Session #179: Rick Collingwood on Hypnotic Mesmerism

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 179 Rick Collingwood on hypnotic mesmerism. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. Look into my. Hey there, it’s Jason Lynette welcoming you back to the program with an outstanding conversation this time with Rick Collingwood from over in Australia.

And I’ve been meeting to have Rick on the program now for quite some time, and glad to have finally had this conversation because definitely becoming well. Let’s use the professional terminology, a hypnotic brother from another mother of talking about some of the themes that often I find to be so critical in terms of the hypnotic process, the power of hypnotic phenomenon, the clarity of message in terms of communicating to the client, what is hypnosis, as well as what is not hypnosis.

And what I’d really share with you is a real takeaway from this dialogue. Uh, Rick being somebody who’s really done the work, really done the. Specifically into a methodology of hypnosis or, uh, a, a close neighbor to hypnosis as it were, of that, of mesmerism, you know, a word that so often we would sort of gloss over in a hypnosis training, maybe get a few lines of history about from, uh, from a book on this subject, but to actually look at how do we take it, And this is not to discount the idea or the premise or even the research around it, but to take some of the dialogue of modern day work.

Out of energetic healing and instead back into the intention of well intent. Because now it becomes something we can replicate, which there may be energetic things going on, there may be energetic healing at its process, yet as we bring it into something that is now more tangible, something we can grab a hold of.

And s is the case with Rick as he spends a lot of time in training, something we can actually. Teach and share with another person, which, uh, give you a bit of a, an action step to come from this conversation you’re about to listen to, to find that moment in your hypnotic process, to lock onto that eye contact, to lock onto that intent.

And find what it is that subtext that, that message that you have inside of you in terms of how you can actually convey that attitude of change, that demeanor that yes, you are gonna go into this hypnotic state and you are going to experience some things that are. Magical inside of the process. It’s where to learn more about Rick’s work.
You can head over to a couple of websites, which will link to these in the show notes that of either global hypnosis academy.com, as well as just simply rick collingwood.com. Just learn more about his work and, uh, looking forward to meeting him in person in about a week or so. But given the scheduling of this program, some of you just met him for the first time at Hypno Thoughts Live.

But again, that’s where you can interact with him on these online. While you’re also online, check out hypnotic business systems.com. You know where we have the techniques. We’ve got to let the universe know that we’re actually there. And hypnotic business systems is where I teach my entire, what I’ve done to build my hypnosis business as well as at times my, what’s working now.

Library to have the strategies to get out there and help you to grow your own successful hypnosis business. That without the person in the chair in front of you, what good are these techniques? So having the strategies to fill up that local office, get people interacting with you in various formats, and, uh, help even more people along the journey.

And with that, let’s jump directly into this. Phenomenal. See what I did there? Phenomenal conversation. This is session number 179. Rick Collingwood on hypnotic mesmerism.

Well, it was hypnosis when I was about 12 in a Spider-Man comic that I tried on my brother and it worked an eye lock induction, but it, uh, it didn’t ha tell you how to unlock the eyes, so I left him on a washing machine for about 20 minutes and . Under threats from my mother eventually said, Open your eyes.

And he did. But I used it for years as a party trick, I guess, or just mucking about. And I was in sales for a long, long time and then decided I wanted to change a career and become a counselor and ended up doing an ericsonian hypnotherapy course at the same time. And the rest is history. Just had a passion for it and moved forward.

That was 27 years. . So when you say in sales, what specifically were you in before? Um, I was a state manager for Ford, Ford Motor Company in Australia. Yeah. , but that’s a, a very stressful position that doesn’t lead anywhere except to a fat bank account. But there’s more to life than that. I think so. Mm-hmm.

Um, instead of, uh, taking money from people, I guess I decided I wanted to give something back and, uh, here I am years later still. Uh, though I’m always looking for, you know, those nuances that something before practice for where we are now. What would you say, were there any specific takeaways from working in sales that you’ve brought into the mindset of working with people for, for personal change, for using those powers for good, as it were.

Yeah, I, I think basically good communication skills, um, face to face, whether involved in hypnosis or not. Um, hypnosis itself, it’s a very misunderstood, um, modality as such, like what? What exactly is it? You know, we talk about conscious minds, unconscious minds, subconscious minds, but no one’s ever really seen one beyond a a, uh, frequency measuring device.

Have they? So it’s, uh, it’s an endlessly fascinating topic and I’m open to learning new things and, and always am. Got it. So that initial entry point and then going on that course, what was kind of that next route from there? Look, I went and did an ericsonian hypnosis course that went for, I think it was nearly three weeks.

And I walked out and I said to one of the, the other students, when I teach this, I’m gonna go and teach it properly. And thought, where did that come from? And, uh, because it was very missed out, I thought I was going off to learn how to click my fingers and put people under some kind of a magic spell. And I’d never heard of Erickson at the time, and I went and bought a little $10 book.

