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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 365, Laughter for Hypnotic Change. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Linett, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Linett. You know, a funny thing happened on the way to the hypnosis.
Bam. Hey, welcome back everybody. It’s Jason Linett, and once again, a solo episode this week sharing some insights, and I’ll tell you where this episode theme came from. There’s a much longer presentation I did a couple of weeks back at the I C B C H Winter Hypno Conference that we hosted here in Orlando, Florida, and I talked about just this one little riff.
On the power of laughter, the power of humor, which yes, this may dip into the themes of what often is expressed with things like laughter yoga or people who have come onto the program and talked about the importance of humor. I wanted to do a solo episode this week talking about the power of laughter, the power of humor, the way that I see it.
So I’m gonna share a few examples along the way, some rather appropriate to classic change some a. Inappropriate as well. So buckle up. This may get a little interesting and I’d say that if you want more like this, check out our upcoming event, Work Smart hypnosis live.com. This is our hybrid live online hypnosis training.
We get students in the class from all around the world, and I’d encourage you. Head over to work Smart hypnosis live.com and be sure to watch the entire video tour at the top of that page, you’ll see exactly how we do this as a hybrid online live event and have found the way to provide a much better experience.
By combining digital instruction along with live training, with real time interaction. Simply put, if you’re still struggling with online hypnosis, it kind of just makes sense to do hypnosis training online and get the hands on interactive practice in that format, plus some outstanding techniques based upon research based changed and hypnotic phenomenon and.
We laugh a lot, so check that out. Work smart hypnosis live.com and here we go. Session number 365. Laughter for Hypnotic Change. I’m gonna do my best to keep this episode of clean. I’m sorry for that . No, it’s because there’s a catch phrase that happens in the work that I do with my clients, which is that as soon as they use.
The salty talk as soon as they use some bit of colorful language, I smile really big like an eight year old who suddenly heard the dirty word and go, Oh good. Now that you use that word, I get to use it as well. So this is in my mind, becoming the chameleon matching up to their model of the world. I will tell you here was the 75 year old grandmother who came in to quit smoking, and even I was uncomfortable.
With the amount of profanity we were using in that room, though, it’s again their model of the world, their perspective of how they communicate. And I think it was, yeah, it was the late great Ted Robinson. Ted was actually a preacher, and even I heard him say, Many of us have a hard time processing true emotion without pfa.
From a man who put on a collar that made it, made it even better. So let’s get into the details of this from a higher perspective. First, laughter is dissociative and the moment you laugh at something, laughter often comes from looking at it in a different way. And one of the simplest examples of this, it would be like looking at the sort of category of observational.
There are people who don’t really even tell jokes. In fact, most comedians don’t tell jokes. The majority of comedians now are telling stories with some funny moments inside of it, or calling out things that you haven’t yet noticed. I’m going to butcher this comedy routine now , because in one of his specials, Jerry Seinfeld has a whole thing about how we use different words for transportation.
You take a taxi, you get on the train, you get in the car, but you call the Uber and it’s funnier when he does it. Now, when he does that though, suddenly now he has created from our hypnotic standpoint an anchor that anytime you use that language, now you’re gonna think back to him and that just increases his fame, which Jerry’s doing all right and doesn’t quite need our help yet.
That sort of brand of observational humor really begins to shift. Which is now making me realize, I have to now quote one of my favorite comedians, Emo Phillips, who I use this line all the time in my training events, which is that I used to think the brain was the most intelligent organ in the body. And then I realized who’s telling me that?
This is the same comedian who by the way, has the line, Well, what they say That one man’s trash is another man’s treasure and one man’s pet stained carpet is another person’s organic twister game gone wrong. Let’s use the brain joke instead, . But what happens is suddenly you’re looking at a situation in a way differently than you did before, and can you begin to see that something that needs to happen?
