From a Live Hypnosis class by Dr. Michael Stower, DCH
The opening remark is going to be a one that will last you a for a lifetime.From the first moment you tell someone that you;
1) have studied hypnosis,
2) have become a hypnotist or
3) studied hypnotherapy, please remember this,

Once someone accepts you as a hypnotist anything and everything that you say from that moment on may now becomes a direct or indirect suggestion to that person.
That's the nature of the mind.

Each person has developed a pre-conceived idea about what hypnosis is and what it isn't. The word HYPNOSIS can actually cause a fear response in them. The word hypnosis creates different feelings for different people depending on their level of knowledge. Anyone that is unfamiliar with hypnosis thinks it's a form of "mind control". All of the myths and misinformation comes through ignorance not stupidity. Ignorance just means you don't know something about the subject matter. The word hypnosis can create a feeling in people that makes them fearful, because of poorly written movies, "c" rated paper back novels and mediocre stage hypnosis presentations. Much of the information people have ever seen, read or heard that has to do with hypnosis was negative.
Pre-conceived ideas also makes you more powerful in what you say and do from that moment on in other's eyes. So please understand that you are now assuming a role that seems to make you powerful. There is no real power.
However, perception is reality, and that's what it may feel like and you will get past it because you will begin to realize you don't have any power. What you do have is the knowledge to create a trance or altered state of consciousness.

Now I admit that what you will learn here this weekend when you finish, you will know how to do something that 99.9% of the people who have ever lived before you and 99.9% of the people who will ever live after you will never know how to do. That's to be able to induce a Hypnotic trance on demand. They will never know how to do that, but you will. It's an easy science/art to learn.
Hypnotizing people is easy. All you have to do is hold their attention longer than they can on one thought to the exclusion of all else in the moment.

Now look at each one of you. You stopped as soon as I said I had something important and you focused on me, and all you are listening to is me, not the air conditioning fan blowing cool air through the room to something in the pipes somewhere. You don't even pay attention to the creaking of the chair or the rustle of the material when you move. All you do is pay attention to me until I draw your attention to something else. That's hypnotic.

A good speaker can be hypnotic. So is a good fire in a fireplace, that's also hypnotic. So anything that you can focus or fixate becomes an induction to a trance state. The word trance, when associated with the word HYPNOSIS. To many people Hypnosis can mean giving up power and control of your mind. You will go through all of those things. Now when someone said hypnosis to you before today, how did you feel about it?

Curiosity, fear of it, mistrust, skeptical, doubtful, excited?
What is it about hypnosis that would make you become doubtful about hypnosis?
Have you ever been hypnotized before?
Did you believe you where hypnotized?

Yes, but it didn't last. yes" IT!; OK, let's put some meaning to the word IT, what is the IT? Hypnosis, hypnosis didn't last, is what you are calling IT. First of all the IT has to be something. Hypnosis isn't a thing. The state of mind that was supposed to be produced is hypnosis. That's different than IT. But we use the word ITto describe ourselves.

Now this is what you will face with your own clients. I'm preparing you to meet them head-on. This is what I hear and it is what you will also hear. My mission is to help you become better prepared when you go back into the office for "IT" didn't last.

When you ask a person "Have you ever been hypnotized?" They will many times say something like "Well, I think I was." Usually when a person makes this statement, I follow up with "Did you believe you were hypnotized, honestly believe you were hypnotized?"
They answer, not always in this order - "I don't know! "No, and why not? The number two answer is "Because, I didn't feel any different, I was still able to think, didn't feel it changed my thought process. I wasn't hypnotized because I heard everything."

Actually the number one answer is, the famous, I DON'T KNOW! Because they didn't know what to expect, so I want them to feel safe. You want to empower someone else with hypnotic suggestions.
Trust, control! It's in your mind. No one gets into your mind unless you want them to. Blind faith, It is and it isn't.
It's a paradox. In order for someone to be hypnotized you only have to do a few things. concentrate, relax and for a few moments open your mind up. Because at any moment you can close it and say all right I choose not to allow that. So you have the control. Most people's fear is that they will lose control. And there is no such thing as losing control.

