Welcome to Part 2 in this series on how to naturally create irresistible hypnotic suggestions.
In Part 1, How To Naturally Create Irresistible Hypnotic Suggestions: The Poetic Fridge Magnet Principle, Hypnotic English 101 & Internal Stacking, you discovered how to create powerful hypnotic suggestions using simple verbs, conjunctions & adverbs and verb modifiers.
Plus, you learned a fun way to create them using the fridge magnet principle.
In this article, you’ll add nouns (nominalizations and hot words), adjectives (trance themes & hyperboles) and unconscious priming to the mix.
But before we dive into all of that, there are a few important points to keep in mind whenever you’re constructing irresistible hypnotic suggestions:
- Context is king – whatever you’re trying to do, it has to fit the context you’re in. If it doesn’t, you’ll come across as being a tad strange and your words will have a jarring effect.
- Match your subject’s/client’s level – don’t use long or complicated words if your subject won’t know what you’re talking about. If you do, your suggestions will have zero impact!
- Practice using your tools – the exercises in this series will help develop your hypnotic suggestions so they become really irresistible. They aren’t inductions in themselves, however, they’re just hypnotic language tools to help make the hypnotic suggestions within your inductions incredibly powerful.
- Approach it with the right attitudes – remember to use H+, to go first, and to have fun. Also, try to push yourself and be curious about how you can master hypnotic language – because it’s the best tool you have as a hypnotist. Even if English/language studies weren’t your forte at school – with the help of a good thesaurus and some patience – you’ll be able to put together some really powerful hypnotic language lists you can refer to when crafting your suggestions (and throughout your career as a hypnotist).
IMPORTANT NOTE: It’s best to revise your lists and compile examples of hypnotic suggestions in your private study time – not when you’re with clients.
Reading from your notes or lists will give the impression that you’re unsure of what you’re doing. Plus, every subject/client is different. This is why we’re not an advocate for hypnosis scripts – each session needs to be customized for the client you have sitting in front of you.
Even when you know in advance what the client wants to address, other things often come to light within a session. For instance, a client comes to see you to quit smoking, but you discover that smoking helps reduce their social anxiety when they’re out in big groups. Meaning it’s not just the smoking element you need to address. It’s their anxiety and perhaps their self-esteem, that needs to be looked at, too.
Irresistible Hypnotic Suggestions & The Power Of Nouns: Using Hot Words & Nominalizations
Nouns are the words that represent people, places, things or concepts. A noun can be the name of a person, such as Peter, or the name of a place, such as Ireland, or the name of a thing, such as apple, or the name of a concept, such as happiness.
Where hypnosis is concerned, there are two types of nouns that are particularly useful. These are:
1. Hot words
2. Nominalizations
Hot words are words that have a strong emotional meaning built into them, and that elicit a strong emotional reaction when you hear them. For example, look at this sentence:
The infant perished in the flames.
Tragic, of course, but it states the facts using relatively neutral language. Look how much more of an emotional impact it makes when it’s written using hot words instead:
The baby burned to death in the raging inferno.
The power of hot words is that they instantly connect with the other person’s emotions, which is another way for you to get their attention, right?
Nominalizations are abstract words used to describe concepts, things that don’t exist in the physical universe. That includes such things as love, respect, learning, joy, and so on.
Nominalizations are powerful hypnotic words because when your subject hears them, their unconscious mind is free to make up its own meaning for the word. Which is another way of stimulating their unconscious.
Here is a list of nominalizations that would be useful as part of a hypnotic suggestion:
Using Adjectives & Trance Themes To Make Your Hypnotic Suggestions Irresistible
As discussed in Part 1, adjective are words that enhance the nouns; the qualifiers, distracters, and hyperboles that embellish the nominalizations, such as: amazing, awesome, powerful, exciting, etc.
In other words, they bring your language to life and create colorful descriptions in the minds of subjects and clients.
Here is a list of words that you might find useful when constructing a potent hypnotic suggestion:
Trance themes, however, are words or groups of words that are trance-like in nature. Trance themes are used to help someone go into a trance. They’re a form of unconscious priming that creates an internal suggestion that trance is occurring.
