Regardless of whether it’s our own mind or someone else’s, sometimes it’s useful to have ways to assert control.
And while hypnosis is not the same thing as mind control, there are certain mind control techniques that every hypnotist should know.
Our minds can seem complex when we’re trying to understand them from the inside.
Conveniently, even though our minds might seem complex, they work on a handful of straightforward principles. Once we appreciate these principles, and learn a few simple yet powerful mind control techniques, everything we do with minds can become so much easier.
Here are some mind control techniques to enhance your hypnosis:
1. Agreement
If we want to have any hope of controlling someone’s mind, it’s important to agree with them on some level.
Luckily, there are lots of ways to move into agreement with someone.
I use this one constantly with everything I do. Agreement is so powerful that sometimes it’s enough to drop someone into a profound hypnotic trance all by itself.
2. Disagreement
Now it might seem odd having disagreement on a list with agreement.
I mean, aren’t they opposites?
Well kinda… but not really.
Take a few moments to think through a situation where someone constantly agrees with you.
It doesn’t take too many steps before our mind starts to notice that something is off.
Inoculate against over-agreement by throwing in the occasional bit of disagreement.
It doesn’t have to be much. Just enough to help your subject feel comfortable.
It’s even possible to create fake disagreement where we deliberately get them to say no, while still agreeing with us.
Now that might not seem like much, but often it’s enough to keep them firmly on the agreement path.
3. Paint A Vivid Picture
Our unconscious minds work largely on experience and emotion. This means that taking the time to create a vivid picture of something is one of the most powerful things we can do to direct someone’s thoughts.
For example, to get someone to move towards a future goal, describe that future to them in vivid detail.
When I use this one, I prefer to get them to do the work of describing it. Use clean language to elicit the future they’d like, and then to mine them for more details.
Building a vivid picture inside our subjects’ minds like this makes it real for them.
4. Tell A Story
It’s one thing to draw a vivid picture of some future goal inside someone’s mind. It’s quite another to get them to act on it.
One of the easiest ways to get someone excited about starting to move towards goals is by telling them a story.
Our brains are essentially machines that process the ongoing stories of our lives, so when we encode things inside a story, they become much easier for us to take on.
Telling stories is one of the most powerful mind control techniques I know.
5. The Slow-Motion Jackhammer
When we want to control someone’s mind, it’s important that they actually remember to do the things in question.
And with human minds, there are two core ways in which we can have people remember to do something: Make it important, and have them repeat it. A lot.
In hypnosis we use a technique known as fractionation to guide our subjects into repeatedly experiencing hypnotic states.
Each time they are fractionated, they become better at having whatever experience it is.
6. Frame Control
As human beings, we assign meaning to just about everything that happens to us.
Here’s the thing though: Usually we’re just making it up.
The actual meaning isn’t there.
This means that frame control is an essential mind control technique.
With frame control, we help our subject to consider other possibilities and assign new meanings to their experiences.
7. Use Emotions, Not Logic
People make decisions with their emotions and then use logic to justify those decisions.
One of the most common mistakes that people make when they are trying to convince someone of something is using logic.
This almost never works.
If you look through the other things in this list, you’ll notice that almost all of them involve helping our subjects to feel good about something, and helping them to remember that.
Help people to feel positive emotions about the things they’d like to have happen. Only use logic to help them justify it afterwards.
8. Embedded Commands
Sometimes it’s useful to be able to drop handy hints into our communications to help lead our subject’s thinking to where they’d like it to be.
This is achieved using embedded commands.
An embedded command is nothing more than a hypnotic suggestion which we subtly mark out to make it obvious to our subject’s unconscious mind, but not to their conscious mind.
This potent mind control technique can simultaneously lead them towards more helpful thoughts, while preventing their conscious mind from interfering.
9. Tag Questions
A considerable amount of effort is required to become proficient in some of the things we’ve covered in this list.
Luckily, there are a couple of ways that require almost no effort so you can get started right away.
Tag questions are short questions that we tack onto the end of statements to turn them into questions.
Statements have more truthiness than questions, so this one is powerful because the unconscious mind tends to perceive the statement as an absolute truth.
Then the conscious mind sees the question on the end and imagines it has a choice.
This has the effect that the statement is more likely to be perceived as being true.
That makes total sense, right?
10. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat!
Our brains decide whether to remember something based on how important we perceive it to be.
When we encounter something enough, it becomes important.
And when something is really good or really bad, we tend to experience strong emotions. This also makes it important.
Now eliciting emotional responses takes a little effort to learn if you don’t already know how to do it.
There’s one thing we can all do right away though: Repeat whatever it is.
When we repeat something enough times, in a way that doesn’t cause people to stop listening to us completely, it goes into their heads and becomes a part of the way they do things.
Every single one of us has numerous beliefs that we only believe because they’ve been repeated to us enough times for this to happen.
11. Anchoring
Ultimately, when we’re wanting to control someone’s mind, we need some means of getting them to do stuff.
This is where anchoring comes in handy.
One form of anchor is the hypnotic trigger, which is used to cause specific thought patterns inside the minds of our subjects.
It’s possible to use anchors to build actual programs inside people’s minds.
And it’s hard to think of a more effective means of mind control than writing a program inside someone’s mind and setting it up to run automatically and repeatedly.
