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CreativityTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:19 OK.
00:21 You don't feel hypnotized right now,
00:23 but you've had some odd and interesting experiences
00:25 with sticking to things.
00:27 And have you ever experienced anything like that before?
00:29 You have experienced that kind of thing before.
00:31 You have been hypnotized before.
00:32 You said you're right-handed earlier.
00:34 I'm going to borrow your right hand this time for this.
00:36 I'm just going to take that up there now.
00:38 I'm just going to get you to straighten your fingers.
00:40 Just look at this point up here.
00:42 Just look at this point.
00:44 Now, this is not hypnosis, but I'd
00:46 like you to just focus on that point.
00:48 In a minute, in a moment, I'm going
00:51 to let go of your fingers.
00:53 When I do, you'll feel them just start
00:56 spreading and spreading further and further.
00:59 Wider and wider apart.
01:00 That's right.
01:01 The space expands between the fingers.
01:04 Now, as that expands, it can expand so far
01:06 before the hand starts to drift in.
01:09 That's it.
01:09 The hand starts to drift in with a motion of its own.
01:12 And as that hand drifts in, quicker and quicker,
01:15 I'd like you to be aware.
01:16 That's right.
01:16 You can keep your eyes open.
01:18 I'd like you to be aware of the number between three and five
01:22 just disappearing, going further and further away.
01:24 That number is just disappearing as that
01:25 comes towards your face, further and further away
01:28 into the distance.
01:28 So it's gone.
01:29 It's just not there.
01:30 It just disappears.
01:31 It's like it never was there.
01:32 Just as soon as it touches your face now, that number has just--
01:36 that's right.
01:37 You can keep your eyes open.
01:37 That number's just bang.
01:38 It's gone.
01:39 Just keep your eyes open.
01:41 OK.
01:42 You feeling OK?
01:43 Yeah.
01:43 Feeling good?
01:44 OK.
01:44 Just looking at your hand here.
01:46 This is your hand?
01:47 Yes, it is.
01:47 Just checking.
01:48 Can I get you to spread your fingers out there?
01:51 Could you count, please, your fingers?
01:54 Just go ahead, count.
01:55 1, 2, 3, 5, 6.
01:58 1, 2, 3, 5, 6.
02:00 Interesting.
02:01 Interesting.
02:02 Interesting.
02:03 Could you go ahead and do that again, please?
02:05 Sure.
02:05 1, 2, 3, 5, 6.
02:07 What's happening now for you?
02:10 Honestly.
02:11 Honestly.
02:14 Honestly, I've got five, but clearly it's going up to six.
02:18 Clearly it's going up to six.
02:20 Does that make any sense to you?
02:21 No, because I can see five in front of me.
02:23 You can see five.
02:23 Yeah.
02:24 So go ahead, count again.
02:25 1, 2, 3, 5, 6.
02:26 OK.
02:27 That's an interesting thing.
02:28 1, 2, 3, 5, 6.
02:30 Doesn't make any sense, does it, really?
02:32 No.
02:32 I'm going to pop that hand down there for a moment.
02:36 And I'm going to get you to close your eyes for a moment.
02:40 Not because I want you to go into a trance, because I don't.
02:43 I'd just like you to close your eyes just for a moment.
02:45 Go ahead, close your eyes now.
02:46 I'd like you to be aware that I'm
02:47 going to walk around you and come back in front of you
02:50 again.
02:50 As I do so, now, you can be aware
02:53 of your inner mind, your unconscious mind,
02:55 the same part that knows things, just making some adjustments.
02:59 So as when you open your eyes, you
03:00 can hear my voice moving around you.
03:02 When you open your eyes, even though you'll
03:03 be able to hear my voice, you will see right through me
03:06 as if I am invisible.
03:07 You'll be unable to see me.
03:09 You will see directly through me as your thoughts are gone now.
03:12 And you make that shift.
03:13 You can open your eyes.
03:15 Notice what you notice.
03:20 Now, can you hear me?
03:23 Yeah.
03:25 Can you see me?
03:26 No.
03:26 What's that like for you?
03:32 Well, you told me that's what's going to happen,
03:34 so it must be fine.
03:39 What's happening right now?
03:40 [LAUGHTER]
03:43 Jaffa caves can fly, apparently.
03:45 Jaffa caves can fly.
03:47 OK.
03:48 Now, as Jaffa caves disappear, in a moment,
03:51 I'll click my fingers.
03:52 My head will reappear.
03:54 [CLICK]
03:56 So what's that like for you?
03:58 It's not necessarily natural.
04:01 Not necessarily natural, but an interesting thing.
04:04 OK.
04:05 I'm going to click my fingers.
04:07 The rest of me will reappear.
04:09 Take a breath in.
04:11 And breathe out.
04:14 And notice every single thing returns to normal,
04:17 turns completely to normal.
04:18 You know the experience you've had.
04:20 You know the reality of that experience.
04:22 You know what's real, what's not real,
04:23 what's there, what isn't there.
04:25 And you know what your everyday reality is like.
04:27 And just take a few moments, take one more breath.
04:30 Experience that everyday reality coming back permanently.
04:34 Thank you very much for helping out with that.
04:36 [APPLAUSE]
04:41 OK.
04:41 Right.
04:42 What I was trying to do there was get something to fail.
04:45 I wanted something to fail.
04:49 So in that not happening, that kind of failed for me.
04:53 [LAUGHTER]
04:58 But I want you to just look at the two different experiences.
05:00 Now, number one, I'm just going to say something here.
05:03 Because this is far out stuff, right?
05:04 Invisibility.
05:06 I don't know what your experience is there.
05:08 You could be faking that, totally, 100%.
05:10 I don't know.
05:11 You could be half faking it.
05:12 It doesn't matter.
05:13 From a performance perspective, it almost doesn't matter.
05:16 From a real perspective, I am genuinely
05:18 interested about people's experience.
05:20 Because I know from doing performance hypnosis,
05:22 you do get people that just go along with it.
05:26 And from a performance perspective, that's OK.
05:28 That's fine.
05:29 From a hypnotherapy perspective, I don't want that to happen.
05:34 So I'll often push things harder than that.
05:36 So there were points there where I was saying,
05:37 you know, what's really going on for you?
05:39 Because I want to know.
05:41 I could think, I don't want to pop the bubble,
05:43 pop the illusion.
05:45 So different people get different responses.
05:47 And I don't know exactly what your experience was there
05:49 at all.
05:50 But--
05:52 Well, when you make it sound invisible,
05:54 it's like one half of my brain can see you.
05:57 But the other half should be reason in terms of reacting
06:00 as if I can see you.
06:01 It's almost as if the thought doesn't jump across.
06:04 It's almost like there's an invisible barrier that
06:06 prevents the reality from me reacting in that respect.
06:11 That's quite a common experience.
06:13 People say it's-- I've had people say,
06:15 I knew you were there, but I just couldn't see you.
