If you’ve found this article, there’s a good chance that you’re interested in becoming a hypnotist. But you’re probably not sure about it yet.
Luckily, it’s easy to gain the basic skills necessary to become a hypnotist for free. All you need are some instructions, a few people to hypnotize, and a willingness to play and experiment. In this article, we’ll go over each of these.
But first…
Why become a hypnotist?
There are a lot of reasons to become a hypnotist. Which of these is the biggest for you depends on what kinds of things motivate you personally.
Hypnosis is fun
A huge reason for a lot of people is that hypnosis is fun. Any time you’re stuck for something to do, all you need is someone to hypnotize, and you’ve got instant entertainment for as long as you want. Or at least, for as long as they’ll put up with you messing with their head.
And with the video calling technology available these days, it’s always easy to find someone new to hypnotize.
Hypnosis helps with personal development
Next there are the benefits for personal development. As you delve deeper into hypnosis, you’ll discover that it can be used to enhance just about any skill.
Skilled hypnotists can spin up time distorted hypnotic realities which seem as real as the real world. Except that time doesn’t quite work the same way. Just how much can you bend time? I’ve had people experience 50 years in the space of a few hours of clock time.
If you’d like to know how to use hypnosis to cause time distortion, you might enjoy my article How to Bend Time With Time Distortion Hypnosis.
Hypnosis is a foundational skill
Beyond the fun and personal development, hypnosis is a foundational skill. What I mean by this is that it has universal applicability to a huge range of fields.
When you become a hypnotist, you gain skills in areas such as building rapport, motivation, storytelling, changing peoples’ perception by giving them new frames of reference, sales, marketing, copywriting, negotiation, coaching, hypnotherapy, and more.
Some of these are useful for virtually all careers.
Not only that, but as a hypnotist the skills you have can be superior to the experts.
You can use hypnosis to become an exceptional coach
As an example, consider coaching. The core of all coaching is helping people to grow into what they’d like to become. And if you check out the big-name coaches, you’ll notice something about them.
Every single one of them is a hypnotist.
There’s a reason for that.
Coaching uses exactly the same processes as some forms of covert hypnosis.
Here’s the thing though.
Not all coaches are hypnotists. By the time you go down one or two layers of expertise from the very best, you start to find people who are undoubtedly expert coaches, but who have no idea that they are using hypnosis, or how any of it works.
Coaches working in organizations tend to be at least another layer of expertise down from these experts.
In practical terms, this means that when you’re an expert hypnotist working in just about any job, chances are good that you’ll be able to very easily become a better coach than anyone else in the organization.
How long does it take to become a hypnotist?
I’m going to make a few arbitrary definitions in this section.
Becoming a hypnotist has several parts.
Learning to hypnotize someone
In principle, someone is a hypnotist when they can successfully hypnotize someone.
All that’s needed is to learn an effective hypnotic induction, use it on someone, and you’re technically a hypnotist.
Most people can learn to hypnotize someone in a single weekend. Probably in a single evening.
Read more: How Long Does it Take to Learn Hypnosis?
That’s not really what we mean by becoming a hypnotist though, is it?
Becoming a hypnotist
When we think of becoming a hypnotist, there’s a lot more to it than simply being able to induce hypnosis.
In order to really be able to call ourselves a hypnotist, we need to have a broad range of skills that allow us to guide other people through hypnotic experiences.
And the truth is that learning those skills takes time.
How much time?
Well I’ve been at it for over 20000 hours now, and I still learn new things every day.
I started to consider myself to be a hypnotist after I’d been doing it for about 3 years.
This seems reasonable since most other professions require 3 or more years of training.
Here’s the good news: The process of becoming a hypnotist is fun.
When you’re learning hypnosis, and implementing what you’ve learnt, it’s a lot more like play than work or study.
And the other good news: The most basic hypnotic effects are so impressive that most people will think you’re an amazing hypnotist even when you’re just starting out.
So even though you might not feel like a hypnotist yet, everyone will assume you are.
Can you legally call yourself a hypnotist?
