Steve Roh’s Hypnosis Blog

Hi there. If you’ve done a Google search for “hypnosis”, you’ve probably seen all sorts of ads displayed that basically claim that you can “Learn How To Hypnotize and Control People, Buy this DVD and Gain Power Over Others!”

Well, that’s really dumb. It occurred to me that this is the modern equivalent of those old “X-RAY Glasses” ads in the back of comic books, that promised you the magical ability to see through solid objects like flesh (”Wow, look! I can see the bones in my hand!”) or people’s clothes. Considering that the audience for those ads consisted of teenage boys, it’s pretty smart marketing. And it might even be a similar audience for those “hypnotize and control other people” ads.

Now, can learning hypnotic language patterns make you more effective in being able to persuade people? Probably. But really, that’s just about learning how to be a better communicator and understanding what motivates individuals. It’s not any more “mind control” than a well-crafted Super Bowl advertisement, or that late-night infomercial that persuades you to pick up the phone and place an order for that wonderful time-saving kitchen accessory!

But anyway, the problem is that this kind of hype about hypnosis can cause people to think that a hypnotist is doing something *TO* them. But the main thing that a hypnotist is doing is walking a person through a process where they can become very focused, and then helping that person vividly use their imagination to create scenarios that can be useful in changing thoughts, feelings and habits. A good hypnotist is able to find out which buttons to push for each individual, in order to best guide them towards whatever positive change they want to make in their life, while they are in a mentally focused and receptive state.

So, the goal of hypnosis is to help *you* gain more control over your own mind, not for you to turn over control to another person. Anyway, it’s unhealthy and disempowering to want to hand over control and responsibility over any part of your life to someone else. If you are hoping that a hypnotist will “fix you” without your needing to make any effort, that’s like hoping that your problems will be solved depending on which politician wins an election.

That sounds a lot less dramatic than the hypnotist having special mind powers that control your behavior, but I assume that you’re mature enough to handle the truth. Otherwise, I have a box full of super-secret X-RAY Glasses that I can sell you!

If you’re like many Americans you spend a lot of time in your car, and much of that time isn’t very relaxing. This interesting website from an engineer has some thought-provoking ideas about the nature of traffic jams, and how they relate to human behavior– http://trafficwaves.org. It also points to some ways to relieve some of those jams and also relieve stress at the same time!

From the site:

It’s always a good idea to drive without changing speed and without competing with other drivers for bits of headway. I’d always assumed that the reasons were philosophical rather than practical (i.e. try to be a calm, nice person.) But my above experience shows differently. A single solitary driver, if they stop “competing” and instead adopt some unusual driving habits, can actually wipe away some of the frustrating traffic patterns on a highway. That “nice” noncompetitive driver can erase traffic waves. I suspect that the opposite is also true: normal competitive behavior CREATES the traffic waves.

Suppose we push constantly ahead, change lanes to grab a bit of headway, and always eliminate our forward space in order to prevent other drivers from “cutting us off”. If tiny traffic waves appear, we will rush ahead and then brake hard, leaving larger waves behind us. Repeated action causes the waves to grow huge. Ironic that the angry people who push ahead as fast as possible might unwittingly participate in “amplifying” the very conditions that they hate so much. The solution seems obvious: drivers with a smooth “calm” style will tend to damp out the waves and produce a uniform flow… and the few drivers who intentionally drive at a single constant speed will wipe out the waves entirely.

Note: this is not about going 35 m.p.h. on the expressway… that would just be annoying and dangerous. It’s about purposefully leaving a large buffer space in front of you while maintaining a steady speed. This is a bit counter-intuitive because it’s natural to want to close up the gap ahead of you. Often, there is a desire to prevent another “competing” driver from stealing that precious gap ahead of you, so you try to tighten it up. But from what this engineer is describing, that is like shooting yourself in the foot.

I experimented with this myself on the Schuylkill Expressway a few times, not to the extent that this engineer took it- he really gets into it, it’s kind of scary. It was very strange: whenever I tried this my trips were not only much more relaxing, but it *seemed* that I made better time than I would have otherwise (hard to judge without a “control” trip to compare to). You may want to give it a try yourself, at the very least it can add an interesting element to your commute!

The Frequently Asked Questions section of this engineer’s site answers some of the obvious questions about these tactics. For example: This is all fine in theory, but it really doesn’t work, since people just go around you when you try to open up a space.

The engineer’s response:

I think the real issue here is emotions, and “losing” versus “winning.” If I let anyone jump into my big empty space, why, that makes me an inferior LOSER! That person is now ahead of me in the “race,” and they’ve stolen my glory. They’ll arrive at the finish ten feet before I do! So I must never open up a space ahead of me, that just makes me vulnerable. Right?

