Conversational Hypnosis Mastery

(1)

Transcript Manual – Part 2

By Igor Ledochowski

(2)

2

3

DVD 36: The Secret to Combining Stories into Hard Hitting Hypnotic Code that the

Conscious Mind has Absolutely No Hope of Stopping ...319

DVD 37: Conversational Hypnosis Mastery – How to Put It all Together Quickly &

Easily ...339

The Conversational Hypnosis Mastery Seminar is the sole property of Street Hypnosis Publishing (including, but not limited to text, content, graphics, video and audio) and is protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws. You must abide by all additional copyright notices or restrictions contained in this law.

YOU MAY NOT POST ON A WEB SITE OR CREATE A WEB FRAME AROUND ANY PART OF THIS SERVICE (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, TEXT, CONTENT, PHOTOGRAPHS, VIDEO AND AUDIO).

YOU MAY NOT COPY, REPRODUCE, DISTRIBUTE, PUBLISH, DISPLAY, PERFORM, MODIFY, CREATE DERIVATIVE WORKS, TRANSMIT, OR IN ANY WAY EXPLOIT ANY PART OF THIS SERVICE, EXCEPT THAT YOU MAY DOWNLOAD MATERIAL FROM THIS SERVICE FOR YOUR OWN PERSONAL,

NONCOMMERCIAL USE AS FOLLOWS: YOU MAY MAKE ONE MACHINE READABLE COPY AND/OR ONE PRINT COPY THAT IS LIMITED TO OCCASIONAL ARTICLES OF PERSONAL INTEREST ONLY.

WITHOUT LIMITING THE GENERALITY OF THE FOREGOING, YOU MAY NOT DISTRIBUTE ANY PART OF THIS SERVICE OVER ANY NETWORK, INCLUDING A LOCAL AREA NETWORK, NOR SELL NOR OFFER IT FOR SALE. IN ADDITION, THESE FILES MAY NOT BE USED TO CONSTRUCT ANY KIND OF DATABASE.

(4)

4 DVD 23: How to Access the Unconscious

Mind by Hiding Metaphors & Similes in

Everyday Language

Igor: Hi. Good morning.

It was very charming. When I was in Thailand last year as part of a program, I was doing some volunteer work and they had all these little kids. In Asia the position of teachers are very high status positions. All the kids are sitting there going, good morning teacher Igor. I’m going, all right. It was a little unusual.

Are you all good and rested? How many of you have been flashers? Did you enjoy it? Did you get some interesting results and responses? More importantly, did you notice how if sometimes you made the eyebrow flash but didn’t follow through and then it was just a moment of confusion. They’re like, I don’t know.

Then other times you’ll do the eyebrow flash and you follow through, and that’s when it seems like a more instant connection is created and so on. Did you notice that in the live world and that freaky jungle of humanity? It’s important, the reason why we have those three key steps in the method – the inner smile sets the context, the emotional thing. The flash opens up, it’s like an invitation to treat and saying hey, let’s have interaction here and then that mirroring part that you do at the end with maybe a friendly smile or something as well. That maintains the momentum so it clicks in place so it actually develops into something. You don’t just do the flash and hope for the best, right? Good.

What I want to start doing now has nothing to do with that at all, something completely different, as Monty Python would say. I like to focus the last four days, so like the advanced portion of the advanced conversational hypnosis thing on something I think is very important. It’s one of the most fundamental vehicles in conversational hypnosis. Everyone knows about,

(5)

5

Hypnotic stories are incredibly powerful. Stories alone are incredibly powerful. The problem is most people teach you what to do, not how to do it. Oh, it must be the same structure and the same shape and you have to have these characters that mirror, but not too closely. Well, what does all that stuff mean?

If you look at the academia around storytelling and so on you will see that there are literally, hundreds of categories that people have pulled up. In just metaphors alone there are extended metaphors, mixed metaphors, pataphors, dying metaphors, root metaphors. The list is huge. Then you have other things – allegories, similes, parables, anecdotes, this huge list of different vehicles that have story-ness to them and it can be overwhelming. By the way, it’s worth investigating all those things, but like anything else, it’s not worth focusing on all of it at once. Those things become useful once there’s a base skill through which it all feeds.

The other thing you should know is that contrary to popular belief, storytelling is one of the most natural things in the world. Who here thinks they’re not a good storyteller? Anyone here think they’ve got issues with storytelling?

If you don’t think you’re a great storyteller and incidentally, I would put myself in that category and have more many years, then it’s purely and simply because when you’re trying to tell your stories, you’re trying too hard. To the extent that you stop, you might surprise yourself with how much better your stories are then you first realized.

To give you a very personal example, when I was in school, I was I don’t know, 13 or 14 or something like that in one of the English classes. It was, in fact, probably the only time in English class I was actually asked to write a story it’s kind of bizarre. In eight or nine years of education or pre-university education, I’d been asked to write one story, not quite sure why and I put my heart and soul into this.

(6)

6

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved I was like, at the time, into the whole fantasy adventure genre, so I filled the next five pages with as many clichés as I could stick on a page. I guess looking back on it now it would be quite an embarrassing piece of work. It wasn’t good but, of course, I’m just putting the little favorite bits of all the things I’d read into one story, which probably made no sense and got a rather poor result.

The interesting thing about that poor result is it destroyed my faith in the idea of storytelling. I thought I just haven’t got it. I felt terrible. The whole page was covered in marks and things like cliché, dull, boring and uninventive. I took all those things on-board and thought I guess that’s what I am. For the next, I don’t know, 10 years or so I didn’t really even try or attempt anything to do with storytelling.

Jokes and especially storytelling jokes really didn’t take much either – I mean again, I kind of get carried away and so on. Then one night something very interesting happened. I’d been out with some from, you know, at university, some 15 years ago now I guess.

I’d been out with some friends and we’d had a few drinks, so I was kind of feeling quite good and been laughing all night, you know those kinds of nights. I was making my way back to my apartment block and it was one of those beautiful nights.