Can you remember a time when you drove your car about 15 or 20 miles and you didn't remember driving it? How do you explain that moment. Did you realize that when you get in your car, your subconscious is driving the car? Your conscious mind is putting on makeup, worrying about being late, cursing the traffic, thinking about what you are going to do after you get to where you are going.
That's the conscious mind, the subconscious is driving the car. It does it automatically. You can't stop your subconscious from driving the car because you have done it so many times before. It knows what to do and if you where to sit down when you get in the car and start to make a list of every motion you go through, you would be surprised at how many things you go through to get ready to start the car.
Like when you first began to drive. You got in the car and you said "my goodness, they want me to look to the front, look to the back, left, right, stir the car, the brake, clutch, gas, shift gears and talk to this fool at the same time." So years later you get into the car and do all of this at the same time. Have we came along way? Yea! So there is no losing power.

Trust only needs to go a little farther than a mutual hand shake. Because by the time they have agreed to come to your office, something has brought them to this decision. So you don't have to prove you are trustworthy, at that time. You will spend most of your time explaining about hypnosis, what it isn't, whether what it is.
I will share with you what hypnosis is and what it isn't. Rather than dwell on the negative. There is absolutely nothing negative about hypnosis, (except a persons perception or preconceived ideas). There is no harm in using hypnosis. Achieving a state of hypnosis by anyone is harmless. Even the most recent learner of hypnosis can not harm somebody by using hypnosis. Can not!

The worst therapist can not hurt someone who came to them for help, except for the fact that they may have kept them from seeking better help sooner. That is the only harm hypnosis can do.
If someone was to come to me for alcoholism, I would be doing them a disservice, because I do not have any training in alcohol addictions. I would not take on a client like that because I do not have any training in it. Beware of any Hypnosis Training facilities that have addictions as part of their curriculum. Unless one of the faculty teaching it is a professional drug and alcohol counselor -

SEEK ANOTHER SCHOOL!

Now I could, based on what I do know, work with them a couple of times, but I don't think I would be doing them any service. All I would have done is waste his money and two visits of his time when he could have been seeking help somewhere else with someone who was properly trained.

Hypnosis is not a cure-all for everything, yet, in the right hands and under all of the right conditions "miraculous changes" can occur. They would have had to have gone through the the 12 Steps and not done well, before I would consider seeing them. As I have said many times before, people come to hypnotists as a last resort. Because everyone else has written them off.

That is why hypnosis is so powerful, because the client has already set themselves up to be successful. By saying "this has to work, I have no other choices". Guess what? When you say that about anything, whatever you are about to do is going to work. You have programmed yourself for success. From that moment on you can't fail. Most of them don't realize that when they get to that point they have reached the bottom.

THE GREATER THE NEED -

THE BETTER THE RESULTS!

I would like to start promoting hypnosis as a first resort. Be honest, make it a first resort, not a last resort. I would like to get them first before they have wasted months in difficult therapy and if it doesn't work you can always go to that. You can always go to long term therapy. Everybody is in a quick fix mode. Time distortion at its best. Many people actually believe they don't have enough time to do EVERYTHING they MUST do or HAVE to do. They eat fast, get in and out of places fast. Don't want to wait in lines, and have little or no patience any more. Want to drive up in front to park.

So why not work with them on their more personal issues more quickly. Does anyone have a problem with that? Working with them faster. The only problem comes down to dollars and cents, I believe. The people who have been into this for a long time using traditional therapies are on-going. They come back every week, months for years. Insurance pays, well guess what folks, insurance isn't going to pay much anymore. You are going to have to turn around and get more clients sooner than you had anticipated.

Because with health management programs they are cutting rates, only paying half. And you know what is funny? When people don't have insurance they don't get sick as often. Have you ever noticed that They don't get sick, they don't seek medical attention so quickly when they don't have insurance. Amazing how that works. Have you found that to be true?