Inside of change. So one of the questions that I often ask to my clients comes about by way of a demonstration of this idea. So let’s use stop smoking as an example. Up until now, whether you’re a visual person or not, In your mind, you’ve been representing this big impossible challenge as if like it’s this wall in front of you or a mountain that can’t be crossed.
Though I’m curious to ask you, what happens when we shrink this thing down so small and put it behind you? Simply put what happens differently when this big impossible task becomes a simple step in a new direction to lead to something better? I think what I’m asking here is what’s on the other side of.
How do you want to be feeling at that point where it’s five years from now and not that it took five years to quit smoking? No. That you’ve had five years of success and this thing is so far behind you. What’s that gonna be like to think about making this decision today? And this is where I start laughing in my delivery and they start laughing too.
And what happens is they go, I’m gonna laugh at myself because I realize how easy it was. Do you see what happened there? Hypnotic suggestions are not just words, there’re thoughts, there’s feelings, there’s actions, there’s experiences, there’s emotions. And so because I was willing to go to a place of laughter, laughter is appropriately contagious and they’d begin to join me there as well.
I’m gonna censor the story as best as I possibly can. There was a man who I worked with to quit smoking. In the middle of the session, he burst out. And I try to utilize it. That’s right. As you feel that laughter rising, let that laughter begin to fade away. Realize it takes you even deeper. Nope, he’s gone.
So I tried to go all stage hypnosis on it. That’s right. Let that laughter build that, that laughter grow up stronger and stronger. Bring that laughter into the part of your mind that used to think this was impossible and realize you could look at it in an entirely different way. No, he’s still laughing.
And finally I just go, Hey Frank, open your eyes. What’s so funny, and to simplify the story, he’s a guy who is purposefully decided to always be single, never wanted to get into a long term, committed relationship. And there’s a certain product that women may need to purchase once a month. Yeah, that one that he’s never had to.
I’m like, That’s what everyone says, . No, wait. Why is that helpful? Why is that funny? He goes, My biggest fear was how will I go to the gas station or the grocery store and not buy those and not buy cigarettes? And it just dawned on me, there’s a whole library of stuff I’ve never purchased before. That laughter was the key to the change.
He had built up this impossible challenge, and then on the other side of it was, He had a skill set, He had the ability to not buy something and, and so it’s from that laughter, I, I get into this now with my clients because I get into the dialogue about how you can’t shock me. I’ve seen enough clients over the years that I’ve heard a little bit of everything, cuz I’ll tell you it’s the oddly specific stories of success that are why I keep doing what I.
You know, uh, I will give full disclaimer. Don Moten, uh, out of St. Louis has a similar story to this one, but then it happened to me. So now it’s my story too, Damnit, uh, which is that you save my life, but you also saved the life of my bird. Like, what do you mean by that? She goes, Well, my bird had this chronic cough, and we thought the bird had cancer.
We took the bird to all sorts of veterinarians and spent all sorts of time, energy, and money, and it’s only two years after I quit smoking. Then I realized the bird wasn’t coughing. , and at first the thought was, Oh my God, I was killing my bird with secondhand smoke. And instead it was the bird was mimicking my cough because I wasn’t coughing, the bird didn’t have the need to repeat my noise.
Bird was never sick. Bird was poking fond of me, perhaps or the man who starts making the gesture. He’s seeing me for weight loss and is talking about how he is fascinated in the shower feeling his. Get those images outta your head, feeling up his body, and he says to me, I’m so amazed that my man boobs are gone.
Do you hear that often? And I have to go, No, but congratulations. You’re doing great. It’s the oddly specific feedback, the number of stop smoking or cut back and drinking. Clients who have sent me relatively detailed emails that the morning bowel movement has gone. It’s the oddly specific feedback that keeps me going, and you know, that’s the stuff that, you know, just dominoes the bigger results over time.
What have I done there? I have brought their attention to the micro changes. Out of the binary, it worked or it didn’t work. Conversation and because I deliver that in a place of just nerdy delight is the dialogue in my brain when I launch into that. I, I am channeling my best Steve Jobs, showing the newest features on the iPhone and his presentations when the man was alive, that he is so excited to bring you into this world.
