The key to hypnotizing someone with your voice is using your voice in such a way that it causes their mind to repeatedly go through a sequence of states that teaches them to go into hypnosis. We do this by modulating our voice tone, rate of speech, pronunciation, pauses, and timing to carry our subject’s mind on a series of waves.
Years ago when I first started hypnotizing people, I used to worry a lot about the exact words that I had to say in order to get someone into hypnosis.
In some circumstances, the words are everything.
If you’re writing sales copy, or hypnotizing someone through text messages, the words are all you’ve got.
But a lot of the time when we’re hypnotizing someone, we’re talking to them.
And it turns out that when we’re talking to someone, there is so much that we can do with our voice that the words themselves become relatively unimportant, at least as far as sending them into hypnosis is concerned.
Naturally if we want to shape their thinking and conceptualizations, and give them instructions, the words are still important.
As far as going into hypnosis is concerned though, the words themselves can be almost completely unimportant.
So just how unimportant are the words?
I’ve used the techniques I outline in this article to send people into fairly deep hypnotic states by doing nothing more than reading them a list of random objects.
Hypnotizing someone with your voice is so powerful that most of the time it’s all I really do when I want to hypnotize someone.
How to hear your own voice
Unless you happen to be a performer or professional speaker, there’s a good chance that you don’t ever really hear your own voice. The fact is that most people out in the world don’t.
If you want to be able to hypnotize people with your voice, it’s of critical importance to develop the ability to hear your own voice.
The easiest way to hear your own voice is to record yourself speaking, listen to those recordings, and then intentionally try to change just one thing at a time.
After doing this a few times, most people find that they can start to hear their own voice as they speak. Until that happens, use a voice recorder like the one on your phone. It’s a lot easier to hear yourself when you’re not speaking at the same time.
Our human minds can only carry out a tiny number of things consciously at once. This means that it’s important to focus on just one component of your speaking at a time to avoid overwhelm.
Don’t worry though. You will become more hypnotic as you modify each individual part of your speaking.
Build rapport and go into self-hypnosis
As with all hypnosis, it’s important to build rapport with your subject. This is especially true when you’re hypnotizing someone with your voice, because the way you speak will carry them on a series of waves, all the way into hypnosis.
I’ve written about building rapport elsewhere, so if you need help with that you might like to check out my article on How to Use Agreement to Build Rapport Even If You’re an Introvert And Hate Small Talk.
Similarly, it’s always useful to go into self-hypnosis when you’re hypnotizing anyone. You can check out my article on How to Hypnotize Yourself Instantly for instructions on how to do that.
How to hypnotize someone with your voice tone
The easiest change to make to your voice is the development of one or more hypnosis voices. Your hypnosis voice is nothing more than a slightly different voice tone that you use when you’re hypnotizing your hypnosis subjects.
You will get the best results if you develop a voice that’s congruent with the state you’d like to induce.
When I do formal inductions, I tend to prefer my subjects to go into deep trance states, so my hypnosis voice is deeper, softer and slower than my regular speaking voice.
Your hypnosis voice is an anchor, so after you’ve hypnotized someone, they will tend to go into hypnosis much more quickly and easily when you use your hypnosis voice again. If you’d like to know more about anchors, I cover them in-depth in my book Artful Hypnotic Anchoring.
To discover your own hypnosis voice, think about what kind of voice will fit nicely into the hypnotic states you’d like to create. Use self-hypnosis to take yourself into that state, then practice speaking in that voice into a recording device so that you can hear what you sound like.
As a bonus, when you go into the state you’d like your subjects to take on, they can unconsciously copy you. This makes it easier to hypnotize them. Naturally, make sure that you remain conscious enough to speak!
By the way, it’s perfectly okay to have several different hypnosis voices for different states. The more you can make your voice tone imply the state, the more effective it will be.
Question, statement and command tonalities
In English, we have 3 basic tonalities we can use when we pronounce sentences.
To discover what yours sound like, record yourself asking a question, making a statement, and giving a command.
Once you’ve discovered what each tonality sounds like, write out a question and practice saying it as a question, as a statement, and as a command.
Do the same with statements and commands.
