critical factor

Conversational Hypnosis is an art largely made up of the language you use.  As a hypnotist you must learn to bypass the critical factor using a set of Stealth Tactics in order to enter people’s minds.  Stealth Tactics are very helpful in the field of conversational hypnosis in this manner.  Once you learn how to use them you will be able to deal with your subjects in a way that you have never experienced before.

Stealth Tactics are simply a way to do one of two things; get into the mind unnoticed by your listener or complicate them to the point of allowed entry.  You really want to learn how to mask what you are doing in order to enter the mind and leave your suggestions.  This takes a fine skill as it means you must bypass the critical factor and defeat resistance.

While it is important to know how to sneak in bypassing all resistance.  Now you need to learn how to go beyond that.  You must learn how to use resistance in a way that is helpful to you as the hypnotist.  Believe it or not, resistance can actually help you to get where you need to be inside the mind to carry out your purpose. 

The Law of Reversed Effect is very useful tool however it can also create problems in your hypnotic relationship.  It can really bring out the worst relationship in a hypnotist and subject when used too often or in the wrong way.  The problem with this tool is it puts your listener in a combative frame of mind.  It becomes a question of you versus them and can be damaging to the self esteem. 

Let’s face it no one likes to be controlled by someone else, it makes them feel weak and can ultimately give a person a poor psychological frame to continue to grow from.  As people we feel we need to have control of our lives, if we don’t we start to overcompensate with feelings of low self esteem and destructive behaviors in our relationships and with ourselves. 

The bottom line is the more a person feels out of control the more they will fight to take that control back.  When they put this instinct into motion the Law of Reversed Effect happens and they will fail causing more damage and hardship to the self esteem

There is a solution to this and it is not to abandon all you just learned about the Law of Reversed Effect!  The best way to combat this problem is to use the resistance you are stealing from them to uplift the persons self esteem.  The idea is to build on your rapport at the same time you are sneaking your suggestions in.  Use your tools and skills to get the person to like you more, give them a feeling of control back in their life.

The best way to do this is by redirecting resistance.  Redirecting resistance is very simple in the idea of it.  It is to purposely give a person something to resist that will fail.  This will give them the feeling of power back, they were not at the mercy of all outside influence and they defeated some external suggestion making them in control of something.

A good example of this would be if you were a real estate agent and you have a client that wants to buy a house.  He has found the house he wants but is still having some second thoughts, he hasn’t quite signed on the dotted line just yet.  As a fantastic real estate agent you give him many options to consider when purchasing a house, one of which being a variety of upgrades.  After hearing about the upgrades, new kitchen tile, fireplace so on and so forth.  Next thing you know he decides on no upgrades but he buys the house.

Now here you have redirected the resistance.  You have given your client something to resist other than the suggestion you initially wanted to take place.  Your desired outcome was for the man to buy the house.  As he was having resistance to that you gave him the upgrades to resist.  It really doesn’t matter to you if he upgrades his fireplace just that he buys the house. 

The beautiful thing here is you both win.  The person resisting feels as if they have regained control of their life again and you get to slip in the suggestion with little to no resistance.

Redirecting resistance is solely about finding the things people will be able to resist instead of your original purpose.  As the conscious mind focuses on the idea of resisting your new idea the old one goes in unnoticed and usually becomes valid.  “When you do this, you can do this as well.”  By accepting the invitation to resist the second part of the statement you are automatically making the first part true.

There are thousands of ways to use this principal, and it will be combined with all the other principals you are learning in order to create a whole.  As a Stealth Tactic redirecting resistance is very powerful and will be an awesome skill to store in your toolbox, especially when it is combined with other stealth tactics.

The next Stealth Tactic that we will cover here is that of refocusing attention.  The concept here is to make a suggestion and implant it and then refocus their attention elsewhere.  This principal is similar to seeding ideas but creates a more powerful effect.

In refocusing attention you will plant the seed in their mind then before it is noticed you will focus attention on something other than resisting the original idea.  The power in this tactic is that the original idea will go unnoticed and start to grow as you focus the person elsewhere.  The key is to refocus the attention before the critical factor gets a hold of it and starts to criticize it.

When you put this skill into action you will drop in the suggestion and refocus the attention repeatedly.  Suggest, refocus, suggest original idea, refocus and so on and so forth.  If there is no conscious information coming from them then the suggestion will have the time it needs to grow within without time for resistance.  Eventually it will appear to them as their own idea and people tend to agree with ideas they think are their own.

An example of how this works is if you were having a conversation with a friend and they suggest an idea or make a statement in passing.  The statement is only a small part of a much larger conversation but it is still there.  Then maybe 5 months down the road you are having a similar conversation and you state the idea as your own.  You may not even know the idea came from your friend because you were not focused on the statement itself you were focused on the entire conversation that was taking place.

You see here how this one layer effect of refocusing attention can be powerful and has probably happened to you at one time or another.  Now think about the same idea but in layers of five, six or seven layers of different topics, much, much more powerful.  This idea of layering creates an overload of information to the point of lack in ability to keep and focus on the original idea.

