There are a number of popular approaches to emerging someone from hypnosis. Rather than limiting yourself to a specific "awakening," we recommend respecting the flow and nature of the hypnosis that has been experienced. That is, if you hypnotised someone by means of a rapid induction, followed by a fairly up-beat session around improving sports performance, then an awakening like the following might be appropriate: In a moment I will count to 5 and you will be fully wide awake… I will count from one to five, and at the count of five - and only on the count of five - you will open your eyes and stretch… all normal healthy sensations restored to every part of you… and...

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Pacing is when you enter the other persons model of the world on their terms. Like walking beside them at their pace. Once you have paced another person, established rapport and shown that you understand where they are coming from then you can lead them. Leading is when you use the influence that you have built up from pacing. For example, when you scratch your nose, they go on to scratch theirs. A common approach is to start with three pacing statements, followed by one leading suggestion. For example: “And as you sit there (P), your eyes blinking (P) and your breathing slow (P), you can begin to wonder just how much of that 'calm peace' you can continue to...

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In hypnosis terms, fractionation refers to the practice of repeatedly taking someone into and out of hypnosis. The idea is that, usually, the more that someone goes in and out of trance, the deeper they descend as they go back in. Fractionation demonstrates a useful principle employed by Dave Elman. Building on the work of Hippolyte Bernheim, Elman believed that when you take a person in and out of Hypnosis, they tend to go more deeply into trance each time they return. Richard Nongard offers, as an everyday example, those times when your alarm clock goes off and you hit the snooze button. Just do that two or three times and when you eventually get up you are more tired...

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Bilateral stimulation refers to stimuli (visual, auditory or tactile) which occur in a rhythmic pattern, alternating between the left and right side. So, visual bilateral stimulation could involve watching a hand moving from left to right and back again. Auditory bilateral stimulation might involve listening to tones that are heard alternately in the left and right ears. Tactile bilateral stimulation takes place in the Cats Paw induction. You can also see it at work in the method known as the Butterfly Hug. Here is how the Butterfly Hug is described in The Anxiety Guide: • Sit with your back straight. Do abdominal breathing. Imagine you have a little balloon in your stomach that you inflate each time you inhale and...

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To match your induction to your client, you will need to think about them as a whole person and their particular issue, as well as what it is you and they want to achieve. The most common means of deciding which induction to use is to match it to your client's personality or place in the world. The main problem with this approach is that it relies heavily on assumptions. For example, some people would suggest that you cannot be authoritative with someone in authority. However, it is equally true that many people in authority have a hard time respecting someone who is not. Similarly, if someone takes a generally passive role in life and their personality is quite placid,...

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The truth is, we don't need any of this. We don't need suggestibility tests, or inductions, or deepeners. We don't even really need "hypnosis" as such. If the end goal is to influence someone in such a way that their experience and expectation of reality is pliable, we could start by recognising that we do that all the time without any kind of formal hypnotic rituals. Every time we tell an engaging story that someone gets engrossed in, we could be considered to be entrancing them. Whenever we tell a chilling tale, causing someone's heart to beat faster and the hairs on their arms to stick up, we are impacting their experience of reality through little more than our words...

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The late Jeff Stephens once wrote: “There is no such thing as hypnosis without an induction. The moment I engage another person's reality, to make it be what I want it to be, I have induced hypnosis.” Simply put, however you begin the hypnotic process, that is your induction. So, in one sense, the answer to the question – what is an induction for? – may be, to start things off. And my feeling is that you may as well start well. The moment you begin to engage another person's reality, to make it be what you want it to be, you have induced – or you have begun to induce – hypnosis. So, let's give that moment some credit....

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Well, that depends on who you ask, who you ignore and how you carry out your research. It is not even possible to rely on something as concrete as brain-waves to help us answer the question. Brain-waves have to measure something in particular. So, we first have to decide what it is we want to measure (for example, relaxation). Yet, those from a competing school of hypnosis might suggest that all we are measuring is relaxation itself. If hypnosis exists in correlation with other effects – be that relaxation, conditioned responses or the REM state – how can we ever really know that we are measuring hypnosis and not one of its correlates? There are a number of “hypnotic scales”...

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A somewhat popular handshake induction, which we have avoided completely, is the arm-pull. You will likely have seen this on the internet or even television. It simply involves the hypnotist pulling their 'subject's' arm whilst giving the sleep command. We have intentionally not covered this induction for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is difficult to teach such an induction safely within the confines of a website. Secondly, related to the above, we have rarely seen this induction carried out with sufficient attention given to health and/or safety concerns. Some hypnotists will check that their subject does not have any shoulder, or back complaints, but neither they nor their subject are medical professionals. To be sure that the induction is...

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