Session #44: Jonathan Chase – Part Two

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 44 part two with Jonathan Chase. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business six. Sets. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. As you last joined us, we spent some good time with Jonathan Chase from over in the UK discussing his background in hypnosis, his approach to both stage as well as the client change process, as well as a very interesting theatrical background getting into this in terms of the mindset of how we approach hypnosis.

Part two is gonna be fascinating to you. I know as he details this project, that he’s a part of all about producing a theatrical play. Not just a stage show, but a play, which at one point brings hypnotized volunteers. Into the performance. It’s a fascinating chat. I wanna jump right in. This is part two with Jonathan Chase.

Make sure you head over to work smart hypnosis.com. I’m gonna put in the show notes for this episode as well as the previous one. Some videos, some links. Just a lot of cool information to check out. Part two with Jonathan Chase.

Tell me a little bit more about this project you’ve got with the festival coming up. Well, it’s an idea that’s been sort of in the back of my head for a long, long time. As you know, I’m quite well known for saying that hypnosis is much more of an art than in case of science. You’ve only gotta look at the difference between say somebody like Gil Boyen and Milton Erickson and see that they’ve both got absolutely fabulous results in entirely different approaches.

Yes. So, you know, and you’ve gotta think, well, yeah, okay, hang on a minute. The hyp sis worked. But why can’t other people get what Ericsson got? Well, they weren’t Ericsson and Ericsson was missed the personality on sticks, literally for most of his life. And well, I’d say we even have that in our modern era.

There are, Oh good lord. There are people who are training techniques. And yet they’re not getting results because of their techniques. They’re getting results because of the atmosphere that they create. They’re getting results because of the energy they bring to the room. The techniques are definitely viable, yet there’s so much more that’s going on beyond say these words.

Absolutely, Absolutely. I mean, it’s like I, I went on a friend’s, uh, stage hypnosis course and I said to him, I said, Do you know what, what was missing? He said, What? I said, You didn’t tell him how to. He said, Well, I said you told them how to walk out on stage. You told them the words to say and everything like that, but you didn’t tell ’em what they’ve gotta do inside here, inside their heads for five minutes before they go out there, you know, and go out as a hypnotist.

Rather than going out just as themselves who do a hypnosis, cuz that’s who’s struggling to remember the words. Yeah, yeah. And it’s usually quite boring as well because then you end up with virtual masturbation, you know? Anyway, the marvelous magical mes. So a lot of people don’t know my. Private life.

Mm-hmm. and I am really into science fiction. I’ve been into steam punk for many years, and the steam punk culture, I used to do Hy Sis training with alternative lifestyle groups, BDSM and that sort of thing, groups. And that sort of went onto the cost place stuff because it’s very, very similar with that sexual element.

And to be honest, I was happier. Losing the sexual element because some of the things I was thinking of doing was just going too. So for me, on a personal level, you know, and on Second Life I’ve been running a theater on Second Life, which is a virtual world for a couple of three years now, and doing lots of theater stuff.

Most people don’t know that. I wrote directed and wrote the songs for a comedy musical that was done at the Prince Wales Theater, you know, and stuff like that. I have a theatrical background. That’s where I come. And I’ve been messing around with an idea of mixing the art of hypnosis with the art of the theater for a long time.

Now, what you get in comedy Hyp sis, is you get a demonstration of hyp sis that’s done in a humorous way. You get the odd comedy hypnotist like Anthony Ks, like Ken Webster, who are actually funny themselves. They could go into a comedy club and get the stand innovation with or without the hyp. Yeah. Yes.

Terry Stoks is another one that is funny. Besides the hyn. The show would work even without the hypnosis. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Darren Brown does mild sleep, although he is known as a hypnotist in this country, does 99% of what he does. His magic mentalism. Yes. But then I came across a guy called Rob in Vancouver and Poly Quinn Hypnosis.

Who do a steampunk style show just twice a year they do a steampunk style show and it’s a little bit like Rocky Horror. You come dressed up, you come as part of the entertainment for the evening, not just the audience. And they’re very much into the steam punky thing. And I was talking to Rob and I said, I’ve been thinking of doing a planner.

