The ability to alter the state of mind has been something you probably have been reading about and possibly practicing for some time now.

If this is true then the next logical step in your education will be to refine and sharpen the trance induction skills you have been learning. To do this you must take all the skills you have been learning and keep them as fresh in your mind as possible. Many of these skills you will be able to use in trance induction as you learn to broaden your horizons in this area.

For now you should focus on the basics of becoming great, a great Conversational Hypnotist that is. The 4 Stage Protocol along with a couple of secret tips will give you the important and basic specifics for inducing a hypnotic trance. The skills and tips in this article will nearly guarantee you the ability to send you subject and those around you into hypnotic trances.

These are all skills you should already be familiar with and if you are not then a brief refresher may help before you carry on. On another note, remember that these are the basics and you will be learning many more layers of skills to add to these as your education continues.

The 4 Stage Protocol is really the meat and potatoes of getting someone into a hypnotic trance. This set of rules or concepts contain all you need in order to create hypnotic trance in another person.

The first step is to Absorb Attention. No matter what hypnotic effect or process you want to do with your subject you must always first absorb their attention. Without the attention of your listener you will not be able to continue in the area of inducing a trance. So make sure to practice getting people’s attention.

You will learn ways to do this as you go on to other articles, all you need to know now is you simply must be able to get a persons attention focused on you to bring them into an altered state of mind or hypnotic trance.

The second stage in the 4 Stage Protocol is a very important one, Bypass the Critical Factor. As you have read before the critical factor is the filter of the conscious mind that criticizes and analyzes all the information being sent in from outside sources.

It is imperative to make any type of progress with the betterment of life that you bypass the critical factor. Your listener must be able to agree and accept your suggestions on some level so you can not only seed them in but get a response from those suggestions.

That brings us to the third stage, which is to Activate an Unconscious Response. This is simply getting any type of unconscious response from the person you are inducing. It can be any of the signals found in the signal recognitions system, an emotion or reaction to your suggestion that is communicated from an unconscious mind level.

A change in breathing, blinking and so on, as long as it is unconscious. This is important because without attaining the unconscious response you will have a difficult time leading it to a desired outcome.

This brings you to the fourth and final stage in the 4 Stage Protocol, being to Lead the Unconscious Response to a Desired Result. When you recognize the different signals or unconscious responses you must take them and lead them into your desired result.

That result can be a thought process, action, idea or anything you want that will help in the person’s goals of life change.

Now that you have been reminded of the four stages you can set those stages in the back of your mind and concentrate on how to get someone’s attention. The fixation of attention can be done in many different ways. The method you use largely depends on the person and circumstance you are in.

You can attract their attention by telling them something that will interest them. You can attract their attention by asking questions that instill some curiosity. You can attract them down the rabbit hole by showing them something they want so they in turn want to follow you. All these are ways of attracting attention.

The above list of ways to attract attention is great but sometimes it is just good to be direct. Simply ask them to direct their attention to what it is you are saying, doing or asking them to do. Humans by nature like to comply, most like to please others and in asking a very direct and easy thing will certainly get your listeners attention.

Being simple and direct in asking for attention may seem like a contradiction since in Conversational Hypnosis you are usually trying to learn how to be indirect. But if you take a step back and think about the greatest hypnotists like Milton Erickson and others even they knew when to be direct. They knew when to just simply make a direct request of a subject.

Being very direct is one of the best kept secrets in hypnosis. You should have no reason not to be direct, and often it can give you the best results. Making a clear concise request without embarrassment or hesitation is an important way to start in getting peoples attention.

The second secret in hypnosis that relates to this is to learn how to move from being very direct to indirect as you improve your skill. After you have refined your ability to get attention with directness you will learn to move to more indirect ways of still getting the attention you need.

This is a way to make things less blatant and more smooth, more like they are taking place in the background of what you are really doing. You will learn how to accomplish the art of absorbing attention with more subtle communications.

These things will happen in the background of conversation and be harder to spot by your listener. This is something that you will want to move on to after you have mastered the direct routes of absorbing attention.

Stories have been one of the secure rocks in the foundation of hypnosis. They exhibit all the elements that you are taught to use and do so on an unconscious level that evades resistance. The language and art of story telling is deeply embedded in the concepts and ways in which we use hypnosis.

The story telling tips and strategies in this article are straight from the horse’s mouth these are real techniques used by master story tellers and they will enrich the ways in which you practice and tell stories to those around you.

