How to Protect Yourself From “Street Hypnosis” and NLP

Set the scene. You are walking down the street, in the park or having a night out with your friends. A complete stranger walks up to you and before you know what’s happening the conversation has turned to hypnosis or maybe just to imagination and pretending.

Then twenty minutes later you find yourself standing there wondering where that time went while your compatriots are either guffawing or also looking
as stunned as you feel.

What’s happened?

Scene two is different, you are at an event and a person walks up to you, announces they are a professional hypnotist or magician hired as entertainment by the venue or event organisers and would you like to take part. You wake up ten minutes later with an audience applauding both you and your performing friend who offers to give you back the memory of astounding reality you’ve just experienced in the last few minutes.

I have no problem with scene two and neither should you. Forgetting any laws
or insurance neither of which would protect you from incompetence or for
that matter stupidity, in the second scenario you can be assured that the
hypnotist has two things to protect. Their reputation and their payment. If
you like their living.

Similarly if you are somewhere and hear someone discussing hypnosis who then
says they are a therapist, then if you ask and they hypnotise you then you
have instigated the thing and they will want you, and the people watching,
to take their card as a client base building exercise.

In both of the later scenes you have the security that the reason for the
hypnosis is one of professional demonstration as opposed to a simple ego
trip for the hypnotist.

Sadly that isn’t always the case. And when it isn’t you need to know how to
recognise and to avoid being effected by hypnosis in places you wouldn’t go
looking for it.

Unless it’s being done so quickly that it borders on assault, or so covertly
that the only way to really avoid it is to hum a tune in your head and not
talk to anyone you don’t know, the approach, setup and induction will almost
always follow a set procedure.

So what to look for?

Watch out for anyone who tries to break your pattern. That is they will hold
out their hand and as you go to shake it they will pull yours toward them or
pull it up towards your face.

They may just shake your hand and not letting go put their free hand on your
elbow or shoulder. While they do this they will either ask outright if you
have ever been hypnotised or much more powerfully they will ask if you have
ever felt “different” or “imagine yourself floating, or distracted, or day
dreaming”.

One of my favourite terms is very simple and gets most people into a
subconscious state instantly and that is, “Just Imagine.”

If they are a little less subtle they may ask you to stare at something,
anything, doesn’t really matter, although something bright or their own eyes
or your own finger are among the most popular.

Once they get past this point they are in your head and when that happens
they become your conscious and your conscience. That’s right they are the
ones making all the decisions and your subconscious hasn’t even been given
the suggestion that you will not do anything that goes against your morals
or your beliefs. This isn’t exactly right and is something which every
hypnotist should implant because when they don’t your morals and beliefs are
a very thin veneer and they are easily suggested away.

So now you are hypnotised and no longer in control of any but your very
basic actions what is the point? Well in a lot of cases of street hypnosis,
certainly when it’s covert, the intent is the gratification of the
hypnotists ego and as such your benefit is a cursory consideration because
they have nothing to loose. Not even in a court as it’s impossible even for
the best of us to prove hypnosis occurred.

So can you go out and buy an anti-hypnosis shield? Is their a tin foil hat
that will stop the hypnotic rays from entering your skull? Does your local
Radio Shack or Maplins stock a covert hypnotist detector? Sadly no. You have
two alternatives.

One is to visit a great hypnotist professionally and get them to install the
suggestion against any inappropriate hypnosis, or your entering an unwilling
hypnotic state at the suggestion of someone else.

Or you can learn how it’s done and then be in the place where if it’s
attempted with you, your subconscious can take over and reverse the
direction so the would be hypnotist becomes the hypnotised.

To learn how to turn the tables on anyone trying to hijack
control of your brain without permission, click here to
pick up a copy of my Svengali System online training.

Or you can own my new book “How to Make Friends With Yourself and Influence People” the transcript of the audio course available on Amazon or any other book seller.

================

TheHypnotistRadio.com

No show on Sunday this week. I’m installing how to do real hypnosis into 30 odd minds this weekend and that is all about focus. But we recorded a very special mastermind show with me,Jonathan Chase, Justin Tranz, Reg Blackwood and our guest British award winning hypno-magician James Brown. You can listen to the show from the BlogTalkRadio page or here as a Podcast from iTunes

I am Against NLP & Hypnosis, Words and Understanding

=============================

I am against NLP

Apparently I am *against* NLP according to a comment on my very good friend Reg Blackwood’s blog.