Forens Guide to hypnotherapy, and I guess I’d probably learned more about inducing hypnosis out of that book than what I did from the course I’d been on. It was all very confusing and big words and metaphors and what have you. Um, then years later, I discovered Gil Boy about three years after that, and I became much more sort of Elman boy orientated with direct hypnosis.

The Exonian techniques. But because I’d been ericsonian for three years, um, I guess I naturally integrated metaphor and language pattern into what I was doing. And I spent a long time thinking this great depth of trance was completely necessary, which it wasn’t. Um, and I just plugged away as a therapist for years and years and years.

Um, after four years I started an academy. and began to train, and now I do both and I have been for the last 25 years. You know, you hit on a theme there that I don’t think we’ve ever actually gone into here, which is that so often somebody would identify as being one specific school, that I’m more almanian, I’m more ericsonian.

And often I see that people are a blend of the two. And almost the same way that an LP we’re bouncing back and forth between Meta model and Milton model, even though this crossover from one to the other, uh, in terms of. Actively doing the work. What, How would you define that style of blending? Both the ericsonian as well as, let’s call it the more mechanical Elman.

Look, I think I came to a point somewhere along the line where I realized that it didn’t matter what style that you followed or were chasing, it was, it’s all inside of yourself. We go looking outside for this perfect model or this perfect induction or, and it doesn’t exist until you realize that it doesn’t.

You’re really trying to do therapy in a paint by numbers style, which initially you have to because you have to find your feet, but. If I’m working with a client now, I’ll get a history. I don’t actually know what I’m going to do induction wise until I’m, they’re sitting in my clinic and I begin. So I’ve broken away from formulas with a full understanding that initially you need a formula, like a roadmap to figure out where you’re going.

But I think the formulas, the inductions, um, the word patterns, you’ve gotta make them fit. So it flows correctly that, that’s my belief with it anyway. And that, that’s what I encourage with my students. So then coming from that three week course and having the mindset of, you know, if I teach this, I’m gonna do it very differently.

How would you say that’s influenced the style of how you actually train students? Um, I make sure that my students know how to induce, uh, a hypnotic trans and create a pH. . Mm-hmm. with, I’ve found with Eon and stuff, there is no phenomena. I, I think a lot of what Milton did, um, only Milton could do. And, and we’re not medical doctors, we’re not psychiatrists.

So we can work within his framework, but only as much as we understand it. Like, I don’t think Milton would’ve been very good on a stage, but that was never his purpose anyway. So to me, hypnosis is when you can put somebody into a state and create a natural phenomen. With them, uh, like such as arm levitation and the like, which is not being done voluntarily.

Um, belief that a person’s gonna go to sleep. So you, you know, you know the common thing, I dunno if I was hypnotized, I heard every word you said. My answer to that is always, Well, it wouldn’t be much good if you couldn’t hear me, would it? And. And, and that’s the truth. And every now and then we luck out with this on Nul list and get a good, fast, permanent result.

But most of it is, um, hard work, a lot of thinking and experience. But my very first foray into hypnosis, going to learn it. I, as I said, I thought I was gonna go and learn to say to somebody, look into my eyes, click my fingers, and they would fall into this deep zombie-like sleep and, uh, just respond to direct suggest.

And years later, I still think to myself, I, I wish that was the way that it is. But, um, at least the public’s waking up now, like I’ve watched in the last 25 years, hypnosis and hypnotherapy. It’s burgeoned, you know, it’s really making a, a beneficial and significant comeback, but still a long way to go I think as well.

Might share the quick anecdote that, I mean, the first line of my pre-talk is you’ll hear every word I say and remember as much as you would from any normal conversation. And in spite of having that in there, here’s a session just yesterday going well, that was amazing. I am no longer a smoker. I, I am done.

I’ve got this though. I. I probably wasn’t hypnotized because I heard every word you said and having the polite phrasing of, I know that’s the first thing I told you, Uh, which I, you know, you’re not asleep. And I, I covered that already and it finally took one little bit of phrasing for her to go. Oh, okay.

Yeah, I guess I was, because it was referencing back again, as you mentioned to the phenomenon, and I found a more playful way to get around to the point seeing that a bit of humor may. Been the pattern interrupt to that, uh, that mindset to say, Well, there are some models of hypnosis where you would be completely in a state of amnesia.

You wouldn’t remember everything. Oh, I know. That’s what I was expecting and I had to then interject. But think about it. If I did that, that’d be fricking creepy. So I don’t do that to people. And she pause and goes, Oh yes, like, so it helps you to remember the work that we’ve done this way. She goes, Oh, I get it now.

It’s amazing how misunderstood the profession still is, isn’t with all the information out there and the, the popularity of it now, there’s still a lot of people have that expectation and, and for a lot of them it’s a fear. Like, you’re gonna control my mind, my answer. There’s why on earth would I want to control your mind?

