How to Hypnotize Someone to Do What You Want

While there are some practical limits on what can be achieved with hypnosis, it turns out that it’s possible to use it to exert a great deal of influence on people.

So how do you hypnotize someone to do what you want? With highly responsive subjects, all you have to do is hypnotize them and tell them to do it. With everyone else, it’s a complex process, which involves having an innate understanding of human motivational drivers, together with exceptional skills in a range of advanced hypnosis topics. In this article, we’ll go over each of these so that you can start to exert more influence over people in everything you do.

Will you be able to hypnotize them to do anything at all? Probably not. At least, not without a lot of work. That said, it’s possible to achieve massive gains in how much people will do what you want with relatively little effort.

The 1% rule

Now you might be wondering just how much effort is relatively little effort.

There are two parts to this.

The effort to become a hypnotist

First, there is the effort that you put into becoming a hypnotist. As a rule, there’s no such thing as too much effort here. But you can optimize it quite a lot. Especially when you’re starting out.

When you’re learning to hypnotize others and get results, the quickest gains usually come from learning to implement a broad range of hypnotic skills, and putting in the effort to become good enough to get results with each of them.

How much effort is required depends on your current level of skill.

Start out with the hypnosis skills that will get you rapid gains.

Let me give you an example.

When you don’t know how to hypnotize someone, any hypnotic induction you can learn and use successfully will give you a huge gain. Specifically, you’ll be able to hypnotize people.

But the second induction you learn won’t give you as much benefit in terms of increased results.

At that point, either learning how to deepen the hypnotic state, or learning how to give your subject an experience of a hypnotic phenomenon, will give you significant gains in skill.

What I’ve found to be effective is to learn to do each of the component parts of hypnosis first, then focus in and go deep in each field.

When your specific goal is hypnotizing people to do what you want, you’ll get huge gains from understanding human motivational drivers.

The effort expended in a hypnosis session

And second, there is the effort that you put into an individual hypnosis session.

There is an almost endless range of things you can do to send someone into hypnosis.

I like to use a guideline that each of these things will send someone about 1% of the way into hypnosis. It’s not true of course, but it gives an idea of scale.

If you believe that you can drop someone into hypnosis with a single simple trick, you’ll end up disappointed with all but the most easily hypnotizable subjects.

But when we work on the basis that each of these simple tricks will send our subject about 1% of the way into hypnosis, we suddenly start to get results.

Even with the most resistant subjects.

Now it might sound scary that each piece of hypnosis will only get your subject 1% of the way there.

In reality, every single sentence we construct can be built to include many of these component parts.

Beyond that, the way that we present ourselves as a hypnotist has a profound effect.

When we’re starting out, we might be able to embed one piece of hypnosis into every sentence we speak. With a little practice.

When you get good, it becomes possible to encode ten or more individual pieces of hypnosis into a single sentence.

Take your time, and practice each component piece until it happens automatically.

Hypnotize yourself first

The very first step with all hypnosis is to hypnotize yourself.

When we do this, our hypnosis subjects can observe what we are doing, and copy it.

Now it might sound like this will be a conscious choice on their part.

Not so.

You see, a little later in the process, we’ll build rapport with our hypnosis subject. When we do that, and we’re in hypnosis, the overall effect is that they tend to be automatically sucked in to our trance state.

This makes it much easier to hypnotize them.

You might be wondering how on Earth you’re going to hypnotize yourself before hypnotizing your subject when it takes a few minutes to go into hypnosis.

Go deep today with my easy step by step guide to self-hypnosis. Click here to check it out!

Won’t they get bored and wander off?

The truth is that it’s possible to hypnotize yourself very quickly. We’re talking less than a second.

You just have to practice it a bit beforehand so that you know what to do.

I won’t go into this in detail here as I’ve written about it elsewhere. If you’d like to know how, you might enjoy my article How to Hypnotize Yourself Instantly.

In it, I give a simple process you can follow to hypnotize yourself and then anchor that state so that you can return to it on demand.

Build a confidence anchor within yourself

One of the shortcuts that we use as humans is taking cues from those around us as to what might be an appropriate behavior.

This has been studied extensively in psychology, and leads to such things as the bystander effect, in which a group of people will tend to do nothing even when someone is in dire need of help.