This is in facet not true. Neuro Linguistic Programming is as far as one can tell, a study of human behaviour and how that results in excellence at any given task. And a theoretical application of it’s findings to create the potential for such excellence in others by dint of emulation. Being against it would need it to be something more than just another way of making the simple complex. It would be like being against flatulence.

That’s what it appeared to be when Messieurs Bandler and Grinder originally thought the whole thing up. Bandler is now on record of saying that it was a way of selling hypnosis to a larger market. However.

Now it’s mostly a sort of psudo-psychology for people who can’t be bothered to go to college to get the real thing, and it’s almost totaly ignored by established psychology and as such is massively attractive to lay therapists.

As a field of learning NLP is what it is – a sort of anchor for the good old school of let’s-make-it-up-as-we-go-along. As a tool for change it reminds me of most software produced by Microsoft, complex and bloated and full of stuff you’ll never use and which has only been tested in the mind of the developers. Even after all these years it’s still in Beta and gets updated every three months or so. That is compared to the Mac OSX approach of real direct hypnosis which is basically Zap ‘em and tell them to stop it!

Richard Bandler talks about NLP but uses, promotes and teaches what I and anyone with half a brain would realize was straight forward hypnosis. Well okay, not straight forward hypnosis. Side-winding corkscrew hypnosis. But at the end of the day hypnosis by any other name.

John Grinder seems to be closer to the original idea and so his videos are generally longer than Bandler’s and slightly more complex. More Linguistic. It’s like dong hypnosis but first having to shove the suggestions through the intellect rather than giving them directly to the subconscious.

So am I ‘against’ NLP? No.

I think it’s long-winded, largely inaccurate, inflexible, unproven and 80% bovine excreta but I’m not against it. You are free to waste your money and belief system on whatever you want.

===========================================

Hypnosis, Words and Understanding

Induce means to create or bring about. Comply means to agree or capitulate which means there is some kind of a choice involved. Understanding means the meaning given to a word, action or symbol by the observer or recipient.

Hypnotist in an online group, club or forum means having the capacity to ignore what a word means and to apply understanding ballistically.

Nothing is more frustrating than the endless discussions that go on and on in the hypnosis ‘community’ about what words mean. And nothing is more ludicrous than writing “Well that isn’t My understanding of what that means”, even in the face of the full dictionary definition.

Samuel Johnson must be rotating fast enough to achieve orbit.

I see that all the time. It’s okay I suppose. You have every right to ignore what some person has painstakingly researched and entered into the dictionary. Hey, language is after all organic and changes it’s pants at the drop of a diphthong. But does it help when the users of the Hypnotic in-speak can’t even agree on what the words they are using mean?

Semantics apparently are not important. Although to be honest that is usually an argument put forward by people who are not entirely sure what semantics actually means.

However, in Hypnosis nothing is really more important to the hypnotist than semantics. At least Lexical semantics. Because if you get the meaning of the words wrong for the hypnotee then their understanding comes into force and that could cause a lot of problems.

The subconscious mind understands words to a degree. To about the same degree as a bright nine year old child.

Vocabularies at that age are large and are not far off adult. Understanding however is far from clear or learned. The average kid can use some pretty damn complex words, even if they have no idea what they mean or what to do with them after. And funny enough the same can be said about the average adult. Especially those involved in a process which has it’s own language and understanding.

So what are Hypnotic words that and phrases that most people will understand, and that are not really open to argument?

Errm, ummmm, weeeelllll, urrrrrr, frarppppp, duhhhhhh….

Off hand there aren’t any. The artisans of hypnotism can’t even agree on what Hypnosis itself means let alone any of the other in-terms such as, Induce, Deepen, Compliance, Choice, and the big three, Subconscious, Unconscious and Conscious, all of which can apparently mean a process, a factor, an aspect and a real entity. And none of which come even close to meaning what their dictionary definition puts forward as a potentially agreeable understanding.