You don’t actually do a play do. He said, Now we don’t do a play. He said, We do a themed. They’re doing a styled hypnosis show as opposed to a play, which is also featuring hypnosis, which is what’s unique here, right? Yeah. Well, what’s unique here as far as we can tell, is we are writing the piece as a five character play.

Yeah, six, because I’m cameo in Guine, I just roll on and roll off every now and again. We’re writing it as a play, and then what we’re going to do is to pick three people from the audience, hypnotize them, and turn them into the characters. Now, although obviously we are responsible for what goes in, we’re not generally responsible for what comes out, so their part of it will be reactionary and impromptu.

But the rest of the characters, you’ll understand this, but let’s explain it to the listener and aside, is when a character and a player a piece steps through the fourth wall, that’s the imaginary wall between the stage and the audience. That it and aside, is when you look directly at the audience and talk.

So apart from asides to explain what’s happening, um, hopefully in a funny way, , , it’s a plane and everything that the main characters on stage is saying has been scripted, is been rehearsed. It will happen exactly the same tomorrow. So although those three characters are included, they’re actually ipro you actors who volunteered to come outta the audience and to enhance and help them get into the role very, very quickly, and to enhance their natural acting capabilities.

We’re gonna bang them under and tell to be. That’s never been done before. And if we can meld the two arts together, what we’re hoping for sincerely and deeply is hoping that, you know, we’re looking at the art of Stateism in an entirely different way from just. Putting people in situations, uh, ridicule.

Now I’m using the word ridicule in, in, in an entirely different way from the way that Mosty therapist use. Oh, you’re ridiculing those people. Now we’re not putting them on a power and saying, Look how stupid this person needs. Look at the clothes are wearing. Look, we’re not ridiculing, but what every stage of hidden is do is.

So it brings people up into stage and puts them into ridiculous situations to see how they. Yeah, I’d agree. I had a moment with a client recently that was kind of a hobbyist hypnotist that pointed out something that I hadn’t really thought of in that format before that. He goes, I really like this category of building conviction and hypnosis through hypnotic phenomenon.

He goes, But it disturbs me how everything or most everything filters through. Try to do this and you cannot. And in the stage environment, you’re now in this quote, sticky situation. Now react to it. So yeah, I, I hear you on that word ridicule. While it may not be the expectation of ridicule that most of us would bring to it, we’re not putting people for the most part into this.

You’re this amazing scenario. We’re putting them into a awkward scenario, and it’s the humor that’s coming out of how they respond to it. Absolutely. So how do we build better empowerment? And I can see that this experiment with putting in the context of a play where people are being showcased of here’s what they can now accomplish, what we’re hoping for is that.

I mean, seriously, we’re gonna get a situation over five nights in Edinburgh. We’re gonna get a situation where somebody isn’t very good. So then we’ve got to, no matter how size they are, so then we’ve gotta decide what to do in that situation. But Edinburg, the fact that we’ve applied for an Arts Council grant, if we get that, and we’ll know in a few weeks time, if we get the Arts Council grant for this piece, it will be the first stage hypnosis.

Show of any kind whatsoever at all to get an arts council sanction that this is art. Yeah, that’s fantastic. And for me that’s mega. Yes. Because I’ve always said, you know, it’s an art and I do resent, I’m quite open about this. I do resent a hypnotherapist who’s learned to do hyp analysis, who’s learned to stick somebody’s hand to the table and then goes out and starts doing stage.

I resent the fact that they’ve done no apprenticeship in how to develop a show, how to perform a show. You know, this happens to me all the time, Jason. I’ll say I did this on a friends group on Facebook. I won’t mention the group, you’re probably aware of it. But I said, Right, I’ll put up one of my routines.

And I said, There’s two reasons for me doing this one particular thing. Why did I do it? And everybody said the usual stuff out to test them, how to do this, how to do that. And it was all. The hypnotist point of view and what you wanted from the people on stage. Not one of them said to give the audience something interesting to watch.

Mm-hmm. , because actually putting in a suggestion’s, boring and not one of them mentioned the audience. Now that’s because. You don’t have these in America, but you probably with some of the country and western style bars, you, you have something similar. But in the the United Kingdom back in the eighties and nineties, we had a phenomenon called Working men’s Clubs.