I have enough trouble controlling my own . That, that tends to, that settle them down a bit. Yeah. So let me ask you this, cuz you’ve hit on a topic which, uh, personally is one of my favorite of that, of hypnotic phenomenon in the process. What specific benefit would you say that really provides to have those, those magical moments inside of the experience?

It convinces for people mm-hmm. , that that something out of the ordinary did happen. Um, and I think that leads them into the belief that what you’ve done is going to stick with them. Like really, our job, I guess, is to change people’s minds. Isn’t. Yes. That’s whether you want to call it hypnosis, the subconscious, the unconscious, whatever.

Um, and that relates to, you know, the difficulty of quitting smoking. But if a lady gets pregnant, she doesn’t have any difficulty, difficulty whatsoever. So I, I think we’re sort of enhancing natural capabilities that we have, but don’t realize that we. , Yeah. I’d share the mindset that, you know, they’re kind of stuck in some sort of hypnotic phenomenon already.

They know they want to create this change, yet they’re consciously, uh, still holding onto that and unconsciously holding onto that. So in addition to that convincer, it’s that mindset that, Politely, respectfully, we’re breaking that old model because they’re realizing, Oh, there is another option. There is another way to experience this world around us.

And it’s that just harnessing of that hyper suggestibility to really get that foot in the door of the change. Yeah. And, and they, they roll with their own change. Mm-hmm. , once they realize how easy it is. The first time I ever had hypnosis myself, uh, was from a psychologist, and I can remember sitting in this chair thinking to myself, Here I am at this beach he sent me to.

It all seems quite real, the sun’s warm, blah, blah, blah. And the next thought that came into my head was, I’ve got a better voice than this guy

So, uh, but once again, I had that initial expectation that this guy was gonna click his fingers and I was gonna go to sleep and just get reprogrammed. If you. Um, and it’s probably a fortunate thing for those people that it isn’t that easy. , . It’s uh, a lot of people would be taking wrong advantage, I think.

Yeah. So then I’m curious to ask, cuz I know that also from, you know, looking up, uh, your bio before we jumped into this, that in addition to the hypnosis, we’re still having a bit of a hand in the sales world in terms of. Yes. Yeah. So what was that, What was that journey to kind of come back to it now and then, is there hypnosis, is there, is there hypnotic language in that process or how would you describe that work that you also do?

Um, well, I try to, How can I put it? Look, if somebody calls me up to learn about training, I don’t keep their phone number. I don’t keep their email, I don’t keep anything. Um, I don’t try and sell anything. I do my, my attitudes what’s for you won’t miss you. Um, and some people go, You’re crazy. You know, you should be marketing this and blah, blah, blah.

But, uh, I’ve just never bothered to, and my courses fill up naturally anyway. I’ve, I’ve never had a course I’ve had to cancel or not follow through with. So I, I think it’s more important. That a student leaves an academy knowing how to do what they’ve paid money to learn how to do, instead of a head full of theory, if, if you understand what I’m saying.

So my hypnosis trainings are very practical. Mm-hmm. , and there’s a, I have a huge resource center where they can go and do all their studies and their online work and what have you. But in my classroom it’s. Look, at the end of the day, it’s a process that once you master it, it, we do a million variations of the same thing.

Like every induction really is the same. The induction to me is only a doorway into a place to enable a person to make change. Uh, and if it’s done morally and respectfully, um, to me it’s important that a client or a student gets the result that they’ve paid the money. So I, I don’t do any selling and marketing and yeah, what have you.

It’s, uh, I’m, I’m way beyond that now. maybe selling a, maybe selling an idea to a client that they can make a change that’s different, but I don’t market my, my work as such. Yeah. Well, it’s the, it’s the Steve Martin model i, I coin as the phrasing of becoming so good. They can’t ignore you. Well, perhaps that’s the way, but in Australia at least.

But I did a lot of time in the US about 12 years ago, um, and did a lot of radio and TV and worked with a few Hollywood stars. And then I came back to Australia and I had three strokes in a four month period. So that slowed me up for a couple of years, and, uh, then I got back into it and just burgeoned ahead.

But as I said, I make sure, now I don’t push myself too. And I just stick with what I do and it’s working to this point. So hopefully it shall continue. . Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And one of the themes that I specifically wanted to chat with you about was mesmerism, that I know that’s something that you’ve got quite a bit of work on, and it’s a.

Very vastly, I’d say, misunderstood aspect of the work that we do and where the history of it is sometimes just kind of glossed over or the perceptions of, uh, you know, the end of the story being, nope, these things weren’t magnets. How, how would you reintroduce mesmerism to the hypnosis community? It’s almost impossible.

Because there’s so much misinformation and misunderstanding out there about what it is, which is a shame because the results that are gleaned from it when it’s done properly are, are quite astounding. But it’s, it’s. Mesmerism to hypnosis is like night is today. So mesmerism is very, very good for psychosomatic conditions.

