41922287 street hypnosis conversational hypnosis private question and answer session

Private Hypnosis Club Q&A

© Street Hypnosis, All Rights Reserved www.StreetHypnosis.com 1

Conversational Hypnosis Private Q&A Session By Igor Ledochowski



Table Of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 2

CONVERSATIONAL HYPNOSIS: PRIVATE Q&A SESSION PART 1 3

INTRODUCTION 3 HOW TO USE HYPNOSIS TO BEAT DEPRESSION 3 HYPNOTIC PATTERN INTERRUPTS 9 THE WORLD IS WHAT YOU THINK IT IS 12 HOW DO YOU CHANGE WHAT TO EXPECT FROM LIFE? 14 HOW TO END PROCRASTINATION WITH HYPNOSIS 17 HOW TO MAKE BETTER DECISIONS 21 HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH FEAR 23 DEMONSTRATION: DESTROYING FEAR WITH LANGUAGE 29


HOW TO USE THE “HYPNOTISTS PERFORMANCE TRANCE” 36 HOW TO TROUBLESHOOT SELF HYPNOSIS PROBLEMS 40 HOW TO VISUALIZE WHEN YOU CAN’T 42 HYPNOTIC FIREARMS TRAINING 44


HYPNOTIC PERIPHERAL VISION 59 HYPNOSIS & THE FUTURE 62 HYPNOSIS & ENLIGHTENMENT 65 THE POWER OF A COMMUNITY OF HYPNOSIS MASTERS 69 HOW TO BUILD NATURAL RECOVERY STRATEGIES INTO HYPNOSIS 71 TROUBLESHOOTING FURTHER VISUALIZATION “PROBLEMS” 81 HYPNOSIS & SALES 85 FINAL WORDS 95



Conversational Hypnosis: Private Q&A Session Part 1

Introduction Igor: Welcome to Street Hypnosis. This is a wonderful opportunity that we

have right now in terms of an open forum question and answer session. Any questions, comments or concerns you ever had about hypnosis I will endeavor to answer today.

We have a bunch of people on the call who have hopefully got a long list

of questions to ask me. We’re basically going to go through them, in no particular order and no particular rhyme or reason, we’ll just take each question as it comes and see where it takes us.

You have carte blanche to ask anything you want. Some questions I will not be able to answer, in which case, I’m sorry. I’ll

give you my best answer or my best guesstimate as to what I might do in that situation, but I’ll be quite up front if I don’t know what the correct answer would be or if I don’t have experience of that.

However, I hope for most of the questions you have I will have a solution

or something of value to present; we’ll see as that goes along. The one favor I want to ask you not do is, don’t ask me to start reviewing other people’s products or courses and seminars that’s not what this is about.

This is about hypnosis itself, it’s not a walk through where we get to

analyze or criticize other people’s materials. There are some great hypnotists out there and some not so great hypnotists -- and it’s better for you to form your own judgment based on solid hypnotic principles than rely on my opinion on that.

With that happy thought, let’s kick in with the first person who has a

question for me.

How To Use Hypnosis To Beat Depression Mary: Igor let me start with a question about the use of direct or indirect

hypnosis for mood, for depression that’s at a level that doesn’t require medication, but is preventing the person from taking any constructive action.



The question is what would be the best approach to bring someone out of a low level depression, out of inactivity; someone who struggles with procrastination?

Igor: Those are two slightly separate questions, although of course one can

very much cause the other. Having a low mood swing can often cause procrastination as people lose the motivation or energy to do something.

Let’s deal with the state issue and assume that’s going to be the

operative cause behind the procrastination. If you want to ask something separately on that on procrastination, which has other causes also, we can do that separately if you like.

Mary: Yes, I’d like to discuss both. Igor: In terms of mood swings or being a little low or anything like that, the

first thing to realize is that this is part of the human condition. It’s natural to have periods of high energy and periods of low energy.

There are extremes like manic depressives or bipolar disorder where you

really go to extremes, it’s quite negative and can be a very destructive thing. We’re not talking about that stuff we’re just talking about some days you feel like running around and some days you just feel like sitting down and having a quiet conversation.

Some days unpleasant things happen and it’s harder to deal with.

What I want to avoid presenting is this thing which I think is a trap that a lot of self- improvement fields get into, where people get the idea that you have to be on the go, full of energy, full of life and full of excitement 100% of the time and that’s it!! There are no other options!! You’re happy, totally blissful, full of energy and excitement -- or you’re a loser. I think that’s a very bad frame to come from. Bodies are machines that, if you like, go up and down in different mood swings and different cycles. We have of course the classic sleeping and waking cycle and it would be ridiculous for someone to suggest that you never need to sleep again. In the same way I think it’s ridiculous to suggest that you’ll always be up and happy, because I think that’s also inappropriate.

Sometimes you need your environment or to respond to your

environment and your emotions are good cues for that so that’s like the pre-frame.



Then let’s assume that someone is moping around, they’re taking too long about it, it’s becoming destructive or it’s not becoming useful in their life, so we’re making a distinction between “Hey, today I’m going to have a lazy day”… and you’ve had a lazy day all week, all month or maybe even all year.

There are different categories.

One is just kind of part of nature and the way it is sometimes you have quiet and exciting days and sometimes not.

The other one is much more of a prevalent condition.

Some people will have trained themselves into low moods. In other words, they will tend to stay in a low mood most of the time and that’s their default state. The reason I begin with this point is because, if your default state isn’t a high energy or happiness – and happiness doesn’t necessarily have to be high energy, it could be just a sense of joy or contentment or something – then whilst some people that’s their default state they can’t understand people who aren’t happy all the time.

What they need to realize is that these other people haven’t had as many

years of training in exercising that muscle or that state as they have. Their body physically isn’t capable of sustaining the release of the endorphins and other various chemicals that they need to over that prolonged period of time.

So there’s a period of growth required to move someone who is usually a

little bit down and pessimistic to someone who is optimistic and has more energy in life in general; it’s a growth curve.

Most people luckily, as tends to happen, fall somewhere in between. In

other words, they’re happy sometimes, sad sometimes, they have enough emotional range to be on both ends of the spectrum and they can probably maintain happiness ad-infinitum.

In other words they can keep relatively happy for most of the time if they discover the mental knack for it. So I’m going to assume your question now is how do you deal with people who have no pre-disposition to being unhappy and how do you help them break their mood?

I think that phrase we just used is the key bit; to break their mood.

Anything at this point works. Distraction methods are great for this, because you’re essentially distracting away from their mood.



Be prepared for people to want to resist that process, because it feels

comfortable wallowing in self-pity or wallowing in the particular mood they’re in. It’s like putting on an old pair of jeans when they’re on your body and they’re all nice and warm.

You don’t want to pull them off and put on a new pair of shiny new

trousers that may be better, but they don’t feel quite the same way, because the other ones fit you, you’ve worn them in, they’re warm and part of your skeletal structure and all that sort of stuff.

Now how do you use suggestion or hypnotic principles to break that mood?

Distraction is definitely a good way of doing this, because you’re

distracting them away from where their mind was, which was on the ideas or thoughts that keep them in that mood and you’re moving them towards other things.

Expect them to find their way back again each time you distract them;

it’s just a question of how many cycles you have to go through. One way I like to do it, if I see someone who is moping around the place

and it’s not adding value to anyone’s life, I will basically use something like the hypnotic blitz that’s one of my favorite ways of doing it. Also, a key point on context I’ll give you an example of a time I used this.

Some years ago I was living in London. I was sharing a house with some

good friends of mine, one of whom was… shall we say he was more generically moody. In other words, his default state was to be unhappy and slightly depressed.

He was a great guy, really had a heart of gold, but he was a bit of hard work at times. I remember one evening he was sitting on the couch complaining about life and how its okay for everyone else, because they’re always happy and people always like them, etc.

I decided to use the hypnotic blitz then, because it seemed appropriate

and pattern interrupt or distraction technique at the same time. He was sitting on the couch, so I basically jumped on him – by the way this is a story, so this is not necessary something that I’m going to recommend as a technique: just use the principles!



I jumped on the couch; he was sort of sitting on the couch. I grabbed him by the shoulder, started shaking him and whilst he had this look of shock and horror on his face, I started screaming at him in a fun playful sort of way, every single positive thing he could possibly think about in his life.

In other words, how great he was, how he has everything to live for, how

amazing things are and how all these different things had happened in the past week that are good or positive things, how the certain thing he wanted and forgotten about –like a little project he was working on that worked out successfully.

I was basically just yelling at him, saying: “You know you’re great, your life is fantastic look at this, the project, people love you, you did this, you did that and you had that other thing.” I’m shaking him all the time, until roughly about three minutes in, he starts giggling like a school girl. At this point, I stop shaking him and still with a little twinkle in my eye I’m still throwing some very direct suggestions at him and he’s starting to calm down a little bit and then his intellect kicks in. His critical factor kicks in and is about to bring him back into his depressed mood. Then I’m using something called hypnotic reversal. So as he starts coming up with reasons why those things aren’t good enough and all the rest of it, I challenged him. At the end of each challenge just as he gets stuck on the frame of the challenge, I fire off like five, six or seven positive suggestions again, like “Do you really think that your girlfriend doesn’t like you anymore? Let me think; she’s come all the way from the other end of London to be here with you. She’s doing this, doing that and she’s chosen you out of all the ten million people in the city. She decided to be with you and no one else. How does that work?” Again, he starts smirking, I don’t know. Then that mood starts popping again and another excuse comes up. We do the same thing over and over again and I think this took about 15 or 20 minutes, until he suddenly threw up his hands in the air and said



“You know what I give up, I’m just going to be happy instead. Let’s go out and have some fun tonight.”

I guess it’s not necessarily a technique per se, but it’s basically utilizing

different strategies in a context where it’s appropriate.

What strategies did we use?

We used the distraction method, particularly a pattern interrupt idea.

I’m using direct suggestion, but I’m using it in an overload

sense. I’m using emotional overload, so whilst I’m kind of shaking him to put

him under physical pressure, which means that the critical factor tends to shut down, I’m beginning to shout positive suggestions at him in a positive tonality.

So I’m not making angry suggestions, the emotional quality is still fun

and vibrant. That message is being reinforced constantly until I saw him beginning to respond to it.

He’s just shocked and he’s trying to get out of this whole pattern of

confusion whilst positive suggestions are hitting him and eventually I see it beginning to take effect.

In other words, I see him shift his state. His eyes light up, he starts

smiling a little bit and at that point, I can start slowing things down in terms of the physical confusion elements, but I’m keeping the pattern, the positive suggestions going.

Eventually of course, I’ve got to allow his intellect to kick back in again,

because I can’t have his critical factor offline constantly, otherwise I have to possibly maintain that.

I allow his intellect to start coming back, but in increments. I do it in

small enough increments that I can again blast through the defense mechanism, the objections that have come up.

As I blast through each one, the objections become weaker and weaker

and eventually they drop away; the person gives up. Some people will take half an hour and some people will take five minutes. Most people will eventually give up.



If they don’t then you may consider that there may be a genuine reason for them to be upset. If you lose a loved one for example, this is not the time to shake them and start telling them how wonderful life is.

Likewise, it might be that there’s an underlying problem. For example,

they may get a sense they’re going to get fired at work and they may have heard something or maybe picked up on something unconsciously that they’re not aware of yet and maybe they need to work through that first.

Either way is fine, because you either get more information so you realize

that something else needs to happen or you pop the state, in which case everyone can get on with their life in a happier manner.

Does that give you an idea of something to work with Mary?

Hypnotic Pattern Interrupts Mary: Yes, that’s excellent. I would love to hear your thoughts on the

procrastination, the lower sense of self-worth that often comes out of prolonged low moods.

Igor: Again, those are two separate subject’s procrastination and a lower sense

of self-worth. The sense of self-worth is linked to state. If you break the state you’ll

break their low self-esteem. The main distinction between someone with high self-esteem and low

self-esteem to a certain extent is that someone with high self-esteem has got mental strategies to get themselves into a better state and as a result they see themselves in a better light and there comes a self-reinforcing cycle.

So if you manage to break the mood cycle with sufficient frequency then

the self-esteem things come with it and of course, the suggestions that we’ve been talking about all kick right into self-esteem suggestion.

In fact, most of the suggestions I was making in terms of his mood weren’t things about becoming happier and happier, “the world is your oyster” etc. they were more about his self-esteem.

“You’re a great person, you have everything to live for people love you,

at work you’re popular, you’re successful” – these are all self-esteem suggestions that I’m using and those are tied quite closely. If you take



care of one, you’ll take care of the other, because you’re just switching the direction or the flow of that loop.

In terms of procrastination now that’s a separate question, which of

course, can be quite related to mood swings, but procrastination can often bring about the mood swings.

One of the ways it does this is the basic pattern of procrastination is

called overload. Whatever task you have ahead of yourself seems so vast and impossible that you kind of give up, you hit paralysis.

It’s a little bit like this; there’s a story that I was told once about a soldier who had a fear of heights.

His drill sergeant, as a gesture of kindness, decided to break this phobia

in the only way he knew how which was to make him confront his fear. The particular method he chose for this phobia of heights was to make him jump out of airplane from 2,000 feet in the air.

They used one of these old biplanes where you had to basically walk out

onto the wing and you get strapped onto a line then you jump off. It’s called a static line jump, so the line obviously opens up on its own.

They’re on this old bi-plane, the soldier when the time comes to go links

himself up, walks out onto the wing and is holding on. When his instructor yells go, being the good soldier that he is, he jumps.

Being the human being that he is, still with a phobia of course, his hands

still hold on. Now you have this strange scenario where the man is stuck on an airplane in a very dangerous position, because his whole body is flapping in the wind, but his hands will not let go of the airplane wing.

The instructor had to pry his fingers off to help him let go. Audience: I was going to comment on this thing about the interruption. Tony Robbins does that in one of his segments where has a client come

to him about a problem, so what he did was he kept splashing water into the lady’s face and by the third time she was upset.

Every time he did it she eventually got the drift and she totally forgot about the bitterness she kept quarreling about and kept bringing back and that’s how he broke her cycle. I like that.



Igor: There’s something very important to bear in mind with that example you just gave us and this is the danger by the way of seeing some big guru doing this on the stage.

The thing that people don’t realize is there are hidden forces at work

there also. If you took for example, just imagine doing this with your mother, your husband, wife or whatever, where they have a problem and every time they start talking about it you sprinkle their face with water.

I don’t know about you, but I can see that turning into a divorce case

pretty soon or at least a family feud. The big distinction is that Tony Robbins has created a meta-frame. A

frame in which it’s okay for him to do this, where me doing weird things is in your best interest and the big frame is switching people towards empowerment. In other words, you’re either at the affect of the world and the world is affecting you or you’re at cause; you’re causing things to happen.

Either you’re making results happen or you’re having things happen to

you. One of these big things is he builds it up right from the beginning, which

is “Don’t be someone that things happen to, choose what to do.”

When he’s sitting there flicking your face with water, she can sit there and get angry with him, but partly she’s caught in a bit of a bind, because he said “I’m doing this to help you. You know why I’m doing this. You know you’re having a dodgy pattern. You’re out of the pattern now, so if you want to go back in and get annoyed with me, which is basically to re-establish the pattern, go ahead and do that, but then you only have yourself to blame.”

Because she’s caught in that bind, she cannot take the responsibility in

front of an audience of 10,000 people – who is going to be so “petty” as to not let this man who’s helping her out do his thing. Then she falls into his frame and that’s part of the leverage he uses to keep her out of the pattern.

If you’re going to do that with a friend or a member of your family, one

thing you need to have firm control on is the frame. You need to be absolutely in control of that frame. One way to do this like in the example I gave with my friend, is to do it all in a friendly atmosphere.



If I was going to use water flicking as the pattern interrupt, I could do it, but I’d do it in a playful way, the way as kids squirt water at each other or throw water bombs at each other, because that creates a frame of playfulness and it’s difficult for them to break that frame.

If it’s a very serious frame like you, having a bad emotion, here’s water a

punishment then it becomes annoying very quickly, because it becomes a punishment rather than a playful fun thing.

I think it’s a great example you gave us and I think you particularly from

some of the comments you just made realize that the set up in that case was as important if not more important than the actual technique itself.

Does that make sense?

The World Is What You Think It Is Audience: Yes. I listen to Eckhart Tolle as well and he talks about the fear of

change that you constantly make this pain connection where two people would meet in an accident on the freeway or on the road and they’re both at that pain seeking moment.

That’s the reason two particular people get in an accident. Until you

realize that you’re seeking those pains then steer away from that or get out of that cycle, then you can stop being glum and stop looking at the world in a glum way.

Igor: Exactly. Audience: Again, with what you did with the Tony Robbins thing about what you

cause, the world and how it happens to you or what you cause, in effect, not to happen to you.

Igor: This is actually very important. There are two ways to look at what you

just talked about. One is that whole spiritual idea that you attract certain conditions to

yourself and some people may have a problem accepting that purely because there’s a lack of mechanism that people can measure about it.

One thing that we do know – that we have measured – is tried and

tested in psychology: and its the idea that the unconscious mind will run with an idea and either reward or punish in certain ways.



Here’s what I mean by that. Let’s say you do something that is reprehensible in some way and you

feel guilty about it. Your unconscious mind will tend to try and create balance again.

If you’ve done something that you feel guilty about it’s going to start

punishing you. It will start punishing you in ways that you probably won’t even notice.

