Category Archives: Hypnosis

Does Snake Oil Really Work or The Power of Visualization

There used to be this guy. He was a normal guy, with a normal job. He had some normal friends, some he liked more than others. He would meet his friends from time to time, and do some various activities with them. Some of these, of course, he liked more than others. Sometimes, after a long workweek, he didn’t have the energy to go out on the weekend, so he would stay home and watch TV, or read the latest novel, or play video games on his computer. Once in a while he would go see a movie, but he always felt a bit strange going to the movies by himself.

He figured he had a pretty good life. But sometimes, when he wasn’t occupying his thoughts with the latest craze, or some time filling activity with his friends, he wondered what he was doing with his life. Once he went to a coffee shop to hang out and read the latest thriller novel, but he forgot to bring it, and so he just sat and thought about things for a while. The cute girl he was hoping to flirt at the coffee shop wasn’t working, so he just kind of stared out the window and let his mind wander wherever minds like to go in those situations.

He started to trace back through his personal history, to determine when he’d made the choices that led him to where he was. Not right there in the coffee shop, but in his life, his job, his friends, his apartment, the area of town he lived in. He wasn’t too surprised that his life was a string of events that were more or less accepted by him, rather than chosen by him. The last time he made a really strong choice was when he decided on which university to go to. Even then his choices were influenced by many other factors. His friends, his parents, what his guidance counselor had told him in high school. He chose his major based on his interests, but again, it was based largely on what kind of job he would be able to get with the major that he chose.

When he accepted the job offer, it wasn’t like there were fifty companies competing for his skills. He had applied to several, got interviews at a few, and took the first decent offer that he received. It was a good company, but he didn’t’ really have as much choice in the matter as he’d let himself believe.

He finished his coffee, and started wandering around the mall he found himself in. It was a Saturday afternoon, and he didn’t have any plans, so he kind of wandered aimlessly, like he’d been doing pretty much his whole life. He wandered into a bookshop. Not a big bookshop like a major chain, but a small, niche market bookshop. He browsed around and picked up a book on manifesting. He had always thought that this subject was a bunch of nonsense, that was nothing more than modern day snake oil. What he found inside this book was fascinating, to say the least.

The book described how mankind was a complex biological social organism that had developed over the course of millions of years. And that human social behavior was goal driven, but for many, those goals are determined by those outside of the individual. People have the ability to choose their own goals, or let others choose their goals for them. Of course, it is much easier, and less risky to allow others to choose the goals for them, so nature has this goal setting mechanism built into the human mind by default. But it can be overcome. The book went on to explain that by creating a very compelling idea of what you want to create, and focusing on that idea again and again, your actions will start to naturally and unconsciously pull you towards those pictures that you want to create.

This guy decided to buy the book and try this out. He spent several weeks coming up with one or two things that he would like to have. His own home, a relationship with a sweet, kind and beautiful woman, a salary double what he was making now. He created several pictures in his mind of each of this, and focused on them whenever he had a chance. Pretty soon, he found himself doing things that he didn’t do before, but seemed to be drawing towards the future that he was imagining, rather than the future that he had allowed others to imagine for him by default.

He started doing things a little bit differently at work, which got him noticed by upper management. Soon he was promoted, and making more money. He started going out by himself, instead of hanging out with his friends. And when he went places, he went to museums, charity events, and other social gatherings rather than the same bars he had been going do. Pretty soon he was dating a few candidates for a serious long-term relationship. And with his increased salary, he was saving enough to put down on a nice house in a neighborhood. Pretty soon his life was completely changed, for the better, and almost as if by magic. The perplexing thing, to him at least, was that he didn’t remember deciding to actually do anything different. All he remembered was making up those pictures of the things he wanted, and focusing on them several times a day. Everything else was pretty automatic. Another thing that came to his attention was how incredibly happy and motivating his life had become. Amazing how these things work.

How to Shut Off the Voices from Your Past

I knew this guy that had bought a new car recently. For him it was a big deal, because all of the cars he’s ever driven have been used. And when he bought them used, they were at least several years old. He is a very successful businessman, and I always wondered why he didn’t want to spend a lot of money on cars, because I was sure he could afford it. He had expensive clothes, and he lived in a nice area of town, in a very upscale apartment building, so I wasn’t really sure why he insisted on buying used cars all the time.