I’m not a lawyer, so you will have to check whether you are legally allowed to call yourself a hypnotist.
Where I live in New Zealand, there are no legal constraints preventing anyone from calling themselves a hypnotist or a hypnotherapist at the time of writing.
This is a double-edged sword: On the one hand, there is nothing standing in the way of becoming a hypnotist for free. But on the other hand, anyone at all can call themselves one.
Even when they lack the training.
What I like to do is ensure that I meet the skill and training requirements of locations that do have regulations around hypnosis.
Working with different types of hypnosis subjects
When you want to become a hypnotist for free, one of the big issues is figuring out how to get feedback on your technique from other hypnotists.
With a live course this isn’t an issue since you can just ask the trainer.
So what do you do when you are your own trainer?
Ask your hypnosis subjects for feedback
Ask your subjects about their experience every time you hypnotize them, and write down what they say.
Before doing this, make sure that you understand the requirements of any local privacy laws. Once again, I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t help with this part.
Now, most of us are hopeless at detecting when other people lie, so assume that you won’t be able to tell if your hypnosis subjects lie to you. Instead, keep a record of what they say each time and notice whether nothing works, everything works, or only some things work.
As a rule, if nothing works, either they are a shockingly bad subject, or they are lying. When I find these ones, I put in the effort to convince them to come back for more. My reasoning is that if I can get something to work on them, then it will work on just about everyone.
Similarly, if everything works, they are almost certainly lying. I’ve worked with hypnosis subjects who will drop into deep hypnotic trance at the merest hint of it, and even with them, not everything works. That said, it doesn’t matter much: Even if they are lying, it’s great for your self-esteem. Try to find a couple of excellent subjects with whom you get on well, and convince them to become long term subjects.
There’s also a cool side-effect of the way that hypnosis works: The only way they can lie about it is by creating a model of the lie inside their mind. If they do this enough, it becomes the truth.
Yep! They literally hypnotize themselves into being hypnotized by you.
The most valuable information comes from people who sometimes tell you that stuff works, and sometimes tell you that it doesn’t. People have an in-built inhibition to telling us that things didn’t work. So if they are doing both, you can generally be reasonably certain that they are accurately reporting their memory of their experiences.
What I’ve found to be most effective is to have a couple of shockingly bad subjects, a few exceptionally good ones, and as many as possible who are in the middle.
How to work with each type of subject
Once you’ve broken your subjects down into three groups, you can use each type for gaining different skills.
For every subject you hypnotize, each time something doesn’t work change just one thing, and try again. Then notice what happens. You will quickly discover which changes make things work better. And which ones don’t.
When you’re working with normal subjects, this is your opportunity for bulk practice. Suppose you want to get good at running a progressive relaxation induction. All you do is run each subject through it, noting what works and what doesn’t, and making tiny changes each time.
You want most things in your hypnotic repertoire to work with normal subjects.
When you’re working with exceptional subjects, see how far you can push things. If you can get normal subjects to perceive a few hours of time in the space of 10 minutes of clock time, see if you can push the exceptional subjects out to days, weeks or even years.
Whatever it is that you’re working with, push it to the extreme.
And finally, when working with resistant subjects, use only the stuff that you’ve got working perfectly with normal subjects. Use the resistant subjects to refine your abilities further.
If you’d like to know more about how to work with resistant subjects, you might enjoy my article How to Hypnotize Resistant Subjects.
How to tell whether a hypnosis training is useful
Naturally, if we want to become a hypnotist for free, we’re going to need some free hypnosis trainings.
These are very easy to find.
The big problem with them is that there is a huge variability in quality.
There are only two things that are needed for a training to be useful.
First, it has to make sense to you. Even the very best trainings are no good if you can’t stay focused on them because the trainer gets on your nerves.
And second, you have to derive some measurable benefit from it. The measurability is of critical importance.
How do you measure it?
Easy! You ask your subjects what worked, and what didn’t.
And you learn to pay attention to the signals they emit that tell you when they’re in hypnosis. These are very obvious once you get used to spotting them. After a little while, you’ll find that you can look at someone and know how far gone they are.
