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.