But whatever the reason, he apparently got over it, as he bought a brand new, state of the art, top of the line SUV. I think it was made in Germany because the quality was incredible. One thing though, he didn’t like at all. It had this navigation system that would always talk to him while he was driving. None of his other cars had navigation systems, and he had always prided himself on being able to find his way around, even when he drove to strange cities that he’d never been to before. He said he could “sniff” where he wanted to go. When he was going to a meeting or something important to his business, he would only get the major cross streets, look at a map briefly before he left, and then go only by memory or by instinct. So when he got this talking car that told him what was what every time he turned a corner, I could understand why he was so frustrated with it. Especially since it was always telling him some potential danger up ahead.

He said it was like having a voice in your head that is always telling about something bad that will happen. Like when you want to get up and give a speech or ask out a pretty girl, there’s always this voice saying, “be careful, you might get hurt or embarrassed.” Most people hear that voice and then obey it completely, like it is a voice from God himself or something. Others don’t even hear it at all, they just get a funny uncomfortable feeling, and when they decide not to do what they were thinking of doing, the voice shuts up and the feeling goes away.

One interesting thing my friend did was figure out how to reprogram his navigation system. What he did was program his goal, or destination into the system, and then put in the time he needed to be there. Then whenever it talked to him, it only told him things specific to his goal. When he realized that the voice he kept hearing were only suggestions, and because it was some mechanical robot voice making them, he didn’t have to take them into consideration if he didn’t want to. He could always listen to them, and then decide what to do based on what they said. Most of the time he just ignored the voice, although sometimes he paid attention just to see what happened. And the time that he did that, although it saved him a few minutes, he decided that it wasn’t that much fun paying attention to some robot voice. So eventually he took his car to the dealership and had the thing dismantled.

And when I finally asked him about why he always drove around used cars, it was because when he was a kid, his dad was a used car salesman. And his dad had told him that since used car salesman always have a bad reputation, he would try really hard to give people an honest deal. So when my friend would buy a different car, he would specifically buy them from used car lot out of respect for his dad. When he figured he’d respected his dad enough, he decided that it was time to move on, and generate some of his own respect. Which is one of the reasons, I think, he became so successful.

How to be a Jedi Master of Conversation

So the other day I was hanging out with this new set of friends I had met previously. I had run into them a few nights ago in a local bar, and we started talking about various things that you usually talk about in bars with strangers. The conversation steered it’s way around to baseball, and I turned out the had an extra ticket to a game last weekend. They offered, and I accepted. So there we were hanging out in the parking lot, having a few and cooking some bbq like most people do before a baseball game.

It’s interesting when you pay attention to the way a conversation flows. It’s a highly dynamic and interesting phenomenon. It’s like it has a mind of its own. One interesting thing you can do next time you find yourself in a conversation that is kind of wandering around aimlessly without any intended direction is to do some experimentation. I wouldn’t recommend doing this when the conversation is somewhat important, like if you happen to be testifying before congress or anything. In that case you might want have your game face on.

But if you think of the topic of conversation as a separate, living, breathing organism, it can be fun to experiment with it and see how many different ways you can stretch it. Sometimes it’s like when you chase a chicken. You can delude yourself into thinking that you are controlling it, but in reality, a chicken has very limited intelligence, and is operating on pure panic and fleeing in any direction possible, sometimes completely irrelevant of the noises you are making to communicate to the poor chicken that you really aren’t going to chop off its head and eat it.

Try this experiment: Next time you find yourself in the middle of a conversation of little global economic importance, choose a topic, completely at random, and as completely far removed from the current topic as possible. Then try and slowly steer the conversation towards your selected topic, but try and do it in such a way that the other people bring up the new items of the conversation. To do this you’ll have to introduce little intermediate transitional breadcrumbs and hopefully covertly help people to think of the connection on their own. The more you practice this, the sooner you’ll realize you can steer a conversation any way you want, including towards things to your immediate benefit. Which will pretty much make you a Jedi master.