Um, uh, issues of unknown etiology, skin rashes, um, past stress that’s gone and put itself somewhere in the body, and the results are quite spectacular from it. There’s always gonna be an argument of how it works and why it works and who said it works and, and what have you. But I did a 12 year study. I went all over the world researching MEMA and what he did, and there was a, so much misinformation even from the historians, what’s been written in books.

Um, it, it was. So much of it was so incorrect, and I was fortunate enough to meet, uh, an old master, if you will, in Europe, who’s now passed away, who taught me. And regardless of how it just works, but they’re starting to break it down now. A lot of it’s, um, just the inter brain, um, hypnotic fascination, same thing that animals do to each.

Constantly so you can get books of Frederick Vai and what have you, hypnosis with man and animals where Stalin threw him in with bears and lions at a zoo and he just put them all to sleep and, and when he was asked how, he said, I observe what the animals do to themselves and I do it back to them. So, although it seems mystical, it’s not, um, I, I, to me, a blade of grass growing or hair growing’s just as mystical as what mesmerism is.

Um, but it’s an endlessly interesting topic and it’s, So if you had to, if you had to give the bullet points, um, how would you really define mesmerism in terms of making it so that we can actually grab a hold of that inform. Look, you need to learn hypnotic fascination, which is, uh, look into my eyes.

That’s where it came from. Um, you need to learn about the enteric brain, the vagus nerve, the, the connection between the brain and your head and the brain in your stomach, uh, and in your heart and the whole thing, sort of, it all comes together. And make sense after practice. And my students, I teach it to half them, end up with a lot of people like to try and do everything in a week.

And part of being a good mesmerist as such is you’ve gotta learn hypnotic fascination first. And that takes a lot of mirroring, a lot of practice, and it’s very misunderstood as well. Um, But you look at any animal, they are constantly making deep eye contact. So a lot of the first part of learning mesmerism from the fascination side is just to be able to get used to looking into someone’s eyes, holding your gaze, not blinking and holding your emotions perfectly calm.

and most people struggle to look into someone else’s eyes for more than 30 or 40 seconds. So it’s, it starts with that. Then you’ve got, um, symbolism of the hands, the fingers, and what have you. Um, and then you’ve gotter points, certain points on the body that you tap to induce depth in mesmerism, but you won’t get anybody to comply to a suggestion because you’re not making.

Um, with mesmerism, if someone has issues, I’ll say, Sit there, close your eyes. Tell me when this began. How did you feel? I’ll, I’ll go through the whole process while their eyes are closed and they’re talking to me. Then I tell ’em to open their eyes and then I mesmerized them, which, which is done by passing, stroking, tapping certain enteric points on the body.

It, it all seems weird, um, but the results are just astound. That far more so for me now than hypnosis. And I’m curious to ask from your perspective, that moment of the fascination, the eyes locked onto each other, I, is there some sort of subtext, is there some sort of internal process that’s happening as that’s going
on?
Basically desire and will mm-hmm. . So to make mesmerism work, the mesmerist has to want it to work. There’s no such thing as trying to pass a thought into somebody else’s head. It it’s, but they’ve proven now there’s a ray that does come out of the eye. And it does affect, um, but you can’t transfer a thought from the eye and it’s not mind reading.

Um, other people confuse it with reiki and therapeutic touch and all these strange, weird, and wonderful things. Um, all that MEMA did is he took what the magnetize had been doing and put it into a unified theory according to himself. Um, they say he was a ologist. He does astrology. He, he said, I’m an astronomer.

I studied Richard Mead astrology, a chief charlatans. This was his words. Um, and he also studied para celsis. And where you look at where Paris Celsis went, he went to Egypt. He studied there. You look at the, um, the high lifts and the temples. You can see the Temple Masters with people laying on stone slabs and rays coming out of their hands.

So, There’s this interconnectedness between people at an atomic level. The, the, um, electrons and atoms communicate, but they communi. Feeling not thought, and it’s not an energy. It’s as much as something jumping from one person to another. It, it’s probably better described as an attuned frequency with attention and intention.

And other people will pick up on it slightly. Um, you know, you can be anywhere If somebody’s staring at you from behind. Eventually you’ll sense that they are, and you’ll turn around. Um, this happens to many people all the time, and it’s not because you have eyes in the back of your head. We’ve got.

Sensing systems, uh, all over us and our hair, our skin. Um, so it, it’s very subtle perception and once you get the gift of it, you can also transfer it to a degree. What do you mean by transfer it well to another person? So, uh, you know, we’ve got 70 billion, billion, billion, billion trillion atoms. In our, the average human being, um, the electrons on a, the electrons in an atom communicate electromagnetic frequency.

So, you know, somebody’s sitting near you and they’re angry or out of. Emotional balance, you’ll sense that not because they’re sitting in a certain way or uh, because they’ve got their back to you or they look angry, uh, cause they don’t necessarily have to. And it’s, you are using the intuition from the, the heart, brain and the stomach brain.

And it’s got nothing to do with the new age or telling the future. Or we have the same sensing systems that animals have for, for example, how does a duck know that winter’s coming? So it needs to fly. Um, how does a massive flock of birds in the sky all turn at the same time and not crash into each other?