Now in a hypnosis session, the subject usually has quite a lot of uncertainty.

Even if they’ve been hypnotized before, they’re probably not a hypnotist themselves.

This means that they will take their unconscious cues about how they should behave from the hypnotist.

If our manner conveys doubt and uncertainty, our subject will pick up on that and will assume that they can choose not to go along with whatever it is. Or they’ll assume we don’t know what we’re doing.

Either way, the result is not useful.

On the other hand, when we convey absolute certainty, most people will feel comforted by that and will assume that we’re the expert and know what we’re doing.

So how do you convey confidence and certainty when you’re just starting out?

There are a couple of tricks here.

Practice on easy subjects first

First, practice with willing volunteers who are easy to hypnotize. This will build your faith in your own abilities.

But there’s a problem.

Almost everyone suffers from something known as imposter syndrome. This is where we somehow conclude that we’re not suitable for the task at hand.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to work around this.

Build a confidence anchor

Every one of us has moments in our past where we’ve been successful. This could be anything from the first time we learnt to write a single letter of the alphabet, all the way through to making that major discovery, closing that big deal, or achieving whatever happens to be relevant in our own field of expertise.

There are two approaches we can take to making ourselves confident on demand.

First, we can mine our own past for times when we’ve felt supremely confident, and then remember what that was like.

And second, we can look to people we regard as being successful, and imagine what it’s like to be them.

Either way will work.

It’s just a matter of choosing the one that works for you.

And if you don’t know, try both and discover which one works best.

Here’s how.

Step 1: Find a success event

This can be anything at all where we’ve achieved something, or felt confident. As mentioned, we can also choose another person and model them.

It’s far more important to choose an event that we have strong feelings about than it is that the success itself was huge.

Step 2: Go into hypnosis

We’re going to be building an anchor so we can recall this state on demand, so it’s important to hypnotize yourself.

Step 3: Call up all the details of that success event

If the event was in your own past, remember what that moment was like. And if you’re modelling someone else’s success, get a clear sense of what they’re like and how they carry themselves.

Step inside all the details of that event. Notice all the feelings. If you’re modelling someone else, imagine what it feels like to be them in that moment. What kinds of things are they thinking?

Go as deeply inside that state as you can. Make it real.

Step 4: Anchor how you feel in that moment

When you’ve made that state as powerful as possible, allow a symbol to appear inside your mind and notice how that symbol embodies confidence.

For bonus points, you can focus and de-focus your eyes and allow your certainty and confidence to swell up inside to attach your confidence to your self-hypnosis anchor. If you used a different anchor when learning to hypnotize yourself instantly, use that in place of eye de-focus.

Either way, whatever that symbol might be, allow yourself to know that every time you experience that symbol, you will feel total confidence.

You know you can do it.

It’s easy.

Effortless.

Allow that symbol to grow stronger and stronger until it’s glowing brilliantly.

And then when you’ve got it, and you know you’ve got it, allow your state to return to normal. Then see your symbol inside your mind and allow that absolute certainty to fill you completely.

Repeat the entire process until you’ve got it down and can become confident on demand.

Understand human motivational drivers

If you want to hypnotize someone to do what you want, it’s critical to have an understanding of human motivational drivers.

This is a subject that has been studied extensively by psychologists.

There are several models that you can choose from. And there are two key components that it’s important to grasp.

First, you need to know what kinds of things are important to people. These are the core motivational drivers. If you’d like to know more about these, you might enjoy my article 16 Ways to Get Motivated in which I cover Steven Reiss‘ model.

And second, it’s important to be aware of the hierarchy of these drivers. There is a model in psychology known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which you can use to make educated guesses about this.

What it comes down to is that people generally need to take care of their immediate survival needs before they can deal with needs around self-development.

These effects can be a lot more powerful than most people realize even when there is no immediate threat to your subject’s existence.

When you want to hypnotize someone to do what you want, it’s important to make sure that there’s not something standing in their way. As you become more skilled, you’ll find that you can use these needs to help your subject to do what you want them to do.

For now though, spend a little time making sure you have a good understanding of the core motivational drivers. Once you’ve done that, think about what might be important to your hypnosis subject in the moment.

The key here is balance.

Ask yourself what they want, and what they need.