The first strategy is to let your own stories ‘slip out’ naturally. In this strategy you will begin to see that over time you will have trained your brain how to tell stories. As you do this your own stories will begin to naturally flow.

Your mind will start to relax as you get more accustomed to telling stories and you will begin to be reminded of the stories in your life that fit into the contexts that have been set. As you tell stories you will remember events and times in your life that you will be moved to insert into the story you are telling.

This will happen more often the more used to telling stories you are and before you know it you will be telling stories that are completely taken from your own true experiences.

The second master story tellers’ strategy is to collect a storehouse of great stories. There will be stories that you tell that will become your favorites. These will be the stories that have a great impact on yourself and those around you.

They will evoke a response and stir emotions. Regardless of whether these stories are from your life, the lives of others or completely fictional it does not matter. These are stories you should write down, record the highlights of them so they are captured.

The one thing you don’t want to do is to memorize your stories, let the little changes happen as long as the big things stay the same if it a truly great story already. Reciting stories word for word is one of the best ways to completely kill a story.

As you do this you will be rehearsing the story so it will provide practice as well as a great library for you to access whenever you need it. This will also reinforce your ability to remember and revisit the stories that are perfect for situations you run across with the people you are helping.

The third story telling master’s strategy is to remember the highlights of each story. This concept is a time tested one that emphasizes that we should carry the highlights of a story with us but be negotiable in the other details.

Story tellers through out history have always had audiences that returned repeatedly to hear the same stories over and over again. This is because they never told the story in the same way, small details change. Sometimes it would take hours to finish a story and other times the same tale could be told in mere minutes.

Use your hypnosis tools to help these ever changing details to unfold; things like sensory rich descriptions, tone of your voice and your linguistic skills. Let changes take place in the rhythm and pace of the story, all these things will re-excite your audience over and over again, it will keep them coming back for more.

Finally the fourth master story teller’s strategy is to use your signal recognition systems.
This is all about watching and observing the signals that the listeners are giving to you about what they want to hear, what they need to hear.

As long as your signal recognitions system is on and alert you will be able to tune change your stories in the ways that will fit your audience. The reason your signal recognition system is so important here is because you will be looking for the unconscious signals that the story is right or wrong for the listener.

Once you determine how you need to tweak your story you will be telling the right story to the right person or people, again want they want and need to hear.

Story telling gives you an insurmountable amount of power with in hypnosis. Story telling is a way for you to access states through the unconscious without triggering the critical factor as well as seeding ideas for future use to change lives.

It allows you to implant emotional triggers, which you learn more about later on in this article. It is a way to express many different types of situations, feelings and solve problems.

There is no real limit to the power behind a story, hence it is a very powerful tool for you to use in you quest as a hypnotist. In this article you will learn how to create an emotional trigger with a hypnotic story. This will serve only to strengthen your story telling ability and assist in propelling you into new areas of the telling of stories.

Hypnosis is a way of altering your experiences to become more responsive in a focused and calm mind. The unconscious is the house where your emotions dwell and when you create an unconscious response you are in effect creating an emotional response as well. Just in this you have already accessed an altered state of mind.

When you embark on telling a story your objective will be to get an emotional response from those around you. You want to revivify the experience for your listeners, really make them come alive in your ideas placed in the story. Context of the story will play a big part in this. You must access the correct contexts for the emotions you are trying to coax from the people around you.

The best way to do this is to ‘go first’. In doing this you will sub-communicate the experiences that you want your listeners to have. If you can make the events, ideas and characters of your story real for yourself in turn your listener will have a better chance of tuning into that same picture.

In going first here you are not just going to be visualizing the story you need to really place yourself within the story in your mind. You need the experience to convey the emotions you wish to extract from those around you. In fact you need to experience the emotions as well.

Remember the things you have been learning as they will be valuable tools for this process. All the tools still count in this type of story telling. You will need to use the three rules of story telling as well as the re-incorporation of events.

You will find that ‘going first’ to visualize the story will heighten the awareness of your listener. Keeping in tune with your creativity and how to let it flow freely from your unconscious to create the story will be pivotal. All of these aspects along with keeping inside the circle and never stop talking will get your story telling to a new level.

As you use all these concepts in your building of stories you will be more apt and more able to let your unconscious mind freely create the story straight from the creative wells with in you.