What do you plan to get out of this class? Becoming more liberal, as an extra tool, personal growth. Even choose to increase your income. When you see hypnosis begin to work, and you will, AHA! That's the first reaction you will get in the beginning. And I shouldn't say that, it will last for a long time. You are never prepared for it. For the change happens that quick. It is done and there is no returning to the old feeling.

PAIN vs PLEASURE

WHAT THIS COURSE WILL DO FOR YOU

The first page will tell you what the course will do for you. This page does not say anything about utilizing hypnotherapy in order to make a career move because, I don't know if that is true or not. So I had to put in only truisms. That is, things that I already know will change by anyone participating in this class. That is to develop and express an awareness and intuition. Everybody has intuitiveness. People say I don't trust my feelings, well you used to. How about when the phone rings and you know who it is before you answer it. Is that trusting your feelings?

Yes, but that's different. You are trying to negate the positive. We are programmed to fail. Between two and seven years of age we get all the programming there is to fail. " Don't do this, you can't do that, you shouldn't do this, you are not smart enough, your not old enough, seen but not heard."; We spend the rest of our life trying to overcome and reprogram. All your brain is, especially the subconscious is likened to a computer. Whatever is programmed into the computer is exactly what that computer will do. If the programming is somehow accepted wrongly, it will perform wrongly, perfectly every time. The old GIGO, garbage in garbage out. Whatever goes in goes out. So now it takes people who have the ability and skills to get the subconscious to say all right. When I started doing this I had a positive purpose in mind, and that may have been when I was seven or eight. Now what I am doing no longer serves me positively.
We will use smoking for an example. When people began to smoke it serves as a positive purpose, no matter what we do, it must serves as a positive outcome.

We are pain/pleasure animals. We avoid pain and go towards pleasure.

So with that in mind smoking usually becomes part of you because it is pure social acceptance. Not from peer pressure. It is pure acceptance, because all of your friends do it and you want to become part of the group. A few cases will be rebellion, to go against the parents, church, whatever. For most of them it is pure acceptance. Imagine a teenager coming out of school and there's a group of the "IN" students with there backs turned towards the student and they go over, curious and want to know what is going on. What are all of these people getting together for? Now Realize they are all smoking. You think, Well if that is all it takes to be a part of this group, I want to be a part of this. I don't want to be left along. I well start to smoke.

Now 30 years later smoking is socially unacceptable, but the teenage mind only had one piece of information with which to learn how to smoke or a reason to smoke and it is still staying with that. So we have to give it some more choices and that is what I will teach you. I will teach you in some advance course some of the NLP techniques, which don't require quote unquote hypnosis, not by anybody else's standards. In hypnosis no one can be hypnotized against their will, but you can be hypnotized with out your knowing it. Big difference! No one knows that better than Madison Avenue. We are bombarded with ads. That is hypnosis at the finest level. You want to call it subliminal, OK. It is not really, it is very direct, very direct. There are messages in ads that you have no idea they are there consciously, but your subconscious puts some feeling into it.

Because the subconscious is the feeling part of the mind. The conscious is the logical part of the mind. The rational part, the part that analyzes' and when it comes to debate between the feel good part of the mind and the logical part of the mind, guess what folks, feel good wins every time. No contest, feel good always wins.

So now what do we do to influence feel good? We give it what it wants. How do we know what somebody wants? Ask THEM! When was the last time you asked somebody what they want What did you ask them "What do you want out of life?" You didn't say what I said. You added something onto it.
I will teach you to break that habit. As soon as you add the word on to it what do you want, they lie. This is it group. Ask, "WHAT DO YOU WANT," shut up and wait and wait. Because they are processing information now. Do you know why? You just put them in a trance. Do you know how you put them in a trance?
Focus of attention.
What is everyone's favorite subject to talk about? Themselves. Knowing this now, there is no one you can not hypnotize, once you get them talking about their favorite subject. Not you, not a textbook case.
Now I do recommend that people talk in t
hird person when you want to get some kind of a message across, but right now we are just gathering information.
"What was that you asked the client?" "What do you want out of life"? " What if they said they wanted to die, you have opened a can of worms. Everybody wants to add a word onto that sentence, it is not necessary. Please, when you ask them, get to the end of the sentence WHAT DO YOU WANT?