I put out a daily dose of hypnotism hints and tips to people who have signed up for it on my web site, and today’s is going to be this…

Find out what your hypnotee understands hypnosis to mean and give it too them. It’s their understanding that counts after all.

========================================

This weeks The Hypnotist Radio Show

Sunday at 7pm UK Time my celebrity co-host Reg Blackwood and I are back together, this week interviewing American Stage Hypnotist Justin Tranz.

Justins record is indisputable, 10 years in his Las Vegas show, 18 months just finished on Broadway, 5 years with his own show on the PlayBoy channel where he hypnotizes couples to divulge their deepest darkest secrets.

Should be world class interview.

Of course there will be Regs Rant, The BIG [business in gear] Question, and the usual live chat and call in.

Are you ready to sleep with strangers?

How to protect yourself from Political Persuasion NLP and Hypnosis.

NLP is Hypnosis when it works and unproven psychobabbling rubbish when it doesn’t. And if you live in Britain you are going to see and hear a lot of it over the next few months as we head towards that great British display of massive apathy which we call The Election.

It’s true, everyone who has to ‘speak’ is paying out huge chunks of the wages you pay them, to people like me, to learn how to use presupposition, visual anchors, embedded commands, Ericksonian language patterns and of course body language, to persuade and influence you to stand at a polling booth and choose them in favour of all the other people who apart from wearing a different colour tie or scarf are saying exactly the same thing with the same intent.

The thing is thanks to largely erratic training and the inevitable lack of finesse the vast majority of them end up sounding like a babbling-bush idiot and looking like something between a badly sown glove puppet and a Windmill. The scary thing is of course that it does actually work if you don’t know what you are looking or listening for.

Last night I sat and watched our PM – that’s prime minister, or president in everything but name for our friends in the sad position of not having any tradition older than the average pine tree. I watched Mr Brown on the news last night with his head poised at an angle that made him look like someone had removed a couple of vertebra, this apparently makes you look honest, as does the head
forward eyes up stance so favoured when you are an adulterating publicity seeking princess trying to convince people you are the personification of an angel.

Next we see the moment silence followed by the classic “Because” move. If you give a reason following the word “Because” it adds weight to your argument because people like to think you’re telling them everything. It doesn’t matter what comes after that magic word “I think you should do as I tell you Because it works that way.” Is an argument politicians use all the time if you really listen.

Actually politicians usually believe the above anyway so their impersonation of the spring loaded nodding dog you see on the parcel shelves of cars driven by people with the sense of humour of a slug, is being backed by Self Belief and Intent. A rare and powerful combination.

Next we watch the body. Mostly, and in the case of Mr Brown definitely, politicians are not oil paintings. Not of the Mona Lisa variety anyway, think more birds eye view of a badly executed pothole repair. It comes from all those years of stress as they toil to stop their erstwhile employers realising that they out number the occupants
of Whitehall Palace 500,000 to one and that they actually have a legal right to say ‘stop it’. All those years give the political visage the stickiness of a superglue sandwich and the flexibility of Michael Jackson’s death mask. Once they begin to smile or frown the chosen expression just stays there for hours.

Until of course they learn NLP and modelling, the safe face of suggestion and hypnosis. Then they realise that if you move something the eyes are attracted to the gesture and away from the face, especially away from the eye of the speaker where the true point of wanting to be in one of the highest paid jobs in the country can be detected. Then the focus is directed away from the obvious rubbish they are saying by the subconscious sign language which is, according to some of the experts, 90% of the communication mechanics between humans.

That is of course unless you are on radio, the telephone, txt’ing or typing and frantically misspelling in an InterWeb chatroom or on FaceSpace where our body language is replaced Neuro Linguistically by the use of embedded commands such as placing the call to action word ‘Now’ after a question, i.e., “When is Now a good time to give up all hope and enter the domain of despair you’ll live in for the next five years after voting for me?” And of course in writing and speaking by adding the dread exclamation mark to everything *!*. And I do mean Everything!

Actually the world communicates more now with video as the technology catches up with the fact that the human eyes are quite important. Most communication nowadays, especially in the UK if you are 16 and have thumbs more dexterous than Nijinski’s toes, is done without the ability to see the protagonists body. However most experts will tell
you that doesn’t matter, if you make the gestures anyway the listener will be able to detect them through the subconscious recognition of vocal tone changes in your voice. Which actually is probably true. It certainly works if you smile, people can and do ‘hear’ that for sure.