There are other aspects you have learned that you will want to work into this web of story telling as well. These include the hypnotic language, precision language, hypnotic themes and sensory rich language.

In practicing your story telling you will be making up stories and telling true stories at the same time. The more you create stories to tell the more your unconscious mind will relate those fictional stories to true events that have taken place in your own life.

Soon you will have the capability to tell genuine stories that will also induce hypnosis and present hypnotic themes. You will be able to embed the suggestions you want your listeners to put into action, and see a response to that action.

When you start to combine all these aspects of hypnosis you will be actively creating emotional triggers within your stories. The story itself will set off emotional triggers and open the people around you to suggestion and change.

Stories and hypnosis go together very well and story telling will be a powerful and important part of your job. The stories you tell will be used to do many things you have already learned. They can assist you in any of the steps in the 4 Stage Protocol. A good hypnotic story will absorb attention, bypass critical factor, create an unconscious response and put the unconscious response into action.

Stories will also give you a place to seed ideas and place suggestions. They will allow you to have a frame set in order to mirror the problems and experiences of the people around you so they can identify with the characters and put the solutions you suggest into action.

All of these things are just the tip of the iceberg in what good story telling can do for you in Conversational Hypnosis. The stories you tell will often be the backbone of your interactions with the very people you are trying to help to better their lives. In this context it only makes sense that you should be the best possible story teller you can be in to influence people in the best possible way. Good story telling is in essence a win-win situation for you and your clients.

As you have been learning you have probably been practicing telling stories in some way or another. Since you have had a little experience it is time to start to polish up those stories and really make them shine. One of the most important things you will need to remember to do this is to avoid at all costs the restriction of your unconscious, your creativity.

There are tricks that will help you to keep your creativity flowing and free. The first trick to this is don’t try to be good. This may sound a little odd when the purpose of this article is to enhance your story telling abilities.

What this means is that there is a set of rules that we have covered previously and you need to stick to those rules. Trying too hard to be good at telling a story can often times be self defeating in that you will diminish the natural flow of the story. Don’t destroy your stories by trying too hard to make them the best stories ever heard. If you stay with the rules instead of trying to be good you will tell stories that are good.

The second trick to telling hypnotic stories is to let the muck come out. There will be a certain amount of muck within you that will need to seep out in the beginning phases of your story telling.

This muck is made up of all the things you think of and ponder that are not socially acceptable to say in conversations with the people you interact with on a regular basis. This is a natural process that happens to all story tellers that are really great, so just let the much flow.

Don’t be surprised when the muck comes. This muck is dirty. It can be a combination of obscenities, morbid thinking, swearing, sexual perversions and all other types of socially unacceptable thoughts that we never discuss with other people. The fact is this is going to be unavoidable and you ultimately are not responsible for your stories.

Stories are created by the unconscious so you need to free yourself here completely. Adopt the attitude that you don’t care what others think of your dirty, dirty muck. Do not criticize yourself for the stories that evolve from this muck. Do not censor yourself in your story telling, just open your mouth and let the muck fly.

If you don’t get it out you will pollute the flow of your creativity and that is the first no-no you were warned of in this article.

The third trick is going to be for you to visualize the scene. You can probably tell I am now going to tell you to ‘go first’ for this trick. You are right it is important that you can not only visualize the scene but also put yourself into it. Make sure to visualize it all so you are creating a reality for yourself and your listener.

The fourth trick to story telling is to keep things inside ‘the circle’. This is a simple idea that is fairly easy to follow. When you are telling a story each piece of information you give will have natural associations attached to it.

These associations are the things in the circle. All the rest of the things that are not associated with the pieces of information you are giving need to be left out of your story.

The best way to illustrate this is to give you an example. If you are telling a story and you set the scene as you are living in the ocean there are automatically going to be associations that go with that idea. Things that will be around you will be fish, water, sand and seaweed.

There is also a broader aspect to this circle of surroundings that the listener may not expect that can also be possible. These things could include a submarine, a body floating in the water and a pirate ship. These are all in the circle.

Things that are not going to be in the circle are dogs, furniture, semi trucks and camels.
Remember that all the things in the circle are going to have associations as well.

This is an easy way to follow your own story; all the future twists and turns in the story will already be laid out for you in the things that are associated with every thing that comes before it.

Finally the last trick to follow for story telling is to just keep talking. You will always have subject matter in the associations with the elements you have previously told in the story so let it flow. Just keep talking.