You may realize that you’ve had days where you’re really accident prone

nothing you do seems to be right. You bump yourself, you bump your head, you stub your toe or you get a paper cut little things, but it’s happening incessantly throughout the day until you sit back and wonder

”What the hell is going on? What’s wrong with me today?”

One or two bumps, everyone has them that’s nothing to really concern

yourself about that’s just being part of the world and misjudging something, but if you’re having a constant stream of these things, basically there’s an intelligence called the unconscious mind that is at work and it’s directing you this way.

Just at the last moment you lose your balance. You just slightly

misjudge the distance between your shin and the table and whack your shin. You accidentally say something and as it’s coming out you just realize it came out in the wrong way or your tonality portrays you and you end up getting egg all over your face.

Where do these things come from? It’s all inside the unconscious. If

you’re pain oriented to use an Eckhart Tolle example, you are telling your unconscious mind: these are the sets of experiences I expect, please make it happen.

People who are pleasure oriented or people who are more positively

oriented are basically giving instruction to the unconscious mind that they expect a different set of things to happen.

There’s an interesting TV program of this on luck and unlucky people –

by the way Mary, we’ll come back to this idea of procrastination very shortly – and it turns out there’s a very interesting mindset distinction. One of the tests that they had was that these people were asked to walk down a particular alleyway to a coffee shop where they’d have a meeting.

What they didn’t realize is that the alleyway was rigged so that as they

walked down the alleyway they would find I think it was a £50 note lying



on the ground and a scratch card with the winning lottery number for £100 as well then they just notice what happened.

Without exception, all the people who are “lucky” people walking down

the road spot these things, pick them up, look at them, smile, put it in their pocket and are now several hundred pounds or 50£ richer.

The unlucky people on the other hand are walking down the same road,

seeing the same signals and they totally ignore the £50 note and the scratch card. They’ve deleted out of experience.

In fact, one of them ends up glancing at it, having a second glance back and you can see him mentally shrugging as he walks on, like that can’t be what I think it is.

So your mindset will tend to attract things to you purely because every

second of your life you have opportunities around you for good and bad things to happen.

Sometimes the waiting is more in favor or one thing or the other, which

is when randomly you get luck or randomly you have bad luck, but if your mind, especially your unconscious which makes a lot of these decisions that you’re not aware of, is pre-disposed to one or the other then that’s what you end up getting.

I wouldn’t be surprised that many crashes are actually caused by people

either having some kind of unconscious need to punish themselves, self- sabotage in some way or just to strike at just the right time.

Did you have a follow up to that? Audience: No, that’s very interesting. You don’t remember the name of the

program do you Igor? Igor: No, it was on the BBC, I do remember that, but I can’t recall the name of

the program.

How Do You Change What To Expect From Life? Audience: I guess the question is how do you begin switching that expectation? Igor: If you’re doing it as a therapist that has a lot to do with self-esteem

issues. It may be something to do with where you need to have some bigger therapeutic tools like regression or something like that, where you



work out the time in their life where they created the belief expecting certain things about themselves.

For example, when parents turn around and say That’s Johnny, he’s just

awkward – that’s a belief that’s been set and that may end up manifesting as a reality for them for the rest of their life. So you may need to go back and delete that belief, which will basically take care of the behavior.

Other ways to do it– there are many ways to do it– another way to do it

is to maybe just do it with a state. In other words, you could create a pre-disposition to much more positive states, which by default will contain more positive attitudes, so as a result means that the unconscious mind will focus more on those positive things.

Remember, the unconscious makes no distinction between conflicts. It

will quite happily run a conflict to totally mutually paradoxical situations simultaneously like it’s night and day at the same time or it’s raining and dry at the same time.

To the unconscious mind it’s irrelevant that there’s a paradox. It’s just a question of – if that happens what end of the paradox do you place people’s attention on? Or you can clear up the paradox, in other words you can clear up the underlying condition. Both can work and that’s of course what therapeutic technique is all about.

If you’re talking about self hypnosis, I think usually the simplest or most

elegant approach is to do something that we’re going to go into in the Power of Self Hypnosis study program that I’m recording right now and that is – to give you a sneak preview – something called the Unconscious Review.

You basically have a little chat with your unconscious mind through your

motor responses, to get it to tell you what exactly is causing this. Very often, this is the strange thing, by uncovering that, it gets rid of that.

Suddenly your consciousness can, when you consciously appreciate the

disconnect between things you know to be true now intellectually and things that your unconscious mind held as a belief outside of your awareness, a lot of times those can collapse then the old belief gets brushed aside.



Sometimes that doesn’t happen, in which case, you can use very simple direct self suggestions, which takes care of that also. Now you see you’re targeting your suggestions at the right cause.

The biggest problem is, say someone is awkward or unlucky and they start suggesting something like Every day and everywhere I get luckier and luckier

OR Every day in every way I get smoother and more elegant.

That might sound like great he’s resolving the problem and sometimes

that actually works.

But sometimes all he’s doing is addressing a symptom and he needs to check for a root as well, because he may be solving the wrong problem.

Let’s say that the awkwardness has nothing to do with a belief that he

should be awkward, but a belief that he is a bad person and needs to be punished constantly by bumping his head, toes and all the rest.

At this point, saying that in every day and every way I’m going to get

more elegant and all the rest of it is not going to make a blind bit of difference, because the unconscious mind still needs to punish the individual, which has this root belief that they are a bad person.

That’s the bit that needs to be dealt with and at that point the

awkwardness will disappear naturally. Of course, you may find yourself being successful with just the elegant suggestions, but then you might end up having the whole transference idea where you have a different way of punishing yourself coming out instead.

You might be okay with that, but I think the elegant solution then is, if you’re using it on yourself, to allow yourself to break the root cause, dissolve that and allow everything to just happen naturally as a result of that.

Did you have a follow up to that Mary? Mary: No, it’s very interesting.



How To End Procrastination With Hypnosis Igor: Okay. Let’s turn back now to this idea of procrastination, which I’m

aware that I haven’t completely dealt with yet. Mary: Yes, we’ve got the guy still holding on and doing nothing. Igor: He’s holding on and doing nothing, exactly. It’s kind of like a catatonic

state – try this Mary– as an experiment. Take your arm and lift it up halfway. Do this at the same time – bend and stretch your arm simultaneously what happens?

Whatever position your arm is in, simultaneously try to bend it and

straighten it out at the same time. What happens to your arm? Mary: It freezes. Igor: It freezes, because you’re being pulled in two different directions

simultaneously, much like the little soldier that we were talking about who is being pulled psychologically in two different directions.

His feet jump, but his hands hold on tight and then he’s stuck in a worse

position. This is what causes us to procrastinate. We are having the equivalent of trying to do two different things at the same time.

The task becomes so large we don’t know where to begin and we literally start locking up, like that arm locks up when you try to bend it and stretch it at the same time. You end up trying to do an impossible thing and end up doing nothing as a result.

The causes of procrastination can be several things.

1. Number one, a big cause tends to be perfectionism. In other words, you want the end result to be so perfect that you

overload. You don’t know how to make it so perfect, so you end up doing nothing as a result. It may be that you’re just overloading on the task because you’re going too far in the future.

For example, if you want to get a new job, you may procrastinate even filling out the application forms, because in your mind you’re trying to predict what my employer wants to see.



What is going to be asked in the interview question and I want to answer it in the cover letter or in my CV, so you’re trying to predict things you don’t know about yet, because you haven’t experienced that company or that person yet. By trying to go too far into the future where there will be a blank anyway because you’ve not had the experience of it yet.

We have procrastination being caused by things like trying to predict the

future too far in advance, when there are going to be variables like, every minute that you go into the future, your variables start growing exponentially, because more and more things might happen.

If you try to take account of all those things and all those things that might happen as a result of those things and those things, the further into the future you try to go, the greater the number of variables that might arise. Eventually your mind will overload and you just can’t keep ahead.

One of the ways that people create procrastination is they try to predict

too much of the future and as a result they get overloaded and then they get caught in this paralysis, which some people call “paralysis of analysis”, they just get stuck by not knowing where to begin.

Therefore, they want to create such a perfect result that they’re afraid

they can’t do it, so they give up. They de-motivate themselves by trying to do something perfect.

2. Another way they do it is that they face an insurmountable

task.

In other words, they maybe even correctly estimate all the work that’s involved then suddenly they just go I just can’t do this, this is way too much; there’s no way I can do this. They end up underestimating their ability because they look at the whole piece of work at the same time. It’s kind of like looking at elephants and saying: “There’s no way I can eat this thing.” Of course, if you had to eat it all in one go you couldn’t, but if you gave yourself enough time, you could.

Some people project too far into the future to cause procrastination, but

some people don’t give themselves enough time. In other words, they don’t go far enough into the future to realize they can parcel out all the tasks and hence procrastination happens again.



The reason I’ve been going into these is, because I think these are the three major causes of procrastination. There are others of course, including fear of a negative reaction or the fear of the unknown.

The reason I’m mentioning these is because each one will be resolved in

a different way, so you need to figure out what kind of procrastination you have.

If your procrastination is down to perfectionism, the solution is to get

someone to– the task is to be perfectly imperfect– in other words, you prescribe the problem in a certain respect. The problem is they’re trying to avoid imperfection, to avoid a second rate effort, so then you prescribe a second rate effort.

Their natural inclination towards perfectionism will mean that they’re

probably incapable of a second rate effort. By trying to achieve a second rate effort they do the main thing, which is to actually get started to actually do something.

Even though they may start off with a half-hearted attempt at doing something badly, eventually they’ll get carried away by their enthusiasm and they’ll just do the task and they’ll probably do it really well or they’ll go through a learning phase where it starts off poorly and then ends up being good at the end of it. At least they’re engaged now, which means they can go through the whole feedback mechanism of going towards perfection.

If on the other hand the problem people have is about future

projection, they’re trying to predict the future too far in advance then the solution is very much to pull things into the present moment, which is called the next small step.

What is one thing you can do right now that will begin the ball rolling?

If you only look one step ahead of you, you take that step that’s an easy step to do and as soon as you get there the next step gets revealed and the next one again and the next one again.

It’s a little bit like crossing a river at night on stepping stones with a

small lantern. The lantern is only enough to light the way ahead one step, so you use the lantern, you find where the next stone is and you step on that.

You have no idea how big the river is, you have no idea how far you’ll

have to go, you have no idea how long it will take you to cross it; all you



have to do is hold the lantern in front of you and the next stone will reveal itself and the next one after that and the next one after that.

Eventually you will have crossed the river without any overload. Let’s look at the other kind, which is the trying to eat the whole

elephant kind. That believe it or not is also solved in the same way as the future projection.

It’s still time sensitive, only this time rather than focusing on the time

sequence, rather than trying to predict the future a year in advance, you just say

What can you do today?

OR How can you prepare for tomorrow?

Now you switch the frame around and say,

What is the one task I can do now? You can’t eat the whole elephant, but can you eat a toe? Maybe. Can you eat part of an ear? Sure. So you start there then you do a little bit more. You give them a little bit of a rest then you do more, a little bit of a rest and then a little bit more.

You start segmenting it down into piecemeal pieces. One of the keys to

procrastination of course is to have a little bit of discipline, because people like their patterns. They will fall into those natural grooves because they know them. Of course, when they’re engaged in the activity it’s likely to recreate the old groove.

So you somehow have to get them out of the old groove, so if you’re

overloaded by trying to eat the whole elephant, you have to keep people’s attention fixed firmly on one small step.

If your pattern is about trying to predict the future, you have to get

someone’s attention fixed firmly on the present moment and what can be done in the present moment.

If someone’s procrastination is based around perfectionism, you have to

keep their attention firmly rooted on the flaw and actually purposefully introducing flaws almost, so it’s a paradoxical instruction. It’s using the pattern to break the pattern.

Does that make sense to everyone?



How To Make Better Decisions Mike: I have a quick question related to this. I’m just wondering if the issue is

a decision as opposed to being overwhelmed by a project that’s huge. In that case, it’s almost akin to being on the wing of the plane there, because it’s a decision to do this or not to do this.

Just focusing on the next small step isn’t necessarily the solution,

because you could do that with either side of the decision. Igor: Yes. That’s an excellent example thank you for bringing this up. There are a couple of things, different kinds of decisions that may create

lock up. One is basically called a toward-away from conflict or a toward-toward conflict.

In other words, you either way two really good things and you don’t

know which one is going to be better or you’re not sure whether something is going to cause you pain, so you’re not sure if you should avoid it or not. Some decisions are also not made because it’s a hard decision, where basically there’s an emotional overload.

A classic example is: When should you split up with someone that you’re no longer in love with? That’s a classic one because people delay it and delay it because the right moment never quite comes.

What they really mean is they never feel quite the right way so it’s a

state basis. If you change a state of course that will help the whole decision making process.

Decisions are state based processes also. If you’re having trouble

making a choice the key thing to look out for is what state are you yourself in or what state is the person in who is trying to make the decision? Until you have shifted the state to a positive state, there’s no point getting into the decision, because even if you do make a decision chances are it’ll be a poor one.



I think there’s a hypnotist I know of who makes the joke that a lot of people spend time getting themselves to a lousy states and only when they feel thoroughly miserable that’s when they start making decisions about who they are and what they’re capable of in life then of course they end up limiting themselves to a great extent.

The key thing to decisions is find the state, break the state. If you’re

doing it with someone else, you can use the same kind of ideas we had with breaking low mood swings and once you’ve broken the state, then you can go into a more positive state and then review the same options again, at which point the options will look different.

It’s usually easier to make the choice and even if it isn’t, people can at

least begin to do what they need to do in terms of gathering information, etc.

The other distinction comes to when you have two things that seem like

they’re contradictory, but you actually want to have both of them whether it’s toward-toward or toward-away in some ways.

At that point, you can actually do what’s called a “parts integration.”

It’s basically that two parts of your neurology are pulling you in separate directions and by integrating them, the NLP visual, squashes a classic version of this whereas in hypnosis you have part integrations.

By integrating those two directions so they pull back in the same

direction, you create a new and more holistic third. There is an old saying that ‘enlightenment is achieved by holding

two mutually contradictory ideas in consciousness at the same time until they spontaneously resolve themselves’.

This is what we’re talking about here.

When you’re stuck in a dilemma or when you’re stuck with a dilemma

between two good choices as well, you want to go beyond the logical level of the dilemma and basically integrate the two things, because ultimately they want the same sort of thing.

To give you a quick overview of what a parts integration would look like,

it’s basically

Do I go to China for six months or do I go skiing for three months instead?



At that point, you might try basically lifting up above the level of which location do I go to and start looking at the higher intention behind it.

What’s my purpose? My purpose is to have fun. Am I going to have fun

in Japan? Sure. Am I going to have fun in Shanghai, Aspen or wherever you want to go instead? Sure.

Then it’s a question of weighing up how much fun you’re going to have

and then you either go that direction or you might end up noticing that a third thing emerges. You might be able to go skiing in Japan for example. Something like that might not emerge until you’ve broken this either/or mindset.

Does that kind of make sense to you Mike?

Mike: Yes, definitely that was very helpful. Igor: So we’ve got different levels of intervention. State is always my starting

point and then we’ll look at the nature of the conflict and conflict resolution is telling you there’s a part conflict.

At which point, you use the highest point of intention and you use that as your negotiation tool to create a greater reality that includes both parts hence, dissolving a conflict at that point decisions become easier again. Don’t be surprised when people end up choosing a third totally un-thought of alternative when you do this, because you literally are opening them up to greater distinctions.

Mike: Okay. Igor when using this, how do you get the guy off the wing of the

plane? Igor: How would I do it or how did the actual instructor do it? The instructor

went and basically pried his knuckles apart until the guy let go and drifted to ground naturally. I would prefer to take care of him before he actually gets in the airplane, so it doesn’t happen in the first place.

Have I answered your question on procrastination, Mary?

How Do You Deal With Fear Mary: Yes, it’s extremely interesting. The only other element I’d appreciate

your talking about is this business of fear.



People who procrastinate not just because they’re overwhelmed, but because they have an underlying fear that’s related to the purpose or related to their self-esteem, abilities and irrationally so they are able to do whatever they’re supposed to do.

Igor: Can you give me a concrete example? Mary: If you have someone who wants to move on to a new job for instance;

we’ve gone through these other scenarios and they are relevant to a certain extent, but there just seems to be a real fear of the unknown.

The person stays in the job, stays in the relationship, stays living in the

same place whatever the situation might be out of fear of the unknown, fear of failure and fear that it won’t work out, so its better just to stay put.

Igor: Here’s the thing about fear and this is one of the key things to dissolving

fear. Fear is actually a static emotion. It’s primarily designed to freeze you.

You know fight, flight or freeze? Freeze is he bigger of the three. Once you’re running or fighting, fear tends to dissolve. Then you may

still have vestiges of the fear when you’re running, but you become much more creative, your mind has become much more open, so it’s not fear in the traditional sense.

The kind of fear you’re describing is paralyzing fear. We’ve got fight,

flight or freeze. The solution to that kind of fear and it’s primarily one of the main fears you’ll come across as a hypnotherapist, the other kinds of fears you often don’t want to do anything about, because they’re useful.

In other words, fight or flight can be useful or can be channeled to

something useful; but that’s not always the case. The primary kind of fear as hypnotists we look at is the freeze one, the fear that prevents or inhibits rather than the fear that promotes something.