06:18 Or somebody else said, it's like my brain wouldn't allow
06:23 me to register you, even though I knew you were there.
06:27 And I've had other people that just said you weren't there.
06:29 So different people have different experiences.
06:31 And I've had some people say, well, I was just
06:33 going along with it because there were people watching
06:35 and I didn't want to kind of embarrass you or whatever.
06:38 I was kind of hoping that the numbers would fail.
06:41 Or just-- could you count your fingers just to make sure?
06:43 Yeah.
06:44 Right.
06:44 Brilliant, thank you.
06:46 I was kind of hoping the numbers would fail
06:48 or the invisibility would fail or something like that,
06:51 so as I could show you how I got out of that.
06:54 But when we did the little bit, I didn't do all of that,
06:56 did I?
06:58 Did it look like I failed?
07:00 Honestly, did it look like I failed?
07:02 No.
07:02 Because that wasn't what I was planning to do.
07:07 I was planning to do all that stuff.
07:09 But it didn't look like it.
07:14 It looked like that was what was meant
07:15 to happen the whole time.
07:17 And stuff happened.
07:18 You experienced some stuckness in your foot.
07:23 Some of you may have seen a video I put out recently
07:25 about quality of response.
07:28 Because people think, oh, a foot's stuck or it's not stuck.
07:30 A hand's stuck or it's not stuck.
07:32 But that isn't necessarily true.
07:34 It's not always that digital.
07:36 You get different qualities of response.
07:39 With a hand stick, you might get somebody
07:40 that passively looks at their hand and says, yeah, it's stuck.
07:43 And I say, really try and move it.
07:45 And there's no discernible shift or change.
07:48 Other people, you will see the muscles vibrating.
07:51 You will see them trying to remove this.
07:53 It's a different quality of response.
07:56 And I'm very much interested in that quality of response.
07:59 Because I didn't see that quality of response
08:01 when we were working together.
08:03 I decided not to proceed to the next bit.
08:05 But I totally framed what was happening
08:07 as exactly what was supposed to happen.
08:12 Now, what we're doing, we're 11 o'clock.
08:17 I'm going to-- just before I move on,
08:25 did anybody register any failure in anything
08:28 that I did at that point?
08:29 Please be honest if you do.
08:31 I'm not--
08:31 As a station artist, I would have stopped.
08:37 But you stopped as well.
08:38 I wouldn't have pushed it any further
08:39 because I would have feared that I was going to get a failure.
08:43 OK.
08:45 I saw the quality of response and thought,
08:47 that isn't something I want to continue to work with.
08:49 With the first demonstration?
08:50 Yes.
08:51 Yes.
08:51 Yes.
08:52 And that isn't something I want to continue working with.
08:54 Yeah.
08:54 I'll move on to the next subject.
08:55 Yeah.
08:56 Yeah.
08:56 Totally.
08:56 And stage hypnotists know about this.
08:58 And they know about choices.
09:00 And they have choices, hopefully.
09:02 Now, what I did at the beginning is
09:03 I did a little bit of a selection process,
09:05 like a stage hypnotist may do.
09:07 I'm not a stage hypnotist.
09:08 I've never done a stage hypnosis show.
09:11 But I am aware, from having done enough demonstrations,
09:15 to not do this, to not go, OK, who'd
09:17 like to help me out with some hypnosis stuff?
09:19 Because whoever puts their hand up quickest
09:21 is the person that's out to get me, usually, as a rule.
09:23 I've learned that one.
09:25 So I did a little bit of a selection process.
09:27 I wouldn't necessarily do a selection process.
09:31 In fact, I wouldn't do a selection process.
09:33 If I'm out doing impromptu stuff,
09:34 obviously with a client, I wouldn't
09:36 do a selection process.
09:37 There's been a selection process,
09:39 and then coming to see me, to a certain extent, beforehand.
09:42 But yes, go on.
09:43 Can I just quickly ask, what is it
09:45 you saw that was different, exactly?
09:47 What was it you saw as different?
09:48 Oh, OK.
09:49 What stopped you from going forward?
09:50 That's a good question.
09:53 Because it's very easy to say, well,
09:55 after you've been doing it for a while,
09:57 you'll start to recognise it.
09:58 And that's true.
09:59 But that doesn't help you if you haven't
10:00 been doing it for a while.
10:01 So I'm looking, thinking back.
10:04 What I saw with Mary-- Pat, sorry.
10:09 I'm seeing Mary in front in my peripheral vision.
10:11 What I saw with Pat was this sort of-- there's
10:15 an expression of testing, and like, well, I'm not sure.
10:19 I didn't see certainty in Pat's face.
10:23 Whatever certainty looks like, I can't say there's
10:26 this particular movement of the eyelid, or something like that.
10:29 But she's sort of like, mm, sort of gauging and evaluating.
10:34 And is that true for you?
10:35 You were kind of gauging and evaluating what was happening?
10:38 Yeah, because you were asking me what it felt like.
10:41 And I knew it was stuck.
10:43 Yeah.
10:44 But as soon as I moved to the left foot,
10:47 the quality wasn't the same with it.
10:50 I hadn't gone with the left foot in the way
10:52 I'd gone with the right foot.
10:53 Yeah.
10:54 So it was different.
10:55 There was a difference there.
10:56 I could see the lack of certainty beforehand.
10:58 When I allowed the foot shift, that
11:00 was a little extra test to see if this
11:03 was going to stick as well.
11:05 OK?
11:08 I'll share this with you about the foot stick there.
11:10 Do you want to know a secret?
11:12 Some of you know this already.
11:14 That cannot fail at all.
11:17 No one will ever pick that foot up.
11:19 Is that a useful thing to know?
11:26 Do you know this one?
11:27 Yeah, it's the center of balance.
11:29 Yeah.
11:29 Can I borrow you for a second just
11:31 to show the positionings of this?
11:33 Because I'm going to share this with you,
11:34 because it's useful to have these little utility
11:36 pieces, right?
11:38 Now, the first thing I do if I want to set this up
11:41 is I ask all that stuff about dominant side,
11:43 this, that, and the other.
11:44 Does anyone know why I ask that?
11:45 Yes, sir.
11:46 Is it?
11:47 Sort of you're trying to get some form of compliance
11:49 early on.
11:50 You're trying to get buy-in.
11:52 These guys, these are people who are writing the money.
11:55 Usually I have people saying, well,
11:56 this hemisphere is more dominant,
11:58 and this, that, and the other.
11:59 It's really, it's just a bit of nonsense.
12:02 It's what some people call, what I call, witch-doctoring.
12:06 Because I'm asking these things.
12:08 No one's going to ask this unless it's significant, right?
12:11 Did that not seem significant when
12:12 I was asking for that, like I was making some choices
12:14 or evaluating some stuff?
12:16 It's a bit of ritual.