They were either called working men’s clubs, they were called social clubs, or they were welfare clubs. The ones that I used to work masterly because I came from coal mining, 10 was mines welfare clubs. So you were going there on a Friday and a Saturday night, you’d be in front of a couple of hundred people, half of which had been in holding the ground for seven for six days before they saw you.

And they’re all sitting there with the arms fold in saying, God, they entertain us, make us laugh. And that teaches you very, very quickly the art of presenting stage HSIs is not to prove hypnosis, not to have a great time for yourself, although hopefully that’s a benefit for it. You know, not to give the people who, just, the people who come up on stage a while over time, but it’s to entertain an audience that’s actually paid to be in there.

And I think it’s such an insult to the people who are paid to come in, that they’re not the first consider. . Well, to go back to, you mentioned Anthony Cools. You mentioned Kid Webster, uh, Terry Stokes that, that they’re getting the laughter from the audience in the suggestion before the volunteers, before the people on stage are actually doing the thing, and the program has to work without the volunteers as well, in my opinion.

Oh, I think so. I’ll think so. Yeah. Do you know, here’s a good tip, if any stage hypnotist or maybe wanna be stage hypnotist, Aren’t there Always judge a stage hypnotist. This way. If I’m talking to somebody in a, in a cafe or report or something like that, and I’ll say, Right, go on. They tell me your best routine.

And if they say, Oh, it’s the carrots, well you, well just getting carrots to smoke and, and they smoke carrots, you know, , Actually, that’s my routine. I wrote, And it’s been copied dozens of times and I hate every single person that’s ever done. They all burning hell. How do you really feel? ? You can’t stop them.

But that doesn’t mean you’ve gotta like them, but I did. This way, if you are talking about your routine, doesn’t make me laugh. Because you created the picture inside my head so well I can see it happening. Then when you do it on stage, you are going to get a mixed reaction because you can’t create the picture inside the hypnotized people’s heads of what’s gonna happen.

And I almost judge comedy stage hypnotist by you make me laugh. Can you tell me now? I’m quite happy from this interview because I haven’t heard you cough once and I’ve heard you laugh several times. I’ve got a mute button for the cough, laughing. The laughing is genuine. , but, But can you understand me from an entertainment point of view?

If you can’t make the interviewer smile and giggle a little bit, then how are you going to make an audience do that, where you make an audience do that by putting them in an in the embarrassment after situation, which is what I see a lot of, especially in the American phenomena of high school hy. Now, we don’t get that in the United Kingdom because it’s actually illegal to him.

Mm-hmm. as anybody publicly under the age of 18, which I think is right because I think. kids are way too susceptible to hyp sis, and you can screw somebody’s head up. I’m not bothered what anybody says. Of course you can. If you can get rid of a phobia, you must be able to give somebody a phobia, you know, and set one off.

And we don’t know. I don’t think it’s happened, but it’s a potential. It’s a possibility. Yeah. Yeah. And in the high school phenomena, what you get is. You get the audience having a while of a time and laughing their heads off because they’re just looking at their friends being stupid, you know? Now, to be quite frank, I know, although I’ve never done a high school audience, I’ve done a Vegas audience, but I’ve never done a high school audience.

But I know that I could come out there, go into a high school audience, hypnotized nobody, and they would walk out after an hour drenched because they’d been laughing. So, Because all I’ve got to do is get their friends on stage and make them look foolish. I am actually gotta do a hypnosis. I am gotta do a show.

Do you understand me? Yeah. I’d say that the programs that I do over here for high schools, the phrase that I comfortably stand behind is that the, the pre-talk structure, what I would say on stage, that’s really more for the people who are paying for the program, that’s for the administration, that’s for the parents, that’s for the faculty.

If you can’t work with that age range, you are doing something so horribly wrong. Yeah. and I, I can think to an experience, I forget who it was and I’d hold back the name anyway cuz it’s criticism, but it’s a video that I saw that was someone doing a stage induction for a group of high schoolers and it was doing the moment of, you know, the last phase of a Dave Alman induction, the losing of the numbers.

And he was doing it one by one. Down the row of people to verify they were hypnotized. Meanwhile, 10 minutes later, the audience is the phrase is the audience is trancing out, not the way that you want them to. So the program has to be entertaining. The program also has to be appropriate. It has to be a match for those people who are in front of.

