All you pro stage hypnotists out there, got a question for you. How did you get started performing on stage? I have a seasoned professional hypnotherapist who is willing to train me, so I am good in that respect, however I'm curious as to how you approached bringing it onto the stage. So that brings the question, how?

Good first step, now find someone equally qualified to teach you how to be on a stage and you will do just fine.

Short form:

Step One: Learn to Entertain. Learn to Entertain with people on stage. Improvisational Comedy is great for this. It teaches you to think on your feet, how to feed people lines and how to react to theirs. It also should teach you that you are not the ONLY star of the show.

Step Two: Learn all you can about Hypnosis. From a clinical AND show perspective. From a clinical perspective because, at some time, somebody is going to do something that is completely beyond your expectations and not a happy-making moment. You will have to know how to handle it. You will also have to know how to create and manage suggestions to minimize the possibilities of that unpleasant instance happening. You will also have to learn what things to avoid in a show to keep people from getting seriously tiked off at you as volunteers and as significant others of volunteers in the audience. A professional certification is a Good Idea and often necessary for liability insurance these days.

Step Three: Create an Act. Put together an act that is entertaining. An act that has a flow from one bit to the next, has dramatic continuity, comedic flair and cyclic humor. Add a dash of impressive visual bits and put it together and REHEARSE it, especially your opening talk, which should be THE HOOK to pull people on stage.

Step Four: Figure Out What Can Go Wrong On Stage. And that means EVERYTHING that could go wrong - from lighting problems, to birds, insects, kids running on stage during the show, bad room layouts, sound system failures, microphone cords acting like trip wires, footlights tripping people and volunteers getting blinded by the spotlights - among other things. Now work out how to keep them FROM going wrong!

Step Five: Take it to an audience and try it.

Step Six: Now that you have bombed, analyze what went wrong and fix it!

Step Seven: Repeat Steps Five and Six until you don't bomb except very occasionally.

Lee Darrow, C.H.

Lee knows the biz.

Hypnotherapy has little in common with stage hypnosis.

Stage usually requires a more authoritarian approach as you are setting the scene with the audience that you have a special ability which they will succumb to.

Stage work also requires that you be able to step into the background and allow the committee to be the entertainers.

Dave Everett

Thanks for the tips guys. Lee, that's really helpful thank you. Dave, I thought that getting the therapy background would help immensely because it's the main arena of hypnosis and then also if something goes wrong during the show, I will have a better grasp of what to do about it.

True it is tremendously helpfull, an insurance policy if you will and a great one

Yeah, useful for dealing with abreactions which may occur from time to time, and of course treating your committee with some more respect.

It's probably useful to increase your income as well, as you could see people in a theraputic sense after the show, or at least make appointments.

Another reason to show temporary suspension of phobias during the show.

Dave Everett

Dev... why only temporary? That seems like it's kinda useless. Why not not just ban the dear for good?

I say temporary because you are not in a proper theraputic setting and such phobia removal will almost certainly be temporary as you are using suggestion and not either dealing with the root cause of the phobia or substituting something posisitve in it's place.

Hmmm, that was a long sentence but I couldn't be bothered editing it

Dave Everett

Lol, I see the point, but as well, when it comes to hypnosis, the use of NLP is also suggested, well at least to me it is. With NLP you don't really need to deal with the root of the problem. You can deal with the reaction and just that. Which is the nice thing about NLP. Heck, you don't even need to know the content to work with people when using NLP which rocks.

Phobias can turn out to be caused by other processes than the element in question.

For example, someone may present claiming a phobia of spiders and they exhibit behaviour consistent with that claim.

So you do a magic wave and swish away the spider phobia only to leave the underlying cause still in place. So a new phobia gets substituted for the old one and the cycle continues.

BTW, NLP is mainly a subset of hypnosis, so there is little new that you can't discover simply by reading hypnosis literature.

Dave Everett

Deverett, while the hydrostatic theory of phobic reaction has been around for a long time, there is really very little supporting evidence in the literature for it. Once a phobic response has been depotentiated, the main concern is not a new phobia asserting itself to cover the issue of the initial sensitizing event, but the concern of the sufferer returning to the old patterns of behavior out of conditioned response.

This is why such methods as the NLP technique of the so-called "swish pattern" is so effective in the short run, but seems to have such a high rate of recidivism with phobics who have suffered long-term phobia issues.

The assertion of a new and unrelated phobia is really so rare as to be almost unreported.

Sorry to disagree, but, after a quick review of the literature, I could not really find much in the way of anything to show that it happens very often, if ever. The concept seems to be one of those concerns that Freud voiced that has persisted to this day, yet has little actuality in the clinical world.

However, I agree, the stage is not the place to be doing phobia alleviation, regardless of the reasoning behind it. The stage is a place for entertainment and phobias are, to the sufferer, something that can range from the annoying to the downright paralyzingly horrifying. And no audience wants to see someone go through something like that!

It's simply not entertaining - nor is it very much fun to experience for the sufferer, regardless of the method used for alleviation, regardless of what the NLP-types say. Been there, done that, experienced it as a phobic myself. It took longer than just one session to work out my issues, it was not fun, but it was effective in about two. But an audience watching would have probably not enjoyed or understood the process at all.

Lee Darrow, C.H.