Utilization by Nathan Thomas

The Complete Transcript

Hello and welcome to the section of your advanced hypnosis training program. I'm Nathan Thomas from hypnosis-training.com. And today we're going to be talking about one of the most important and crucial skills you will ever learn. The skill I would have mentioned in many of the other lessons, but Ive decided it needed its own audio lesson, simply because it is so valuable. When you learn and apply the skill to your hypnosis, you'll find that no matter what happens, you will always be able to accomplish your intention with every induction you do, and with every suggestion you give. This skill is called utilisation. It requires you to be flexible, to think on your feet, for you to be in touch with the subject, to be responding to their cues, and for you to be able to respond ideally to the situation. So, what does it mean to utilize? Well, it simply means to take what's happened and turn it to our advantage. I have told the story before I believe, the very first time I was asked to demonstrate hypnosis in front of a crowd of people. Would have been a few years ago now. And I sat down with the subject, and I was really nervous. Heaps of my friends were watching. I had never hypnotized this person before. It was nerve wracking. So I asked the subject to push on my hand, I asked her to close her eyes, and I move away from my hand, and I said "Sleep!" Instead of what I had hoped for, which was her closing her eyes and immediately falling into a trance, she opens her eyes, tilts her head back. Gives me one of those cynical "Yeah right" looks and starts laughing. I look at her, and inside my head I'm going "Oh god, oh god, what do I do" but I had been reasonably well trained by that stage. I looked at her and said "Right, just keep laughing. That's right. And notice the more you try and stop yourself from laughing, the louder and louder you'll laugh. That's right. Just keep laughing now, and the more you try and stop yourself from laughing, the more you laugh. Now close your eyes and realize that because you're laughing, and because your eyes are shut, your eyes are glued shut. Now go, attempt to try and open them, but even as you notice, you're laughing so loud it means your eyes are glued shut. Go on, attempt to try to notice them now. But realize that they are glued tightly together. And from that point, she couldn't open her eyes, she kept laughing, and we immediately led into an induction. And out of that scene of twenty people there, only one of them knew that that situation hadn't gone exactly as planned. In that situation, all that I did was utilize the response of laughter. The behavior that she caused, the behavior that she had - exhibit laughter - was, if you think about it, a hypnotic response. She would not have been laughing had I not attempted to hypnotize her. So I simply took that response and directed it towards my intention - her being hypnotized , her responding to the suggestions that I gave. So I merely gave her a suggestion to continue the behavior. And you can use utilization with everything.
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Now, utilisation is rather tricky to teach because in reality, it all comes under common sense. So I'm going to talk you through a few situations to get your mind thinking about how you can best utilize hypnotic responses to your own advantage. When it comes down to it, when you learn the skill, everything you do reasonably will be successful. Absolutely everything? Well no, not quite. There will be times where you'll exhaust your ingenuity and you just do not get the results you want. Milton Erickson has been known to spend over 16 hours with one client, trying to get them into a trance. In the situations we do hypnosis in, and that's simply not viable. But with the vast, vast majority of people, if you utilize the responses they give you, then yes, you will be able to achieve a successful outcome. So, we've talked about how to use utilisation with inductions. Demonstrate the response they give you. Let's say they don't laugh. Let's say you do an instant induction, and instead of closing their eyes, they just stare blankly at you. Well like with every utilisation, you have a bunch of options here. You can accentuate the current behavior. So let's say the current behavior is them just stopping and staring blankly ahead. And you can say "Right. And as you stare blankly ahead, notice how easy it is to begin to tune out and dissociate from what's around you. Like have you ever been totally captivated by a song or a movie, and noticed how time just seems to drift on. You know that I am consciously, you're absorbing what's going on. And you can just allow yourself to focus in on these learnings, being easily processed as you relax now. And just go deeper." Or you can piggy back from the current behavior into a similar one. So you can go, "That's right. And as you can continue to stare straight ahead, just close your eyes now. And relax. So you're taking them from where they are, and you're leading them towards your original intention, them closing their eyes. Simple pacing leading. Utilisation in a way, but it's more just common sense, not letting yourself be phased by the failure. Another option you have which is similar to the last one, is to use this as a gateway towards confusion or towards some other form of trance. So, let's say you're doing an induction. You tell them to close their eyes. You pull on their hands say, and you give the command sleep. They jerk back in shock, look at you like you've gone mad. At that point, a very valid option would just be to go "That's right. Now close your eyes and sleep. Deeply now. The key to that is youre remaining calm and you're remaining confident. You're not being fazed. And I'm sure I don't need to continue to emphasize to you the importance of maintaining confidence on the surface. You have several resources here dedicated towards your external non-verbal and verbal cues which will teach you how to project this calmness and this authority needed so that no matter what behavior people respond to, they unconsciously feel like they are doing the right thing. They are unconsciously getting the idea that they're going into hypnosis. So all that you need to do is give the simple suggestion "Close your eyes and sleep." And no matter what happened before, they will believe that they are doing the right thing. And because they're doing the right thing, they obviously want to continue doing the right thing, and will follow your instructions and go easily and deeply into hypnosis.

