Hypnotic Storytelling

I recently moved from the world of corporate finance to being a transpersonal hypnotherapist. How do i connect my work with my own story so I am being me, rather than borrowing stories from the ‘expert’ story tellers I come across.

That’s quite a change isn’t it? From corporate finance to transpersonal hypnotherapist. Not an uncommon one though in my experience- I’ve met many clients who broke free of a rigid, souless world to embrace something more … human.

You must have some great stories to tell about how that happened for you. Of course you have a knack for storytelling. It’s part of your birthright as a human being. You can’t NOT tell stories. Just because you aren’t jumping up and down showing off in front of a crowd! (yet

I remember when I first read Paul Auster’s “Mr Vertigo” something about it really impressed me. Here’s this story about a boy who is sold into the service of a Master Magician who tells him “If I haven’t taught you to fly by the time you are 12 then you can cut off my head with an axe”

Well sure enough he learns to fly and causes a huge sensation and you’d thing that that would be it, that that would be the story.

But the remarkable thing about the book, the thing that impressed me most was that it goes on .. after what you think would be the highlight of this kids life, well he becomes a salesman and he gets married and he’s just not the kid who flies anymore. That was something in the past.

Now I’ve worked in the theatre; I’ve been a musician; I’ve been a systems analyst and a computer programmer; I’ve been a corporate consultant; a teacher; a healer; I’ve been a roadie in the music industry and I’ve worked on building sites and farms. I’ve even been Santa Claus.

I don’t think any of these things is who I am. They are just what I do, what I was doing. And they are all wonderful opportunities from which to craft stories.

So WHO ARE YOU? What’s your story?

Have you ever been in love?

What’s the happiest you’ve been?

Do you know what it feels like when you acheive something special you’ve wanted for a long time?

What scared you most?

How did you come to change your life so radically?

What’s the most bored you’ve been?

The most frustrated?

What made you angriest?

When were you most relaxed?

What surprised you?

What delighted you?

As you explore for yourself your answers to those questions you’ll begin to see you already have a wealth of experience that you can call on. If you want to connect your work with your own story then you have to start telling it. You’ll find yourself on an amazing voyage of discovery. There will be challenges on the way but you won’t regret starting it. You’ll know yourself a whole lot better and that will enable you to understand other people so much more.

Good luck on your journey!

Robin

Well what is a story anyway? I mean if you think about it you’ll realise that a story is simply a narrative of a sequence of events.

Like the time I was in a training seminar and the exercise was to come up with 5 stories from our personal experience. And this guy comes up to me and he says. “You know when ever someone asks me to think of something like that my mind just goes blank”

And I said to him, “That’s great. And what’s your second story?”

Because of course he already had one right there. And he realised that could be the beginning of an interesting teaching tale.

There are just 5 key elements make up a story- whether that story is a couple of sentences long or 600 pages.

Time, Space, Character, Actions and Consequences

What brings a story to life is the degree to which you use these elements to assist your audience in creating vivid, compelling, intriguing images in their minds that are relevant to their own experience. How you tell the story is as important as the mechanics of the plot. Take the following:

“Now some of you know that I am very interested in the power and the possibilities of Magick and the other day I wished to communicate with a certain magical adept. Being versed in the principles of communication at a distance I brought forth my magical weapons and composed the necessary incantations and spells for my purpose. Having sealed this powerful magick I sort out and invocted a Spirit being who I could bind to my will for the purpose. Reciting a magical formula I gave this spirit a token of power that compelled him to deliver the message to my magical colleague”

or, in other words

“I wanted to get a message to a friend so I took out pen and paper and wrote him a letter. I stuck it in an envelope and went to the post office. I said “Can I have a first class stamp please?” and handed over the money. The postmaster took the letter and put it in the collection box.”

You can take any of those 5 key elements as the starting point for a story. Take some time to think about stories you’ve read, heard or seen that you enjoyed and practise identifying the 5 key elements. You can take any of those elements as the starting point for a story and in the hypnotic storytelling foundation course we show you just how to do that.

Yours Robin

I want to be able to tell stories in an informal context, just chatting. The “audience” would generally be work colleagues who are generally very concrete and left-brain thinkers.

I sometimes find that they are very “blinkered” and will hone in on something minor without seeing the bigger picture.

My intention in telling the story is for them to go away thinking that there may be more than one way to resolve an issue, to have fire in the belly to accomplish tasks and to understand that there will always be a human element in dealing with people (surprising that!) and that you cannot win arguments, or get messages across with legislation, rules, regulations alone – you need to understand people, invoke appropriate emotions and that there are different ways to get the message across.