Where I went to university in Exeter is out in the west country of England and its the closest to the ‘Lord of the Rings’ country as you can get in the U.K. There are tiny little winding lanes, leafy farms and farmers with little haystacks coming out of their ears. So it’s a little picturesque scene.

I’m walking and it’s late at night. There’s a little bit of mist on the ground, its England so there’s always mist. The moon is shining and for some reason there’s no one around. It’s very quiet, a peaceful quiet. I don’t know, maybe because I was a little happy, the whole scene sort of struck me a little more fully. I really liked it. I was inspired by it to some degree.

When I actually got home and I went to bed, I just didn’t want to go to bed yet, it was too soon. I wanted to somehow capture that moment. Now maybe it’s because I was a little drunk, but I decided to write something.

(7)

7

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved Only this time I wasn’t really focusing on writing for anyone. The only reason for me to write was to try to capture that feeling I had, because it made me feel good.

I didn’t really care who would read this because I didn’t think anyone would. I didn’t care what would come of it all I cared about was that as I wrote, the words were actually making me feel more of what I had done a moment ago. I don’t know if that makes sense to you or not.

Anyway, I finished it and I read through it and, of course, I had a little glow inside. Some might call it the alcohol. Then I went to bed and forgot all about it. I kind of went off the next day to lectures and stuff happened and all the rest of it. A few days later I came back and I see this thing. This is in the days before laptops were easy and cheap to get hold of, so I had written most of that by hand. I crossed things out and used another word because it just felt better and so on.

I was going through my notes for the last few days, and somewhere in the middle of this stack I found these couple of pages. I read them and went wow, that’s pretty good I still like it. Then a friend of mine read it and said, this is pretty good. I went really? That started to change my opinion a little bit and then the same friend asked, can I borrow this, I’ll just type it up for you so you’ll have it nice and neat. I said that’s great, fine. They gave it back to me a few days later all typed and that was nice.

Anyway, I forget all about this and life goes on as life does. At the end of the year, I get a little envelope through the post. I open it up it’s from the university, so I’m thinking did I do something wrong? Did they catch me cheating? I thought I was good enough that nobody noticed.

So this envelope comes through the post and I open it up. I’m kind of curious why the university would write to me? Inside is a letter and a check. I’m going money is good, but why? It turns out my friend had actually entered this little essay, story or whatever it was – it was actually written in verse because I couldn’t write stories so I had to write in verse, of course – had entered it into a literary competition that was held on campus. It wasn’t

(8)

8

The interesting thing is even though that kind of experience was very positive and other things started happening, I still did not consider myself a storyteller. When I came across the whole idea of hypnosis and storytelling I went, how the hell am I going to do that? How am I going to tell a story to people?

Then of course, I’d go around telling everyone stories about how poor I was at storytelling and the whole time I didn’t realize that it’s when I wasn’t paying attention to whether or not a story was coming out that they were all coming out. Does that kind of make sense?

The irony is you’ve all told thousands of stories over your life. You’ve probably told dozens if not hundreds of stories just this week we’ve been together without even realizing it. Stories about who you are, where you come from, what you do, what you don’t like and what you do like. It’s just that we don’t recognize them when they come in.

What I’d like to do today is to begin to do a couple of things. First, to stimulate your minds to understand what those unconscious building blocks are, from which stories emerge. A story, by the way, in terms of what we’re doing in stimulating the unconscious in these ways, can be expressed sometimes in three or four words. Was it Hemmingway who had the competition of a five-word story, I can’t remember.

They slip out in all the things that we do, so what I’d like to do today is focus on developing that skill, just so you realize that you’ve been doing it all along, now you can do it on purpose and you can build on it to create what we more formally recognize as a story and so on. Does that make sense? The first thing we need to do is have everyone stand up and put all those delicate cups of coffee away to one side where people will not tread on them or destroy your lovely notes. Now, without really thinking too much about it, because as you may have noticed, thinking is our enemy right now. Thinking is a good thing to do, but thinking is something that happens when you’re not doing, right?

(9)

9

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved Right now we’re going to be focusing on doing, so I would encourage you to save the thinking until after the seminar is over when you can reflect back on the experiences you’ve had when there’s actually something worth thinking about.

The first thing I want you to do is walk around and chat with random people, just briefly little 30-second conversations. I’d like you to tell as many different people as possible in this room something that they do not know about you. It doesn’t have to be your biggest, darkest secret. I murdered someone last night and he’s in your sandwich.

I mean a heads up would be nice, but you don’t have to give yourself away that much. It could be something as simple as I like to ski. Something trivial is fine. The point is to go around and start telling different people something they don’t know about you.

If you want to use the same thing again and again, by all means do so, just please make it a little bit more elegant each time. Although, if you want to experiment with how many different things can come out without your realizing it, that’s fine too. Is everyone cool with that? All right guys, take a minute to do that quickly.

Off you go.

It’s relatively easy to do isn’t it? It’s easy to tell someone something they don’t know about you yet because let’s face it, you’ve lived with yourself all your life and they haven’t. One thing I want you to notice is who found the things that the other people were telling you actually relatively interesting? Who considered that what they were telling other people might be relatively boring, anyone? About half of the people in the room maybe.

Consider this, everyone in the room put their hand up when asked if something they were hearing was interesting, only you put your hand up when you thought what you were saying was boring. So either you didn’t talk to anyone or you might consider that there might be something else going on.

(10)

10

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved What I’d like to do now is do exactly the same thing again. You may reuse your secrets or you may come up with new ones. It’s up to you. Only this time if you haven’t done so already, I would like you to place your particular secret, the thing that someone doesn’t know about you, into a specific context.

For example, if you went around saying to people I like to ski you might say something like I like to ski. Last winter I was in Whistler and on one particular day, it was a beautiful sunny day, I went down the slope and I had a great time.

It doesn’t have to be a story. It doesn’t have to be great. It just has to flesh out the secret and put it into some kind of a context. Does that make sense? So for a context, of course, we’ll need a location, we’ll need some kind of timeframe and we’ll need some kind of action. Those are the basic things inside of a context.

Off you go. Just spend a minute doing that.