The key thing that destroys that kind of fear, believe it or not, is

motion/movement. So you need to get some kind of movement, both in a metaphorical sense, but also in a purely physical sense.

When someone starts moving towards something, this is what the idea of

the next small step is, they don’t have to move towards it sometimes they can move away from it, but once they start running they suddenly realize I don’t need to be running anymore and they’ll start running in the right direction again, so any movement is better than none.



Sometimes when you have difficulty, getting them to run towards what they want– the new job or new relationship– its okay to get them running in a different direction. Maybe get them started in a different way like running away from something for example or to maybe intensify the fight in some ways.

I’m not necessarily suggesting this as an actual solution, but basically

what you want them to do is start moving and taking some form of action, irrelevant whether it gets them into the new position they want to be in or it takes them further away from that.

The key thing is to start moving. Then you start shaping the new

behavior that slowly starts giving them the information they need to get towards the new set of safer circumstances.

Let’s look at this in a practical sense. For example – have you got

someone in mind that you’re working with at the moment who has a fear that you want to work around?

Mary: No, go ahead and use whatever example pops into your mind for this,

because I have many examples. Igor: Let’s think of someone who maybe wants to change jobs, but doesn’t

know he can do it. You can actually hijack his fear, which is something I haven’t mentioned before.

The way to do that is to – fear is an overloading emotion. It gets them

into a mental rut where they have certain thoughts looping. So you start looping similar thoughts, but you then start changing the content, being more insistent and you start creating positive suggestions rather than negative ones.

The thought loops are basically self-suggestions which are negative that

keep them trapped. Let’s say someone goes through a though loop like

“Oh, I can’t do this, I’ll never get a job; I’m not good enough for this.” You might try to reason with them, saying No you’re perfectly fine, you’re okay – and all the rest of it; but that won’t work because they “know better”.

One approach that can work but won’t work all the time is to overpower

their negative self-talk with a more positive version coming from you.



They’re literally like rabbits caught in the headlight; this goes back to the idea of the hypnotic blitz, where you’re just throwing in positive suggestions.

You’re describing in minute’ detail what this new life could be like, but

you’re so insistent that it basically blows out the fuse on them doing the negative thinking.

Once you’re gone, expect the negative thoughts to come back again.

This isn’t a permanent solution usually, it’s just enough to get some kind of motion. That might need a top up or is enough to get them started so you get some momentum towards a new direction, so that they can start running on their own.

The key thing is not to get them to make too big of a step at the starting

point once you’ve got some motion going, because then they can get right back to overloading, fear and shutting down.

If you do this big pep talk, they get motivated enough to do something

and you get them to maybe resign their job, between leaving your office and walking to their boss’s saying here’s my resignation, they’ll have thought twice about it, they’ll say I can’t do this and they’ll back out.

The pep talk might be enough to get them to apply for another job, but

not actually quit their first one yet. It might be enough to talk to a head hunter, to gather information, in other words begin the process that they want to be in without actually having to commit to it.

That begins the whole thing with the lantern and taking one step at a

time that’s all you’re doing with it. You’re just pausing the fear enough to allow that and if you’ve done enough of those stepping stones, eventually their fear gets exposed as a nothingness, as an irrelevancy and they just carry on with what they’re doing.

Another way to deal with it is again the idea of root cause. In other

words, typically fear is fear of the unknown or fear of invariables.

One of the places that this comes from and this is a little bit of an over generalization, but it’s a reasonably accurate one, is you’ll tend to find that kind of fear, fear of the unknown, happening a lot with people who were punished, especially as children, for not “getting it right”.

The school system is great at installing this in us. You write an essay

and it comes back with all kinds of red marks. You write a test paper and it’s not the answers your teacher wanted.



Your teacher gives you a brain teaser, you come up with a bit of a clever answer and he smacks you down for being a wise ass, a wise guy or whatever the expression is.

It happens to a certain extent to all of us, but it happens more to some,

some are more sensitive than others are, so they end up developing this unconscious mindset of, I have to know the answer ahead of time, I have to know everything at once.

So the people again will be stuck in procrastination, because they don’t know what the answer is yet, it’s similar to the future projection one.

They don’t know what to expect, hence they won’t do anything. They

won’t jump unless they know they’ll land safely, but they won’t know if they’ll land safely until they jump, so they’re stuck in that loop.

For those people, you can do some kind of regression work. You can do

work around the issue, which is the idea of letting go. How do you do this? You can go into the past and do a re-imprint or a negotiation with the

younger self around forming that belief that they have to know the answer ahead of time and realizing that’s just the school system, life is actually different. In life you have the experience first and then you decide what you’re going to do with it.

You can go around the state based thing, in other words you start

building other states to start blowing out the fear thing. If done with elegance, a simple collapse anchors or collapsing of the two states – a very positive with a negative done elegantly will actually do this work.

You’ll find that with a lot of fear based things, like the mind bending

language that we’ve been talking about can be tremendous. Think about the mechanism that creates the fear, the thought loops that people go through, it puts a spanner into the mechanism that it can never run the same way again.

They can still recreate that fear, but it’ll never be quite the same way as

before. Once you’ve interrupted that mechanism enough times, it has a habit of breaking down, at which point they’re wide open, where you can actually recreate a whole new mindset, where they’ll say it’s not a big deal getting a new job or getting into a new relationship or something like that.



The approach is kind of a shotgun approach that I’ve just given you here. In one aspect you want to create some motion and that can be physical, in other words breathing, sports – that begins to break down the fear response.

If you ever get yourself in a position where you’re frightened about

something, maybe you have a lot of pressure and you don’t know what decision to make, go for a run, play squash, wrestle with your kids or with someone else – obviously with consent, otherwise that’s called a fight.

That physical release will often be enough of a release mechanism that

you can actually get on with the motion. In other words, they can get on with doing what they know should be done and that releases.

If that’s not enough, you may want to look at the thought loops that are

creating the fear or rather allowing it to maintain itself and you can break that in many different ways.

You can break that in terms of the past, go back to the point where the

decision was created; usually it’s got some kind of regression work involved, like a re-imprint or change personal history type pattern.

You can do an interruption of their strategy, which you can do with mind

bending language where you start – have you all listened to the mind bending language master class?

I think it’s the one which is currently up on the forum [editor’s note:

“forum” refers to the Private Hypnosis Club membership forum], so listen to that.

Basically for mind bending language the idea is that you take the

statement of whatever their problem is, like I’m afraid of (x) and you start running it through thought loops, which totally distorts the meaning of that, so they can never react to that meaning again.

If someone says I’m afraid of leaving her, you say How much is that fear

not leaving you now?

Now you’ve changed he word order, which changes the meaning already, but because the syntax is linked to the experience they’re having, the experience is fear now leaving later.

So I’m afraid of leaving her… so you can leave off being afraid?



Start putting the horse behind the cart and they go hang on a second that’s not how it works the horse pulls the cart, so it’s got to be in front.

Therefore, by saying to someone who says I’m afraid of leaving her – can

you leave off that fear now – it’s like you’ll see them they’ll start struggling, going – what are you talking about? They can’t compute it.

At that point, they’re at the edge of a TIP, a trance of infinite possibilities and you want to push them over into that trance of infinite possibilities and open their mindset up to many more possibilities.

Does anyone have a slight fear or concern that we can give a

demonstration of this on?

If not, we’ll leave it as the principle, but it would be quite nice if I could give you a demonstration of the interaction. Don’t make it like a major life trauma, just a little thing that you’re afraid of.

Demonstration: Destroying Fear With Language Nathan: I’m not sure if it’s appropriate, but I might as well throw it out there.

Hesitation basically when using street hypnosis, not going for it in the moment would that be appropriate?

Igor: Sure. How do you know that you’re not doing it? How do you know it’s

time to not do it? Nathan: I know it’s time to do it and then I don’t. Igor: Can you give me a specific example? A specific one is like one that

you’ve done where you didn’t do it and you wanted to have done it, an actual historical event.

Nathan: I was doing a conversation induction on a friend of mine at the swimming

pool a week or so ago and that would have been the perfect time to say hey, do you want to do a rapid induction or something?

I’m pretty sure I could’ve done it if I went for it, but something stopped

me in the moment. Igor: Good, stop right there. What happened just before? You did a

conversation induction and that was great. Nathan: Yes.



Igor: How were you feeling whilst you were doing that conversation induction? Nathan: Good, because I could tell the conversational induction was working. Igor: You were feeling good inside and then what happened? Nathan: Then I thought well, it’s time to do something else. Igor: Excellent and just as you thought that, what happens? Nathan: I start thinking various thoughts to stop myself. Igor: Just before you start thinking those thoughts, what happens? You think

about: it’s time to do something else now… Nathan: Then I think about – I’m hesitating again I suppose. Igor: How do you know you’re hesitating? How does it feel in your body? Nathan: That I’m stopping myself from doing something and I’m feeling frustrated

at the time. Igor: How does it feel inside your body when that’s happening? Nathan: Frustrated. Igor: Frustrated. How do you know when you’re frustrated? Where do you

feel it? Nathan: All across, tightness in my shoulders I suppose, if you want me to

describe it like that. Igor: You have no problem hesitating to frustrate yourself, right? Nathan: No. Igor: So you can hesitate to frustrate yourself is that what you’re saying? Nathan: Yes. Igor: When you hesitate frustration, what are you left with? Nathan: Frustration.



Igor: If you hesitate frustrating yourself, what happens? If you hesitate on that?

Nathan: You don’t hesitate, I suppose. Igor: When you hesitate on your frustration then you have no frustration, is

that what you’re saying? Nathan: Yes. Igor: What does it feel like to hesitate like that? Nathan: I wouldn’t know I haven’t done it, I imagine it feels quite good. Igor: What is it you were doing? You’re there; you’re doing conversation

induction and what happens? Nathan: I hesitate and stop myself from doing a proper overt induction and street

hypnosis. Igor: Can you stop yourself doing that now? Nathan: I suppose I could. Igor: Let’s put it this way. Consider this very carefully. You just put yourself

there, you’re seeing your friend, you’re doing the induction and you’re thinking hey, I should do something different now.

At that point, I just want you to think very carefully, because anything

less than not totally stopping yourself from feeling the hesitation fully won’t frustrate your street hypnosis experiences now. Just think that through fully.

What happens now? How are you doing now?

Nathan: I’m feeling quite odd. Igor: You’re feeling quite odd that’s right. What’s it like to feel quite odd? Nathan: One could describe it as odd. Igor: Is it a pleasant odd or an unpleasant odd? Nathan: It’s definitely a pleasant odd. Igor: So you can feel odd and feel pleasant at the same time?



Nathan: Yes. Igor: Wow what an odd experience; very good. So you can feel odd and

pleasant at the same time, how do you know that it’s pleasant? Nathan: I’m smiling. Igor: You’re smiling. Is that the only way you know that it’s pleasant? Nathan: No, I feel that it’s pleasant. Igor: Oh, you feel that it’s pleasant. Are you sure about that? Nathan: Yes, I’m sure. Igor: As you’re feeling this pleasant assuredness, what happens to street

hypnosis now? What happens when you just think about street hypnosis?

Nathan: I still feel the pleasant feelings. Igor: You’re not hesitating about that? Nathan: No. Igor: That’s frustrating, isn’t it? Nathan: Not particularly. Igor: Are you sure about that? Nathan: Yes. Igor: How do you know? Nathan: Because it’s not happening the way it used to, it’s happening the way I

want it to. Igor: Because it’s not happening the way it used to, so what is happening? Nathan: When I think about it happening the way I want it to I’m going for it and

doing it well. Igor: So it is happening the way you want it to and it is going well.



Nathan: Yes. Igor: How do you feel about that? Nathan: I feel very good about that. Igor: You do, do you? Nathan: Yes. Igor: How do you know? Nathan: I get the feeling of feeling good. Igor: Can you get the feeling of feeling bad back?

It’s kind of too simple for you to not feel good now, so I want to try to get that old bad feeling back, the one of hesitation and frustration. Try hard and see if you’ll fail. What happens now?

Nathan: It’s almost as if I’m trying to get the bad feeling back and I’m feeling it a

bit, but there’s some resistance as well. Igor: You mean you’re getting resistance to feeling bad? Nathan: I’m getting resistance to feeling bad, but the resistance itself doesn’t feel

that good. Igor: That must be so frustrating. Nathan: It’s very frustrating. Igor: It is, isn’t it? How do you feel about that? Nathan: Frustrated. Igor: You’re frustrated that you can’t feel bad? Nathan: Well, I can’t feel bad the way I used to. Igor: Damn that’s a bit strange, isn’t it? Nathan: Very. Igor: What are you experiencing now?



Nathan: Complete confusion. Igor: Complete confusion that’s right. How do you want to feel as you’re about

to launch into doing something else? Nathan: I want to feel confident and successful and really go for it. Igor: That’s right and you are, aren’t you, feeling a sense of confidence now

and it’s beginning to grow somewhere inside. Nathan: Yes. Igor: Where does it begin? The place that used to have frustration now feels

confident and it can continue to grow all by itself as you begin to contemplate the many different ways that you have of doing street hypnosis.

Here’s the most interesting part; as your mind begins to feel those

pleasant experiences of confidence in your chest expanding and things going well, from time to time you’re going to find yourself having a very surprising thought, a thought that’s going to come back to you over and over again and it’s going to be a very odd thought.

The thought is of you doing street hypnosis and things don’t work out

quite the way you wanted them to. Somehow, you really don’t care. It might seem amusing, you might just feel a curious odd kind of pleasant feeling that makes you smile, because knowing that you’re making mistakes means you’re learning street hypnosis at an even deeper level.

As you think about all the times that it goes well and continue to focus on

that feeling of confidence, etc. just notice from time to time the oddest flash of a thought occurring to you or something just stuffing up.

Maybe it’s in an amusing way; maybe it’s in an oddly pleasant way. How

can you actually enjoy your street hypnosis going wrong? How can you possibly do that? Isn’t it the oddest thing that your mind will allow you to feel good whilst thinking of things going wrong?

I don’t want you to dwell on that, because of course you’re feeling the

sense of confidence and all the street hypnosis things going well, maybe an instant induction or a wonderful demonstration of people being charmed, happy and excited by the whole thing and that’s really what street hypnosis is all about, right?

Nathan: Yes.



Igor: What’s happening now? Nathan: I’m feeling confident, happy… and the fear of failure I suppose, which

was underlying the whole time is completely gone. Igor: Here’s the thing now. You’re going off to do your daily things because

you’re about to finish up here now. What I want you to report back on the next time we speak is how many times you got that odd sensation that something has gone wrong, but you kind of like it.

I just want you to notice it and be curious about where that comes from. Nathan: Okay. Igor: Very good. Thank you for that. Mary, does that give you an answer to

what we’re talking about? Nathan: Thank you for that that was amazing. Igor: Thank you very much and you’re very welcome. Mary: That was wonderful, it was very interesting. I do understand. Igor: We’re getting motion in different ways. What we just did there is we

were basically interfering with a pattern. We were using the thing that kept the pattern together to break the pattern now.



Conversational Hypnosis: Private Q&A Session Part 2

How To Use The “Hypnotists Performance Trance” Audience: I have a question about self hypnosis I’m having a problem with. It

seems I can rub my hands together, have the ball of energy, spread them apart, absorb it and then I can sometimes relax, but I come to a stopping point.

I can do the arm levitation, one arm I lift, one is heavier, but again I come to a stopping point.

For example, I tried to calm myself. The first person I hypnotized was

my wife. She was having health problems. She had just got out of the hospital, had a stint in her heart and she was unsure about it.

I was kind of nervous. She went in to hypnosis very quick. It helped her

a lot and worked well, but I had to back off, because my heart was beating fast and I was nervous.

Since then, I have hypnotized a handful of people. They can all go pretty deep, but I’m having a hard time putting myself into a deeper trance.

Igor: So you're talking about putting yourself into a hypnotist trance as you're

hypnotizing others. The heart palpations, etc. are in the way or are you talking about doing self hypnosis without having to do anything else in other words, just do it by yourself on yourself.

Audience: Both ways. I’m having problems with myself. Igor: Let’s take start with the first one and take the second one separately,

because they are two different situations. In terms of what you did with the first one, by the way, congratulations.

You hypnotized your first few people and those are the scariest people to do. Believe it or not I was sweating blood the first time I had to hypnotize someone.

I got a lot of things wrong and actually for the first year or two when I

learned hypnosis I was hugely nervous, so it’s not uncommon so that’s not a big deal. Part of it may be that you have unrealistic expectations in terms of how you’ll feel whilst performing something.



Do you drive a car? Audience: Yes. Igor: How old were you when you first started driving a car? Audience: Probably about nine or ten. Igor: Did your father put you in his car and let you drive around a parking lot

or something? Audience: I lived in the country on dirt roads and back roads. Igor: Can you remember the very first time you sat in a car and it was time for

you to drive it do you remember that? Audience: Yes. Igor: How did it feel? Audience: It felt good. I can feel things good. I can reach out and actually feel

them its visualizing things that’s harder. Igor: We’ll talk about visualization in a moment. Typically, when people first

learn to drive, something that happens is they have a nervous response. Their heart races, they’ll sweat a little bit and that’s because there’s a lot of information they have to correlate at the same time.

Steering the car, watching the road, looking in the mirrors, operating the

pedals, if you have a gearshift, you’ve got to shift the gears every now and again as well. So there’s a lot of information you have to handle at the same time whilst being present and alert to the outside world.