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That's a rather direct approach. You can use a slightly more indirect approach if you like, combining this with some language patterns. And if they just continue to stare at you, open their eyes, don't respond. Go "That's right, and as you begin to stop yourself from not realizing how easy it is to continue, to keep staring ahead now, notice back behind you before, when we started this process of going into trance, you can just begin to think quite clearly upon what lies ahead, before you begin to look back on how deeply and to trance you won't go, now until you just notice how much of you has already relaxed. And how much you were just waiting to enter into this wonderful deep state of trance. Like when you are doing any type of confusional process, you're not just throwing out words willy-nilly. And you're saying, "What is left, right, up and down as you continue to not think about stopping yourself from considering how not easily to go into do blah, et cetera. Not just throwing words out willy-nilly. Because if you do that, people (a) know you're trying to confuse them so stop listening anyway, and (b) your words have no meaning, no real impact. The key to effective confusion is making it sound like you're trying to say something meaningful and making them think that there might just be something meaningful into that, having then to scramble consciously to find what's going on, and offering them that safety of your suggestions which is why combining ambiguities and questions like that work really well. Now, for a young hypnotist, and for the old hypnotists we'll be demonstrating this in casual settings. Youll be coming across some people who, theyll do an induction say, and this happened quite a lot to me in my early days, and still happens to me sometimes now. Youll do your induction, and youll say Sleep. Theyll jerk their heads up, look at you proudly, and go No, didnt work. Didnt work on me. And then theyll look really proud and as a new hypnotist, youd feel kind of disappointed. Now with this training though, youll realize its quite easy to utilize that response and deal with it very aptly. Youve a couple of situations. First of all, just go No, it didnt. Piss off or something slightly more polite than that. Bearing in mind that you dont really want to spend your time as a hypnotist dealing with people who dont really want to allow themselves to experience hypnosis. However, if you are determined to have this person experience hypnosis, there are a few other things you can do. You can reframe it. you can go Youre right . That time you didnt go into trance, but I wonder just how much more deeply youre going to go into a trance this time, bearing in mind you know now how not to go into a trance. You can do the opposite now, as we go for another attempt, and notice how easily this time itll work. Something like that. Or you can just play along with it, totally utilizing their frame, as youre using your questions cleverly. So they go, Oh no, Im sorry, it didnt work. You go Mmm, youre right, maybe that time it didnt quite work yet. Let me ask you something. What would have to happen in order for it to work? Theyll look at you blankly, and theyll go Huh? I dont know. Say Well, if you were to go into hypnosis, how would you feel? Uhmm... I dont know. Well think about that, if you were to experience hypnosis (notice the embedded commands youre using) If you were to experience hypnosis, if you were to go into a trance, you know, if you were to just allow yourself to relax, to let go, and to go into this state of hypnosis, what would be the first thing
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youd experience? And theyd go Oh, Id begin to feel relaxed. OK, and what would be the part of you that would feel the most relaxed? Oh, my shoulders. Oh yes. And which shoulder would be the most relaxed? My left.. my left shoulder. So as you focus on the feeling of relaxation, your left shoulder, what is it about that feeling which tells you youre going into a trance now? Then theyll go, Oh, it makes me feel calm and peaceful. And you go Thats right. You feel calm and peaceful. And notice how this feeling of calm, peace can wash over you. So just go ahead and close your eyes down, and notice just how easy it is to allow yourself to experience this now. So then youre utilizing their frame, and youre going into a very powerful and also rather Ericksonian induction. Thats actually not an induction, just on its own right, without having to break the context of utilization, but bearing in mind youre taking their reality, It didnt work, and youre using it to direct towards your shared desired result. Very simple, very powerful and extremely effective. So you should be beginning to get some ideas in