NLP Persuasion Tactics on TV

Because I can only vaguely understand the dialogue the music cues were telling me when to be shocked, angry, sad, when to laugh and when to cry. And the cues worked brilliantly.

This is NLP anchoring at its best. I have no understanding of the plot and yet I seem to have been laughing, frightened, shocked and sad in all the right places.

Developing your Anchoring Skills

This whole experience has put me in mind of an exercise that will help you develop your anchoring skills. For those of you new to NLP anchoring a basic explanation of anchoring would be taking an emotion, behaviour or thought that you want someone to go through and Anchoring it to a unique stimulus so they go through the process when you fire the anchor.

A couple of typical examples would be an alarm clock and a comedian setting up a catch phrase to let the audience know when to laugh. Here you will find more examples explaining NLP Anchoring Techniques in depth.

The Secret to Great Comedy?

On the Advanced Persuasion Patterns course we discuss how you can switch your emotional state to make a point. Extending that further you will learn how to pace and then lead people so that when you change states they come with you. This way you can get people to feel real emotions when you discuss things with them either as a group or as individuals. Imagine the persuasive power you will have if you could speak to people on an emotional level. For example:

• A manager might want to get their team to experience the excitement of rising to a difficult challenge
• A sales professional might want a client to experience the joy of using the perfect product to rid themselves of an annoying problem
• A teacher or trainer might want their class to experience the exhilaration of getting great results from using new skills
• Or a comedian might just want their audience to laugh in the right places

The key to being able to do this well is fourfold, being able to pace and lead your subject, being able to switch emotional states yourself and having the right timing. On the Advanced Persuasion Patterns Programme you will learn how to develop all four areas easily. But for the moment let’s look at how you can develop your anchoring skills effortlessly.

Watch Foreign TV

Pick a suitably melodramatic programme such as a soap opera. Listen to the music, watch the nonverbal cues and notice what emotions are being conveyed by the actors. If they are any good you will, just as I was last night, find yourself experiencing the emotions.

Watching TV in this specific way serves several functions. Watching when you don’t understand the language means that you cannot get caught up in the content. Consciously you can watch for what nonverbal cues connect with what emotions. This tells you both what you will see when people are experiencing that emotion and what you will have to do to convey that emotion to others. Secondly you will start to notice the build up to each of those emotions.

Careful watching of a comedian will show you that each joke has a lead in (preframe for you NLP Jargon Junkies), a build up and a precise time to let you know when to laugh. Different comedians, different material and styles change the length and intensity of each section but watch a few, particularly in a foreign language and you will see it happening very obviously.

The Art of Anchoring

But here is a really clever bit. If you are watching the soaps you will have heard the music cues for each dramatic sequence. Imagine what happens to you when you replay some of the music in your head. If you allow yourself, what will happen is that you will start to go into the emotional state the music was setting you up for. This in turn will make your nonverbal signals align with that emotion and you can lead your subject or audience into the emotional state. All you need is rapport, pacing and leading skills. Once you have these skills this idea well executed will carry you subject or audience through any emotional landscapes you want to take them through. All you have to do is play the right music in your head.

Learning Powerful NLP Persuasion Skills

There are faster, cleaner and simpler methods that you can learn to really pull your subject or audience through several emotional states from mild curiosity right through to insatiable desire. They are all described in the most comprehensive internet download hypnotic persuasion skills course here I wanted to demonstrate how easy you can pick up a few core skills. If you want to find out more here is a link to Advanced Persuasion Patterns .

Dealing with Skeptics using NLP

I finished up by deconstructing my approach into a process and thought I would share it with you.

Jamie Panter – A Rising Star

Jamie is currently studying hypnosis with The Quest Institute and I suspect he will soon become a very successful and influential hypnotherapist. He posted a question on his wall concerning the attitude of a friend of his that provoked a discussion about dealing with skeptical people. Here is the discussion. Whilst I have Jamie’s permission to print this I did not ask any of the other contributors to the discussion, therefore I have left all of their comments out and the discussion is slightly edited to make sense.