It’s this universal energy, if you will, and I don’t like the term energy, but it’s the same thing that makes a grass grow. It, it, it’s, so, it can appear to be this amazingly mystical, weirdo, new age stuff, but when you break it down and take the new age away from it, it’s not, um, you look at MEMA himself, it took three commissions to a, They kept saying, Yeah, this, this stuff works.

But you claim there’s an ethereal fluid comes down from the heavens, we can’t see it. So you are. And we don’t care how many people you have cured. And what happened after the third commission? He, he went to England for a year or so, then he went to Feld in Switzerland and ended up living in Berg in Germany.

But uh, on the way through it all got distorted. Poer came along with his, uh, uh, his methodology. He was a disciple of mema, but he was the first guy to put words. With Victor race in a, in a vineyard. He had mesmerized him. Um, and then he asked another worker a, a question and Victor Race answered it and Poal, my goodness, people can speak in this state, Mesmer, then through what I consider would be jealousy, cuz he hadn’t figured it out himself said, That’s of Horr, people shouldn’t talk in the state.

Um, and MEMA faded away then he just happily retired in Berg and had plenty of money. Spent the rest of his life working on the poor for free. But 50 years after he passed the French Academy of Medicine, not the Academy of Sciences, they did a study over 10 years with 5,000 people, and their final result was, We don’t know how this works, but it does.

Um, and that was a proper study done double blind with a lot of that got hidden. It took me four years to find it, but it was there. So once again, it’s all shrouded in this mystery and this misunderstanding. Uh, when brave, um, went to the show with Laugh on ta, Brad actually spent 10 days. And he learned the magnetism and mesmerism terrified of what they’d done to mema.

So he came up with his eye fixation. Basically all he did was keep the look into my eye aspect of it. And then he said just before he passed, if I could never achieve what the magnets could, And I wonder perhaps should I have been a little bit less afraid of the medical associations and kept some of their methodologies?

Um, I I don’t think it replaces hypnosis. I think the two working together, you know. Well, I think there’s something fascinating about what you just mentioned of, and this is not too discount, that it’s not this, but if we take it out of the dialogue of energy and, uh, tell me if this word fits for you, that of.

Absolutely. Yeah. Intention and, and attention. Mm-hmm. pay attention with intention. You know, we, the new age grabs bits and bobs of this and distorts it. So we, we have this, um, you know, this presence living in the moment. So the new age theme is the pastors Gone. It never existed, and the future’s not here yet, so it doesn’t exist.

But presence really came from La Fontain and the magnets. And they would say, when you are doing your work, Be present with your patient at the time and it over the years, it all became distorted and you would know as well as I do, if you’ve got somebody in your clinic using hypnosis of whatever methodology, if your focused on them and your intention is to bring a change within them for them, you’ll get a far better result than if you’re just trying to do a paint by numbers, reading of a script to quit smoking or so.

Well, I’d look at, there’s the, there’s the interactions with someone like Sean, Michael Andrews, and there’s the number of videos where people are looking at him staring into someone’s eyes just before doing a standing instant induction and to look at the YouTube comments and people are going, Oh, he’s waiting for this flash within the eyes that he’s waiting for this specific thing.

Oh, he’s reading this specific energy. And, uh, I believe his exact dialogue is I. Looking them in the eyes with the intention of, I’ve got you. You’re gonna go into hypnosis, uh, and to look at, I, I came originally from a career working in management and theater and the fascination of the power of a transition that we can be in the same lit room, but the moment where suddenly the energy in the room shifts.

Which I can highlight, even I’d phrase it this way, even before I knew better, uh, here’s a clear moment where the quality of the eye contact would change. And really that was the induction. And I just happened to then say, close your eyes and then run through a Dave Ment induction. But that intent that, uh, that, that conviction inside of it, where sort of my internal subtext, which.

Again, the appreciation of bringing it out of the energy dialogue and, and not to discount that, cuz there may be something going on there, but it’s that phrasing that if we’re placing it off in this dialogue of energy, there’s nothing quite tangible we can yet grab onto as opposed to if it’s intent, if it’s mindset, if it’s this level of conviction going into that, that is something we can teach.

That is something we can duplicate where my dialogue is, I’m locking onto those eyes and drawing them in. It’s that phrase that you’ve already changed. I just need to consciously catch you up to that reality. Yeah, I would totally agree. It’s, look, hypnosis is misunderstood enough, let alone meser isn’t.

It’s, Bring something else confused again, . Yeah, precisely. Look, at the end of the day, it’s our tension intention. Focus and doing the best you can for your client, I think. But it’s a shame that a lot of hypnosis now is marketed as this, do a three day course and become a master grand master of this, that and the other.

And, and at the end of the day, what makes anyone good at anything is getting the basics. And then practicing it until it becomes part of you. That’s like, I can remember working with airline pilots and I bought this guy at a trance one time. He said, How do you do that to me? And I said, Do what? And he said, Make me feel like that.

