These Are Not the Response You Were Looking For

A typical stalling tactic for police officer is to start asking questions about you, where you are going and what you are doing. Sometimes they are obviously interested for a specific reason and often, like in this case it gives him some breathing space to think about what to do next.

You can read the previous parts of this story here:

 Part One – Setting the Scene

Part Two – Using Social Status

Part Three – Building Propulsion Systems

The reason this poor young officer went into asking these questions was because he could see his original objectives slipping away from him and he had nothing to replace them with. He had originally intended to speak to me about my driving and then issue me with a ticket.

Since I was not admitting guilt, in fact clearly stating the exact opposite and subtly asking for evidence either way the officer had a problem. The problem that I had was I didn’t have a way of getting him to a win / win situation. I had to find a way of guiding him to letting me go but feeling like he was in charge, it was his decision and he could justify it to his mentor who was still sat in the police car.

We were stalling and the officer started asking me general questions whilst we both tried to think of a way out of the situation. I normally refuse to answer anything unless it has direct relevance to whatever investigation the police are conducting. But in this case I didn’t really want the escalation or to annoy the officer unnecessarily. Staying in my one down position I started sharing information about my address, car, driving licence and insurance.

It was a cold night and I had got out of the car just wearing a tee shirt. The officer seeing me shivering was the one thing that allowed me to take complete control of the situation, talk the officer into great trance and load in a stack of post hypnotic suggestions.

Behavioural Flexibility, Being Able to Seize Golden Nuggets

Up to this point my plan was to keep stacking more and more implied work on the officer until he crumbled and decided that it was not worth the effort of saving face.

I had already subtly told him that he would have to take me to court because I was not admitting guilt. I had suggested he needs more than just his witness testimony and would have to apply for all the CCTV footage in the area. I was lining up to get him to call out the council to test the time differences between the various lights. And I was thinking of ways of getting him to check the car and breathalyse me, all of which would be fine but would just increase the paperwork, time and stress he would have to go through. All of this would work but it wasn’t going to get me to my poker game anytime soon.

But he then gave me a golden nugget that just allowed me to shortcut my plans and give him a way out straight away. The thing I was having difficulty with at this point I could not see how to let the officer to back away gracefully from the situation.

This is an important factor in persuasion. When you want someone to do something just giving them the motivation is sometimes not enough. You also need to remove obstacles and make the path obvious. Remember the propulsion systems we have discussed in the last article? I had put loads of pain in his way but I just hadn’t found a way for him to turn round and point him in the other direction yet. I was pretty sure the officer just wanted the situation to go away but just didn’t quite know how to make that happen. Nor did I until…

The officer saw me shiver and he said, “Why don’t you sit in your car and I will talk to you through the window?” As soon as he said it I was laughing on the inside. I knew I had won, I was getting away to play poker and everything was right with the world.

Interrupting the Click Whirr Response

An NLP Technique that has a lot of confusion associated with it is Pattern Interrupts. It is a really simple thing though. We do a lot of things unconsciously, on auto pilot if you will. Imagine the routine you go through from waking through to ending up at your workplace. How much of that do you do consciously?

In this particular case the officer probably had a clear idea of how the encounter was supposed to go, he may even have talked it through with his mentor. And all of a sudden I was not acting as planned. As a result he already had a level of confusion and uncertainty. He had now idea just how much I was about to deepen the confusion and completely interrupt his way of looking at the world.

Depending on the degree that it happens when people have their pattern interrupted they go into inside themselves to try and understand what is happening. From a persuasion perspective that going inside can be a great trance state to use.

Jedi Mind Tricks

As soon as he suggested that I should sit in the car I switched my social status from one down, to one up. I stood straighter, took on a more authoritative stance and I took a more commanding tone. Here is approximately what I said, “I’m sorry officer I cannot allow you to do that. I would not be able to live with you being run over standing in the middle of the road whilst talking to me. This is what we will do I will get my jacket from the car and then we can stand on the pavement and we can discuss the matter there. Just wait here”

You can see just in the words just how commanding I was and just how many instructions I issued out to him in just a few lines. The “just wait here” command was my test. If he complied I knew I would be able to give him post hypnotic suggestions.

