To hypnotize someone just by talking, repeatedly move their focus from fine detail to big picture and back again, while moving their awareness from external observation to internal contemplation. This trains their mind to make the transitions necessary for hypnosis, while simultaneously consuming all of their conscious awareness.
When you’re starting out as a hypnotist, it’s easy to worry about exactly what to say to cause hypnosis. It turns out that hypnosis is far simpler than that.
Humans have a very finite ability to consciously process information. Specifically, we can only keep track of about 7 things at once. Go much above that, and things start fall out of our awareness.
We keep ourselves safe through an alerting system that more-or-less instantly switches our attention to things that we perceive as a potential threat.
Hypnosis happens when all of our subject’s conscious awareness chunks are consumed and we present new information in such a way that their alerting system is not triggered.
So long as we take appropriate steps to consume their awareness and not trigger their alerting system, hypnosis is almost guaranteed.
I’ve gone into this in a lot more detail elsewhere, so if you’d like to know more about that, you might enjoy my article on How Hypnosis Works.
As you might imagine, there are a lot of ways that we can hypnotize someone.
So what are the steps to hypnotize someone just by talking?
1. Go into hypnosis yourself
To hypnotize yourself, close your eyes and think back to any time you’ve been hypnotized and remember what it was like. Allow all the sensations associated with that state of hypnosis to flood back into you. Bask in that state for a few moments until you’re glowing, then slowly open your eyes.
The very first step with all hypnosis is going into hypnosis ourselves.
When we do this, some very useful things happen.
First, our subject unconsciously knows that hypnosis is possible because we’re doing it right in front of them.
Second, it gives them something to model: In short, they can copy what we’re doing.
If you’ve never been hypnotized before, or you’d like a way to make it easy, you can check out my article on How to Hypnotize Yourself Instantly, in which I give a simple self-hypnosis technique, and then show you how to attach an anchor to it so that you can re-hypnotize yourself more-or-less instantly in the future.
2. Build rapport
The easiest way to build rapport just by talking is to agree with your hypnosis subject. When building agreement frames in this manner, it’s important to be congruent. This means that we should only ever agree with things that we can personally agree with.
So how exactly do we agree with our subjects?
It’s surprisingly easy, because even if we don’t agree with the things that they say overall, there are always parts we can agree with.
For example, when we use their name, that causes a tiny spark of agreement inside their mind. When we allow them to speak, it causes them to feel like we’re agreeing with them. When we listen, we start to move further into rapport.
There are other tiny things that will spark agreement. As they’re speaking, occasionally encourage them with a few of their exact words that they’ve just used. This fires up the pattern matching in their brain, which amplifies the rapport.
In short, be interested in what they have to say and allow them to do most of the talking.
And when they stop talking, ask them questions that match their current state.
If you’d like to know more about building rapport, you might enjoy my article on How to Use Agreement to Build Rapport.
3. Hypnotize your subject just by talking
Once you’ve hypnotized yourself and built rapport with your subject, just about anything you do to maintain that rapport will result in your subject going deeper into hypnosis. Help them along by slowly switching to your hypnosis voice, by pausing for slightly too long, by varying your rate of speaking, and by moving their focus around.
In order to hypnotize someone, we need to consume all of their conscious awareness chunks, while simultaneously presenting things in such a way that we don’t trip their alerting system.
Conveniently, just about everything we can do will consume conscious awareness. And so long as we don’t press too hard too soon, we’re unlikely to trip their alerting system.
And it’s even better: Even if we do trip their alerting system, usually all we have to do is continue right on as if nothing had happened. Each time someone goes into hypnosis, they tend to get better at it. So the worst case is that if we do something that causes them to drop out of hypnosis, they’ll tend to go even deeper into it when we guide them back.
Each of the things in this section should be done as the opportunity presents itself. There is no specific order, and you don’t need all, or even any, of them. If it helps, assume that each tiny part will help your subject move about 1% further into hypnosis.
It might not seem like much, but once we’re good at this, it’s possible to include ten or more of these in a single sentence.
Rather than trying to implement all of them at once, slowly add each one into your hypnotic conversations and get good at it before adding in the next one.