Jamie Panter Very much looking forward to the weekend. Quick question: I was chatting to a friend who said that Therapy for self improvement is for losers. I was quite shocked by this. My opinion has always been, if there is a quick and easy way to have significant improvements in your life, surely it’s worth doing isn’t it? Answers on a postcard.

Rintu Basu The perceptions of self help and therapy are not great. Obviously this is a generalisation and more specifically my generalisation. I wonder if your friend has picked up on this perception and this has manifested in his judgement?

My perspective tends to be if you can show me an intervention that gives me a greater result than the effort taken to make the intervention then I would be a “loser” not to take it.

Generalisations are useful (imagine having to work out what a door is and what it is for every time before walking through it) but they also really help you not to see the usefulness of specific things. This is also a generalisation so doesn’t always work.

Making Personal and Professional Development Difficult

At this point there were some interesting comments where it was clear that some people did not believe lasting and deep change is possible quickly and easily. Obviously this is a generalisation and imagine what happens to people that think like this.

If they ever want to make personal changes they will make them difficult for themselves regardless becasue of their beliefs. There are even worse scenarios. I once had the misfortune to meet a guitar teacher who believed that to develop musically you had to put in lots of blood, sweat and tears.

I met him because one of his students was a business coaching client of mine. At the end of a coaching session my client made reference to the guitar that was in the office. As part of that half hour discussion I taught my client a system which meant he knew every scale and mode in every key, there are 50 or 60 of them. But it is a simple system that once you have the hang of it you can learn and play them all in minutes. My client went away almost in tears because he had been trying to learn all these scales individually and had been taking months over it.

Two days later I was phoned by my client’s guitar teacher and virtually threatened. There were some choice phrases including, who do I think I am as an untrained musician giving out “dangerous” advice to guitarists. The basis of his argument was learning the hard way means you appreciate it more. And that if you can learn the system in minutes then it can’t work.

This is despite me offering to demonstrate it it, allow him to test me and even teach him the same. His automatic belief was it didn’t work and he refused to even contemplate any evidence that might go against his belief. Interestingly my client fired his guitar teacher because, quote, “I taught him more about playing the guitar in half and hour than he had learnt in over a year of lessons.”

My view is I want to work really hard at making things as quick, easy and simple as possible. The issue is not developing skills, making changes and self reflecting. The issue is enjoying the benefits and results of your personal and professional development. So for me the balance has to be getting the results as fast as possible, clearly some things are hard and take longer than others but having a mindset that is always looking for easiest route to change has surely got to be easier than believing it will be a long hard struggle?

This is why I have developed the processes and systems in The Persuasion Skills Black Book and my download courses in the way that I have. I spent the time looking for the key to learning making learning hypnotic persuasion skills easy.

Dealing with Obstacles

Meanwhile, back at the point here is the question Jamie asked me and my response as a deconstructed process.

Jamie Panter Rintu, how do YOU overcome the barriers of sceptics?

Rintu Basu Let me start with the esoteric. For an obstacle to exist you have to perceive it as one. See it differently and it becomes something different. This guy isn’t objecting he is just letting you know what his beliefs are.

Next stop; get inside his head and understand where that belief is coming from or at least pace it for example…”I can see how you might think that…”

Then redirect his focus e.g…”the issue is not about therapy or self help but about getting the results that you want to get out of life…”

Link to one of his core values, (you might have to ask a values question here but to keep it clean I am going to assume you already know some of them and let’s just use a hypothetical example of “winning” as one of his values)…”and if you could win more often by learning from your experience wouldn’t that be useful for you?”

It’s a very closed question with only one real answer and once he takes it you have a number of possible options:

Conciliatory: “Let me show you how you can get exactly that with the help of a coach.” Notice I am avoiding the words therapy and self help.

Provocative: “If a therapist offered to show you how to be able to do that would you accept?”

Adversarial: “How much of a loser do you become if you refused to accept that result because it came from a self help therapist?”