Build agreement and rapport

After hypnotizing ourselves, the next thing we want to do is build some rapport with our hypnosis subject.

Rapport is what happens when our stream of thought synchronizes with our subject’s stream of thought to some extent. The more this synchronization happens, the more rapport we tend to have.

Now it’s possible to move into rapport with someone in many different ways.

The easiest way I’ve found is to build an agreement frame with them.

You do this by making a series of statements that they have to agree with.

For example, when you authentically smile at someone, that’s the beginning of creating an agreement frame. When you say their name, it moves them a little closer into agreement.

As a rule, each thing that you can do that matches their own state of mind in some way will move you further into agreement with them.

If you’d like to know more about building rapport with agreement frames, you might enjoy my article How to Use Agreement to Build Rapport Even If You’re an Introvert and Hate Small Talk.

Now agreement is not necessary for rapport, but it can help a lot. For one thing, most people don’t have to think about how to do it too much, which means that your mind is freed up for other things.

If you’d like a really simple way to get started with building agreement, try using tag questions strategically.

How to use tag questions to hypnotize someone to do what you want

A tag question is nothing more than a question we add to the end of a statement to garner agreement. These can be very powerful because they create the illusion of choice, while guiding your hypnosis subject to do what you want.

Let me give you an example of how tag questions work.

Suppose you wanted to help someone to feel happier in the moment, and you can see the beginnings of a smile on their face.

You might ask them a question like: Are you feeling happy right now?

This approach has at least two huge issues with it. First, they are totally open to say no, which is a very closed response. And second, the question itself creates doubt and uncertainty in their mind. If the question is timed wrong, their attempt at answering it could make them less happy.

Not the desired outcome.

Contrast this with using a tag question: It looks like you enjoyed that. You’re feeling pretty happy right now, aren’t you?

In this case, we’ve first acknowledged what we can see on their face. Then we’ve told them that they are feeling happy, and asked them to validate that.

The second approach is far less work for our hypnosis subject, because we’ve told them what to do. We’ve also mostly removed their choice. But we’ve left it open enough that they can contradict us if they want to.

So by making a statement about their current state and using a tag question, they still have the choice, but it is much easier for them to agree with us.

Tag questions are incredibly powerful.

Use them sparingly for maximum effect.

Use hypnotic frame control

Everything that we experience exists within a context, or frame.

A few years ago, I told one of my friends a story about a trip I took on my boat. I went into great detail. I started off by telling her about how it was a gorgeous day, so I’d decided to go for a hoon on my boat with some of my mates.

We cast off the lines and pushed away from the dock, before hauling up the sails and heading out to explore. Around lunchtime we anchored off a sandy islet with a single palm tree, and rowed ashore for lunch.

There had been a storm a few days earlier, so the islet was covered with far more debris than usual, and the sands had shifted.

So there we are… it’s a beautiful day, the sun’s streaming down, there’s a gentle breeze blowing… we’ve cracked out the rum… everything is right in the world, for a time.

And then I noticed something. A hard edge poking up through the sand. We investigated, and found a wooden box with a giant padlock.

It sounds like a fun day, right?

When I told this story to my friend, I went into a lot more detail. I spent at least 15 minutes going over everything I’ve just related to you. With any story there are points you can add in or omit, depending on your purpose. Like the sea shanties I didn’t mention this time.

Around the time I mentioned the sword fight with armed guards, she cottoned on: Wait! Are you telling me about something that happened in a game?

Now it might sound like a bit of a dick move on my part to spend 15 minutes telling someone a story about a game as if it were real.

But what if I told you that this particular friend is a hypnotist. And a gamer. And I was teaching her about storytelling and frame control.

That’s the thing about frames.

Most of the time, the context is something that we’re vaguely aware of, but not really paying attention to. We make assumptions and educated guesses.

Change the frame and you change the meaning

The context in which we place information can completely change its meaning.

It gets even better.

Usually we don’t know what the exact context actually is, so we make a guess. When we do this, we tend to have a strong belief in our guess.

By and large, this is an extremely useful heuristic. If we didn’t constantly make such guesses, we would have to spend all of our time conducting thorough investigations.

And a lot of the time, our guesses are mostly right. Or at least, right enough.

So how can you use this to hypnotize someone to do what you want?