Untie Your Elephant Leg and Roam Free

The other day I was reading this really interesting article on the Internet. You know how you are just surfing around and come across something that intrigues you somehow. You get a feeling of curiosity, and you have to read this, like something here is really fascinating.

The article was about elephant trainers in India. It was talking about how when they take an elephant at a certain age, they tie a long rope around it’s leg, and the other end to a large post in the middle of the elephant training camp. The interesting thing about this is that they have to tie the rope to the elephant’s leg at just the right time, or else it won’t have the right effect.

Timing is very important in cases like this. People can realize how important timing is because life itself is a long succession of events, which are dependent upon events that transpired before them. When you think of how events are really based largely on what happens before them, you can appreciate the value of proper timing. I’m sure many comedians have made the mistake of telling a punch line at the wrong time, to unhappy professional consequence.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried stand up comedy, but it’s an interesting study in communication, there is a unique style of communication that makes doing stand up particularly humorous. And when you can combine the skills of stand up with other acting skills such as improv, then you can be really influential with your communication. There are lots of different books on this subject, if you are interested in improving your communication skills. Most people can realize the importance of being able to improve your communication skills.

So when they tie the elephant’s leg to the middle of the camp, they only need to keep him tied up for a few months before he learns of the limitation. Even when they remove the rope later on, the elephant still thinks he is constrained by a physical limitation that is no longer there. Some elephants can go their whole lives and be tied by an imaginary rope that was taken away a long time ago.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been constrained by something in the past that no longer applies, but it can be useful to look through the list of limitations in that you keep in your head and go through them. You might be surprised to find that many of them are no longer applicable. And when you can take any list of things where most of the items on the list don’t apply any more, most people just go ahead and crumple up the whole list and throw it in the garbage.

When you can remove all your limitations just like that, you are free to do pretty much anything. Have sex with beautiful men and women, make lots of money, run for president, whatever you can think of is how way more possible than when you had that old list of outdated ideas in your head. Something to think about next time it feels as though something is tugging at your leg.

One Scoop Please

I was taking a stroll down the street the other day, just kind of meandering in the direction towards my eventual destination. I had a few hours to get there, and even longer before I had to be back. The weather was pretty nice, not as humid as it had been lately, and temperature had luckily dipped a little bit. It’s always nice when you have a day like this. You are certain you will eventually get to your destination, and you are just as certain that your destination will hold for you exactly what it is that you need right now, whatever that might be.

Something kind of cool usually happens to me when I’m in this state of mind. I can somehow release all anxieties and really pay attention to the stuff that is happening around me. The sounds of every day life that you usually miss out on because of what worrying thoughts are running around in your head become more colorful and endearing. The smells that are always drifting around become more salient and observable. The colors and movements of objects usually only assigned by your unconscious to your peripheral vision become center stage and fight for your conscious attention.

I happened across a group of kids talking about something. They seemed to be really animated about the subject, so I slowed my pace to listen to them speak. They were talking about some new superhero movie that was coming out, and seemed to be comparing it to the comic book. There appeared to be one group that was arguing that the movie was much better, while the other, less enthusiastic group seemed to feel that the movie didn’t capture the true essence of the characters as described in the comic books. They seemed to be less enthusiastic in their arguments and position, but it was a position that I seemed to agree with, don’t ask me why, so I found a reason to stick around and find out more. You know how when that happens, right? You are wandering around, minding your own business, and you come across something, and you hear or read a little bit, and there is something here, maybe you’re not sure what, but you just feel this slight curiosity to find out a little bit more information. Perhaps it could be useful someday.

So I looked around, and I decided to grab an ice cream cone at this ice cream shop that I’d just passed. They had a few outside tables, and there were a couple vacant ones, so I went inside to get an ice cream. I hadn’t been inside a non-chain ice cream shop in a while, and I’d never been inside this particular one, so I was surprised at what I saw. They had many old-fashioned ice cream equipment parts that were used as part of the decoration on the inside. They seemed to have taken quite a lot of time decorating, and getting the ambiance just right. I realized that is the difference between a chain restaurant and a family owned shop. You can tell a really good family owned shop when you enter because you get a feeling right away it is a business that means more than just making money. When you can put your own personal interests and personality into a business, and sell something that is really important to you, you’ve really got something. Of course, in the whole scheme of things, ice cream is not that high of a priority, but in the people that owned this shop, they really took pride in something that they thought was important and had made a conscious decision to present it so people could feel their appreciation.