12:18 Now, I don't want to go into the whole hypnosis
12:20 without trance methodology.
12:21 But you probably all know that I don't really
12:24 believe that hypnosis is about trance.
12:25 I think trance, or a particular altered state,
12:29 renders people responsive to hypnosis.
12:31 I believe it's how you engage their beliefs and their belief
12:34 systems and their cognitive processes.
12:37 So this little bit of ritual is about engaging the belief
12:41 system.
12:41 So I set up with this left foot, right foot stuff.
12:44 And I act that congruently, plausibly,
12:48 like it really matters, and like I am making some decisions.
12:51 And sometimes I am.
12:52 So then I'm going to pick a foot.
12:53 It's usually the right foot.
12:55 The setup goes like this.
12:57 Could I get you to step forward with your right foot
13:00 onto about this spot here?
13:01 Now, you see how the weight's shifted forward at this point.
13:04 Now, I'll ask the person, I'm saying,
13:06 could you pick a point on the top of your foot
13:08 that you could focus on?
13:09 Now, this kind of brings the center of gravity
13:11 forward slightly more.
13:12 And I'll say, and just allow yourself to relax that knee
13:14 so you can feel the connection through it.
13:16 Now, by bending the knee, that brings the weight forward
13:19 even more.
13:21 Now, from this position, without shifting weight,
13:24 it is impossible to lift that foot.
13:26 But his weight's on the other foot, isn't it?
13:28 On his left foot?
13:29 The majority of the weight's on the right foot.
13:31 Majority of the weight.
13:32 There's a little bit more weight.
13:34 You can set it up almost like this sometimes.
13:36 But that's enough.
13:38 Now, from there, you can't lift your foot, can you?
13:40 No.
13:41 You would need to shift your weight to lift your foot.
13:43 He needs to shift his weight back to lift his foot.
13:46 This is a nice, reassuring hand here.
13:48 [LAUGHTER]
13:50 Now, what I don't do is I don't force back.
13:54 So if he goes to shift the weight back,
13:56 going to shift the weight back, I actually lift up slightly.
13:59 I don't push back, because pushing back, you'll feel it.
14:02 But lifting up slightly just lifts his weight.
14:04 So you go try to lift that foot.
14:06 That's right.
14:06 You can really try, because it's just stuck there.
14:08 Now, can you feel me pushing back?
14:10 No.
14:10 Even he knows I'm doing it.
14:12 I'm not pushing back.
14:14 In Chinese martial arts, Chinese internal martial arts,
14:17 this is called neutralizing rather than resisting.
14:20 So all I do is I lift the force up slightly
14:23 rather than push back.
14:24 I'm redirecting the force, almost
14:25 as if I wanted to bring it back in a loop like this.
14:29 That makes it very hard to sense the force.
14:32 Also, if you've got them fixated on their toe,
14:35 that's where their attention is, not here on your hand.
14:39 So it cannot fail.
14:40 But here's the beautiful thing about this little piece.
14:44 If the suggestion really takes, there
14:46 will be no pressure up here.
14:49 And you can take your hand away, and you've
14:51 got the real deal going on.
14:54 You've got the real thing going on.
14:55 But you never, ever risked anything or ventured anything,
15:00 because the worst that's going to happen
15:02 is exactly what happened with Pat.
15:05 Now, it's not either it really happens or it doesn't.
15:08 You'll get a mix.
15:09 So there may have been some genuine response
15:11 on a hypnosis level there.
15:12 Thank you for helping me out with that.
15:15 OK.
15:15 I've got a question.
15:16 So I've had failure with that.
15:18 Not actually in it not working.
15:20 Yeah.
15:21 I've had people saying to me, I won't
15:22 be able to-- not because they're familiar with the process,
15:25 but it fails.
15:26 You will occasionally get that.
15:29 There's a reason why it's happening.
15:30 Nothing to do with you.
15:31 So then you have fail, and how you handle--
15:36 We're going to deal with that scenario
15:38 as well, because technically it can't fail.
15:40 But very occasionally, you will get someone who'll go, yeah,
15:42 well, obviously I can't lift my foot,
15:43 because I've got all my weight on it,
15:45 and you've got your hand on my back.
15:48 So that will happen.
15:49 And I will tell you about these kind of things.
15:51 I don't want to get ahead of myself at the moment,
15:52 but that's a completely valid question.
15:54 I'll echo that.
15:55 I've had magnetic fingers.
15:56 People go, well, they're just going to come together
15:59 because of the way your hand's stuck.
16:00 Totally.
16:01 And a hand stick.
16:02 I've had a couple of people going,
16:04 oh, my hand feels really heavy.
16:06 But that's because my hand's been in that position
16:08 for a couple of minutes.
16:09 Exactly.
16:10 And I'm getting tired.
16:11 And you'll get that.
16:12 And we're going to totally deal with this.
16:13 So make sure-- I'm going to deal with this outright,
16:16 but make sure you ask these questions again,
16:18 because this is coming up.
16:19 This is part of what we do, because these things will
16:21 happen.
16:22 These things will happen.
16:25 Before we take a break, because we're
16:27 going to do some exercises, we're
16:29 going to start doing some stuff.
16:29 And interesting, the first thing we're
16:31 going to do is magnetic fingers.
16:34 These are little bits of what are called pseudo-hypnosis.
16:36 This is pseudo-hypnosis, but they can--
16:38 the magnetic fingers, if you don't know it,
16:40 I'm going to get to in a moment, is total pseudo-hypnosis.
16:43 But it has a place in real hypnosis.
16:46 People often overlook it.
16:47 The foot stick there is half and half.
16:49 It can be either, which is why I like doing that one so much,
16:53 because it can so readily translate, transfer in.
16:59 Let's look at the primary concept
17:03 behind what I'm calling the no-fail protocol, the stuff
17:06 I'm going to share with you today.
17:07 That foot stick isn't it.
17:10 That's just a little bonus.
17:11 So as you know, you've got something
17:12 you can play with that's a nice utility tool.
17:15 But that's not the no-fail approach.
17:18 The primary concept behind this no-fail protocol
17:21 is that of maneuverability.
17:24 Maneuverability.
17:26 I had to look up how to spell that word.
17:31 And I've written it enough times now on the flip charts
17:33 that I should know it for good.
17:34 Maneuverability.
17:35 So whatever happens in the no-fail protocol approach,
17:40 you must always have allowed yourself somewhere to go.
17:44 Whatever happens, you must always
17:49 have allowed yourself somewhere to go, somewhere to maneuver.
17:53 Where you'll come unstuck is when you go,
17:56 you can go ahead, you can try and lift that hand,
17:58 find it sticks more, and then go, shh.
18:00 And you go, oh.
18:03 You didn't have anywhere to go.
18:04 You had no maneuver.
18:05 You had nothing in place.
18:07 You had no safety net.
18:08 You had no contingency, nothing.