But if you think about it, you’ll see that there is no race. There is no finish line, so any small gains are wasted. I could spend my entire commute trying to get two car lengths farther than everyone else, but it would be stupid and pointless. We can beat any driver on the road no matter what their skill level… by simply starting our trip a few minutes earlier! This “race” is a bunch of stupid nonsense created by insecure immature drivers. Screw ‘em. Instead do the opposite: look for ways which you personally can improve the traffic flow. Let people merge ahead of you whenever they need to, and you become the more professional driver.

It’s funny that an engineer recognizes that the real cause of (and solution for) this type of problem is found within people’s emotions. I think this topic is also a good example of how your attitude determines, to a large extent, how your daily life unfolds — if you go through life thinking that people are “out to get you”, that life is endless struggle and hardship, and that you’re surrounded by hostility, well, guess what? Life is like a mirror, and you tend to get what you expect, good or bad.

PS. Hypnosis can help a person strengthen their ego and gain self-confidence, so that they don’t feel a need to engage in silly, counterproductive behavior that is born out of insecurity.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — Steve Roh, owner of Center City Hypnosis, is pleased to announce his participation as a Contributing Author in “The Ultimate Success Secret” by Dan S. Kennedy and Michael M. Capuzzi.

Steve was invited to participate in this exciting and meaningful book developed to inspire and educate people to pursue their dreams. His path to entrepreneurial success and nuggets of wisdom are shared in his chapter entitled “Reinventing Yourself”.

“I am honored to participate in this book with other successful Philadelphia entrepreneurs along with Dan Kennedy and Mike Capuzzi. Dan Kennedy is one of the country’s highest-paid business consultants, and his marketing guru status is well-deserved,” says Steve.

“The Ultimate Success Secret” is not an academic book on business success. It is a collection of smart, proven strategies from a number of dedicated entrepreneurs. Inside these pages you will learn:

• How to Take Action & Turn Failure Into Success

• The ONLY Reliable Path To Maximum Success

• How to Double your Paycheck

• THE Way to Overcome Worry

• Your Most Undervalued Asset

• Power Steps to MASSIVE Achievement

• And much, much more

Steve says, “It’s a privilege to share my experiences in rapidly building a successful hypnosis practice, but more importantly in achieving a level of personal freedom and control that continues to expand.”

From the book:
“Steve Roh is a serious person of action and implementation. In a short period of time, Steve has reinvented the marketing of his practice and positioned himself a ‘go to’ resource for business professionals looking to shed unproductive habits and beliefs and gain a unique competitive mental advantage.”

Click here to learn more and to get your copy of this inspiring book!

As Pennsylvania’s leading 5-PATH® Certified Hypnotist, Steve has helped hundreds of people take control of their lives. He has been featured on the Comcast Network and KYW 1060 Newsradio as an expert on hypnosis. He is also the editor of “Real World Hypnosis: Insider Tips from Leading Hypnotists”, available at leading online booksellers.

Google Scholar is a neat tool. Google describes it as:

…a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.

It didn’t occur to me until just now that Google Scholar could be an interesting source of information about hypnosis: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hypnosis&hl=en

These articles can be hard to understand unless you have a scientific or academic background, but fortunately most of them have abstracts that summarize the research in semi-plain English. It’s a good resource because it’s legitimate, peer-reviewed research and not just “stuff someone made up that sounds vaguely scientific”… you may have noticed that the latter is unfortunately common on the internet when it comes to subject of hypnosis.

PS. I don’t waste a lot of time trying to convince people that hypnosis is “real”. If, for some reason, a person refuses to believe that hypnosis exists in spite of the research done at places like Stanford University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, the Mayo Clinic, Mt. Sinai Medical Center, etc. etc., then there’s little chance that I can convince them!

No, that doesn’t mean 100 push-ups over the course of six weeks… that means 100 consecutive push-ups!

One Hundred Pushups is an interesting site that has the single-minded goal of training you to be able to do 100 push-ups by following a simple training program. I accept this challenge!

Like most modern humans, I need to work on building up my physical strength, anyway. Sometimes I wonder how I’d be able to handle myself if I ever ended up in prison. At the very least, it’d be nice to be able to change a 5-gallon water jug without struggling. Being prepared for these kinds of scenarios is part of prudent risk mitigation.

Plus, this is going to be an interesting exercise in self-discipline; this program requires only 30 minutes per week. As a hypnotist who helps people build mental strength to achieve their goals, I expect success. If I can’t manage to do this for myself, then I deserve a kick in the butt!