Sounds like an interesting challenge you have set yourself. You can have some fun with this. You have identified several outcomes which I would group like this:

1) seeing the bigger picture, not getting caught in the details-
more than one way to resolve an issue

2) legislation and rules are not enough, you have to include the human element.

3) having fire in the belly to accomplish tasks.

Rather than approaching the whole challenge in one go, choose the one that you feel you can accomplish with the greatest ease first.

So where do you start?

For each of these outcomes start looking for stories that illustrate the message. In your own experience, when did you have fire in your belly to accomplish a task? What examples can you think of where NOT having fire in the belly negatively impacted on the outcome? Start scanning newspapers and magazines for situations where legislation and rules have not included the human element. I’m not going to do your home work for you but I think you’ll find a rich source of stories there once you start to look.

Of course, because these stories are “news” they are easy to bring up in the course of a normal conversation. Although it’s possible that the right story told at the right time could make all the difference to someone what you want to go for in this case is lots of little pointers in the direction you want to go. No one will suspect that all the interesting news items you keep dropping into conversations have the same theme. You may also create a “wildfire” effect where other people start passing on these interesting stories.–

Ok one quick example- there was an article in the news the other day about a fireman who faced a disciplinary hearing because he had disobeyed a direct order from his line manager not to enter a burning building. He was given a formal written warning for his actions- though the disciplinary committee did note that his actions saved the life of a 5 year old child that he pulled from the fire. You can use that kind of story as a conversation starter. Should he have obeyed his line manager? What would have happened if he had? Was it more important to save the child than follow the rules?

I will give you some suggestions for tackling the first outcome- animal behaviour experiments! Develop an interest in the strange and intriging world of animal behaviour. Check out “Nature”, “New Scientist”. Get some books out of the library.

I was walking along the road with my friends dog “Indy” the other day. He was on a lead and we happened to walk on either side of a lamp-post. Of course all forward motion stopped. The only way I could get him to untangle the lead was actually to walk backwards!! There are lots of experiments with dogs, cats rats and mice that demonstrate both the flexibility of their learning and also their blind spots.

Hope that helps!!!

Robin

There are two major assumptions build into this question. First, that your audience will “resist” your story. Second that they need to be deeply in an altered state to get the message.

I would challenge both of these assumptions. One of the main reason why stories are so effective as vehicles for suggestions is that they are gracefully indirect. A story is always about someone else, its just that, the way the mind works, in order to understand the story the audience have to connect with their own experiences (the magic of “transderivational search” as all you NLPer’s will recognise). The meaning they take from the story is something that arises in their own thinking, it is not imposed by you and most people do not resist ideas that arise from their own thinking. Why should they? It was their thought in the first place.

The other day I was walking into my local bank branch and as I put my hand out to open the door I clearly saw the word P.U.S.H stencilled onto the glass and naturally I pushed. Nothing happened. So I pushed again. Of course then I realised that actually the stencil read H.S.U.P- It was stencilled on the other side of the glass!! I had unconsciously just reversed the order of the letters, ignored the fact that they were mirror images anyway and acted on the command.

Stories don’t push. They pull

Robin

I love this question because it gets to the heart of what is possible when you master the art and science of hypnotic storytelling. It reminds me of a story John Grinder told me. When Richard Bandler and he were modelling Virginia Satir she would often make what seemed unusual and counter intuitive interventions based on her intuitions. When John asked her “How did you know to do that?” she would reply “I just had a gut feeling” As John pointed out, that’s all very well … as long as you have Virginia Satir’s guts.

The truth is, I have virtually no conscious input into the choices that I make when I construct a sequence of stories on the fly in the course of an ordinary conversation. I open my mouth and the words come out. As I am talking I will see pictures that act as visual cues for relevant stories and I am sometimes aware of making a choice between two or three pictures depending on my intuitions in the moment.

Intuitions and improvisations like this are based on massive amounts of practise and rehearsal and the direct experience and feedback that I have received through more than 20 years of playing around with this stuff.

On the other hand, you already have a great deal of experience in this area whether or not you realise it. Many conversations between people are built on the exchange of stories. Someone tells you something which reminds you of something that happened to you, you tell that story, that reminds them of something … and on it goes.

If I break the problem down into simpler parts it should give you some clues as to what you need to focus on next.

1) Setting an outcome.
How do you choose your outcome?
What story do you know that is analogous to the current situation and moves in the direction of your outcome?
What embedded commands, reframes and other verbal patterns are necessary to acheive your outcome?