After looking around the shop, the shopkeeper gave me a full description of their most popular flavors. That’s another hallmark of a successful family run business, they can tell right away when a customer walks in if they are a new customer or a customer that comes there every day, or even the occasional customer. I had a feeling that if I came to this ice cream shop more than once they would be able to quickly ascertain all my likes and dislikes, so I would feel right at home in their wonderful little shop.

After having a protracted discussion with the proprietor, I finally settled on a peanut butter chocolate pecan mix. Single scoop in a waffle cone. When I found my way back outside, I realized I had completely forgotten about the kids arguing over the recent incarnation of their comic books hero’s. I looked around, and they were gone. Completely. Just as well, I hadn’t seen the movie yet, and I didn’t want to have my opinion tainted by some young zealots. It’s important to make up your own mind on these important issues.

The Metal Work Saviors – The Choosing

Once upon a time there was a small village. They village was part of a large collection of villages, which together formed the basis of a kingdom. It was kind of a strange kingdom, as it wasn’t governed by a king in the traditional sense, with the king living in a big castle in the center of the kingdom, and poor serfs living outside the castle walls. This village/kingdom was a semi-independent collection of villages. Some villages were better at certain things than others, and there were various trade agreements between villages. For example, some villages were good metalwork, and others were good at farming. They would all meet once a month in a large flat treeless area to set up and exchange the goods they could produce for the goods that they needed. This was a time before money, so they all enjoyed bartering and trading and all the ensuing arguing that happened naturally when people got together and tried to get the best deal.

The great meeting usually lasted three or four days. After everybody was satisfied, the traders would stay for one extra night to have a large celebratory party. Of course the most popular person at this large celebratory party were the villagers that made the mead that was used to drink at this festival.

The particular village of this story was the village that specialized in making horseshoes. Because several of the villages depended on horses for travel and farming, horseshoes were in great demand. In the horseshoe village, boys were trained from a very early age to find the raw materials to make the steel, and forge the iron that would be used to make horseshoes to use in trade with the other villagers.

But recently there had been a problem. The hills where they would go out into and collect the materials for making the steel were becoming less and less fruitful. They had known about this for several years, and they finally decided it was time to do something about it. The village elders demanded a solution be found when it was determined that the raw materials wouldn’t last for more than three more seasons.

So after they finished the month end celebrations for the trade, the horseshoe village decided to have a meeting of the elders and the senior horseshoe makers to determine what they could do. After much arguing and consulting with oracles, they decided that they would simply need to find another source of raw material. This wasn’t entirely unheard of, as other villages had moved in the past in order to better produce whatever they were good at producing. The loose collection of villages comprised a large enough area that it wouldn’t be a problem to maintain their monthly meetings.

Then the tough decision was made. Who to choose to send out in search of new material? They would need at four teams of scouts. One for each direction, north, south, east and west. And it was expected that each team of scouts would be gone for six months at the very least. They would be trained to be able to determine from the earth which hills would support a new village for at least another generation. They decided they would choose four teams of three-member search. A total of twelve young boys who would be tasked to finding the resources that would keep the village alive for another generation.

After their decision, they made an announcement, and asked for volunteers. They were completely surprised by the number of applicants. Every single boy in the village that was old enough to be an apprentice was accepted as an applicant. They put them through a series of rigorous mental and physical tests, and made their selections. The time finally came for the boys to depart.

Nobody had any illusions about the safety of the boys. They would be gone for at least six months, and despite the loose collection of villages, there was much danger. Predators, both beast and man, threatened to kill the boys just to take their supplies. It was expected that half of the boys would not return. The boys knew, however, that if they returned with a location sufficient to sustain the village for another generation, they would forever be loved by the village. Having the status of a provider, an explorer, a discoverer of resources was well worth a fifty percent chance of death.

The village had a celebration for three days to pray to the gods and celebrate the bravery of the young boys whose discoveries would carry the life and safety of the village on into the next generation. After much singing and weeping, and several tearful goodbyes, the boys, who were by now being only referred to as The North, The South, The East, and The West, gathered their equipment, and departed.

