Some Followup to Easiest Embedded Commands

I've been getting some great followup to my article on easy embedded commands with a pattern interrupt. Here are a few points that came up that are worth clarifying: --You won't have much of an effectusing it on a person if they're in a strong emotional state. Most of the time, office workers are in a kind of a neutral haze. It's a mild state, and most of the time, the little conversational pattern interrupt offered in my article is suitable to break that. However, if the person you're interrupting is, say, in a hurry, or strongly preoccupied or focused on something else, even though they may still say "how are you," they're most likely too preoccupied to notice. A stronger emotional state usually calls for a stronger or more personalized break-state. It's all about putting the right shoe on the right foot. --It's been pointed out that "feeling fantastic" isn't technically a command, rather, the command form is: "feel fantastic." I'm not sure I agree. Grammatically, "feel" is a command while "feeling" may not be, but in practice, "feeling" functions quite well as a command, especially when delivered with proper emphasis and tonality. As a covert technique, "doing" words like feeling, listening, going, etc., are much easier to employ as embedded commands than the grammatical command form of the word. For example, I might want to make someone hungry by saying "talking about ice cream leaves me feeling really hungry now." To get someone to listen to me I might say " ...then the girls started listening to every word I say." and so forth. --Some non-NLPers have suggested that my explanations of the techniques are not correct or even necessary. I say: fair enough. The definitions aren't important, except to break then down into pieces that are accessible and repeatable by myself and the others who use them. See, it's not just about this particular technique, which is fun, but about using the technique as practice for other applications that might arise. Defining the elements allows one to access and apply them in other areas and achieving repeatable results. The terminology I use comes from NLP, but there may be other ways to do the same thing. What's important is reliable & reproducible results. That's all for now! Cheers, Jeff

Metaphors as Pattern Interrupts

I'll probably be writing more about this later, but I wanted to get my thoughts down now. In my last post I talked about an easy embedded command practice, and touched on a pattern interrupt that was inherent in the technique. It got me to thinking about pattern interrupts in general. While I was mentating on just that, I also had a long discussion about metaphors. Metaphors, as you may know are sort of story-fied version of making a point. A kind of "as if." For example, describing your in laws like "a pack of hungry dogs," is a metaphoric way of getting across some information about the impact they make on you. The most famous of hypnotic metaphors is probably Erickson's "Tomato Plant." (You can probably find the transcript on the web). Erickson had been faced with a client who was depressed and wasting away due to cancer, but was resistant to direct hypnosis and direct suggestion, so instead, he just told a long story about the way tomato plants grow and thrive. The man's subconscious made the connection between the plant and himself and the suggestions were delivered without any kind of overt commands or hypnosis. Fables are metaphors: stories that deliver a moral by way of story. I've been a story teller long before I was a hypnotist, so I like metaphors. How are metaphors employed? They work when there's some sort of conscious resistance, or when there's lack of focus. Because they're stories, they (should) have vivid sensory descriptors to really capture the audiences attention. They're a natural choice to use on oppositional children, and great in a business context where raw, dry information can leave your audience unmoved. and, yeah, they're kind of covert. Anyway, here's my point: When you use a good creative metaphor ("steaming piles of paperwork," or "happy tourists popping up like mushrooms"), you engage people's senses and imagination, and when you engage their imagination you're tapping into their subconscious. That necessitates withdrawing from the moment, and that, my friends, is a pattern interrupt. Go out and play with these things and imagine yourself not like a hypnotist, but like a hawk, soaring effortlessly and freely through the labyrinthine corridors of your audience's mind. ;^)