What is Conversational Hypnosis

In the next few weeks I will post a series of articles on the subject of conversational hypnosis. The previous article was about Derren Brown and Conversational Hypnosis. Now you can learn more about what conversational hypnosis is and how you can use it.

Misconceptions about Hypnosis
You have probably seen or heard stories of people making a fool of themselves on stage after someone hypnotized them. They seem to be completely under the control of the stage hypnotist. This can be scary to some. What if someone has the power to completely control or dominate other people? This huge misconception of power has been created by films, the media, books and articles, but fortunately this kind of power is not possible.

In hypnosis you are negotiating with someone’s subconscious mind. And the subconscious mind is the place where people’s ethics and moral code is stored. A stage hypnotist’s job is to create the illusion of control, but the volunteers on the show never do anything conflicting with their moral code.

What is Hypnosis?
Normal everyday hypnosis is happening all around you. Have you ever driven in your car and all of a sudden you wonder what happened the last fifteen minutes or so? You know you were driving your car, because you are not in the same place where you were fifteen minutes ago. But you can’t recall the journey. This is an example of your subconscious mind taking over, making your life easier. You could say that you have entered an hypnotic trance. Another example of everyday hypnosis is when you are reading a book and you are so involved in the story that you forget about everything else and just don’t pick up signals from the world outside anymore.

There are different kinds of hypnosis – self-hypnosis, stage hypnosis and there is also Ericksonian hypnosis. The last one is also known as covert hypnosis or conversational hypnosis. With conversational hypnosis you can hypnotize and manipulate people just by talking to them. They don’t even realize that they are being hypnotized.

How Does Conversational Hypnosis Work?
First you need to know about one of the basic rules you hear quite often in the personal development field. Before something manifests itself in the real world, you first thought about it in your inner world (your mind). That means that if you want to help someone change their behavior, you should help them change their inner world first. Eventually that will influence the way that behavior manifests itself in the outer world (the real world).

Most people have a guard around their inner world that protects their beliefs and how they think and feel about certain things. Normally you can’t simply walk up to someone and tell them to change their behavior and their beliefs. A lot of people will become defensive and come up with all kinds of reasons about why you are wrong and they are right. You need a more subtle approach for this. This is where conversational hypnosis comes in. Conversational hypnosis is all about planting seeds of action in someone’s inner world. By carefully influencing how someone views his or her inner world, you begin to influence how someone thinks or feels about certain things and how they will act on this.

The 4 Steps to Hypnotizing Someone
There are four steps to hypnotizing someone using conversational hypnosis.

1. Absorb attention. You want to make sure that you have the attention of the other person, so that they are not distracted by other signals and their own thoughts.
2. Bypass the critical factor. If you have ever given someone good advice, you know the kind of responses you can get. Good advice that would actually have helped them, gets discarded with remarks like “No, this isn’t possible” or “Oh, I thought of that already. That won’t work“. Their ‘critical factor’ is getting in the way. Once you bypass this critical factor, then you can present your advice.
3. Activate an unconscious response. Any response will do. An example is an emotional response. You don’t choose to have an emotional response to something – it just happens at an unconscious level and they are the results of your subconscious mind responding to the suggestions that you present to yourself.
4. Lead the unconscious to desired outcome. And this is where you lead those unconscious responses to the outcome you are looking for.

There are several ways to absorb someone’s attention and there are numerous ways to bypass the critical factor. I will go into those in the next articles. If you can’t wait, you can check out this great course called The Power of Conversational Hypnosis. I’ve been reading and listening to the material the last few weeks and simply can’t put it away. I’ve already noticed the difference in my conversations with other people. The course contains great exercises to learn this material quickly, but just by reading the material or listening to the audio files you pick up some of these techniques and work with it on an unconscious level.

Have fun and see you at the next article in the series!

Gerber

Related posts:

1. Derren Brown and Conversational Hypnosis