Spend some time thinking about the context in which your hypnosis subject will be placing the things that you say.

For an example of that, look back to the story I just relayed.

I started off by saying that it was a story I told to a friend. That created a context. Where it gets interesting is that most people reading it would have forgotten completely about that context until I mentioned my friend again a little later on.

This happens because the human mind can only track a tiny handful of things at once. If you stack up enough details, humans literally don’t have the resources to track all of them. I’ve talked about this elsewhere, so if you’d like to know more about it, you might enjoy my article on How Human Memory Works With Hypnosis, where I go into it in detail.

How to use framing to hypnotize someone to do what you want

What this means is that if you want to use frame control to hypnotize someone to do what you want, there are a few things you can do.

First, and most important, become aware of the frames yourself. When you know what frames your hypnosis subject is placing information within, you then have the opportunity to change those frames. The easiest way to do this is by asking them questions.

Second, ask yourself what information are they missing. Or better yet, what information could you help them to be missing through misdirection.

Third, ask yourself what you can add to reshape the information to hypnotize them to do what you want.

Convey ideas and frames with hypnotic stories

Back when I was a kid I started to notice something interesting.

It was quite a lot of work to get the stuff from school into my head. Since I was planning to become a scientist, this was mostly things like math, physics, chemistry and so on.

Most people find it difficult to take this kind of information onboard so at least I wasn’t alone.

What I found interesting was that when I was watching a show on TV, or a movie, it was suddenly very easy to take on seemingly similar information. I could recall in detail exactly how the fictional technology they were using in the story worked.

The thing about the human mind is that it’s essentially a device that processes the ongoing story of our lives. Because of this, it is almost always easier for someone to take on new information when we wrap it up in a story.

Not only that, but when we place information inside a story, it becomes much easier for us to place importance on it, which in turn makes it easier to recall.

So if you want to hypnotize someone to do what you want, tell them a story that models the thing you’d like them to do.

You have to be a little subtle about it.

But probably nowhere near as subtle as you might imagine.

As you’ve potentially noticed by now, stories have almost infinite possibilities when it comes to complexity. It’s helpful to have a framework. When you use this framework, be aware that it’s just that: A framework.

You can and should change things about as suits the story at hand.

Step 1: Set the context

It’s important to give your hypnosis subject some way to assign meaning to the story. You can do this up-front at the beginning, or at any appropriate point in the story.

Step 2: Introduce the situation

All good stories have to happen somewhere, even if it’s only inside someone’s mind.

Ideally the situation should be something that your hypnosis subject can relate to.

Step 3: Introduce the hero

And likewise, all good stories need to have a hero of some kind. This does not have to be a person.

It’s easy to do the first three steps in a single sentence. The story I told earlier about me telling a story did just this.

As with the situation, it’s important to make the hero relatable.

Step 4: Have the hero go on a quest

In order for it to be a story, something has to happen. This can be anything at all.

It also provides the framework. When you’re hypnotizing someone to do what you want, arrange the quest so that it does not look like the thing you want them to do.

Step 5: Have the hero encounter a problem

Stories only tend to be interesting if the hero has some kind of challenge to overcome. This does not have to be anything big at all. In fact, it can be tiny.

Make the problem relatable.

Step 6: Have the hero overcome the problem

If we’d like the person to whom we’re telling the story to change in some way, we need to give them a model for overcoming the same class of problem as our hero.

Use story loops and emotion

Now if you’ve been paying attention, you might be thinking that there was no problem overcome in the story I told earlier. That’s because the hero of that story was my friend. The problem she overcame was spotting what I was doing with the story.

Story loops like this are a common structure in storytelling. The story about the boat trip was actually one layer down. And if you look closely at it, you’ll notice that it doesn’t end.

You’ll also notice that there are story loops buried within the boat trip itself.

How did the storm cause debris? What was in the chest? And swords? What?

When you use story loops, it becomes easy to hide information in plain sight. If you tell a story with something exciting buried 4 or 5 loops down, most people won’t be able to track it. But they will be excited about whatever that thing might be.

As you might imagine, storytelling is a huge topic.

And the best way to get good at storytelling is to tell lots of stories, and notice how people respond to them. Once you can tell a compelling story, start adding in loops, then start embedding instructions in the inner loops.