When you use words such as: relax, focus, calm, comfort, drifting, safety or peace – over and over again in a conversation or induction – they naturally prime the person’s unconscious mind to follow these suggestions and feel a certain way.
Here’s an example of using hypnotic themes as part of a hypnotic induction:
Did you spot the theme here? Yep, it was comfort and relaxation.
The above is a great example of the kind of language you might use when putting someone into a hypnotic trance. It puts the person in a calm state and primes their unconscious that good things are about to take place.
And here is a list of common trance themes you might want to use to complement your hypnotic suggestions:
Hypnotic Insider Tip: Lack of Referential Index
The Lack of Referential Index (LoRI) relates to the way you refer to someone or something. If you don’t specify who or what you are talking about, then you have a LoRI.
For example, if you say: “You can relax,” then you are specifying a particular person. If you say “Peter can relax,” you’re also specifying a particular person, but calling them by name. But if you say “People can relax,” then you are not specifying anyone in particular.
If you are not specifying anyone in particular, that is called a lack of referential index, or an LoRI. And if you then said “Relaxation can be enjoyed,” that turns it into a passive LoRI.
It’s passive because it uses a passive verb. But that’s a good thing, because passive verbs are more hypnotic. They force people to make sense of them at an unconscious level.
Creating a passive LoRI to use in your hypnotic suggestions is easy. Simply follow this formula:
X (nominalization) can be Yed (enjoyed)
Here are some sample Passive LoRI’s to show you how the formula works in practice:
- Happiness can be enjoyed
- Luck can be experienced
- Mastery can be understood
- Relaxation can be discovered
- Elegance can be celebrated
How To Make Your Own Multi-Level Hypnotic Language List So Your Hypnotic Suggestions Pack A Powerful (Yet Non-Violent!) Punch
In Part 1, you may remember there being two tables showing lists of verbs, conjunctions, adverbs, action accelerators and language softeners.
Using these tables as a reference, now it’s your turn to create your “hypnotic language list” using what you have learned in part 1 and part 2 (this article), to include:
- Verbs & conjunctions
- Adverbs, action accelerators (like the word Now), language softeners (maybe, perhaps), etc.
- Nouns, including both nominalizations and hot words
- Adjectives, including trance themes (relaxation, focus) & hyperboles (amazing, wonderful)
Creating lists like these is a great way to mentally “take note” of the kind of language you can use to make your hypnotic suggestions even more potent.
Plus, by having the list to hand, you can reference them whenever you want to prepare for a session with a client (and or have a few minutes to brush up on your hypnotic language).
For example, if you’ve been working with a client who is suffering from insomnia, you could reference your list in advance to see what kind of words would trigger the most favorable response.
So make a note to set a date with yourself and a pen, a notepad plus a thesaurus to create your list of hypnotic language!
Tip: You might want to use a large piece of paper to begin with so you can create multiple columns and have everything in the one place. That way it’s easier to see how it all fits together. If you have a whiteboard hanging up – even better!
Plus, as mentioned, it’s also really helpful to incorporate trance themes into your list(s). For instance: you could have a list of words for the following trance themes: relaxation, healing, letting go, comfort, safety, self-love etc.
You might also find it easier to have separate lists, such as one for verbs and conjunctions together, and a different one for adverbs and accelerators in another list etc.
Do what works best for you. The main thing is that your list(s) contains words that you’re comfortable with and they help accelerate your learning so you become fluent in the art of hypnotic language.
Using The Unconscious Priming Technique To Create Undetectable Hypnotic Suggestions
A great way to think of hypnotic suggestions is to imagine them as pebbles in a pond. Each one affects your subject’s unconscious mind in a different way.
When you throw one pebble into a pond, it creates ripples. When you throw one pebble after another in close succession, the ripples of one pebble affect the others.
Each word you use is in your suggestions is like a pebble. It stirs up a train of associations in the mind of your listener, associations that have been built up over a lifetime of experience. In the same way that the pebbles interact with each other, hypnotic suggestions also blend together to create new meanings.
