10 Influence Tools – The Pattern Interrupt © Nathan Thomas 2012, www.10InfluenceTools.com Hey this is Nathan Thomas and welcome back to 10InfluenceTools.com and this, the second installment of this exciting hypnosis and persuasion training program. You’re going to be learning a technique that I’ve been using for years for fantastic effect, whether doing standard hypnosis or persuasion and influence out in the real world. You’ll find this one simple tool particularly powerful. It is used by the most persuasive speakers and the most inspiring and charismatic conversationalists as an everyday piece and can be used in mere seconds to completely change any conversational dynamic and create dramatic, powerful and lasting results. It immediately opens up the door to people’s unconscious and subconscious minds, blasts past conscious resistance and critical barriers, and allows you to get in the driver’s seat, take control of an interaction and really get your message across. I’m talking, of course, about the power of the pattern interrupt. So let me tell you a little bit about how this works and give you a bunch of powerful applications that you can use this in the real world, many of which will come as a big surprise to you. So the way the pattern interrupt works is that people, as we walk through the world, we carry out certain preset patterns. Rather than having to consciously figure out every action we do from putting on our clothes, to tying our shoelaces, to walking, to climbing stairs, to driving to work, to shaking hands, to signing our name, to doing all of the things that make up our day to day life, rather than having to stop and tediously, consciously analyze and calculate and figure out every minute action, we pass it to our subconscious or our unconscious mind who does it on autopilot. It just happens automatically. We do these things without thinking about them. And I’m sure you’ve experienced this each and every day, at least of your adult life. Say you’re driving or walking to work, you may often find yourself suddenly realizing that you’ve arrived, without really being able to remember any of the journey. Or maybe – and this happens sometimes – you’re in the middle of an unconscious task, something you do all the time like tying your shoelaces, and in the middle of tying your shoelaces maybe the phone rings or someone says your name, and you look up and when you go back to tying your shoelace, you suddenly pause and freeze. You were in the middle of an unconscious pattern that got interrupted and you suddenly have to go back to the drawing board to consciously try and figure out what to do next. The power of patterns is very, very prolific and very pervasive. Patterns make up a phenomenal portion of our everyday life and patterns go beyond the menial tasks and actually play in to how we interact with and relate to the people we meet. © Nathan Thomas 2012, www.10InfluenceTools.com If you meet somebody at a party, your pattern may be to say, “Hi, how are you? What’s your name,” and so forth. And, beyond behavioral patterns, you may also have mental patterns that you go into. You may judge them and think, “Oh, they look like an intelligent or a safe or a nice or a decent person,” and you may go through a mental evaluation process. People may have subconscious patterns that they go into when they go to buy something which causes or prevents them from making or not making a purchase. They may have unconscious patterns which they get stuck in which cause them to be stuck to a problem, whether their patterns cause them to feel anxious in a certain situation or to prevent themselves from doing something in a certain situation. These patterns, these subconscious routines, these habits, become part of our everyday life. And the pieces around us constantly need to be reasonably uniform to make these patterns click. For example, if you bent down to tie your shoelace but you suddenly realized that your shoelaces were made of lead and were almost too heavy to lift up; well then this pattern would be broken. “Hang on, that’s new, that’s different. That’s something extraordinary.” You’d have to stop, you’d have to pause and you’d have to think and in that moment, when suddenly you go, “Huh? What’s going on here?” Something new has happened, you’re surprised and maybe even slightly shocked, and you’re no longer consciously in control of the situation. Your subconscious mind has come to the forefront, so if in that moment, someone in a position of authority were to take over and tell you what to do, you’d be unusually prone to respond to their suggestions and their commands. Military groups like the police and the SWAT team use this all the time when they crash down your house, well hopefully not your house, the house of a target or a suspect, and shout, “Freeze!” They are causing a shock and immediately giving a suggestion. This is a very powerful pattern and something that happens all the time. The most common hypnotic example of a pattern interrupt is the hypnotic handshake induction. Like tying your shoelaces, shaking hands, particularly for males, but also for females as well, is a deeply ingrained subconscious pattern. It’s something that we do automatically, unconsciously and without having to think about it. Interrupting that pattern causes a state of mental blankness, of mental surprise. “Huh, what’s going on here, that’s never happened before,” which the hypnotist can take advantage of. There’s a lot of mythology surrounding the pattern interrupt. A lot of people claim to have invented it or to have invented their version. © Nathan Thomas 2012, www.10InfluenceTools.com The most common version you’ll often see commonly attributed to Richard Bandler, probably accurately so, involves you reaching out to shake somebody’s hand, as they stick out their hand, you take a hold of it in your other hand, pull it up so their hand is front of their face, pump