My starting point: I can do 20 push-ups at once before collapsing into a heap. Updates to follow…

Give it a try yourself, and feel free to post updates or comments below.

UPDATE:

Well, I haven’t been able to get to 100 Pushups at once yet… the most I can do so far is a little over 80. Here is a video of my latest attempt:

Now, I know what you are going to say: “Those are the wimpiest pushups ever!” I was going to blame it on the camera angle, but yes you would be right — these pushups won’t qualify me to join the Navy SEALs anytime soon. I didn’t realize until I video-recorded myself that these pushups were so lame, they are nowhere near good-form (where the chest touches the ground each time). Believe it or not, I’m not in the habit of videotaping myself doing pushups, and it sure felt like they were real pushups while doing them.

But here’s the thing: if I was only able to do 20 of these pushups before, and with just a bit of effort am now able to do over 80, well, I think that is still something interesting. For one thing it means I’ve been operating at much less than 1/4 of my physical capacity, which is kind of sad.

Anyway, I look forward to continuing to work towards getting to 100 at once. Maybe then I will concentrate on improving my form. ^_^

Got one of those “I’m very strong-minded; maybe some people can be hypnotized but I doubt it would work on me” emails recently. The implication that only weak-minded people can be hypnotized indicates a misunderstanding of what hypnosis is.

All hypnosis is self-hypnosis. The hypnotist is just coaching you as you put yourself into a mentally relaxed but highly focused state of awareness. Since hypnosis involves strengthening a person’s ability to control their own mind, being ’strong-minded’ is good.

Sometimes hypnotized people can go through things like childbirth, dental work, and even surgery, using their mental abilities to ignore pain and discomfort; I would not call that sort of person weak-willed. Golf Digest magazine says Tiger Woods underwent extensive mental training including hypnosis– would anyone call him weak-minded?

Since the hypnotist operator is really just a coach or a guide helping the client enter hypnosis, a useful way to think about “hypnotizability” would be thinking in terms of “coachability”.

If a person is resistant to following a coach’s simple instructions (such as ‘please count slowly’), this can make things harder. This can happen if a person feels a need to demonstrate that they have the ability to resist the instructions, which of course they can choose to do at any time. But that attitude is not really a sign of having a strong mind, if you think about it…

Richard Feynman, the famous Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist, was very hypnotizable, to the extent that he could be burned by matches without feeling pain. Feynman wrote that he found hypnosis to be “a very interesting experience”. Encyclopedia Britannica says he is “widely regarded as the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-World War II era.”

So if some smarty-pants implies that only weak-minded simpletons can be hypnotized, consider Feynman, who was not only an undisputed genius, but a true maverick and fearless free-thinker. And can you think of anyone mentally tougher than Tiger Woods?

PS. It’s great to work with athletes and performers, because they are used to working with coaches, trainers and instructors in order to gain a competitive edge.

One of the ways that hypnotists can help people is by helping them get a better perspective on things, so that they can see the bigger picture.

For example, if you think about it, any human who happens to live in the US in the 21st century has pretty much won the lottery of being in the right place at the right time. Relatively speaking, in comparison with the entire global population, we are the Paris Hiltons of the world in terms of material wealth and comfort.

With that in mind, I’m pleased to announce a trial run of a new referral bonus program that could help impact people’s lives around the world.

You may have heard about Kiva.org or micro-financing in general. Kiva allows individuals to make $25 loans to low-income entrepreneurs in the developing world (microfinance). By doing so, individuals like you provide affordable working capital for the poor (money to buy a sewing machine, livestock, etc.), empowering them to earn their way out of poverty.

Instead of just giving someone a handout, I really like the idea of making zero-interest loans to people who are striving to build sustainable growing businesses. Helping to increase global prosperity is a good long-term investment!

Here is the deal: if you’re an existing client, for every person you send to us who becomes a new client, we’ll send YOU a $25 Kiva gift certificate. Then, you can use that gift certificate to choose a business to finance. $25 goes a long way in some parts of the world!

Please make sure that the person you refer mentions that YOU sent them.

I’m going to run this new referral program as a trial and see what response is like. I hope people take advantage of this opportunity. If you’ve studied the nature of wealth and habits of successful people, you may have noticed that one of the fundamental principles of generating wealth is spreading some of it around, keeping it in circulation by giving freely. Sounds like a paradox but it seems to work!

Click on this flyer to learn more about Kiva. They have received great press in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to NPR to BusinessWeek.