18:12 Which seems like a weird thing to do.
18:13 You wouldn't learn to walk a tightrope without a safety net.
18:16 But people learn hypnosis without having safety nets
18:19 in place.
18:19 And they feel that anxiety.
18:20 And they feel that fear.
18:22 Some people don't.
18:24 But most do.
18:24 So the whole idea here is about whatever happens,
18:27 we're going to engineer.
18:28 We're thinking from the start.
18:30 Thinking from the start of engineering places for things
18:33 to go.
18:34 So as nothing ever fails.
18:36 Worst case scenario, pretty much what happened with Pat.
18:39 Maybe that's not quite the worst case scenario.
18:41 There could be some worse case scenarios.
18:46 So let's think about this.
18:48 Keep that in mind.
18:48 Maneuverability.
18:49 Keep that phrase in mind.
18:51 We have-- I'm going to come over here.
18:58 I'd like to share this little model with you.
19:02 It's the model of critical moments in hypnosis.
19:04 Can almost everybody see this?
19:07 Maybe even everybody?
19:09 I know it's a bit small.
19:10 Let me just bring this around slightly this way.
19:13 This is a really simple model.
19:15 First of all, we have the beginning.
19:17 And we have the end of the hypnotic process.
19:20 Whatever that's going to be for you.
19:22 It could be doing some hypnotherapy.
19:24 It could be doing a piece of performance.
19:26 A piece of street hypnosis.
19:27 Could be anything.
19:28 Could be just a demonstration at a cocktail party.
19:31 We have a beginning and an end.
19:32 We're not really going to define these points too strongly
19:34 at the moment.
19:35 In between, we have these various hypnotic events.
19:38 Maybe things sticking to things.
19:39 Maybe amnesia.
19:40 Maybe anesthesia.
19:41 Maybe a hallucination.
19:43 We have these hypnotic events taking place
19:45 between the beginning point and the end point.
19:47 Make sense?
19:48 Good.
19:50 Now I've put these little C's in here.
19:52 And these are what I call critical moments,
19:54 or critical points.
19:56 And these are points where things
19:58 can fail to a greater or lesser extent.
20:02 Maybe even catastrophically if you're unprepared.
20:05 These are the critical points.
20:07 So what we get with critical points
20:09 is we either, after each one, it's
20:15 going to go one way or the other.
20:16 Yeah, this will do.
20:17 It's either going to go as a success or a failure.
20:22 So that's an S I've put there, or a fail.
20:25 So you go, whee, or failure.
20:27 Now success enables you to track back and go on
20:31 with the next thing in the hypnosis process.
20:33 Typically, failure, if you're not prepared,
20:38 if you don't know what you're going to do,
20:39 if you haven't figured out your manoeuvres,
20:42 failure will leave you, end a process, and worse than that,
20:46 looking a bit silly because you said something was going
20:49 to happen and it didn't.
20:50 You said you were a hypnotist, and someone's
20:53 standing around going, yeah, but that's just a load of rubbish.
20:56 So it's the end of the game.
20:57 And it's the end of the game with egg
20:59 on your face of some variety.
21:01 We don't want this because it means that we don't really
21:03 get to go anywhere other than shuffling off, going,
21:05 oh, I can't see these people again.
21:08 Because there are some fails that can be pitched as success
21:13 or actually work in your favour.
21:14 I was in a pub yesterday.
21:15 I was in Zapp, someone I do all the time.
21:18 And I just started to talk to them,
21:21 and they realised what was going on.
21:24 And they went, oh, no, oh, oh, no, it's really scary.
21:28 Now that has put my kudos way up here
21:29 because even though I hadn't achieved anything,
21:32 I hadn't got any phenomena, they were really worried
21:36 that I was going to get them.
21:37 And so they pulled out of it before we even
21:40 got to the hand stick.
21:41 But they could see from the language I was using
21:43 and the expression of the eyes, they didn't go, oh, this
21:46 is stupid.
21:47 I'm not going to do it.
21:48 They went, oh, this is a bit scary.
21:49 Right, I'm stepping back.
21:50 And then when I was in the pub, I went, wow, that must be good.
21:53 I hadn't even done anything at all except scare this person.
21:56 I was going to hypnotise him.
21:57 I totally get where you're coming from with that.
22:00 I mean, even just a couple of days ago,
22:02 what I wanted to do for today was
22:04 get some video of some stuff and then
22:06 talk about the critical points, show the film
22:08 and talk about the critical points in it.
22:10 However, to do that would have required
22:12 a higher degree of organisation than I'm capable of.
22:17 So just because I only thought of this on Thursday,
22:19 I thought, right, I want to get some video.
22:21 So I went out for a coffee with somebody
22:23 who I know, who I have done one hypnosis session with years ago
22:28 now.
22:29 I didn't even do any hypnotic phenomena.
22:30 I just did some trance work for a personal issue.
22:33 But I thought, well, we're going out for coffee.
22:35 I'll just do a few bits and pieces
22:36 and get them filmed on my flip camera.
22:38 And then I can show them on my projector,
22:40 and we can go through the points.
22:42 So I said, hey, let's call him Bob for the sake of anonymity.
22:47 I said, hey, Bob, do you mind helping me out
22:49 with just a little bit of hypnosis stuff?
22:50 I need to film some stuff for the event
22:52 that I'm doing at the weekend.
22:53 He said, no, no, no worries at all.
22:55 And I said, OK, great.
22:57 And he said, you're not going to do any of that sticking stuff,
22:58 are you?
22:59 And there was this kind of real--
23:04 and I said, well, yes.
23:07 And he went, well, I don't know if I want to do any of that.
23:10 Now, I didn't do any hypnosis.
23:14 But there was no failure as such there,
23:15 because the power of hypnosis was established,
23:17 and my credentials as a hypnotist were maintained.
23:21 So even though absolutely nothing happened,
23:24 it's not a failure, because I maintain my credentials,
23:26 maintain my status, my position.
23:29 So that was OK.
23:30 I remember another occasion when I
23:32 did an impromptu demonstration for a group of people.
23:34 I walked in, and this group of people were there.
23:37 And they went, hey, James, we'll call this other guy Bob.
23:40 It's a different Bob, but it just keeps it simple.
23:44 They all went, oh, Bob wants to be hypnotised.
23:46 He wants the works.
23:47 [LAUGHTER]
23:51 So I thought-- I don't know what the works are,
23:53 but I thought what I would do is I
23:56 would do a full kind of trance-based hypnosis.
23:58 I would do a rapid induction, all of that kind of stuff,
24:00 instead of the eyes open stuff, because I
24:03 knew a friend of mine had already done some of that stuff
24:06 on him before.
24:07 And in his mind-- this is a weird thing--
24:09 his hand had been stuck on all of this,
24:10 but he'd never been hypnotised, because the guy had said
24:13 at the head of time, this is not hypnosis,
24:17 which is my classic setup.