All right, how was that? Did you enjoy it? Which one was more interesting, the first or the second exercise? The second. I wonder why. So, we’re going to spend some time focusing on some specific types of stories over the next few days just to focus your attention in terms of how to use them. Once you can understand the different types of stories, then when you get across all the other varieties, you’ll have more ideas of how to use them, how to actually do them and what they’re useful for.

The kinds of stories I want to focus on right now over the next few days is

anecdotes. An anecdote is essentially a story you tell about another

person. It could be yourself or someone else. It’s a real story about a real person, something that actually happened.

Then we’ve got the idea of analogies, similes and simple metaphors. These abound everywhere and we’ll be looking at those more closely today. They’re some of the most useful tools for persuasion, because they’re like

(11)

11

Then there’s the fable or the classic story. These are stories that have, shall we say, formal story-ness to them. We know that they’re stories from the beginning or somewhere in the middle of it. We recognize the story-ness of it. We realize it’s not “supposed to be real,” so we forgive the story for, shall we say, violating some things about how the world works, how physics works and so on but, of course, the symbolic meaning still has a lot of impact on us.

Finally, and this is what we come onto more towards the end of the whole advanced session over the next four days, is something called hijack stories. If the idea of hijacking stories sounds intriguing to you, you best stick around. There will be no Marshalls to protect you now. Don’t tell hijack stories in the airport you might get in trouble.

I want to focus now on just the simplest building blocks of what is involved in stories that give story-ness to stories and make them feel richer and something you can slip into normal conversations. People won’t necessarily recognize them as stories, but they’re stimulating the same part of the mind that stories do.

What I’m talking about is a category I like to call hidden metaphors. These are the metaphors used in everyday life, but we’re not really aware of it. The first of these hidden metaphors are classically known as dead metaphors. A dead metaphor is a phrase or an idea that has become so commonplace that people don’t even realize that a metaphor is being presented.

Has anyone ever met someone who’s a real pain in the neck? Did they really have a big neck with pain signals jumping out or is something else going on there? How many people, when someone is described as a pain in the neck flash a visual image of someone’s neck actually hurting and then realizes oh, there’s an analogy here; hence, they make me feel as though someone was chiseling my neck or something?

Has anyone here ever say something like, you know what, I can’t read that report right now that’s just going to give me a headache? Do you actually

(12)

12

Alex is saying that it’s very interesting when you learn a different language. Each language has its own dead metaphors they don’t translate. So as soon as you come across a dead metaphor in a new language, you will interpret it literally. It’s like, what the hell? Why should the shoes be on the wall? What does that mean?

Then as you get the sense of it, when it’s used, how it’s used, and more importantly, sometimes people will actually be able to tell you why it’s used that way, what the bigger metaphor is, it’s kind of a sample of a bigger metaphor. Then it makes sense and then suddenly you start using it, and you stop thinking about the image. Does that make sense?

Dead metaphors are bound. They can be useful, but it’s also very useful to know when they arise, because it tells you a little something about how the other person populates their unconscious realm. Remember, the unconscious mind works symbolically. So, if you imagine, the world we see out here is just a reflection of the world that’s inside of us. Their dead metaphors will tell you what that world looks like to some degree.

What I’d like you to do now is get into groups of say five people, just take five minutes and come up with a list of common dead metaphors that we use in everyday life. That was a red flag. Do you see where we’re going with this? Find four or five people, get into a nice little group and just write down maybe a dozen or 20 or so dead metaphors that are used in daily language. We’ll come back and talk a little bit about it and go from there.

Off you go.

Was that interesting? Would it be fair to say there are quite a few dead metaphors in the English language? It’s probably easier to list what they’re not then what they are. What kinds of things did you find? Give me some examples of the dead metaphors you have?

→ Dead as a doornail → He/she is on the ball

(13)

13

→ Shoe’s on the other foot now → Crazy as a loon

→ Tip of my tongue → She’s a fox

Now, I’m guessing people aren’t saying they’re actually attracted to animals, right? What other things?

→ A shot in the dark → Nerves of steel

Let’s keep that as a list for the moment. I know there are hundreds more of these. Notice how all of this is actually metaphorical communication. We know what it means and it has nothing to do with what they’re actually saying. When someone’s on the ball, they don’t literally have a ball and they’re not sitting on it going, mine!

So something happens inside our brains that let’s us know what those things mean and they have cultural reference points.

This is a cultural shortcut to a whole bunch of reference experience. Do you see how that works? It also tells us a little about what the mental movies are that are running inside people’s minds. Have you noticed how some people use a lot of sports metaphors? Other people use more military metaphors. Others will have artistic metaphors.

It’s actually telling you how they live their life, how they view life and, believe it or not, it tells you a lot about their values, doesn’t it?

What I’d like you to do now is, in your same groups, I’d like you to explore some of these things. I’d like you to explore from your own personal opinion, I’d like you to give me a metaphor for what life is for you, what business or work is like for you and just present it.

For example, you might say life is like a bowl of soup. It’s warm, but sometimes something crunchy comes and surprises you. It really doesn’t matter what it is, the point is I’d like it to be something about how you genuinely feel about life, about love, about your work, about family or any of

(14)

14

Cassie:

♦ Does it have to be a dead metaphor, or can it be your own?

Igor: I prefer it to be your own. If it happens to be a dead metaphor, that’s fine. In

other words, if it happens to be something that most people talk about like love is a battlefield, that’s a common metaphor amongst a lot of people. But it doesn’t have to be. You choose whatever expresses how you view life most naturally. Is everyone clear on that?

All right, just pick a couple of categories like– love, life, work, play or family. These are big, broad categories and then as a group share what your own personal metaphors are that summarize your attitude.

Off you go.

This is still the warm-up phase we haven’t actually got into anything we can do with this stuff yet, but already wouldn’t you say it’s fairly interesting, the stuff that’s coming out? Who here was surprised by some of the life, love or whatever metaphors that other people were giving to them? Who here wanted to argue with them, anyone? No, you’re wrong it’s clearly not like that. You’re only going to get yourself in trouble that way. Don’t put your hands up because I know we all do this sometimes.

