The 4th most common mistake is a lack of genuine interest.
The thing about ‘interest’ is that, when you feel an interest inside and your focus is actually on the ideas that someone else is presenting, your whole body language changes.
You begin to sub-communicate, at a very subtle level, signals of interest; your pupil dilation will change, your level of focus will be changed, your movements will be different. And these are things that other people will read very carefully at the unconscious level and be influenced by.
So if your own signals, which are going out, are saying “I’m bored, I’m disinterested, I don’t want to know any more”, well the other people will respond to those signals by shutting down, or getting annoyed, or just losing interest in the conversation themselves.
So there are two simple solutions to this problem when you learn hypnosis online. The first solution is what a great therapist, called Carl Rogers, called ‘having a high unconditional regard for the other person’.
Now, no matter what you think of that person normally, whilst you’re building rapport hypnotize me online you must, inside your mind, convince yourself completely and 100% that whatever the other person is saying is worthy of respect.
Now I happen to think that that’s a good way to view people anyway.
But to have a high unconditional regard for someone else will help them to open up, because suddenly all the signals coming from you are saying, “Whatever you say, you will not be criticised, you will not be attacked”, which makes them feel safe enough to begin to share the feelings and ideas that actually characterise rapport in the first place.
Another, and slightly more obvious way of doing this is what’s called to ‘track back’.
Track Back is similar but different to ‘active listening’.
In active listening you’re told, “When you listen to what someone says, then repeat what they’ve said to you in different words so that they know that you’ve heard them”.
Now there’s a big problem with active listening; and it’s that language has a neurological effect on people. There’s a difference between someone saying, “The baby was in my arms”, to someone saying, “I was holding the infant”. Whilst the information may be the same, the actual emotional tone is very different.
It actually fires different parts of the neurology, and is understood differently on an emotional level.
So, if someone says, “Well, I was holding my baby in my arms”, and then you reply [in very formal voice] “Well, so you were holding the infant”, the problem is at that point the person feels that you’ve somehow misunderstood (because you’ve missed the emotional undertones of the conversation).
The solution is to ‘track back’ – to actually use the same words and the same tonalities that someone else has been using.
Well, let’s give you an example. If I say to you, “Well, I was walking down to the shops and, you know, a person just jumped out at me and scared me”…
A Track Back might track that same information and say, “Oh, so you were walking down to the shops, and then suddenly someone jumped out and they scared you.”
Notice that I’m using the exact same language and reflecting it back on to them. This goes back to the idea of ‘matching and mirroring’ someone, but I’m doing it
in a conversational hypnosis style so that it fits the context of what I’m doing.
Another way that you can actually employ a ‘track back’ frame when you learn hypnosis online is to say something like, “Oh, let me just make sure I’ve got this right. You want to do this.” And then you repeat the exact same words back to them.