24:19 This is not hypnosis.
24:20 What I usually do is reframe it later on to being hypnosis.
24:23 But he never did that reframing.
24:25 So as far as the guy was concerned,
24:26 even though he'd had his hand stuck and had an amnesia
24:29 experience, he hadn't experienced hypnosis.
24:31 So I had to do something that would be framed as hypnosis.
24:34 So I was very careless with my setup,
24:38 because I thought, well, they've all been talking about it.
24:42 The work's probably done.
24:43 So I got very lazy.
24:44 I went, yeah, sure, no problem.
24:46 There was a group of people.
24:47 I said, can you come up in front of the group?
24:49 And the guy got nervous straight away,
24:50 because I think he wasn't expecting to be brought up
24:53 in front of the group.
24:55 And I did a rapid induction.
24:57 And I think I did a hand-to-face induction,
25:00 if I remember rightly.
25:01 But whichever induction I did, it
25:03 involved a rapid click of the fingers and the word "sleep,"
25:07 at which point the guy went, vroom,
25:09 and hit the ground like that.
25:11 I've never seen it before.
25:12 I've never seen someone take sleep quite that literally.
25:16 But he just went, vroom, and then went, whoa, and got up
25:19 and was really--
25:20 and I said, that's OK.
25:21 I said, we're going to do this again.
25:23 And this time, you will find yourself
25:26 being very solid in your feet, very centred,
25:28 and very well balanced, even though you're
25:30 going to a deep and profound state.
25:31 So I did it again, same induction.
25:37 I went, sleep.
25:39 And he went, no, like that, opened his eyes
25:42 and shouted, no.
25:44 And I said, that's OK.
25:45 We don't have to do this.
25:48 Now, in some senses, what we were planning to do
25:51 never happened.
25:52 But it was not perceived as a failure.
25:56 It was perceived as a very powerful moment
25:58 by the people watching.
25:59 It was perceived as, whoa, that guy knows his stuff.
26:04 I don't even do that whole mind-control Svengali frame.
26:07 I don't even like that.
26:08 I just happen to get it on that occasion by default.
26:13 So you will get these critical moments.
26:15 Some critical moments, some failures
26:16 are not failures anyway.
26:19 What is a failure?
26:20 What is failure?
26:22 [INAUDIBLE]
26:23 I don't know the definition of what a success is.
26:25 Mm.
26:27 I'm having a lot of mess up.
26:28 It's your perception as well as the subject's perception
26:31 that just because you didn't hypnotise someone,
26:34 you may perceive yourself as failed,
26:37 whereas everyone else is, wow, he's amazing.
26:40 Absolutely, yeah.
26:40 Or you may achieve something, like you said,
26:42 the non-trance stuff.
26:43 And you've succeeded.
26:45 Like you say, they might say, yeah, but I wasn't hypnotised.
26:48 So maybe they class as a failure.
26:50 I think hypnosis is a lot about management of perception.
26:52 Yeah.
26:52 Isn't it just about what they perceive as hypnosis is--
26:56 if their perception is banned, you know, trance,
27:00 and you don't produce that, then they're hypnotised.
27:03 I mean, I saw a show the other night
27:04 where the people who were concerned
27:07 had dressed it up and, like, complicated matters
27:10 to a lot of people by saying, this is not going to be--
27:12 I'm not trying to produce hypnosis here.
27:15 It's a state of--
27:17 I'm going to produce a state of symbolism.
27:20 Right.
27:21 But it's not hypnosis.
27:22 Yeah.
27:23 I wouldn't do that.
27:23 I would use a not-hypnosis frame.
27:25 But I wouldn't then introduce a word
27:26 that means nothing to nobody.
27:28 But then they don't-- because they don't understand
27:30 what that means, they don't see it as being trance hypnosis.
27:33 It's just a word that they don't understand.
27:34 Well, we're going to get into this,
27:36 because a lot of this is about engineering perceptions,
27:40 engineering people's perceptions, which
27:41 I think is the bedrock of hypnosis,
27:43 the core of hypnosis.
27:44 For me, it's not about trance and altered state.
27:48 It's about managing people's perceptions.
27:50 It's about engaging their beliefs.
27:52 This is what I believe it's about.
27:53 I believe that hypnosis uses everyday cognitive faculties,
27:58 stuff that we do all the time to make sense of the world.
28:00 The same processes we utilise in doing hypnosis
28:05 to alter people's perception of reality
28:07 on many different levels.
28:09 This is one way of doing it, managing perception.
28:12 Looking at this, we've got these critical events.
28:14 We've got success.
28:14 We've got failure.
28:15 Simple choice.
28:17 But we want to introduce a third thing, which
28:19 is the no fail, which I'm just going to put as NF.
28:27 I haven't given myself a big enough circle.
28:29 But this allows us to move on to the next bit,
28:33 or-- got complex with this.
28:37 It allows us to exit, but in a very specific way.
28:41 So this is the simple thing.
28:43 We are looking for these critical points.
28:44 There will be critical points.
28:47 The critical points usually come before phrases like this.
28:54 Go ahead and lift that foot and find that it's stuck.
28:58 There's a critical point.
28:59 It was a critical point because you can fail at that point.
29:06 Not all critical points are that strong.
29:08 And it depends how you set them up.
29:11 There's one chap I know who's kind of famous for really going
29:17 to town with so much gusto.
29:18 Somebody that had their eyes closed up being trance.
29:20 He'll be going, you're so deeply in trance.
29:22 In a moment when I touch you on the shoulder,
29:24 you will open your eyes.
29:25 Your name will be gone, disappeared, completely gone
29:29 from your mind, from your imagination, gone.
29:32 One, two, open your eyes wide awake.
29:34 What's your name?
29:35 Bob.
29:38 And he really sets it up every single time
29:40 as that critical moment.
29:41 His response to that is usually, shit!
29:43 [LAUGHTER]
29:46 And then straight back in with another induction,
29:49 which is fine.
29:50 But we want to set it up differently.
29:52 We want to create these moments of choice.
29:54 We want to create these moments of maneuverability.
29:56 The first thing to be aware of is
29:58 to be aware of your material, to be aware of the things
30:01 that you are going to do, are likely to do,
30:03 are planning to do, and be aware of the critical failure points.
30:10 I know, with the stuff that I do, where it can fail.
30:15 And I know I have a number of choices and maneuvers
30:18 at that point.
30:19 One more thing I want to say at this point about failure.
30:23 And this is something that I learned
30:28 from a guy called James Brown, who
30:30 may have been coming here today.
30:32 Some people in this room already know James.
30:35 And he was talking to me on the phone about this.
30:37 But I've spoken to him a lot about this over the last year.
30:40 He was telling me this stuff.
30:41 And I said, you know, James, you're telling me this stuff.
30:44 I will pinch it.
