How to Hypnotize People Quickly

Video Transcript

"Hi everybody I'm John Graden. I'm an NGA certified hypnotist trainer out of Clearwater Beach, Florida. I'm here to talk to you about how to hypnotize people quickly. And in this case it really depends on how do you define quickly? I imagine we're discussing what we would call a formal induction. So when I have somebody I'm working with in hypnosis, I am going to go through a process called an induction. An induction is a pattern of words, a pattern of speaking, a pattern of language that helps to increase the level of trance in the person I'm working with. Imagine you have two minds, the outer mind and the inner mind. The outer mind is the conscious mind. This is your thinking analytical mind and the inner mind is the subconscious mind. That's where the hypnotist wants to get to. That's where the hypnotist wants to do the work that needs to be done. So the process of hypnosis is designed to bypass that conscious mind and speak directly to the subconscious mind. So in order to do that, we use various inductions. In the old days, sometimes an induction would last a day, two days, where a doctor would just talk to someone and try to get them to relax and relax and relax until the point he could bypass that conscious mind and get to the subconscious mind. The filter between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is called the critical factor. So if you're studying hypnosis you're going to hear a lot about the critical factor and the reason hypnosis is used for psychological change with great success is that the critical factor allows in only what it accepts as true. So an induction is a process of bypassing that critical factor. So we have a progressive relaxation induction which typically like half hour, 45 minutes, that takes a long time, I'm talking about more modern induction then the multi day I described earlier. Then we have something called the David Elman, the Elman induction, this is a brilliant induction takes about 4 or 5 minutes that's what I was trained in. Faster than that is a rapid induction. A rapid induction could be done in as quickly as 30 seconds. We have things like arm drop inductions, handshake inductions and then we have the instant induction. And the instant induction is done pow, just like that. In fact as part of our graduation requirements, we had to go onto a college campus and individually, we call them dropping, we had to instantly induce hypnosis in people. And I worked with 6 different people and I got 5 out of the 6 and the key to an instant or rapid induction is to create some confusion. So typically that might be a snap of the fingers, it might be pulling them off balance a little bit, it might be having them pushing your arm and then pull the arm away and say sleep. And that momentary, that moment of confusion bypasses their critical factor and gets right into the subconscious mind. Immediately however, after a rapid or instant induction, you've got to start deepening and deepening and deepening to get to a deeper level of hypnosis where you can do the work that needs to be done."