So how did this all come to the point where you should know how to protect yourself from it? There was a time of course when a great orator was simply that. Good at talking. Usually because they believed in what they were saying. They then said stuff in a certain way, moved their head and body just so. Clenched their fist or beat their chest. Or did nothing physically but changed the tone of their voice and spoke with absolute focus.

Back in the seventies, when I was watching the like of Robert Halpern on stage in Glasgow and the Amazing Kreskin on television and fuelling my own burning ambitions in hypnosis and total world domination, there was a movement of events which led to the idea that if you do and say what I do and say you become as good as me at what I do. Which may or many’nt be true. You’ll certainly not become better at what You do but that’s a different story.

This led to the phenomenon of people learning to be speakers and presenters rather than just believing in something and telling people about it with passion. At that time in the Americas, of which some States are United, NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming was developed, discovered or just plain invented by a linguist and a mathematician in California who were both very good at subconscious communication and suggestion. The force behind the ‘copy me become me’ school of thought was born. Or at least was wonderfully commercialised and corperatised so that the word Hypnosis didn’t come into the equation.

And this is what led to almost all speakers, especially of the trained variety, all looking like a cross between Ghandi, Hitler and Mother Teresa and sounding like the overly polite southern state psychiatrist which most of the really serious language patterns are based on, a guy called Erickson.

The thing that makes all this work of course is belief. No, not yours in their argument, what makes it actually work is their belief that doing this stuff means they are in control of your desires and decisions. Believe something strongly enough and you can rave and wave all over the place and regardless of any logic a vast amount of people can and will follow you. And like it or not if you don’t know what to look or listen for you too will be affected to some degree.
Sometimes even more so if you think you are critically analysing their drivel.

So, what do you do to protect yourself from the persuasion invasion already beginning to turn our tellies and papers into a mesmerising cock fight. Yes they are using the power that your inability of being unable to look away from the car accident gives them. So, how do you stop your mental process being directed and changed without your
knowledge?

Firstly don’t watch. Close your eyes or turn around. Body language is great when people can see it and pretty useless otherwise. Secondly listen for the words ‘Now” or any word that signals they are talking to You, You and Your are the obvious ones. And of course don’t forget the reason words like Because. I’d bet a pound to a penny that whatever comes before that word is dubious and after the word is a lie.

Thirdly move to an island in the south Pacific until after the
elections returning with the honest statement that no one can blame you because you weren’t even at the scene of the incident.

Fourthly? Vote for the raving loony party who are usually too poor or too crazy to use this stuff and who promise that when they get in they are taking everyone on holiday to the Bahamas for two weeks on the falling over fluids. Which for me is more believable than what the other lot will have you believe.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Can we cure M.E.?

I read today that a woman in Britain was set free from the murder charge with which she had been given after assisting her daughter to commit suicide after suffering from ME from the age of 14 until she died at the age of 31.

I’m not interested in the morals of the case. People decide to do stuff and if the persons involved all know what they are doing and are not innocent or incompetent or just too plain stupid to make decisions then I figure it’s their life, their choice

What does interest me about this case is ME or Myalgic
Encephalopathy/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome or basically just feeling sick and tired with no apparent reason.

Now I have personally never dealt professionally with ME. Although I suspect I may have under a different label. Its symptoms which vary considerably to the point where there really are no specific ones and being labeled with the condition is what’s left after the medical diagnosticians fail to reveal anything and everything else. So in medical terms it stands for ‘No Idea’.

I have however read about similar states in very old books. In many books written before 1939 when the ME tag was added so that it could be filed more neatly, conditions of the spirit and body which seem unerringly similar to the dread ME were around. Everything from being possessed by a lazy spirit, through Ague and Morbidity right through to Hysteria. Yet, except for the possession theory, they all agreed that the root cause of the malaise was emotional or of the spirit!