And I think you could think of a dozen more options from here.

I find people that are very judgemental and / or sceptical have usually got a lot of fear and have built massive walls around themselves. For me to take them seriously they would have to pay me and the nature of their issues is a lot to get through before they would want to pay me. I can find more open people easily.

So long as you remember to leave people in a better place than you found them these people are generally great to play with. They are usually brilliant hypnotic subjects and that means you get to practice all of your covert patterns. Trance them through the floor and have some fun with them. The most difficult thing is not to laugh out loud as you anchor them to a blank state and keep firing it off when they try and say something or give them a giggle button that you press whenever they put food or drink in their mouth.

Sorry Jamie, but you did ask. Any chance I can turn your comments and my responses into a blog post for next week (not any of your friends because that would not be fair to them)? I’ll send you a copy before publishing.

Jamie Panter Hi Rintu,

Good answers my friend! Your spin on it is fantastic. One thing Quest has taught me almost as a by product is language. I find that therapeutic language works very well in non therapeutic situations. And I find myself doing it almost automatically now. There is so much to take in but I am getting there.

Very happy for you to use this in your blog – you can even use my full name as it will help with the google rankings of my name for when I start my practice.

If you want to get the low down on covertly getting round the beliefs that people use as obstacles a great place to start would be Advanced Persuasion Patterns. You can find out more about this download persuasion skill course below:

How Do You  Make Your Hypnotic Language Patterns Sound Right

When I was a teenager I was a keen guitarist and desperately wanted to be able to play like some of my favourite guitar heroes. I would spend countless hours listening and working out their licks and solos from their recordings.

I used to work out a guitar solo one note at a time and often had to spend hours just working out what was happening in licks and phrases of four or five notes. Once I had the notes worked out I would have to spend hours learning to play them together. My biggest bugbear was that even when I was certain I had all the right notes, in the right order and I struggled with fluency and making it “sound right”.

The solutions had everything to do with the way I was practicing. What has all this got to do with learning to use hypnotic language patterns? Well,  read on  and you will discover some insights about how to   practice your fluency ,  use your patterns   for impact and get some great results.

Learn NLP Language Patterns

When you go on a good NLP Practitioner Course you  learn a different frame for how language works  and then come out with a huge package of language patterns all of which are naturally occurring, some of which you probably already use in real life and others that are completely alien to you.

The trouble with the familiar patterns is that now  you  know the impact  you can never again  use them  in the unconscious way you used to  just use them.  The trouble with the unfamiliar patterns is that because they are unfamiliar you have to go through a learning curve before  you can use them.

Some Practitioners get crippled at this stage and they walk away from the language element for life. Yet with a few pointers on how to practice, develop the confidence and fluency you can  use lots of patterns  within minutes.

Become Fluent with Patterns

As a teenaged guitarist I quickly discovered that I needed to learn those licks and phrases in the context of the whole song or solo, otherwise it was a pointless twiddle that hung in the air doing nothing. In the same way without specific scenarios and contexts to  use your hypnotic language patterns  all you are doing is pointless twiddling.

Another thing I noticed when I started using this approach is that the lick, phrase or pattern started to   sound more natural.  This is because I would  practice the pattern  in the context of the bigger solo. If you  practice your patterns  outside of the context of a conversation when you go to  put them into the conversation  you are potentially building up what musicians call hesitancy.

Hesitency is where as a musician slightly stumbles in their playing because they are coming up to a “difficult bit”. Unfortunately some musicians because of improper practice techniques eventually build the hesitancy into their performance. In the same way some NLP’ers have developed themselves the same problems with their language patterns and may never gain any fluency with their patterns.

Develop Your Own Style

As I was bemoaning the fact I could never sound like the guitarist I was trying to copy a friend of mine pointed out something really important that I have taken into everything else that I have done for the last thirty years. My friend pointed out that I always sound like me when I played the guitar.