your head now of how easy it is to utilize any given response and the context of how to do an induction. And Im sure youve realized also, how you can take these skills from an induction and apply it to suggestion. Because after all, what is a hypnotic suggestion but an induction. Or to put it far more accurately, what is an induction if not just a type of suggestion. So lets say youve done your trance, youve done your deepeners, and you tell someone When I count to three, youll open your eyes, youll remain in trance, and youll be totally unable to remember your name, no matter how har d you attempt to try to remember that name, its just as if youve got a word on the tip of your tongue, etc and you cannot find that. You know the whole suggestion. To forget names, name amnesia suggestion. And you count to three, and yo u go Whats your name? You cant remember their name. And they stare at you smugly and go Ha, my name is Jim! At that point, you can go Oh, Im sorry, it didnt work. Next please. Or you can do what is a far better response. You can say Thats alright, now close yo ur eyes now Jim, and go deeply into a trance, and relax more et cetera, which is fair enough. Or you can utilize their response and you can think quite cleverly here, and come up with some creative ideas to utilize what they give you, and lead it toward your intention, which is to have them experience powerful hypnotic phenomena. So you can say Thats right, and your name is Jim, and because that name just leaps into your mind easily, right at the tip of your tongue, launches itself right into your mind whenever you need it. It means that you can remember with ease, immediate ease, how it would feel if your hand would have become stuck down to the table, and sure you can easily remember now experiences when youve just felt so tired, maybe lying in bed before you fall asleep. You just cant be bothered unsticking your hand from the bed. Your hands are so stuck there, so stuck tight that you just cant lift it off, as if its glued there, bound there . Because you can remember your name so easily, it means you can easily experience this easy idea of just allowing that hand to be stuck there. So, what are you doing? Youre piggybacking from that suggestion from their response, being I remember my name which is a textbook failure in the normal hypnotists terms. But for you, because youre creative, because you think on your feet, because you utilize, youre using cause effect to allow their response to cause your intention. So remember there are so many ways that you can achieve your hypnotic intention, which is to give them a powerful experience or, to make them quit smoking, or to entertain your crowd, or whatever you have. You dont just have to have the rigid parameters of They must close their
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eyes, T hey must look limp and They must forget their name. No, you need to relax, you can trust your unconscious, and you can realize that yes, this is a great way of doing it, but there are so many other ways, other options, and other ideas that you can do. So just trust your unconscious, and allow the ideas that come to you in the moment to fuel your creativity. So as you sit here now, listening to me talk to you about utilisation, the moment this audio stops, all I want you to do is stop for a second. Stare at the wall or close your eyes, and run through three experiences when doing hypnosis, when you would have to utilize. Perhaps during an induction. Perhaps during a suggestion. Perhaps even during a pre-talk utilizing resistance that someone gives you then. Utilizing any form of resistance, any response whatsoever, and any overt or covert hypnotic context. Using what they give you and using it to direct towards your shared intention, piggy backing to a desired result, ignoring their frame or using their frame towards your advantage, changing their frame, using what they have at a different context, reframing them, using belief changing strategies.... Basically taking what they give you and using it towards your own invent ion. And Im going to ask you to be creative here. Im going to ask you to have some fun with this. Im going to ask you to think about how many new and interesting and original ideas you can come up with, which can cause you to be able to achieve this int ention in any number of situations. Utilisation is easy, its powerful and can make almost anything you do with hypnosis amazingly successful. Practice this skill in your head, and in the real world. Give it your thoughts, give it your energies. Think about this now as this recording ends, and it becomes your turn to think about how you can apply the amazing power of utilisation to the hypnosis that you do easily now.

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