Now don’t get me wrong here. If you have ME it is very real. Just because something is said to be all in the mind doesn’t mean that it does not affect the body, that would be stupid. The smallest emotion affects the body. That’s its job. Otherwise fear wouldn’t make you run away or freeze and amusement wouldn’t result in aching ribs and crying. And trust me I do know what it feels like to be consistently uncomfortable in some way and tired for most of the rest of the time. having a neuromuscular condition myself. So I empathise. What I am doing however is wondering about the cause and of course, the possible remedy of what is a totally debilitating condition.

On the UK ME association site – there’s an association for just about everything now isn’t there? On that site -
http://www.meassociation.org.uk/ – in the section marked
Complementary treatments the only mention of anything dealing with the mind is that of the ‘Lightening Process’ a combination of NLP, Hypnotherapy and Life Coaching.

Sad really because I have no doubt that even if hypnosis can’t get rid of the thing itself it can undoubtedly help to combat the effects at an emotional level which could make the difference between life being so unbearable that it stops being an option and getting enough from your existence that you at least enjoy more than you suffer.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Google Masturbation

And now – this being the first of the Weekly Wednesday Wisdoms – to set the format for my meanderings I will have a look around the InterWeb for something Silly, unbelievable, disgustingly cute, terribly bad or just sodding amazing.

Something designed to fill your head with Dopamine
and make you smile. And just for the look of the thing I shall apply the eye of the Hypnotist to whatever we may find. . . if you have any suggestions where I should go then leave them below if there is a space for comments or go to TheHypnotist.co.uk and drop some graffiti off there.

Now this may or may not make you smile but it certainly made my grin chin appear. I Googled the name Jonathan Chase and pressed ‘I’m feeling lucky!’ and it went right to My site!

That’s it. I can retire now.

Now I am more ‘important’ than a Gay Actor, a Photographer and a General.

It’s hard. Well it would be wouldn’t it? This is Google Masturbation after all. Being number 1 on Google’s ‘lucky’ search is like having a penis extension without the cost of buying a Bugatti Veyron or a Range Rover.

It means you is ‘Da man’, or it means that everyone who shares your name hasn’t got as good a search engine optimisation programme as you.

Either way it made my day.

See you next week.

Smiles
JonC

Before presupposition the French had a term for it which pre-dates presupposition by about a hundred years first appearing around 1845 in a history of a Franco army triumph.

The term?

Fait Accompli – which means ‘the deed is done’.That roughly means to suppose that something has already happened.

Creating a reality as if it has already happened, even though it will happen in the future, is what hypnotists have been doing as a matter of course for a few hundreds of years and what subconscious minds have been doing for ever.

“When I wake you you HAVE forgotten your name.” The presupposition there is you Have forgotten it even though that hasn’t happened yet.

What you DO with it is to act as if the result is a thing of the present rather than a thing of the future.

For instance to get someone to shut the door you could say, “You found closing the door to be pleasant.”

Don’t hide it, there is no need. Their brain won’t understand it as it has no future nor past and becoming confused will give over control to the mind. Their mind will just believe it and to make it so and fell ‘pleasant’ it Has To Shut The Door. What will happen is they will look at you with a frown or even say “What?” and then they will close the door to ‘feel pleasant’.

Of course you could just say, “Please shut the door,” but that isn’t anywhere near as much fun as playing the mind game!

So to use a presupposition move your imagination into a place where Fait Accompli! And act and talk as if it is.

Jonathan Chase

Actually Derren Brown blows the old eye accessing clues apart in his first book. It’s totally unproven rubbish. However what he gives you in place is worth gold. And I’m paraphrasing here.

What you need to watch for is their ‘Pattern’.

Ask them three questions that they can not lie about. “Is your hair brown?” “Is it cold today?” etc. Watch where their eyes go and how they move their eyes AND their mouth, head and shoulders. If they lie that pattern, whatever it is for them, will change, even the volume and tone of their voice sometimes changes.

I did a variation of that once on Jane but without her speaking.

I said “Just think three things about Saskia – her daughter – and make one of them a lie.”

I then said, “Think of the first thing”, counted to four.
“Think of the second”, counted to four.
“Now think of the third.” counted to four.

I then told her it was the second and she was amazed.

Between you and I it wasn’t all that amazing because although she held her eyes pretty steady on the second thing she very slightly nodded her head.

