Hypnosis

How to hypnotize people even if you’ve never done it before

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Are you sitting down? Good.

Let me try something I haven’t tried before.

I’m going to count down from 3. And when I get to 1, I will snap my fingers and give you a suggestion.

Ready?

3…

2…

1…

[snaps fingers]

*SLEEP*

.

.

.

.

.

.​​​​

What?

You’re still reading? Not asleep? Hm. Let me check my manual and see where I went wrong.

[Flips through book. Aha!]

Confession:
​​
I’ve been reading Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind. Brown is a UK TV personality whose toolkit combines a lot of topics that interest me.

Comedy… magic… showmanship… classic influence techniques… NLP… and of course, the magical and mystical art of…

Hypnosis.

Brown says he started hypnosis in college. He would hypnotize his friends and then give them a post-hypnotic suggestion.

​​That way, when he saw them next and snapped his fingers and told them to sleep, they would pass out instantly, as though they’d been punched on the jaw by Mike Tyson.

And it worked. People would collapse on command.

But then a funny thing happened. Brown had a friend visit.

The two of them had talked about hypnosis before. But Brown remembered wrong, and he thought he had also hypnotized his friend before, even though he hadn’t.

So this second time, Brown snapped his fingers, and told his friend to sleep, expecting the post-hypnotic suggestion to kick in.

And sure enough, the friend collapsed and went to sleep.

In other words, hypnosis worked… even though there was no hypnosis. Or as Brown put it:

“I realized that day that hypnosis works not because of a carefully worded magical script from a self-help book, but because the subject believes the process is effective.”

Maybe that’s why my email induction above didn’t put you to sleep.

It wasn’t my fault. Rather, it was your fault. You didn’t believe it would work.

Of course, if it’s all the subject’s doing, then what is the good of a hypnotist?

Well, the hypnotist creates a setting, an environment, an experience, which allows the subject to believe. There are lots of ways and techniques to do this, and that’s what the skill and expertise and extensive training of the hypnotist are really all about.

But don’t despair at the words “extensive training.” There is one thing you can do right now to hypnotize people, even if you’ve never done it before. In Brown’s words:

“Bear in mind that you are not really inducing a special state, although you will talk as if you are. Instead, you are utilizing the subject’s expectations and beliefs. So if you appear unconvinced at the start that he will be a good subject, the chances are that he won’t respond well. You must be confident, unflustered, and act as if you’ve done it a hundred times before, even if you haven’t.”

Aha! So maybe it wasn’t your fault after all. Maybe it was that sentence I squeezed in at the start, “Let me try something I haven’t tried before.” It violates Brown’s rule about being confident, unflustered, and appearing experienced.

Yesterday, I told you a story about my friend Sam.

Sam confidently used the nonsense phrase “I’m from Los Angeles” to hypnotize a guy into renting us a sailboat.

That situation ended in shipwreck an hour later, because Sam and I had never sailed before.

But there are many situations in life, in which you are be perfectly skilled, able, or deserving.

But you still lack confidence.

And in spite of all your preparing and striving and wishing, confidence won’t come.

So that’s the point of my email today.

Whenever you don’t have internal confidence, then find something external, a mechanism, a process, a person, to believe in.

That’s why hypnosis works. That’s why I told you the story of Sam and me. That’s why I told you about Derren Brown.

Now that you have these stories in your head, you will be able to summon them up on command, along with a surge of confidence, just with the [snaps fingers] snap of your fingers.

I’m sure of it.

In fact, I’m sure that in the next 24 hours, you will have an opportunity to turn on your confidence to 100. When that opportunity comes, do it. And then write me and tell me all about it.

You just got a valuable treatment with the magical and mystical art of hypnosis.

Now, on to the magical and mystical art of making money.

Specifically, my email newsletter.

That’s where I share persuasion and marketing ideas that business owners can use to make more money… based on the hundreds of businesses I’ve already worked with… the thousands of sales emails I’ve personally written… and the millions of dollars of products and services those emails have sold in total.

If “more money for your business” makes your ears perk up, then you can sign up for my newsletter here.

Hypno-wizards and their willing victims

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Imagine a small, dark cell. There’s a light bulb swinging overhead. One man is seated at a table under the light bulb. Two men are standing over the seated man, and a few more sit in the shadows along the wall, watching the proceedings.

“Who else was involved in planning the robbery?” asks one of the standing men.

“It was me…” stammers the man at the table. “Well, we had talked about it the night before…”

The other standing man leans in. “Who is this ‘we’?”

The seated man looks up into the light and blinks over and over. “It was just me. Bjørn… I…”

“Bjørn was also involved in planning the robbery?”

Suddenly, one of the men sitting in the shadows coughs. He makes a show of crossing his legs in an unusual way. The parts of his legs beneath the knee form a clear letter X.

The man under the light bulb straightens up. “Nobody else was involved. I acted alone. My goal was to support the revolution.”

In 1951, a man named Palle Hardrup robbed a bank in Copenhagen. The robbery wasn’t his first, but it was the first one that went bad, and Hardrup killed two people. Soon after, he was arrested and interrogated.

During the interrogations, it became clear Hardrup might have been acting under the direction of somebody else.