And I’m channeling that in that moment. A, and I’m getting them laughing, but I’m getting them now to sort for the micro changes that now, as I say, domino into the big ones. So basically put, if you can get your client laughing about their problem, and I talk about this sometimes as I want to get a baseline, because if I get you laughing during the.
The change is already in motion. And also too, when it’s time to test my work, conversationally, after the process, I’m seeing the same emotion I wanna see when I’m kind of asking you to bring up the old feeling, asking you to bring up the old fear, and instead I’m getting that laughter response. We have now imprinted the new positive emotion over the old.
Because laughter is dissociative. Why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side and know it’s not funny anymore? Yet suddenly the criteria changes at the end of the joke. Why was six afraid of seven? Well, because 7, 8, 9 hahaha. Because you hear it’s the let’s go hypnotic language on this.
It’s the centax ambiguity. It’s the phonological ambiguity. Okay. No, it’s just a silly kids joke. Yet it’s suddenly now the criteria has changed and you hear it differently. Forgive me now for this slightly crass, but really not crass joke, my friends. What do you do to an elephant with three ball? You walk ’em and pitch to the rhino, Bu bu, okay.
And by the way, jokes and humor are even funnier when you stop and explain them. Because up until the beginning of it, you thought it was a rhino with a rhinos with some sort of physical abnormality and no, it’s a bunch of animals playing baseball. That’s all I always clearly what I. You filthy person, you, not that I would ever tell these jokes.
Of course, inside of a session though, there might be an opportunity to do so. It’s instead look at what happens when laughter occurs. They’re looking at the situation in a very different way. And take note, I I said just now. I’m not telling jokes like this inside of a session. I’m using these silly little jokes as an illustration of the point because this is where even Tracy Canan, who was on the program recently talking about her approach to laughter, which by the way, Tracy’s doing a conference, uh, one day workshop at Hypno Thoughts Live this year.
Take it. It is amazing. I’ve seen the work that she does about how you don’t have to be the comedian, you don’t have to be the comedy writer yet the principles of comedy writing can be lifted up and brought into your hypnotic change work. I actually hosted a, uh, one day training with her online a couple of, uh, months ago, and just the people raved about what she shared, so check that out.
She does some incredible, incredible stuff and I share that because I agree with her that it’s not the situation where you have to be the naturally funny. Look it again. The gift of observational humor. You get on the train, you take the taxi, you call the Uber, you get in the car. Even back to, who was it?
Uh, it was Gallagher who used to do a whole routine about how weird the English languages, Laughter l Hey, it’s the word we’re using. Laughter. L A U G H T E. . How do you spell daughter? It’s not Daer, it’s daughter. It’s the same spelling though. D A U G H T E R. . No wonder our language is kind of wacky. So looking at how we can have them observing their situation differently, and if there’s one takeaway from this quick solo episode, it would be utilize the question that I ask up until now, which there’s a beautiful little embedded pattern.
Up until now, this has been this big, impossible task in front of. , what happens when it becomes that tiny thing behind you that was just the first stepping stone to something bigger and better in such a way that you might even laugh at the fact that used to be the challenge. I, I’ll give you some of the nuances of this, that here’s my guy who I worked with and he is not the only one in the world, but there are several who, uh, he has a double doctorate in Russian litera.
which he said was one step away from a multi-level marketing company selling skin creams, essential oils or whatever else. I’m like, What do you mean by that? He goes, Well, it turns out when you have a double doctorate in Russian literature, the only job you can have is becoming a professor at a university teaching Russian literature from the textbook that you.
Which is one step away. It was, there’s a meme that was online about a friend of someone’s gotta doctorate in Egyptian history and the only job he could get was teaching Egyptian history at a university. Tell me how that’s not a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme. . So he’s this guy who the whole thing was, He’s the expert in the room.