Here is an example of a Kiva entrepreneur whose life you can change:

YOU’VE INVESTED IN YOURSELF…
NOW LET’S INVEST IN THE WORLD!

I’m pleased to accept the honor of being named Vice President of the Greater Philadelphia Chapter of the National Guild of Hypnotists. It’s going to be great having the opportunity to help the profession grow.

Here’s some information about the NGH:

The National Guild of Hypnotists, Inc. is a not-for-profit, educational corporation in the State of New Hampshire. Founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 1951 the Guild is a professional organization comprised of dedicated individuals committed to advancing the field of hypnotism…

Established in 1951, the Guild has grown to over 12,000 members, with over 100 local chapters in 65 different countries. A growing percentage of our members have academic credentials in other fields, including medicine, psychology, counseling and nursing.

The National Guild of Hypnotists has been acknowledged, even by other professional hypnotism groups, as the number one association in the field. We invite you to share in the prestige and recognition membership brings, by joining the nation’s premier hypnosis organization.

NGH members are required to participate in continuing education and training in order to constantly improve their skills. As you can imagine in a field involving human behavior, there is a never-ending amount of new things to learn.

I’m also glad to have renewed my membership and support of the National Federation of Hypnotists. The NFH is chartered as Local 104 of the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) of the AFL-CIO.

You’re probably as surprised as I was to learn that there is a union for hypnotists!

I like this quote by Marcus Aurelius, one of the greatest Roman emperors:

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

People often create troubles for themselves because at some level they identify too much with their circumstances. Or they think that other people are always judging them, as if they were the center of other people’s worlds. They take situations personally even when they can’t possibly have any deeper meaning behind them.

Imagine someone taking a nap on a Sunday afternoon. Then a car alarm goes off outside. What is the “normal” reaction? Anger, cursing, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

What purpose does that anger serve? Did the car alarm go off in order to insult and disrespect the napper?

I’m not saying that I would remain calm if a car alarm woke me up from a nice nap. On the contrary, if there happened to be a brick and an open window next to my bed…

There is a tendency within all of us to take too many things personally. I think this contributes to the very common fear of worrying about what other people think. Also things like road rage.

In that quote by Marcus Aurelius, it seems like he recognized that a lot of stuff was just out of his control, and so he didn’t “sweat it”. It’s an interesting perspective coming from someone who was probably the single most powerful human on the planet at the time.

Here are some books that I like to recommend to clients; reading these along with working through hypnosis sessions can be a great way of enhancing positive changes. Listening to the audiobook versions is even better (and easier), I think.

The Power of Now
I love Tolle’s idea that compulsive thinking about both the past and future is a disease and at the root of many problems we create for ourselves.

Think and Grow Rich
When I first read this all-time classic, I was surprised to see that it was basically about the power of the subconscious mind and using emotions and desire to shape behavior and therefore reality. It even has a section on Autosuggestion. Did you know: Bruce Lee followed the recommended steps in this book, including writing a statement to himself where he committed to his Definite Chief Aim to become the “highest paid Oriental superstar… I will achieve world fame…” We know how that turned out! There are also some extremely successful business people who give credit to this book, but c’mon, would you rather be the billionaire CEO of some company, or Bruce Lee?

The Now Habit
This is a great book that I always recommend to procrastinator clients. Terrific insights into why people procrastinate and different ways of looking at yourself in relation to productivity. This is another book that has elements of hypnosis in it, but doesn’t call it that by name. PS. Did you know that procrastination clients are the most likely to be no-shows for appointments?

Goals! - Brian Tracy
This is another book that uses hypnosis (very evident in the audiobook at least), but never actually comes out and calls it that.

Total Money Makeover
Dave Ramsey understands that personal financial success is 80% attitude and behavior (the subconscious mind), not about math or interest rates (the rational/analytical). Check out the podcast of his radio show, where people call in with nightmare stories of getting into debt. Highly motivating and frightening at the same time. I like how Ramsey gets people totally fired up and fed up with the debtor mentality that is constantly being sold to us: car leases, student loans, credit cards, debt consolidation, etc. He’s a powerful speaker; sometimes it almost seems like he is hypnotizing people so that they can’t stand the idea of being in debt.

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind
(Not to be confused with the dry but otherwise excellent “Millionaire Mind” by Thomas Stanley) This book is about the differences in self-image and self-talk between people who have a poor vs. rich mentality (regardless of raw income). When Eker talks about the programming we allow ourselves to live by, and how Thoughts–>Feelings–>Action–>Results determines our lives, I think it has a lot of relevance to the work we do together in hypnosis.