Hypnosis Book Review

If you want to learn how to hypnotize people, the first thing you need to do is to focus on building rapport with your subject. This can be as simple as calling them by their first name often and smiling and nodding as they talk.

You will also want to test someone’s suggestibility to see if they are truly open to suggestion. Suggestibility tests will vary depending on the method of induction you decide to use. For example, if you choose a traditional induction, you can simply use an “arm drop” test, where you ask your subject to relax their arm while you hold their wrist. Count to three and let go. If their arm drops, they are sufficiently relaxed.

If using a covert or conversational hypnosis induction, you may want to guage their body language and pupil dialation as you talk.

The next step is to chose a method of induction that you feel most confident about:

1. The Progressive Relaxation Induction - With this induction, you slowly and methodically get your subject to relax by having them relax individual body parts and breathe deeply. Average time it takes to induce trance is roughly 10-18 minutes.

2. The Dave Elfman Induction - Similar to the PR induction, the Elfman has a subject focus on relaxing their eyes and testing if they remain close. Then, you simply tell them to send that same level of relaxation throughout their entire body. Also, both you and the subject take turns counting up from the number “one”, relaxing the subject at each number. The average time to complete is usually 4-9 minutes.

3. The Handshake Interrupt Induction - This is a rapid induction technique and you should only attempt this method after you have a few successful “standard” hypnosis sessions under your belt. Basically, you use around a minute of suggestibility testing and rapport building while talking to gain trust and then stick your hand out awaiting a handshake from the other person. As they reach for your hand, you grab it with your other hand and hold their hand in front of them. Their mind will take a second to process this pattern interrupt and at that moment you give the simple command, “sleep”. Average time if done correctly can be less than 2 minutes.

If you want to learn more about how to hypnotize people, check out my in-depth review of good conversational hypnosis courses. 

Or you can simply go to http://www.conversationalhypnosiscourse.info for more details.

~Jarrod