NLP on stage: captivating your audience

When the father of hypnosis, Milton Erickson, used this technique, those who didn’t know what he was doing assumed he was a bit forgetful. That didn’t matter though…he got results. It was very effective in putting people into a trance. Here’s one way he did exactly that.

That reminds me of a story I heard Tad James tell about him, when Mr. Erickson was visiting some friends, he remembered getting out of his car and heard loud noises across the street. Being extremely curious, he wandered around to find out what all the noise was about. He looked up, above the door it said “Boiler Factory”. Now he was very curious, he wanted to know what was going on. He pushed the weight of his body against the heavy door and the door slowly opened. It was very dark inside, he waited for his eyes to adjust. That’s in contrast to a dentist’s office.

A colleague of mine is a dentist. In the NLP training, he told the class that he only uses hypnosis for his clients who need dental work. I was so excited to talk to him about it! I had to wait until the next break. When we had the break, I reached out to him to find out more. He captivated me, I wanted to learn more.

Imagine being able to captivate your audience from the beginning of your meeting, session or class. What would that mean for your effectiveness as a teacher, as a salesperson, as your legal representative?

There is a very special technique, and it took Richard Bandler and John Grinder to study exactly what Milton Erickson was doing to get to what was really going on. This process of “unpacking” what an expert is doing is called Modeling, in NLP. As they took note of Mr. Erickson’s successful actions, they noticed that he would start stories and then, just as he got to an interesting part, he would start another story. It seemed that at the end of the session, he would somehow finish these stories.

They called this process “nested loops”. Nested loops is where you typically have between one and five stories (of course you can have many more, that depends on your timing). What you do is take note of the best place to split your story. The place should be a “suspense” and also leave the person with a good feeling, not a negative state.

Be very aware of the states you take your audience to. They will pin statuses and stories to their idea of ​​you!

The idea is to open up your “loops” like I did at the beginning of this article, with the Milton Erickson story, then the dentist story, then deliver your content, your talk, etc. Once you’re done with your content, close the loops in reverse order. I will close this article with the end of the dentist story, then with the story of Milton Erickson’s boiler factory.

I spoke to the dentist and was amazed at the simply hypnotic technique he used to successfully anesthetize his clients. We have made such advances in the application of hypnosis since its inception.

When Milton Erickson was finally able to focus in the dark interior of the boiler factory, he noticed that there were workers going in all directions, doing so many tasks. He wanted to speak to the manager and find out more.

You see, I kind of left you hanging at the end of the second story. You can do that too. It makes people want to learn more about your topic!

Once you try this, you’ll be amazed at how fascinated people are with what you’re saying. It’s as if curiosity about the “rest of history” feeds on its own material.