Slowly switch to your hypnosis voice as you talk
When you notice your subject going into hypnosis while you’re just talking with them, slowly switch into your hypnosis voice.
As a rule of thumb, the deeper they are in hypnosis, the more your voice should sound like your hypnosis voice and the less it should sound like your regular voice.
But wait! I hear you ask: What exactly is my hypnosis voice?
I’m so glad you asked!
As luck would have it, I’ve already written an article in which I cover how to create your hypnosis voice along with some other nifty things you can do with your voice. So if you’d like to know more about that, head on over to my article on How to Hypnotize Someone With Your Voice.
If you’d like the lightning version: Develop a voice tone that is congruent with the state you’d like your subject to have. Record yourself speaking to refine it until it’s just right.
Build psychological pressure with pauses
Have you ever been caught in an awkward silence while mid-conversation? It’s a little bit unsettling, right?
Awkward silences can quickly destroy any conversation, which tends to not be a good thing for hypnosis. But when they’re used in the right amount, they can enhance the effects.
When you get good at it, the effect can even be used to fractionate your hypnosis subject and send them deeper into hypnosis.
To do it, first notice where you pause naturally while speaking. In written language, this is where we use punctuation. Once you’ve noticed where you pause naturally, try to lengthen one of those pauses until it just starts to feel uncomfortable. Then hold it for a few moments longer.
The key is to get the length just right. Too little, and nothing will happen. Too much, and your subject will think you’ve stopped talking and they’ll start. Or there will be an awkward silence.
It takes a little practice to get right, but once you do, the effects can be enormous.
Vary your rate of speaking
The rate at which we speak conveys a lot about our own state. When we speak quickly, it tends to be associated with states like excitement. And when we speak slowly, it tends to be associated with states like being relaxed, thoughtful and calm.
Naturally there are a lot more states than just these ones.
Take some time to think about what kinds of states are being implied by the rate at which you’re speaking.
When we go into hypnosis, our state switches, so if we learn to imply that with our rate of speaking, it can massively enhance what we’re doing.
So how exactly do we imply hypnosis?
Start out by speaking relatively quickly, and then slow down every time you talk about things that are commonly associated with hypnosis such as relaxation, breathing, calmness, and so on.
After doing this for a little bit, our subject will start to follow along and will be automatically pulled into hypnosis each time we slow down our rate of speaking.
Further fractionate your subject’s hypnosis state by repeatedly switching between speaking quickly and speaking slowly.
Move your subject’s attention around
So far we’ve talked about things you can do with your voice to cause hypnosis. But we haven’t talked much at all about what to say.
There’s a reason for that: When you get good at all the things we’ve mentioned previously, people will tend to go into hypnosis simply from being around you. At least, that’s certainly what happens with me.
That said, it’s still important to know what to say.
Otherwise there’s no conversation and we’re in danger of stopping talking.
There are lots of dimensions that can be considered here, so I’m going to focus on just two. Naturally you’ll want to extrapolate from this and play with other ones to discover what happens.
The two I have found to be very effective are moving someone’s awareness between internal contemplation and external observation, and moving their focus between fine detail and big picture.
Generally speaking, when we direct someone to internal things they will move deeper into hypnosis. This is done by asking them about their experience.
Similarly, when we direct someone to external observations, they will tend to move out of hypnosis.
And when we have them focus on fine detail, they will tend to go deeper into hypnosis, while big picture stuff will often move them out a bit. Results do vary, so you have to pay attention to your subject and track their state over time.
When you repeatedly move someone in and out of hypnosis, they become fractionated. Put another way, the more you do it, the deeper they go.
If you’d like to see examples of this in action, check out any of the visualization scripts I’ve listed in my article on Hypnotic Visualization Scripts. In those scripts, you’ll see that I repeatedly move the subject’s attention around different things and different scales.
4. Build layers of hypnosis by talking about something else
Deepen your subject’s state of hypnosis by building layers. This is done by switching topics to something else for a while, making suggestions, and then switching back to the original topic. When this is done correctly, the hypnosis subject tends to have limited ability to recall things that happened inside the inner layers.