So give me some examples of life metaphors that people had just simple little vignettes.

– Life is like a box of chocolates.

Oh, the Forrest Gump one. There’s the box of chocolates. What other kinds of metaphors are there? Go ahead.

– A clown at a funeral.

That’s what life is like? Wow, that’s interesting. Although to be fair, that can be taken two ways, can’t it?

(15)

15

Interesting. Okay, what other life metaphors are there?

– Life is like a bowl of cherries, sweet and juicy, but has the pits. Notice how each of these things extrapolate to something else. Go ahead.

– Amazing adventure or nothing at all.

Notice how the quality of your life will change according to what you view life to be like. So I want you to explore that a little bit now. You can do this in a group if you like, and then you can start playing with them on your own a little bit.

Let’s say that we had three different people with three different relatively common life metaphors.

1. One would be life is like a battlefield.

2. Another one might say life is more like an adventure or an explorer.

3. Another one might be life is more like a community or a builder constructing a house.

How would each of those three people express that metaphor differently? In other words, what kind of language would they be using that fits the context that they have?

For example, the war metaphor. What kind of language or phrases, do people who consider to be a battlefield or a war, what would they be using?

– Strategy and tactics – Struggle

– Take positions – Weapons – Win/lose – Battles

(16)

16

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved Do you see the whole military metaphor here? It’s about winning and losing, it’s about breaking people, it’s about taking positions and it’s about annihilating, destroying or being destroyed. There’s not much room for things like mercy, fun and enjoyment. Let’s have a fun war. Yay!

Let’s go to someone then who looks at life more like an explorer, it’s an adventure. What kind of vocabulary would that person be using?

– Discovery – Navigate – Surprise – Amazement – Unexplained – Twist – Curiosity

Do you see how that creates a very different experience? I’m not going to say it’s going to be better or worse than the war ones, but if you tried that world on, doesn’t life look very different? Isn’t your reason for getting up or your motivations change quite significantly?

Student:

♦ Would this key into the 16 drivers?

Igor: I’m sure that at some level it might very well do, but there’s no research on it

so I couldn’t give you answer either way, but it’s an interesting thing to experiment with, isn’t it?

What about the community builder? What kinds of things do people who have building metaphors, what kinds of things do they use? What community metaphors?

– Sharing – Together – Planning – Common good

What I want you to do now, this is still not necessarily part of the persuasion process. I’d like you to play with the idea of entering different realms,

(17)

17

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved different psychological realities, just to that very simple vignette. Don’t people talk like this constantly anyway? They drop these little vignettes in everything they do? Writing a contract is like having a good meal. You have to make sure you pay attention to it or you’ll waste all the good stuff.

What the hell does writing a contract have to do with a meal, but they envision or experience it that way.

What I want you to do inside your group now is there will be four varieties we’ll do here. I’d like you to adopt a different way of looking at life, love, work and so on, than the metaphor that you carried into this room with you this morning, just to see what it feels like or to notice how it might be a little different.

The first one we’ll do is just a simple simile. A simple simile is to use the Forrest Gump example is life is like a box of chocolates. You do not even explain it. You do not have to add on that, you’ll never know what you’re going to get. There’s no explanation necessary. Just say, life is like a box of chocolates just put it out there and notice what that feels like, for example. Then they have to explore a little bit. What kind of vocabulary might you be using if you actually believed that? If life is like a box of chocolates, what might I be saying well, that’s sweet and a little bitter? That’s not my taste. Overall, it’ good I’ll die nice and fat. Do you see where we’re going with this? I want you to just explore the simple simile level. You don’t need to explain them yet we’ll come onto that afterwards. I’d like you to add one more category into the ones that we’ve been talking about. We’re talking about life – everyone love, work– these are some big ones, family. I’d like to include the category of mastering hypnosis.

What is your metaphor for mastering hypnosis and then try out different ones. No need to explain anything. Just throw out some vocabulary that will be a consequence of that, but no need to explain the actual metaphor yet. Make sense?

(18)

18

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved Was that enjoyable? I’d like to add an extra half to this exercise now that you’ve kind of warmed up into it. Now you have a sense of what it feels like to create a simile. In other words, life is like this and then some of the vocabulary comes out of it. The first question I want to ask you is, how much more real or how much stronger do you feel about that new reality when you start talking about the vocabulary that relates to it?

Does it increase the sensation a little and make it a little bit more real for you? That’s how language creates realities. If you used a vocabulary that does not support your primary metaphor, it kills the metaphor. It pops out of it. This is how people, for example, create poor suggestions. Their phrasing of a suggestion does not live in the same world as someone who has a particular experience being suggested.

Do you see how that works? You want to make sure that your language is always in support of the vocabulary that follows the hypnotic reality that you are creating.

The second point is going to be made in a moment when you contrast the following. You’ve all hopefully, been using the formula life is like, hypnosis is like, or mastering hypnosis is like, work is like and so on. What I’d like you to do now is go from a simile to a true metaphor, and all you have to do to do that is drop the word like.

Life is a bowl of cherries. Work is a walk in the park.

Love is ice cream on a hot sunny day.

Drop the word like and then I’d like you to compare how you feel when you drop the word like to when you actually had the word like in it. Is it the same or is it different? That’s the only question to ask yourself.

So the question is as soon as you come up with a metaphor, just spend 30 seconds coming up with a vocabulary of that. To some extent you’ve already done it with a simile. All I want you to do is contrast the similes you already have, convert them to a metaphor and see if something changes when you do. You’ve already seen a change when you added the vocabulary, have you not?

(19)

19

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved Now see what happens when you drop the word like and just present a genuine metaphor, what the impact is. The language is already there, and if you want to add the language afterwards to compare like to like, that’s fine, but the key thing is comparing what you already have, which is a simile, to a pure metaphor. Make sense? It’s easy to do, right?

Off you go.

How was that? Was that interesting? What happened when you dropped the word like? Did it get stronger or weaker?

Students: Stronger.

