The Milton Model in Ericksonian Hypnosis is a wonderful thing.  It’s all about being artfully vague.  Experience shows that saying something that sounds official, but without providing a lot of detail, will cause most people to simply accept it as truth.  Just like experience shows that vitamin C is necessary to prevent scurvy.

I didn’t explain it ahead of time (except for the title of this post), but I used a language pattern there to create influence.  That pattern is to say, “experience shows … (fill in the blank)”.

Who’s experience?  What experience exactly?  How exactly does it show this?  These are all questions that the Meta Model (as taught in NLP ) would teach you to ask. But most people won’t ask those questions.  They’ll accept the statement as truth.

A salesman could say “Experience shows that customers who buy this model of vehicle have the greatest level of satisfaction over the life of the vehicle”.  It’s typically going to be accepted.

This pattern can be used to influence people.  You can use it within a covert hypnosis session, or you can use it in ordinary conversation.  After all, there really is no difference, right?

Technorati Tags: Covert Hypnosis, Influence

Here is an easy language technique you can use to slip in an embedded command when you are having a conversation. You may already understand how to use an embedded command by marking out a fragment of a sentence. In case this is new to you, it’s simple. As an example, you could say, “It’s easy for some people to sleep easily at night”. The words “sleep easily at night” would be marked out differently by tone, tempo, or by looking directly in the person’s eyes when saying it. The unconscious understands the marking.

To enhance the power of the technique you can add a word such as “tonight” to the end of the sentence. But, to make it ambiguous, and therefore allow it to slip past the conscious mind even more effectively, you continue with another sentence. The idea is to have the word “tonight” serve as the last word of the first sentence, and the first word of the last sentence.

Full example: “”It’s easy for some people to sleep easily at night … tonight … I am probably going to go to bed early and I look forward to the rest”.

So you can notice how the embedded command is used, followed by the word “tonight”, which bridges the first and second sentence. This is a classic Milton Erickson technique. The conscious mind spends time wondering how to interpret the sentence, while the unconscious mind understands the message.

Check out the free hypnosis CD downloads available by clicking here.