With a little practice, it’s possible to make any question sound like a command, and any command sound like a question.
How is that useful?
Well… when we ask someone the right kind of question, their minds become more open, and they have more doubt and uncertainty.
And when we give someone a command, their minds become more closed, and they have more certainty.
There are at least two ways this can be used to induce hypnosis with your voice.
First, if you move someone through a sequence of question command question command and so on, they will tend to go into hypnosis. Most of the time they won’t notice it happening because most people are not consciously aware of voice tone.
And second, you can use it to shape their thinking. This effect is so powerful that it even works in writing.
Let me show you what I mean.
You’re really getting this now, aren’t you.
Now that sentence probably feels like a statement even though the words themselves are a question.
Want another example? How about this one:
Would you like Thai food? Or pizza.
Most people are not consciously aware of question and command tones, so when they are used in this manner, a lot of the time your subject will choose the thing you speak using the command tonality over the one with question tonality.
How to hypnotize someone with vocal tone waves
When I’m hypnotizing people, I like to take them on a journey specifically designed to repeatedly lift them out of hypnosis and then drop them back into it.
The end result is that they get very good at going into hypnosis very quickly.
From their perspective, it feels like I’ve effortlessly hypnotized them without them having any idea what I’ve done.
Imagine that you’re on a roller coaster. You climb up a hill. And then suddenly drop down.
That specific sequence has quite a profound effect on most people.
And you can mimic it with your voice.
The simplest form of this can be done with a single word. Let’s use hypnosis as an example.
Now you could pronounce it as hypnosis, and it wouldn’t really have any effect. But you can also raise your pitch at the end of the hyp, pause, and then lower your pitch as you say nosis.
It sounds like a tiny glitch in the middle of the word.
By itself this effect is tiny. And a typical hypnotic induction might be comprised of hundreds or even thousands of words.
The effects are cumulative.
So how can you use this?
Find a few multi-syllable words that you use all the time. Then practice saying them in this manner.
Timing here is critical. The trick is to make the pause ever so slightly too long.
Don’t do it all the time or people will notice.
But when you scatter these throughout your speech, everything you say becomes more hypnotic.
Or should I say… hyp-notic.
Fractionate your subject with your rate of speech
Vocal tone waves can be extended over more than just a single word.
It’s possible to drop someone quite quickly by saying the first part of a sentence slowly and raising the pitch at the end with the question tone, pausing, then dropping down and saying the end of the sentence quickly using the command tone.
As you might imagine, with the almost infinite variety of sentences you could speak, this can get complicated fast.
So choose a few sentences with two parts, and practice with them.
Once again, timing is everything with this. Make the pause ever so slightly too long.
Experiment with different pauses and rates of speaking, and notice the effects.
Fractionate your subject with pauses
When we speak, there are specific spots within our speech where we pause. When we write text out, these are generally indicated by punctuation.
It’s possible to get significant hypnotic effects by making the pauses ever so slightly too long.
The keys to making it work are to not do it too much, and to get the timing just right. Too short and the effect goes away. Too long and they will think you’ve stopped speaking.
As with the other things in this article, the best approach is to experiment and discover what works for you.
How to practice hypnotizing someone with your voice
Each of the vocal control techniques we’ve covered in this article can be practiced and learnt independently of the others.
Our human minds have some significant processing limits, which mean that it’s necessary to practice each skill until it becomes a habit.
Now this might seem inconvenient, but in reality it’s the exact same process that allows hypnosis itself to work.
The truth is that if you want to get good at hypnosis, it’s important to have an understanding of what’s really going on.
And one of the easiest ways to understand things is to apply the underlying principles to new situations to see how they work. I’ve written about these principles elsewhere, so if you’d like to make things easy, you might like to check out my article on How Hypnosis Works.
Inside that article, I cover how the limitations of the human brain essentially guarantee that hypnosis is going to happen. Once you know how the system works, and you can use the voice skills we’ve gone over in this article, hypnosis can become almost effortless.
The ability to hypnotize someone with your voice is a vital skill for hypnotists, so if you’d like to supercharge that skill, go and check out my article on How Hypnosis Works right now.