Igor: It became more real. That’s interesting, isn’t it? Let’s turn this microphone

on because I suspect you have some interesting comments or insights you want to make.

Student: I think it depends on what it was because, if you said, mastering hypnosis is

like climbing a mountain or mastering hypnosis is climbing a mountain, for us it got more real. But, if you said, life is like a box of chocolates or life is a box of chocolates, that didn’t make as much sense and it was harder to associate being a box of chocolates with like a box of chocolates.

Igor: Did anyone else find that sort of thing as well? So, there will be things in

each person’s mind that will be more attracted or less attracted to the reality you’ve created. The reality in which we become inanimate objects is harder for Westerners to accept; hence, it becomes less real. Does that make sense?

That has to do with culture and indoctrination. If you go to some of the more Shamanic societies, especially like the jungles of South America, Peru and going through the whole Amazon Basin, the idea of becoming an object is very standard.

So life being a box of chocolates– if they have boxes of chocolates in the jungle I guess– would not be that wild of an idea; hence, the impact would

(20)

20

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved be greater. Do you see how these other things are going on, on the outside that will increase or decrease the likelihood that they can accept your metaphor, which is a very important question, can that person, given his cultural background, accept the metaphor, understand it? We don’t understand becoming things. Do you see how that works?

That’s why we have similes as well as metaphors because sometimes we need to drop back to the like so people can accept it as something more distant as a reality that they could grow into, versus that they have to be inside of. Do you see the difference?

It is a subtle point, but it increases the likelihood of something being accepted that might otherwise have been rejected. Is this good stuff?

Student: When I said life is a train with unlimited fuel, there was no expectation to

explain anything else. When I said, life is like a train with unlimited fuel, it’s like the other person wanted to ask me more.

Igor: Right and why do you think that is? Well, it has to do with levels of

consciousness. Life is like, appeals more to the conscious mind. We’re not saying it is something, so consciously you’re going okay well, justify it. Life is a train is appealing more to an unconscious process. Remember, how does the unconscious mind reason? Association Life is a train. No need to explain. Life is like a train. Well, please explain. You’re talking literally to different parts of their minds.

Let me ask you this. Did anyone here find it difficult to actually switch from saying, life is like a train to saying life is a train? Did anyone here feel like I can’t really say that? Do you know why you felt that way? That’s your conscious mind interfering. You’re switching across to a more metaphorical part of your brain and the conscious mind is interfering. Life clearly isn’t like that. That’s your reality strategy saying, it’s only like it. It isn’t it. But, of course, in order for it to be like it, at some level it still is it.

So once again, we’re back to what Arthur discovered which is, if you need something to be accepted, although it might be a little bit more difficult for them to accept initially, you soften the blow, the conscious mind feels accepted because it’s like something it isn’t it. Then over time you can make

(21)

21

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved it that thing, make it that reality and so it becomes more acceptable because they’re more used to it now. Does that kind of make sense?

The comment there was to follow up what we’re saying, which is if you make a comment straight out, some people might reject it if it goes against a conscious idea that’s already in existence. But by softening, the simile is the metaphorical equivalent of a language softener, isn’t it? Do you get a sense of why some of the experiences you’ve been having were there when you were having them? Hopefully, that starts explaining some things.

Student: Just to go off the conscious-unconscious, what you were just discussing

about, I noticed even amongst our group a lot when we were using the metaphors, people’s breathing starts to relax, people closed their eyes. It was as if we were all going into trance just by using the metaphor.

Igor: Because metaphors are more about experience, aren’t they? They are a

revivification of a symbolic reality, as opposed to a physical reality. Interesting? Notice how many people drop these little hypnotic realities around them in normal conversation without having any idea of what they are doing. Isn’t that something?

Student: It was just interesting observing all the trance signals and signs just from a

simple sentence.

Igor: A great observation thank you for that

James: It seems to be me that if I use the word like or as, I’m allowing the person to

let me have that experience. My mind says okay, well that’s your reality and so it’s okay for me to kind of view it, but when I move to it is, that’s something I need to adopt.

Igor: The like is the equivalent of saying here is a window into my world, have a

look. The other one is saying, come into my world and experience it. Make sense? Hence, the softer version is something you present when it’s less likely they’ll accept it, but if your metaphor is so charming, they might just want to drive into it and say wow, I want that. Does that make sense?

(22)

22

Igor: Yes. More importantly, it’s what the word like does. It’s the difference

between a simile and a genuine metaphor. A simile is rationally more acceptable. A metaphor is experientially more concrete; hence, it has a bigger impact.

Your choice points are; are they likely to accept the full experience or do they need a taste of it first before I can get them to dive in and have the full experience. That’s really the main question you have to ask yourself.

Now remember the pacing and leading induction we did a few days ago? You should right now be having some thoughts around using similes and metaphors in similar ways, hopefully. Some sign to click there?

Now I have an important question for you. It has to do with evaluating character. Let’s say I know someone who is in prison now and what he used to do with most of his time was go around with a razor sharp knife – and I apologize for the graphicness of this, but it will help you validate the character. He used to cut people open so he could reach in and take out their internal organs. Is that a nice person? Is that a good person? He’s a surgeon and he’s in prison for tax evasion.

But notice something. If I change my vocabulary – why do doctors speak the way that they do? They’re not human beings they are patients. They don’t have a knife they have a scalpel. They do not cut they make an incision. They don’t open them up they open a cavity or they find a cavity of some sort.

They have created a whole new vocabulary in order to create a reality, in which it’s okay to carve people open and take out their internal organs, something, which in normal society, is not allowed. Something that would make most of us feel squeamish, ill and emotionally upset about it or even contemplating the idea, yet they do it on a day-to-day basis. How can they do that?

They have to have a vocabulary that puts them into a reality in which it’s absolutely okay to do that. They can never mix the two realities because the minute they mix the two realities, now they are butchers. Now they are

(23)

23

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved harming people. Do you see the difference? Incidentally, those of you who want to work with people in hospitals preparing them for surgery, the same ideas – doctors do it to shield themselves and they don’t realize it. They don’t do it to their patients though.