Our brains come with a nifty system that enables us to get things done. I refer to this as the human task completion system. I’m sure it has another name that I don’t know.
The way that the human task completion system works is that whenever we start any task, it constantly pings us to get back to it if we’re interrupted.
This is how cliffhangers in stories work: They tell the story right up to a critical point, and then switch tracks to something else.
And we all know that people tend to want to know what happens next when there’s a cliffhanger.
Not only that, but once a task is complete, it tends to become harder for us to recall. We know that it happened, but unless we go back to the start and work our way through the memory, we generally have no idea what happened inside the task.
We can exploit this in hypnosis by switching topics just as it’s starting to get interesting.
So how exactly do you do that?
Switching to a new topic
There are some magic phrases you can use to facilitate moving seamlessly into a new topic. I won’t go into these here as I’m sure you already know them. To give you one example: It’s a bit like when…
There are lots and lots of these. All you have to do is notice which ones you prefer, and then start using them with intention.
You can also just randomly start talking about something else without announcing it to your subject.
Make some hypnotic suggestions
Once you’ve switched to a new topic, it will be much more difficult for your subject to recall what happened. It will also consume even more of their conscious awareness, which moves them further into hypnosis.
This makes it the ideal place to make some hypnotic suggestions.
Remember how earlier we talked about the importance of not triggering our subject’s alerting system?
When we make these suggestions, it’s vital to frame them in a way that the subject is highly likely to accept.
There are lots of ways of doing this.
How blatant you can be depends to some extent on your subject’s depth of trance.
If you want to hide something completely, often the best approach is to tell them a story from which they can have the ideas you’d like them to have.
And if they seem to be in a reasonably stable deep trance, you can almost certainly give them direct suggestions at this point. A direct suggestion is always a statement of current reality.
It looks like this: And that left foot is completely stuck to the floor now, isn’t it.
You can also be more permissive: And you might begin to find that left foot is becoming so comfortably numb that you don’t want to move it at all. It’s almost like… it’s completely stuck now, isn’t that right.
The key here is to appreciate that it’s an iterative process.
If something doesn’t work, simply act like everything is going exactly as it should be, and make your suggestions a little less prescriptive.
You can also set up post-hypnotic suggestions here like you might see in a stage show: For the next hour, every time you hear me say the word HYPNOSIS you will immediately drop back into a wonderful, blissful hypnotic state, twice as deep as you’ve ever been before.
Whatever you choose to do, so long as you don’t intentionally set out to cause harm, there’s not a lot that can go wrong. Most of the time the worst that will happen is that your subject pops out of hypnosis.
Switch back to the original topic
Once you’ve given your subject some suggestions, talk about whatever the topic was some more, then switch back to the original topic. This will close off the loop, making it more difficult for them to consciously recall what happened.
As you switch back to the original topic, and you’re bringing them further out of hypnosis, remember to switch your voice back to your regular speaking voice. This will signal the end of the hypnosis to them, which will make it easier for them to separate hypnosis from non-hypnosis.
It also makes it easier to hypnotize them in the future when you switch back to your hypnosis voice.
Build multiple layers to deepen their hypnosis
So, you might ask, how do you send them even deeper into hypnosis?
If you’re using the structure in this article, the simplest approach is to layer in other topics as you go.
Start with your original topic, switch to another one just as it’s getting interesting, then switch to a third topic just as that one’s getting interesting, and so on.
Make your suggestions.
Then close off the topics in reverse order.
When we do this, the deeper layers are much harder for them to recall than the outside ones.
Above all else, play about with it and discover what happens.
How to hide hypnosis in plain sight
When we want to hypnotize someone just by talking, quite often that’s because we don’t necessarily want them to know that the hypnosis has begun. We can use covert hypnosis techniques, including non-awareness, multi-dimensional fractionation, and storytelling, to hide our hypnosis in plain site.
In order to take your abilities in hypnotizing someone just by talking to them to the next level, you’ll want to know how to do each of these.
So I’ve written an article all about covert hypnosis in which I cover exactly that.
If that sounds like something you’d like to have happen, go check out my article on How to Hypnotize Someone Secretly right now!
