Hypnosis can help create success because hypnosis is about creating expectations. These expectations aren’t the so called ‘positive thinking’, or just hoping for the best. They are a part of you. They become your instincts. Now because your instincts work for you automatically, this positive attitude means you’re freed from the effort of trying to be positive – which never really works. You just can’t help it. You can’t help being positive. You begin to expect the best quite naturally.

With hypnosis you can change unhelpful patterns so your expectations and instincts start to work productively for you. The advantages are huge. Even setbacks are seen in positive ways. Positive people learn from setbacks and often say afterwards that in fact they didn’t see them as setbacks at all.

So where do you get your attitudes from? Well, you learn attitudes in two ways. Either they get conditioned into you by others, or you condition yourself through natural self-hypnotic experiences. Every time you learn something new to the extent that it becomes automatic, then you’ve been hypnotized. Remember, hypnosis can last just a few seconds and your eyes can be wide open. This is why we talk about anger, pessimism, anxiety, addictions and depression as hypnotic trance states, because they all require a restrictive, narrowed focus combined with a use (or misuse) of imagination.

People trance out just as much when they’re being negative as when they’re strongly positive, because your instincts are essentially programmed through natural hypnotic focus states. So it’s perfectly possible to program yourself to believe unhelpful or limiting things about yourself. The argument of pessimists usually comes back to what they call realism. You know the kind of thing. I’m just being realistic. Things really are that bad.

In our work we don’t use unrealistic and simplistic positive thinking ideas, but we do encourage life transformation through developing productive creativity, optimism and staying power. Remember, expectation is powerful. Your brain works towards what it’s been programmed to expect. This principle can be much more powerful than you may currently realize.

I’ve sometimes set my alarm clock for seven and then – due to high expectation in my brain – I’ve woken up one minute before the alarm goes off. Friends and colleagues tell me of similar experiences. People often talk of consciously struggling to remember someone’s name – so creating expectation for their brain to manifest. Hours later they may have been mowing the lawn or taking a bath and suddenly the name pops up, even though they were no longer thinking about it consciously. Expectation is powerful stuff and works below the level of your conscious mind.

It’s the power of unconscious expectation that determines your attitudes in life, and attitude is really a subconscious expectation; and, as any medic will tell you, expectation can even cure some illnesses. This is why placebos work in reducing swelling or pain even when they’re just sugar pills. Placebos also make excellent anti-depressants. It’s the expectancy produced by the positive belief that these substances are powerful healing medications that produces the positive result.

Hypnosis is a medium through which positive subconscious expectancy can be programmed and maintained. The more the patient’s attention is locked onto the placebo and the more their imagination is engaged, the more successful the placebo will be in actually reorganizing cellular structures in the patient’s body. This is the hypnotic part and the success of the placebo is the completion of the expectancy. Few doctors understand that the working of a placebo pill is a post-hypnotic response, but that’s exactly what it is.

If you truly believe that things are going to work out well, then you’ll feel confident and have more staying power to keep trying longer. You’ll also have more energy and enthusiasm, which is more likely to attract others to your project, and your creative mind will be working for you, so you’ll produce unexpected solutions and ideas.

Your subconscious mind will be constantly working towards manifesting the expectation and your brain is a powerful engine and what it is geared towards is absolutely crucial. Research shows that optimists have better immune systems, live longer, become less stressed by challenges and persevere longer, meaning they’re more likely to ultimately succeed.

Hypnosis is a natural learning state and happens spontaneously and continually, and most of the time we’re unaware of it happening. This means we can easily get hypnotized by the attitudes of people around us, and by TV and advertising.

Fortunately, optimism is a strategy that anyone can learn and the quickest way to do this is also through hypnosis. Optimists see positive things as part of who they are – permanent and relating to life as a whole. It’s as simple as this. The more times you enter positive and productive hypnotic trance states relating to your life, the more positive – and likely to be successful – you become.

Because negative emotional states also work on people in hypnotic ways, we can use hypnosis as the optimum tool to overcoming depression, anger and other conditions. Similarly, because determination, inspiration and the ability to enter performance flow states are also hypnotic, we can again use hypnosis to create and enhance positive states until they become a lasting way of relating to your life.

Of course, anything worthwhile takes perseverance. But individuals who can keep creative, upbeat and determined and see through the limitations of negativity are the ones who’ll thrive.

In summary

All psychological limitations are learned through natural trance states. Likewise, all skills, abilities and positive attitudes become fixed through hypnotic experiences. Negative attitudes produce negative expectations – which makes people give up too early and miss opportunities. Positive expectation means more energy and likelihood of success and happiness. Both optimism and pessimism tend to be infectious. Positive expectation and focus can be programmed through regular and effective hypnosis.

Mark Tyrrell

Well basically, you do it and do it until it just isn’t scary any more! Hardly a deeply insightful answer, but true. Think of anything you have mastered that was difficult at first, and you’ll see that’s what happened.