Hypnosis is the same thing. The initial set of inductions requires you to

do a lot of different behaviors at the same time so there’s a lot of pressure.

One of the ways to take the pressure off or to reduce those heart

palpations that you have isn’t necessary to doing hypnosis and say I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid, because very often that can create more fear, because you're creating a dirty goal.

You're so desperate to not want to feel those experiences that every time

you tell yourself you won’t, you make it hard on yourself not to. Does that make sense?



Audience: Yes. Igor: One of the ways around it is and this is where the 10-second hypnotist

came from, is to get rid of all performance pressure, get rid of all the causes for you to have that pressure. That can be summed up in one word: results.

If there’s no particular result that you have to achieve, then there’s

absolutely no reason for those heart palpations, because how can you do anything wrong? Make sense so far?

Audience: Yes. Igor: Are you familiar with the 60-second hypnotist? Audience: Yes. Igor: This is where it evolved. By creating a frame of, “You pretend to go into

hypnosis and I’ll pretend to hypnotize you,”… it takes the results out of the equation.

You’ll know you have a dirty goal when you do the following. You’ll do

this frame: say you pretend and I’ll pretend to hypnotize you then I’m going to get a little practice that way. Then you still get the heart palpations and think “I’ve got to make this work my God, what if it’s not good enough,” etc.

At that point, you're still trying to hypnotize them let go of that. All you

care about is;

Are you following the sequence? Are you asking to close their eyes and go into hypnosis? Are you doing something funky like touching their arm saying, go

deeper and deeper? Are you counting down from ten to one, ten go deeper, nine go

deeper, etc.?

You're treating it as a ‘practice run’, a dry run, but they’ll end up in a trance anyway.

Some people will not necessarily go into a very deep trance, a very light

trance and say I don’t think I was hypnotized. That was more that they went to a light trance more than anything else, but that’s beside the point.



What you want is to have experience of having gone through these steps many times so that they're all smooth and natural. Then you can start concerning yourself about how do I use this response with that response?

Then it’s less about can I hypnotize someone and it’s more about if they have this response what can I do about it?

The beauty about the 10-second hypnotist is, once you’ve hypnotized

100 different people using this method you’ll have seen most of the kinds of responses you’ll get in hypnosis by accident. I’m not saying you should have to hypnotize the same person 100 times, I’m saying 100 different people at lease once.

Doing one-person 100 times is better than doing nothing at all. Doing

100 people once is even better. Doing 100 people 100 times is 100 times better.

What you require in terms of the performance element, I would say from

what I’ve heard, is just practice, just being allowed to do it. The easiest way to do that is to get yourself into a hypnosis course where the pressure is off you, because you don’t have to get results anyway, because everyone is in the same boat.

Or, go round to your friends and family and say I’m not really going to

hypnotize you, but I want to play this wacky game. You pretend to go into hypnosis or pretend to relax I’ll say these things and we’ll all pretend together.

Go through your friends, family anyone that will volunteer for it. You’ll

notice that probably around your 15th, 20th or 30th person, at some point you’ll stop pretending to hypnotize them and they’ll forget that they're pretending too.

Does that answer part of your question? Audience: So far I’ve jumped in and instead of doing the 60-second I’ve done

friends and family and it’s been working well so far for everybody that I have hypnotized.

Igor: It tells me that you're a good hypnotist. Audience: Some people seem kind of nervous when you say hypnotism they kind of

back off they're shocked. Igor: That happens a lot. Audience: I am calming down with the more people I do I have noticed that.



Igor: Exactly. The only reason I’m suggesting the 10-second hypnotist isn’t,

because you might not be a good hypnotist. I think you're probably a very good hypnotist, because you’ve jumped into the deep end and are doing a great job.

It’s about how quickly you can switch your nervous system around.

You're pulling the rug out from underneath what is keeping that fear thing, the heart palpations, etc. going and at the same time you get to have fun whilst your friends and family get to experience something wonderful also.

This way everyone wins out.

You’ll find that if you do this, with you probably very quickly, just doing a

couple of family members this way, where there’s no pressure on you at all where you’ll feel fine doing it and they’ll feel fine going into it.

Suddenly you’ll have this crystallizing realization– wait – what am I

worried about this is no big deal. From that point on you’ll be a hypnotist and you’ll have a great time with it. Make sense?

Audience: Yes.

How To Troubleshoot Self Hypnosis Problems Igor: In terms of self hypnosis tell me, what do you do at the moment to use

self hypnosis? How do you use it? Audience: The easiest way for me – when I rub my hands and have the bond and

absorb the energy. Then I might try the levitation and try to go a little deeper, but I get to that point and that’s pretty much it.

Igor: How do you know you're getting to that point? Audience: Just the way it feels. It doesn't seem like I’m getting anything else out

of it. Igor: How do you know when you’re getting something out of self hypnosis? Audience: As far as emotions of things like that– getting into a different state I

want to be in to hypnotize a certain person.



Igor: You may want to consider one thing. I don’t know if this is the case; I’d have to see you doing it to get a genuine sense of this, but you may want to consider this. It might be that you’ve actually gone into self hypnosis and gone to a deep enough trance to do whatever work you want to do and you just haven’t realized it.

Any one of those things you talked about, the hand levitation, feeling the

energy of the ball and absorbing it that sort of thing, is already a hypnotic context.

At that point, you forget about the symptom, the hand levitating, the ball and the energy, you let all that go, close your eyes and you start your suggestion phase. The suggestion phase could be pre-hypnotic suggestions, intra/regular hypnotic suggestions or image suggestions, i.e. visualizations. Those are the three primary types of suggestions you have.

I have a suspicion that you're in hypnosis, you are in the perfect place for

it, but you expect something greater hence, you're trying to achieve some level of something that may not necessarily exist or exist for you at this point or isn’t necessary for you yet.

Does this make sense to you?

Audience: Yes. It’s like if I’m trying to visualize myself at a beach or something; it’s

very hard for me. Igor: The visualization thing is hard for you? Audience: Right. Igor: First of all, you're not limited to visualizations you can just use the

words? So you could do an entire hypnotic session without ever seeing a single picture and have it work like a charm. If you have difficulty with visualizations, don’t do them or rather don’t do them yet.

There are a couple of tricks that I’ll talk about in a moment for visualizations. That’s one big thing. Have you got the Secrets of Hypnosis Revealed?

Audience: Yes. Igor: In the second CD on suggestions, notice how we talk about different

styles of suggestions and how they activate different processes. The two key types for suggestions are words and mental images.



What you're telling me is that you probably respond to words quite

powerfully. We're not necessarily sure about mental images. Let’s take the idea of mental images as a separate topic now. Let’s

assume that you never have to do visualization again in your life. Do you feel confident that you can carry on and do some useful self hypnosis based entirely on words now?

Audience: Yes. Igor: Good. Is there any hesitation or any doubts as to what you might be

able to do with it? Audience: No. Igor: Good. You now have something to do in your self hypnosis. You’ll do

your hand rubbing thing or your arm levitation.

When your arm starts coming up, just close your eyes and start using your self-suggestions or better still, before you start self hypnosis read your suggestions to yourself five to twenty times then do the arm levitation.

Then close your eyes and let your mind drift and do its own thing until you come back out that’s the 10-second version of self hypnosis.

How To Visualize When You Can’t Let’s see if you generally have a problem with visualizations. Let me ask

you this. What kind of car do you drive? Audience: Chevy Truck. Igor: A truck so the door is quite high up if you compare it to normal cars,

right? Audience: Yes. Igor: When you're talking to me right now, with your right hand will you

pretend to pull out a bunch of keys and stick it into the door so you can unlock your truck.

Audience: Yes.



Igor: Wherever your hands are, just take it out and imagine you're going to be

unlocking your friend’s car – whose got a regular car like a Ford, Toyota or something like that – and unlock that.

Audience: Right. Igor: May I ask you this. Did your hands reach to two different levels out in

space in front of you? Audience: Yes. Igor: Exactly. It would have to because you know the door or your truck is

much higher than the door or a normal car. The question is how do you know that? How do you know where to put your hand?

Audience: I can see it. Igor: You can see it right, but here’s the crazy thing. It’s not that you are

aware you were seeing it whilst you were seeing it. Now that I’ve called your attention you realize that you actually did see it. The realization that you saw it comes after the fact that you’ve done so.

Does that describe your experience reasonably accurately?

Audience: Yes. Igor: What I call this is the veil of consciousness.

It’s like your unconscious mind can do images, make pictures and visualize. It’s just as a strange veil that’s drawn across those pictures so your conscious mind doesn't notice it’s going on and that’s why you think you can’t do it.

Therefore, the harder you try to make those pictures or force them, the

more you don’t notice them, because they're hidden even more. It’s like one of those laws of reverse effects, the loop that you end up building for yourself.

So the solution for you, to use visualizations is the simplest thing in the

world– stop trying to see the pictures just think about the scenario and that’s it. Just think of it. If you want proof of whether it’s happened or not, later on once you're out of hypnosis, think back about what you thought about and notice about the images that may or may not come to mind.



I know this partly, because I was very much like you. I could not make any mental images for about a year when I first came across the idea of visualizations.

There are many different ways of resolving this but one, which worked

very well for me was pretty much what you did just now. I ended up pretending to visualize. I closed my eyes. I pretended to visualize. I thought about the things that I would see, but I couldn’t see them.

Maybe eight or ten months down the line, it’s hard to say when, I

realized that for the last three months or so I’d been seeing pictures, but had forgotten to notice that I was doing it. For those people that have not had this experience it sounds like a very weird contradiction, but it’s true.

I think you’ll appreciate this now having gone through this experience.

Does this make sense to you? Audience: Yes. Igor: Do you have any other follow up questions on that? Audience: No.

Hypnotic Firearms Training Igor: Excellent. Thank you. That was an awesome question. Let me go to my

mailbag. There are a couple of people who wrote in with questions who won’t be able to come on the call.

One question I have here, if you're on the line if you sent me this email

and you’re still online then please do come on so we can discuss this a little bit. It’s from a firearms expert who teaches police officer’s swat and army personnel how to fire firearms under pressure.

These people have all the physical mechanics ready, but one thing is

having the mechanics of being able to ready, aim and fire. Another thing is doing it under pressure, while someone is out there shooting bullets at you, which are likely to do a lot of damage, so it’s like dealing with massive amounts of pressure.

The question he has is, how can you create an anchor or hypnotic trigger

that allows people to disassociate from the threat so they create a detached trance state so the emotions don’t inhibit and they get to revert



back to the automatic physical behaviors that have been trained into them?

Is the person that sent me that question on the line? Matt: Yes, I am. Igor: Perfect. I’m going to throw some ideas at you and feel free to come back

on these so you’ll get some ideas as to what you might be able to do. The first thing I want to say before I go into all of this is this is something

I’ve never done a test on or experimented with this, so these will be approaches and ideas worth playing and experimenting with these are not definitive answers.

Is that okay with you?

Matt: Yes sir, it is. Igor: I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on firearms. I’ve shot a

handgun once in my entire life, but I can tell you how I would apply hypnotic principles in the situation and maybe I’ve misunderstood the situation, in which case please correct me and we’ll see if we can work something out that could be useful.

Matt: Thank you Igor. Igor: The first thing to realize is that states, like behaviors can be conditioned,

you can train and practice states. I presume you can get people into the disassociated, slightly detached

state of mind in a non- or low-pressure situation is that correct? Matt: That is correct. Igor: Excellent. Now we have something worth anchoring. You get the state,

you anchor it. How do you anchor it? You may choose to use a word, an auditory signal or physically. Depending on how you run the rest of the sequence will depend on which one of those you will choose.

It may also be a visual queue and we’ll talk about that in a moment. The next thing you want to do is drill and rehearse that anchor to get

them into different situations.



For example, you can run different exercises like running a gauntlet, spontaneity exercises or anything like that where at a moment’s notice they get put on the spot and you fire the anchor so they get used to, blank mind leads to this stage.

A key piece if you’re going to do that is pressure testing.

That is an absolutely crucial thing that has to happen and whether you do it hypnotically or live, I think live is probably better or a combination of the two at least. You want to as closely as possible, simulate the conditions under which they’ll use the state and physical behaviors as possible.

As an extreme example, which I think is a very elegant use of this

although one which many will hesitate to use unless you're very qualified– because it’s quite dangerous– the special forces in the UK have a training drill where a new recruit who’s passed all the selection processes, so he’s basically in but there’s the last bit of testing or training before they go through the regular mechanics or whatever they do.

One of the things they have is something called the ‘killing house’ where

they run in and run around with live bullets spraying the place like crazy so they get used to live ammunition rather than just blanks.

They take this new recruit and stick him in one of the rooms. Sometimes

they’ll tie him to a chair and sometimes he’ll just sit there, often he’ll have a hood over his head and sometimes without.

Then they’ll go round the normal process or clearing the room as they

would for a terrorist house. They’ll come bursting into the room, pepper the entire room with bullets and especially they’ll fire all around the chair or place where this person is sitting.

So this guy is going to have bullets zinging within inches of his ear and

the rest of his body and these are live rounds. This is as intense as you can get without actually shooting someone.

This is the actual situation he’ll be in. His instructions are that he is not

allowed to move, which of course, is - in these terms - a very sensible thing, because if he doesn't move he’s safer than if he does move. Emotionally he will want to move.

Why? Because his self-preservation instincts will want him to curl up into

a ball or make a small target of himself, etc.



He now has the classic conflict that people in a firefight are likely to get into, which is a conflict between the built-in self-preservation instinct, curl up into a small ball or run away and the response, which is safer, but seems a little counterintuitive, which is stand your ground and fight back.

You want to create those conditions as closely as possible. How do you

do that? I don't know. You may want to experiment with the right audience to use live rounds, but then they’d need to be a very high caliber for obvious reasons and safety. I think you're much more qualified than I am to decide on that.

You may just want to use blank rounds fired at a safer distance, because

they still have a similar shock impact that a live round would have. You need to take into consideration safety parameters for noise volumes.

I would encourage you, if there’s a way to do this safely, to do it without

any ear or eye protection as well, because that’s part of the experience. You want that to end up being the trigger for the state.

The thing that someone is going to be afraid of, which is a bullet firing

near him is going to be the trigger for the actual state they want to be in.

Does all this make sense so far? Matt: Yes, the British SAS use that quite a bit. Igor: Exactly and it works very well for them. A lot of people, without having

had actual experience in the field won’t freeze in the field or have a smorgasbord of typical responses, because now you’ve created a clean chain.

The state that they get induced spontaneously, in other words, the

stimuli that sends normal people into panic mode sends them into response mode, which is a very elegant solution if you can take care of the safety problems we’ve just discussed.

Matt: Right. Igor: Once you’ve got enough of that, the beauty about hypnosis is you can

use a regular hypnotic induction or sequence of hypnotic inductions to instill that inside them so that the unconscious mind rehearses many different situations where this might occur in different ways.

A loud bang up close, a quieter bang further away, something from a

distance, a flash with a bang, you have different gradations depending on what kind of weapon and distance it is, etc.



Basically, rather than having one fixed stimulus, you want to generalize

the stimulus to a type of stimulus, i.e. gun fire, which is primarily sound with a little bit of smell and sight with flashing of the flame coming out of the gun. Excuse me if I get a little intense.

You're using these as the stimuli, which will generalize in the

uncomfortable so they end up having the new response. Here are a couple of tricks you can do to help cement that in more quickly.

One, use post hypnotic suggestions.

Are you familiar with post hypnotic suggestions and the basic protocol for them?

Matt: Yes. Igor: Use them a lot.

Two, you can use mental rehearsal. Once they have the live experience, once they have the experience of what it’s like to be shot at you can use those as reference experiences. In hypnosis those can be time distortions combined with that reference experience to put them in different locations, buildings or scenarios.

Have the unconscious mind rehearse the start point, in other words,

normal every day thing, stimulus, running the chain which is state-state- decision- behavior.

I imagine you get to the detached state, you look for wherever the threat may be coming from, you make a quick evaluation of whether or not you shoot and then you go through the biomechanics of preparing the weapon, aiming, firing, etc. So you now use time distortions to speed that up and hypnotic states to recreate the environment.

Matt: Share with me as far as time distortions. I know time distortions happen

normally under a sympathetic response. Is there a way to integrate and create a time distortion in the actual training scenarios?

Igor: Excellent question. Yes, there is. Your body has many different types of

clocks of biological mechanisms to keep track of time and they distort depending on how you process information.

One way to distort time and make things happen very slowly believe it or

not, is by upping the amount of information people are aware or keeping



track of. When you're with a friend having a great time or having a chat, hours fly by and you don’t realize how much time has gone past.

One of the reasons is, because time and this by the way relates to a

question that’s going to come up in a moment, one of the ways we organize time is through a numerical system of counting events, basically changes in a period of time.

Time has no relevance unless there’s change that allows us to measure it

against. There are some types of time that do make sense other than through changes they're more biologically oriented, but the sense of time distortion occurs when you have many events occurring at one point in time or a brief period in time.

The more events that are in a unit of time, let’s talk about 60 seconds-

one minute, the more events you have in that one minute the slower time will run for you.

Under pressure what happens is, because there’s a threat, there’s a

biological mechanism that your unconscious runs which makes you pay attention to everything, so you become hyper vigilant. It’s that hyper-vigilance that creates time distortion.

If you want to create hyper-vigilance in someone or time distortion in

someone you need to give them a lot of information to keep track of simultaneously. At that point, they will automatically hit time distortion.