2) What are the key stages you need to move through before you deliver 1) See there are always certain steps you need to go through on the way to your outcome depending on the context.
Rapport building is always going to be the first one, Getting attention is another. Trance elicitation may be a third. If your desired outcome is learning something new then you may need to go through a belief change or elicit learning states (early learning sets for example) If your intention is persuasion then you might want to elicit wanton desire, powerful away from or towards motivation, good decision making…

For each of these stages it is possible for you to create a library of stories that you have already rehearsed to unconscious competence. Then it’s just a question of choosing the stages and picking the appropriate story for the context.

3) Don’t do all the work yourself! In a formal presentation situation you can just deliver story after story. If you have excellent calibration skills then you can generally tell when your audience are getting it .. they give you subtle clues like nodding their head, leaning forward or rocking backwards! In a conversational situation then it is much easier to ask questions and to let them do the talking. Not only does that give you time to think of what to say next (while listening intently of course) it also means you get to collect the key words and phrase that are powerful drivers for your audience.

Hope that makes some sense.

Yours

Robin

To what extent does being physically present make a difference in what is required for you to get the same result?

Oral delivery is much more effective.

All the principles of what makes a good story still apply in the written form- capturing attention; engaging interest and motivating the “audience” to keep reading; keeping the story relevant and moving the action along; creating believable characters and vivid images; eliciting strong emotional states. To understand just how effective this can be you only have to take a look over the direct marketing style sales page for a product you are interested in. Perry Marshall and John Carlton are two of my favorite copywriters and they are both excellent storytellers.

What is missing from the written form is the non verbal aspects of communication. In the written form these are limited to the physical characteristics of the page, the typography, the space between lines and words. It is still possible to use hypnotic language patterns, even embedded command (through the use of bold, italic or more subtly by altering the spacing between words) but the physical presence of the performer in oral storytelling makes a huge difference.

Gesture, movement, tone, volume, pace, rythmn, facial expressions- all these add to the impact of the story and all can be delibarately used to enhance the audiences experience and to mark out hypnotic messages and embedded commands.

More than this- your physical presence and the emotional states that you are capable of experiencing are themselves powerful anchors and drivers for your audiences experience. We have inbuild neuro-somatic (brain-body) circuits that resonate in harmony with the bodymind state of the people we are with- it’s how we understand what they are feeling, and these circuits kick in strongly during an engaging performance. You can use that fact delibarately to elicit the states you want from your audience. Of course this is what actors are doing all the time.

Having said that, of the top of my head I can think of three examples of books that are delibarately written as hypnotic, “brain changing” stories. The first is “All and Everything” by G.I. Gurdjieff. The second is “Adventures of Anybody” by Richard Bandler. The third is “Owl’s Story” by …… me

Till next time

Robin

This is a very important question- particularly as there are plenty of NLP trainers out there claiming that their training courses will “install” the effective behaviours of NLP unconsciously. All too often this can be a cover for them not really knowing what they are doing. You know? “Oh don’t worry if you don’t get it consciously .. it’s going in unconsciously” Yeah right!

I did my NLP Practitioner, Master Prac and trainers training with Richard Bandler who is certainly a master of storytelling. I’ve also listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours of the available audio recordings he’s done and I’ve used deep trance identification and behavioural modelling to learn his installation patterns. (This got me in a lot of trouble with John Grinder .. but that’s another story!)

Three experiences I had quite early on convinced me that there was something going on.

1) The trainings themselves. I’m a quick study anyway but after each training I did my skill level ramped up considerably, without the usual degree of repetition necessary to build an unconscious competence.

2) After listening to one of Bandler’s DHE trainings I started to spontaneously hallucinate a kind of transparent globe floating around people that made it much easier to keep track of eye movements and the location of images

3) After the Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning training I found myself reacting with unexpected passion to a bad suggestion that my brother was giving himself and telling him very firmly to stop it. Immediately afterwards I recalled a moment from the training where Bandler had reacted in characteristic fashion to a suggestion from a doctor.

There are a number of different ways in which skills can be installed unconsciously. The general formula goes something like this:

Start nesting stories
Capture attention
Elicit good feelings
Elicit unconscious learning state (early learning sets a la Erickson)
Create strong associated identification with performance model (usually self)
Perform skill
Embed post hypnotic suggests for recall
Close loops.

You can hear this pattern in action in my interview with Igor, “Preparing for performance”

We’ve had a great response since the site went live and its been great to find out more about you all and what you’re most interested in learning about hypnotic storytelling. Over the next week I’m going to be answering the most common questions that have come up and telling you more about the Foundation Program we’re creating.

I’m really pleased to have this opportunity to dive deep into a subject I myself find so fascinating.

Robin