I got my jacket from the car whilst carefully watching to see if the officer stayed in the middle of the road waiting for me. I needed to time this quite well, if I took too long the trance would break and he would be back to himself. But I also wanted to keep it going for as long as I could because it reinforces his compliance.

I got my jacket, put it on returned to the officer and led him to pavement whilst saying something like, “Come with me on to the pavement where you can be safe.” I don’t know if this actually happened this way but I seem to remember gently grabbing him by the elbow and actually leading him to the pavement.

Either way you can imagine how this young officer was struggling with the situation. In seconds he not only completely lost control of the situation but he is now following my commands.

Let’s make sure we are clear about the mechanics of this approach. Whilst I have taken charge I am also suggesting very reasonable commands. If I were making unreasonable demands I have no doubt that he would break out of the trance and come back at me. It is very difficult to not become compliant when the suggestions you are being given are things you would do anyway. This is the pacing part of pacing and leading. The next step was to lead the officer in to letting me go.

Process Driven Post Hypnotic Suggestions

Once on the pavement I said to the officer something like,

“Now we can safely discuss the issue I would suggest that you need to check out the details that I gave about me. So you could just go back to your car and check my details against PNC (Police National Computer). That way you can find out everything about me checks out and you can discuss with your colleague the best approach to letting me go on my way and we can get this over and done with quickly. That would be good wouldn’t it?”

The officer nodded and I sort of shooed him off in the direction of his car saying that I will wait for him on the pavement. It was really difficult not to laugh as I watched him shuffle off towards his car still in deep thought trying to work out where exactly the situation reversed on him and he found himself following my suggestions. The most difficult thing in Hypnotic Persuasion is not to laugh whilst doing it.

If you reread that paragraph again you will notice that I again am making suggestions that seem reasonable. I give him specific step by step instructions that are easy to follow.

I also gave him stuff that I know he would feel good about. It was obvious that he was starting to feel out of his depth and I was giving him the opportunity to take time out as well as consult with his mentor. This should be an emotional release for him. And in the middle of it I am suggesting all my details will check out and that they will be discussing how best to let me go.

I think it can come as no surprise that he let me go. After a brief discussion with his mentor he came back; because everything checked out and I was being so open and honest he thought he should just ask me to be careful when approaching traffic lights and let me get on my way.

Any other day of the week I might of asked him how he came to that decision but I was late for my poker game.

Let me cut to the chase. I am giving you an opportunity that I have not opened up for two years. Let me explain why I am doing this.

My publisher is pushing me for two new books. One I promised him almost two years ago and the other is a sequel to The Persuasion Skills Black Book that many people have been chasing me to write. Both are well over half way but I am having trouble completing them. I need to lock myself away, get my head down and just focus on completing these two books.

My way of making this happen is to open up the Advanced Persuasion Patterns course. My group of students and graduates are great and they have been with me for a long time. I need an influx of new students to keep me generating exciting new material to put in to these books.You can be party of this community. Students and graduates of this course get access to the private Facebook group where we can discuss advanced concepts and integrating new material.

Normally I keep the numbers static and you have to join a waiting list for spaces to open up. It has been over two years since I have had a big intake. I am opening the doors until 9:30 am BST on Monday June  3rd or I hit maximum capacity and then the doors will close again. Click through and find out about the deal here.

Episode Three – The Story So Far

Over the last couple of days we have been talking about how I ran a red light, was stopped by the police and am now in danger of getting a ticket. We looked at how I was using my persuasion state, gathering information and building responsiveness in the officer. Today you will see how I am a classic language pattern to subtly destroy the officer’s ability to deal with the situation. You can catch up with the previous lessons here:

Episode One – Developing a Relaxed Persuasive State as the foundations of being able to react: click here to read

Episode Two – Using social status as a way of building responsiveness in your subject: click here to read

A Propulsion System

People move away from pain and towards pleasure. You can use either or both to move people. As a rough rule of thumb people move away from what they don’t want faster than they move towards what they do want. And another rule that is worth observing is if you want to get people to change direction it is easier if you give them a huge obstacle to their original goal AND point them in a new direction.