Matt: Yes. Igor: Again, I’ll throw an idea out, but it may be wrong given your

environment. One way may be to keep track of a lot of things. It may be for them to keep track of a crowd of 20 people, all of them with fake guns and one of them has a real one and they're all shouting and yelling.

They have to keep track of what they’re saying, where the gun is at the

moment and maybe the gun is going from person to person and they have to keep track of where the gun is and who has the gun at any one point in time and what they're saying at the same time.

Maybe even bring some behavioral aspects in there as well where they

have to talk to the people whilst they’re doing this whole process. At that point, you have so many things that the person has to keep track of, they’ll be in a very similar situation of high pressure or high vigilance and time distortion.



They’ll probably also hit tunnel vision, which also comes in the same sort

of paradigm they’ll be in when they get shot at. That’s one way to create time distortion. You want to pack in many events and make sure they're keeping track of those events.

The more events they're keeping track of, the more time slows down for them. Ironically, the closer they’ll be to the actual experience. Does that give you some ideas on how to work that in?

Matt: Yes. Igor: Okay. Now we have the idea of states and using the stimulus, i.e.,

primarily the noise, maybe a bit of flash and even the word ‘gun’ to become the new trigger to stimulate the hypnotic trigger, i.e. the state of calm detachment.

You can use hypnosis to install the a bit more deeply, you can use

personal suggestions to do that, all part and parcel of physical training. It does not replace physical training; it enhances physical training.

A couple of other tricks you might use are the following.

Number one, dreams. You can use hypnotic dreams. You can induce a dream where people maybe for a week or month following the program have one dream each night, which relates to a high-pressure situation where they might want to use their gun.

So they basically carry on the training in dreamtime so it continues with

building muscle memory and being live in their neurology, etc. The thing to be careful of and again it’s something that I have no experience with so you’ll have to keep track and adjust this as you go along.

You don’t want to create paranoia where, because they're dreaming of it constantly they're actually looking for a fight and may end up causing one where nothing exists. There have been classic examples where people end up going into a fire fight that didn't exist, but they misunderstand something and somebody gets shot by accident, because they were on a high trigger.

The key there would be in my opinion, to make sure that the state is the

key piece that is anchored, so even in the dream before any weapon is



discharged, the whole point is being fired or shot at gets them to this very calm, detached and focused state where they make the right choices.

They are no longer running around paranoid; they're running around

calmer if anything else. Make sense? Matt: Yes. Igor: Part of that has to do with acceptance. I’m sure you do this already.

The irony is in any sort of dangerous situation the key factor is acceptance. One of the ways to do that is to accept the fact that you're going to get injured and maybe even get killed then suddenly the whole reason for the fear response disappears.

This pertains to a lot of people. I’ve heard of a fireman in Australia who

was at a scene of a petrol spill with fire everywhere it was terrible. He goes in to rescue a girl and as he’s trying to do his thing he gets cut off as an oil spillage catches fire and he’s caught in the flames.

So he and the girl are both royally screwed at this point. At first he’s

paralyzed by fear and we talked about fear earlier today. Then he described something very interesting.

At the point where he intellectually grasped the fact that he’s going to die

and he accepted it, suddenly he was okay with it, he was like “I’m screwed, I’m going to die, so what.”

At that point he described a complete calm descending over him where his training kicks in again, he helps get this girl out from whatever she’s stuck under then he does something very brave.

He gives her his breathing apparatus, he covers her in his fireproof coat

and together they end up running through this wall of fire. She is pretty much unharmed, because she’s well protected. He gets burned to crisp, I think his face has the half molten look to it that some people have when they’ve been exposed to very high degrees of burns, but they're both alive.

Although he had serious burns he went from paralysis, which would have

killed both of them, to action where both end up surviving in a virtually impossible situation. So the sense of acceptance is going to be a very important element of any kind of high-pressure situation.

Does that make sense? I’m sure you’ve got something like that already, but I would make an emphasis of as well.



Matt: Excellent. Igor: Another thing I think would work incredibly well is stories and hypnotic

loops with stories. Collect at least a dozen, if not more, short stories that revolve around gunfire and correct responses.

I’m presuming you have a strategy that you're trying to inculcate in

people, which starts with someone either drawing a gun or shooting and firing a weapon and ends with the officer or soldier in question discharging his weapon and getting rid of the threat in some way.

Matt: Yes. Igor: So it might be something along the lines of state, look, draw weapon,

make safe or unsafe whatever point, squeeze… I don't know what the steps are, but that might be a crude version of whatever chain you end up using, right?

Matt: Right. We use a very progressive methodology for that. Igor: I’m sure you have a very sophisticated one, but excuse me, I know very

little about handguns and firing in a live environment so I’m going to make that presumption and allow you to fill in the blanks.

Matt: I’m filling in the blanks I’m doing good Igor I appreciate it. Igor: I’m glad you're doing this. It’s helping me that you're on this call

otherwise I’d be creating something in a vacuum and it’s a lot harder to do that.

Matt: One of the things that, if the mind is pre-loaded in other words, working

with SWAT teams and Special Op guys in the military, if they're pre-loaded as far as they’ve already got their mindset, their game plan together, their game face on, they're ready to go in and make a dynamic entry whatever mission is, generally they perform extremely well.

Where I’m having the biggest problem is with the standard law

enforcement officer who makes dozens of routine stops every day and is basically in what we call a state of white, which is somewhat of a trance state.

In other words, they’ve already made the assumption that this is just

another traffic stop. They pull the suspect out of the car, everything is calm and easy. The next thing you know the guy pulls a gun on them and the cop goes into a panic mode; it’s a spray and pray issue.



My thing is, how do I get him to see that gun and instead of going into

the panic mode, flip them into an automatic trance state of machine-like precision?

Igor: Beautiful. A very simple version of this would be a straightforward

hypnotic induction. It’s over simplifying a bit, but it will definitely help whatever else you do also.

The key thing here is that you describe two varying situations: an

expected surprise and an unexpected surprise.

People might think how can you have an expected surprise? If you're going into a situation where you know people are going to be running around with gunfire you expect weird stuff to happen so your mind is primed to deal with it it’s in that mode already. Whereas, if you're not expecting anything to happen then it has to get itself into that mode, in order to respond to it, so the key problem is thought. What you don’t have time for is to think.

What will cause this spraying stuff is that people start having to think

figuring out what’s going on and by then it’s too late. They’ve been hit in a confusion trance of their own and there’s no one to show them the way out.

One solution to that problem is first, you want to not focus on the entire

sequence or chain; we're talking about you only want to focus on the first step of that chain. In other words, the mental progress should be, when surprised, do (x) which is the first step of that sequence.

It isn’t, pull the trigger. A lot of people jump to “The guy has a gun!! I’ve

got to fire!!”… and that’s why they're spraying bullets. The mental program is when gun comes out there is Fire!! shoot the person.

We don’t want to get them to the end point, which is fire or squeeze the trigger that’ll take care of itself, because the sequence has all been inculcated already. You want them to get to the first point, which is the mindset or maybe something they do with their eyes. Let’s assume for the moment that one of the first things that you teach an officer to do is to look at someone in a certain way.

We want them to start the first point of the chain. Let’s say the first

point in the chain might be you narrow your focus, you look at someone



a certain way or something along those lines. You want surprise to go straight to the look.

You don’t want just normal surprise to go straight to that look you want

an interrupted routine. Basically, you're talking about the handshake interrupt or the equivalent that has to lead to them doing this. Then the rest of the chain follows automatically.


Matt: Yes. Igor: There are a couple of devices to make this happen. One, you can use

storytelling for this. Storytelling pre-formats the unconscious mind to deal with a sudden situation in a certain way.

This is where classically you tell officers under fire stories. He was doing a routine check, a guy pulls a gun and he goes and does this, so you want to talk about success stories rather than failure stories. For example, the stories of Special Forces soldiers who walk into an ambush and without hesitating they attack into the ambush hence, they end up saving the situation where they should have all been killed, because they put the attackers of the ambush into a route, because they get confused.

When you tell these kinds of stories, there are a couple of things to bear

in mind.

First, you want to keep the outcome positive. The whole story should follow the sequence that your own strategy includes. So if your sequence is something like state, look, draw weapon, point, aim, fire whatever then the stories should map those very sequences within the story, if not necessarily obviously.

It could be something like there he is and the door opens up. He sees

something and doesn't know what it is. Suddenly he feels this numbing sensation come over him and before he knows it, his vision expands and he’s looking at this gray cylinder like thing. He doesn't eve know what it is.

His hand is already touching his hip and is lifting up. He ends up looking

down at the thing, suddenly he realizes this guy is about to shoot him, he hears the sound of the gun going off and realizes that his finger just squeezed the trigger.



This is a crude version of the story I’m trying to tell, but do you see how I’m matching the strategy you're trying to install in them through the story?

Matt: Yes. Igor: You're not going to tell just one story. You're going to tell many stories

that follow this strategy sometimes in a very light level and some in a much heavier level. You want them to have dozens of stories thrown out so there’s repetition that sticks into the mind.

The basic theme is mundane routine event, panic or blank, a blank

confusion, numbness you just talk to the officers and you’ll have a big list of the sensations that accompany surprise of this sort.

Numbness, Time distortion, Confusion, Difficulty of thought, Slowness of motion

These will be a collection of sensations, so you pull that in next. Very importantly, you don’t want to tell them what’s happened yet. So you don’t say he pulls a gun, he feels this way, because they already know what’s happened now. You want to use the story to stimulate the same situation, which is something happens, which indicates gun-ness, so the audience will probably say I know what’s going on it’s a gun, but you never actually mention that they’re being fired at, because the realization hasn’t been made inside their mind yet. Does that distinction make sense to you?

Matt: Yes. Igor: At the end of that that state of confusion, panic, numbness, blankness

whatever you want to call it, leads into your strategy with a successful outcome. For law enforcement officers it might be not shoot to kill, but maybe shoot to stop. It might be shooting to kill. I don't know what the standard is – that’s something you’ll be more of an expert in than I am.

The point is you’ve run the chain to a successful conclusion whatever that

conclusion may be. Matt: Yes.



Igor: You want to tell many of these stories and pepper them in unexpected

events so they sink into their unconscious. So say over lunch you’ll tell a funny story that’s based on the same principles and there may be a disguised story not about shooting things, but about surprise and people doing something amusing as a result.

Maybe someone tries to play a practical joke on someone and the guy

who’s meant to be the victim of the practical joke ends up turning the tables in a clever and funny way, but he still follows that same sequence that we’ve been talking about, which is shock to expanded awareness, to a set of physical motions that can be analog to the ones that we're talking about.

One more key piece, if you're going to use storytelling – and this is going

to be a very important piece that you can put in there, which is that – you want the stories to be as surprising as the situation is.

Ideally, want to bore them with the beginning of some of these stories, not all of them; because there are different rhythms to storytelling, but with some of these stories you want to bore them so they think they know what’s coming now, the guy is going to do this... You might use stock stories that people tell each other. Maybe in the police force people have certain stories about, you won’t believe this wise guy who did this.

Again, in the beginning of the story you're leading their mind toward a

certain expectation that is disappointed. The expectation might be a drunk driver giving police officer abuse. “Look at the stuff we have to put up with!”… and that’s one of the stories police officers will tell each other.

“An abusive woman thinks she’s the most important person in the world

and tells me off” OR

“A sexy driver tries to seduce me into not giving her a speeding fine.” Any of these stories and they all start in a certain way where everyone knows what’s coming without necessarily spoiling the joke of the story.

So you tell those stories as well mixing your gun stories in with regular

stories of regular things happening, but then some of your gun stories start like these regular stories, then suddenly you throw this whole confusion thing in the middle and you want to become very hypnotic as you do this.



Use your whole conversation in hypnotic tactics to get very hypnotic at the point when no one can quite make sense of what’s happened. Therefore, when they suddenly realize that this sexy blonde isn’t trying to seduce her way out of a ticket, but something else is going on and they haven’t quite reached the conclusion yet, you get very hypnotic.

Start putting in lots of detailed information, which doesn't stack up to

making a lot of sense until you analyze it looking backwards that it actually makes sense that she’s trying to shoot someone.

You're describing behaviors like pupil dilation, frowning, nervousness,

aggression and you're describing all of these behaviors that happen in a five or ten second period, but with micro detail, which creates time distortion for them.

You describe the officer’s shock, not knowing what to make of it. Is this

a joke? Of course this is a joke she’s still trying to get out of her parking fine, but there’s a kind of numbness sensation or a creeping sensation that something is coming up.

You're describing the state that the person is going through. Then you

run your chain through the conclusion.

At the end of the conclusion, probably again– you need to map this out in terms of what people do when they're in a genuine fire fight and they're doing it in an ethical and responsible way– the thinking process may kick in just before they squeeze the trigger, so that you don’t shoot someone as they're pulling out their notepad in a particular way – that would be very bad news.

The thinking process part of it has kicked in as part of your strategy in

other words, choosing “Do I shoot or don’t I shoot?”… but that’s at the end of the strategy not at the beginning.

You have this bunch of confusion and automatic behaviors that get

followed through up to the point where the thinking process kicks into make the critical choice, shoot or not to shoot then you go to the regular conclusion.


Matt: Yes that’s very interesting. I appreciate that, great insight. Igor: You can also do this physically. It depends on how much time you have.

You can give people very mundane tasks to do where they get thoroughly



bored stupid. Then you surprise them with something that makes them go through the whole drill.

The question is how do you set it up without them knowing that

something is going to happen? They’ll half have an inkling that I know what’s going to happen. Say we're in a seminar so you give me this task, fill this bucket of water and empty here then fill it up again emptying it here and doing this mundane task.

Suddenly you go freeze. In the back of my mind I know something’s happening, because that’s why I’m here. The way to create monotony and surprise at the same time in that situation– this is a very fun thing– you create a group activity. You choose one person who thinks they're going to be tested so the pressure is on them. Then you get another person to help you set up the scenario by doing something very repetitive, monotonous and boring dull as dishwater.

Everyone is armed, maybe with empty guns; however, you want to

practice the physical element of the drill safely. The key thing is all the focus is on person ‘A’ who thinks he is being

tested. Person ‘B’ who thinks he’s helping you test person ‘A’ is getting bored stupid focusing on a task, which is a bit mind-numbing, but requires a lot of effort so he engages a lot of his attention in it.

Suddenly, you switch the tables and the test actually occurs to person ‘B’

so at this point he has to respond. Doing this once or twice at different points of the day that group will probably twig to what’s going on and everyone will be constantly alert, so you can only use this at choice points in time so use it wisely.

I woulds tend to use it after having done all the set up, the stories and a

lot of the other drills, etc. as a demonstrator to everyone that they’ve learned more than they think they’ve learned.


Matt: Yes. Igor: That creates a lot of faith, a lot of buy-in and in that way their

unconscious minds has a certain expectation of results and that expectation will tend to be activated in the surprising circumstances.

Does that give you some stuff to work with?



Matt: Yes it does. Thank you very much for your time Igor. Igor: You're very welcome. Let’s get the lines open again. I appreciate

spending some time on this, but this was a very complicated question that was asked, so I thought I should spend a bit more time dealing with that.

Conversational Hypnosis: Private Q&A Session Part 3 Igor: Someone else just asked a question or was about to make a comment,

who was that? Howard: This is Howard in Mount Shasta. Igor: Howard, go ahead. Howard: Igor, I was interested in the role of hypnosis for human potential.

This has been fascinating on therapy and I’m looking toward the direction of what future applications do you foresee in terms of maximizing quality and increasing the quality of human life, not just problem solving, but pushing the unbelievable forward into the human potential level?

Igor: That’s a great question. Could I ask you to hang onto that for a moment,

because someone had a question just before you that I want to get back to now? As soon as I’ve answered that question please jump back on and take this question, because you’ll be next.

Howard: Great, thank you. Igor: Who was it who had the question on peripheral vision?

Hypnotic Peripheral Vision David: That was David in Los Angeles. Igor: Hey David in Los Angeles. Tell me a little bit more about what it is you

want to know about peripheral vision?



David: You have an exercise where you look at a certain spot up above eye level.

Igor: Sure. What happens to you when you do the exercise? David: Unfortunately, in the instruction you said it’s best to do it while standing

and I’ve just broken my ankle in three places and I can’t stand well. Igor: You can do it sitting as well, the only reason to do it standing is because

some people have a tendency when they do hypnotic work to drift off into an internal trance and I want them to be firmly anchored outside, but sitting down is fine.

David: All right. The problem I’m having is that I will get to a position where my

eyes will get tired, but then from there I lose concentration. Igor: Excellent, thank you. If I understand you right you stare at the spot, your eyes get tired and

you start getting a little fatigued. It’s almost like your eyelids are getting heavy and you want to go inside to a normal type of trance is that the experience you’re having?

David: Yes. Igor: Excellent, perfect. What’s happened is that you’ve taken it a little bit too

far. In other words, you’ve trained your eyes a little bit too much. Peripheral vision is actually very simple to get. Let’s do it right now if you want whilst we’re on the call. Is that okay with you?

David: Sure. Igor: Go ahead and pick a spot on the wall, maybe just slightly above eye level

and stare at it until there’s a little bit of strain.

Tell me when you see a little bit of strain, like a tiny bit of tunnel vision beginning to happen and it feels like the beginnings of tiredness, not like it’s really tired, just the beginnings of it. Tell me when you have that.