Now that we know the insider tricks to polishing your stories lets add a few insights to them to get the complete story on polishing your stories.

The best way to become an exceptional story teller is to train your brain. In this you are conditioning your brain to grow new neurology and make new connections that will let the stories come naturally with practice.

A good insight to keep in mind with this is to avoid blocking or wimping out. These are ways that will hold up your story telling and bring it to a stall, boring. Blocking is when you keep doing the same activities over and over again simply because you are afraid of moving on to the next idea in your story.

Wimping out is when you keep circling around the same idea repeatedly running in the same circle. Remember that you have a preset story line provided by you unconscious and the association with the aspects of the already existing story. You should not be afraid to move on.

The final concept and second additional insight into story telling is to just take it one step at a time. There is no need to panic because you don’t know the rest of your story as you tell it. Taking it one step at a time will be easier for you and your listener.

Each next step is presented to you in the list of associations that spring from the previous step. If you are keeping it inside the circle you will have all the answers you need. There is no need to know the whole story at any time in your story telling.

By following these insights and tricks and combining them with the rules for telling a story you will advance in this area powerfully. The best thing to do is just stick to the rules, tricks and insights and your stories will grow from your unconscious beautifully.

Stories absorb your attention, they bypass critical factor simply because you recognize them as stories and they create unconscious responses in everyone. When you tell a story you will incorporate hypnotic themes, sometimes without even trying, and seed a strategy in the minds of others. You can use stories as a way to embed suggestions, emotional triggers and link these suggestions and triggers to a specific action or outcome.

Stories can help you to suspend reality as well as merge realities together. They can offer a quiet resemblance to your life and the situations and problems you find yourself experiencing. All these aspects of story telling run right along the lines of the skills you will practice and master in hypnosis.

Stories are an important part of what you will be doing as a hypnotist. They are an art form and there is as much a method to good story telling as there is to hypnotic story telling. Remember as you read this information that we are focusing on the telling of stories, this is much different than the writing of stories. What you will do as a hypnotist is tell stories in order to invoke change in the people around you.

There are certain aspects that need to be involved to tell a hypnotic story, there are different actions and ideas that need to take place, at least to some degree. Even the simplest stories are still recognized as stories because they follow a type of formula that you hear and think, okay so that was a story.

You may think it was a bad story or you may think you heard a great story. Either way you are not able to deny that it was a story.

Hopefully you will be creating and telling great stories. In order to get on your way to telling good stories there are parts of a story that you need to be consciously aware of. A simple set of instruction that will help you in creating the most basic principal of what a story is. From there you can build and add to the story as you feel necessary, but it must contain these few instructions in order to fall into the category of a hypnotic story.

The first rule you must include in all your stories is to begin with a routine. This can be a very simple routine or a complicated one; it does not matter as long as there is a routine placed at the beginning of your story. In this article we will build an example story together. So the beginning routine of our story will be, “I was driving my car down the highway.” This is a routine that will start the story we are going to build here.

The second rule for building a hypnotic story is that you must break that routine. Whatever routine you found to begin your story with must be broken. There needs to be an interruption in the action.

“I was driving my car down the highway when I heard an unexpected noise coming from the back seat.” Here we have broken the routine, something other than driving down the highway has happened.

The next rule to this formula for story building is to change someone. There needs to be a character in the story that is changed. This means they need to have some type of emotional effect. Something needs to happen to affect the character you are changing that will produce an impact on that character as a result of an event.

“I was driving my car down the highway when I heard an unexpected noise coming from the back seat.
As I looked in my rear view mirror I saw a small black dog, she was holding her paw in an odd way.
I immediately pulled the car over and got out to see what the situation was. The little dog was bleeding and was in great need of medical attention.
I decided that I would have to postpone my plans to go out and take the little dog to the animal hospital.”

The part of my story where my character decides to take the dog to the hospital is where the change is taking place. There is a clear decision made and an emotion is attached to it.

Now there is a fourth and final rule to hypnotic story telling that you have the option of including or leaving out. If you can find a way to incorporate it into your stories you will be glad you did.

This is called re-incorporation and it really pays off in the end. Re-incorporation is when you add a seemingly meaningless detail to the beginning of the story and then re-incorporate it at the end. This is a way to usually add a riveting effect to your stories.

If you can follow all the rules of story telling you will come up with a story every time that will be recognizable as a story. Your listener will have no question about what you have just said and it will meet the expectations of a story for anyone who hears it.