When he said this I suddenly realised that my purpose for learning these solos, licks and phrases was not to sound like someone else (however much I admired them) but to  build your vocabulary of patterns  to use the way that you want. This gave me the freedom to take all those licks and phrases and play them over other songs, put them in other solos and change them to deliver the impact that I wanted.

My new way of practicing was to learn a phrase from a solo and then find other places where I could play it. I spent more time adding my new phrase to lots of different songs, I would play the phrase at different speeds, with a different emphasis and add different things in front and behind it. All of a sudden my skills as a guitarist dramatically improved.

In terms of learning NLP Language Patterns when you start to  use patterns and phrases  as part of your normal conversation you  learn flexibility,  you learn about the impact these phrases have and you learn what needs to come before and after to  integrate these patterns into your language.

Whilst I didn’t get any better at sounding like my guitar heroes what I successfully did was  learn a larger vocabulary of patterns  that I made my own. In the same way you can  add patterns to your library  that  become natural and instinctively you.

Practice with Confidence

There is a phrase that is in common usage that can create a long and painful climb to fluency. The phrase, and I urge you to treat this with the distain it deserves, “Practice makes Perfect”. The reality is only “Perfect Practice Makes Perfect“. If you had this then becoming fluent with a whole bunch of patterns can be quick, easy and fun.

There are four parts to being able to  develop perfect practice routines. Firstly; the structure and process that allows you to  practice regularly and consistently. Secondly the confidence to  have a go. Thirdly the insight into what turns practice into perfect practice. The fourth? That you will have to wait as I intend to share it only when I put together my accelerated learning download course. But if you want to experience how these hypnotic accelerated learning principles work together whilst learning hypnotic language patterns then  just click through this link.

Academic vs Pragmatic Approaches to Learning

When I want to watch TV I turn the TV on, pick up the remote control and select the channel I want to watch. The science behind how a TV works, how the remote control works and you can get even more complex when you delve into the world of quantum physics and the nature of reality.

Understanding these concepts will help you design and develop better TVs and remote controls. They might even help in understanding your relationship with your electromechanical world. But if the purpose was to watch TV then you might be better learning the specific processes of turning the TV on and using the remote control.

Each set of learning is a different approach giving a different result but both are related to TV sets. Understanding your learning outcomes will give you significantly better results.

I was once coaching a woman through her MA dissertation. She had been given a three feet high pile of books by her lecturer saying that she would need to read all of it for research. She panicked and called me.

I got her to outline what questions she needed answers to and what background was relevant to her dissertation. I then got her to skim the content pages of the books looking for relevance. She then could discard one pile and just read the relevant sections of the others. This then set up some more questions and she repeated the process. The result was in one weekend she read everything in those books that was relevant to her dissertation.

On the Monday she excitedly went into college to tell her lecturer what she had done and promptly was roasted alive for not doing the research “properly”. She got a distinction for the dissertation a month later, but she had learnt not to tell the academics that she was not doing proper “research”.

Belief Busting

A key issue that happens is that over a course of centuries these two approaches have become mixed to the point where there is a confusion of beliefs that seriously hinder people’s learning. Let’s look at a couple of examples that are close to my heart.

Hypnotic Persuasion

There is a wealth of information, research studies and scientific study that has been done. It really explains in intricate detail some ideas about how some concepts work. If you look into the body of work called NLP and study the Milton Model you will find around 16 Milton patterns and then a whole lot more tweaks, patterns and distinctions. Incidentally if you are not an NLP Jargon Junky the Milton Model is loosely speaking hypnotic language.

Now many practitioners come away from their NLP Course with a whole collection of labels for certain patterns and little understanding of how to apply them usefully in the real world. Whereas I suspect most of them want to know how to use a few key ideas to make a significant difference in their lives and a process that will allow them to simply build more onto those foundations. That is what The Persuasion Skills Black Book is all about.

Several people have criticised the book for not have enough theoretical explanation of what is going on. I would agree and would suggest if they used the material for a few days they would have enough subjective personal experience of how this works. The real issue is that theory is do you want to understand how a TV works or do you want to watch your favourite programmes?