Then hush. Because the minute you add a word you are putting yourself in there and they don't want to talk about you. So now you become a mind reader. We don't do mind reading acts. Like couples that have been married a long time. You ask one a question and the other partner answers for them. I wonder which one is the ventriloquist and which one is the dummy?;

You think I'm wrong. The next time you are out watch, ask somebody a question, of spouse or favorite person they have been with a long time. The other one will most of the time answer.

Until you have the answer to this you have no therapy. Nothing has begun. Becoming their hypnotist I become their guide and we are going to create a map to reach their destination, but see, if we don't have a destination, I can't do that and it's not my job to create it. You simply cannot create a map form somebody who does not have a destination. You do not have a place to go to, how can you do the next two steps? What is nice about this approach is this is so much kinder then being this. Because folks let me tell you something this field is associated with, like the word hypnosis conjures up images. So does this and this is what they think and one reason why you go to one of those is because of one of these and you are not. See I tell them you are not that broken. You are confused, lost or stuck. Let them make a choice, I'm just taking a guess.

I mean they came here not because they believe they are whole and fixed, but because they have been told by someone in a prestige position of authority they are broken in some area and/or they are stuck in some area, right. Why else would they come to us for help? It is a lot kinder because everybody has been stuck, not everybody has broken something, but the odds are 90% of the clients that you see have had something break.

Either personally or a bone, or they're heart, and what is the difference in breaking a bone or your heart. I think broken heart is the greater pain than the bone in the arm. So everybody can relate to feeling broken and stuck. I help them get unstuck and they begin to heal. They do the healing.
"Any questions up to this point?"

That is very similar to my approach in therapy, that all human beings are fallible, and when they come to us we don't fix anyone, we empower that person to make the necessary changes in there life that will make them feel better.

One major difference about traditional therapies when compared to hypnotherapy is learning to differentiate between the two different parts of the mind you can talk to.
It seems to me that traditional methods of talk therapy is talking to the conscious mind, most of the time. The conscious mind is a censoring device. It is also a dictator, it will analyze, rationalize, and a lot of the times it doesn't believe you, the therapist. Based on a client's life experience, you have to prove to them that you are believable, that what you say is going to happen.
"Can you do that in one session?
Can you do it in two?
Four, maybe.

They're conscious mind is nothing but a screen, a filter. You have to do something, even stand on your head and take wooden nickels, as they say to try and convince this person to let you in. That could take years this way. Because, they put up a wall. I well show you how to take down the wall in less than two minutes.
See, the beauty of hypnotic trance inductions is it's speed, gentleness and availability on demand. The more rapid it is the more effective it is. It works just the opposite. The more rapid it is the less time a subject has to rationalize the process, analyze it and or censor it. You don't want the analyzers to do that. They are merely trying to find flaws in the process. Rapid Inductions don't allow that to happen.

You want to get to the subconscious, all you have to do is tell the subconscious what to do and it will act upon it literally. So your words become very important. We will cover that also.
The subconscious doesn't have an opinion or emotion. We are talking about the part of the mind that operates the sympathetic nervous system among other things. It is working all the time, it never sleeps.

The conscious mind sleeps. The subconscious mind is always working and doing something. The conscious mind is the part that is thinking about doing something.

What I want you to do is realize which part you are talking to. This part you want get anything back, until this part believes it. How long do you want it to take? It finally consists of trust, respect and likability. We use all of that in one word, it is called rapport. You have to be in rapport.

The first step in rapport building skills is the clients has to give you permission to stay in their presence. You have to get their permission to stay in there presence and talk to them. To be able to influence them. Because if they don't give you permission to stay none of this can occur. So what you say or do to get them to allow you to stay in their presence, is the first step to building these areas. Let me tell you something folks, by the time I finish here this weekend that is the only thing they should do.
Give me permission to stay there.
Give me three minutes with them and I will have them in trance. All you need is three minutes, sometimes less. Depends on how motivated they are, or the more pain they are in.

Hypnosis works because "the greater the need - the greater the desire - the better the results..

