Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Reality Bending … Online Hypnosis Training with James Brown

Subscribers and regular visitors to the blog will know I am a fan of hypnosis, and like most things I am passionate for I am always on the look out to discover new ways of doing things, gaining perspective of others and generally a healthy thirst for knowledge. You will of noticed I have purchased a few of James Brown products recently (specifically from the POWA range) and even though I have trained with James before I have never looked at his approach to hypnosis specifically, so when he released online hypnosis training material “Reality Bending” I was keen to check it out and at $147 USD I thought it could be reasonable value for money.

So in this post I will provide a general overview of the content as well as my conclusion and if I think its worth you spending the money if you have an interest in developing your hypnotic abilities.
If you don’t want to read and just get on with learning / seeing something, click the image at the end of the post and get access to a FREE video to learn the “Stuck” foot stick method.

For years we have studied and practiced hypnosis but never quite felt comfortable with the way it was explained.All the rituals seemed a little silly and never really explained what was happening. All the talk of putting people to sleep and entering their subconscious mind seemed, well, far fetched. Even when it worked (which it did!) the difference in others reaction was vast, and merely saying ‘some people can’t be hypnotised’ felt like a weak cop-out. We wanted something easy to understand.

In this training we will destroy the myths and kill the gods leaving you with a clear understanding of what’s really going on. From this simple foundational understanding we will teach you to create dramatic suggestions.

Introduction – As you would expect this covers a welcome section to introduce you to the principle and agenda of the training, James also provides some background on himself and personal usage of method and development, then we finish up by discussing the “conventional” perception of hypnosis and the methods considered by most to be the defacto approach. This section is about 15 minutes.

Foundations – In this section James sets out the approach that will be taken on the learning journey of the course, he then spends some time talking about suggestion and that essentially depending on the delivery and intent everything is / can be suggestion. Then we discuss fear and the various barriers people put in place as reasons why something cant be done or attempted. This section is about 45 minutes.

Ingredients – This portion of the training is broken up into 5 sections, and its through these sections that we start to cover the ingredients to James method of hypnosis, specifically around creating the belief and stimulating the imagination. This is a big portion of the substance to help you understanding the guiding principles of the hypnosis approach, its not a formula as such its more a capability to understand the recipe and adjusted flavourings you need for the various types of people you encounter. This section is about 60 minutes.

In the trenches – This is one of my favourite parts of the training and wish more people did this. This is various footage of the material being used in the real world, the successes but more importantly when things didn’t quite go as planned and how to handle these situations. So many people just want to show the polished material, but in a training context you need to see and understand everything, worts and all. This section is about 170 minutes.

Conclusion – To conclude the training James summaries the content covered, and also very briefly touches on the subject of safety. This section is about 10 minutes.

Bonus – As for this bonus material, I am not sure if everyone gets this or if its time dependant, but I have also seen some new material added since I first purchased the course (the joys of online content). In the bonus section James present the “Stuck” approach which you can view for FREE below, there is also footage of James presenting at the Change Phenomena Conference from back in 2010, along with some content from TedMed 2013 and a Berlin Magic Conference in 2015. Finally there are two extra new additions in my version, one is on self hypnosis and another on rapid inductions. Over 6 hours of bonus content.

So is it worth the money?? I think if your new to hypnosis and have only read some books and watched some videos on YouTube and are struggling then 1000% its money well spent and video format is really helpful to hone your technique and get out there and just do it. If your not new to hypnosis then perhaps you want learn something new if you think you know it all, but I still think its worth the money as you get additional perspective. Alot of what James covers in this course I would say is similar to my approach, but he broke some things down further and certainly got my cogs whirring into action in how I had assessed things before. Depending what side of the ocean you are on in this post Brexit economy this could be even more of a steal 🙂 If you do go ahead and make the purchase in the future please come back and leave a comment, was it great and informative or a total waste of money, I am always interested to hear what my readers think.

As mentioned earlier, if you what to wet your hypnotic whistle then check out the “Stuck” tutorial for FREE by clicking the image below. Thanks for reading, please like, share and subscribe I really appreciate it.

Stuck

Matching and Mirroring (or: Cybernetic Issues in NLP)

One of the fundamental tenets of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) is the idea of “matching and mirroring” – the idea that we create rapport between individuals by mirroring aspects of their physiology in ourselves and, because they see someone who looks like them, they’re more likely to enter in to a rapportive state with us.

