Hypnotic trance… a term used by so many yet nobody even knows for sure what exactly it is.

We can benefit from it, we can induce it but we don’t know WHAT it is. Almost everyone you ask will give you a slightly different definition.

According to mindcodes, a hypnotic trance is “an altered state of awareness induced via hypnotism in which unconscious or dissociated responses to suggestion are enhanced in quality and increased in degree.”

It’s a fairly good definition, however it doesn’t take an important component into account: the critical mind (a part of the conscious mind), which also has to be distracted in order for the enhanced responses to have a proper effect.

For instance: If I were to take someone from the street and start talking to them about my product and get them all excited about it (= altered state), it wouldn’t guarantee a sale. He’d still say: “Yeah, an interesting product, but I have no need for it right now.” If I replied: “No, you don’t understand, you DO need it. It’s a great product…”, his critical mind would reject my suggestions and I’d loose the sale.

So, to get a desired response, we either need something else besides a trance in a person, or we need to redefine the word trance. For convenience of this article, we’ll just slightly redefine the word trance.

“A trance is when a person’s activity of conscious mind’s critical faculty is severely reduced, his conscious mind is narrowly focused on our desired outcome and his unconscious or dissociated responses to suggestion are enhanced in quality and increased in degree.”

For our purposes in covert hypnosis, this is a much better definition of a trance state because we deliberately induce a trance to get a desired outcome (which is in many cases more than just a momentary unconscious response).

OK, now that we’ve established what a trance is, we can focus more on how to induce such a state in a person:

TECHNIQUE #1: Curiosity

Curiosity is a wonderful trance inducer. It gets a person focused, it gets him or her more responsive and the critical faculty’s activity is greatly reduced as if the person would be at full alert he or she wouldn’t be curious but cautious.

So, how to induce curiosity?

Simple… here’s just a few tricks:

• If you know that a person is interested in something: “You know what I found was the easiest and best way to do X?”
• “You know what are the two words that will get people instantly do what you want… and for some reason NOBODY knows this?”
• “Can I ask you for a female opinion so that we bust this myth once and for all?”

Once you induced curiosity, don’t tell what you were about to immediately! Save it for last — now you’ve got them in a powerful trance and they will respond to your every command (well, almost).

Example:
Man: “Can I ask you for a female opinion so that we bust this myth once and for all?”
Woman: (visually interested) “Yeah, sure!”
Man: “You know when you feel that sense of an incredible connection with someone? When you talk to someone and you begin to feel that wonderful sense inside your body. It’s almost like a flash of bright, warm energy goes from you to the person you’re talking to and as it begins to glow with the warmth of that connection, it really bonds you with this person (subtly gesture to yourself)?”
Woman: (visibly captivated and responsive) “Yeah…”
Man: “Well, I was wondering… this friend of mine told me that women tend to put much weight to this special connection. Is this true or are there other things more important?”

See, before the man gave the answer, he snuck in and described some great feelings that this woman now feels with him (because she had to experience them in order to understand what he was saying)! This was also an example of using a language pattern, which we’ll discuss next…

TECHNIQUE #2: Hypnotic language patterns

Hypnotic language patterns are paragraphs of text specifically designed to induce a trance in a person. These sentences include special words like “imagine”, “instantly”, “suddenly” and phrases like “have you ever”, “what if”, “what’s it like when” and so on. These words and phrases instantly guide a person in a trance state because in order to answer the question, we need to go inside our mind and subtly get into the experience.

Example: “Have you ever really wanted to get that special person to do something YOU wanted? You know that instant desire you get? It’s in those moments that, when you begin to imagine what it would be like to get a certain reaction or behaviour on demand from that special person, you suddenly realize how good it is to learn covert hypnosis and literally hypnotize that person to do whatever you want. Isn’t it nice when you can just do that?”

TECHNIQUE #3: Storytelling

This is probably the best and the most underused way of using covert hypnosis. Getting a person in a trance with a story is perhaps the easiest and the most powerful technique because it works almost instantly and it gets a person in a trance that we defined a few paragraphs back. I’ve given an extended example of using story for subconscious communication in my previous article here.

Think about it… Whenever someone says: “Oh, this is an interesting story… listen to this…”, your critical mind shuts off, you become extremely responsive and you focused all your attention towards the outcome suggested in the story.

Of course this really depends on some other factors, such as:

• Your rapport with this person
• How captivating the story is
• How much of your core beliefs the story violates and so on

But with proper training everyone can create and tell powerful and deeply influential stories.

With proper practice and education one can quickly become a master of inducing trance in people and very soon begins to get what he or she wants from people.

If you want a world quality education on the subject of covert hypnosis and using story to persuade and influence people, then read my Kevin Hogan advanced covert hypnosis review. You’ll also get an option to sign up for my free covert hypnosis newsletter.