Should you join  the KeysToTheMind Yahoo Group you will be sent the passwords for the 7 lessons below, current members reading this will recognize that the lessons are clear and valuable, but there is something that all people interested in really becoming good at hypnosis need to realize.

Do you remember when you first learned to read and write?
It is likely that you were first taught individual letters and their shapes and sounds, and then moved onto words.
In many ways learning hypnosis is a lot like that, it can be frustrating at first but soon it will all come together.
You can think of the handshake induction as just one word, one word out of the however many hundreds of thousands there are out there.
Learning this word will make you able to use it appropriately and to be able to write, read and spell it, but on it’s own it is of little use.
Fortunately though this word contains many letters, and the letters that you learn that form this word also form many other words, so you will be able to take what you learn about the handshake induction and apply it also to other areas of hypnosis.

I hope you forgive me for the metaphor above, when you begin to understand it  will become an empowering way of looking at hypnosis and hypnotic techniques, and i hope you enjoy processing it at many different levels as your hypnotic skill and confidence advance.

There are many ways of looking at hypnosis, you should be encouraged to develop your own unique perspective, but now i am going to share with you another way of viewing the hypnotic world which i believe will bring you a great deal of success and value.
Think about this; What is an induction, really?

Any hypnotic induction or hypnotic technique, be it the handshake induction, a deepener or an NLP technique, is really just an example of one way of operating, one way of stringing the many letters and phonemes in this language together to make a certain sentence. However, if we all spoke in the exact same sentences and same tone of voice all the time, conversation would not be compelling!

In order to truly be an effective communicator we must find our own way of speaking, one which others can recongize and understand, but one which is unique to us, adapted for the situation, and based on our own experiences. Real hypnosis should be the same, not merely the mechanic repition of old techniques.

When i started this blog years ago i was a lot younger than i am now, and frankly not a particularly good hypnotist. Since then i feel have learned a huge amount and progressed a lot in my understanding of the idea, art and science of hypnosis.
While i still use various forms of the handshake induction not infrequently when i do hypnosis, i do it in my own way with my own style, and it forms an extremely minor part of the overall hypnotic process.

What i hope you are beggining to sense or realize is that to become a hypnotist you need more than a few nice scripts or memorized techniques, you need to develop your own unique and personal understanding of hypnosis.

Now, modelling techniques is extremely helpful, and is a great way of learning hypnosis and honing your hypnotic skills, but if you depend on them too much you will lose what is the real heart and soul of hypnosis, that true deep and meaningful element which really makes powerful changes happen.
I would encourage you to learn as much as you can, study all the techniques you find, review these lessons, buy books, courses and training programs and embrace the variety of information, styles and opinions that are avaliable today, but always keep in some deep and influential part of your mind the ideas which i have shared above, and remember that when it comes down to it you are the hypnotist, so you should do hypnosis your way.

I spent many months examing some of the worlds best hypnotist, including Milton Ericksn and Dave Elman, and thinking deeply about what really happens when people transition from someone who trys to do hypnosis to someone who is a hypnotist, and this largey formed the basis of the Advanced Hypnosis Training Program i have been giving much of my time to lately.
Now, even that course which i, and those who helped me, poured so much into is not the be all and end all of hypnosis. This course will fuel your confidence, your skills  and you abilities and rapidly accelerate your hypnotic learning process,  but in the end the one who makes you into a hypnotist is you.

This post was not meant as a plug for the Advanced Training Program, simply as a wake up call to all those people out there who can’t see the difference between a hypnotic technique and hypnosis, between a word and a conversation.

Please enjoy thinking over this post, and allow yourself to extract as much value from this as you can.
I hope i have given you a lot to consider.

Best regards

Nathan Thomas

The lessons appear here a few days after they are posted to the group, and serve as archives so that old members can refresh their memories and new members can catch up with the group.

The lessons are in multi-media format and will train you to the level of mastery in all variations of the hypnotic handshake induction, for more information on what you get when you join for free see: http://keystothemind.blogspot.com/2007/12/free-hypnotic-handshake-interupt.html

or join directly from http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/keystothemind/join