After answering Sally’s question, I’ve been receiving all kinds of questions from beginning NLP students.
Mike now wants to know what a leverage induction is.
First of all, I’ll stress that we’re moving from NLP into Hypnosis here. To me, there’s a big distinction between NLP and Hypnosis and I want to make sure you know it.
You can read the definition of NLP I’ve posted on the blog and various posts that nuance that definition. So how do I define hypnosis?
To me, hypnosis is a communication protocol you utilize to engage someone’s unconscious mind. It’s a specific way of communicating that targets your messages to the unconscious.
And that’s where leverage inductions come into play.
A leverage induction is a type of instant induction, ie inductions that alter your subject’s state usually in less than 5 seconds.
What distinguishes leverage inductions from other types of instant inductions such as pattern interrupts and so-called power inductions?
Leverage inductions generally consists of building response potential and then ramping into deeper altered states. This means that the hypnotist first takes control of the communication and begins to guide the subject with apparently inocuous instructions. Once the subject is used to obeying those commands, the hypnotist shifts gears and moves into deeper states.
As usual, reading an example will make it much easier for you to understand this.
The hypnotist might ask the subject to first start slowly lifting her arm, until her extended hand is pointing straight forward. Notice how the instruction leaves the subject in an extra-ordinary situation (how often do you lift your arm forward and keep it that way?) and distracts the filtering power of the unconscious mind.
Because of this “new” behavior, conscious guard now focuses primarily on maintaining the gesture. The hypnotist leverages this to start giving suggestions to the unconscious and move the subject into deeper states.
Here’s a great example on video.