That somebody else turned out to be Bjørn Nielsen, a self-taught hypnotist.

Over the next 10 years, the story slowly unfolded across Danish courthouses, prisons, and hospitals. Eventually, it even made it to the European Court of Human Rights.

The question was who was responsible for the robbery and the murders. Hardrup, who had confessed to the the crimes… Nielsen, who dozens of witnesses claimed had hypnotized Hardrup over the course of two years, and who still seemed to have total control over his hypno-puppet, each time the symbol X appeared in some way… or Hardrup and Nielsen both.

What do you think? I’ll tell you what Dan Kennedy thinks:

Dan thinks if you want to get rich, then be the wizard… and beware other wizards.

What Dan is saying is we all crave to give up responsibility in our lives. It’s a dangerous thing to allow yourself to do… but there is lots of money to be made in providing that service to other people.

And that’s what I think those Copenhagen hypnosis murders illustrate.

Human beings are extremely programmable.

We also have individual agency.

And if you ask me, those are two magnetic poles that cannot be reduced down to one.

This is something you might want to keep in mind… if you too have decided to get rich, the way I’ve finally done recently, for the first time in my life.

And in case you want to get educated about persuasion, marketing, and copywriting to help you in your quest to get rich… you might like my daily email newsletter.

Try not to enjoy reading this post

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Hypnotist Mike Mandel says that there is a magic power word, which you can use to get people to fail. What’s more, if you find yourself using this word to describe your own actions, expect that you will fail also.

What is this magic word?

I’ll tell you but be careful. The word is “try.”

Mike has all sorts of technical explanations for the destructive power of try. But my best evidence (and maybe yours, if you give it a try) is just by looking inside my own brain software. Whenever I found myself saying, “I’ll give it a try,” or “I’ll try my best,” deep down, I found I was expecting to fail. And often, fail I did.

I’m telling you this for two reasons:

First, it might be worth kicking the word “try” out of your own vocabulary, down to the curb with the rest of the head trash. It might take some time to find other words that will express what you want to say. But when you do, you will probably find the effort was worth it.

Second, if you write copy, then you can use the word “try” to get other people to fail. Why would you want to do such a cruel thing? Well, a classic example is the three-pronged road at the end of so many sales letters:

“So here are your options now. Option one is you can go back to what you were doing before, pulling your hair out and picking at your skin while your unsolved problem mounts and your family looks at you with growing suspicion each passing day.

“​​Option two is you take the breakthrough system I’ve just described to you and TRY to implement it yourself. But you know how that’s going to turn out, don’t you?

“​​And then finally, you’ve got option three, which is to accept the risk-free offer I’m making you today. And then just try not to shout with joy when your problem is finally solved…”

Finally, I’d like to announce that I write a daily email newsletter. Try not to sign up for it. But if you find you aren’t successful, then click here and follow the instructions.

How to make magic more fascinating

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I just watched an impressive magic show that appeared on Britain’s Got Talent.

The magician, a guy named Marc Spelmann, walked up to the judges. He asked one to choose a crayon for a box. He asked another to pick a card from a deck of 52 different animal cards. He asked the third to mix up a Rubik’s cube. And he asked the fourth to circle a random word in a book.

By the way, this might be off topic, but did you know that Siamese cats have an incredible property not seen since the days of 1980s Matchbox cars? It’s true. Here’s what I mean:

Siamese cats actually have heat-sensitive fur. That’s why cooler parts of the cat, like the tail and the ears, are darker that the warmer cat bits, like the belly and the back. It has something to do with a mutated enzyme involved in melanin production. Maybe this means you could color-correct a Siamese using nothing more than a hair dryer and an ice cube.

Anyways, getting back to the magic show. Once each judge had made some kind of random choice, the magician went back on stage and showed a video. The video was recorded two years earlier, and showed the magician’s kid.

In the video, the kid was drawing with the exact color of crayon the first judge chose. She was sleeping with the animal shown on the card chosen by the second judge. She was playing with a Rubik’s cube that had the exact pattern the third judge had just mixed up.

​​And when asked what message she would like to give to the world if her daddy ever made it to BGT, the kid said, “hat,” which was the random word the fourth judge had circled in the book.

Now, I heard about this whole performance by listening to Mike Mandel’s hypnosis podcast. Mike and his business partner Chris discussed the video because they thought it was a great example of using hypnosis-like principles. But where’s the hypnosis?

Well, right after the magician had asked each judge to make a random choice, and right before turning on the video showing his daughter who predicted all those choices, he told a quick story. It turns out his wife couldn’t conceive for 5 years of IVF.

​​Finally, when she did conceive, she was diagnosed with cancer. So while she was pregnant, she had to go through chemotherapy. There wasn’t much hope. “But this is real magic,” the magician says. Both his wife and his baby survived.

And so ends the story. And then the video comes on and you see the kid playing with the crayon etc.

Hypnotists Mike and Chris said that this is a great example of how you can stir up an emotion and link it to a suggestion. The magic show would have been good without this story. But injecting emotion and drama in the middle, even though it had nothing to do with the actual performance, made it over-the-top better.

So maybe keep this in mind. ​​A little bit of gratuitous emotion and drama might be something you too can use to make your message, or offer, or even magic show, more fascinating and more impactful.