To be continued…

Design Your Own Trance For Love and Romance

I was talking to a friend of mine the other who had a rather interesting experience recently. He was telling about this stage hypnosis seminar that he went to. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a life stage hypnotist, but they can be pretty funny. People can do some funny things when under some kind of hypnotic trance. There was one guy who, every time the hypnotists said his name, he would automatically look out over the audience and see everybody without any clothes on. The audience got a kick out of that. There were other things like counting to ten and forgetting all the odd numbers, thinking their feet were glued to the floor, and thinking that they were professional singers. One of the most interesting things was at the end, when all the people that volunteered were given their post hypnotic suggestion as a thank you for volunteering. The hypnotist said:

From now on, every night you will have a full, restful sleep. You will fall asleep quickly and easily, and wake up refreshed and feeling positive and happy. You will always have wonderful dreams that will satisfy your every fantasy, even those you are too shy to share with your closest friend.

Because everybody saw how readily they took all the other suggestions, like clucking like a chicken and having joints made out of wood, everybody assumed, correctly, that they would take the above suggestion as well. And I imagine that suddenly everybody was thinking the same thing that I was at that time:

“Dang, I wish I would have volunteered!”

Of course, had the hypnotist told everybody what a wonderful post hypnotic suggestion he was going to give, and what a wonderful experience it was going to be, then everybody would have volunteered. Instead of relaxing and watching the show, people would have been wishing it were them up there. Because the hypnotist obviously knew what he was doing, he created the allusion that volunteering was scary and dangerous. So when people were watching the show, they could all think, “I’m sure glad that’s not me!” Of course this turned into, “I wish that were me!” at the end.

Of course, that’s how risk usually works. If you knew you were going to be successful going into something, it wouldn’t be risky, and everybody would be doing it. What separates the winners from the not so much winners, (or however you want to categorize ourselves) is that people that take measured risks, generally have a better life. Sure, sometimes they get embarrassed, or lose a few dollars, or look foolish in front of others, but they always seem to bounce back and learn from the experience. And the times that they do succeed, the rewards are enormous. It seems that people that make a habit of taking measured risks only need one or two successful outcomes to keep their belief in themselves up.

I was playing golf with a guy once who didn’t keep score. I asked him why not, and he said that if he kept score it would only frustrate him. I asked him what he looks forward to, if it wasn’t a good score, and he said the pleasure of hitting a good shot. He said the combination of the physical feeling of a nice swing, combined with the visual result of the ball landing on the green was a wonderful experience, and that he didn’t need to write down a number to record it. The experience was enough. I was surprised when he said he only made one or two shots like that during one round of golf, which judging by his skill level, was easily over a hundred shots per round. I asked him if all the other not-so-great shots frustrated him, and he said that going into each shot, he only focused on a potential good outcome. If he didn’t get one, he would immediately start thinking about the next shot, and forget the ball his just hit over the fence or into the water. I thought that was a pretty good strategy. He seemed to enjoy playing golf more than most people I’ve played with.

My friend said that one of the most interesting things about the seminar is that it is held in Bangkok, Thailand. The instructor always has this particular course (once a year or so) in an exotic location. The reason for this, my friend explained, was that even if you are not up on stage forgetting all the numbers between one and ten, most people are walking around in a hypnotic trance of some sort. If you are ever focusing on something to the exclusion of other things around you, you are in trance. It is unavoidable. The secret is to make sure your trances are positive and life affirming, like the golfer who only focused on positive outcomes. If you walk around thinking about your ball going in the lake, or that girl rejecting your advances, or that business venture you are thinking of failing, you won’t be very happy. On the other hand, if you focus on a good green landing, or a smile and a phone number, or a successful business, and keep these thoughts in your head despite what happens, you’ll do pretty good.

Create Internal Coalitions to Unlock Your Potential

The other day I was talking to an acquaintance of mine. She is a woman I met recently, and we have an occasion to bump into each other once in a while. I had asked her how her recent weekend was, and she explained that she had finally broken up with her boyfriend of many years. She seemed to exhibit an extreme feeling of lightness and relief when she described the breakup. Normally when you hear people talking about a breakup, they are sad, angry, frustrated, victimized. But not this lady. She was ecstatic, because the relationship had gone on much longer than she’d wanted to. I’m sure you know somebody that is in a relationship that, on one level, they realize it’s not very healthy, but on another level they don’t really have the courage to extract themselves from it. Such is the nature of human problems. They never are straightforward, or easy.