David: Now. Igor: Excellent. Before it goes any further, just allow your eyes to do what

they want to do. They naturally want to feel just easy and relaxed, so soften those eyes and allow them to be easy. You’ll notice instantly that the strain disappears and the place of your attention becomes larger.



Instead of being maybe an inch, it becomes five, six, ten maybe 20 inches and it’s quite natural for that to do so. As that continues, allow yourself to get a sense of it expanding even further. You may see the corner where the ceiling meets the wall, maybe the color of the wall going down to whatever is in front of you, maybe your desk or your telephone.

Perhaps even get a sense of the colors of the walls on either side of you.

All this time of course you’re looking up slightly, you’re seeing all these things, but your eyes can find a natural relaxed position. If looking up slightly is still causing your eyes some strain, just allow your eyes to come down more horizontal, to whatever level they feel comfortable in.

At the same time, it’s almost like you have this three dimensional view of

the room. You can see the walls and the floor stretching out ahead of you. You can see the corners and the bits where they meet together and no particular point is attracting anymore attention than anything else.

Can you see any of that happening right now?

David: Yes. Igor: You’ve just hit peripheral vision. You see, it’s nothing magical. A lot of

people think it should be this profound state that you go into. If you want a crazy profound state that changes your perception, take

hallucinogenic drugs. I’m not recommending it by the way, but that’s what it takes to get a profound and quick instant like “Wow, this is just totally different.”

The thing about peripheral vision is it is gentle, very subtle and people

often miss the fact they’re doing it, because they’re looking for thunder bolts when in fact they should be looking out for warm sunshine and a gentle breezes.

Does that make sense? Let me check something with you. Are you still sort of in that peripheral

vision state or can you allow your eyes to soften into that state again so you see the walls, the ceiling and the floor?

You hear my voice of course, but you can see all around you. Maybe

your eyes lazily drift across the room and you’ll notice some interesting things happening.



For example, the colors somehow seem more meaningful. The colors in the room kind of grab your attention or have an emotional under tone that they don’t normally have. Of course, the more interesting thing is, notice what’s happening to your breathing.

Tell me, have you noticed it shifting yet?

David: Yes. Igor: Very good. When your breathing has shifted, it tells you that you’re now

in parasympathetic nervous system arousal, which basically means you’re in the relaxation response so you’ve made the shift.

You should feel that in terms of feeling a bit more relaxed inside, your

breathing drops down a few notches, you feel a calmness begin to envelope you, your thinking begins to clarify somewhat, it’s like all the mental chatter dies down and at the same time it’s like a mental space opens up, which makes it easier to think.

All the time you’re seeing the world around you without particularly

focusing on one object or another.

Does that answer your question? David: Yes, thank you. Igor: Thank you very much. Now let’s go back to the next question that we

had queued up. Could you repeat that? I think it was about hypnosis in the future.

Hypnosis & The Future Howard: I was curious that besides the therapeutic applications, which are great

to make changes for people, what do you see developing as future applications for hypnosis in the human potential field; enlightenment to spirituality?

Igor: That’s a great question. I’m not sure I’m a great trend predictor. I can

tell you what I would like to see happening. One of the things that definitely will happen is there will be more and more applications in non-traditional fields.



For example, the idea of sports psychology is already waking up to hypnotic techniques like visualizations. I think more of that will continue to happen and I think it’s going to spread into other areas. So if you can do performance enhancement on the sports field, then it only stands to reason that in schools, academics, businesses, etc. people are going to start wanting to use that there also. At least I hope that’s going to happen, because I think it has a tremendous amount to offer.

- My first hope for the future would be that self hypnosis at least

becomes a much more standard tool that people are aware of and use in a daily sense as a daily enhancement experience whether an artist uses it to be more creative, a businessman to solve problems, a school kid to pass exams or a sportsman to improve his handicap at golf for example.

These sorts of trends hopefully will continue so that more and more areas

will find applications that apply to them. Basically, whenever there’s a human being present, you have an unconscious mind. Whenever you have an unconscious mind, hypnosis can help improve the circumstances, in which that person exists within that field.

- In terms of the second thing you mentioned, the idea of spirituality this

is something of great interest to me in particular, because I do think that many of the spiritual disciplines have got hypnotic elements within them.

Many forms of prayer are quite hypnotic. I’m not suggesting by the way

that the only affect of prayer is placebo affect, there may be some spiritual elements to it, but the fact that it puts you into this more meditative self hypnotic sort of place certainly does not hurt.

Many of the experiences described by mystics, by Buddhists or people

who claim to have been enlightened are experiences, which I think hypnosis can help you get closer towards and probably more quickly also.

Yes, actually I think hypnosis has a lot to offer spiritual disciplines in the

sense that it can bring a sense of clarity to exercises that have been developed if you like, by default, trying to explain something without the vocabulary to explain as of yet.

I think in looking at spiritual exercises as a hypnotist will help us to

maybe refine those exercises and make them more impactful so you can have the results more easily, more quickly and more long lastingly or at least more reliably.



- The other thing I hope hypnosis develops into and this is the idea behind street hypnosis, is that hypnosis doesn’t become limited to little pigeon holes: This is golf hypnosis. This is phobia hypnosis. This is academic hypnosis.

I hope hypnosis becomes part of the greater interaction so people start sharing it, so that every day people start using hypnotic ideas in their everyday interactions.

This way a teacher no longer tells a boy how stupid he’s being with his

marks, but actually ends up creating a context where his feedback actually leaves a positive impact.

When people treat each other in a respectful manner so even if they’re having an argument, the argument which may be relatively minor doesn’t end up causing some bigger problem in their relationship, because people are aware of how these things might work out.

Therefore, I like the idea of street hypnosis for several reasons. Number

one because it reaches a much wider audience and shows hypnosis up as a force for good.

Stage hypnotists to this day have been the primary marketing tool for

hypnosis as a discipline. Some are great, some are ethical performers and others are not. Others detract from the image of hypnosis by being if you like, less than professional or ethical in their performances.

What I’d like street hypnosis to be is a sense of giving the everyday person a sense of wonder in their life in a sense that wow; I can do this and I can use this for myself. It’s a force for good, not some Svengali trying to dominate me. It’s something that I can be curious about, be interested in and it’s safe for me.

- The other reason I like the idea of street hypnosis is because it’s a live

discipline.

If you’re doing it with strangers, people that you don’t know, it really forces you into a particular box where it’s more difficult – it’s probably still possible – but it’s much more difficult to become rigid. I notice particularly in hypnotherapists, the therapeutic profession, people have a tendency to become very rigid and stiff.



I remember in London, when I first started as a hypnotherapist, I went round to check out the competition to see how they did their work. I checked myself in as a client and some of these people were so rigid, I thought: “Man you have more problems than I have, what am I doing here?”

I’d like to get this idea that hypnosis is a human discipline. It’s not just

mechanical bits and techniques and if you say the right words in the right order it all works out. You are an operative element in that equation, so you should work on yourself as a human being and as such you’ll become a better hypnotist also.

This is what I think street hypnosis allows you to do. By taking certain

risks you get instant feedback.

If you do some very elegant pieces of hypnosis, but you enter the situation as an arrogant something or other, as a cold intellectual or something like that, the feedback you will get will put you back in your place. Then you have to start challenging yourself to be a little bit warmer with people, to be a little bit kinder with people, to be more respectful with people and still be able to have fun with people as well.

So it’s not like you’re bleeding from the heart, everyone is warm and

cuddly and make sure everyone’s happy, you can still challenge people, but you can do it respectfully. You can still make fun of people in a way that actually enhances their experience rather than dis-empowers them or makes them feel less.

Does that make sense to you?

Hypnosis & Enlightenment Howard: Yes, very much.

I was wondering if you believe in moving states of consciousness, moving from the conscious to the unconscious then from the unconscious we could then more easily facilitate the more enlightening experiences possible through the application of self hypnosis or street hypnosis.

I’ve been experiencing meditation and self hypnosis for more than 40

years and I’ve discovered certain possibilities so I’m curious if you’ve



discovered them as well and are perhaps going to be developing some courses or some directions in that way.

Igor: What I would say, I’m going to put a caveat around this, this is an

opinion not a hypnotic fact and it’s not something that I have any data other than it’s something I’ve reasoned out for myself.

I believe – and this is a pure belief, so you may take this on board as you

wish to or not – that many of these deeper states of consciousness or deeper results of meditation are not possible unless you manage to delve into deep unconscious territory, so they are a type of hypnotic phenomena in some respects.

Understanding hypnosis, understanding how to move your consciousness

through the different parts of your mind will open you up or help open you up to these experiences and then ultimately get to the goal that you’re seeking.

I’m not sure I would agree with saying that it’s all about becoming more

unconscious I think it’s about dissolving the boundary between consciousness in other words, dissolving the boundary between the conscious mind and the unconscious– although it’s an artificial label anyway– so that the conscious mind can enter realms of unconsciousness that are not normally available to it.

A classic example is something like dream control.

You can learn for example through self hypnosis or through hetero hypnosis to wake up inside your dream, realize that you’re dreaming and still have the full blown dream running ahead of you, which means that REM does its thing. However, when you want something to happen within the dream you can make it happen just by willing it in an indirect way, it’s a knack you develop.

This is something that is typically outside of peoples’ control. Until a man

called Steven Laberge actually started doing research on this every psychologist on the face of this earth would have told you, it’s impossible to direct your dreams.

It’s impossible to wake up inside a dream, know that you’re dreaming

and consciously direct that dream. He proved that this is not the case and actually way before him many spiritual disciplines for example, some of the Buddhist Dream Yogis have known this for centuries.



Hypnosis is one of the fundamental tools you can use to make this happen. In particular, you can make this happen much more quickly than spending 40 years on a mountain top until you get to the point where you can do this.

Yes, I think hypnosis will offer us shortcuts. It’s in many respects I think

the operative element behind meditation techniques. Take any meditation technique; look at it as a hypnotist in terms of

hypnotic principles and you’ll probably be able to meditate more efficiently once you have passage through that process.

I think you’ll understand what the aim of that meditation is much more

clearly and you can get there more easily than having this vague sense of like I can’t think any thoughts or I can’t do this or I can’t do that. It’s less about injunctions and more about directions that you go in.

Does that kind of make sense?

Howard: Definitely. Igor: In terms of products, thank you for asking, a little quick plug. Once the self hypnosis course is out, then I intend to create a whole

bunch of information around self hypnosis that plugs into the basic self hypnosis process, which will allow you to take yourself in different directions.

You can be in some very practical directions like weight control, stopping

smoking, confidence and that sort of thing, but also taking you in more esoteric directions should you wish to, like lucid dreaming for example, or having an out of body experiencee.

Not because everyone will want to do this, some people will and some

people won’t, but because I think hypnosis definitely speeds up that process and makes it more possible and easier.

Howard: That’s great. I’m interested in the application perhaps of hypnosis, either

self, projected hypnosis or mass hypnosis for the creation of mass enlightenment. I’m curious as to whether you believe that might be possible.

Igor: I think anything is possible. It’s a question of how would one use the

dynamics that we know about to make something like that happen?



I know that mass hypnosis at the moment can be used very easily in terms of mass dis-enlightenment or obscuring and has been used like that by the unscrupulous many times.

The question is: how do you take that and switch it around?

That would be something you would have to sit down and consider the hypnotic principles and challenges, because you’re doing something – it’s a bit like self hypnosis– you realize that self hypnosis has a built in contradiction.

I don’t know if you realize this. The contradiction if you want to say, “Yes feel free to do that” – or not; the contradiction is very simple. There’s a built in contradiction to self hypnosis and it’s very simply this; in hypnosis one of the operative conditions is to bypass the critical factor. In other words, you bypass part of the thinking process.

In self hypnosis, the part that’s trying to guide the process is the same

part that the critical factor is attached to. The very act of willing yourself through self hypnosis will tend to activate the very factor you’re trying to avoid.

There are ways around this and I talked about that a little bit in street

hypnosis exposed, the introduction set and also we’ll talk about it in much more detail in the Power of Self Hypnosis course.

Essentially the way around that is to create a receptive mindset, which is the same mindset you’re in when you’re being hypnotized, but then you can let go of a lot of responsibilities, only this time you maintain a small amount of awareness to guide enough of the process for the rest of it to take care of itself. The same kind of problem applies to mass hypnosis. The way that you do mass hypnosis, the tactics and the group dynamics that you’re employing in many respects run counter to a lot of the ideas of enlightenment. Enlightenment is about ironically, is individualism although it’s also about getting a sense of being connected to everything else. It’s a sense of independent thinking, independent experience and verifying it for yourself rather than taking someone else’s word for it. So whilst you might be able to create a hallucination that you’re connected to the rest of the world, etc., you’re still missing some of the essential elements of enlightenment which is this meta-frame of seeing reality for “what it is”, to whatever extent that’s possible.



Mass hypnosis will tend to create a kind of sheep instinct or herd-like mentality so people follow you. How do you simultaneously create or utilize that sheep instinct or herd mentality that we as human beings can fall into and at the same time foster independence of thought, independent experience so that people don’t accept your experience as the right one, but their own set of experiences then learn from those? That’s going to be the key question. I personally haven’t spent a lot of time sitting down to work through that in terms of getting an answer, but these are the kinds of directions I would think about. I would encourage you to think about it, because I think it would be a thoroughly rewarding thing for the world to know about. That’s the conflict you need to resolve and that’s the place where mass hypnosis may well turn out able to help mass enlightenment movements occurring. By the way, I don’t think it’ll be a one shot wonder or a magic pill either, because there’s still a process of growth that everyone goes through.

Howard: Thank you so much, I’m working on it.

The Power Of A Community Of Hypnosis Masters Igor: Good for you, share it. If you’re on the forum, come on the forum and

drop your ideas in. I’m sure a lot of other people who are hypnotists and very good ones as well, will put their two cents worth in and maybe you’ll try an idea out.

This is one of the beauties of the forum as a community, is if you have an

idea like this, which is a great idea to have, you can post your theories, your approaches then maybe someone will test it out or have a chance to do it in what they’re doing and say hey, I tried this out, these are the results I had.

That may then spark an idea in you which you then may try somebody

else and by the way, this is how a lot of the greatest ideas and periods of real growth in our civilization have occurred.

We have periods like The Renaissance, the enlightenment things like that

and one of the things necessary before these periods could happen was a community of individuals interested in the same sort of thing.



In The Renaissance one of the things that allowed that to occur was – Italy basically became a major trading nation, since Marco Polo opened the trade route to China. Most trade to the Far East happened through Italy, so the Italian ports became super wealthy and the families that ran these enterprises became the Bill Gates’ of their day.

They had more money than they knew what to do with, so they started

pumping it into things like the arts and literature, etc. That started drawing a lot of people there with that mindset and they started learning from each other, copying each other and sharing ideas.

If it hadn’t been for that, I doubt that people like Michelangelo would

have existed. As ingenious as he was, he needed an environment to be in that allowed him that potential to manifest.

The same is true of the enlightenment period, which was to a large

extent centered round Scottish institutions. A small group of thinkers in academic institutions who shared ideas, would cross review ideas, read and learn about each others’ ideas where one idea would spark another.

In the process of arguing and trying things out they developed some

amazingly fundamental concepts about civil liberties, about law, about government institutions, inside of the human condition, market forces all of these things; there was a sophisticated thing that happened.

I’m hoping that the forum, the Private Hypnosis Club, will offer people a similar environment, so people like yourself can share ideas they have and have other people comment on them.

Sometimes the comments will be “Yes go for it this is good.” Sometimes

someone will try something and feedback some response. Sometimes someone might have an idea that might be even better or improve on something you’ve said and through dialogue, experimentation and different peoples’ experiences you develop a whole new set of technology and techniques that never existed before.

So your dream can be made a reality much more quickly, because you have many minds working on it at the same time. Does that kind of make sense to you?

Howard: Yes that’s great. I’ll be happy to post some ideas. One more thing I’ll share and then I’m done, in terms of bypassing the

critical factor in self hypnosis. I’ve found for myself that in writing my



scripts, recording them, playing them back and being passive to my own suggestions helps me solve that problem.

Igor: Perfect. By the way, that’s one of the classic solutions to the dilemma of

too much conscious involvement in a self hypnosis process. There are other solutions also, but that’s a very elegant one.

Anyone who’s listening to these recordings, I strongly encourage you to

try that for yourself, because you get the best of both worlds. You become a better hypnotist because you’re creating your own inductions and you get to experience hypnosis.

So you know what may sound like a good idea when you’re writing it down isn’t such a good experience when you’re hearing it in trance or vice versa, something which didn’t seem like it would work out ends up being fantastic when you’re in trance.

You get a lot of really valuable feedback and of course you also get the

personal benefit of overcoming some problem issue at the same time, so I would definitely encourage that approach.

We had someone who was talking about recovery strategies who had a

question on that?

How To Build Natural Recovery Strategies Into Hypnosis Jonathan: Yes Igor this is Jonathan. Igor: Okay Jonathan. Jonathan: The full version of my question is how we can prevent hypnotic subjects

from recovering from positive hypnotic processes?

A more specific example would be…say there was a gang member and the idea was to use conversational hypnosis to get him out of the gang life, get him in school and stop selling drugs.

As you begin using better commands, ‘my friend John techniques’, build

rapport and stuff like that and you begin to fractionate him out of that way of life; because there appears to be a nominal fractionation in indirect hypnosis, a necessity seems to be that at some point in time you have to let that person walk away for awhile until the next time you see them.



