If you are reading with an interest in acquiring and developing hypnotic communication skills, you will serve yourself by taking the time to enjoy practicing each small piece that is presented so that you can become systematically effective. If the pieces are too big for you to do comfortably, break them into smaller and more digestible chunks.
If you are reading this book simply for entertainment or out of curiosity—enjoy! Grinder and Bandler's teaching is more interesting and entertaining than most comedians.
Connirae Andreas
Introduction
Our topic here is hypnosis. We could immediately launch into an argument about whether there is such a thing, and what it might be if there were. However, since you already paid your money and came here for a seminar in hypnosis, I won't bring up that particular argument.
I hope that in the three days we spend here together, you will come to understand the sense in which that might be a fruitful argument. I hope you will discover that you already know a great deal about hypnosis under other names, or under no name at all. You can discover that certain experiences many of you have had are really excellent examples of altered states of consciousness. In the course of these three days, I will call upon both of each of you to enjoy and learn from what takes place here.
I assume that each of you is here with at least two objectives in mind. One is to discover how hypnotic patterning might be useful and effective for you in whatever area you are in, whether it's psychotherapy, management, education, nursing, sales, or something else. I assume that you want to discover what new choices hypnotic patterning offers that you might add to your present repertoire to become even more effective in doing what you do. In addition, I am sure that many of you are interested in making a number of personal changes as a part of your experience here.
I invite you to participate with both those objectives fully in mind. In dealing with this material, we will be doing demonstrations, we will discuss what is going on, and we will ask you to do exercises under our supervision after we've explained what we would like you to do.
Hypnotic patterning is the same as any skill that can be learned. In order to be learned, it has to be practiced. I assume that most of you here drive automobiles. If you don't drive automobiles, you can find some comparable perceptual–motor skill that you have mastered, whether it's riding a bicycle, roller skating, or playing some athletic sport. If you remember the first occasion on which you attempted to master the complex skill of driving a car, there were many things that you had to keep track of. Your hands were doing several things. At least one of them was on the wheel, presumably, and the other one was working the gear shift, if the car you were learning to drive had one. At the same time you were taxed with the task of being able to pay attention to what your feet were doing. There were three things they might do down there, and some of those things had to happen in coordination. You may remember putting the brake on and failing to put the clutch in at the same time, and the disastrous results of that. You had to pay attention to all of this, in addition to having some consciousness of what was going on outside of the car itself.
As with any complex perceptual–motor skill, what's required is that the task be organized into small pieces or chunks, so that you can practice each small chunk individually until you've mastered it. Once you have succeeded in practicing each chunk to the point that it becomes an automatic, effective, unconscious skill, you are free to attend to new possibilities: other components of the task. You can then practice these new chunks until they also achieve that same status of an unconscious, effective, perceptual–motor pattern that you do not have to give any conscious attention to.
The easiest way to become skilled at hypnosis is to practice small chunks one at a time, in the same way that you learned many tasks such as driving a car. I assume that the ultimate test of your skill in hypnosis is whether you can walk in and begin to interact with someone in such a way as to induce the specific kind of hypnotic outcome that they request—without having to strategize at the conscious level. Three days is not long enough, in my opinion, to achieve the kind of graceful, systematic, unconscious functioning that is required of a really fine hypnotist. However, our task in these three days will be to organize the overall task of hypnosis into chunks, and ask you to practice the various pieces. Our job will be to balance the amount of time we have you practice specific skills with the time we spend making sure we complete a coherent whole that will give you an overall strategy for hypnosis. I trust that you, and particularly your unconscious mind, will continue to practice such skills after this seminar. I also hope that you will continue to add alternative ways of achieving the same outcomes to the repertoire you will be acquiring here.
What we do for a living is an obscure thing called modeling. When we model, we try to build descriptions of how to do something. As modelers we are interested in two things: one is asking really good questions about what needs to be known, and the other is making descriptions of what seems to work. It's something akin to writing a cookbook.
During the next three days, we'd like to teach you a model for doing hypnosis. It is not the truth. It is not an answer, It is not real. If you think you know what's "really" going on and want to argue with me about what's really going on, I'm not going to be able to argue with you because I don't know. There are some things that I do know about; I understand how hypnosis is done. Why it works, I don't know. I do know that hypnosis works in the same way that you learn and remember and everything else. It works in the same way that you understand language.
Although hypnosis is not different from anything else, in the configuration we're going to teach it to you, it's a very powerful tool. And I would like you to think of it as a tool that accomplishes something specific. It's an.amplifier. No matter what you do, whether you're selling cars, doing psychotherapy, or working with juries, you can do it and elicit more intense responses from people. Hypnosis will allow you to do whatever you do and have.a greater impact with it. By itself it won't do anything.
I also want to point out that hypnosis is not a panacea. I have been using hypnosis for seven years, and I still sometimes wake up tired in the morning. Since I'm not a person who ordinarily drinks coffee, if I drink a cup of coffee in the morning, my body vibrates. If I fall down, I still get bruised. If I have a toothache and I remove the pain with hypnosis, I still have to go to a dentist to do something about the tooth. I consider these to be limitations not in hypnosis as a tool, but primarily in myself. Right now, hypnosis and communication arts in general are in their infancy as disciplines.
The process of learning to do hypnosis is somewhat unusual,because unlike most things you learn, you already know how to do it. The problem is noticing it. So rather than going through a long and detailed description this morning, I am going to ask you to do something and then afterwards take a look at it.
Exercise I
I'm going to ask you to get into groups of three people. I want one of you, person A, to think of something that fits the following description; a situation in which you become deeply involved, with a limited focus of attention. For some people that's jogging; for others it's reading a book. It might be writing, watching television, going to the movies, driving your car on a long trip—anything which fits that description.
If you're A, I want you to tell the other two in your group, B and C, what the experience is. Give them only the name of the experience: jogging, sailing—just a word. If you give them too much detail, it makes it too easy for them. Just give them a word, sit back and close your eyes, and pretend that you're in hypnosis—it's all pretend anyway. I want the other two people to describe what they believe would have to be there in sensory terms if you were having that experience. The magic words are "have to" because if someone is jogging and you say the bright sun is shining down on your body, that doesn't have to be there. People can jog at night, or on a cloudy day. However, they do have to have some skin temperature. So you're going to have to be artfully vague. I want B and C to take turns saying two sentences or phrases each. One will say "You can feel the temperature of the air on your body, and the place where your foot touches the ground." The other one might say "You notice the beating of your heart. You can feel the temperature of your skin." Those are experiences that have to be there.