Despite the fact that she spent the last weekend happily removing any remembrance of him from her house, she was going to celebrate by going out drinking with her friends. She then explained that was the one thing that she and her ex boyfriend had in common, an affinity for alcohol. Then went on to explain some other lingering problems in her life, and was explicit in her reasons for drinking. It allows her to forget the stresses and worries of the day. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a big fan of forgetting the stresses and worries of the day. Too much focus on what’s ailing you (and believe me, all of us have something ailing us) will generally only make things seem much worse than they are. And I also fully appreciate the fantastic effects a few drinks can have on your mood. I’m a scotch on the rocks man myself.

But when she continued describing her plans to go out until the wee hours of the morning, she started seemed to lose her happiness. As she described how she usually dreaded the day after, as once she starts, she can’t really control herself, it became apparent that this might not be the best strategy for stress relief, at least not for her. All doubts disappeared when she voiced one of the biggest killers to human happiness:

“I want to quit, but I can’t.”

That short sentence sums up the vast horrors of personal emotional suffering. I want to….but I can’t….or I need to…. But I can’t… Or perhaps the most insidious, I have to….but I can’t….

Why are certain problems so difficult to get around? Some have called these paradoxical problems because as much as we want to get rid of them we are receiving some kind of benefit from perpetuating them, no matter how ludicrous or illogical it may seem.

One way to get to the heart of this is a mind experiment called “Parts Integration.” What this technique does is dig down beneath the reasons for holding on to behaviors that don’t seem to be helpful, and finding out the hidden benefit in them. Once you figure out the hidden benefit, you can find other ways to fulfill it. When can find better ways to do this, the unwanted behavior has no reason to stick around, and vanishes.

This kind of procedure can be best done with somebody else guiding you, but it’s not necessary. Here are the basic steps. (Be forewarned, it’s kind of goofy and requires liberal use of your imagination, such as having a two-way conversation with different parts of yourself.)

Ask the “part” of you that is responsible for the behavior to come out. Hold it in your right hand.

Ask the “part” of you that wants to stop the behavior to come out. Hold it in your left hand.

Keep asking the two parts their underlying reasons for doing what they are doing. Ask these “parts” questions like “Why is that important, what is important about that?” It’s important to be open for whatever answers present themselves, and to be accepting that grateful for the answers that do come. You will usually find that the part in your right hand is likely using a very old strategy to keep you safe and protected.
For example, you overeat because you feel good, you feel good so you won’t have to express yourself, and you don’t want to express yourself because you might get rejected. So in this case, overeating s (the bad behavior in this example) serves to protect you from getting rejected.

The part in your left hand wants you to stop eating because it’s not healthy. Being unhealthy will make you unattractive, and being unattractive will cause you to be shunned by others, and this will cause you your rejection.

In the above (way oversimplified) example, you find a place where both “parts” want the same thing, but they are each going about different ways to achieve it. Once “they” realize this, you can ask them to work together, and figure out a way that is both healthy, and will keep you safe and free from rejection. You ask the two “parts” to work together, and then bring them both to your chest. You then breathe in deeply and feel gratitude for this new relationship between the parts.

You may have to try this a few times before it “sticks,” but you’ll be amazed how freeing this exercise can be. Having patience pays off in this case. You find subtle shifts in the motivations that drive your behavior over time. Behaviors that you’ve had for a while can take some time to fully release, but it is absolutely possible to change your life around completely with this “procedure.”  There are many videos and resources available to help you get through this. This is but one of the many tools that are available to you that will allow you to unlock your potential.

Once you decide to make it a habit to always explore ways to improve yourself and your world, you’ll be light years ahead of where you used to be.