This effect does have some amount of basis and has been studied quite significantly – psychologists tend to call it the “chameleon effect”, based on the landmark 1999 study by Chartrand and Bargh.  Their definition:

“The chameleon effect refers to nonconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one’s interaction partners, such that one’s behavior passively and unintentionally
changes to match that of others in one’s current social environment.”

The studies have shown that the effect of mirroring is present across most studies that have been performed – in particular, the Chartrand/Bargh study found significant impacts of mimicry on the rapport set of those studied.   (Although, as Chartrand & Bargh note, some studies (LaFrance) have noted that the effect doesn’t exist or depends on other aspects of a relationship between those being studied)

The problem comes when we consider the reason for rapport from an evolutionary perspective – we have evolved rapport and mimicry to facilitate social interaction between humans, not as a one-way process.   That is, when I mirror you, I am unconsciously reproducing your state within me – this is facilitated by the “mirror neurons” (the posterior inferior frontal gyrus and adjacent ventral premotor cortex, as well as the rostral inferior parietal lobule as described by Iacoboni) – we are able to mimic another because we perceive their behavior and, in so doing it, represent it within ourselves.

Note that this is the other half of the cybernetic loop that is edited out in the studies (and much traditional teaching of NLP) – in mimicing another successfully, we unconsciously represent their state within ourselves.    While the Chartrand/Bargh study talked about the target of the mirroring liking the study confederate more when mirrored, there wasn’t a corresponding questionaire filled out by said confederate to determine whether they had increased liking for the person being mirrored.   Obviously, this would have had some methodological concerns.  (Note that Chartrand and Bargh noticed the potential issue that this half of the cybernetic loop wasn’t being respected, and attempted to control for other behaviors – however, the question of the subtlety of mirroring behaviors on the behalf of the confederate is still open – I’d love to see a FACS coding of some of the samples of the confederates against those of the participants and note facial / micro-expression similarities.)

The state being mimiced is, in effect, dual-sided – that is, the more precisely we replicate the state of the other person, the more effectively we display the chameleon effect.   It is this behavior that Chartrand & Bargh noted in their third experimental condition – that, at an unconscious level, those of us who tend to take other’s perspective (which can correlate to but isn’t the same as the traditional emotional definition of empathy) more often have a better developed set of strategies for adopting mirrored positions with others.

This, in my opinion, leads to a lot of the problems with the traditional NLP model for learning matching and mirroring.  As Grinder said in “Whispering in the Wind“, there are two criteria for the evaluation of a model:

Is it learnable?
Does it lead to the learner producing results congruent with the original source of the model?

While any six-year old can learn the NLP version of matching and mirroring (i.e. “monkey see, monkey do”), it’s the second condition that is much more problematic.   Many who attempt to learn to create rapport through traditional means end up with matching/mirroring processes that, rather than create rapport more often, come off with the subtlety of a bad used car salesman.    The reason for this is that we aren’t effectively attempting to teach the student of NLP how to mirror states, but only to broadly mirror large parts of behavior – we’re not respecting that rapport is a cybernetic process with multiple sides to the loop.  And anybody teaching it from the perspective of behavior/posture isn’t respecting the other side of the loop (at least consciously).

In fact, in my own modeling of those who are excellent at creating rapport, it’s not their ability to mirror posture or breathing pattern or eye blinks that is most effective – it’s the ability to mirror and represent within themselves the state of those around them and to effectively convey that mirrored state (usually at a completely unconscious level).

Grinder also noted this in Whispering, when he stated that calibration is “the most fundamental of all NLP processes”.  The person who is most effective at creating rapport with others is the one who most precisely calibrates the state of the other person and, upon representing that state within themselves, unconsciously adopts whatever behaviors are appropriate, regardless of whether they precisely “mimic” the other person.

The student who attempts to learn to create matching and mirroring without understanding how to effectively calibrate (which, using NLP terminology, is akin to an unconscious shift in to second position) doesn’t become (in the Chartrand/Bargh terminology) a “high perspective taker”, which is one of the fundamental bases of being effective when it comes to matching and mirroring.

