Using Hypnotic or Milton Language in Text

There's often debate in social media forums about whether or not you can use hypnotic language in text, because of course you can't control the intonation, pace and so on. Well, if your hypnotic repertoire doesn't stretch beyond adding "now" on the end of every sentence and talking in a very boring monotone then the answer is simple. No. However, if you're a little more... sophisticated... then yes. Here's a paragraph that I've just written for my new book which you'll see contains a progressive association, used to switch perceptual positions.

The next day, these super-human productivity machines go back to work, and are instantly deluged with demands for urgent things and yesterday’s things and tomorrow’s things and something for the meeting I’m going to right now and don’t you even think about taking a tea break and WHERE’S MY REPORT????

How did your feelings change as you read through that?

Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?

I've seen a lot of talk recently about the use of NLP language in advertising and marketing. Personally, I find it awkward and embarrassing. What works in conversation just seems silly on paper. And yet, 'hypnotic marketing gurus' still maintain that they know the secrets of unconscious influence that will have customers beating a path to your door.

I've felt for many years that hypnotic language such as Milton Model patterns or Sleight of Mouth patterns may work in a therapeutic conversation, but they don't necessarily work on paper, for many reasons. But it was just the other day, in a conversation about cultural alignment, that I realised what the root cause of the problem might be.

When Bandler and Grinder modelled therapeutic language patterns to create the Milton Model and Meta Model, they modelled therapists.

Now, would you hire a therapist to sell a car?

Maybe if you were giving free phobia cures as an incentive. But generally, no, you wouldn't. Their goals and beliefs are different to those of car sales people. Not better or worse, just different.

Would you go to a car salesman for relationship therapy?

So if you wouldn't buy a car from a therapist, why would you copy a therapist's language patterns to sell a car?

Wouldn't you model successful sales people?

This is the fundamental problem with NLP when used outside of a therapeutic context. NLP, as you'll see in my books Genius at Work and The NLP Master Practitioner Handbook, is the modelling toolkit from which we define and code excellence. When that was used to code the work of therapists, the set of scripts that we know as 'NLP Practitioner techniques' were created. But most people stopped their NLP studies there and went out swishing and squashing and modal operating on their customers.

Even those that went on to study Master Practitioner were mostly given a dreadful mis-service by their trainers who just taught them more techniques. What a waste of time. At Master Practitioner level you're supposed to be learning how to create custom techniques of your own, not just learning more scripts.

When you learn modelling, and I mean real modelling, not just strategy elicitation and TOTE, you can model great sales people, or doctors, or project managers, or drivers, or musicians, or therapists, and you can create unique, custom techniques that are specifically aligned with that cultural environment.







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Milton Model of Language

Milton Erickson was a Hypnotherapist in Arizona. He can perhaps be credited as the person who made hypnotherapy acceptable in western medicine, using it in a wide range of situations and helping patients that other therapists had declared 'incurable'. Erickson had suffered from polio in his early life and found himself able to spend many long hours paying attention to the effect that words had on people.

Erickson's language was structured to gently influence the listener, almost like hypnosis but without the stereotypical 'trance'.

In a normal conversation, language has both structure and content. The content gives you facts and the structure connects those facts together into a story.

For example, if a story contains the facts 'cat', 'dog' and 'tree', there is nothing to tell you what is actually happening. The chances are that you have already imagined what is happening in this story, so your mind has unconsciously filled in the missing information based on your prior experiences.

NLP's Milton Model of language works in this way, giving you the structure but no facts. The listener has to insert the missing information from their own experiences and the result is something that is absolutely unique to each listener.

This process wasn't invented by Milton Erickson, he was simply the role model for it in NLP. If you listen to any statement prepared by a politician, you may hear something similar. For example:
"People will understand that the solutions to these kinds of problems are to be found not in the past but in the future, and everyone will appreciate what a difficult task this can be. You can also be absolutely certain that the government we have now is in a far better position than any other to tackle these problems and to resolve them in a way that is economical, effective and respectful to the local community."

Does that sound familiar? Perhaps you remember hearing that before, about asylum seekers, or racial problems, or local policing policy? It sounds like it says something, but when you look carefully at the words, it says nothing at all. Unfortunately, many people have prior experiences of politicians which make them interpret such vague words as being 'manipulative' or judging such statements as 'sound bites', and it is vital to bear in mind that a political context is entirely different to a training, coaching or therapeutic relationship.

Milton language is a framework within which the listener can place their own meaning which becomes totally unique and personal to each listener.

Using Milton language enables you to communicate in a very personal way to a diverse audience, and it also allows a NLP Practitioner to communicate very effectively with his or her clients.

Uniquely and crucially, Milton language enables NLP Practitioners to coach clients without knowing specific details about the presented issue. This means that a Practitioner can help a client to achieve change without having to go into factual details about an issue that could be embarrassing or even traumatic to describe.