Revelation of Ages

Once upon a time there was a fellow who didn’t really see things the way other people did. Most people were content to kind of drift through life, doing the same thing every day, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. But not this guy. This person demanded to see things from a different perspective. This person didn’t accept the average plate of existence that was handed to him every day. This person didn’t accept that life was largely up to fate of a group of unseen god’s who seemingly rolled the dice to see who succeeded and who didn’t, who was happy, and who wasn’t. This story is about a man who would not accept the averageness anymore. Who would not believe in the average beliefs any more.

This person could understand that the secret of life was not in waiting for things to happen, but to make them happen. This person realized that there was  a large amount of randomness in everyday life, but the secret was not in what you received, but in what you did with it.

Of course, you may have already realized this well known but rarely applied truth. You may have heard that this is the secret behind the success of everyone who has actually applied this rule on a consistent basis. And you are probably already aware that this is not really a rule, or a law, rather than a particularly useful hallucination that if applied correctly, can lead to untold happiness and achievement not thought possible under the way that you used to look at things.

Mystics and Guru’s throughout time have well understood that the ability take what appears to be real and mold it according to your intentions is the metaphysical truth that lies beneath all bliss. When you take on this truth as your own, you will be well on the way to achieve dreams beyond comprehension.

This person was aware of this, on a deep level, but not consciously. He lived for a long time, according to the old model of reality. Until one day, he stumbled across a truth that was at once overwhelmingly simple and extraordinarily powerful. With one simple thought, he was able to adjust his perception of reality just enough to see the truth. That reality is really a reflection of your thoughts. What you think, becomes your reality. Your thoughts are your world.

When this person realized this, the world changed from an overbearing system of rules and regulations and fears to a vast playground of opportunity and bliss.
Never again was this person able to live life according to the old model. Because once this person saw the way things really worked, it was inconceivable forget the new found freedom.

If you are feeling a bit of familiarity, like a dream that you swear you’d had before, don’t worry. It is meant to be that way.

Because the time of revelation is now, and this person, is you.

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The Magical Power of Rapport

Try a little mind experiment with me. Imagine a friend of yours, one that you’ve known for a long time. You trust that person, right? If they suggested that you do something,and it didn’t sound too crazy, you’d probably do it, right? Me too. Now imagine if somebody that you didn’t know came up to you, and asked you out of the blue to do the exact same thing. How would you react? Probably the same way I would . Tell the person no thanks. If they persisted, then tell them to get lost.

What’s missing from this is a feeling of connection. A deep feeling of similarity with this person. Similar beliefs, ideas, experiences. It’s very hard for somebody that hasn’t known you for a long time to create this feeling. But what if there was? What if there were a secret method, known only to a few of how to create this feeling?

This technique is called rapport. The word rapport is probably familiar to you, but unfortunately it gets thrown around so much, not too many people really understand the power behind it. Rapport is that deep feeling that you experience when you are really connecting with somebody on an unconscious level. And the best part about it, is it’s really easy to do.

Here’s how.

The first step in rapport is to match body language of the person that you want to persuade. Mirror them as much as you can without getting caught. When they shift, you shift. This is so simple, yet so mindbogglingly powerful its amazing so many people don’t use this on a daily basis. If they are slouched a little bit, you slouch a little bit. If they are resting their elbow on the table, you rest your elbow on the table. I’m not going to even begin to describe how powerful this is on a first date, because I’m sure you can think of many ways you can use this.

The next step is to match their speech, as closely as possible. This one is a lot more complicated, because most people feel weird when speaking in a voice that is not ‘normal’ for them. It gets easier the more you do it, though. It’s important to match their tone and speed. If they speak really fast, you speak really fast. If they speak slow, and pause a lot, you speak slow and pause a lot.

The next step is to see their point of view. This doesn’t mean agreeing with everything they say. This means listening, not interrupting, and really making an effort to see things from their point of view. Even if they have a belief which is diametrically opposed to yours, one such controversial topics such as abortion and gun control, hold your tongue. Listen patiently, and at least let them know that you respect their opinion, and you can see how they would have such an opinion. This is a major stumbling block for people. So much so that some people refuse to date or even be friends with people that have opposite opinions than theirs. This can be very limiting, as being able to see opinions from viewpoints than your own can be very rewarding.

These are just the beginning steps of developing deep rapport with somebody that you want persuade. But because they are so powerful, once you master these, you will have an edge over almost anyone you meet.

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