the pump, point their hand and go, “Focus on that hand.” You’ve interrupted a pattern, you’ve directed their focus and immediately they’re in that state of shock and surprise. It only lasts for a second or even less. You’ve quickly taken advantage of it and tilted it to what you wanted. When you’re pointing to their hand you can go, “Focus on the hand, notice the changing focus of your eyes as you begin to slip even deeper into a state of relaxation.” That normally works in a hypnotic context. If you’re being a hypnotist and you’re using this in a street hypnosis setting or you’re a hypnotherapist or an NLP practitioner and the person coming to see you knows that you do hypnosis, they’ve got this frame, this context, this preset of beliefs inside their mind, then that can be a very powerful hypnotic induction. The way it originally began however, does not require you to have any of this hypnotherapy stuff going on. You can be just a normal person. And it was started by Milton Erickson, who I spoke about in the first CD in this training set, when I taught you hypnotic language patterns. Now in addition to being a very gifted psychotherapist and hypnotherapist, Milton Erickson was a survivor of polio. As such, his left arm was weak and withered and he had very little control over it. So when he went to shake somebody’s hand, instead of extending his healthy arm, if he wanted to freak them out, he’d extend his withered and weak arm. And because the arm was different, he’d simply lift it with his other hand and flop it at them and this would cause a second of surprise, a pattern interrupt. People would go, “Oh, what’s going on here?” And Erickson, being a wily hypnotist, would use that moment of shock and surprise to begin a story, to begin layering in hypnotic suggestions, to begin using hypnotic language patterns, like you learned in the previous section of this training program, to cause and deepen the state of internal focus that he had created and to lead the person down a powerful and lasting trance experience. Now, that is a powerful way of doing it. The other Ericksonian handshake interrupt, which you can use if you don’t happen to have a withered arm handy, is the more subtle Ericksonian handshake interrupt. It’s when as you’re shaking somebody’s hand, you take a hold of their hand a little longer, you move your fingers onto their wrist and gradually apply a small amount of pressure. It’s unusual enough to cause somebody to go, “Hey, something new has happened. This pattern of handshake has been interrupted,” and to begin the internal focus. But it’s not unusual enough to cause alarm in somebody or to have somebody experience a state of alarm or negative reaction or negative shock. © Nathan Thomas 2012, www.10InfluenceTools.com Now, if you read the literature of what is termed “the Ericksonian handshake induction,” when you’re causing a trance state, simply a state of less conscious interference, when people’s subconscious minds come to the forefront because you’ve interrupted the subconscious pattern, they say that you have to be very precise and put just the right amount of pressure with this finger and just the right amount of pressure with that finger. I think, to be honest, that’s all bull. Do not get too hung up over the minutia. Focus simply on causing a subtle interruption of the pattern and then immediately filling that blank you have created with your hypnotic language patterns. It helps to start with your intention. So say you’re talking to somebody who is in quite an anxious and unpleasant state of mind and you want to help them come into a more relaxed and pleasant state of being. You can take their hand to shake hands with them, pause for a second holding their hand, apply a bit of pressure with your forefinger on their wrist, look them in the eye and say, “You really do feel good today, don’t you?” Just a simple embedded command and tag question, like I taught you on the previous audio. But because you’ve caused this pattern interrupt, the state of internal focus, the state of mental blankness, it’s going to be ten, twenty or a hundred times more powerful. After that you can complete the handshake as normal and go on. The suggestion will be more or less missed by the conscious mind but it will be accepted by the subconscious mind, acted upon and will create powerful transformation. It’s amazing stuff. Very powerful stuff and it’s something that you can use well. Don’t get too hung up by the minutia, use it subtly and use it powerfully and you’ll be able to create a great deal of success. So that’s the handshake induction, a powerful pattern interrupt. But, these go way beyond that as well. When I was a kid in high school, I had already been learning hypnosis for a couple of years; I started doing this stuff when I was just 14 or 15 years old. Now because I wasn’t a great student and spent far too much time learning about hypnosis and tracking down hypnotists and training with them rather than doing my lessons, I’d often show up late for school. Now you see, my high school had a policy that, if you were late, even by five minutes, any day of the week, you got an instant detention. This didn’t sit well with me of course because school started far too early, I liked to stay up late learning hypnosis and sleep in. So what I’d do is I’d show up five, ten, fifteen, even an hour late, routinely and at the end of the week the head of my year, the Dean, would sternly call me in for a detention. Now most of the students who showed up late fit into the typical pattern of the late student, they’d slouch into © Nathan Thomas 2012, www.10InfluenceTools.com the Dean’s room late, surly, they wouldn’t make eye contact, they’d be mono-syllabic and go “Oh yeah,” or “Nah,” and speak in that typical arrogant teenage monotone. They’d be rude without eye contact, they’d shrug at all questions, they’d be impolite, unengaged and, when the