So a patient still thinks someone’s going to carve me open. Someone’s going to take something out, I’m going to bleed. That’s part of where the fear and the pain and the slow recovery comes from, because they’re in the wrong reality.

So one of the things you do to prepare someone for surgery is to put them in a better reality, one where they’re not going to be cut open. Does that make sense? So hopefully, you’re beginning to understand that even though we started relatively slowly with some simple example’s these are things that happen in language all the time that actually, a lot more is going on underneath the surface than we care to realize usually.

When you appreciate this, your power to influence others goes through the roof, because you can hear just in the way that they speak to you what their life is like. What is their internal reality that they’re operating from like? What are their values that allow this world to work, which means you no longer have to do a full value solicitation if you listen closely enough, you can take some pretty damn good educated guesses.

Now until you get there, by the way folks, I’m not suggesting you go out there and make it happen straightaway. No. This is a process that will require do your classic value solicitation, ask the direct questions and you’ll get the feedback.

Then do a normal conversation and what will happen is you’ll start to realize that people who value this sort of thing will speak in these kinds of ways. Suddenly, you’ll see the reality that’s there in front of them. It’s kind of like being invited into their mental movie. It will not happen overnight, but it might happen over a week. Who knows?

Student: I do a lot of business and obviously, there are a lot of war metaphors at

(24)

24

that?

Igor: We’ll come onto that as the course continues. Not tomorrow or the day after

tomorrow, if you don’t have a decent answer to your own question by say lunchtime tomorrow, feel free to ask me again, it’s just that we need some tools in place before we can do that.

A very simple answer, by the way, on a very simplistic level is to go from simile to metaphor like we just did. We have to destroy the competition. Well, you know this project is like swimming on the lake or being in a lifeboat. Either we all drown or we all make it. You just throw that out as an idea and over time you evolve that into a metaphor, but we have different vehicles for doing that. Does that help you?

Are you getting a little bit excited? When I started to get the sense of the stuff we’re talking about and by the way, it took me a long time to try to figure it out from a Jungian analysis and all kinds of other little bits and pieces. I got a little shiver, a little tingle of excitement down my spine because the potential here is huge and the beauty is, more so than the stuff we did before, the conversational hypnosis patterns and the classic things that people look for.

This stuff is more invisible and potentially more powerful because it’s so invisible, and because it goes straight to that symbolic reality at which the unconscious mind likes to operate. You don’t even need any overt trance at this point.

As soon as people accept the metaphor you’ve presented, they enter a different world. If they enter a different world, different rules apply which means their conclusions are met, which means different behaviors come out and different feelings come through. It can happen literally in a five-minute conversation, if you present the hypnotic reality in a way that’s acceptable to them. Isn’t that something? And you thought the highlight was over.

What I want to do now is to see if we can breathe life into these similes and metaphors. You started already a little bit. How? Well, you started choosing the vocabulary that goes along with that reality, right? What I want you to do

(25)

25

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved now is create what’s called an extended metaphor. In an extended metaphor, you take vehicles that sit within the realm you just created and you present them.

For example, someone talked here about life is a train with unlimited fuel. You might extend that metaphor by talking about all the happy passengers get to see all the sights as they go by, and when they feel like it, they’ll just pull the stop sign, get off and have a nice day before they get back on and go somewhere even better.

Do you see how we’re breathing more life into that reality by extending the mental movie it’s creating? The vocabulary is important because it will leak out in normal everyday interactions, but by designing that mental movie – it’s called the competency equivalent is made, which is life is the train. Then suddenly, everything that happens to the train will be accepted as something that happens to you in life.

The beauty of this, of course, is it’s just a metaphor. You’re just drawing little mind pictures. They must be harmless, surely. Do you see how this works? So, we’re going to go back to the metaphors you had before – the similes and metaphors. Feel free to start with a simile; get the vocabulary and shape it into a metaphor. But then extend the metaphor so that more stuff is happening in that mental movie, supported by the vocabulary, but now rather than just having that train going down the tracks, you have all the things that happen on and off the train to make it more real.

Just spend a few minutes doing that please. Off you go.

Okay, I’m sorry I’m rushing you a little bit. I realize that, there is just a lot of wealth and depth that you can explore with these things on their own. We could quite happily spend the next two days just doing the exercises we’re doing now and letting them unfold. However, that wouldn’t allow us to do a lot of the other things I want to do with you.

Is it okay if we rush through some of the things to get the core foundations that will allow you to do some pretty amazing things with storytelling?

(26)

26

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved Let me ask you first, who is increasingly enjoying these exercises that we go through? Why do you think that is? Why is it more interesting? Because we’re going inside, because it’s stimulating the unconscious mind, because your inner blueprint is being enriched. Remember the five realities, one of which was a symbolic reality?

In my opinion and it’s an opinion, there are no tests that I know of that have experimented with this. However, in my opinion, those people with the richest set of symbols, the riches symbolic reality, have the riches lives. They enjoy their lives most.

Those people who have impoverished symbolic realities, for example, just purely intellectual realities or purely physical ones, they lead the most impoverished lives because the symbolism is what creates meaning out of life. By the way, I’m not saying that intellectuals are impoverished. A lot of intellectuals have a strong symbolic reality. Philosophy is a largely symbolic activity in many ways.

So I’d like to add another layer in terms of what we’re doing. I’d like to introduce you to the concept I like to call miniphors, which is a mini metaphor that is disguised in language. Essentially, what we’re doing now is taking the part of language, the fundamental elements, which are nouns and verbs. I apologize if I sound like Mrs. Hildegard doing her little grammar lesson. Nouns are objects, things in the real world or ideas. Verbs are words about action, doing and so on.

Words that describe nouns are known as adjectives, as you know. Words that describe verbs are called adverbs. So, we have adjectives and nouns. We have adverbs and verbs. All four of these can be replaced by metaphors. He was a flower withering under her burning gaze. Does that not become a much stronger sense or more emotive image than saying, she was angry at him and he didn’t like it. Do you see this?

