the belief that it’s simply too late to start something new, a sense of being overlooked or having run out of dreams. She describes fear as the real obstacle in these cases, calling it a dream killer that stops people from pursuing things they genuinely want. In her experience, many of the habits that erode health and vitality with age, reduced movement, social withdrawal, poor diet, are just that: habits, and habits are exactly the kind of thing hypnotherapy is suited to help shift.
She’s quick to point out that mobility in particular matters as people age, not just for general fitness but because staying physically capable changes how a person falls and recovers from a fall, something she considers an underappreciated piece of aging well. Her own approach to this is practical rather than rigid. She lives in Cyprus, where summer heat regularly climbs into triple digits on the Fahrenheit scale, making outdoor walking impractical for several months of the year. During that stretch, she attends a twice-weekly fitness class called Body Fit and Functional in an air-conditioned studio and swims regularly. The rest of the year, she walks roughly ten kilometers a day, often with a close friend.
On diet, she’s similarly unwilling to prescribe anything extreme. She describes eating a largely normal diet built around a base of beans, fresh fish, and plenty of salad, with less red meat, while being upfront that she had a large ice cream for lunch on the day of the interview. Her underlying message is one of balance rather than restriction: a solid nutritional foundation, mixed with ordinary indulgence, rather than an all-or-nothing approach to health in later life.
The belief that it’s “too late” to pursue something new can become a barrier of its own. How to Stay Positive and Motivated as You Age offers another perspective on maintaining motivation, challenging limiting beliefs, and continuing to pursue meaningful goals after 60.
A Life Built Around Travel, Writing, and the Soul Kit
Semi-retired now, Elisabeth describes her current work as a mix of projects she genuinely enjoys rather than obligations she feels pressured to keep. She edits an annual publication called the Cyprus Business Group Magazine, conducts interviews for its podcast studio, takes occasional hypnotherapy clients, and speaks publicly at events, something she says she genuinely loves, describing herself candidly as an attention-seeking person who enjoys being on stage.
Her own podcast, Most Memorable Journeys, grew directly out of the isolation of the COVID pandemic. Unable to travel, she says she felt like she was missing a limb, so she began talking about travel instead, launching the podcast in March 2021. What started as her own stories gradually expanded into interviews with guests about their travels and, increasingly, about their broader life journeys, since, as she puts it, life itself is a kind of journey too. Five years and 244 episodes later, she’s currently taking a deliberate break from her usual weekly publishing schedule to focus on promoting her newest book.
Writing, more broadly, seems to function for Elisabeth as both a creative outlet and a form of emotional processing. She’s written two books: The Soul Kit, First Aid for the Soul, and her more recent release, One Suitcase, A Thousand Stories, which draws on her eleven years as a tour guide in the 1980s. She describes a moment that stayed with her, her own daughter reading the book and telling her she now saw her mother in a completely different light, having previously had no real sense of everything Elisabeth had actually done and experienced before becoming a parent. Elisabeth also journals regularly, describing a simple mental image she uses: that her worries travel down her arm, through the pen, and onto the page, leaving her system once they’re written down. Her next book, still in progress, will focus on traveling with her own children.
Building retirement around meaningful projects, creativity, and work you genuinely enjoy is also explored in Creating a Fulfilling Lifestyle After Retirement, with ideas for shaping a rewarding next chapter around your interests and priorities.
Where to Go: A Few Recommendations for Travelers Over Sixty
Given her decades of experience, Seb asks Elisabeth for destination advice specifically for an audience over sixty, and her answer carries a practical piece of timing advice worth noting on its own: if you’re over sixty and still physically fit, she suggests prioritizing the longer, more demanding trips now rather than later, since shorter, closer destinations will still be accessible at seventy or seventy-five, but long-haul travel becomes harder to manage the longer it’s postponed.
Her own list of favorites spans several continents. She speaks warmly of Tanzania, describing a sunrise hot-air balloon ride over the Serengeti, watching herds of zebra and giraffe from above, as one of the most memorable travel experiences of her life, and she’s looking forward to an upcoming trip to Botswana. She recommends Jordan for its history, singling out the ancient city of Petra, with its structures carved directly into the surrounding rock formations, as well as Jerash, home to one of the largest ancient amphitheaters in the region, larger, she notes, than many comparable Roman and Greek theaters elsewhere. She also speaks at length about Egypt, describing a typical itinerary that moves from Cairo and the pyramids to Luxor’s temples, followed by a Nile cruise ending near Aswan, and depicts the cruise itself, watching the landscape drift by from the deck with a drink in hand, as one of the most purely beautiful travel experiences available anywhere.
Closer to home for American travelers, Elisabeth makes a point of praising the United States itself, calling it one of the most beautiful countries she has ever toured professionally, citing its combination of coastlines, deserts, canyons, and national parks, and she encourages people who are hesitant to travel abroad to not overlook what’s available domestically. For travelers nervous about going somewhere unfamiliar, particularly solo or for the first time, she recommends starting with a reputable organized tour company, citing her own positive experiences with Gate 1 Travel across several trips in East Africa, as a way to remove logistical stress while still getting access to knowledgeable local guides.
The Space Between Stimulus and Response
Elisabeth Villiger Toufexis’s story resists a single tidy label. She’s been a tour guide, an interpreter, a hypnotherapist, a coach, an author, a magazine editor, and a podcast host, and she seems entirely comfortable with the fact that none of those roles has ever been permanent. What ties them together is a belief she returns to again and again throughout the conversation: that people are far more responsible for their own responses to life than they often want to admit, and that habits, fears, and old stories, whether about who deserves attention or who is too old to start something new, can be changed with the right tools and the willingness to use them. Her own life, shaped early by rejection and bullying and later rebuilt through curiosity, movement, and work she found genuinely meaningful, serves as her own case study for that belief. For listeners over sixty wondering whether it’s too late to take a big trip, change a long-standing habit, or simply see more of the world than they have so far, her answer is consistent: if you’re able and willing, there’s no better time than now.