Have you ever wondered what it would be like to hypnotize anyone just by talking to them? Imagine talking to someone in a regular conversation and getting them to do something that they had no intention of doing. Does this sound like magic or fantasy?

So how do you hypnotize anyone without them knowing it? The answer is subconsciously. Now this may seem like a pretty obvious answer especially if you know anything about hypnosis. By definition hypnosis involves a hypnotist getting his subject to relax while he or she gives commands or suggestions to the subconscious mind.

So what’s the trick to hypnotizing anyone? Well, the trick is to use the advanced techniques and language patterns of traditional hypnosis but use them in a conversational way so that it’s natural and normal. So forget about asking someone to sit back in a recliner and relax and close their eyes as you slowly count backwards from ten. Think more along the lines of meeting a co worker at the water cooler and having a conversation with them or sitting down at lunch and having your usual conversation with someone.

Is it possible to influence the subconscious mind without the conscious mind knowing it? In an experiment developed by psychologist John Bargh a group of subjects were asked to make a four word sentence out of five words as quickly as they could. Try this yourself:

1. sheds old my fur dog

2. sunny gray is always Florida

3. learn tricks dogs old wrinkled

Not very difficult, is it? What the subjects didn’t know was that the researchers weren’t really measuring the subject’s ability to finish sentences. What they were measuring was whether or not certain words would the affect the subjects in a certain way. The results of the experiment were that the subjects walked out of the testing room and down the hallway much more slowly than when they entered the room.

what slowed the subjects down, you might ask? Well,according to the researchers, the reason was a couple of words that were hiding in plain site- namely, the words ‘old’, ‘Florida’, ‘wrinkled’, and ‘gray’. It seems that although the subjects were not impacted by these words consciously, subconsciously the words had a totally different effect. The words brought on the feeling of ‘old’ and the subjects (without knowing it or making a conscious decision to do so) acted accordingly and took on temporarily the characteristics of feeling old. Hence the slower pace when leaving the room than when entering.

What’s so significant about this little experiment? The first significant thing is that the subjects had no idea that they had been influenced at all to act one way or another. The second significant fact is that they actually changed their behavior as a result of being influenced outside of their awareness. And how did this happen? The researchers simply put regular everyday words “gray, wrinkles, Florida, old” into an exercise but had the subjects concentrate on something else.

Now, you might be asking yourself, can you really influence someone subconsciously just by talking to them? And the answer is- absolutely-if you know what you’re doing. The father of modern psychological hypnosis, Dr. Milton Erickson, had mastered the traditional techniques of hypnosis to the point where he could easily hypnotize anyone simply by talking to them. He was a master story teller who could, through the use of stories or metaphors, implant subconscious suggestions or commands.

How hard would it be to hypnotize anyone in a conversation without their awareness? well, if you could engage the ’subject’ and get them to concentrate on one part of your conversation, you could sneak in (using regular everyday words) hypnotic suggestions and commands that would completely bypass their conscious mind. Then you would only have to decide what you wanted them to do and then ‘hypnotize’ them to do it!