There are ways of distracting attention that will make this tactic even easier.  The first way to do this is to simply change the topic, a new set of information to focus on.  You can also confuse them.  This will focus them on trying to decipher what you have said and again focus will be distracted.

Another way to distract attention is to overload the person with details and facts.  An overload of information will cause their conscious to focus on finding a place for all the details you are giving them, when really these details are probably unimportant.

Now it is very important to remember to use repetition in this process.  On the other hand, it is also equally important not to come back to the idea so often that they figure out on a conscious level what you are up to. 

There are degrees with which you must alter your repetitions.  If you are working with a very sharp minded individual you will need to repeat less and mask your suggestion more.  The opposite happens for the simpler minded; you will need more repetitions and can make your suggestion in more blatant statements. 

You will be able to determine how often repetition is necessary from experience with each person you work with.

As you dive into the deep art of conversational hypnosis you will find that there are a set of Stealth Tactics that can be used in order to bypass the critical factor in people’s minds.  Stealth Tactics are used in a way that either will be unnoticed by your subject or will be too complicated for them to really grasp the objective you have in mind.

The main point in Stealth Tactics is that this is a way of disguising what you are doing in order to defeat the critical factor and get your message through a person’s resistance.  Because these tactics are a little on the sneaky side you will want to be sure to exercise the best judgment in using them.  If you do not it is likely that your listener’s unconscious will start to distrust or dislike you in the actions you are taking.

The first Stealth Tactic we will discuss is the Law of Reversed Effect; it will explain how we should be using something called the Hypnotic Challenge.  The Law of Reversed Effect is simply that the harder you try to do something the more likely it is that you will fail.  This is not to be confused with persistence.  It is not the more your try to do a thing it is the harder you try to do a thing that will result in failure. 

There is a reason this failure will take place and that is that our conscious minds work in a way that it executes doing things.  Our unconscious mind acts on the things we decide to do and works out the navigation of how to actually do them.  For instance you decide to read a book, you read the words consciously but your unconscious deciphers them and adds the emotions and feelings that accompany the words.

This is important to understand as it is the basis of why the Law of Reversed Effect works.  The Law of Reversed Effect works because our conscious mind is trying to do something that we would normally use our unconscious mind for.  The conscious mind works on the simple things, things that only require 5 – 9 steps to accomplish.  The unconscious mind makes the more complicated functions of life run more smoothly as it can handle much more complicated procedures.

It is only when the conscious mind starts to get into the unconscious mind’s territory that failure begins to take place.  When the conscious mind starts to interfere with the fluid motions of the unconscious the result is failure. 

Now this brings us to the Law of Imagination, which is yet another reason for failure.  The best way to describe this law is to give you an example.  We are all humans and in that we want things.  If you think of something you want but should not have you start to set yourself up for the failure in this law. 

The way this works is when you state that you do not want something or you shouldn’t do something, you are reminded of it often as you think about how you shouldn’t have it.  Usually if you want something the thought of it will bring a mirage of good experiences to mind.  If you like cake the taste, if you like cars the excitement of owning a new car. 

These are good feelings and experiences that you relate to the thing you are trying to avoid.  The more you think about preventing yourself from getting the thing you shouldn’t have the more positive associations are ignited in your head.  Eventually you will be overloaded by the positive images of the thing you shouldn’t have and your unconscious will give in and get the thing you shouldn’t have. 

Now in this comes the Hypnotic Challenge.  In the Hypnotic Challenge you are going to be setting your listener up for failure by using the Law of Imagination and the Law of Reversed Effect.  The Hypnotic Challenge is a way that you will ask someone to try to fulfill a suggestions and you watch to see how they fail. 

A classic hypnotist would do this through suggestibility tests.  The test is not within the suggestions themselves it lies within the challenge and failure to complete that challenge attached to the end of the test.  When a person tries and fails a challenge you have set before them they will unconsciously start to believe that resistance is not within their means.

As long as the listener believes that resistance is not within them to control, that control will be given over to the hypnotist.  As long as they continue to believe this one thing it will continue to ring true for them.  Now all the suggestions you make will easily flow to the unconscious because there is no resistance in place to stop and examine the suggestions.

This is where the reversed effect comes in; by showing a person that they have no resistance and that they will fail you have actually, in a very sneaky way, passed up the barrier that causes failure.  They have no resistance; they failed because you set it up that way, now they will believe they have no control over failure.  Because they believe this you now have the power to avoid all failure in your objective as you have bypassed all their resistance.

The best way to use this law in conversational hypnosis is to use a linguistic trick by using words that imply “try”.  “Try” itself implies failure and to imply the failure is to stack the odds in your favor that they will actually fail at a preconceived task. 

Now let’s review this as there is a lot of action going on in this Stealth Tactic.  The Law of Reversed Effect says that the harder you try to do a thing the more likely it is you will fail. 