Knowledge is a Great Base for Confidence

There is one thing that I know that has served me well in getting out of roadside tickets and fines. But, NOTE: if you are anywhere other than the UK make sure that the case is similar where you are before using this information. The law may be different in other countries.

In the UK you have to admit guilt before a ticket can be issued for driving offenses (again, NOTE: this is not the same for parking offences). If you protest your innocence or refuse to admit guilt the police cannot issue a ticket and they have to take you to court and try you for the offence.

You may think being taken to court is a worse situation but the reality is often the police don’t have enough evidence, it will involve a lot of tiresome paperwork and they don’t have as much probability of winning the case. The ticket system was devised to cut down on the time and effort it takes to prosecute traffic offenders, but it relies on an admission of guilt. Basically if you believe you are innocent you are entitled to your day in court and you are still innocent until proven guilty. In my case I knew the evidence would just be based on the two officers witnessing the event…and if I can make them doubt that I would be home free.

Meanwhile Back at the Story

As soon as the officer opened with that line, “Good evening Sir, Do you know why we’ve stopped you?” I knew my chances had significantly improved. Staying with the one down social status I replied with something like, “If I were to guess, you might think you saw me go through a red light.”

I got the response I was looking for. He replied, “You did go through a red light.” This gave me an opportunity to do two things. The first was make sure that he knew I was not admitting guilt and secondly making sure he knew that there would have to be a huge amount of evidence gathering for him to prove his case in court.

Here is, as close as I can remember it, what I said to him. I’ve split it into sections so you can more easily follow the deconstruction below.

• I can see how you might think that,
• because the lights you were at change at a slightly different time to the ones I was going through and I do admit my lights were on yellow.
• The issue isn’t what you thought you saw but what really happened. Do you think there are any CCTV cameras that could settle the debate between us?

The first line is an agreement frame and pace and lead. It shows empathy with his situation and still does not admit any guilt. The second line starts with a “because” and is a line just to make him less confident in his witness testimony and justify my agreement frame.

We then go straight into an X/Y reframe that tells him that I don’t agree and that he will have to find more evidence to settle the difference. Added to which think about what is presupposed in a phrase like “…what you thought you saw…”

Incidentally I have no idea if the lights change at different times but I was setting up for suggesting they get the council out to test the time difference between the lights as another point. This would be another hurdle and more work for them. But he didn’t take the conversation that way. Instead he did something that gave me complete control of the situation so I didn’t need that avenue.

I had very strongly just shovelled a massive amount of pain in front of the officer’s original intentions. At this point the thing I was struggling with was how to give him a new direction. If I couldn’t find one quick he would feel trapped and may become more resolved to see things through the way he originally intended.

Luckily he did one thing that allowed me to completely seize control, shove him into a highly suggestible trance and throw embedded commands at him as post hypnotic suggestions to let me go.

Responsiveness is a key part of your persuasion skills. On the Advanced Persuasion Patterns course you will learn how to develop responsiveness as part of your natural persuasive state. And you will also learn a way of delivering embedded commands that is so slick that within an hour of practice you will be throwing them out so instinctively that it will be difficult to stop.

Let me cut to the chase. I am giving you an opportunity that I have not opened up for over two years. Let me explain why I am doing this.

My publisher is pushing me for two new books. One I promised him almost two years ago and the other is a sequel to The Persuasion Skills Black Book that many people have been chasing me to write. Both are well over half way but I am having trouble completing them. I need to lock myself away, get my head down and just focus on completing these two books.

My way of making this happen is to open up the Advanced Persuasion Patterns course. My group of students and graduates are great and they have been with me for a long time. I need an influx of new students to keep me generating exciting new material to put in to these books.You can be party of this community. Students and graduates of this course get access to the private Facebook group where we can discuss advanced concepts and integrating new material.

