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Do You Know How Your Beliefs Can Have a Hypnotic Effect on Others?
By Adam Eason
I would like to tell you about a lady that I worked with a few years ago. She was written about in Woman's Own magazine here in the UK and I got an enormous amount of PR as a result. However, she came to see me to reduce her weight: She was 22 stone.
She was so large that I had to work with her in the reception area of my clinic on the sofa as she was too big to sit in the reclining chair I had in my consulting room.
She believed that she was very ugly. She felt ugly. When she was very young, her father used to come home from work drunk and tie her up in the garage and beat her. Her mother was an alcoholic who lived in fear of her husband and never did anything to protect or assist her daughter.
The weight she began putting on served as a layer of protection to protect the regularly beaten little girl. Over the years, that little girl learned to dislike men and put on weight to repel them. She also dressed unconventionally. Her mother eventually died of alcohol related illness and at the age of 17 the young lady left home and got a job. She did many menial jobs where people were not always very nice to her and made her feel less attractive.
She truly believed she was ugly.
When friends told her that she was not, she disagreed. Because she believed she was ugly. Her beliefs were ingrained and therefore people simply suggesting that she was not ugly just gave her the chance to further reinforce her own belief and disagree with them. Her friend's thoughts did not match her beliefs.
When she came to see me, there was no way I was going to disagree with her. Not on your Nelly. When I took clients notes and got her information, she told me that she believed she was ugly and she believed this with a lot of conviction.
So.... I agreed with her. I told her I agreed and as a result, she trusted me more, because I said what she already believed - that she was ugly.
You know what? She had been to over 12 different therapists of some kind before seeing me. It got written in Woman's Own magazine and I got lots of clients as a result of that fact. However, I just did one simple thing to get her on my side... I agreed with her beliefs.
You see, opinions and beliefs are a person's reality. I wrote in my first book "what you believe to be the truth is the truth for you". People will run bare naked screaming at the enemy to protect their beliefs and what they believe to be the truth. Therefore, you can see and understand how potentially dangerous it is to dispute someone else beliefs, can't you?
I want to mention pacing. The easiest way to understand pacing is from my own marathon running experiences. At the London marathon, you can meet up with specialist runners who will run the marathon at a certain pace to ensure that you finish the marathon in a certain time. When I am running in a marathon, often a faster runner may come from behind me and run alongside me and slow themselves down. We end up running in similar stride patterns, breathing at a similar pace and running together.
The faster runner is now pacing me, the slower runner.
I have talked in the past about matching physiology to gain rapport and matching language to gain rapport with someone. This is pacing too. It is like you are saying "I am like you are" at the unconscious level of communication.
When you pace someone's beliefs, you are demonstrating that you understand them and you are being perceived as truthful. Then, in a therapeutic environment, I am in a position to lead those beliefs elsewhere for the benefit of that person. In the case of this particular lady, I was able to help her to then gain more self-assuredness and self-esteem and begin an effective weight management programme and so on.
In all of our communications, how we respond to the beliefs of others is going to enhance our communication greatly or damage it irreparably. I have been talking about sales environments a lot in recent weeks and pacing beliefs is exceptionally important when wanting to sell a product, service, an idea or a message too.
Now, let me get something straight here; you do not have to agree with every idea and belief of everyone you communicate with. I recommend that stop before saying anything you do not believe in yourself, you do not have to be dishonest for this to be effective, you may well even seem rather fake, all I am suggesting is that you pace the belief.
So how do you handle communications with strong beliefs that you do not agree with? Good question. Follow these simple steps:
Step 1: Start by simply feeding back what the other person has said. You show them that you have listened and noticed. If that person said to me "The last therapist I met didn't fully explain to me what was going on all the time and I often got confused." I may well pace back "You believe that the last therapist treated you in a way that was hard to understand."
(It is such a simple process that Step 1 is the first and final step in this process!)
Notice that I am not saying that the last therapist was hard to understand, just that they believed that was the case. I prefix my statement with "you believe that..."
If a sales prospect says to a salesperson "I can get a much better deal at another place." The salesperson can pace that opinion, that belief by saying "you think that you can get a better deal from someone else." The prospect is then going to nod and agree and they have taken what could have been confrontational over the price and they have turned it into a small agreement. Clever eh?
So many of us in our modern societies seem to be more interested in talking than in listening, and this turns people off often. A common complaint in marriage is "my spouse does not listen to me." A common complaint employees have is "The management do not listen to me." A common complaint in children is "My parents don't listen to me." Many people say the same about therapists, consultants and salespeople "they just don't listen to my needs and wants!"
When you pace opinions and beliefs, you communicate that you are hearing and listening attentively to the person that you are communicating with. You are going to resonate far better with them as a result. I remember hearing Zig Ziglar say "People don't care what you know until they know that you care."
We resonate well with people if we think they care and when you pace someone's beliefs, they know you care about them. You are distinguishing yourself from everyone else they communicate with too, those that are more interested in talking than listening and recognising. It demonstrates empathy and understanding for the person that you are communicating with and importantly you get some agreement from that person in return.
There are very few things more valuable in communication than agreement, as I have wanted to illustrate this week and last week, pacing peoples beliefs and opinions achieves this. See how when you pace peoples beliefs and opinions, the difference in the way that they respond to you.
About the Author
Adam is a best selling author, consultant and speaker please visit his website for a vast range of personal development resources and to receive your free, instantly downloadable hypnosis session and amazing ebook: http://www.adam-eason.com Thanks.
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