Where to find trainings to become a hypnotist for free
Hypnosis trainings can be found in multiple places on the internet. I won’t list these places here since they change constantly and you’ll find them easily with a quick search on your favorite search engine.
Let’s go through the general categories.
Websites where you can become a hypnotist for free
Hopefully this one is obvious. All you do is search in your favorite search engine for how to do whatever you want to know about, and the content appears in front of you. That’s probably how you found this article.
To get you started, you might like to work through my article How to Hypnotize Someone Easily.
In it I give some simple instructions that you can follow to hypnotize your first subjects. Just like the title implies.
Free books on kindle
Did you know that Amazon has a program where if you’re an author, you can list your books for free for 5 days every quarter?
To find the current free books, scoot on over to Amazon, set the search dropdown to Kindle, and search for whatever topic you’re looking for. Most books will be in one or more categories. Click on the category, and you should be able to find the top 100 and top 100 free.
This is a great way to try out an unfamiliar author’s work. Once you’ve discovered one you like, even paid books are very cheap to buy.
By the way, if you enjoy someone’s book and they have less than 10 reviews, please leave them a positive review.
Social media groups
There are numerous groups on the various social media platforms around every topic you can imagine, including becoming a hypnotist.
As with the internet and Amazon, a simple search will usually find a few groups to join.
Do a search on your favorite social media platform, find some groups, and apply to join each of them.
Once you’re in the group, read the rules and then ask any questions you have as appropriate. There are some groups where skilled professional hypnotists will give away material every week. As they say: Seek and you will find.
Online courses
When you’re starting out with becoming a hypnotist for free, it’s easy to find lots and lots of information that’s new and fresh to you. Over time, you’ll find that you get to the point where you’ve covered everything that’s out there for free.
Sooner or later you will reach the point where the amount of time you have to invest to gain just one golden nugget is quite large.
By the time this happens, you’ll probably already be a hypnotist and you’ll have an idea of who’s who in the hypnosis world.
The next logical step is to pick someone whose other material you’ve enjoyed, and move on to their paid courses. These can be in written, audio or video format.
There are also live online trainings. At any point in time, it’s easy to find several of these.
If you sign up for various hypnotists’ mailing lists, they will usually tell you when they have live online trainings, new product releases, and so on. This is invaluable for the live trainings since otherwise you might not hear about them until after they’ve finished.
When you sign up for my list, I’ll send you my book 10 More Fun Things to Do With Hypnosis to give you some ideas on what to do with people once you’ve hypnotized them.
Library books
No list of free ways to learn something would be complete without a mention of your local library. If you’ve not been to one for a while, libraries still exist, and often have audio and video courses available on CD and DVD, along with regular books.
Meetups
Regardless of where you live in the world, there are probably local clubs, societies and meetup groups for just about every subject you can imagine.
These groups tend to have a presence on social media, as well as having their own website and being listed in directories like meetup.com.
And if there is nothing local to you, it’s easy to start your own. Just find somewhere you can meet, then put up an ad either on social media or on meetup.
You can also contact local hypnotists and ask them. There’s a good chance they will be familiar with the local groups.
Finally, consider checking out your local Toastmasters group. They are oriented around public speaking, and so often attract hypnotists.
Where to find hypnosis subjects
Regardless of whether you want to hypnotize people online or in person, one thing is certain: You’re going to need hypnosis subjects on whom to practice.
Who not to ask
As a rule, it tends to be a good idea to avoid asking friends and family when you’re starting out. I won’t go into the reasons here, other than to say that we form perceptions of those around us, and our brains sometimes treat it as an attack on us when those around us try to change.
With most things this doesn’t matter very much.
When they are your hypnosis subject, this can lead to large amounts of resistance. Which is exactly what you don’t want when you’re starting out.
The exception to this rule is if they are learning to become a hypnotist with you.
So if we can’t ask our family and friends, how do we find hypnosis subjects?
Finding hypnosis subjects in person
The reality is that potential hypnosis subjects are around us all the time.
All you have to do is tell people that you talk to that you’re a hypnotist.
