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This morning I’ve been thinking about covert hypnosis tools.  The reason we call it “covert” hypnosis is because it comes across as very natural to people that you are working with (talking to).

One of the most natural things to do in conversation is to move your hands and to make gestures.  You can take advantage of this natural component of conversation by establishing an unconscious meaning to your own gestures.  When your brain (or someone else’s) assigns some kind of meaning to a gesture, then that gesture has become an anchor for the meaning. 

Some everyday examples can suddenly become obvious to you.  A guy winks at a girl, and she knows he is interested in her.  A person choking on a piece of bread will hold his hands to his neck to indicate this (since he can’t talk).  Putting your index finger on your temple is an anchor for “I’m thinking”.

In covert hypnosis you can establish anchors by performing a gesture at the same time as you elicit some kind of mental thought or psychological state from another person. 

A simple example would be to anchor “yes” and “no” to different places that you point to.  You can establish the anchors by pointing to the “yes” place when you establish rapport and talk about simple stuff.  Anything that gets the person to say “yes” or think “yes” is sufficient.  You can ask the other person any question where “yes” will come out of his mouth and as he says the word, you gesture to a location very subtly.  Then as you get him to say “no” to something else, you gesture subtly to another location.  You should actually do this more than one time per anchor because anchors are not set quickly unless the emotional state of your target is at a high level. 

Once your anchors are set, you can use them as you make suggestions.  For example if you wanted to suggest to your wife that it was time to buy a new big screen TV you might say, “I just love how the prices have come down on the new LCD TVs (gesturing to the “yes” spot), and I realize we weren’t planning on replacing our TV so soon (gesturing to “no” spot).  And with the price drops, I feel comfortable with the idea that we can go ahead and do this now (again gesture to “yes” place). 

That’s just a simple example of how to use gestures as anchors in covert hypnosis.  Hopefully you learned something from it. 

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