You know, there are loads of books and stuff out there that I’ve waisted time and money on when what it comes down to is you’ve got to look for the easy stuff.

The stuff that works!

Smiles
JonC

In the “Svengali System” I go into much more detail as far as technique is concerned but the bottom line is really simple.

Hide it right out front and just do it.

Don’t expect full blown trance, it’s too much trouble and you don’t need it. Go for a moment of distraction and or fascination which happens best when your targets are talking about emotive things.

Now some people claim if it isn’t trance you are not doing hypnosis it’s NLP. The fact is that the workable stuff in NLP is hypnosis, that’s where NLP came from in the first place. NLP models hypnosis not the other way around. “Trance” is a by product of hypnosis not the thing itself and real hypnotists have been using suggestion forever without trance.

In my experience that sort of hypnosis happens all the time. No, not when you are day dreaming or distracted, it’s when your subconscious takes over all together and it can be directed and steered there to the point that you just don’t consciously know it.

Creating what I call Momentous Moments, that’s moments when we pick up our beliefs which lead to our behaviours which lead to our perceptions…. creating those moments is very easy with a bit of practice. You can create this simply by repetitive tapping at a level almost inaudible, or by using questions with a repetitive theme – that’s how advertising works. And then at the right moment pop in the suggestion – which is the true art of hypnosis anyway.

Is it that simple? Yes.

Is it hypnosis? If that’s your intent then yes.

Will it be covert? If they are not a hypnotist they won’t notice.

Will it sell more Coke? Of course it already does!

Is it ethical? Well everyone manipulates and controls, influences and persuades anyway so I guess that’s down to the intent behind your using these skills.

Whether it’s NLP Hypnosis EFT Chinosis Symbolism, the bedrock of everything is suggestion.

Suggestion in psychology is the process of inducing a thought, sensation, or action in a receptive person without using persuasion and without giving rise to reflection in the recipient. I think that explains pretty much what has been happening with hypnosis and all it’s off shoots over the past few thousand years.

No really hypnotised person reflects on why they are doing or thinking what ever it is they are doing or thinking, if they do then they are not hypnotised.

All hypnotists whether they be clinical, theraputic, stage, motivationalists, NLPers, or any other sort of “If I do this then you will do this” Hypnotists use suggestion.

They have to, it’s all they have.

Now when I was training I was given a list of rules for suggestion, and because I don’t like rules much I have tested every single one and guess what? Not one of them stand up as necessary in practice.

Lets look at some of them.

In suggestion don’t use negative terms like ‘Don’t’, yes I was actually told that! Apparently the mind can not process negatives. No it’s true, they actually write this rubbish in some pretty famous books.

Another beauty is never use the past tense or mention the thing you are trying to cure, repair or remove. It like trying to prepare a plate of poisonous blow fish by carefully making sure that there s absolutely No blowfish in the dish!

I used to lie awake at night trying to think of alternatives!

I gave up.

Nowadays, and I don’t do this often, I tell smokers they don’t smoke, that they never have smoked and although some people may tell them they smoked that won’t bother them they won’t get confused or have any problems with that.

I then cement that with some symbolism and that’s that. It never fails and is as permanent as any other behaviour or belief.

For a phobia I say this, “You know how you get scared and panicky when you see a [spider or sit on a plane etc] well you can stop that now. Just stop. And the next time, and every time you do —- you’ll act —- ” Then cement that with a little symbolism, job done.

This works 100% with people who are hypnotised.

Suggestion is strong stuff.

So strong that we can carry around a poor self image simply from someone telling us – suggesting – that they think we are useless. And this only has to be accepted as our internal reality and that can happen instantly.

So why has this industry – never saw it as a real science – of explaining all this taking time to change a mind grown into psychology, psychotherapy and all the cumbersome complex theory that holds no water in practice grown to where it is now?

Human beings want complexity. If it’s complex it is difficult and therefore it has to be studied and examined. It has to have reams of dead tree devoted to it and hours of fairly useless and cumbersome techniques applied.

You know I stopped ‘teaching’ when I found it much easier to install simple concepts at a subconscious level. And apparently, acording to the experts, I can’t do that either.