30:45 I will steal it and tell people.
30:47 So I'm giving James full credit for this.
30:49 But one thing that James points out, and it's absolutely true,
30:53 is that when you're the authority in a situation,
30:55 particularly a situation that somebody knows nothing about,
30:58 the person you're working with is likely
30:59 has never really experienced hypnosis before.
31:01 If they have, not extensively.
31:03 You are the expert.
31:05 So your responses define the moments
31:10 that happen in the interaction.
31:12 They look to you to know what's right, what's wrong.
31:17 They don't know what's supposed to happen.
31:19 I used to do public speaking at Toastmasters.
31:21 And one of the great pieces of advice I was given--
31:24 afterwards, I remember I did a speech,
31:26 and it didn't really work out.
31:28 I forgot half the stuff I was going to say.
31:30 And I was saying to the guy who was mentoring me,
31:31 I forgot half my points.
31:33 He said, it doesn't matter.
31:34 They don't know the points that you were going to be making.
31:38 So they don't know that you forgot half your points.
31:40 The story that James Brown tells is
31:47 of a relative of his, a little girl, who the first time
31:51 when she was learning to walk, she fell over
31:54 after taking her first few steps.
31:58 And the first thing she did that James noticed
32:01 was that she looked to her mum to see how she should respond.
32:07 Because she didn't know at that point.
32:09 She had no reference experience of her own.
32:11 And her mum went, yay, well done.
32:14 So from that point on, every time she fell over,
32:17 she just smiled and laughed.
32:19 Whereas if the mum had gone, oh, no,
32:22 it would have framed it as failure.
32:24 Now, we're not children.
32:25 The people we work with are not children.
32:27 They're adults.
32:28 But they are still looking to you as the authority
32:31 to define those moments.
32:33 So the first thing is to know that you
32:40 don't need to respond to those moments of failure.
32:46 In fact, you don't even need to respond at all,
32:48 internally speaking.
32:51 Last year, I did a lot of work doing
32:54 various motivational talks for a further education college that
32:58 has no academic courses.
33:00 Most of the kids there are defined
33:02 as behaviorally challenged.
33:05 And I was being brought in to do various talks
33:08 on various different subjects, sometimes on interview skills,
33:12 sometimes on sports psychology for the coaching groups
33:15 and this kind of thing.
33:16 But most of the kids there, they don't really
33:17 want to be there.
33:18 And they're actually quite embittered and cynical
33:20 about life.
33:21 And one of the things that I learned quickly
33:22 is they chuck stuff at you all the time, little pebbles,
33:25 little flicks.
33:26 They make comments.
33:27 They try and undermine you.
33:28 And if you respond internally, that's it.
33:32 They'll rip you apart.
33:36 But if you act as if it's business as usual,
33:39 it's no problem.
33:39 It's the utilization principle from Ericksonian hypnosis,
33:42 from NLP.
33:44 So one example here is I was doing
33:45 a talk for a group of lads about-- it was just
33:50 a general motivational talk about them
33:51 being able to achieve things they want to achieve, x, y,
33:54 and z.
33:54 And I'd introduced myself as a hypnotherapist, somebody
33:56 that helps people to make changes in their lives.
33:59 And I'd done all my motivational stuff about halfway through.
34:02 And I'd been talking about beliefs,
34:04 how beliefs shape our perceptions,
34:05 this kind of thing.
34:07 And the one guy went, he says, oh, this
34:10 is what you do for a living, is it?
34:12 I went, that's right.
34:13 He said, well, you must be pretty shit then
34:14 because you haven't changed my mind about anything.
34:16 [LAUGHTER]
34:18 So at that point, I'm faced with a choice.
34:21 I can go, oh, no, oh, and get defensive and fight back,
34:25 in which case they would have had me.
34:27 They would have taken me apart.
34:28 It would have just been like a swarm of locusts coming in.
34:34 So I had to utilize it.
34:35 The first step is to not respond internally.
34:38 I learned during that year if you get a little--
34:40 a jump, a fluster, anything like that, non-verbally,
34:43 it communicates panic, failure.
34:47 And the claws come in.
34:49 So the trick is not to response.
34:50 I used a version of the no-fail protocol.
34:54 I went, brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
34:57 Did you all hear that?
34:58 Could you say that again?
35:01 Which is the last thing the guy expected me to say,
35:04 to get him to repeat his undermining comment,
35:06 to affirm that it's good, it's a brilliant thing,
35:09 get him to repeat it.
35:10 Could you say that again?
35:11 Second time he said it, it was a bit different.
35:13 It went, oh, you must be pretty shit because you
35:18 haven't changed my mind.
35:20 Suddenly changed to a questioning tonality.
35:24 And I said, that's brilliant.
35:25 That's a perfect example of how beliefs get shaped,
35:29 how your beliefs get shaped.
35:30 Because I have a choice right now.
35:32 I can listen to what he says.
35:33 I can take it on board.
35:35 I can allow it to affect me and my image of myself and who I am.
35:39 Or I can realize I have a choice.
35:41 And you all have a choice at this point.
35:44 So it's no-fail.
35:45 It's utilization.
35:47 It's taking that moment, flowing with it.
35:49 There's another example I'm not sure whether to share or not,
35:56 which is kind of funny.
35:59 OK, I will.
36:01 I was doing the sports psychology group.
36:03 And I was talking about getting into flow,
36:07 into that state, into that mindset,
36:09 where you're playing at your best.
36:11 So I said, when you're playing at your best, that's like what?
36:15 And we'd gone in and got this state.
36:17 We're getting quite into this.
36:18 And then I said, so what do you do?
36:20 Because they all played sports.
36:21 What do you do before a game, before a match,
36:23 to get yourself into that flow state, into that flow?
36:26 And one of them's gone, I have a wank.
36:28 So instead of going, oh, we'll have less of that behavior
36:33 in here, thank you very much.
36:34 I said, right, brilliant.
36:36 I have a wank.
36:36 And wrote it up on the flip chart.
36:39 And then I've said, so how many times
36:41 do you need to wank before you get into that state?
36:45 All of a sudden, all the attention is on,
36:47 and he's sort of, drrrr, before he
36:50 was going to be the big guy, the ringleader of the trouble,
36:52 and all of that.
36:53 But I didn't respond in a panic or in a sort of, oh my god,
36:57 what do I do?
36:58 Just flow.
37:00 Just flow.
37:02 There's a rule, and we'll come back to it again.
37:04 There's a rule.
37:05 Whatever happens, utilize it.
37:08 Your first response should be pace it and affirm it.
37:12 If you say, your foot's stuck, and they lift your foot,
37:14 you go, that's right, you can lift that foot,
37:17 right before you even thought about the next bit you say.
37:20 If you go, that's right, you can lift that foot,
37:24 then make the rest up.
37:25 Well, I don't make the rest up.
37:25 I've got it all planned.
