Resistance Is A Waste Of Time

When you volunteer to come onto the stage, the important thing is to relax and to follow the hypnotist’s instructions. There’s little point in volunteering if you treat hypnosis as a contest of wills. The hypnotist is unlikely to overcome your resistance, and won’t even try because dealing with resistance makes for a boring show.

After one show in early 2006, I spoke to a woman who had volunteered, but was soon dismissed from the stage. She told me that at the beginning of the hypnotic induction she had gone along with my suggestions and felt herself slipping easily into a trance. When she noticed this she decided that she was making it too easy for me by co-operating (!?!) and so she started resisting my instructions. She quickly found herself coming out of the trance she had entered and was wide awake at the end of the induction. She had trouble grasping that hypnosis was not something that I would do to her, but something we would do together. Co-operation isn’t optional. Co-operation is how you get hypnotised. When she was co-operating everything was fine, but funnily enough, when she resisted it didn’t work. Even funnier to me was that she was surprised by the outcome. I have no idea where she got the notion that this was meant to be hard. It is in fact very easy.

Whether learning to drive a car, learning to ride a horse, or learning to go into a trance, the point is to follow your teacher or guide.

Many years ago I attended a seminar call Money and You, which was presented by a company run by Robert Kyosaki (author of ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’). After the seminar I joined the team of volunteers who rang up referrals and invited them to the seminar. This was telesales by a team of volunteers.

I assisted with enrolments for three seminars, and each time I topped the sales charts by enrolling more people in that seminar than any other volunteer. Robert’s promoters ran sales skills training and they give instructions on how to talk with people and how to enroll them, etc. I remember being asked often how come I was so successful at selling. Most people just didn’t believe my answer. I told them that I went to the sales training seminars, and did exactly what they told me to do. It was really that simple, yet so many people thought there had to be more to it, or that it had to be hard.

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