detention came, they’d accept it. Because I’d learned about the pattern interrupt, what I’d do was, I’d walk into the Dean’s room five minutes early, and I’d smile politely and shake their hand. I’d ask about their kids, I’d ask about a hobby I knew that they were interested in. I’d say, “Oh yeah, by the way, before you tell me what I can help you with” – I’d imply that I’d gone in there just thinking they wanted my help with something, wanting to ask me a favor or [inaudible 00:14:31] – I’d take the initiative, take the lead. “I just wanted to apologize for being late before. I’ve been really busy lately with a lot of homework, it’s been piling up. So I’ll make sure I’m better next week. By the way, what was it I can help you with?” Immediately I’d be polite, I’d be bright, I’d take control of the interaction and I’d be very pleasant. Not once in my final year of high school, despite being late probably the majority of days, did I get given a detention, simply because of this pattern interrupt. It’s a pattern interrupt with your behaviors that is incredibly powerful. So think about the types of patterns in your life that people expect you to fulfill, whether it’s in your personal life or in your work, and think about ways you can break these patterns for positive effect. Notice how often in the entertainment industry, all we’re watching is one giant series of pattern interrupts. When Lady Gaga walks on stage wearing an outrageous outfit, it is a pattern interrupt. It’s something we don’t expect to see. It breaks the pattern of the normal entertainer and leaves us open to be entertained. Entertainers break patterns all the time. It’s why they’re interesting, it’s why they’re dynamic, they’re surprising and they’re new. And it’s why we’re continually interested, continually captivated, continually open and obsessed and wanting to watch them more and more. Begin thinking of ways that you can use a pattern interrupt inside your own life, be it the way you talk, how people expect you to talk, in certain controlled situations, change that. How about the way you dress? Are you in a type of work where everybody dresses in a normal business suit? How can you change that pattern in an appropriate yet powerful way? Wear a pink tie. Wear shiny different colored shoes. Wear a new pair of jeans to work in a deliberate controlled way. Break patterns in a way which says, “I’m in control.” This sends a powerful message and breaks the normal pattern. It throws people off guard for a second and gives you time to take control of the interaction. It puts you on the front foot and other people on the back foot in a positive © Nathan Thomas 2012, www.10InfluenceTools.com way. It throws them out of the normal, hum drum, typical cycle of day to day life, and allows you to send them down a more powerful, enriching, empowering and free direction. And it does that with you personally as well. Why spend your life trapped in a bunch of boring patterns? Start breaking patterns. Start doing things your way and you’ll be surprising, you’ll be dynamic, you’ll be in control and you’ll be phenomenally persuasive. The pattern interrupt is a habit and a mindset and it’s something that needs to be practiced. Think about all aspects of your life, from how you dress, to how you talk, to what you eat, to where you go, to what you think, to the thought patterns inside your own mind, and dare to be different. Be a leader. Be independent. And as such, you will be breaking patterns wherever you go. Use this, delight in the surprise you cause, revel in the blank looks and use it to their advantage and to your advantage, to help people feel great, to help them also break out of negative patterns and to help people achieve transformation. Milton Erickson, as a therapist, often did outrageous things to break the pattern of the normal therapist. People with psychotherapeutic issues would be bounced around from therapist to therapist, all of whom would do the same boring menial device, which wouldn’t work at all, so to shake things up, to use a pattern interrupt and to show people that this guy is different, now the pattern is different, the old patterns of failure are broken, and change and transformation is actually going to happen, Milton Erickson would do outrageous things including, in one example, actually physically ripping the heater or the radiator off the wall and hurling it across the room. Be outrageous. Don’t be damaging of course, be safe and sensible, but be outrageous. Be over the top. Be crazy and brilliant. A good family member of mine who used to run a large company, in order to keep his employees alert and awake, in order to snap them out of the boring, “I’m at work,” pattern, would walk through his office buildings doing outrageous things. Once he called up the local police office and got two police sergeants to walk with him into every room of his office building that employed 300 people with very somber and serious expressions, just to keep things interesting. He’d show up to office functions, not in a business suit, but on a motorbike with a leather jacket and a biker’s helmet, this is a very serious British firm. He kept doing things to change things, to keep things different, to keep things dynamic, and to snap people out of the normal boring patterns. To put them on the front foot and allow him to keep things fresh, powerful, new and controlled free and conscious. © Nathan Thomas 2012, www.10InfluenceTools.com And this is the power of the pattern interrupt. It really does put you in the driver’s seat. Develop the attitude that these stories are instilling in you. Get out there, do something different tomorrow and break a pattern. Aim to break at least two unconscious patterns tomorrow and discover what power they will give you. This is Nathan Thomas and I’ll be seeing you again on the next installment of this training program. © Nathan Thomas 2012, www.10InfluenceTools.com