WHY CONSCIOUS COMMUNICATION WORKS BETTER THAN HYPNOSIS OR UNCONSCIOUS COMMUNICATION

Sigmund Freud divided the brain into parts. Frederick Perls, the Father of Gestalt Psychology, divided it into Top Dog and Under Dog. Modern brain scientists tell us there is a left brain and a right brain. Being a student of Psychology, I’ve learned all the different names for brain and mind and their attributes. After all this and 25 years of teaching business people to use their minds more effectively, I now think of the mind, not the brain. The mind seems to be bigger and yet, include the brain and all its magical powers.

Because business is goal oriented, the effectiveness factor of the skills we teach is a good selling point for our seminars. Recently I’ve found some web sites that are recommending hypnotic techniques for your business dealings. Before you try these hypnotic techniques ( and get clobbered for your efforts) there is something practical you should know about the way the mind works.

I agree with Freud that we all have a conscious mind, a sub-conscious mind, and an unconscious mind. The conscious mind is the one that knows our identity, that can remember the past, and imagine our future. The one we are using here and now. The subconscious knows our phone number, the address of our office, where we parked our car, and all the memory items we are not using at this moment, here and now. But may need to recall quickly. The unconscious is simply everything else that is in the mind or available to the mind. It holds our memories, our conclusions and beliefs from those memories and the sensory data of the experiences that created the memories.

Communicating to the conscious mind is easy, communicating with the unconscious is difficult and tricky. Hypnotic techniques are designed to communicate with the unconscious mind and go around, jump over, by pass, the conscious mind. Sales people view the conscious mind as the policeman, the nay sayer, the blocker to closing the deal. They believe hypnosis will silence this policeman and convince the unconscious, which they think of as kind of stupid, but vulnerable to their hypnotic skills. They are making a grave mistake here. The conscious mind does not guard the gate at every moment, but it shows up often enough to be an important component to any sales deal. Hypnosis promises, but does not deliver.

The problem is that sooner or later, the unconcscious mind and the conscious mind do get together, and communicate with each other. That’s why in California, you can return the car you bought on Saturday to the dealer on Monday and he has to cancel the contract. The conscious mind woke up and communicated. That’s one reason not to use hypnotic techniques. You need to get buy-in from both the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. Then you’ve got a deal.
Now, for therapy, hypnosis is quite safe and effective. The therapist knows all the ins and outs of both the conscious and the unconscious minds and gets buy-in from both for the therapy to be successful. The unethical business person or sales person does not know how to do this, and believes he can trick the person into doing what s/he wants. In some cases the novice hypnotist actually thinks s/he knows what’s best for the other and is actually not trying to take advantage, just to get the other to do what the manipulator wants. No one knows what’s best for someone else, once the someone else reaches around 12 years of age, so do not fool yourself with this belief. Unless you are a therapist, take up another hobby. Drop hypnosis. It has a bad smell from being mis-used by crooks, manipulators, and deceit artists.