Music

I spent 20 years as a fairly competent guitarist. One reason I never took my music further was a feeling that I had that I did not know music well enough. As a self taught blues guitarist I knew where to put my fingers to create certain sounds.

I could listen to a lot of music and then reproduce it on my guitar. Sometimes it would take one listening sometimes I would have to listen to it many times and have to work really hard at learning it. I was also pretty good at making thing up, the muso word for this is improvising.

But still I had this idea I was not a proper musician. This was based on a few beliefs I had running. Whatever I did I could not understand music theory and struggled learning to read music let alone relate it to my guitar. I also had a belief that music was complex and difficult to understand, what I was doing seemed too easy and therefore I could not have been doing it “right”.

Understanding of Music Seminar

This is why Duncan Lorien’s Understanding of Music Seminar was such a revelation to me. In the course of two and a half days I learnt the nature of practicing properly to the point where you can devolve the whole thing done to ten minutes key focus a day. I learnt all the music theory I needed to talk intelligently to any musos and exactly how I can easily learn to sight read music (I was doing it before the end of the seminar). Even more startling was the fact there were several people that had never touched a musical instrument on the course and they were doing the same.

How was this achieved?

Firstly Duncan throughout the course broke down the beliefs that people traditionally hold around music. He put together all the key distinctions you need to make playing music simple from the nature of what you are trying to achieve, what real practice is and the key simplicity that is always behind the complex.

Key Simplicities

This idea needs a little explaining so let me give you an example for both learning NLP Persuasion Skills and for Music.

Hypnotic Language Patterns

Having sixteen separate patterns thrown at you all in the context of a hypnosis client and learning does not allow you learn how to use hypnotic language patterns. Having one pattern and fully examine it in many contexts build the background to use that pattern. When you then give a process that shows you how to integrate that into your life you just repeat the process for as many patterns you like.

This is a key simplicity about focusing on the ultimate outcome i.e. using these patterns in your life. A couple of people have commented that they seem to have got more from the book than a few hypnotic language patterns. This is because I covertly engrain the process of learning patterns rather than just give you patterns. If you follow the ideas in the Persuasion Skills Black Book you are learning the process of learning hypnotic language patterns although you might think you are just learning a few patterns.

Music

Music is a form of communication. Imagine the issue if you had to concentrate on forming your words rather than the meaning you intended to convey. How much harder would it me to get your message across to someone? In the same way as a musician if you are totally focused on getting your fingers in the right place at the right time you have no space to develop expression and make your music “mean” something.

By creating exercises that focus on control, accuracy and expression you develop your musical communication skills. The ultimate is when you are performing you can spend your time on getting some emotion and feeling into what you are playing. Arguably this is the difference between some that can play an instrument and a true musician – and Duncan teaches this to complete beginners.

UK Understanding of Music Seminar

Duncan is only running one seminar in the UK this year. If you want this then click through, check the dates and book now.

How to Practice Hypnotic Language Patterns

This article is about the lessons I have taken from learning music and how you can use them to rapidly develop your NLP Persuasion Skills.

Accelerated Learning, Music and Persuasion

Way back in 2006 I went on Duncan Lorien’s Understanding of Music Seminar. As a guitarist for 20 years and having studied Accelerated Learning for even longer I went on the seminar arrogantly thinking that I might get a little inspiration to play more but didn’t really expect to learn anything.

In two and a half days I learnt more about music than I had in twenty years, but even better I suddenly realised there were a whole lot of things I could transpose into dramatically developing your persuasion skills. This article specifically is about some of the core elements of practice for persuasion skills but they could apply to any area of your life. For example Tom condensed a week long training programme down into a day using these exact principles. Read the article here.

Using, Playing and Practicing – What is the Difference?

One thing Duncan is very clear about is separating practice from playing and performing. Musicians often confuse these three and so do people developing their persuasion skills. In front of 10 000 people in the Albert Hall would not be the right place to start learning a new piece of music. In the same way the middle of a job interview would not be the time to start using a new language pattern you have never tried before.