Now there are many ways to tell stories. If you find one that works better for you and incorporates all that a story need then you should stick with what works for you. But these are the rules that will rest assured give you a good story frame, the rest is up to you

The idea of telling stories has been around as long as humans have. There is sufficient evidence of this from cave drawings to modern day books and the internet. There is not a person on earth who can speak in full sentences that has not at one point or another told a story. They happen everyday, countless times.

You tell the mechanic about the funny noises your car is making. You tell the grocery clerk about how frustrated you were trying to find the eggs. You tell your child about sharing and your spouse about your day. These are all examples of stories that happen daily.

All these stories also have something in common, they are all powerful. Every story speaks directly to the unconscious mind. You feel emotion for a story as simple as not being able to find the eggs at the super market. You may identify with the story tellers frustration or dismay. Emotion is the language of the unconscious and stories evoke emotion.

Stories do several things in hypnosis first they bypass the critical factor. The critical factor recognizes a story and really pays no more attention to it simply because it is a story. There is no resistance to stories.

The other thing that stories do for you is to take your reality away and suspend it as you enter a new reality. This new reality is not really defined and can blend realities together to confuse them. You often find yourself identifying with the characters the speaker is talking about and experiencing their lives and emotions as if they were your own. They allow you to live in the character’s experience.

This is why you feel emotion when we read particular stories. It is because you identify with the characters at some level. This is important as you put into the context of telling stories to improve your hypnosis, you can use a story to conjure a hypnotic effect in another person.

Once you pass up the critical factor you have the ability to create identification with characters and the person you are conversing with. After these two things are accomplished you are in a very powerful position, a listener with no resistance and a story they will want to listen to.

Because story telling is so pivotal in hypnosis, especially Conversational Hypnosis, you should really concentrate on getting experienced and good at it. Practice with those you know, everyone like to hear a good story.

Now lets look at hypnotic stories, how exactly do you tell a hypnotic story? The first thing a story does for you in the area of hypnosis is to seed ideas or set up a frame work of ideas that will lead your listener into experiences. To seed ideas in your stories be sure to embed suggestions within the story. The story itself can really be on any topic as long as you are focused on inserting your suggestions.

You should be aware to use trance themes within your stories as this will have a greater impact on your listener if they are coaxed into a trance. Trance themes that you can start out with are relaxation on vacation, being drawn into a movie or suspenseful ideas. These are hypnotic themes that will help to draw your listener into a hypnotic state.

Isomorphic stories are another helpful skill set to keep in your library. These are stories that portray likeliness to the situation or person you are telling the story to. This goes back and relates to mirroring.

Really be cognizant of mirroring your listener and their situation in the story you are telling about other characters. An isomorphic story will also offer a solution or plan of action to take about the problem or situation within the story, which is in essence your listener’s situation or problem. This type of story will send your listener away analyzing what has happened and eventually find their own meaning stemming from the story you have told.

Finally the last aspect of story telling you will want to practice is that of priming the unconscious mind. This is the art of forming the unconscious mind to be aware of a thing before you actually tell it in the story. This is a technique that is used in many different areas including competitive sports, teaching and sales.

Competitive sportsmen talk about how they will win and this is responded to on some level of the unconscious. The same goes for teaching a teacher can plant the teachings in a form of pre-teach before they actually teach the lesson they want their students to learn. Sales does this through testimonials of products, they convince the customer that they will be happy with the product before they even purchase it.

This concept actually inserts the idea of the motions the person would be going through so they think they have experienced it even before it has actually happened. A sales man shows you want you will need to do for the paper work of buying your car before you actually fill it out.

All the story telling skills and types we have covered are very, very powerful. They will help you in bringing in hypnotic themes and plant processes in the minds of your subjects. They will also assist you in embedding suggestions, accessing states, setting emotional triggers and producing productive positive outcomes.

An embedded suggestion is nothing more than a suggestion that is often repeatedly buried in the context of a conversation of miscellaneous words and uttering’s. The statements that contain the suggestion may vary in wording and meaning but the suggestion itself is focused on a particular aspect you and your subject will be working on together.

This practice was first discovered somewhere between the late 1940’s and early 1950’s by the famous master hypnotherapist Dr. Milton Erickson.  The idea was presented to him through rumor that the random things that schizophrenics would walk around saying and muttering really had some deeper meaning to them.  These undecipherable phrases were ways in which the afflicted were trying to communicate with whoever would listen.