For your first few, tell them that you’ve been studying hypnosis so that they know you’re just starting out.
When I mention that I’m a hypnotist, I typically get one of two responses. Either they think hypnosis is fake and they have a negative reaction, or they think it’s real and they want to know more.
Simply ignore the ones who think it’s fake, and engage in normal conversation with those who know hypnosis is real. When you get this right, more often than not, they’ll ask if you can hypnotize them.
For most of us, there are lots of people we talk to every day. When they ask you what you do, tell them you’re a hypnotist, and allow the rest to follow.
Finally, since willing volunteers are everywhere, you can go along to clubs, societies, and meetup groups about any topic. Then, when you’re talking to people, mention that you’re a hypnotist and allow nature to take its course. In these cases, you can use the common ground of the group to build rapport.
Finding hypnosis subjects online
When you want to hypnotize people online, follow exactly the same process as in person: Tell them you’re a hypnotist, have a conversation about that only with those who are interested, and allow the rest to follow.
You can find willing volunteers everywhere online. To give you some ideas, you can find them on chat servers about virtually all topics, on social media, in forums, and on the various services that exist to pair people up with like-minded individuals.
Next, just as you can create a meetup group for learning to become a hypnotist for free, you can create one for practicing hypnosis.
Attract people by saying something like Come along and learn to relax on demand with your first hypnotic trance. When you become more advanced you can upgrade this to things like Come along and learn the one trick to overcome anxiety.
The key is to take a few moments to think about what’s in it for your volunteers. Then communicate that to them.
How to become an expert hypnotist
In this article we’ve covered how to become a hypnotist for free.
However, hypnosis is a vast topic.
As I mentioned, I still learn new things every day, and I can’t see that ever stopping.
So what do you need to do to become an expert hypnotist?
There are a few topics that you’ll need to cover in-depth. For most of these, you can find either free resources online, or you can purchase books at minimal cost.
And naturally, you can also invest in online courses, audio courses, video courses and in-person trainings when you’re ready.
Here are some of the topics that are typically included in any expert hypnotist’s toolkit:
Fractionation
Once we’ve got someone into hypnosis, we generally want them to move deeper into it. When you’re starting out, it’s common to use a hypnotic deepener for this, which is nothing more than another induction after you’ve induced hypnosis.
After you’ve mastered inducing hypnosis and deepening, you’ll want to learn all about the use of fractionation in hypnosis.
Fractionation is a form of accelerated rote learning which we can use to rapidly train our subjects to go into hypnosis. Whereas with a regular induction and deepening it might take anywhere from 3 to 20 minutes to get your subjects into a decent state of hypnosis, once you’ve mastered fractionation, it’s possible to get them there in just a few sentences.
The trade-off is that it’s a much bigger skill to learn.
Anchoring
Anchoring is a process in which we attach stuff we can control to things we’d like to have happen inside our subject’s mind. As a simple example, you might set up an anchor so that when you say the word SLEEP, your subject drops instantly into deep hypnosis.
I cover this in detail in my book Artful Hypnotic Anchoring.
This skill is a critical part of becoming an expert hypnotist.
Storytelling
Did you know that all effective stories are a form of covert hypnosis?
They are, and an important part of becoming an expert hypnotist is learning how storytelling works, and how to use it to guide your subjects.
When you get good at storytelling, it’s possible to move people from wide awake and alert into deep hypnotic trances, without them ever noticing that you’ve done anything.
Negotiation
This one is more of a side-effect than anything else. When you become an expert hypnotist, the skills that you acquire can be used to negotiate just about anything.
And the best part? Once you get good, you don’t even think about it. It just happens. The people you’re negotiating with will usually think it was their idea, which makes it very hard for them to resist.
I’ve used this to negotiate significant discounts on new cellphones and cars from places that don’t offer discounts.
Negotiation is one of those skills that’s useful for any conceivable career.
Sales and Marketing
Just about everything we want out of life involves some degree of sales and marketing.
Not understanding this key point is where people will often go wrong.
As an example, consider writing a resume to apply for a job. Most people think it’s all about them. As a result, most resumes are bypassed without more than a cursory glance.