37:26 But that's my first response.
37:28 If something unexpected ever happens, I will utilize it.
37:32 And as your mobile phone starts ringing,
37:34 you go deeper and deeper.
37:36 Yeah, yes, speaking of which, I will turn my mobile phone off.
37:43 Did anyone see the video?
37:45 And it was filmed in this room on a previous workshop
37:48 where I mishandled a transition.
37:51 The guy's hand had been stuck, and I
37:53 wanted to do a force field so he couldn't touch his nose.
37:56 And I said, when you try and touch your nose,
37:58 you'll find a force field that pushes your finger away.
38:00 The harder you try and touch your nose,
38:02 the more it's pushed away.
38:04 And he went like that.
38:09 Now, my first response was to not respond,
38:11 to not have an internal response, to not go, oh, no.
38:16 Because then I'm framing it for him.
38:17 I'm leading him.
38:18 I'm the expert.
38:19 I don't want to lead him in that perception.
38:22 So I've gone, that's right.
38:23 You can touch your nose.
38:24 Touch your nose again.
38:26 So instantly, I've utilized, I've
38:28 hijacked the behavior that was outside of my frame.
38:31 Touch your nose again, and one more time.
38:33 And this time, just leave your finger on your nose
38:35 and look at my finger, and straight back in.
38:40 No response, no internal response
38:43 that marks that up as failure.
38:45 Seize the moment, blow with it.
38:47 So we've got these hypnotic events.
38:49 We're going to have a break in a minute.
38:50 I'm just going to share these two rules.
38:52 Then after we share these two rules,
38:55 we are going to do a little exercise.
39:00 And we're going to do a lot of exercises today.
39:02 I've done most of the talking I'm going to do.
39:04 These are the two rules for effective no-fail maneuvers.
39:09 Each maneuver must be congruent with the overall framing
39:13 of the hypnosis process that you're running.
39:16 You may be calling it hypnosis.
39:17 You may be calling it energy work.
39:18 You may be calling it something interesting
39:20 about how the mind works, whatever.
39:23 But it must be congruent with the overall framing.
39:28 Now, I'll share with you what that means.
39:30 This is my process overview,
39:34 my hypnosis without trance process overview.
39:36 We're not learning this today.
39:39 This I teach in the weekend workshop
39:41 and it's taught on the home study stuff,
39:43 the hypnosis mastery program.
39:45 Phase one is set up and pre-framing.
39:48 So who's heard about doing a pre-talk
39:52 ahead of doing hypnosis?
39:53 This is a bit like that, but it's not a pre-talk.
39:57 It's a pre-communication.
39:58 It's a pre-conversation.
39:59 It's about designing a reality
40:02 that will fit with that person.
40:04 It's about engaging their beliefs
40:05 so you can start to do quality hypnosis.
40:08 But one of the key parts,
40:10 the way I talk about setting things up
40:14 is to, what I've written here is phase one up here,
40:18 the set up and pre-framing is beyond pre-talk.
40:22 It's about establishing an operational mythology
40:24 that provides a big because.
40:27 That provides something that's gonna engage their beliefs,
40:30 that's gonna give them a reason
40:31 for the weird stuff to happen that's gonna happen.
40:33 That's not what we're talking about today.
40:35 What we also do in this phrase,
40:36 and this is what we're at phase,
40:38 which is what we're talking about today,
40:39 is build maneuverability into the process.
40:42 We want to set up frames that give us choices
40:46 about how to move later on.
40:49 Because if we set up a frame that says,
40:51 I am a hypnotist, and I am going to melt your mind,
40:55 you will experience your hand being stuck to the table.
41:01 You will experience, you will be unable to do this.
41:04 If you set up a hard frame like that,
41:07 it's not to say that can't work, 'cause it can.
41:10 It can be very persuasive, very powerful,
41:12 but what it does mean is it gives you less space to maneuver.
41:15 If you've said you will do something
41:16 with absolute clarity and certainty,
41:18 you've got nowhere to go if it's not happening.
41:20 So we're building up frames that set choices,
41:24 maneuverability.
41:26 So the maneuvers that we want to make
41:28 must be congruent with the framing
41:30 that we've done at the beginning.
41:32 (breathing)
41:34 If I've said I'm gonna make myself invisible,
41:37 and then what happened with Pat happens,
41:40 I've lost the game because I said that.
41:42 I pre-framed it badly.
41:43 The second point is each maneuver must frame the moment
41:49 as both intended and significant.
41:52 Now this isn't quite right.
41:53 Intended, I struggled with this word.
41:55 What I mean is whatever happens,
41:58 when you manage that little maneuver
41:59 to deal with that critical point,
42:01 whatever happens has to seem deliberate,
42:03 has to seem within your control, within your knowledge.
42:06 It has to seem like something that was always likely
42:09 to happen, always going to happen.
42:12 And significant means that it's got some weight to it,
42:16 some power, it's not just some trite thing
42:18 that you go, "Well, there you go.
42:21 "That proves you were hypnotized, doesn't it?"
42:23 No.
42:25 Or, "Isn't that weird that you just picked your hand up
42:28 "and waved it around?"
42:29 "Not really.
42:30 "I could do that sort of thing all the time."
42:33 So you have to make that moment seem at least
42:36 a little bit different, a little bit odd,
42:38 a little bit significant and a bit intended.
42:41 So the key is all about framing.
42:43 It's all about framing.
42:45 I will just say this about framing.
42:47 The idea of framing is this.
42:49 Imagine as human beings, we all walk around
42:52 constantly asking the question,
42:54 "What is it that's happening here?"
42:56 Everywhere we go, we evaluate the situation
42:59 by asking that question, "What is it that's happening here?"
43:02 And we access our entire experience
43:05 and reference it to the information that's around us
43:08 and come up with an answer,
43:09 which is the frame for the experience.
43:12 What we do is we answer that question for them.
43:17 When somebody's asking unconsciously,
43:20 "What is it that's happening here?"
43:22 We need to provide the answer for them,
43:24 not leave them to come to their own conclusions,
43:26 which may be favorable to us
43:28 or may not be favorable to us.
43:29 We are always dictating the content of what is happening,
43:34 the answer to that question.
43:35 And the more that we can do that,
43:37 the more effective we can be as hypnotists.
43:40 We're gonna take a break,
43:43 but I've got to say something about truth quickly.
43:46 I was having a conversation with a hypnotist the other day.
43:51 She's a very good hypnotist,
43:53 but she's got a very different belief
43:54 about what hypnosis is from mine.
43:56 Her belief is that it is about an altered state.
43:58 It can be measured with functional MRI scans
44:01 and all of this kind of stuff.
44:03 My argument to that is if you rig somebody up
44:07 to a functional MRI machine and get them to eat a donut,
44:10 you will record a particular state shift,
44:12 but it does not mean that donut eating is that state shift.
44:15 But anyway, that's beside the point.