Where is my metaphor? It’s a noun. He was a flower withering – which is the verb – before her burning gaze. Burning is an adverb modifying the word gaze. So we’ve changed the nouns, the adjectives, the adverbs and the

(27)

27

So we can use these things, sprinkled inside our vocabulary. Remember before we talked about when life is a battlefield, people go for strategy, for destroying our position and so on. If you then also include a vocabulary where you have miniphors within your metaphor or simile, it once again increases the reality tone of it.

Why? Because you’re once again, populating the unconscious realm, that hypnotic reality with more stuff. See how that works? There are essentially, two ways to use miniphors and I’d like you to experiment with both right now.

1. The first one is to create a supportive miniphor.

The miniphor, basically, enhances your message because it just makes more of it. The example we just gave you of the withering gaze and so on. It accentuates it by showing it more metaphorically.

2. The opposite is also the case you can use a contrasted miniphor. In a contrasted miniphor, you’re essentially using irony, maybe even sarcasm to make your point more strongly by combining two worlds that are not supposed to meet, and that forces a contrast that makes the world you want to show them that much more real and poignant.

For example, he was as generous as a miser on a bad day. Do you see the contrast? Do you see how it has a greater impact on you now because of the contrast? So, miniphors can be used to increase the impact, either by supporting or by contrasting and maybe creating a bounce back effect where people expect one thing.

It’s kind of like an agreement reversal, they expect one thing, but it snaps them right back the other way and now they are forced into an even more detailed version of that new reality, the miserly reality because of the contrast they can now make. Do you see how that works?

(28)

28

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved Whose head right now is whirring away at 90 miles an hour? Don’t worry. We’ll start exceeding the speed limits very soon. I’d like to take just five minutes in your groups adding miniphors to what you have already done. Off you go.

All right, are you enjoying that? Are you enjoying yourselves? Is this making you very thoughtful? Please come on up here. Is this starting to make you more thoughtful about how language works in some of the things you’re doing? This goes beyond how most people think about language, which is like what noun do I use and which nominalization and so on.

It’s taken to a very different realm, and we want to start increasing that as we continue. I appreciate that we’ve got a lot of building blocks that we have at our disposal. The one thing I want you to realize is we have a lot of tools that we’re beginning to develop here. You do not have to use all of them at once, but you can.

Sometimes you’ll find it easier to use a miniphor, it just fits into the conversation and it’s great. Sometimes a simile fits. Sometimes an extended metaphor will fit. You really don’t have to know ahead of time what it will be, as long as you’re familiar in navigating these territories on your own. Does that make sense?

The other thing you need to know is that you can have something called a

mixed metaphor. In other words, if your main metaphor is I think someone

just came up and said, we’re learning hypnosis like exploring on an ocean, you can have a miniphor that fits it. When I do an exercise, it feels like I’m diving into this crystal clear ocean and discovering these pearls that no one’s ever seen before.

I’m clearly running with the same metaphor, but I don’t have to. I can say something like I’m doing an exercise, its lying in a comfortable bed where thoughts and ideas just come to me.

Notice I have changed metaphors, haven’t I? Yet somehow it could still fit within that reality. I could be in a cabin inside a boat or something like that. So the metaphor does not contradict the reality I’ve created it can enrich it in some way. Do you see how that works?

(29)

29

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery ©Street Hypnosis All Rights Reserved Of course, I could also use contradiction, but the only reason I would use contradiction is to snap someone out of the contradiction deeper into that reality as we saw earlier on. So it just gives you some maneuvers and things to play with. By the way, you will notice as you have conversations throughout today that these things will stick in your mind more and more. You will hear someone say something and go oh, I just caught him.

Chances are you will have caught them. They have no idea they’re doing it. That’s why they do. Of course, you can then start filtering more and more. Is this kind of making sense a little bit?

Scott: We were having a great deal of difficulty understanding exactly what the

miniphor was and how it worked in conjunction with the greater metaphor. So I was going to ask you to talk a bit more about that.

Igor: Did what I just talk about help or is there a follow up on that?

Scott: Well, I’m not sure.

Igor: You’re not sure, all right.

Well, consider a banquet and everyone’s feasting. Now if we had a very rigid banquet, then we’d have like a four or five-course meal with nice wine and so on, and everyone would be served the same meal. However, in the kind of banquet I’d like to invite you to, it’s one in which each meal can be different.

There might be a certain standard. In other words, we won’t be allowing necessarily having McDonalds into the room, but you can still have a hamburger, as long as it’s gourmet. Is this beginning to help you understand how miniphors fit inside metaphors a little better?

Student: Which were the miniphors?

(30)

30

Igor: If it’s going to help you out, the miniphors would be the meals. The

metaphor is the banquet. By the way, that’s how metaphors can work. Do you see how much easier they suddenly become? But have I actually told you anything. You’re thinking hamburgers and pizzas. Yet now you’re better able at doing linguistic tricks because you’re thinking of hamburgers and pizzas. How does that work?

Student: Can you use the word like in the metaphor?

Igor: Well, consider this. At our banquet, you can either eat or drink. Sometimes

there’ll be a simile and sometimes a metaphor, it doesn’t the feast. Oh my God, he’s good. Yes, I have my moments it’s true, but after all, I’m hosting the banquet. I want to make sure you’re entertained.

Are you seeing the value of extending the metaphors now?

Student:

♦ Is it just like a mini loop in a story, nested loops where you have

miniphors and stuff?

Igor: We’ll come onto to nested loops and so on, but absolutely, you can extend

metaphors into their own versions of nested loops and mini loops and so on. You can do a whole bunch of stuff, but a very smart thing to have made. After all, just to make sure everyone else understands, there’s more than one course at this banquet, isn’t there?

[Laughter]

Student: That means you get more value for your money, folks.

Igor: No you charge extra.

Student: I’m not going to touch that. Okay, so maybe to help break it down a little

more because I get the feeling I’m not the only one that feels that boundaries between miniphors and metaphors, is still a little murky. You’d said earlier that he was a flower withering under her burning gaze. Let’s just break that one down.