At the time Dr. Erickson became aware of this rumor he happened to be working as a
Doctor at the Worcester State Hospital with mentally disturbed inmates, many of which were themselves schizophrenics.

Upon realizing this theory Dr. Erickson decided to conduct a study of his own using the reams of texts recorded verbatim with what the schizophrenic patients were saying.  As he poured through the vast amount of different transcripts all of uttering’s that had been recorded word for word from schizophrenics he discovered something.

As Dr. Erickson deciphered the many uttering’s he found that there were actually messages embedded among the majority of non sense words and sounds.  The theory Dr. Milton Erickson came up with was that some of the words buried deep with in the non sense were meaningful and made sense once connected.

The doctor spent more time and found and recorded all these words and put them together to create what he thought were real attempts at communication. Usually the finished phrases included explanations of the patient’s conditions and asking for help.

Because this was only a theory it needed to be tested.  Dr. Erickson knew of a secretary in the office that suffered from severe migraines, when she got a migraine she would have to immediately go and lie down to deal with the pain.

He prepared a file of the uttering’s from the schizophrenic’s files and inserted his own embedded messages in place of theirs.  The next time the secretary needed to lie down because of the pain in her head Dr. Erickson insisted that she take dictation from him.

As he was a doctor she begrudgingly did so without putting up much of a fight.  Amazingly, ten minutes into the dictation her head was completely pain free. Her migraine was gone.

She was amazed and Dr. Erickson had proven his theory within this study.  Today this principal is known as unconscious priming in the psychological literature that circulates.

So what Dr. Erickson did was to prove that there was a way to get messages across hypnotically when embedded in a list of nonsense.  This happens because our unconscious minds have an extremely good ‘ear’ for ‘hearing’ or identifying and picking up patterns within life (including your conversations).

There have been many studies since Dr. Erickson’s study; some more complicated, that also prove his theory stands the test of time.  Embedding suggestions works for many people at an unconscious level.  The mind can pick out the patterns of the words that make sense and use those suggestions and respond to them.

Another example of how the unconscious mind picks up patterns in life is referred to as implicit knowledge.  Implicit knowledge are those things you just seem to know, no one ever taught them to you directly you just somehow know how to do them.  These are simply patterns that the unconscious mind has picked out of life and learned.

These are things that are learned in the background instead of the conscious forefront of learning.  Such as shaking or nodding your head, you know what it mean but you were never exactly instructed on how to do it or what it meant.

Embedding suggestions in your Conversational Hypnosis will likely be a fantastic skill.  This is a very powerful technique as it lets you speak directly to a person’s unconscious mind and instill the actions needed to get the responses you want.

Embedding suggestions is an art you should practice hard, often and well as it will be one of the defining factors in a novice hypnotist and a master hypnotist.

It is a fact that on average the conscious mind can concentrate, and keep straight 5-9 items at one time. Five things are generally pretty easy for a person to remember and nine is beginning to become quite difficult. As you can see this is not a great number when you put it into the amount of items, facts or ideas you can rattle off in a conversation.

This is why when you are having a conversation with a person about their car being in the shop and they start to give you a bunch of different facts about the car they drive, the car their parents drive, the car Uncle Tom drives and the car Aunt Hilda drives you may get confused.

You will so busy trying to keep the different cars, the people who drive them and the facts about them straight that you will miss the point of the conversation in the first place. Your speaker was talking about his car being in the shop.

Overloading the mind with any information will cause the critical factor to either get distracted with unimportant information or shut down all together. This is a plus for you as a hypnotist because then you can attach a suggestion and it will flow right on in.

If a person is able to keep track of the information they will more than likely be focusing on the wrong information which will still distract the critical factor and again allow your suggestion in anyway.

The idea behind overloading people with details is just that. No matter what the subject or how it is being presented, whether it be fact, fiction or just random information, you want to really give them a lot of details to use this powerful concept to its full advantage.

The next language trick or confusion pattern you will use to overload the mind is called the spontaneous change of meaning. This is done by the sudden and unexpected combining of two different statements. When you take two statements that end and begin with the same word you can mush them together to make one sentence that just doesn’t quiet add up.

For example, “I’m going to the store is out of milk.” In this statement the meaning at the beginning and end are fine, they make sense. But somewhere in the middle things get a little confusing, just confusing enough that you have to stop and think about what I have just said.