And his name was Jim. And I said, Jim, how do you land a 7 47 jumbo jet at Hong Kong airport in the middle of the night? And said, Oh, guess what? I, I get what you mean. It’s experience, isn’t it? And at the end of the day it is, um, you know, with my students like that, they have to have scripts. They have to have manuals, they have to have in class training.

But I say to them, You’re a hypnotist when you put these manuals away. Mm-hmm. if, if you’re still sitting there with manuals looking for scripts and the amount of people that you know, you speak to. I went to a HYP and it didn’t work, and I could hear them shuffling. Uh, it’s, it doesn’t do the profession much good.

I don’t think well, to use him as that, as that training will that, you know, I, I’d always come back to the metaphor of the standup comedian, uh, who’s doing crowd work that you know, you, you’re in the audience and he finds there’s a lawyer in the audience and suddenly it looks like he’s an improvisational genius.

Doing six minutes of riffing on lawyers, and yet if you were in another city the next week and someone else was a lawyer, it might be rather similar . And we find, we find these chunks. We find these patterns, which to pull specific bits of dialogue from one thing. It’s where I’d always say that as, as much as we can talk, scripts always have the mindset that, okay, this is a transcript of one specific session with one specific client.

And it’s about what can I model out of it rather than just read it. Yeah, exactly. Right. And if you’re not fo, if you’re focused on a script and not a client, you, you are not going to get the same result. In most cases. If you’ve lucked out and your clients are so NAB list, you probably will, but you know, we can’t.

Put in an advertisement, some naus only. Um, we don’t, we don’t get to choose who comes into the clinic. They’re coming in of their own free will. And I think our responsibility as a professional is to ensure that we have the skills to do that. But you can’t just get the skills. It, it, they’re learned. Um, I can, I, in my early days, I.

Years just reading scripts out loud and inductions to, to me a word. Read aloud as a word. Remember. And it takes you to the point where you can just continuously talk. Uh, if you are hypnotizing somebody and you stop talking, their conscious mind comes straight back into the picture. I, in the early stage of an induction, um, There’s a lot of things that you have to learn to do on the way through.

And I can remember in the early days, you sort of drift down into L for yourself and all of a sudden you think, Oh, I’ve got a client here. Mm-hmm. , um, you run outta words. So I learned really quickly to say, with each breath that you take, you let go a little more with each breath out that you make, you go a little deeper.

And when my voice returns, you’ll go deeper then than you are now. And then I’d get myself together. Refocus on the client and come back in with a, with a quiet voice, and you can literally see them sinking in the chair. So, but that’s only learned from experience. You, you can read that in a book. You can watch other people do it, but you are not going to get the gift of it until you actually do it and you see that it works.

It’s like rapid inductions. The first one I ever tried was a handshake in. And when I started, the internet didn’t exist. So of course it came out of a book and I walked up to this guy and I said, Look at my eyes, looking at my eyes. And I went sleep. And he just looked at me and said, What are you doing?

You? He turned around and walked off. So there was no videos to watch, so you had to try and figure it out from a book. But persistence, once I’ve. Done the first handshake induction that worked it, it then became very, very easy to just continue on and, and once again, that comes from experience. And if you wanna be good at this, you have to have a passion for it.

Then you’ve gotta put the work into it. You can’t just do a paint by numbers ABC, because life isn’t like that, you know? So if you had to rewind, Part of your history back, what are, what are some of those, let’s say, prominent lessons that are very clear to you now that would’ve been much more helpful in those early years getting started.

Um, the Almond Induction and watching a Gill Boy video called The Case of Bunny. Where he does a rapid induction up on the stage and she comes out of it, Uh, her arm floats up and she’d been in physio for a few years and she was a psychologist saying, he said, How did that feel? And she said, Well, really, I was thinking to myself, I’m glad that it worked.

I know all this stuff in theory and, but my arm went up and there’s no way that it could do that. So I know I was hypnotized, but. When you watch the video from the exterior, this lady’s gone and she’s got her head right next to his microphone. So you can hear this of her breathing. But she came out totally aware of everything that had happened and that was, I guess, the kicker for me that was, Hey, no one’s gonna go off into a deep, deep state naturally unless there are som list and they’re not gonna have this.

I was always looking for this, um, I suppose spontaneous ams. and the only time you’re gonna get that is in a stage show with some Aus that you keep reorientating and putting back in. And many of them eventually will go into a spontaneous amnesia, but the general public usually isn’t going to. So ? Mm-hmm.

If you pursue that, you pursue a frustration. I, I believe, Anyway. And, and that’s that understanding too, that, and just to define it here, for the folks that may be new to it, I, I oversimplify the definition that the natural sy nebulous is that person that really, it doesn’t matter what technique you use, they’re gonna go to those profoundly deep levels no matter what.