Igor: Yes. Jonathan: When the gang member walks away for example, he returns back to the

neighborhood going back to the crime and whatever. Igor: You’re talking about a recovery strategy here, right? How do you get

someone to have a recovery strategy when they’re facing the same situation, which kept them in the trapped in the first place?

Jonathan: Yes. It’s like you begin to improve and you’re making progress then it’s

like what you’ve done becomes undone, because there’s a tug of war between influences.

Igor: Here’s one thing not to do. One thing not to do is to try and avoid the

obvious fact that they will fail at some point. Let’s talk about this in terms of smokers, for example.

It’s a similar thing. You stop smoking and then someone pulls out a

cigarette and you go damn it, I want one as well and you start smoking as well.

The reason I’m using smoking is because the structure is similar although

the outcomes and the intensities of it are different, the structure is very similar of you’re getting away from a negative thing and then you are getting pulled back into that negative lifestyle in some way.

One of the things you want to make sure you do is that you prepare

them for failure. In fact, you prescribe it to some extent. So somehow you will make sure that – this is usually part of the future pacing.

Initially, to use your example – getting him off it, you may spend most of your time initially building trust, rapport and planting the idea that it’s possible to have a better life outside of the gang, but only the idea, so that they enter back into their environment without necessarily having the conflict to deal with yet whilst the idea is too new.

So the idea is in the back of their mind, but you’re distracting them away

from the idea before they can analyze it too soon, so they’re not rejecting it at that point.

Does that make sense so far?

Jonathan: Yes.



Igor: Then they go back, they think they’re a regular gang member, but in the

back of their mind there’s a slow burn, a little fuse beginning to start burning up.

The next thing to do in this particular example, I’m assuming you chose

this particular example specifically because you may be working with this. The next thing you may want to do with this is begin to pull the rugs out from underneath the relationship that is maintaining the pattern.

Part of maintaining the pattern is this idea that you belong to something,

you owe someone else within that group favors, allegiance, loyalty or something like that so there’s a great reciprocity going on there.

They’re doing favors for you constantly, you’re expected to do favor’s

back and one of the big ones of course is being part of that group and there may be fear elements as well.

One of the things I want to do is start to subtly undermine the power of

those relationships by again seeding certain ideas, thinking out loud what one of those ideas might be, that the other guys maybe are being selfish or using you by keeping you in the gang.

Hence, it’s gone from the reciprocity frame of I owe (x) something

because he brought me a pint of Kool-Aid last week to He’s using me and he’s manipulating me with the Kool-Aid; for example.

You don’t want to throw it out as blatantly as that, you want to begin to

insinuate at the beginning so they start coming to that conclusion themselves and get a sense of something isn’t right here, which begins to set the foundations for it.

It’s probably something you have to build up over time a little bit.

Then when you get to a point where it’s a crisis point, they’re making a

decision like I want to get out of this, but I’m not quite sure how yet there’s a point of transition where they’re ready to jump out, but they still have to go back to the same environment whilst they’re doing it.

One thing to do then is to build in a recovery strategy where you

basically pre-empt what is likely to happen. What’s likely to happen? Their buddy’s are going to come round. They’re going to ask them to go



off and do something with them, maybe just hang out with them, maybe drink with them, maybe go to some meeting with them.

I’m not very well versed in what happens in gangs, but somehow there’ll be a social contact that’s going to be difficult to refuse. Once they enter that social contact – going out for a drink with your buddies may end up being a drive-by, because the car they’re driving in ostensibly just to go for a drink, on the way you stop off for a quick something you have to do and they’re right back in the middle of things again.

At that point you need to help them develop strategies for elegantly

excusing themselves long enough till they can make a complete break from that group and that’s something you probably want to do quite openly, because by this stage they’ll be ready to make the transition.

Before the crisis point and most of the time leading up to it you’re

seeding ideas. You’re planting ideas into their heads which then blossom whilst they’re away to start thinking about certain things in different ways.

The little bits that used to tie them into the relationships start pushing

them off and they start thinking they are demanding too much of my time, they want too much from me; are they really trying to use me? Maybe they’re disrespecting me and these things start running through their minds.

So we’ve talked about the idea of you beginning by planting seeds of

ideas.

One of which begins to disrupt the normal flow of the relationship that keeps them bound inside the gang; ideas of respect, loyalty, owing someone something, etc.

The other ones as to doubts as of the lifestyle future and etc. and there maybe being a better way that is a smarter way or using the leverage in terms of what they get out of the gang as something that they can get better outside the gang than inside the gang.

You’re using basically a sense of leverage, but you begin by intimating it

so you aren’t getting any conscious resistance up front and then as the relationship develops they’ll end up voicing certain ideas, voicing doubts and you start playing on these and building those up.



Then you’ll have the relationship strong enough and there’ll be enough questions inside their mind where they start to realize the gang life is not for them so they’ll start reaching some sort of crisis point or a point of change.

At which point, their normal gang life first of all is not going to be the same anyway and second of all, they may want to start to extricate themselves from it.

You need to start brainstorming strategies of how they can keep

themselves clear of that environment, but in a way that’s not going to get them into more trouble. This is something that a little experience in the field is going to be very important to know about.

What kind of excuses can you make? Can they go on holiday to visit an aunt for awhile? Can they do different things like that? Can they say I’m not ready for drinking right now? I don’t know.

What kinds of excuses can they make to begin to extricate themselves

without having necessarily any comeback, until there comes a point where they’re ready to make the complete break?

Does that make sense so far? Jonathan: Yes. Igor: The key thing is not to be afraid of telling them or doing a rehearsal of

the very conditions that may destroy all the good work you’ve done. To use the smoking analogy, don’t just tell them you’re a non-smoker

now, you don’t feel like smoking, you’ll never smoke again, you’re feeling great and fantastic, etc. Then very quietly stop and say nobody breathe, nobody move, he’s changed now, but anything could make this fall apart now.

It’s like a house of cards, you just very gently move them out of the

office and hope to God that he doesn’t break before he’s paid you your cash and moved on, but that’s a very poor way of doing it, because life is messy and life is going to happen.



The better way of doing it is once you’ve created the moment of change, which is what we’ve just been talking about up to this point, you want to be able to create a recovery strategy.

What happens if things go wrong? The first stage of the recovery strategy is to realize that things will go

wrong. In other words, people will offer them a cigarette. They will be drinking. They will be in all these different environments that they now have to behave differently in, because their life choices are going to take them down a different path.

If they have nothing to put in that place they may end up with their old

behavior as a default because they don’t know what else to do. So you probably want to spend a significant amount of your time either

ahead of time working out with them or just telling them if you have more experience in terms of what can work, ways of dealing with those situations.

In a smoking session, the classic way of doing it is saying you’re at a

party, you’re having a few drinks and people around you are smoking. You see that and suddenly you get this feeling my God, I am so glad I’m a non-smoker. I am free of that habit. Those poor schmucks over there are trapped in this…and you just carry on with those sort of ideas.

You’re basically taking the same experience that would normally be a

danger to them and you’re using it as a re-enforcer for the changes you’ve done.

The next thing you can do is build in a recovery strategy. What if they

do smoke? What if they do get a craving for example? What happens if you’re sitting at a party, you get this thing and its like,

is that a craving? Maybe I do have a craving. Let’s face it, it might happen it might not, but what if it does happen? What do you do?

If there’s a danger of it happening, address it. Say if it does happen,

now you start installing a new strategy, it’s called the recovery strategy – then you go through these following steps.

You’re not doing it in a logical sense, you’re doing it unconsciously.

When you’re at a party, you’re having your drinks and you get this



curious sense that you used to do something maybe a cigarette would be the right thing.

Maybe you see someone else smoking and they have this wonderful look in their eyes like they’re really relaxing and you think wow, I would like to feel that way.

Now you’re beginning to build up that moment of doubt that would normally precede the failure and that’s where the recovery strategy kicks in.

As you look at them, you can realize that you can feel that way anytime

without the cigarettes. You can take a deep breath and feel great about the fact that you aren’t a smoker anymore then you start going off into your positive frames again.

What you’ve done is you’ve gone and you’ve slowed down the decision

point, in other words the bit that would get them to fail. You’ve slowed it down and you’re taking the precursor to failure, which is usually a state and often a situation.

Therefore, it’s like a context which then triggers a state and the state ends up triggering a strategy like certain thoughts happen and certain decisions get made, which ultimately lead back into the problem behavior.

You’re going to use the situation to set up the beginnings of that state,

but you’re going to hijack that state. You’re going to hijack the precursor to the actual behavior and you’re going to make that reinforce the changes that have occurred.

Does that make sense? Jonathan: Is it kind of like teaching a memory? Igor: It is exactly that. It’s a future memory, rehearsing the problem spots

that they’re likely to meet along the way. Some of them you’ll have instant answers for like how to not hang out with your gang buddies anymore.

Others may be a bit more difficult like the emotional things like you’re hanging out at a family barbecue and it happens to be that half of your family are gang members say that’s the case.



At which point, you better be sure you build a recovery strategy in here, because chances are they’re going to come up and say We haven’t seen you for awhile, what are you doing? Why are you dissing us? Why aren’t you with us anymore?

They’re going to put a lot of emotional pressure on him. You want him to

feel that emotional pressure. You don’t want him to walk away from that emotional pressure; you want him to feel that in that future memory, because it’s going to happen.

Instead of that pressure being something that leads to them caving in

and going back to the whole gang thing, it becomes pressure that triggers a resolution, a new resolve, a sense of wow I’m glad I’m no longer in there this is what I’m really missing, so that reinforces their reason for not being in the gang rather than causing them to collapse back into it.

Does that make sense? Jonathan: Yes. Igor: Again, I apologize for not being able to give you a concrete version of

this with your example, but it’s a specialist field that I have no experience of. I would probably make stupid mistakes at this point without having any experience of it, but I think the principles are pretty sound at that point.

Jonathan: You basically believe that if you could run a certain pattern on some of

the more difficult cases such as a gang member that’s hard core that the same patterns and the same recovery strategies could be run for people who are having family problems or people who are having severe cases of anorexia, drug problems and smoking as well?

Igor: The basic idea is the same, which is that you want to take the crisis point

which are likely to cause them to fail and you want to create a re-direction that leads to at least one other option if not several other options.

In certain circumstances you’ll have similarities, so I can imagine like in

family disputes and gang type situations, you’d have similarities, because it’s all about relationship there versus let’s say that and anorexia.

Anorexia has less to do with external relationships and has more to do with a certain sense of purpose, control and power or loss of control, etc. and the whole eating thing of course.



With anorexia one thing you need to be able to pre-empt is the very high

likelihood that at some point she’s going to have an emotional shock – it’s usually a girl, so that you pre-empt the shocks that would normally lead back to anorexic behavior.

You pre-empt things like low self-esteem, depression, mood swings, being knocked down by life in some way or not getting your own way and that might normally have lead back to anorexia as a coping mechanism.

A lot of the pattern in anorexia for example is people feel out of control

and then their control over food is one of the few places they feel still in control hence they over control it, which is part of the pattern usually involved in that.

You need to be able to understand what the pattern is that drives the

behavior in the first place. Pre-empt them at some point hitting crisis points, which are similar to ones that cause that pattern and then give them choices out of those crisis points that don’t lead back into the pattern.

Does that make sense? Jonathan: Yes. Igor: That’s the key behind a recovery strategy. Future memories are a large

element of that. Incidentally, what I just did with Nathan (in audio part 1) with the street

hypnosis thing was a very small version of a recovery strategy. Can you guess what it was or can you analyze through what we did and tell me what it was?

Jonathan: On that one, I was tipped off on that one because you used that voice. I

kind of just drifted way a little bit. Igor: Fine. When you listen to the recording again, what I basically did at the

end was I built in the fact that if he’s going to do street hypnosis, he’s going to fail.

Part of what kept the pattern, the hesitation of him doing street hypnosis

and the fear is – I was doing a bit of a mind read there – but it’s a fear of failure. He’s hesitating because he thinks it’s not going to go right.

He’s doing a conversation induction, it goes right, he’s all happy and

good, but what happens if goes tits up what if it all goes wrong?



I pre-empted that, I told him he’s going to stuff up and sometimes it’s

going to go monumentally wrong. Then I moved through that and gave him a bit of a future memory or a little rehearsal of things going wrong, but his attitude having changed.

His attitude now is one of it being positive, of it being something that

proves that he’s engaging in street hypnosis and of it maybe even being funny. I used a little bit of his own mechanisms, like one of the first things he talked about was how he feels odd but kind of pleasant, it’s a pleasant oddness.

I used that as a metaphor for when he’s is these situations. If something

goes wrong, I know he’s going to start beginning to feel something which isn’t necessarily his usual state and it’s going to be unusual.

It could turn towards something negative or begin as something

negative, but before he recognizes it as something negative he’s first going to recognize that something odd has happened.

So I’m now hijacking the odd sensation and going down the route he’s

already created for me, which is odd but pleasant that feeds into a loop where he gets it wrong, he feels odd but pleasant, but he’s got it wrong, so he doesn’t understand it.

I’m using this idea of thinking, the thought loops that people get into like

How can I feel this oddly pleasant sensation when I’m doing it wrong? I’m creating a reinforcement that allows him to stay clear of fear and anxiety and that.

Then attach that to the idea that it feels oddly pleasant because he’s actually engaging in street hypnosis in other words, he’s got the chance to learn, so I’m putting it into an overall reframe of mistakes are the opportunity to learn. Hence, he can feel oddly pleasant about it and that was the rough thinking behind that recovery strategy.

Does that make sense? Jonathan: Yes. Igor: Does this answer your question? Jonathan: Yes. Thanks a lot Igor.



Igor: Thank you. We’ve been doing this now for about three. Let’s take about half an hour

more of questions then we’ll call it quits. Who is next?

Troubleshooting Further Visualization “Problems” Joshua: I had a question about visualization. Igor: Go ahead. Joshua: There are a couple of issues. One is that I’ve given the example of the

car door using the key at the right level and things and I’ve had the response oh that’s just muscle memory.

Igor: Okay that’s fine. Joshua: I’m trying to get them to realize they can visualize, but they think it’s

just muscle memory. Igor: You can do the same exercise, which has nothing to do with muscles. Do

you live in a house or an apartment? Joshua: Yes. Igor: What color are you bedroom walls? Joshua: White. Igor: Did you choose that white or did someone choose that for you? Joshua: Someone else did. Igor: Do you like it? Does it feel bad or you don’t mind it? Joshua: I don’t mind it. Igor: If I came in and I would paint your entire bedroom in a wonderful shade

of grandmother pink and change your bed sheets to be a matching or maybe clashing shade of pink and purple, with little frilly tea cozy style net lacing on your bedspread and whatnot, do you think you’d enjoy living in that room? Would you like that in your bedroom?

Joshua: No.



Igor: Are you sure about that? Joshua: Yes. Igor: How do you know? Joshua: I can see myself in that and not liking it. Igor: There you go that’s your answer. Has that anything to do with muscle

memory? Joshua: No, it doesn’t. Igor: This is an important key, by the way. I am forcing you through

consistency to commit to a position and the position is that “At some level I must have seen this or otherwise I can’t know it’s true.”

They escaped it with the car example, the taps or whatever you want to

do, because they go “That’s just muscle memory, I know what it’s like!” Now I’ve taken care of the muscle memory idea and I still need to pin

them down. I need to externally commit, ideally in front of an audience or at least me as an audience, to this position otherwise they can mentally reverse it, because they’re not necessarily committed to it yet.

Does that make sense? That’s a very important part. Joshua: Yes. Igor: Then you can explain the whole idea of the veil of consciousness, how it

works and how pretending about it is fine, just thinking about something is okay. Thinking about it really is visualizing, it’s just not necessarily making an image or a mental movie.

You can go through the whole rigmarole afterwards, but you need to get

that point of commitment, otherwise they’ll always come up with doubts buts and whatnots. You have to lock them tight and cement them into that position. This is where you are, either agree to it and you’re there now.

Joshua: Excellent. Igor: Any follow up on that?



Joshua: Yes. My follow-up is there’s someone that I know that has an overactive visualization. One example is that she tries to count sheep and she just bursts into fits of giggles because one of them trips over whatever they’re jumping over.

She has a really hard time visualizing because it becomes so vivid for her

and she gets away from herself. Igor: You mean the visualizations get away from her intent, so they have a life

of their own is that what you’re suggesting? Joshua: Right. Igor: So they kind of play havoc with her a little bit. Joshua: Yes. She basically invariably dissolves into fits of giggles. Igor: That might be less of a visualization issue and more of a concentration

issue. You get people who have problems with attention and some people actually use this as a defense mechanism.

Some people who are morbidly serious, the equivalent in the other

extreme who are incapable of taking even serious things seriously, because it frightens them and they alleviate that anxiety through joking, through humor through diversion tactics of some sort.

They’ll crack a joke at a funeral, maybe it’s inappropriate, but it’s their

way of releasing the internal tension. I’d check, if that’s not part of what’s going on with her, because it’s a nervous mannerism that she’s engaging in, which is masking something else that’s underlying.

That’s an idea that you need to think about. One way you can tell this by the way is if she ever gets serious about

anything. In other words, other things that she’s passionate about where she doesn’t burst into fits of giggles because it’s just silly, what does she like? What are her hobbies? What other things is she passionate about?