If you take the statement apart you see that ‘I’m going to the store’ is quite average and normal; as is ‘The store is out of milk.’ This sudden change in how people are used to hearing things causes critical factor to stop for the confusion. When that happens you can simply add your suggestion to the flow of conversation and it will again go in unnoticed.

Another way to incorporate spontaneous change of meaning into your Conversational Hypnosis is to introduce a suggestion in your conversation and then continue speaking as if it never happened. This again causes enough confusion for critical factor that it wants to stop to figure it out.

This is overridden by the fact that you are still talking and there is no time to go back to figure it out. Now the unconscious does pick up the suggestion and stores it away for future use. Again your suggestion gets in to the mind as it bypasses the confused critical factor.

As you include more and more of these spontaneous changes the mind will not only pick up the conversation you are having aloud it will begin to recognize the pattern being created within through the hidden messages.

Yet another way to use this change of meaning is to avoid the ambiguity all together and just combine two statements that end and begin with the same word together. These statements will make more sense and be a little less confusing but still distracting. The key here is to make sure to add these statements casually into conversation otherwise they will be noticed and detected.

Also remember to use these when you need to, not for every other statement. If you use this spontaneous change of meaning too often it can become annoying and overbearing, which is true for most confusion language tactics. Becoming too confusing can be counterproductive in that your listeners will no longer have an interest in listening to you.

Lastly we come to the language confusion concept of shock and surprise. This is a fascinating concept, any time you really shock or surprise someone you will automatically run over the critical factor and make it in. Shock and surprise will create their own type of trance induction.

Just by being shocked and surprised your conscious thinking will immediately overload and shut down leaving only the unconscious open to suggestion and ready to follow instruction, which is perfect for a hypnotist.

There is a caution in shock and surprise method. Some people do not like to be shocked and surprised so be sure you are picking and choosing wise times and the right people to use this technique on.

Milton Erickson was a great hypnotist and one of the pieces of his profession he was most admired for was his ability to get the most stubborn and resistant people into a state of hypnosis.  His secret weapon in this was simply to confuse them.  Confuse them to the point that the critical factor within them is too busy trying to get unconfused and make sense of it all.  This allowed him to simply slip past the critical factor and induce a hypnotic trance in those who were very resistant.

So let’s take a closer look at Mr. Erickson’s secret weapon of confusion. How can confusion be used to create a positive outcome, after all that is the point of hypnosis in the first place.

Confusion in Conversational Hypnosis is very powerful. The language of confusion with in the context of hypnosis will allow you to do things that would normally not be allowed due to the strict surveillance of the critical factor.

Your ability to confuse people will assist you in sneaking by the critical factor to insert your suggestions into the unconscious itself.  When you master the technique of confusion you will be able to bypass the critical factor easily and efficiently.

So how exactly do you get past the critical factor with the language of confusion?  Confusion will simply keep the critical factor busy trying to sort out all the different messages that it has received; it gets all tied up, giving you the opportunity to send in the suggestion with little to no detection by the critical factor.  The unconscious at this point is like an open door just waiting for you to walk into.

The goal here is to get enough confusion going that the critical factor is completely overwhelmed and preoccupied.  The first way to really concentrate the language of confusion is to layer it in, much like you learned to do with ambiguous messages.  When you use this layering effect is sure to include double meanings as this is what really gets the confusion going.

Layering the double meanings on top of one another, each time using a different context for the word and doing it repeatedly will be a difficult task for the critical factor to sort out.

Let’s give an example in which you use the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ in your conversation.  Just these two words, left and right, with all their different meanings and in all different contexts, one right after the other.  As the conversation proceeds the meanings will start to get confused.  Your listener’s critical factor will want you to slow down so it can analyze it all, however the information from you will just keep coming.

The quick smooth relay of all the different meanings of the same words used in different contexts will be very overwhelming to the critical factor.  The confusion becomes so much that the critical factor will just give up at some point and let down its guard.

This language of confusion can be used anytime you come across a word with multiple meanings.  Keep in mind that the word and its meanings will need to fit into the context of what you are trying to get across to your listener.  It seems that the need for adequate context would limit your abilities here, it does to a point but you will be surprised at how often this layering can still be done.

Another confusion pattern in called the double negation.  It is otherwise known as double negatives.  The way the double negation confusion pattern works is to use two negatives in the same statement, you can use more but you should start with two and work up from there.