THE GREATER THE PAIN THE BETTER THE RESULTS.

The more pain they are in the faster it works. This course will develop and help you express your awareness and intuition. Please pass that on to your clients.

Whatever you think you are, you are.

Private practice, one-on-one therapy that is what I call it. Stress, smoking and weight loss will probably be the top issues for you as a hypnotist, because they already have a reputation of being helped easily through hypnosis.

I think people want to get off of chemical dependency when it comes to these things. You would think so, everybody is going drug free, but yet here they are putting the patch on, giving you more drug, making you take dexitrim and all of the other stuff, more drugs. Every time you turn around there is another drug for another thing that you didn't know even existed and you want the kids to be drug free. How do you do that, if you can't be?

Whether you want a practice with children, adults or families, or whether you want to just work on behavior modification. That's what I work in, areas of self improvement. I take people who have already achieved some levels of success in their life and show them how to use these skills for success to make life better.
Learning improvement, self improvement, sports hypnosis, very big.
Promoted properly, gives you a lot of variety, lot of free press. The teams, one-on-one, amateur of professional doesn't make any difference, sports hypnosis is very powerful. I like doing group seminars. I do for smoking, weight, stress and goal achievement.
If you have some good ins at the corporate level you will be able to get in. When you do some really good work they will seek you out, believe it or not and when they ask you to come it is much easier to sell them on a program than if you go knocking on their door.

Counseling and this is where I add, requires more education than just hypnosis. I am honest, I don't try to make people believe I can give them what I can't give them. Teaching self hypnosis and pain control.
The last one is the one where you are treading on the line between practicing medicine and not. But I found that most of the people that have come to you have already been written off. They are told to learn to live with it.

The famous words, "You just have to learn to live with it." That is the only place that you are treading on the line as a hypnotist, but I will tread on it, because you are not invading the body with anything other than suggestions. So if they want to get me for practicing medicine, so be it. Because I am a believer that you can not mask a pain with hypnosis if it is life threatening. The body will not allow it.
I have had a lot of people who will disagree with me. That is why you are welcome to your opinion even if you are wrong. But the body is too smart, it is too perfect in it's creation to allow anyone to go in and mask a pain that is life threatening. You just can't do it. You are not giving someone something to do that could cause injury to them. They won't do it.

Have you ever heard of anyone being sued for using hypnosis? No. No one has ever been sued over hypnosis because they can't prove it exist. Can't prove crime happened without a weapon.
What you want from each client is a yes answer. Get them to do at least 5 things for you before the hypnosis begins. You want them to do somethings for you in or out of trance.This is your key to success and is very important.


So what you have got now is a condition that you are creating of them doing something for you. The more tasks they do, the more the mind will except the next suggestion and the next and the next. Until it finally they do it on auto pilot. Unless, it comes up with something it does not want to do at the moment
Always stay in the moment. That's when you bring them out of trance. So it will behoove you not to give them a suggestion that you think for any reason that will bring them out of trance. Not to worry, you can put them right back into trance. But at that moment they will be out of trance. So she did not do anything she did not want to do. But she got into the situation of doing what he asked of her. So one more thing was easy to follow, but she had to have had the desire also. Emotion, when you are dealing with the emotional part of the mind so there has to be feelings there.

Evidently we are pain/pleasure animals.
We avoid pain and go towards pleasure. She knew something good was going to happen, that's what she was going for. Everybody plays dumb.
I also perform stage hypnosis. All my people remember everything. I want them to remember. Because now they become my advertisement. I treat them with respect, kindness and they had a good time and a lot of fun, plus finding out that they could be hypnotized. Now they go around talking about hypnosis on a positive note. So you are going to become an educator at the same time now that you have become an hypnotist. Can't help but do it.