And for everybody else, here’s our sets of techniques and, you know, the Elman work being a great methodology there of, to guide people. That we don’t have to have the natural sub nebulous, though we have techniques as I would phrase it, to guide everyone else into a level similar or close to or in sub nab that we don’t need that delineation as, uh, being the, nope, this is the percentage that I need.

Absolutely ab and I think a lot of therapy has become, what’s the right way to put it? Um, I, I want to say ericsonian distorted, but that, that’s not the right thing to say. Perhaps there’s a lot more to hypnosis than the average Milton Ericson, uh, belief system that many people have about what hypnosis is.

Um, Great techniques. He was a brilliant therapist, but there’s more to actually inducing trance. And you know, I, I often chuckle at the last video he ever made and a doctor’s asking him where to learn. And he says in that, be your own natural self. I’ve seen dozens and dozens and scores of men try to copy others.

And it’s a hollow pretense and the patient knows it. I’ve done it myself and it’s a mess. So Milton was very good at not quite telling everybody everything. So it it, after he passed, I, I think a lot of people tried to take the natural gift he had. Um, and pass it on, but perhaps not knowing exactly what he meant in the first place.

He, he wasn’t that good at explaining what he did. He was far better at doing it. So there’s more to it than, than just Erickson. But having said that, he’s a brilliant therapist and, and he, a lot of validity in his work is very, very relevant to hypnosis, But to Milton wasn’t that well known for creating phenomena, in my opinion.

and my view of hypnosis, if, if you haven’t created a phenomena, you have a, an altered state perhaps that we call a trance. But I, I don’t think for a moment that all h um, hypnosis is self hypnosis, and I don’t think for a moment that all trance states are what I term as hypnosis either. So a lot of things get watered down and brushed over, and I, perhaps I’m just old school.

I, I don’t know, but it’s, I I think we need to learn as much as we can. Every training you can go to from anyone, you’re going to learn something and, and this process, you’d know yourself. It’s, you never know it. And as soon as you think you do, I, I, from my point of view, you’re in trouble there. There’s always something to learn.

There’s always a way to improve a technique, but those ways come at the coal face. They don’t come from reading books about it. You might get some insight from books. Videos are great because you can see how the techniques are happening, but, but at the end of the day, you get good at it from passion.
Practice persistence and having a passion for what you’re doing. That’s what makes anybody good at something, I think. Well, I mean, it’s observing that sometimes there’s more going on than just the technique. I mean the, what you just said about Eric said often highlights the fact that even to this day, there are people out there who are.

Teaching techniques and yes, the techniques are effective though. Part of what’s getting the result is that that intent that they’re building in the room, that mindset towards change that, and I think that’s something that’s really learned and defined by experience as opposed to saying, handing somebody, Hey, here’s this, uh, resource for that, that it, it’s that ability that the practitioner does have that ability to transcend the technique and the techniques, you know, all the work around.

Rapport that here’s the works, even in the therapeutic models, that the, the outcome was directly correlated to the rapport in the room. That yes, we need good strategies. Yes, we need sound techniques, and to go in with some sort of plan that we’re gonna actually use some process, but it’s that energy as well in the room.

Not to go back to that energy word, but it’s that intent that we’re setting in motion that, as I phrase it, I got this, this is gonna be easy. And letting that become the mindset of the client. Precisely. And look, you know, I found in my early days, I, I sort of tend to, uh, uh, if I do something, I do it full on

So I decided I was gonna have a mass hypnosis event and I got 1,058 people in a room for quit smoking. It was a big event in Brisbane, and I’ll tell you what, it’s easy to hypnotize a thousand people on one. . And that’s the first experience I think I had of this connectedness of, we’ll use that word energy, but I’ll say frequency, the connectedness.

These people just went down like nine pins. It was astounded, , um, you know, and, uh, with one or two people, it, it’s always been not more difficult, but it was much easier to hypnotize a large, large group than, um, One or two people or when, when I was in the us you know, you learn about necessity and, uh, what’s coming out of you.

I remember going on a big radio show in LA and, sorry, in, uh, Chicago and this announcer, we couldn’t find the building and we got there with about. 10 minutes to spare. Rushed upstairs, got into the studio and, and this announcer opened the door and his wooly hair came out through the journey. When are you the Australian Iist?

And I said, Yeah, I am. And he said, Well, you’ve got a terrible sense of timing. There’s four people there. Make them zombies. We’re on air in five minutes. And, and that’s when you learn that necessity becomes a mother of invention. You know, it’s. Radio, they always wanna do something a bit funny. And if you can’t do it, you’ve, uh, I don’t think it’s very good to go on a radio show and everything falls over.

It doesn’t do your reputation much good, but it’s like on stage, if, if I’ve, if I’m doing a stage show and I say to somebody, I click my fingers and go sleep, and they stop instantly and they fall over into that, or that they bow over into that position, then they’ll start to s. If I just say to them, You’re stable on your feet.