That’s how it’s possible to generate multiple levels of meaning within what might otherwise seem to be a simple set of suggestions. But you don’t want to generate meanings willy-nilly – you want them to be specific to the hypnotic scenery or atmosphere you’re trying to create.
And that’s where unconscious priming can be so useful.
It’s a technique that allows you to prepare someone’s mind to respond in a certain way. It’s like playing with a loaded dice, so the outcome is always going to be in your favor.
Unconscious priming is a psychological phenomenon that has been demonstrated over and over again. Here are a few examples of the studies and results that show the phenomenon at work.
- Hot & cold coffee cups – when asked to hold a coffee cup for a few seconds, and then asked about the person whose cup they were holding, students’ responses varied depending on whether or not the coffee cup was hot or cold.If hot, they were more likely to say the person was warm and personable. If cold, they were more likely to say the person was less pleasant. The only difference was the temperature of the coffee cup, but this was enough to influence the students’ opinions.
- Hidden bucket containing citrus flavoured water – people were asked to complete a questionnaire, after which they were given an extremely crumbly biscuit to eat, which would inevitably leave crumbs all over the work surface.For some of the participants, researchers hid a bucket of mildly-scented citrus water in the room. This mild scent was enough to suggest the idea of cleanliness, and those people were more likely to clean the crumbs from the work surface before leaving the area.
- Grey wrinkled Florida test case – people have to walk down a long corridor to get to a room where they take a test. The test involved reading random sentences, but for one specific group the sentences were primed with words designed to elicit a certain behavior.The words buried within the sentences were all linked to old age, such as grey, wrinkled, and Florida. Each word was used in a sentence where its link to old age wasn’t obvious (such as a grey coat), but after the test the results were unmistakable. The “old age” words group walked back down the corridor much slower than any of the other groups.
The trick with unconscious priming is to develop a list of words that are all associated with the hypnotic scenery or atmosphere you want someone to find themselves in.
These words prime the unconscious mind so they’re already expecting whatever it is you’re going to say or elicit from them.
In the old age example above, people’s minds were primed with the idea that old age made them slower and less agile, for example. And even though the words were buried in sentences where their meaning was disguised, they still managed to penetrate the unconscious mind and produce the desired behavior.
So there’s no reason why you can’t use unconscious priming to do the same thing with more positive outcomes. Here are the steps you need to take to be able to do that.
- Begin with the end in mind – think about what you want, and what kind of “place” the mind needs to be in in order to naturally do what you ask of it.
If you want people to walk slowly, then old age is a good reference point. If you want them to feel friendly, then friends & family will probably be a good end to keep in mind.
- Free associate – use the association game to come up with as many different words related to the behavior you’re trying to elicit. If you want them to feel friendly, then you need to use words that can be associated with friends. For instance:
- Dog (man’s best friend)
- Hugs (how close friends often greet)
- Laughter (something you do with friends)
- Appreciation (how friends treat each other)
- Vocabulary – now write down the words you came up with (dog, hugs, laughter, etc.) and start to use it liberally but in a different context. Here is an example to show you one way it could be done.
“Look at the way this car hugs the road… safety is no laughing matter for us… it’s not just the underdog that can appreciate the advantages of this model…”
If you find it difficult coming up with lots of words to associate, try using a thesaurus. There you’ll find lists of synonyms for just about every word you can think of.
Feel free to experiment and you’ll find that there are lots of different ways to use the same material.
Also remember that the point of the exercise is not to collect a bunch of words together. It’s to help you prime the unconscious of the other person so that they become even more susceptible to your hypnotic suggestions.
In other words, it should help to make your hypnotic suggestions even more irresistible.
>>Want to discover how you can make your hypnotic suggestions even more irresistible, as well as other “insider techniques” such as hypnosis profiling, how to exploit pseudo logic and hypnotic power loops? Check out Igor’s invaluable collection of Advanced Hypnosis Masterclasses to discover these and much more.