When you’re an expert hypnotist, one of the things that you appreciate is that a resume is all about your potential employer and how you can help solve their problem.
If you’d like to know about using hypnosis to get interviews, you might enjoy my article How to Use Hypnosis to Craft a Resume That Gets You Interviews.
And that’s just one example.
As is the case with negotiation, sales and marketing are skills that are useful for any conceivable career.
Coaching
Coaching is a career that has enjoyed explosive growth in the last decade or so. And it’s set to grow even further.
This has had an interesting side-effect: Lots of people have started calling themselves coaches without having the necessary skills, or in some cases even knowing what a coach actually does.
The skills used by coaches are exactly the same as some of the processes used by expert hypnotists.
Clean language
Clean language is a way of interacting with people in which you avoid contaminating their thoughts with your ideas.
Once you know clean language, you’ll start to notice it all over the place. You’ll even see it in various articles on this site.
It all begins with one simple question: What would you like to have happen?
And then following a path to help your hypnosis subject map out how to get to the future reality they’d like to have happen.
There are countless ways to do hypnosis, and clean language is one of the nicest I’ve come across.
Generative trance
What would it be like if rather than using hypnosis to directly fix someone’s problem, you instead had them construct a self-repairing program inside their mind that leads them to the future they’d like to have happen?
With generative trance, you get to do just that.
And because it’s generative, it adapts over time.
In a sense, you’re teaching them to get out of their own way so that they can solve their own problems for life.
And you get all the praise.
Hypnotherapy
Regardless of whether they want to become a professional hypnotherapist, most hypnotists end up with a significant background in hypnotherapy.
This can be used for all sorts of things, both in your own life, and in others.
Imagine: You’re on a plane, and someone starts freaking out. You walk up to them, and within a few moments you’ve not only guided them to calm, but also removed their fear of flying.
And that’s just one of the uses.
So can you become an expert hypnotist for free?
Probably not.
It’s not that it can’t be done. The information is out there.
It’s just that becoming an expert is a huge endeavor.
If you have to spend 5000 hours just finding the information, that’s a significant chunk of time.
On the other hand, with a little guidance, that time can be cut down massively.
It’s the same with learning each of the components of hypnosis.
One of the things that I’ve run into time-and-again is people who think that they’re somehow clever because they’ve been educated in the school of life.
This claim instantly collapses when you apply even the most basic math.
As I’m writing this, it’s mid-2020. There are around 7 billion people on the planet. There are countless more billions who have lived before us.
On average they’ve probably each contributed maybe 5 to 10 years of actual research based knowledge.
Some of these people were way smarter than us.
And they contributed new thoughts and ideas for their entire lives.
So here’s what it comes down to: Right now we have access to the end result of hundreds of billions of years of human thinking, learning and problem solving.
When we make the claim that we’ve been educated in the school of life, what we’re saying is that we think we can do a better job than was achieved in those hundreds of billions of years.
Since that’s far longer than the universe has been around, even if we were the smartest person ever to live, we still couldn’t do it.
So what can you do about it?
How to get personal guidance into becoming an expert hypnotist
The reality is that to shortcut your learning and get on the path to becoming an expert hypnotist as quickly as possible, you need a guide.
Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, a sensible approach is to start out by learning what other people have already figured out.
Once you’ve done that, you’re in a position to add to the depth of human knowledge with your own ideas.
And when you work with someone who’s already walked the path, you can get there much more quickly.
You can probably see where this is going…
If you’ve enjoyed my content, I’d like to invite you to consider some personal coaching with me.
I conduct my coaching via online audio calls, and they can generally be scheduled to fit in with everything else you’ve got going on in life.
Because it’s online, you can be coached from anywhere with internet. I’ll probably be sitting in my car at the beach.
The first step towards your coaching call is to have a chat with me. When we talk, you’ll be able to decide whether it’s a good fit for you.
No shady sales tactics. Just a chat. Then you get to decide.
So if that sounds like something you’d like to have happen, drop me a line and we can sort out the details.