Fear, or lack of confidence, is all about uncertainty, and once you have done something enough for the uncertainty to mostly disappear, the fear disappears too.

But that leaves a big problem. What if you’re so scared to do something you can’t even get started? Or what if it’s not the sort of thing you can practise?

This is where hypnosis comes in. Hypnosis builds a ‘bridge’ from where you are just now to your destination – doing what you want to do comfortably.

Time for an example I think…

Jane, a client of mine, was terrified of driving her car. She had been driving home from work one day when an angry driver had started harassing her by driving right up behind, swerving in front of her and shouting out of the window. She was very stressed at the time as her mother had just died, and she had a panic attack behind the wheel. When she got back in the car the following day she had another panic attack and was unable to drive. Now she had bravely got herself to the stage where she could ride in one if someone she trusted was driving, but she couldn’t drive herself.

Now, she could go no further in her career without a driving licence and so was in a very difficult situation.

So what to do? Jane has to drive, but is terrified of it. It’s the sort of situation that can make you feel pretty hopeless. But not if you know hypnosis.

Firstly, we used hypnosis to get Jane to feel differently about the road rage incident – so that she could remember it without panicking and – more importantly – so she didn’t experience panic when she got behind the wheel.

Then we had her rehearse driving over and over in hypnosis so she could ‘experience’ doing it while relaxed.

After the hypnosis, Jane said she felt more relaxed about driving, but how could she be sure it would be OK?

I told her she couldn’t be sure. You can never be sure until you do it. You can fool yourself into thinking it will definitely be OK, develop some powerful optimism, but you can never be 100% sure. Used in the right way, hypnosis reduces the feeling of uncertainty to tolerable levels, so you can go and do that thing that used to terrify you.

But when it comes down to it – it’s down to you to make the final leap. (It’s just that it feels more like a hop!

Jane made that final leap and things got easier and easier from then on. She didn’t do it because I ‘told’ her to – she did it because I helped her reduce the unpleasant emotions to a level where she could do what she needed to solve the problem.

Hypnosis builds a bridge over the chasm you have to leap.

If you read the Master Series essay on What is Hypnosis? you will remember how Mark Tyrrell described how hypnosis accesses the REM state to create a new blueprint for the instincts. These sessions create a more confident emotional blueprint for specific events.

And here are some more great reasons why you can be more confident…

As I said above, you can never be sure before you do something that ‘everything is going to be OK’.

But you can trust yourself that you’ll do your best.

And you can accept the possibility that you’ll surprise yourself.

And you can concentrate on relaxing so that your unconscious mind can help you.

And you can form a clear picture of your desired outcome so your unconscious knows what to aim for.

In summary

So to sum up, hypnosis works by re-educating the unconscious mind, giving you control over responses that you can’t control consciously, or by trying harder.

Roger Elliott

Well, hypnosis ‘re-educates’ your unconscious mind. By that I mean your habitual responses, or instincts.

So, for example, you might think of a certain person and feel nervous. How does that happen? You thought of someone, and even though they weren’t in the room, you felt nervous! How did you do that? Well, at some stage, a mini hypnotic state glued together in your mind that particular person and the emotion of anxiety. That’s what hypnosis does – it helps you learn – and fast.

So, we can use hypnosis to change this response. We can take deliberate control of the way you feel by relaxing you and having you imagine things that make you feel good, and then have you rehearse doing the problem situation while feeling the way you want to feel.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

And it is! Of course, there are many subtleties involved as well, but this is the most fundamental use for hypnosis. Changing your emotional reaction – how you feel about something.

Think of the applications…

• If you’re a smoker, change how you feel about cigarettes
• If you’re trying to lose weight, change how you feel about fatty and sugary foods
• If you dislike public speaking, change how you feel about that
• About exercise, about achieving, about yourself, …

The list really is endless. And all from one ‘simple’ tool.

One thing I always make clear to my clients is that hypnosis has not been successful until it has changed the actual situation.

What I mean by that is that it’s one thing sitting at home feeling all calm and peaceful about the presentation you’ve got to do next week, but feeling different at the presentation itself is the only proof that matters.

You can’t call yourself ‘changed’ until you’ve done what you were aiming to do, while feeling the way you wanted to feel.

And once you’ve done it, you are changed. Your experience is changed. And no-one can ever take that away from you.

So if the unconscious mind learns so quickly and so effectively, how can we use hypnosis to teach it new things?

Well, the first thing you need to understand is that the unconscious mind needs a clear message about what you want from it.

This is really at the core of all hypnosis. Once you understand this, you will understand the central mechanism of almost all self-help approaches – positive thinking, visualisation, autogenics, the Silva method – all sorts. They (and hundreds of others), all use this ‘trick’.

So what do I mean when I say ‘give the unconscious mind a clear message’?

Well, think of it like this:

When you can do something without thinking, you have assigned it to your unconscious mind – talking, driving, writing, walking, eating, catching a ball and so on.

And you usually get there by repetition.