Many musicians play their favourite pieces and then confuse this with practicing. If you are playing things you already know then you are not developing your skills. Even worse, for musicians they often have a piece of music they can almost play well but they stumble in the same place all the time. By continually playing the piece in this way they are reinforcing the stumble.

The only purpose of practice is to practice and this should be geared to developing the skill, understanding or use of whatever it is you are practicing. In the Persuasion Skills Black Book we discuss letting go of outcomes and having fun as a way of concentrating on the practice. Ten minutes of this is far more valuable to you than buckets of sweat in hour long meetings where the outcome is more important than the practice.

Overlearning

Part of Duncan’s teaching on the Understanding of Music Seminar is practicing technical skills until you can do them without conscious thought. So for example you might be practicing scales or a performance piece whilst simultaneously reciting the alphabet backwards. This means when you get to perform you have the ability to focus on adding expression and communicating with your audience instead of tying all your energy into getting your fingers in the right place at the right time.

As a persuasion artist imagine learning a pattern. You think about using it in many different contexts, practice saying it out loud by yourself or with a study buddy and you go out to play with it in normal conversations you are doing a thing called over learning. Another way people think of this is ingraining the skill into the muscle memory. The purpose of doing this is so when you need the pattern or the skill you use it unconsciously so all you have to do is focus on the conversation.

The Sum of the Parts is Greater than the Whole

Lots of simple ten minute exercises that are focused on a key skill area are far better at developing the skills than long unfocused practice sessions. For example as a guitarist I find particular chord changes more difficult than others. There is no point practicing the changes I find easy – I can do those already. I need to isolate the changes I find hard, develop them into an exercise and then practice that. Develop a good exercise and I will have the problem solved in a few ten minute sessions.

A persuasion skills example would be this. I know that one thing people have difficulty developing the confidence to use these patterns in live situations. So what if I developed an exercise that is quick and easy to do that focuses on developing that confidence. In the book I outline an exercise where you develop patterns to say to yourself to leverage that confidence and ask you to link it to something that you do every day. For example how about developing ten patterns about getting confidence whilst brushing your teeth and then saying them out loud (after you have washed your mouth out to minimise the spray)? How many days do you think it would be before you were confident and fluent with a bunch of new patterns to use?

Mastery is only about Pace

One of the keys you will learn about practicing music on the Understanding of Music Seminar is about playing in slow time to get everything perfect. Duncan is very firm about playing the right notes in the right order and keeping the pace slow enough for you to be able to do that. The only difference between practicing a piece of music and playing it is the speed at which you go.

The idea is that if you play slow enough you can get your fingers in the right place every time. This teaches your muscles the right movements, you are learning more control and you are practicing perfection. As you develop fluency you speed increases until you are at the performance pace – all this without ingraining the stumbles and pitfalls that most musicians seem to develop.

In terms of developing your persuasion techniques The Persuasion Skills Black Book reviews a specific sequence, building blocks if you like to develop your skills. For example the book lays out examples of all the patterns covertly before we discuss them. When discussing the pattern we look at examples in different contexts. You then write a few out for yourself and then practice them aloud on your own. Finally you go out and play with them with real people, firstly with a study buddy or someone that knows what you are doing and then with people that don’t but where it doesn’t matter. All of this is building up to “performance speed” where you are using these patterns as if you have always used them.

Understanding Accelerated Learning for Music and Persuasion

If you are:

• a musician looking for a quantum leap in your playing ability
• thinking of learning any musical instrument and want to be at a performance standard within three months
• someone fascinated by accelerated learning and want real practical tools you can transfer from music to any other context

then Duncan Lorien’s Understanding of Music seminar is a must attend course. I am hosting his one course date in the UK this year because of the effect this course has had on me. You can find out more here. If you can’t attend this one Duncan is delivering this course all over the world and you can find other dates and places on his website here: www.dlorien.com