He wrote the fricking textbook. He’s in the expert role teaching the class. Everyone else are the undergrad students and as he put it, why am I shaking like I’m back in my third grade math class? So it’s where as the process of hypnosis progressed, the most helpful thing was getting him to laugh at the dynamic of the room so that now he could observe it as it actually was and not how he previously perceived it to.
Steal this next one. The moment you have the client realizing they are physically as well as emotionally, as well as just simply, literally bigger than their habit. The piece of paper is just a piece. The cigarette is just a piece of paper wrapped around a bunch of junk, representing a chemical concoction that used to just be pure tobacco.
Uh, and now they can see it for what it is. , it’s the human body bigger than this little cardboard box filled with garbage they don’t need anymore. The very idea that the food, the beverage, the substance, the fingernails could ever control them again. Let that just become so ridiculous that even if there was the slightest idea of engaging in that old, useless, unnecessary pattern, catch yourself kinda laughing at yourself and realizing, Oh yeah, I got this.
This is gonna be easy. You go first. That’s not joke telling, that’s not observational humor. You get on the train, you take the tax you call, you get the idea. It’s no longer that. It’s instead calling out the situational obviousness of the situation and letting that become a moment of change. There’s a piece of language I usually get into which this applies over to emotional change as well as habitual change.
And this may sound a little counterintuitive. Right now, thank yourself for successfully fill in the blank issue all these years because we already talked about this. You wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t have given you something, and that’s where you can show yourself some gratitude right now because you can let today be a moment as if it was like a graduation.
Kinda like you went to school for all those years to finally get the piece of paper to hang on the. What that really meant was you didn’t have to go back to that school ever again. You put in all that effort to get the learning, the lessons, and the documentation, so then you didn’t have to go back. So let today be a moment of taking anything that has been valuable, of having this experience for all these years, and choosing what’s good and worth holding onto, and letting the rest now be behind you where it belong.
And if there ever is, and listen to this pattern, I teach this in more detail in the Work Smart Hypnosis Live event. Far too often people, unfortunately, hypnotists, often remind their clients of the problems they’ve already let go of. When you have a craving, do this. When you have the fear, do that. Listen to what’s different here.
Even if there is that slightest moment where some trace of that old, useless feeling creeps. I’m distancing and I’m dissociating, and I’m bringing humor into it. So just a couple of quick thoughts here on laughter for hypnotic change. No, you don’t have to tell jokes. No, you don’t have to bring in silly time and twist animal balloons, though.
That sounds fun. It’s instead, find those places to get your client laughing at how serious they used to perceive the issue to be. And by doing so, now you dissociate them even further from the old problem. And you help them create an even more fun solution. Jason, let Ed here once again, and as always, thank you so much for leaving your reviews online.
Subscribing to this program and joining us at events like work smart hypnosis live.com, and I will make a bold promise to you the Work Smart Hypnosis live.com event, which I now share the stage with Richard non guard. And the training of that is an event that has two combined promises. And I’ll call it out.
No one else in the industry can make these two promises the way that together Richard and I can, it is at the same time the most laughter filled hypnosis training event that combines research based hypnotic, phenomenon based, hypnotic change, along with an appropriate amount of content of stories about dogs.
Boom. Top that. Okay. Yeah, he’s got the golden doodles. I’ve got the Corgi and the Beagle, uh, Bele Mix . Yet it’s where laughter also helps us to absorb the information. Laughter makes something lock into people’s minds. It’s how we hear something funny and we feel the need to tell the story. So simply put, the more you make use of these laughter principles in your sessions, your clients are gonna talk about their change.
They’re gonna remember it was you and not just any other hypnotist that’s gonna help you to grow your. That’s gonna help you to get even more clients, that’s gonna help you to become even more successful. So this is also part of why when we do the training, half of the audience is brand new to hypnosis, and the other half is looking to sharpen their skills and get more consistent results.
So check it out. Watch the entire tour at the top of the page of Work Smart hypnosis live.com. And we’ll see you soon. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast and work smart hypnosis.com.