I once did, um, a charity, a fundraiser, and the agent rang me up and he said, It’s very small group, John. That’s why I rang you, um, . He said, It’s very small group, 25 people, and we’re in a restaurant. There’s no performing area. I said, Right, no problem. So we went in there and from standing in the corner of the room, I hypnotized everybody that I got.

I’ve got a bed, I’ve got. Five or six people and they were all on different tables, and I just hypnotized them at the table and, and did it all with it, with no contact with them whatsoever at all. And my approach, that was certainly way, way different. What I would’ve done saying an army base or a university.

And the reason for my approach being so different is that every single person in there was multimillionaire and the table prices were 15,000 pounds. That was for a fundraiser won going to what it was for, but it was, it was something stand up. You know, it wasn’t, but there was a certain expectation that what they were gonna get was gonna be funny.

It was gonna be classy. It would be near the knuckle, but it wouldn’t be the. . And the thing that gets me a lot with Static S training is the assumption that one show will do, and you can just do the same show everywhere you can. But one style won’t do, one style of presentation won’t do. And it is sort of like, as we’ve been scripting, the mechanical me is there’s a lot of things that we’ve had to take into account now.

Number one is that our lead actor, Paul Henshaw, has got cerebral palsy. And uses an electric wheelchair. So the first thing we have to do is plan on him not actually running over anybody’s. because that could be quite painful. And knowing Paul, he would do that to see what reaction he gets . But, you know, Paul’s a trained thespian and, um, being ansm, you know what those are like mm-hmm.

So everything’s gotta be done right. And the script’s gotta be right and the timing’s gotta be right and everything like that, you know? And then there’s me who’s very much an ad li and then there’s um, Anna who is. Probably more script than Paul in that the Scriptor has gotta say what she’s gotta say in the right way, like most esp.

But then again, the audience expectation is going to be different because they’re coming along to see a play with hypnotized people in it, rather than to see hypnotized people. Playing. Well, it’s a similar formula to what we’ve already talked about, that the, the state, the stage hypnosis show still has to work as a show, and the play still has to work as a play.

That also now happens to have the hypnosis element. Don’t you find that a lot? The time the word show is misinterpreted. I’m show business. Like I said, I learned my trading and working men in the working men’s club and the comedy circuits. In the old days when, when comedy was funny and was, wasn’t all political like Disney, but the word show biz, you know, and, and the idea of show business was entertaining.

Something that you wouldn’t get anywhere else, you know? And what I see now with the street tip sis and the street magic and the street, stuff like that. And I know I’m terribly old fashioned, and I’m, I’m terribly old. I’m in my sixth decade, you know, I’m looking at it. But what’s happening in the business is we are getting unremarkable and unremarkable.

People not doing a show, they’re just doing a demo. And they’re doing a demo with a word that I’ve always hated. It comes from for built, and that’s skit. And skit. Sounds a little bit too close to what I see. A lot of , , if you know what I mean. Why? Imagine you mention back to someone like Darren Brown, who also is employing magic and mentalism.

It’s the difference between the technician and the artist. Absolutely. The technician is just demonstrating the skill. If it’s the card magician, here’s this amazing piece of slide of hand, which you could just kind of sit back and like a machine go, Okay, that machine works really well, as opposed to, Oh wait, there’s supposed to be presenting magic.

It’s supposed to come across as if a magical experience. , and you’re right, there’s been a trend away from that. I think as well. One thing that the internet has opened up that we never had before, I mean when I started as stage hypnotist in this country, in the whole of the United Kingdom, but remember that there was probably then only about 47 million of us, you know, about population of Texas, something like that.

But there might have been a dozen stage hypnotists and only six or seven of those were actually full. But what the internet has done sadly, I think has opened. He took now to everybody that can do hypnosis is doing hypnosis and is showing people that they’re doing hypnosis. I mean, you know now. So grace, because from a professional point of view, right?

It makes me smile because I know I can do. And a lot of people think, Oh, you are an arrogant pastor. No, I’m just confident. There’s a big difference. I always say the confident person will tell you how good they are. An arrogant person tells you how bad you are and , you can look at me from that point of view.