In this technique the mind has difficulty because it does not like to deal with negatives.  Negatives are confusing because if you really stop to think about it, a negative does not exist.  Dealing with something that is non existent is more difficult than dealing with things you can see, hear, and touch.

When your mind hears a statement about something you don’t have there is a process to go through in order to understand that statement.  First your mind recognizes the subject, (the thing you don’t have) then it has to take it away realize what you are left with.

It is important to understand how hard the mind is working here, mainly because most people never think about it.  Speaking with one negative comes so easily that unless you read this you may never know how hard your mind is working when it hears more than one negative in a statement.

So how double negations work is you make a statement with two or more negatives in it.  For example, “I don’t have a piece of gum that you can’t chew.” After you have made a statement to a person with two or more negatives in it you will simply attach the suggestion to the end of it.  “I don’t have a piece of gum that you can’t chew anymore than you can relax right now.”  Notice how you focused on figuring out whether or not I actually have a piece of gum for you?

Statements with two or three negatives are generally confusing enough to the mind that the critical factor will too be busy dealing what you do an don’t have that the suggestion you attach to it will slip in unnoticed.

Ambiguous messages are simply these words put into a context that will deliver a suggestion or message to the person you are speaking to.

Ambiguous words, which have different meanings, will be used in your practice as a hypnotist.  Before you can do this you must find the words, know the different meanings and be able to use them in the correct contexts.  Different words will mean different things to people depending on where you are and the nature of the language.

A good and common example of an ambiguous word is the word right.  Right can refer to a position of an object or person.  It can also mean you were correct in answering a question.  It is a casual word we use everyday whether we are putting on our right shoe or whether she was right to wait longer for the bus.

The ways in which words similar to the word ‘right’ work within our minds is important here.  When you hear a statement with an ambiguous word in it the unconscious mind will extract that word in turn and analyze all the different connotations and meaning it can have for that particular person.  It then narrows down the field and choose the definition that makes the most sense dependant on the context and circumstance of the statement.

This simple trick of using words with different meanings will give you a wide range of levels you can work with a person on.  As you will learn later you will be able to communicate on multiple planes with words that are ambiguous.  You will learn to embed them into suggestions so that what your conversation is based on may not be the actual message their unconscious is receiving.

Ambiguous messages will do two very interesting and complicated things for you as a hypnotist.  It will first require the conscious and unconscious minds a choice.  The conscious mind will hear one message and the unconscious mind will be very busy deciphering and filing away the other possibilities.

This alone will cause the second thing to happen which will be that you will begin to communicate on different levels and the listener will unconsciously be keeping up with multiple messages embedded into their meanings.

When learning to use ambiguous messages it is important that you pay attention to setting up the scene or context in which you are going to be using these words.  If you do not and the meanings are interpreted differently that you are expecting a completely messy situation can occur.  You will think you are sending a specific hidden message and really they will get what may seem like nonsense to them.

Ways you can prepare or set up the context for using ambiguous messages and words is to do some seeding of ideas to build up to the correct interpretations.  Another way for preparing is to embed the information in the person before you start in with your multiple meaning words.

Using ambiguous words and messages are usually done in a story.  You will tell a story that can be completely off subject as long as the pre-seeded ambiguous word is involved you will be able to plant your suggestions.

Let’s say you are in sessions with someone for a fear of being in tight spaces; or otherwise known as claustrophobia.  If you tell a story about space and being in outer space, you can drop in lines that talk about how comfortable space was, maybe even serene, quiet and dark yet peaceful, not confining or alarming.

These are comfortable words and ideas that the unconscious will begin to relate to the other meaning of space for them; the idea of claustrophobia and a fear of tight spaces.
The unconscious will pick up on the idea that space is okay, comfortable, not alarming, and peaceful.

Now don’t be alarmed it this all sounds very complicated and confusing to you, especially having not practiced it.  The truth is this is a very sophisticated concept and understanding it can take time.  It is however just the beginning of multiple layered effects, their meanings and how they can all occur simultaneously.  It is a common occurrence and just becoming aware of it will be a good step.

If you really want to study this further, and you should, you can see this concept happening in many of the various plays by Shakespeare, who was very skilled at layering meanings of different levels into his plays.  They are not too hard to pick up on and will give you some further examples of how this is done and the effect it can have on people.