How to Hypnotize a Person

The first thing to do is to make sure that you have agreement and permission. If I’m doing work with anybody for anything the first thing I say is,
“Now you agree that we can do hypnosis together and it’s okay.”
Okay, so I have their permission that it’s okay to do hypnosis. If I’m doing self-hypnosis it’s probably pretty evident that I do have permission already.

The other thing you need is some kind of intention. What is the intent for going into hypnosis? Otherwise it’s just a nice, relaxing sleep. So it might be we’re going to do hypnosis for the purpose of the stage show, or we’re going to do hypnosis for the purpose of helping you be better motivated, or maybe we are just going to do some hypnosis so that you can feel as if you had eight hours sleep in just a few minutes.

So we have an intention, a purpose now. So the unconscious mind knows what we’re going for. This is the verbal “Hypnosis Contract”. Whenever either party steps outside of the bounds of the contract the hypnosis basically stops.
If I were to say to somebody,
“Hey, we’re going to do hypnosis so that you can feel as if you had eight hours of sleep in just a few moments”
and somewhere in the middle of the hypnosis session, I said,
“Okay, now you’re going to cluck like a chicken”,
Their unconscious mind would say,
“Hey, that’s not playing by the rules”
And they would wake themselves up.
We have their intention, now we need to do the “Progressive Relaxation Induction”.

Have them get comfortable or if you’re doing self-hypnosis you’d get yourself comfortable, and you take a couple of nice, deep breaths, which helps to relax us, and then you can either do it with your eyes closed, or sometimes you’ll do it with the eyes open and have them focus and stare at something.
So let’s pretend that we’re doing it with self- hypnosis. You’d go ahead and you’d close your eyes and you’d just concentrate on relaxing, say, your feet. Start at one end and you relax every group of muscles all the way up your body. So we’d start with relaxing the feet and then we relax the ankles and you have to imagine that these things are actually happening. So if you’re sitting there and you’re thinking to yourself,
“Okay, I’m relaxing my feet, relaxing, relaxing, relaxing”,
That’s not really doing it.

BUT If you’re sitting there thinking, Okay, I’m relaxing my feet now, and you consciously feel the feet relax and the muscles just kind of go loose and limp, then that’s what we’re talking about.
Then you relax the muscle groups up from the ankles and then to the calf, and you work your way up through all the major muscle groups, all the way up the body, making sure you, you know, you get the knees, you get the back, you get the torso, you move all the way up and you relax the head and relax down the arms. Generally by this point the brain is, is to that point where it’s just, boom! Bored to death and you drop into trance.