But the other point of view is that. As we know, expectation is, is hugely important in hyp, certainly in stage hypnosis. And I think what’s happened over the last decade or so is that the expectation has actually dropped in as much as that’s why audience numbers dropped, you know? And, and please the number of Americans that were saying to me, Oh, I went out, there was 3000 kids in this hall.

Yeah. Kids are in the school. 3000 big deal. If you’d just said to me there was 10,000 people in the hall and there’s only 2000 kids in the school, I’ve been impressed, but Don try and impressed me with all the kids wanting to come to something that’s on their school. Of course they did. , but they were all there for the last football match.

you know, they were all there for the last hockey game. They were all there for the last basket. Apart from people who weren’t interested, that don’t count because there’s only six of belts and it’s that lowering of expectation. The same thing’s happened in magic. In magic. I know for a fact the USA is exactly the same as Britain.

Is that only one in 20 magicians have ever done a show for? Of any kind whatsoever at all, even part-time. A much, much smaller degree are actually earning living from it. But what’s happened with the internet is that it’s opened up people who don’t earn a living from it to demonstrate the level of their capabilities.

And I dunno about you, but I find it rather hard. A professional to watch these people. And when they come on the groups and everything, you know, and they’re saying, Oh, aren’t I wonderful? I’ve just done this. I’m going, It’s not very good. Well, I tell you what, Jonathan, I promised you. 30 minutes, we’ve gone for an hour.

what would be the, uh, the partying advice for these people? Is it as a next step to improve themselves? Not to put you on the spot, , I see so many people who shouldn’t be doing it, doing it, but. The people that come online course, they say, Right, okay, what have I got to do to get there? And the first thing you’ve gotta do is work bloody hard.

It doesn’t drop in your lap. Yes. And you need, look, that’s location, understanding, contacts and knowledge. You’ve gotta be in the right place at the right time. You’ve gotta understand why you are there and have a plan while you’re there. You’ve got to know the right people. Who can do things that you can’t, who can put you in places you can’t possibly get yourself.

And then you’ve gotta have the knowledge, You’ve gotta have what they want, and you’ve gotta be able to do it really, really well and stop thinking that, hey, this is just fun. It’s a career. It’s hard work as well, and you should treat it as your job. Not just as something you do on the side and then you get better, then you hone your skills, then you’re thinking about it all the time.

You know, I’ve just come from rejigging websites and looking at copy on websites and that before talking to you. And when I go from this, I’m going back to writing a script and I say to sustain . So coming into the business all the time, showing me a script and or I haven’t. . Right. Okay. So you’re just gonna do some routines?

Oh yeah, I’ll do some skits. Notice I call them routines because I think they should run one off the other. So what I would say, if you really, really wanna improve, and if you wanna help us who are in the business, improve the business so that the art which is in danger becoming doesn’t just become something that you only see in high.

And people saying, Why don’t you see much, much hypnosis on the television? And that’s because television is up close and it doesn’t tell any lies. So if you’re gonna be on television, you’ve gotta be somebody like Darren Brown, and that requires a lot of hard work, dedication, and skill. So if you’re prepared to put those in and you chase people enough, somebody might decide to mentor you.

But if they turn around and say to you, Look, okay, I’ll mentor you for a year, gimme 20. pay them. It’s worth every penny because if they’re that confident that they’re gonna give you that amount of value, you’re gonna get that amount of value. Absolutely. Well, I tell you what I’ll put over on work smart hypnosis.com.

I’ve taken note of several links here, the video promoting this project that you’re working on, the Indiegogo page, the tickets page, as well as your own personal website as well. I’d love to point out, this is the first time you and I have ever chatted. Yes. Yeah. This has been phenomenal. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast.

And work smart hypnosis.com. Hey, it’s Jason Lynette with one last quick thing. We can work on improving your skills in hypnosis, uh, in terms of how to get change, how to get your volunteers animated. If it’s a stage production, yet, one of the most overlooked components of the hypnosis business is simp.

That itself, the hypnosis business, and I’ve got a free resource that I’m excited to share with you. I call it the 10 Day Hypnosis Business Challenge. It’s 10 days of emails, 10 days of videos, 10 days of specific action steps, all designed to help you to grow your. Business head over to work smart hypnosis.com and click the button on the side for the 10 day Hypnosis Business challenge.

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