If you listen to the kinds of things that jarred people, usually they were things that weren't sensory–based, or things that weren't universal to the experience. If you're playing the piano, you are going to have contact between the keys and your fingers, but you are not necessarily going to feel that "the music is you." For example, if you were playing "Chopsticks" would you feel like a chopstick? It wouldn't necessarily work that way.
Exercise 2
Soon I'm going to ask you to do the same thing again, only this time I want you to restrict yourself to descriptions of what must be there in sensory experience and to be non–specific. If you say "You can hear the splash of the water" and the person is underwater, it won't work. But you can say "You can hear the sounds that the water makes" because there will be some sounds.
This time I'd like you to add one other important piece: I'd like you to have a steady voice tempo and use the other person's breathing as the speed… and rate … and the pace … of the speech … that you generate. Matching someone's breathing with anything in your behavior—whether it's your own breathing rate, the tempo of your speech, or anything else—has a very powerful impact. Try it and find out what impact it has. I want you to use the same experience and keep the same groups. Take two minutes apiece and don't talk about it. It should take eight to ten minutes at most for everybody in your group to do it. Notice if it feels different this time.
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I'd like to ask you if you noticed any difference in your own experience, even with just that small amount of instruction. Was it different at all for you? Some of you are nodding. Is there anyone here for whom it was not different at all? … One person. Even with just that little bit of instruction, that little bit of change, the experience changed for everyone but one person in this room. That difference to me is a profound one, because the instructions I gave you are just a tiny bit of what's available.
Hypnosis itself, asfaras I'm concerned, is simply using yourself as a biofeedback mechanism. You were doing that when you matched the other person's breathing rate with your voice tempo. Your behavior became an ongoing feedback mechanism for his behavior–Whether you're going to use altered states for inducing personal change, for some medical purpose, for the purpose of relaxing, or as a form of meditation, the things that allow you to be able to respond to another human being by going into an altered state are not genetically predetermined. They're simply the mechanisms of communication.
If I tell you that I want you to think about this (speaking rapidly) "very–slowly–and–carefully," the incongruity between what I say and how I say it gives you two contradictory instructions. But if 1 tell you I want you to stop … and consider … very … slowly , . . just exactly … what the change … in your own experience … was … then … the tempo … the rate of my speech … the movements of my body (he has been swaying to the rhythm of his speech) don't interfere with the words that I'm saying. In fact they embellish them and amplify their impact.
I heard somebody here say the word "up" as he lowered his voice. That's an incongruity. Those two things don't match. It's like talking about being really excited in a monotone. Hypnotists do this sometimes. There's an old notion that you're supposed to talk in a monotone when you do hypnosis. It is actually much more effective to sound thrilled if you are taking someone back into a thrilling experience. Being in trance doesn't mean that you have to be dead. A lot of people tell me "Well, I don't think I was in a trance because I could still hear things and feel things." If you can't see things and hear things, that's death; that's a different state. In hypnosis, what you hear and see and feel is actually amplified for the most part.
I believe that people in a state of hypnosis have much more control over themselves than they think they do. Hypnosis is not a process of taking control of people. It's a process of giving them control of themselves by providing feedback that they wouldn't ordinarily have.
I know that each of you in here is capable of going into any trance state—even though Science has "proved" that's not true. And given how researchers have proved it, they're right. If you use the same hypnotic induction with a group of people, only some of them will go into a trance. That's the way traditional hypnotists work. However, we're not going to study traditional hypnosis. We're going to study what's called Ericksonian hypnosis, after Milton H. Erickson. Ericksonian hypnosis means developing the skills of a hypnotist so well that you can put someone into a trance in a conversation in which the word hypnosis is never mentioned.
I learned a long time ago that it isn't so much what you say as how you say it. When you try to convince somebody consciously by overpowering him, it elicits from him the response of resisting you. There are some people who don't resist being overpowered, and who go into a trance. However, neither resistance nor cooperation is a demonstration of anything except the ability of people to respond. Everybody who is living can respond. The questions are: how and to what? Your job when you do hypnosis is to notice what people respond to naturally.
People come into my office and say "People have tried to hypnotize me for years and it has never worked." They sit down and say "go ahead and try to hypnotize me." And I say "I can't hypnotize you." They say "Well, go ahead and try." I say "I can't do it. There's nothing I can do; if I decided to force you to keep your eyes open, that would make you keep your eyes open, I'll try. Keep your eyes wide open. Stay totally alert. Everything you do will make you stay right here and right now." Then they resist me right into trance. The principle I was using was simply noticing the response of the person in front of me, and providing him with a context that he could respond to appropriately in a way that was natural for him. Most people are not that radically resistant. Every once in a while you find one. If you realize what he's doing and alter your behavior, it can be really easy.
A stage hypnotist usually pulls twenty people up from the audience and gives them a series of commands. Then he throws out all the good that's not an indication of skill; that's a statistical approach to doing hypnosis. I want to teach you to see how someone is responding so that you can vary your behavior to provide a context in which he can respond appropriately. If you can do that, anyone can go into an altered state in which you can teach him whatever you want him to learn.
One thing I've noticed is that people are more apt to respond easily when they're in a state that hypnotists call rapport. Rapport seems to be built on matching behaviors. Disagreeing with people won't establish rapport. Talking faster than people can listen won't build rapport. Talking about feelings when people are making visual images won't build rapport. But if you gauge the tempo of your voice to the rate of their breathing, if you blink at the same rate that they blink, if you nod at the same rate that they're nodding, if you rock at the same rate that they're rocking, and if you say things which must in fact be the case, or things that you notice are the case, you will build rapport. If you say "You can be aware of the temperature of your hand, the sounds in the room, the movement of your body as you breathe" your words will match the person's experience, because all of those things are there. We call this kind of matching "pacing."