Shifting Your Prospect’s State
After you’ve established rapport between yourself and your prospect, the next step in the process is to shift your prospect into a more suggestible state. This sets the foundation for the conversational hypnosis techniques that will follow. The more suggestible your prospect, the easier it will be to persuade them to your way of thinking.
Shifting your prospect’s state does not involve holding a shiny object in front of their eyes and telling them that they are getting sleepy and drowsy, with eyelids getting heavier and heavier, ready to drift off into a pleasant state of hypnosis.
WAKE UP! (I know you were starting to drift off there a little. The automatic nature of the human mind, remember?)
What we generally do, however, is talk about things that will cause the automatic nature of the mind to drop down into a more suggestible state. Talking about being relaxed is one way of doing it. Here’s one example of how this could be done.
“Isn’t it great when you can just relax your whole body, releasing every ounce of tension that collected during the day, to the point where you feel a sense of warmth growing inside of you? I know that when I relax, my whole perspective on life changes for the better and I begin to see the wonderful things right in front of me, things that will suddenly have a great significance in life. This is great, isn’t it?”
Later in this book, we will cover 10 different things you can do to shift your prospect’s state. Most of these techniques have one thing in common – they redirect your prospect to focus on something that is not in conscious awareness. By directing your prospect to focus on something that is not in conscious awareness, your prospect MUST shift into a subconscious awareness to follow along in the conversation. And when anyone is focusing on a subconscious awareness, they are more suggestible and can be persuaded more easily. NLP experts call this state ‘downtime’.
One of the techniques we use to shift our prospect’s state is to ask them to remember past events. Memories are not in conscious awareness, so recalling a memory takes us into a subconscious, suggestible state. Asking your prospect to imagine a hypothetical situation, or a possible outcome to a situation does much the same thing. They have to think about something that is not within their conscious awareness, so they have to shift into downtime.
“Can you tell me what would happen if you were to walk up to someone as if you had more confidence and pretended to be an authority? Is it possible that they would simply accept you as being the authority you claimed to be and respond by trusting your judgment?”
One of the reasons that hypnotherapists start out by getting their clients to focus on their breathing is because it is something that is not in the client’s conscious awareness. They also induce hypnotic trance by talking about relaxation and suggesting that the client will begin to notice different things that normally happen as they relax.
Classic hypnotic techniques are used extensively in power persuasion. Throughout this course, you will also find many techniques that professional hypnotists themselves rarely use. In fact, by the time you finish this course, you will be able to get better results in less time than 95% of all professional hypnotists.