(31)

31

Igor: Of course it is. So miniphors are mini-metaphors and that’s what miniphor

stands for.

Student: Sure. So in that case it’s embedded, and then a flower withering, that just

continues to extend the existing metaphor, but when you say her burning gaze…

Igor: That’s a new metaphor.

Student: So it is a metaphor unto itself.

Igor: Exactly, but they kind of fit. Now I create a bigger metaphor, in which there

might be a source of burning – maybe the sun, maybe a fire – and a flower and it being affected by it; hence, you see the relationship between the two. That in itself may be the starter in our banquet. The banquet itself might be a completely different world yet again.

The point is a metaphor is a metaphor is a metaphor in that sense. So you’re absolutely right, whether you replace or qualify a noun, replace or qualify a verb with a metaphor, you are still using a metaphor. So a miniphor is a metaphor and you can use a simile instead of a metaphor as well, so it would be a minime.

[Laughter]

The point I’m trying to get across is that you have a concept, a simple concept – similes and metaphors – that can be broken down. It’s kind of like a fractal, you’ve seen those little fractal pictures. It can be broken down in infinite sizes to a very large scale and down to a very small scale. At our banquet, I can focus on the meal and the constituents of that particular course or I can focus on the people around you and that little interaction. I can focus on the whole banquet, so I can scale the metaphor or the simile up and down and combine them accordingly. This is just another way of making sure your mind realizes you can go small scale, as well as large scale. Does that help you?

(32)

32

Student: Very much. Now you’d also said that there were two ways to use miniphors.

One had to do with accentuating or reinforcing and the other we want to achieve maybe an unusual contrast and maybe irony and sarcasm are helpful.

Igor: Well, irony and sarcasm are the key that creates the contrast because you

don’t want the contrast for them to fall into the wrong reality. For example, if I was teaching a bunch of doctor’s surgery, I don’t want to start creating a contrast of a butcher carving up a pig.

Why? Because that does not create a contrast, it sucks them into the new reality, and now they’ve got the image in their mind that they’re carving someone up, and that doesn’t feel so good, unless they’re a sociopath, in which case they’ll be there every time.

Just to finish that little metaphor there. In terms of the contrast I need to create something else that’s so ridiculous, they won’t stay there. For example, when we’re going to make a delicate incision – and those of you who have worked on a building site, you may as well leave the room now. Do you see building site, heavy machinery, heavy lifting, delicate, there’s a contrast. It snaps people back over to the other side and makes them more delicate now, because the contrast is we don’t want heavy-handed lifting equipment hooking up a person. Does that help a little bit?

Student: Yes. So our group came up with one and I’d just like to share it and see if it

falls under the, accentuate reinforce or is it the unusual contrast. That’s that the hypnotist and ride a bike and pump air in the tires at the same time.

Igor: Great.

Student:

♦ Is that more the contrast or more the, accentuate?

Igor: Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. Seriously, the first rule of thumb is that

these categories are just there to peak your mind in terms of what you can do with it. There is no right and wrong answer. If you put the wrong label on

(33)

33

You’re still staying within the same context. You’re creating more of the same, there’s no snap back type thing. So the contrast is just to show you that when you create two concepts that don’t fit together, they’ll snap out against each other and hopefully if you set up the contrast correctly, they’ll bounce into your reality more fully as a result.

It’s like talking about a nun and her sexual fantasies. It’s a shocking contrast. It may lead further into the sexual reality because you’re bouncing off the idea of nun or, depending on your audience it may go back into a more innocent reality, because the contrast is snapping back the other way. It all depends on when you say it, what group you’re saying it to and so on. The thing about metaphors is you cannot leave the context, and the context is defined primarily by your audience. As you’ll see as we go through today, your content is going to become increasingly important when using metaphorical and symbolic communication. You cannot escape it in regular hypnosis, but you especially cannot escape it in metaphors. It is the most important thing of everything.

Student: Thank you.

Igor: Has this been useful?

Student: Not a question so much as an observation. A metaphor is like a simile. They

both have a double meaning.

Igor: Yes, absolutely. It’s just one becomes a little bit more. That was a nice

simile, by the way. One just has a slightly stronger impact and the other one has a slightly easier acceptability rate. Who here enjoys the idea of metaphors and doing more of it? Good.

In that case, let’s come back after the break where I will show you how to get inside someone’s symbolic reality and find out what’s actually there, so they’re generating the metaphor now automatically. Off you go.

(34)

34 DVD 24: How to Use Universal Symbols to

Directly Re-Program the Unconscious Mind

Igor: Who here is enjoying this day trip through hypnotic and symbolic realities?

Who here is already beginning to understand that if we just finished today this one session, this would give you the heart of Conversational Hypnosis in a very different way than most people think about it? Wouldn’t that be fair? You wouldn’t even have to pay extra for it.

I made a promise which I’d like to fulfill now, which is, I’d like to show you how to not just take a day trip, but a full voyage through someone else’s unconscious territory.

More importantly, as you do so, I’d like you to learn how to navigate your own unconscious territory so that all of this stuff around storytelling and thinking what do I say or do is not your responsibility. It’s not you. It’s the other you. To the extent, you let the other you do all the work for a change, you will.

Everyone please stand up and put your notes to one side. The following exercise will be done in pairs with one person being the coach and the other being the voyager.

The coach will get a hold of someone and spin them around a few times, gently and slowly. We're taking a little of their balance and orientation so their consciousness is not keeping track of this. We're trying to block some of their capacity to think and that thinking space out for a while.

When you stop, they'll open their eyes and they're going to describe to you what I call a strange new world. A world that no one has ever seen before or an environment they’ve never been to before. They're turning and turning and suddenly they stop. I see a blue ocean with waves going off in to the distance. The sun is over there, I think it’s rising rather than setting and some clouds coming across the sky.

There’s a steam train on the horizon, I’m not sure why and I can see the cloud of the steam train coming across. As you get closer we’ll see there’s a train track like this bridge across forever, the whole ocean has a train track on the top of it and the steam train is going across it. It’s red and black and inside it’s full of school children.

Conversational Hypnosis Mastery - Part 2