That is, the goal in matching and mirroring isn’t to replicate behavior – replication of behavior comes naturally when we effectively can adopt and replicate the state of the other person within the interaction.   To attempt to mimic the behavior generally works only in so far as that adopting a matched physiology can assist in replicating state.

Technorati Tags: chameleon effect, matching, mirroring, NLP


Social Compliance and Manipulation… The Art of Confidence

As human beings we are very good at making excuses, and always believing that some how we have it worse than the other guy. There is often that mentality that, its not we don’t want to do this or that, its just that ………. add any excuse you want. When you speak to people about where these excuses stem from, it often comes down to an apparent lacking in confidence, and the other guy has so much confidence, and that is why they are successful. To some extent this may be true, perhaps the other guys does have so much confidence, or at least that is the perception.

So when it comes to getting your social engineering foo on, I am sure you would expect that confidence plays a pretty essential part in getting people to comply with your requests and manipulate people in such a way to reach your desired outcome. In many ways you are correct, confidence is a key component. However I would prefer you think of it as the Art of Confidence is essential to success.

Confidence is many things to many people, when I talk to people about what confidence feels like to them in a hypnosis context you hear some very strange definitions. However these strange definitions did help me realise something, confidence is something that is very personal, and might not actually make sense at a concious level. The dictionary says confidence is freedom from doubt; belief in yourself and your abilities, a state of confident hopefulness that events will be favourable.

I think confidence is really not something you can clearly label. Confidence is a result of many different attributes, so when someone says they don’t feel confident, its not really as simple as one thing (its not a simple flick of a switch), however you can get realisation after taking certain steps to realise confidence is some what of a placebo.

So what is the Art of Confidence? The Art of Confidence is a lacking of fear. If you ask someone why they are not confident of something, the end result is normally a fear. Why wont you speak to the woman at the other end of the bar? Fear of rejection or looking stupid. Why wont you call a company and ask for information, or a discount? Fear of intimidation, or failure. Why wont you attempt to SE your way into this building? What if I get caught, or I forget my cover story, etc etc. These are all valid, but they don’t need to be.

So if to be confident we need to lose our fear, what do we need to do. We can achieve this in a few ways, first of all knowledge is power. If we study body language we can understand what fear looks like, the subconscious signs our body gives away to alert others to the fact we nervous etc. Knowing our subject matter, if we are pretending that are an engineer we should have a good level of knowledge of what that looks like, the dialogue that is used, the basic knowledge that should be known during your interactions, and having done the appropriate reconnaissance of what your target is doing, backgrounds, specialities etc. Having a plan and process is also very important. The plan should cover all angles with multiple steps to achieve your goal, what to do when confronted, how to handle awkward situations, and how to bail out gracefully. Finally self belief, just believe and act like what ever you are doing you have done a million times before, both with success and failure, you are the oracle, your are Mr / Mrs Informed, look, feel and act confident. This is very important, a large majority of subconscious tells are removed when you really believe in yourself and what your trying to do, just seeing the talent shows on TV is more than a good example of this.

Its important to note that demonstrating the Art of Confidence does not alleviate all fear (fear is important to success to), clearly there are going to be times that you are crapping yourself, but its how you handle it, and ensuring you still project yourself as confident. Appearing confident is a very attractive trait, and it puts you in a kind of Alpha state. When in this position people are less likely to question you, they are more likely to assume you are in a position of authority, and we all know even if something doesn’t feel right, or we should really do it, we may turn a blind eye when those in authority request it.

Some final thoughts for what may also make you feel confident are the following. Reciprocation, you may feel more confident when asking someone to do something if you have previously given or done them a favour. Perhaps you bought them a drink, picked up some paper work when they dropped it, open a door for them etc. Humour, we all feel more at ease around someone with a good sense of humour and appropriate jokes. So if you have a quick wit, and think fast on your feet, and know some half decent jokes you may also use this in your favour. Reasoning, we know from other posts and studies that we respond more favourably when we have justification for a request. So as part of your planning and process work, define some reasons for why you are requesting what you ask for, or the actions that you take as these will be accepted more favourably.

Remember the BIG BECAUSE. Everything in life happens for a reason, the things we say, the way we act, everything. So give time and thought to why you are confident, why you belong, why your are successful. We can often easily remember and think of negative, but focusing on the positive is a more productive approach of our time, and will lead to a happier more successful outcome.

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT!