The ability to alter the state of mind has been something you probably have been reading about and possibly practicing for some time now.

If this is true then the next logical step in your education will be to refine and sharpen the trance induction skills you have been learning. To do this you must take all the skills you have been learning and keep them as fresh in your mind as possible. Many of these skills you will be able to use in trance induction as you learn to broaden your horizons in this area.

For now you should focus on the basics of becoming great, a great Conversational Hypnotist that is. The 4 Stage Protocol along with a couple of secret tips will give you the important and basic specifics for inducing a hypnotic trance. The skills and tips in this article will nearly guarantee you the ability to send you subject and those around you into hypnotic trances.

These are all skills you should already be familiar with and if you are not then a brief refresher may help before you carry on. On another note, remember that these are the basics and you will be learning many more layers of skills to add to these as your education continues.

The 4 Stage Protocol is really the meat and potatoes of getting someone into a hypnotic trance. This set of rules or concepts contain all you need in order to create hypnotic trance in another person.

The first step is to Absorb Attention. No matter what hypnotic effect or process you want to do with your subject you must always first absorb their attention. Without the attention of your listener you will not be able to continue in the area of inducing a trance. So make sure to practice getting people’s attention.

You will learn ways to do this as you go on to other articles, all you need to know now is you simply must be able to get a persons attention focused on you to bring them into an altered state of mind or hypnotic trance.

The second stage in the 4 Stage Protocol is a very important one, Bypass the Critical Factor. As you have read before the critical factor is the filter of the conscious mind that criticizes and analyzes all the information being sent in from outside sources.

It is imperative to make any type of progress with the betterment of life that you bypass the critical factor. Your listener must be able to agree and accept your suggestions on some level so you can not only seed them in but get a response from those suggestions.

That brings us to the third stage, which is to Activate an Unconscious Response. This is simply getting any type of unconscious response from the person you are inducing. It can be any of the signals found in the signal recognitions system, an emotion or reaction to your suggestion that is communicated from an unconscious mind level.

A change in breathing, blinking and so on, as long as it is unconscious. This is important because without attaining the unconscious response you will have a difficult time leading it to a desired outcome.

This brings you to the fourth and final stage in the 4 Stage Protocol, being to Lead the Unconscious Response to a Desired Result. When you recognize the different signals or unconscious responses you must take them and lead them into your desired result.

That result can be a thought process, action, idea or anything you want that will help in the person’s goals of life change.

Now that you have been reminded of the four stages you can set those stages in the back of your mind and concentrate on how to get someone’s attention. The fixation of attention can be done in many different ways. The method you use largely depends on the person and circumstance you are in.

You can attract their attention by telling them something that will interest them. You can attract their attention by asking questions that instill some curiosity. You can attract them down the rabbit hole by showing them something they want so they in turn want to follow you. All these are ways of attracting attention.

The above list of ways to attract attention is great but sometimes it is just good to be direct. Simply ask them to direct their attention to what it is you are saying, doing or asking them to do. Humans by nature like to comply, most like to please others and in asking a very direct and easy thing will certainly get your listeners attention.

Being simple and direct in asking for attention may seem like a contradiction since in Conversational Hypnosis you are usually trying to learn how to be indirect. But if you take a step back and think about the greatest hypnotists like Milton Erickson and others even they knew when to be direct. They knew when to just simply make a direct request of a subject.

Being very direct is one of the best kept secrets in hypnosis. You should have no reason not to be direct, and often it can give you the best results. Making a clear concise request without embarrassment or hesitation is an important way to start in getting peoples attention.

The second secret in hypnosis that relates to this is to learn how to move from being very direct to indirect as you improve your skill. After you have refined your ability to get attention with directness you will learn to move to more indirect ways of still getting the attention you need.

This is a way to make things less blatant and more smooth, more like they are taking place in the background of what you are really doing. You will learn how to accomplish the art of absorbing attention with more subtle communications.

These things will happen in the background of conversation and be harder to spot by your listener. This is something that you will want to move on to after you have mastered the direct routes of absorbing attention.

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But now that we have a list of words, hypnotic words, which are specifically designed to induce the beginnings of trance we need to, broaden your horizon. You will do this next by learning about hypnotic themes.

Hypnotic themes are by nature the big brothers of hypnotic words; they are stronger, bigger and more powerful. A hypnotic theme takes the hypnotic words we have been working with and puts them together into a new context. The idea or activity in the themes is loaded with hypnotic characters and as I give you some examples you will see what I mean.

There are many, many hypnotic themes. You see and are confronted by them everyday probably without even noticing it. A hypnotic theme that is very common is when you sit down to watch a movie, whether at the movie theatre or on your television at home. As you are engulfed in the movie’s action you are eventually so absorbed that the very activities around you go unnoticed.

You are too busy experiencing within yourself the lives of the characters you are watching. You are feeling the emotions they are feeling and closely following their story as if it were your own life being played out for the world to see.

This is an example of a hypnotic theme; another example would be if you are a person who enjoys reading. As you sit down with your book you usually end up so wrapped up in the story line that you don’t even notice that you are actually reading words. Instead there is only a picture playing out in your mind, and nothing happens around you except what the characters in your book are doing and saying. Often you will lose track of time and continue reading because the story line is too captivating to put down.

Now the two examples I just gave you are common everyday samples of how a hypnotic theme happens, feels and looks like. These are activities that are loaded with the hypnotic concepts found in the 4 Stage Protocol. Your attention is completely absorbed and the critical factor is bypassed mainly because you believe it is a story, therefore needs no or little analysis.

The activity is also getting an unconscious response from you in that it is evoking emotions, sometimes strong emotion if you can identify with the characters and sometimes just the sharing of the experience. You are also putting the uncommon response into action, you are taking in the experience you are watching or reading about and making it your own, adding it to your file of the way things feel, look, sound and the way they affect you.

Reading books and watching movies are both experiences that will be categorized in the hypnotic themes section of life. We usually don’t view them this way and no one expects them to change your life for the better, but that is because they are simply themes and not the whole process of hypnosis.

As you begin to use hypnotic themes in your practice you will be giving rich and deep descriptions of things, ideas and activities. The more you focus in on these things in your stories the more focused and interested your listener will become in your words. The more you speak in hypnotic themes the more your listener will become engaged in what you are saying. Their neurology and the related matters within them will begin to activate and start buzzing them with excitement about what will be happening next. They will be lost to your conversation much like they are pulled into a book or movie.

This in itself is the activation of a trance. It usually isn’t going to be the type of trance where a person falls on there face because they are so hypnotized but it is defiantly an altered state of mind. They will seem awake with their eyes open and they will respond to your words with slight nods of the head, an occasional word of agreement or facial expressions.

However, you may notice the eyes slightly more dilated and glazed over, and a difference in their breathing. This is because the signal recognitions systems you have learned about will be present even in this sort of trance.

Hypnotic themes are a very powerful way of conveying a story and engaging people in only what you are saying. They will be very helpful in creating a positive environment for other Conversational Hypnosis skills. They are very powerful and can have a dramatic impact on the lives of those around you.

Look for these signals the next time you are in a deep conversation or telling a good story to a friend and you will see that you are probably inducing these everyday without even being aware of it.

Another skill that we need to discuss is that of personal trance words. These are again related to hypnotic words but they are different in that they are words important to the person. Hypnotic words have a universal meaning to them, one that most people understand in a broad sense within the culture.

Personal trance words on the other hand are words that people will lean on unconsciously because they are words that are defining to them. People will find their personal trance words without even knowing it and they will use them over and over again. Each time they use the words they will lean on them in the same ways, using the same tone, emphasis, body language and even the same facial expressions. These words become natural triggers for the people that they belong to.

The bottom line is personal trance words are unique to the individual my personal trance words will likely be different than yours and they will have a special meaning or significance to each person as well. Now there are both positive and negative personal trance words and as you work with people you will begin to pick up on these.

For your purposes in hypnosis you will want to use only the positive personal trance words as you interact with your subjects, you want a positive experience. When you are in a session with a subject and you are using personal trance words you will not have the same trigger effect if you simply state the word.

You must pay attention to the mannerisms, tonality, rhythm and general way they express the word to be effective. Then when you use the word or repeat it back to them you need to do it as closely to how they say the word as possible. This will give you the greatest effect and will allow you to use these words in your language to your advantage.

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Hypnotic words can also be used in any stage of the 4 Stage Protocol. As you will see these are words that can be used in absorbing attention, bypassing critical factors, creating unconscious responses and using unconscious responses. These words can also be used to elegantly recreate experiences, express ideas in a hypnotic way and will create a smooth language for you to engage in your conversations.

So how do the hypnotic words work to engage a mini-trance or beginnings of an altered state of mind?

When you use a hypnotic word in conversation with a person they are required to access the experience that goes with the word you have said, at least to some degree. Their brain will unconsciously do this in order to really define the word you used. After they do this they can put the word and it’s meaning into the context of the statements you are making.

For example if you use the word ‘tired’ the person you are talking to will take that word out of the statements you made and access the emotion or feeling that defines for them. This is the only way they will really understand it the meaning it has for them.

Hypnotic words are words that are closely related and extremely important to hypnotic ideas. These are words that imply a fixation of attention and will always activate the neurology inside a person to begin a kind of trance response.

Hypnotic words are similar to words like fixation, curiosity, focus and mesmerized; any word that has the same meaning or connotation as these words will more than likely fall into the category of a hypnotic word. It is imperative as a conversational hypnotist that you build a strong library of these words to have and use as you need them.

As you are learning to use hypnotic words you will find that you can use them in layers like many of the other concepts we have discussed. When a hypnotic word is used alone there is a possibility that it will start the process of inducing a trance, however this is no guarantee.

However if you take the time to practice the words and add them into inductions they will become very powerful in capturing the themes of your conversation. This can be done repeatedly and will create an enormous impact in your hypnosis. The more you can get used to using hypnotic words in different instances the more opportunities your subject will have to access the experiences you are taking them into.

This is a powerful way to layer hypnotic words. The repetition that is created will give a variety of experiences and emotions to access while still using the hypnotic words to induce trances. These conversations will be memorable and easy to trigger for your subjects if the environment is right.

There are many hypnotic words to choose from that will fit into the contexts of all the stages of the 4 Stage Protocol. It is true, as you will find that many of the hypnotic words will fit well into the first stage. However other words such as fixation or attention can be used in many different instances and stories for intensification purposes. You will also easily be able to use hypnotic words in bypassing the critical factor and activating unconscious responses.

Spontaneous is a great word to use in bypassing the critical factor. Just the very meaning of the word implies that you will be bypassing any rational thought about the word or idea that is attached to it. Since the meanings of words are the emotion we incorporate with them the meaning of this word itself will simply slip a suggestion right past the critical factor and into the unconscious mind.

The word spontaneous also creates an unconscious response in itself, so now you have taken care of two steps in one with simply using one hypnotic word!

This is of course only one example; there are many words that you will find that will do the same type of thing with all the different stages of protocol. It is important that you put these words into a list and keep them handy as you will no doubt be using them on a regular basis. They will be a wonderful tool throughout your Conversational Hypnosis training and profession.

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In order to create a new Emotional Trigger in a person there are skills and concepts you must learn to do first to be successful in implanting an Emotional Trigger. Before you start to practice the concepts in this article be sure to have the principal of 4 Stage Protocol mastered. The 4 Stage Protocol will help you to set the right environment to set a successful Emotional Trigger.

Aside from the 4 Stage Protocol you must also be able to understand and utilize the technique of ‘going first’. Both these concepts will help your subject to enter the clearest state of mind to whatever emotion you are trying to provoke. Once you have mastered these two skills and are well practiced at the other beginning skills you will have the ability to smoothly set successful Emotional Triggers.

When you have a listener and you are ready to set an Emotional Trigger in them you must first utilize the 4 Stage Protocol. If you will remember this is used to bypass the critical filter and keep the listener from analyzing your trigger. If you cannot use the 4 Stage Protocol then your attempts at setting triggers may likely go unsuccessfully for the simple fact that the conscious mind will be too involved to let the trigger in.

Your trigger may not even make it past the critical thinking of the person and be rejected before it is even set. Setting Emotional Triggers is an act that needs to happen when the conscious mind is not aware of what you are doing. This way it will take less time and effort to set a successful Emotional Trigger.

On the other hand it is possible to set a trigger when someone is consciously aware. The danger here is that it will activate the Law of Reversed Effect. The Law of Reversed Effect if you remember is the harder you try at a thing the more likely it is you will fail. The harder they are trying to consciously activate the state you are trying to trigger the more likely it is they will fail.

Another pitfall of setting triggers while the conscious awareness is checked in is that it will take more and more repetitions to set the trigger. The reason for this is you will have to work harder to bypass the critical filters as they will still be in place if the person is consciously aware.

So the first step in setting Emotional Triggers is to use the 4 Stage Protocol, the second step is to induce a State. This is done by actually giving direction to the person’s inner experiences; this will assist you in accessing hypnotic experiences.

Inducing a State is easiest done by asking questions that will be vivid enough to bring the experience back to life. There are other tools in your language that will help you with this. The main language skills you will want to use are detailed descriptions that bring a set of vivid pictures and feelings to the forefront of the listener’s mind.

By doing these detailed descriptions in vivid detail you will be triggering an already existing emotional trigger. This is a trigger that was previously developed through environmental experiences or because you created it purposefully in a previous session to trigger the state you are looking for.

Pre-existing triggers, whether created environmentally or by you, will be helpful in your job as a hypnotist especially when working with the same subject consistently. This happens because once a person is used to or recognizes your hypnotic tone or auditory shift to a hypnotic voice it will tend to trigger responses much quicker.

This shift to your hypnotic voice when working with your regular clients will help them in accessing hypnotic experiences.

This is why you must develop several different voices. Your speaking voice must have a different tonality than your normal speaking voice otherwise you could send people into trance at inappropriate times.

Think about if you were to always use your hypnotic tone with people who are conditioned to go into trance when they hear it. It can produce dangerous situations for you and your subjects. Hypnotic states should only be accessed when the person is in a situation where they are not consciously concentrating on any other thing.

At this point we should add that it is important to really polish your skills so that you are aware that you are only setting triggers and inducing hypnotic states when the outcome will have a positive effect. These should be used to bring to light positive changes in a person and because these triggers are set accidentally around you and possibly by you everyday it is important to become aware to only do it when the time is right.

The third step in creating Emotional Triggers is to intensify the State. This is pivotal; you must produce the cleanest, clearest and most pure state of mind possible in order to get the best result in setting your trigger. The stronger your subject’s state the easier it will be to not only set the trigger but also to activate that trigger to access the state again later.

Finally the fourth step in creating an Emotional Trigger is to associate the State to the Emotional Trigger. This is just as it states, you will be attaching the clean state of mind to the emotional trigger you want it associated with. After you accomplish this you will use the ABSAIL formula to link it all to an action that is carried out by the person you are working with.

After you have accessed a clear state of mind you will set your trigger, this is done simply by firing the trigger. Do whatever it is you want the trigger to be, if it is your voice use that voice. If you want the trigger to be a gesture or mannerism use that specific gesture or mannerism.

Remember that your tone of voice is important and will often work alone with those you have been in hypnosis with before. It is also important to remember that the trigger you set should be something you can use within the context of a normal conversation. This way it is easy for you to fire the trigger later with little to no extra effort.

It is important to also remember that setting and creating Emotional Triggers in people is a powerful action and will be one of the key elements in the basis of your hypnosis.

A quick review of the vast amount of information here is that you will set Emotional Triggers by accessing a pure state of mind. At the height of their emotional experience you will set off the trigger you have chosen, this attaches that state to that trigger meaning whenever you want to access that set of emotions in a person you will use that trigger to do so.

It may be possible that with some subjects you will need to repeat or condition the trigger, this is simply done through repetition. Always keep in mind that the more powerful the state is the easier the trigger will set.

After you have set your trigger you will want to test it to be sure it was set correctly and accessing the correct emotional state. This is done by breaking the state the person is currently in and re-firing the trigger, then observe. If the person re-enters the same state, meaning you see the signals that show you they have re-entered that state, your trigger was successfully set.

You will remember these signs from the Signal Recognitions System we reviewed earlier in these articles.

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Emotional triggers were discovered at the turn of the century, sometime between 1901 and 1902. A Russian researcher named Ivan Pavlov is credited with the discovery of unconscious responses, which are in essence an emotional trigger. In his experiment known to us now as Pavlov’s Dogs emotional triggers were presented to the world.

In this experiment Pavlov would ring a bell directly before sending food to them through a shoot. The dogs developed an emotional trigger in a short period of time. The dogs began to associate the ringing of the bell with the expectation of food. After a while just the sound of the bell would cause the dogs to salivate.

This was a profound discovery in that it astounded people to actually be able to see such an unconscious event controlled by the nervous system to take place on cue. Salivation is a bodily function that can’t be consciously controlled. It is an automatic nervous system function that was being triggered due to the ringing of a bell. It was a very graphic example of emotional triggering and one that is still talked about in history today.

Before Pavlov and his dogs were recognized for this discovery of unconscious responses or emotional triggers there was an American doctor by the name of William Twitmeyer who is considered the unsung hero of discovery in unconscious responses. William Twitmeyer discovered the Knee-jerk reflex.

The knee-jerk reflex is when you firmly tap the soft part of the knee cap to extract a reflex in which the leg jumps and straightens out. Twitmeyer also realized in his discovery that after around 50 to 100 times of repeating the process just holding the hammer in a position that suggested he was about to tap the knee the person’s leg would automatically jump and straighten out.

This accidental and unconscious response was the first discovery of unconscious responses and emotional trigger. It is also a very powerful example of an unconscious trigger that was either intentionally or unintentionally implanted in the patient.

This research by both Twitmeyer and Pavlov shows us today that there is a truth in the conditioning of unconscious responses and emotional triggers. These are referred to as post hypnotic suggestions.

Post hypnotic triggers are emotional triggers that can be set by a hypnotist within another individual to create a specific reaction. Many times these triggers are created by environments and sometimes they are created unintentionally by other people. No matter how they come about they are there and they can be created by you.

Emotional triggers that are created by our environments naturally occur on a daily basis. This can be something as simple as hearing a song that brings back specific memories of a time in your life. Any time you hear that particular song you are instantly taken back to a certain memory or set of memories. When this happens you are reliving the memory as you think of the events and feelings it brings to mind.

Some very common examples of naturally occurring emotional triggers are songs, the smell of perfume or cologne, smell of cookies baking, pictures, phrases or even the voice of someone familiar.

One of the most common examples of an emotional trigger is in advertising. The advertisements we see everyday utilize this principal by way of packaging. They access the unconscious response through the recognition of boxes in the advertisements, when we see those boxes or packages on the shelves of the supermarket we instantly recognize them. The package seems to stand out from the others surrounding it.

This is just one example of the many unconscious responses and emotional triggers that are common to us everyday. It is your job as a hypnotist to learn how to recognize and develop this skill for yourself so you too can create these emotional triggers in the people around you.

In order to do this you must learn to create your own hypnotic triggers that will access emotional states from the people you are helping. Triggering people into an emotional state is a powerful technique to learn. It will give you the ability to obtain certain behaviors or thoughts put into action from the people around you.

In learning how to implant an emotional trigger in your subjects you must take certain specific steps to ensure you are doing it correctly. The first of those steps is to follow the 4 Stage Protocol. In the 4 Stage Protocol you will absorb the attention, bypass the critical thinking, activate an unconscious response and be rewarded with a desired behavior or thought pattern.

After you have successfully done this you will have set the scene for creating an emotional trigger later on. Before you can actually set the emotional trigger there are conditions that you must be aware of in order to be skilled in this area.

The first condition you must we aware of is that you must have access to a clear state of mind. Without this you will have difficulties in the future accessing the exact strong state of mind you were originally seeking. If you want your listener to relax you must access it fully, there is no room for mixed states of mind here. Whatever state of mind you have access to when you set your trigger will be the state of mind that is presented once your trigger is fired.

After you have successfully done this you will want to continue with the next condition. This is to set the trigger. The trigger you are setting can be anything you can work in to a casual conversation.

It can be a word, gesture, smell taste, touch or sound. However it is good to know that while you can use any of these the easiest to work with are the touch, sound and sight triggers. Examples of these are simple. Do something they can see you do, hear you do or feel you do physically. Once you have decided on a trigger you set the trigger simply by doing it.

After you have set the trigger you will want to condition it through repetitive actions. This is the third condition for setting an emotional trigger.

The final step and one of the most important is to test the trigger. You can do this by simply breaking the concentration with a distraction. It doesn’t matter how you do this as long as you leave them with a clear state of mind. This is important because once they are in a clear state of mind you will set off your trigger once again and then watch to see if it has taken effect.

When you fire the trigger and the previous emotional state returns you will know you have accomplished this short term goal of setting an emotional trigger. If the state does not return you simply need to start over from the beginning and try again. Keep in mind this is a very powerful technique of accessing states of mind and should be done with caution.

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