The next thing you learn about are the titles in Washington, the Department of Labor has titles. Hypnotherapist, alternate title is Master Hypnotist, alternate title is Hypnotist. Hypnotherapist induces an hypnotic state in a client to increase motivation are alter behavior patterns through hypnosis. Consults with the client to determine the nature of the problem. Prepares the client to enter hypnotic states by explaining how hypnosis works and what the client will experience. Tests the subjects to determine the decrease of physical and emotional suggestibility. Induces hypnotic techniques of hypnosis based on interpretation of test results and analysis of the clients problem may train client in self hypnosis conditioning. That is the job description title for the Department of Labor.

The next one, questions and answers about hypnosis.
You are going to know every one of those by heart. Not because you are going to study them but because everybody you come in contact with well ask all or a majority of those questions. You will be able to answer them in your own way after enough repeated inquiries, but you must know these up-front.
You can even give this to the client let them read it if they are waiting in your waiting room and let them get it out of their system once and for all.

Why waste time once they get into the therapy room when you are working on them. Time is money. In fact there are a few people, where the office set up will allow it, they show a video, and the video is a therapist. Explaining all these things live on a television. Get it out in the open, face it up-front, get it over with, then you can get on with the therapy. So they are setting there wondering what it is like whether I can, I can't, they are just wasting time. Are you working for $15 an hour? Why not give them what they pay for? They don't mind waiting for you when they are given some information. So get them to fill out the client in-take form and then they believe they have come for hypnosis.
What is hypnosis?
Why do some people have doubt? Because it is misunderstood.
Is it dangerous? The harm is that hypnosis is not us often enough. They has never been a bad communication of harm coming to anyone using the therapeutic use of hypnotism. There has been a lot of people who have professed harm but they never won a case in court. Just can't prove it. How can you prove you are out of control? Can't take a picture of it.
A case about sleep walking, where someone killed his mother. They won't be able to associate sleep walking with hypnosis. Why wouldn't they? They do not go together. Wouldn't you say it is an induced state? No, it is a natural phenomena. It is called somnambulism. Some people have it some people don't.
Can you do the same thing?; No! Can this state of somnambulism be created? You can not self induce somnambulism. It is a deep state of hypnosis. You will learn to create somnambulism and I will show you how to create a somnambulistic state in less than five minutes.
Five years ago they said only four out of five people could go into somnambulism. Now it is four out of four that can go into somnambulism.

Charles Tebbetts Said,
"If you want to be hypnotized and believe you can be hypnotized then there is no power on earth that can stop you from being hypnotized."

It is that simple. If someone said they do not want to be hypnotized, than the session is over for them. You dismiss them. Usually that won't happen. because that is the reason they came in, if you are a hypnotist.
What does it feel like to be hypnotized?
Ask a hundred people and you will get a hundred answers. And the number one denominator Is determined in every hypnotic subject, was the state of relaxation. Was greater than any other time in their life. They never remember being that relaxed. There is no other way to create that state of relaxation. Except through hypnosis.
Some people feel numb, some feel light, some feel tingly, some warm, some cool, some don't feel any of those things, some feel all of them, but every one of them feel a profound state of relaxation. A feeling unknown to most people any other time.
Another one of the beautiful side benefits of hypnosis, every ten minutes in hypnotic trance is the equivalent of getting a two hour nap. So if you can keep them in for 10 minutes they will feel like they have had a half of nights sleep. Guess what that will do for the productivity.

Does hypnosis weaken the will? Can a person be hypnotized against their will? NO
Do people have trouble coming out of hypnosis? That is the number one fear.
What if they won't come out of it?
There is no way to stay in it unless you chose to. The only reason why someone will chose to stay in it, is fear. What kind of fear? Fear that they will never feel this good again. That is the fear. In fact, that is the method that I recommend to use to get them out of trance. You find some one that does not responded to a count up, when you have done everything you know how to do. "You whisper to them and say "All right now, I'm going to count to three, when I count to three you will open your eyes, if you chose not to open your eyes now you will never be able to feel this good again."

One, two and they are up!! I guarantee you it works and I have had to use it once, and it works. See the only reason they want to stay in hypnosis is because "IT FEELS SO GOOD," they don't want to take a chance on not being able to come back to this special place ever again. Not it's up to you to get them back there again and quickly to keep the belief system strong. This is done through post hypnotic suggestions.

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