The purpose of asking hypnotic trance-inducing questions is to put the person in a position of access to useful and meaningful information. Such questions happen to be hypnotic, although any kind of hypnotic trance is not intended to ask such provocative questions. Asking a question can put a person in a hypnotic trance state. You can tell that they are in a trance because their eyes will move as they access the information necessary to answer the question. As they access that information, they are in a trance state. A trance state is generally very focused, yet relaxed. Even as you read these words, you find yourself in a kind of trance as you probably (and hopefully) don’t realize your surroundings. It is focused on the translation and interpretation of these symbols called letters and words into meanings. When a person accesses internal information, they are often unaware of their external environment. A good question will require a person to focus their attention on their internal landscape to gather the information. During this time, they will be slightly, or in some cases extremely, unaware of their external environment and most likely in a hypnotic trance state.
For example, the question “where would you like to go for dinner tonight” is not really provocative and does not require any depth to access the information. The question “How would you describe your first dinner date?” It requires remembering something; While remembering and gathering that information, a person will concentrate in a hypnotic trance state.
Asking any question necessarily directs a person’s mind in a particular direction; as such, any question is a suggestion, in the hypnotic use of that term. Hypnotic suggestions are simply words that automatically conjure up images. For example, when I ask “can you imagine sitting on the back of a white-winged horse flying through the sky?”, You must necessarily have that image in your mind to understand it. That question directed his mind to a particular image. I can ask the question “Do you think it could rain today?” on a perfectly clear day, but still, the mind of the listener will be drawn to the image of a rainy day. This is how the suggestion works. It takes the mind in a particular direction. Similarly, the mind does not imagine the negative, so the statement “do not forget to close the door” only conjures up images of forgetting to close the door. A much better suggestive statement would be “remember to lock the doors.”
This information can be useful when dealing with other people because it is a way of directing your attention to a topic that you want. For example, suppose you are dealing with an employee who made a mistake at work. Instead of focusing on the mistake, you can ask “what would it be like if you did it correctly?” That question requires the person to access a mental image of something that did not actually happen, but could have and should have happened. The question brings to mind a mental image of the correct action that is much better reinforcement than repeating the mistake. If a teenager objects, a parent may ask “let me ask you this, what should happen to make you more cooperative?” This question requires the adolescent to access images of cooperative behavior to convey to parents what might be necessary for that behavior to occur. This is much better than “stop being an opponent” because, again, the mind does not visualize the negative. The word “stop” cannot be visualized, but “being an opponent” certainly can be.
There are two general formats for asking such penetrating trance-inducing questions. Both formats rely heavily on the single, simple word “yes.” I like to refer to “yes” as “Iimagination Fascination “because using” if “requires the mind to imagine something and hopefully be fascinated by that imagination, which is a trance state. The first question begins with” what if “and the second question begins with” what prevents (behavior or action) to happen. The second question does not use “if” directly, but the need to be fascinated with the imagination is still necessary. If a person says they can’t do something (or won’t do something), a good question is “what’s stopping them from doing that?” Or, you could ask “what if I did?” Both of these questions require a high degree of internal focus to answer, which is why it is often a difficult question to answer. More often, the answer is not “I don’t know.” In such cases, you can say “guess”. Whatever comes out of that assumption stems from your internal machinations and is useful information.
These two formats: “what if …….” and “what prevents ……” are questions that induce a hypnotic trance and it can take a person several minutes to respond appropriately. You can tell if they are processing information by looking at their eyes. Our eyes tend to move up to the left, down to the right or to the left or to the right … when we access inner experience. A person’s eyes can reveal an entire strategy of thought simply by answering a question. For example, when you ask a person who wants to quit smoking “what is stopping you from quitting”, you may notice that their eyes move up to the right, then down to the left, then up to the right. the left, then up to the right and then to the center right and then up again. true … There can be a lot of movement as the person accesses the inner states of mind necessary to answer that question.
Eye movements tend to correlate with different sensory channels. Top right tend to be visual constructions, that is, imaginations. Top left tends to recall visual experiences, that is, memories. Bottom right is generally the feelings and bottom left generally the internal dialogue. Centered and to the right is usually constructed auditory (imagined) and centered to the right is generally remembered auditory. Directly centered is generally constructed or visually remembered. Often it takes some calibration to figure out what a particular person’s eye movements represent. You can ask a simple question like “do you remember what you had for lunch last week?” And you will discover what eye movements represent remembered. You can then ask “what will you do next Friday night” and then you can observe the eye movements for a constructed or imagined experience.
When you ask a person these kinds of suggestive questions, you are directing them; you are a leader. Take some time to watch people’s eyes as they think about the answers to the questions; then practice asking these trance-inducing questions. You will find them effective tools for gathering meaningful information and directing a person’s attention to content-rich regions of their mind.