Normally I keep the numbers static and you have to join a waiting list for spaces to open up. It has been over two years since I have had a big intake. I am opening the doors until 9:30 am BST on Monday June  3rd or I hit maximum capacity and then the doors will close again. Click through and find out about the deal here.

The Story so Far

I accidently went through a red light whilst being watched by a couple of police officers. They stopped me and one officer got out to speak to me. Things looked fraught, there was no way that they could have missed my running the red light so I went into my persuasive state and planned how I would approach the problem.

Observations Skills

The police car pulled in behind me and the officer in the passenger side got out and came towards my car. I could see that he looked very young, especially when compared to his colleague who was sat in the driver’s seat.

He also had in his hands his ticket book. There is no point in bring out your ticket book if you had no intention of writing a ticket. I knew I would have to use a lot of my knowledge and skills to get away from this one.

Using Social Status

Let me over simplify the world for a moment. We are social animals and we respond to hierarchical structures. So you could boil this down to in any given situation you could be equal to the person you are communicating with, one up from them or one down. This is just a simple way of looking at some of the systems in place when communicating and is similar to (but not the same as) a transactional analysis view of communication.

This is a useful structure to consider as you might already recognise:

• Being one down makes people more responsive to a plea for help or sympathy
• Being equal allows for freedom of discussion
• Being one up allows you to take charge of a situation

Obviously this only works to the degree that both parties are playing the same game. And there are interesting effects that you can create when thinking like this. For example when people are confused and looking for direction assuming a one up position can mean that people will automatically follow you without questioning your authority. I used to covertly coach some of the trainers I used to work with when I could see they were going off track.

I knew they needed bringing back but I needed to do that in a way that maintained their authority with their audience. What I would do is assume a one down position, and ask questions about their subject as if I were really curious. The questions were designed to either bring them back on track or alert them to the fact they had gone off. I was planning to control the conversation but from a one down position with this police officer. Often police officers will assume a one up role. They will abreact if you try to be anything other than the expected one down because it does not fit with their expectations.

In this case it would be useful to give the police officer an illusion of choice and to let him think he was in charge of the situation and everything was working as normal until I had a better handle on how I was going to get away from the situation.

So I got out of the car and approached the police officer with a big wide open palm stance asking him how I could help. Note, the custom in the UK is to get out of the car and approach the police. This strategy would not work in America for example where the police expect you to stay in the vehicle with your hands on the wheel. All I am doing is conforming to the police officer expectations bytaking a one down role.

Pay Close Attention to Detail

As I approached the police officer I noticed that his colleague was making no effort to get out of the car. The normal expectation would be that one officer would talk to the driver whilst the other would walk round the car checking for faults, roadworthiness or clues to criminal behaviour. But it was obviously not their intention in this particular case. I also noticed that the officer was fumbling with his ticket book.

The first thing the police officer said to me was something like, “Good evening Sir, Do you know why we’ve stopped you?” As soon as he said this several assumptions dropped into my head. The important point for me was that he said “we” not “I”.

The assumptions that I had was this was a junior officer and the guy still in the car was his mentor. The junior officer was still learning the job and this will be one of the first times he had filled in a ticket with a real life “customer”. They saw the opportunity I had presented them with and the guy was out to practice his skills. On the face of it my chances of getting away had just decreased significantly if it had not been for one thing.

Developing Sensory Acuity and Utilisation

One of the biggest areas of persuasion skills that is often missed is noticing what the other person gives you and then using it to your advantage. This is why on the Advanced Persuasion Patterns course you learn to create a state that has observation and reaction built in to it.

As part of the course you will learn how you can develop heightened sensory awareness to the point where you can often see the change in emotional states in people as you talk to them, understand their thought processes better than they understand themselves and some of their key motivations and drivers.

I only have restricted numbers for the Advanced Persuasion Patterns course. I will be opening up registration for a limited number of users this week. You can visit the FAQ page here.

Revenge of the Sith

Just these few small observations were enough for me to drive a wedge right into this poor young officer’s ideas of how the world works, drop him into a heavy duty trance and shovel massive amount of post hypnotic suggestions into his head. Tomorrow I will tell you exactly how you can do the same.