44:17 What she was saying is she'd seen another hypnotist
44:18 who had enraged her because this other hypnotist
44:21 had said that she wasn't going to do hypnosis
44:24 and then had gone along to do something
44:26 that was quite obviously was hypnosis
44:29 and that it was wrong to lie like that to people.
44:33 And I said to her, I said, "I do that all the time."
44:39 In fact, I think that that's what hypnosis is in a sense,
44:44 not lying, but framing.
44:46 You can make up your own mind about what that means,
44:51 but I'm a great believer that getting into the philosophy
44:55 of it, and I don't want to go too deeply,
44:57 I don't believe really much in objective reality.
45:00 I think we always filter reality.
45:02 We always change it.
45:03 We always interpret it somehow.
45:04 We always frame it.
45:05 I don't think anybody knows what hypnosis is at all.
45:10 And I think you could ask a hundred hypnotists
45:12 and it will be something subtly different
45:13 for each one of them.
45:14 They certainly don't know what trance is
45:15 'cause since I did the hypnosis without trance thing,
45:18 I've had so many people saying,
45:19 "Yes, but this is trance, but that's trance,
45:21 "but this is trance, but that's trance."
45:24 So I don't know what the truth is,
45:27 so I can play with it.
45:30 I'm comfortable in playing with it.
45:32 Now, whatever you believe the truth about hypnosis to be,
45:36 I would recommend using that as the basis, as the bedrock.
45:39 I can tell people it's about an altered state,
45:43 and occasionally I do, even though I don't believe that.
45:46 Mostly, I'm pretty upfront.
45:48 I say, "You know, hypnosis is really to do
45:49 "with how your mind works.
45:51 "It's about capacities you have within your own mind
45:53 "to literally change how you perceive reality,
45:56 "to literally shift your experience,
45:58 "which is why it's such a powerful thing for hypnotherapy."
46:01 I'll tell people that.
46:02 That's pretty much in a line with what I believe,
46:05 but I could also say,
46:07 "Well, it's whatever you need it to be, really.
46:09 "It's just a load of bluff
46:11 "that just engages your imagination,"
46:13 but that would make it weak.
46:14 It wouldn't be a strong thing to do.
46:15 So most of my approach,
46:18 and if this is difficult for some people,
46:20 then I can only apologise.
46:21 Most of my approach is based on being highly malleable
46:25 with the truth.
46:27 I don't know what the truth is,
46:28 but it's all about framing.
46:29 It's all about managing perceptions.
46:32 Let me just say something about this setup phase now.
46:37 The setup and pre-framing.
46:43 How you set hypnosis up
46:51 will differ depending on who you're doing it with,
46:55 where you're doing it,
46:56 and the purpose for doing it.
46:59 So everybody in this room is gonna find themselves
47:03 in different situations
47:05 where they want to be doing hypnosis.
47:08 Now, this idea of examining stuff
47:09 and picking out critical points and building manoeuvres,
47:13 it starts ahead of time
47:14 'cause you want to build in manoeuvrability
47:17 at the beginning so the manoeuvres can take place.
47:21 Here is an example of the kinds of things that I will say.
47:30 I've put not a script up here
47:33 because I want you all to know that this is not a script.
47:36 You may be tempted to write these things down
47:38 if you could read them,
47:39 if I hadn't written them so small,
47:40 but I'd rather you connect it with the ideas.
47:45 (pages rustling)
47:48 So here I've written,
47:49 "People think that hypnosis is about mind control,
47:52 "but it's not really."
47:53 Now, a classic element of pre-talk
47:56 is to take away fears and this kind of thing.
47:58 So in a sense, I'm doing this.
48:00 I go, "People think that hypnosis is about mind control,
48:02 "but it's not really."
48:04 Looking at the subtleties,
48:06 I haven't said, "But it's absolutely not."
48:08 I've said that it's not really.
48:11 So there's a little bit of ambiguity in there.
48:14 It's much more about tapping into the potential
48:17 you have within your own mind,
48:19 which can be very powerful.
48:21 Now, this is a kind of framing I will classically use.
48:24 I'm quite humble in my approach to hypnosis.
48:26 I make it all about the client, all about the subject,
48:30 and not all about me and my Svengali powers.
48:32 This is my choice.
48:33 And I'd like to put my hand up
48:35 and say it's a benevolent choice
48:37 because I want to empower the person,
48:39 and that's partly true,
48:42 but it's also about building in maneuverability as well.
48:45 So I say it's much more about tapping into the potential
48:49 you have within your own mind.
48:51 Also, I'm incentivizing the person here
48:53 by telling them they have potential in their own mind,
48:56 and they're gonna be learning to tap into this.
48:59 So this is incentivizing them to go along with the process.
49:02 I mention this as a point aside.
49:04 It's nothing to do with the no-fail bit.
49:06 And I say, "Which can be very powerful?"
49:12 Ultimately, leading to quite profound shifts in reality,
49:15 which is why it's so good for helping people
49:19 to make positive changes.
49:20 Now, when you take this little setup bit as a whole,
49:25 these little bits of framing,
49:26 and this isn't a whole setup in totality.
49:28 It's just an example of how you will pre-frame.
49:32 When you take this, what does it all mean?
49:36 In pink and purple here, beautifully lettered,
49:41 it says ambiguity.
49:43 It probably makes your eyes funny looking at that,
49:45 but if it does, then notice how that takes you deeply
49:49 into trance.
49:51 Ambiguity, how much ambiguity is built into this?
49:54 'Cause I could have been really specific in my setup.
49:58 I could have told him exactly what I was gonna do
50:00 and how I was gonna do it and when I was gonna do it,
50:02 and exactly what mechanisms were at work.
50:05 But I haven't said that.
50:06 I've said a load of stuff which sounds really quite nice
50:08 and powerful and intoxicating,
50:11 but it's totally vague.
50:13 It's much more about tapping into the potential.
50:16 What is the potential?
50:18 What does that mean?
50:20 What specific potential, not specified.
50:22 You have within your own mind,
50:24 whereabouts within your own mind,
50:26 you could say, which can be very powerful.
50:29 What kind of powerful?
50:30 Can I run my car on it?
50:31 I'm not specifying.
50:34 Leading people to fill that in in a vague way and go, ooh.
50:38 Ultimately leading to quite profound shifts in reality.
50:42 What is a profound shift in reality?
50:44 Is it like going, ooh,
50:50 everything looks slightly different at the moment,
50:52 or ooh, I feel more relaxed than usual,
50:54 or ooh, I can't see that guy that's standing in front of me.
50:57 Ooh, I can't feel my hand.
50:59 What is a profound shift in reality?
51:01 I'm setting up, I'm seeding the idea
51:07 that there will be changes,
51:07 there will be things happening,
51:09 and they will be powerful things,
51:10 whatever powerful means.
51:11 But I'm not specifying.
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