But you can get there much more quickly by attaching emotion to it. Here’s what I mean:

• You have an embarrassing experience and afterwards, you only need think of it to blush (it’s an unconscious response – try blushing deliberately!)
• You have a terrifying experience and afterwards, any situation similar to it makes you feel anxious
• A film makes you laugh and afterwards, just thinking of the scene makes you chuckle

The common factor is all these scenarios is emotion. Emotion makes the ‘pattern’ stick. The more emotion, the more stuck it gets, and the greater the effect in the future.

Are you starting to see why this is so important?

So, given this fact that emotion causes patterns to ‘stick’ in the unconscious mind, what happens if you think negatively all the time? Anxiety is the easiest emotion to create – all you need to do is worry!

And what happens then?

The most common mistake (and I mean seriously, startlingly common) is firstly to think of something you don’t want to do (like feeling anxious when public speaking, blushing at a party, stumbling over your words at an interview).

Then you feel anxious because you just thought of something scary.

And right away, you begin to ‘stick’ the pattern! Your unconscious mind has received a clear message about how you want to feel in the situation itself!

This is called negative self hypnosis.

I guess you can imagine how difficult it makes things if you are constantly having to ‘battle against yourself’ – that is, creating patterns through negative thinking that make it harder for you to perform the way you want.

Using hypnosis a lot trains your brain to focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want, giving you control over the contents of your thoughts.

That’s why, if you want to get out of your own way, we recommend using hypnosis on a regular basis. This gives you the immediate benefits of the hypnosis itself, plus in the longer term, stops you doing negative self hypnosis and making life difficult for yourself.

In summary

So to sum up, hypnosis works by re-educating the unconscious mind, giving you control over responses that you can’t control consciously, or by trying harder.

Roger Elliott

How many times have I heard: “Where’s your swinging watch?” or “Can you make me eat onions?” So anyway, this friend of a friend asks: “Can hypnosis make me more confident? And how does it work?” Bearing in mind that I was off duty!

Well, firstly, how it works is pretty easy once we clear away all the piercing eyes, swinging watches and black-caped mumbo jumbo. Hypnosis is a natural state akin to night time dreaming, which happens during the Rapid Eye Movement phase of sleep, otherwise known as REM.

REM sleep is called ‘paradoxical sleep’ because brain wave patterns are similar to how they are during wak-ing hours. During the last three months in the womb, the human neonate experiences more REM than at any other time during its life. It’s during this time that many human instincts are ‘programmed’ – such as empathy, fear of heights and the ability to learn language.

By this time my new friend was looking glazed – quite trance-like, in fact. But by now I was warming to my subject and continued…

So if instincts are laid down through the REM state before birth, then it makes sense, during life outside the womb, to go back into the REM state in order to change your responses to things. Which is what hypnosis does.

Your instincts try to help you out, but sometimes they’ve just learned the wrong response. So your instincts may have learned to produce anxiety when it’s not actually helpful – such as during public speaking, dating or socializing.

I’ve never heard anyone say they consciously decided to bring on a panic attack or a blush – these things just get switched on instinctively. So for ‘hypnosis’, think ‘instinctive programming’. You can understand why you have a problem, but if you want the problem to disappear, it’s your unconscious responses that ultimately need to change.

When hypnosis has done its job we hear things like: “I didn’t even expect to feel different but, you know, as soon as I got into that interview room I just felt so much more relaxed!” When people talk like this what they are telling me is that their instincts have updated. This is not the same as consciously learning something. And this is why we use hypnosis.

Gamely trying to keep up and perhaps wishing he hadn’t asked, my new friend’s next question was: “Is this why hypnotists used the swinging watch method – so they can artificially induce the REM state in their subjects?”

“Yes, I replied – now you’re beginning to understand what most people never do, what hypnosis is and why it works.” But you know the watch swingers hadn’t made the connection between the REM state and the eye movement caused by the watch swinging induction – they just knew that somehow it worked.

The first step to being confident within a situation is to truly imagine being confident in that time and place. Your imagination is aligned to your instincts, and so can program them. People can imagine something scary, sexy or annoying, and their instincts can produce emotional responses – even when those these things aren’t actually happening in reality.

The more dream like and rich this imaginative experience is, the more fixed the new hypnotic blueprint or ‘template’ will be for actually being more confident in those times in the future.

Using hypnosis for confidence means that you no longer have to try to be confident, because the confidence starts to become and feel natural.

But my new friend hadn’t finished yet. “What about problems? Can people cause them by doing negative self hypnosis?”

“Sure they can,” I said. If you think about an upcoming event at the same time as feeling nervous, then you are priming your instincts to feel anxious in that future event. But we use hypnosis to get people performing to the best of their potential.

You know the rest of the party was a bit of a blur, but I recall thinking that all truly successful people have learned to use hypnosis positively whether they realize it or not.

In summary

So to sum up, hypnosis mimics the REM state to help you program your instincts to create the sort of re-sponses you require.