You can’t fall over, they won’t fall over. They’ll keep swaying. But if I, I learned a long time. If I go, if I point at them and go, you cannot fall over pointing at them. You’ll see their body react and yet their eyes are closed and they can’t see what you’re doing. Hmm. So there is some kind of a sensing system between people, but once again, that word energy comes into it and, and I’m not sure that it is an energy.

I, I, I think it’s a, an energetic connection of some type. I like that. Yeah. More so a frequency, you know, it’s, it’s not something leaping from one person to another. It maybe it’s projected, but it certainly doesn’t. So it’s a fascinating subject. Well, there’s a, there’s a phrase that you dropped a moment ago with, uh, some, uh, disbelief in the phrasing.

And, uh, you may be preaching to the choir on this one. Uh, but the phrasing of all hypnosis is self hypnosis. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, well, why do we need hypnotists? That, that’s my plain simple answer. I think some hypnosis is self hypnosis. Um, me, for example, I can hypnotize myself into physical nonsense ability in as much as I can numb my leg, my arm, my chest, my back, whatever.

But I can’t shut my. Left brain down and be totally in my right brain or I’ll go to sleep. So my answer would be that a recording is good self hypnosis, but then someone will say, Yeah, but if you didn’t make the recording yourself, it isn’t self hypnosis because you are not doing it. So it’s one of those points that can be argued continuously to me, everybody’s capable of, of going into hypnosis.

If they haven’t gone into hypnosis with their hypnotist, clinical or otherwise, I think the hypnotist stopped too soon. We we’re just looking to get people through a switch point, and for a som nebulous it can be 20 seconds. Um, for a high analytical thinker, it can be 20 minutes. But if you keep going, eventually you’ll get the state, whether they’re willing to experience it or not.

Um, but once again, that all comes down to experience. And you, you books on the internet, they give us information, but they don’t give us knowledge. We, we need to get this information, practice it, and turn it into knowledge. and then we become good at what we do. That, that, that’s my perception of it anyway.

Well, I think the phrase can often also be edited, uh, that perhaps all hypnosis is self hypnosis eventually. Yeah, that it has. I would agree with that. Yeah. It has to begin with that relationship of, uh, I like that phrase of, if that was the case, why we need the inot test. It has to begin with someone who understands the process and can guide the experience the same.

I mean, going back to, back to that fascination, that moment where, you know, to have the client very much sense that, okay, this is different now, um, which is on its own some bit of phenomenon. Yeah. E exactly. And look, that only comes through for self hypnosis for me. I think, um, Jerry Kind, uh, rest in peace. I, I think his technique of giving a trigger to go back in after hypnosis has been induced.

That to me is self hypnosis. Somebody laying on their bed or sitting in a chair. Um, You know, to get into that level of consciousness where you can plant a seed and make it effective quickly, most people can’t do that. So the next thing is, okay, self hypnosis. You after 20 sessions of self hypnosis, I changed this, or I did that, or I achieved the other.

Well, you would’ve done that without hypnosis after 20 sessions. Because you’re just creating a new habit for yourself. So if someone can induce themselves into that state and create a phenomena for themselves, genuinely, then I would call it self hypnosis. Um, I remember talking with a few, um, NSA remote viewers.

I, I met a few of them in the us, David Moorehouse and Li Buchanan and what have you. And, and they would go into their remote viewing rooms at Fought Mead, and they would always have a monitor with. Because when they went down into the the state, it all got very wishy washy. So they had a monitor to keep them at some level of consciousness so they could be guided and directed and also speak with whatever it was they were perceiving.

So the. It, it’s a very, very complicated, um, kettle of fish, so to speak. And as, as I say to my students, Get out of your own way. Hold the moral high ground and get on with it. The more you practice it, the better you’re going to be at it. Don’t overstep your mark. Um, don’t work beyond your own capabilities, which is we are working with the, the mind and people’s issues and problems and what they’re gonna tell us in a.

Isn’t necessarily what they’re really experiencing when they leave your clinic and go back into their own reality and, and all of these things as a therapist need to be taken into account. I think. Outstanding. Rick, it’s been awesome having you on here. Uh, where can, uh, people learn more about you and your work online?

Probably the best site to go to is global hypnosis academy.com or one word outstanding, and we’ll link to that over in the show notes [email protected]. Rick, awesome having you on here. Thanks. I look, I look forward to seeing you in Vegas. My friend will have to have a beer or something.

Absolutely. All right. Thanks so much, . Thanks, man.

Jason, Lynette here once again, and as always, thank you so much for your feedback online, for leaving your reviews on iTunes for sharing this on your social mode media streams as well. Once again, check out Rick’s websites, either global hypnosis academy.com or. Rick collingwood.com and also check out once again hypnotic business systems.com.

It’s the entire all access pass to my hypnosis business training library strategies you could put into use right away marketing materials. You get the full license rights to replicate to get your business in motion. Check that out, hypnotic business systems.com. See you on the inside. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis podcast and work smart hypnosis.com.