Get a sense of what she’s like when she’s talking about those things,

what’s going on inside her mind at those times and you’ll get an idea of this.

In terms of other things, if things are getting away with them, the other

thing you can always do is you can take control of those visualizations too.



If they’re running away with her, one thing is her allowing them to run away, which is possibly a defense mechanism. It’s another thing the unconscious mind doing it on its own, which is almost going into psychosis territory, because the unconscious mind no longer has any influence over them.

In that case, you may want to use either straight suggestion to anchor or

rather to settle this experience down. If you have the sheep tripping over, it’s standing up and everyone else is jumping over smoothly, you go right back to the original scene again as though nothing has happened. You incorporate it and you just move on.

Basically that steals its thunder and you swamp it with a greater set of

suggestions for the regular thing. Another thing you can do is actually ride the giggles in. Use a hypnotic

trance where she is giggling herself into silliness and I’ve actually seen this with one or two people – it’s very odd.

I’ve done this with one guy who, when he goes into hypnosis, he goes

into the weirdest giggling fits. When I first saw this, I thought this guy was mentally disturbed. It turns out he’s not, he just has a really weird way of going into hypnosis.

He goes into hypnosis, responding to suggestions things get better, he

just happens to be laughing like a hyena the whole way through it. You just get used to the weirdness of it and deal with it that’s another way of dealing with it.

These are some options that you have. It really depends on what the

situation is. You can either use the giggling as the trance itself.

You can hijack the imagery yourself and bring it back on course or you can check whether or not this is a defense mechanism, in which case there may be other things you need to take care of before you can go down this route.

Joshua: Excellent. Thank you. Igor: No problem. Are there other questions?



Hypnosis & Sales Dave: Yes, hi this is Dave in California. Igor: Hey Dave. Dave: If you were a successful salesman who sold to individuals and to groups,

what would you say is the recipe for success in sales, using all the different skills we’re learning about as whatever tools you can use?

Igor: Okay. First of all, a caveat here, I’m not a salesman. I’ve not spent

most of my life selling things, so this is arbitrary rhetoric I’m using hypnotic principle applied to a discipline that I’m not a master of.

I’m just putting that up as a frame around this. The first thing I would say in terms of selling is confidence. Your state go

first this is the basic principle in all hypnosis. Can you create a pure clean state inside yourself which is positive and can you do that, especially when you’re talking about your product?

All other sales techniques pale in comparison to your ability to go first, be

a generally positive person, which is something that is quite attractive to others anyway and when you talk about your product to imbue it with positive qualities not by some trickery of language, deception, distraction and whatnot, these are all wonderful pieces that can help.

The key thing is what are you doing? Who are you? You’re the mechanism; you’re the machine through which this whole thing has to operate.

Using an analogy which is in my mind right now because of what we

talked about earlier on, you’re the pistol. The bullet can be the best bullet in the world, but if the pistol is jammed it’s not going to go anywhere, if anything it’s going to backfire.

You’re the device through which the hypnotic elements, the sales

elements, occur. You need to go first. You need to keep yourself in a positive frame of mind, in a positive attitude which is going to exude into what you’re doing.

Hence, it really helps if you believe in your product, because if you don’t believe in your product, why the hell should he believe in your product he doesn’t even know it yet.



Does that make sense in terms of a basic foundation? Dave: Absolutely. Igor: The next thing is to remember that the key to influence is not to change

minds it’s to change moods. You need to be attuned to peoples’ states of mind and the way I mean it is their mood.

What state are they in? What mood are they in? How are they feeling at this point in time?

Someone who is grouchy because his wife has just phoned him up and

bitten his head off or because her boyfriend has just cheated on her and is bringing that emotional baggage into the meeting is going to view your product through those filters to some extent.

They may know enough about what they want that those distractions

won’t destroy the deal, but they’ll certainly make the deal a little harder, so you need to have tactics for breaking those moods.

We just talked about a few of them in terms of pattern interrupts, positive suggestions, the blitz and things like that, but there are other things you can do also like storytelling, pattern interrupt is really a big one by the way.

Pattern interrupt and distraction techniques are one of the key methods

to changing people’s moods.

The other one is overloading, in other words, you have such a powerful overbearing and positive vibe that it washes away the negativity. It’s harder to do for a lot of people because it requires a lot of self- improvement on your side to maintain that, but it’s actually very powerful. I’ve done it myself. I’ve seen it done by some very charismatic people and it works there. The point there is that you’re empowering, you’re not overpowering. Do you see the difference?

Dave: Yes. Igor: That’s the next piece I would say. The next thing is, don’t try to sell

them.



People are already used to being sold, so this is another kind of pattern interrupt, it’s their pattern and they’ll have mostly developed defenses towards it.

I used to be a very quiet person, so the minute a salesperson used to

approach me in a shop my instinct was to say no thanks, no matter what they said.

Do you need help? No thanks. Do you want anything? No thanks. Are you looking at this? No thanks.

I’m sorry no, I’m just looking at this, but I’m okay. It’s to refuse help, which is really silly of me, because now that I actually

go into shops, asking for help and getting people to chat and talk to me, I see many more things and much more value and I make much better decisions actually.

My shutting them out was based on fear and personal insecurities rather

than anything else. My big fear was that some slimy salesperson would put me into a moral bind where I’d feel obliged to buy something I don’t want to buy.

Take that pressure off them and don’t sell anything. There will be a point

to ask for the sale absolutely, but it’s not at the beginning. A lot of people talk themselves out of a sale. You’ve probably done this yourself, where you walk into a showroom for a car or a TV set, it could be a big thing or a small thing.

You’re hell bent on getting it then the salesperson is such an annoying

little bugger that you just think you know what I don’t want to do this and you walk out. Then you’ll drive across town to buy it from someone else or go on the Internet to buy it – anything just to not have to buy it from that person.

They’ve basically outsold themselves; well done. So don’t be in a hurry

to sell something. The beauty of not trying to sell something is you get to go through a process of discovery. Discovery is very important because you don’t know what motivates this person in front of you.

If you’re selling one product and you’ve seen a lot of people, you may be

able to take a very good educated guess at what motivates people to buy that particular product, but even so you’ll never quite know it.

Here’s an example. I presume you’re a salesperson, right?



Dave: Yes. Igor: I’m going to sell you something. Give me a product. What do you sell? Dave: I sell software. Igor: Excellent. Do a little mini-role play right now and try to sell me the

software; tell me the whole features, benefits thing and all that sort of stuff.

Dave: Sure. Usually I start off kind of asking them… Igor: By the way, you’ve just lost a lot of momentum. Do you know why? Dave: No. Igor: Who has control of the frame? Dave: You do. Igor: Right. I said just tell me about your software thing.

Is that a good frame to be in? Do I value your time? Do I value you? Do I value your product?

Do you see the subtlety of what I’m talking about here? You’ve just been

out framed, you didn’t even realize it and it happens a lot.

How many times do you go to a meeting and the person you go to talk to is late?

How many times do you get cancelled on? How many times do you get this rude attitude where they go, so

what are you going to sell me now? How much does it cost?

You want to avoid this. You want to basically inoculate against this by

out framing it. You want to pre-frame the hell out of your clients to make sure they don’t do this, because it’s actually very difficult to sell someone something like this and usually they’ll end up being your nightmare client.

You want to be really careful about managing the relationship from the

very first point of contact. How do you think you might do that? How



might you manage to manage that relationship from the first point of contact, if you’re going to sell me software?

Dave: I guess I would set up the frame beforehand where to set the tone

there’s going to be some discovery going on, it’s not going to be a straight going right into the product, but set the frame that there will be some discovery going on.

Igor: Excellent. We’re talking about a contract up front or an agreement; let’s

agree that these are the rules we’re going to play by. Believe it or not that happens on the first phone call. Choose the top 10

things that happen to you in a meeting or even before the meeting happens that tell you the meeting could go south, sour or that you’re not being valued and out frame them so it’s no longer possible for that to happen.

For example, let me take your role for a moment. You’re some company

and I’m going to sell you software and I’m going hey, hi I’m so and so from Software Inc. Your colleagues at (x) asked me to give you a call.

They say hi, how are you doing? We have a pleasant little chat and you

ask me, when can I come in? I might say – first of all, you might want to put up a little scarcity in

them and say if you invite me for a meeting at 10 I’ll check my diary and go “Hang on a second, Wednesday I’m afraid I’m booked from 9:00-12:00, can you do the afternoon or would another day of the week work better?”

So do a bit of a scarcity thing. Don’t overuse it, you don’t want to make

it a cheap trick, but it’s definitely useful. The next thing is, let’s say we agree on Thursday morning, at 10:00. I’ll

say “Oh by the way, sometimes I turn up to company and there’s a rush on, people are very busy that day and I end up hanging around for half an hour or an hour sometimes even and it’s really no good for anyone.

It’s not good for them because they feel under pressure; it’s not good for

me because I have a lot of clients to see as well. Do you think that’s going to happen here?”

Respond as the client might do. I don’t care how you respond, just

respond. Dave: No, that won’t happen.



Igor: Excellent. What we have now is a contract. You now have a consistency

commitment. You’ve committed to me that this will not happen. If it does happen, you’ve broken the social contract.

If you know the five laws of influence that’s a very difficult thing for

people to do; if you still break your contract, consider very carefully whether you want to waste your time with these people.

Even if you do manage to sell something to them, chances are these will end up being nightmare clients that you’re better off firing and spending the extra 100 hours a week that you have getting clients that are decent clients that will make you more money and are more rewarding to work with.

These are places where you can really start testing right up front. If it’s not a problem say great, if it is a problem, just reschedule. Say

“That’s not problem I understand, maybe we can reschedule to another time when you are under less pressure.” What this does is – just think about it. Let’s rehearse and notice what happens inside your body and how you feel when this happens.

Propose a date to me. Dave: Hey, can we meet on Tuesday? Igor: What time? Dave: Two o’clock. Igor: Let me just check through, hang on a second. We’re talking about

Tuesday the 13th, is that right? Dave: Yes. Igor: I’m afraid I have a lunchtime appointment that goes all the way until

4:00. Do you have another day of the week that we can work? Dave: Friday afternoon works.



Igor: What time? Dave: Three thirty. Igor: Let’s have a check. We’re talking about the 16th now, right? Dave: Yes. Igor: Perfect. Three thirty is fine. I’ll head over to your office and I’ll be there

at 3:30. Sometimes I find that a few clients have a busy day, sometimes a whole bunch of stuff happens and they end up leaving me waiting in the lobby for like half an hour or 45 minutes, which ends up wasting everyone’s time.

You get put under pressure and I’ve got a lot of clients to see as well, do you think that’s likely to happen here?

Dave: No, I’ll make sure it doesn’t. Igor: Perfect. Let’s just pause there notice how that feels. You just made me

a promise. You now have to live up to your end of the bargain. Now when I come into the meeting the first thing I can do is say

something like, “Thanks for inviting me.”

What does that do in terms of frames? Dave: It makes it that you’re there because I invited you and you’re my guest. Igor: Exactly. Now we have the protocol of host and guest to deal with. We

do not have the protocol of cheesy salesperson trying to pull one over on me.

Dave: Right. Igor: Do you see the difference? These are all real subtleties. Frame control is

a subtle discipline, but you must think about all the implications of all these little things that you’re doing.

The reason I’m going through this whole rigmarole is because that’s the

next thing I was going to say is important for a salesperson; it is to understand the idea of frame control and the consequences of when you’re being frame controlled, even when the other person isn’t realizing that’s what they’re doing.



When they’re being rude to you, when they’re answering phone calls,

when their cell phone goes off, when they’re texting in the middle of a conversation, when their secretary keeps coming and butting in or when their tonality is disparaging; these are all basically them stealing the frame from you so you’ve got to bring it right back.

The frame you want is one of two professional peers talking to each other

in a respectful manner. We’re talking like doctors, maybe like a doctor/patient relationship. You’re the doctor giving advice to the patient.

Two doctors correlating on a piece of work and they both have some

impart of information.

One might be the technician who knows how to operate the machines, the other might be the doctor that needs to have a certain thing happen and together they’ll work out how to do it that’s called a working relationship.

That is not called an abusive relationship. The problem is a lot of sales people unwittingly allow themselves to be manipulated into an abusive relationship and as a result they get tied up in all these weird things like they start feeling weird.

You feel it. The thing about frames is you feel it when somebody puts

you into a negative frame, even if you’re not quite aware of what it is. The classic example is a guy who sees a pretty girl at a bar and he wants

to talk to her, he walks up to her and starts having these insecurity issues. Why? Because he starts feeling like maybe he’s being some sleazy weirdo chatting her up and all the rest of it, so he stops being himself. What does he do?

He starts apologizing. I’m sorry; I’m not a cheesy weirdo and a stalker

type. What is she going to think at this point? She’s going to think cheesy weirdo stalker, because he’s just nervous and he’s talking about these things.

He’s leaking that sort of frame and of course she’s going to treat him in a

way that’s going to reinforce that impression. If instead he just walks up as a normal friend, like a casual person just having a chat with another person, just saying hey, my name is Igor how are you doing?



It might be something as simple as that. She sees a real person, a

normal person. She has no stalker vibe. She has no insecurity vibe. She has no sense that this guy is going to cling onto me like a limpet mind, so she treats him differently and he feels it.

If he approaches in that more hesitant manner and she starts getting a

bit more closed down, he feels it also and he makes it worse, which means that now even if he tries to persist, he gets an even worse reaction.

Now he’s making her worst dreams come true. Here’s the weirdo who

won’t go away, so she gets a bit colder and he ends up feeling even weirder, so he starts trying harder to fight it and go no I can win this through.

This is a horrible mess you just got yourself into. This is not just dating,

this is not just sales this is any situation. If you feel that something is wrong, it’s probably because something is wrong.

The thing that’s wrong is that you’ve allowed yourself somehow or you

allowed a negative frame to dominate the situation somehow. So start thinking about how did that happen? Did I allow rudeness when I wouldn’t normally allow it?

Are you married? Dave: Yes I am. Igor: If you call up your wife and you say Hey, let’s go for an exciting

weekend, leave the kids at home, etc. and she goes “Okay what do you want now?” – are you going to keep trying to sell her this holiday or are you going to address whatever that rudeness is about first?

There’s no point in your going on a holiday, to some romantic vacation,

when that’s the mood that contaminates the whole thing. You know you have a job to do before you get on with the idea of doing the fun vacation.

Therefore, as a salesperson, you have to set the foundations before you go through the process of selling.

Does that make sense? Dave: Yes.



Igor: Then of course you’ve got the whole discovery process that’s another

thing entirely. If you’re interested in this, have you got the master class on hypnotic reversals?

Dave: Yes. I haven’t gotten to it yet, I’m moving slowly through the material to

try to grasp it all. Igor: If you’re particularly interested in sales techniques listen to that one,

especially session three, which is dedicated entirely to these ideas that we’ve been talking about. I run you through an entire model of sales using hypnotic reversals in that and everything we’ve talked about so far is an example of that.

You’ll see many more elegant and much better ways of reversing.

Basically, you’re figuring out ways of how to reverse people’s positions in other words, negative frames being imposed on you, how to reverse them so you burst through them and end up creating a positive working relationship again, which is what you need for a sale to occur.

Does that make sense? Dave: Yes, thank you. I’ll go there next, thank you. Igor: Perfect. We’re now running to about three and half hours, so if someone has a

very quick question I’ll take it now, otherwise I think we should probably call it a day. Does anyone have a very quick question?

[SILENCE]

I’ll take that as a no.



Final Words In that case, let me thank you all for coming online and sticking with me,

it’s been a long journey. Thank you for sticking through some of the other questions, which I know interest some people more than others.

Hopefully, I’ve answered all the questions, even the ones that are less applicable to you in a way that you can learn from it in terms of hypnotic principles, how a hypnotist thinks in order to solve problems.

Let’s face it, I don’t have all the solutions to all the problems and I don’t

think any hypnotist alive has or ever will have all solutions to all problems. What we do have is principles and we have enough intellect to be able to apply principles in a way to get to better resolutions.

www.privatehypnosisclub.com/members/forum

Hopefully this session, this little question and answer session, is going to prepare your mind to start thinking like a hypnotist, thinking in terms of hypnotic principles and how those apply to different and widely different situations.

Thank you very much for turning up. Thank you for all the excellent

questions and enthusiastic questions. I look forward to interacting with all of you in greater detail on the forum.

Remember, in the question/answer section you can always post a

question and get an answer on that. Please be sure to post your comments, your ideas, your results, things you’re working on and things you’d like to work on all these sorts of things.

www.privatehypnosisclub.com/members/forum That’s what the forum is there for, especially places like the lounge,

where you can share knowledge with other hypnotists, puzzles and ideas.

If you have a problem with something, chances are someone out there knows how to deal with it, has some experience with it and will share with your successes or give you an idea on how to improve something.



Use the community. You will get out of this community, the Private Hypnosis Club, as much as you put into it.

The more active you get on that forum, the more active of a role you take posting questions and posting things, doing what all of you did here on this call by asking a question intelligently and following up on it if the question was not addressed fully, there was still something that you were curious about, you followed up with another question.

These are the attitudes, the attitude of curiosity and exploration that I’m

going to encourage you to take to the forum, because it’ll take you just as far as and much further than the limited time we have on this call could take us.

With that happy thought I’d like to thank all of you for being here and I

look forward to meeting all of you again in the future.

41922287 street hypnosis conversational hypnosis private question and answer session

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