To put this law in action you need to require that the subject make a conscious interference with a normally unconscious process.  You will add to this basing the odds in your favor by asking them to complete a task it is likely they will fail at.  As you do this you will use subtle hints to imply they will fail, such as the word try or something with a like meaning. 

All of these steps will cause a conflict in their resistance to your suggestion.  The critical factor and resistance will be completely bypassed in the process.

It is important to realize that agreement tactics are very useful in persuading people through the art of conversational hypnosis; this is mainly because they bypass the critical factor and get the person to start to see things your way.

If the critical factor is not bypassed or put to sleep then the resistance of your subject will be in place and your suggestions will not make it through.  Once you use the agreement tactics to get past the critical factor it will open the doors of suggestion.   You will be able to present information, ideas, thoughts and suggestions to your subject that will seem completely plausible to them in their altered state of mind.

The first of the 4 Agreement Tactics is Plausibility, which is stated as when a person is in the habit of agreeing with you then the next statement doesn’t have to be one they would find as true as your last statements.  Plausibility works on a sliding scale depending on the depth of trance a person is experiencing.

The second Agreement Tactic is the Agreement Habit.  The Agreement Habit is based on ‘going first’.  This is to immerse yourself in an idea before you invite your subject in so the experience is real for them.  This is important for the Agreement Habit as it is to get someone in the habit of agreeing with you.  You cannot do this fully if they do not believe you agree with the thoughts you are presenting to them yourself.

The third and fourth Agreement Tactics are brought to us by a master hypnotist Milton Erickson as he used these often in his hypnosis.  The ‘Yes Set’ and Piggy Backing of Suggestion were among Erickson’s favored techniques.

The third of the Agreement Tactics, which is the ‘Yes Set’, is very useful in getting agreement from your subjects.  In a ‘Yes Set’ you will begin with statements that are true so you are activating the part of the brain that enjoys agreeing.  Once you have gotten a person to start to agree with you it is likely that they will continue. 

The ‘Yes Set’ can be demonstrated in three different ways. 

The first way to use a ‘yes set’ is to repeat what the person is saying to you.  This is exactly as it sounds: use what the person has said to you by repeating it back to them so they agree that that is what they said or meant.  This is accomplishing the goal of the ‘yes set’ by activating the agreement part of the brain.

The second way to put a ‘Yes Set’ into action is to state the obvious facts.  Use in your conversation statements that are verifiable facts.  If there is no question that what you are saying is a fact then you will again activate the yes neurology in the subject’s brain causing agreement.

The third and final way to produce a ‘Yes Set’ is to make truisms.  Truisms are sayings that a culture has conditioned its inhabitants to believe as unmistakably true.  The statements are a way that people view the world or a part of the world.  These statements will largely be found true by almost all people you speak to.

The three different types of ‘Yes Sets’ are used very often in conversational hypnosis.  This is partly because they are ideas that you can work into a conversation, they cause agreement and they can be manipulated to fit almost any context you may be working with your subject in.

The fourth Agreement Tactic is the Piggy Back Principal.  This is the idea of attaching suggestions to other statements or ideas that are already going out to your listener.  This is a very popular and successful way to get suggestions into the minds of your subjects. 

This is done by first getting your listener into agreement with you; this can be done through compliments, yes sets, following along with their thoughts and repeating back.  Your goal here is to create an environment they are willing to accept, and then you add a suggestion to it.  Compliment them on the great job they have been doing and then add how they can improve on it.

This works because as humans we are always willing to accept praise and agreement.  And the fact is if you are accepting one part of the statement you must be accepting the whole statement on some unconscious level.  Now that they have unknowingly accepted your suggestion they will at some point bring it into their behaviors, thoughts or actions.

The best part about this agreement tactic is the more you do it the stronger and more powerful your suggestion becomes.  You can piggy back as many facts and suggestions as you want as long as you keep the meanings clear so as not to confuse your subject.

You can also piggy back suggestions onto yes sets.  This is done simply by stating a single or series of verifiable facts and then adding a suggestion on to the end of the last statement.  An example of this would be, “When you get out of the car, lock the doors.”  This works because you will inevitably get out of the car at some point and because the mind accepts this as true you will be more likely to now lock the doors as well.

The third way you can piggy back suggestions is to present feedback to your subject that will have them accept it; this should be done in a smooth and elegant manner of speaking.  This utilizes positive reinforcement by first creating a yes set, then adding a compliment and then attaching a suggestion to the end. 

This way of piggy backing is successful because we all enjoy and accept compliments.  Compliments in this sample are somewhat of a sugar coating for the suggestion; you cannot accept the compliment without also accepting the suggestion.  Compliments also tend to extract positive behaviors from us and make us more agreeable and accepting anyway.

The Agreement Tactics of the Yes Set and Piggy Backing Suggestions are very important and useful in psychological persuasion.  They were among the top choices of the master hypnotist Milton Erickson.  He brought us the perfected art of these two Agreement Tactics and used them often in his hypnosis practice as you should consider doing in yours.