Deepen the hypnosis with multi-dimensional fractionation

People have a tendency to go into hypnosis when they experience a story. If the story is complex enough, they don’t really have any choice in the matter since our human brains lack the capacity to track more than a handful of things at once.

They can either listen to the story and go into hypnosis, or they can not listen to the story and miss out.

People generally don’t like to miss out.

Once they’re in hypnosis, it makes sense to enhance that state as much as we can.

Each story loop that we open will do this. Story loops can be used to exploit the human task completion system to hide information.

And they have another effect.

Each time we open a new loop in the story, we’re effectively teaching our hypnosis subject to go deeper into hypnosis. This means that through a process of repetition, they get better at it.

This is a form of fractionation.

What is fractionation in hypnosis?

In hypnosis, we refer to the process of using rote learning to teach someone to go into a state as fractionation.

The simplest way to use hypnotic fractionation on someone is by hypnotizing them, bringing them out of hypnosis, then hypnotizing them again. Each time we hypnotize them, they get better at being hypnotized.

There are far more subtle ways to fractionate someone’s state.

What is multi-dimensional fractionation?

With multi-dimensional fractionation, we want to become deeply aware of exactly where our subject’s attention is placed, and where it is going, at any point in time.

Deep Trance Secrets by Max Trance book cover. How to Deepen Hypnosis With Hypnotic Fractionation.

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Think about where your words, gestures, and way of being is sending your hypnosis subject’s mind.

Let me give you an example.

As you’re reading through this you may have noticed that sometimes I’ll refer to we and sometimes I’ll refer to you. This is intentional. We is slightly bigger, more inclusive, and supportive. On the other hand, you is you. It’s very specific, and hopefully is something you can identify with, you being you and all. The thing about you is that you have to do it by yourself.

There are some very interesting and subtle effects that result.

For example, When you stumble over your words it can be confusing for your subject, looks like a normal sentence, but the human mind will process it as something that the person being spoken to is doing wrong.

In highly suggestible people, it might even install the act of stumbling over their words even if they didn’t previously.

Contrast this with the equivalent using we: When we stumble over our words, it can result in our subject becoming confused.

Try running each of those sentences through your head, and notice the subtle difference. They both say exactly the same thing, but when we use we it’s inclusive. It feels like it’s something that happens to everyone, so we’re shielded from any negative effects.

As a rule of thumb, use we whenever making statements that could be perceived as being negative, and you when making statements that are positive.

You’re getting this now, aren’t you?

And it’s not just limited to pronouns. Just about every word we can use will send someone’s mind somewhere. That’s kinda what words are for.

Pay attention to where each word you speak sends someone’s mind, and you will quickly begin to get a sense of how it works.

This takes time and practice, so start off with simple word pairs. For example, you can notice the difference between cat and kitten. Or this and that. Or fast and slow.

The key is to focus on the states your subject’s mind is going into. Are they more or less focused? What’s happening with their emotions? How much work do they have to do to form pictures in their mind to track what we’re saying?

Use embedded commands

So far we’ve covered a lot of stuff about how to get someone into hypnosis. And I’ve hinted that you can get them to do specific things by modelling what you’d like them to do in a story.

But what about giving them blatant instructions? That might be handy when you’d like to hypnotize someone to do what you want, right?

It turns out there’s a way to do that as well.

There are two features of the human mind that make hypnosis work. First, we can only consciously process a certain amount of stuff at once. When that limit is exceeded, we tend to go into hypnosis.

And second, we have an alerting system that allows us to instantly switch our attention to perceived threats.

As a rule, the deeper someone is in hypnosis, the bigger the threat can be before it trips their alerting system.

In practical terms, this means that the further someone is in hypnosis, the more blatant you can make the instructions you give them.

When someone is in deep hypnosis, quite often all you have to do is tell them to do something, and they will do it so long as they don’t have a compelling reason not to.

On the other hand, if someone is in a light hypnotic trance, as they might be if you’ve told them a regular story, you have to be a little more subtle about it.

This is why it’s important to have an understanding of human motivational drivers. If you can present an instruction in such a way that your subject perceives it as being a good idea, they’re much more likely to do it.

What is an embedded command?