]]> http://www.thenlpcompany.com/using-covert-hypnotic-persuasion-tactics-with-the-police/feed/ 2 http://www.thenlpcompany.com/using-post-hypnotic-suggestions-on-police-officers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=using-post-hypnotic-suggestions-on-police-officers http://www.thenlpcompany.com/using-post-hypnotic-suggestions-on-police-officers/#comments Tue, 28 May 2013 07:30:07 +0000 Rintu Basu http://www.thenlpcompany.com/?p=5438 A few nights ago I was rushing to get to a poker game and I ran a red light. I was seen and stopped bang to rights by the police and was almost certainly going to get a ticket. This is the first in a short series of article showing how you can use NLP Skills to take a police officer in to trance, shovel in a load of post hypnotic suggestions to let you go.

Setting the Scene

I was driving to a casino for a poker game and I was late for registration so was in a hurry. The map will give you my exact location. I came up North Street and turned right on to Sauchiehall Street. The traffic light on that corner were just turning from amber to red. I got through those but the lights at the junction of Sauchihall Street and A804 had turned red before I had crossed them.

The police car had been at the other arm of the junction and were in clear line of sight of the traffic light. It was a dry, cold and dark night. But the area is well lit, traffic was light and the visibility was good.

As I continued down Sauchiehall Street I saw the police car in my rear view mirror and realised that they must have seen me run the red light.

Define your Outcomes

I made a quick decision to turn right in to Elmbank Street. I was simply looking for information. If they turned with me I knew I would be stopped and it would give me a few moments to set some objectives for the encounter. They did follow me on to Elmbank Street and almost immediately signalled me to pull over, which I did.

I decided my overall objectives for this encounter were just to get away from the situation as quick as possible without a ticket. Sadly that was not how the police were looking at it.

Getting in to a Persuasive State

I don’t know how much you have noticed but when you experience negative emotions your communication skills get worse. This is true of almost all skills but is most obvious with communications. You tend to be able to perform better when you are in a relaxed, happy and usually slightly detached state.

I teach my students to develop a persuasion state that has certain elements built into it. First you should be relaxed, having fun and confident in your ability to react to an on-going situation on multiple levels. And just as importantly I teach them to have their attention outside of themselves and on the person they are speaking with.

The problem with most persuasion contexts is that there are emotions, normally negative ones involved such as the desperation of “needing” the result, the fear of the consequences not achieving and anger at being caught out. I pick these three as examples because I was feeling these as pulled over to speak to the police. The reality is these emotions can be the very thing that stops you achieving the result.

Luckily you can learn to develop this persuasive state so it kicks in automatically when you need it. I fully explain the process and how you can develop it for yourself as part of my Advanced Persuasion Patterns Programme. In simple terms once you have built the state and can access it you just anchor it to something that happens automatically when you need your persuasive state.

As I watched the police car pull over and an officer get out carrying his clipboard and ticket book. His intentions were clear. It looked like I would need all my persuasive ability to get out of this one. I let myself breathe deeply, went into my persuasion state and started to relish the challenge of convincing this officer that letting me go was a better option for everyone.

In the next article we will discuss different forms of rapport, how to subtly undermine your opponent’s argument and how to shovel post hypnotic commands into the heads of police officers.

Advanced Persuasion Patterns is currently closed. But I will open it for a new intake in the next couple of days. For the moment you can click through here and find out more about the course.

Frequently Asked Questions

• To the optimist, the glass is half full.
• To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
• To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
• To the marketer, the glass is a handy new special beverage container solution to your drink related problems
• To the hypnotist, the glass is just a metaphor for how you store all your fluid knowledge deep inside now…that’s right
• The NLPer just asks which glass specifically and then models your answer
• And the Persuasion Artist would just drink and then talk you in to buying them another

Want to develop the attitude of a Persuasion Skills Artist?

If you want to learn how to install the attitude, develop the skills and stay motivated to achieve massive results for both yourself and others click through and find out more about the only NLP Practitioner Course I am running in the foreseeable future.