So what else can we do to avoid tripping someone’s conscious alerting system?

One of the simplest constructs in hypnosis is the embedded command. And it’s literally what it sounds like. We embed a command in what we’re saying, and mark it out in such a way that it can be easily perceived by our subject’s unconscious mind, but is unlikely to be noticed by them consciously.

An obvious example might be: And you don’t have to allow those feet to become completely stuck now.

In this sentence, we would mark out allow those feet to become completely stuck now, as a command to their unconscious mind.

How to use embedded commands to get someone to do what you want

The keys to making embedded commands work are:

Repetition. If you don’t repeat the same general idea a few times, they’re unlikely to get it.
Choose a command that’s acceptable to them in their current state.
Mark out the embedded command so that it sounds like an instruction to their unconscious mind.
Use command tonality to turn the statement into a command.

Let’s go over each of these quickly.

First, repetition. Hopefully this one is obvious, but in case it’s not, consider this: If we don’t repeat the instruction several times, there’s every chance that they’ll miss it due to not paying attention.

The rule of thumb in hypnosis is to repeat each instruction at least 3 times. And remember the 1% rule from the start of this article.

Second, acceptability. Whatever the instruction is, it is critical that it doesn’t trip their conscious alerting system. This means that instructions should be phrased in a way that makes our subject want to do it.

Third, mark out the embedded command. There are a few ways to do this. Essentially anything you can do to make it stand out from the surrounding speech will do. I tend to favor inserting a brief pause before and after each embedded command.

And fourth, use command tonality. In English, there are three basic voice tones that we use regularly. We tend to shift our pitch up at the end of a sentence when we’re asking a question. We tend to leave our pitch flat when making a statement. And we tend to move our pitch down when giving a command.

This has an interesting effect: When we shift our voice tone up, it conveys uncertainty. And when we shift our voice tone down, it conveys certainty.

To hear this in action, grab any recording device and record yourself speaking a few questions and a few commands. Listen to the recording. Then practice being able to state questions using the command tone. And vice versa.

The effect of this is so powerful that it’s possible to drop someone into trance without doing anything beyond fractionating them between certainty and uncertainty with your voice tone.

Use anchors to get your hypnosis subject to do what you want

So you’ve hypnotized someone, either overtly with a regular hypnotic induction, or covertly by telling them stories and using multi-dimensional fractionation.

And you’ve used embedded commands to get them to do stuff.

It’s only natural to want to be able to get them to do more stuff in the future without all that work.

We do this by constructing anchors.

An anchor is something that our subject can perceive that reminds their unconscious mind to do something else.

As an example, we might create an anchor so that they fall into hypnosis when we snap our fingers. In this case, snapping our fingers would be the anchor.

We create anchors by having our subject to perceive the anchor at the same time as they experience the thing we’d like the anchor to cause.

There are lots of ways we can do this, and here we’ll focus on just two.

How to create overt hypnotic anchors

First, the overt way. Use this one when your subject is in relatively deep hypnosis and knows they are hypnotized.

These are also known as hypnotic triggers.

To create an overt anchor, all you do is make a statement to your subject along the lines of Every time you hear me say the word SLEEP, you will return to a state of hypnosis at least twice as deep as ever before.

In short, you give them an instruction that they can follow. As with other things in hypnosis, repeat at least 3 times to make sure they don’t miss it.

Once you’ve created an anchor like this, bring them out of hypnosis and test it right away. Their emotional response when it works will bind in the anchor.

How to create covert hypnotic anchors

Sometimes we want to be a bit more subtle. Covert hypnotic anchors can be created when your subject is in any state at all, so long as they can perceive the thing you’d like to be an anchor.

To create a covert hypnotic anchor, guide your subject to the state or action you’d like the anchor to cause, then fire the anchor as they do it.

As an example, you might want to use an anchor to cause your subject to carry out your embedded command.

To do that, as you give the embedded command, perform the anchor at the same time. This could be a gesture, snapping your fingers, looking at them a certain way, or anything else you can cause them to perceive.

If you’d like to see an in-depth example of using covert hypnotic anchors to hypnotize someone to do what you want, you might like to read my article How to Hypnotize Someone With Your Eyes next. In it, I give the details of a process you can use to hypnotize someone using nothing more than your eyes!