Street Hypnosis - What is it? What can it be used for? How do you do it?

The street hypnotist seems to many people to be a magical and somewhat extreme (or occasionally fake)version of the hypnotist, which is odd considering that both street hypnotist and therapeutic hypnotist often use exactly the same skills.

Whether you ever plan to perform street hypnosis or not, the skillset required to be a good street hypnotist is a good skillset for any hypnotist to have.

What is Street Hypnosis?

Street hypnosis is the skill of hypnotizing (covertly or not so covertly) a member of the public in a public place without any prior arrangement or knowledge on the part of the subject.

This may be entirely covert, in that the subject may be affected without their awareness that anything is going on, or they may be approached and hypnotized using some kind of instant hypnosis technique - in this case they will be completely aware but unable to do anything but respond to the hypnotist (assuming the hypnotist achieves their aims).

Before embarking on this hypnotic approach, please take note that in most cases the difference between a street hypnotist and a stalker is often down to whether you have a camera crew or not.

What is the purpose of street hypnosis

This form of hypnosis is invariably used for entertainment purposes. And while there is no reason why therapeutic work would be less effective in this form, I cannot think of a setup where a hypnotist would choose to work with a client in a street scenario and it be ethical to do so. In other words a hypnotist should never perform a therapeutic change that has not been requested by the client/subject no matter how relevant and useful the hypnotist believes the change to be.

Street Hypnosis Skills - How do you learn Street Hypnosis

As mentioned above, a street hypnotist uses the same basic skills as a good therapeutic hypnotist. I say a 'good' hypnotist as there are many hypnotists who simply regurgitate scripts without using any skills at all.

A street hypnotist needs proper hypnosis skills - skills that are more often taught to NLP Practitioners. The starting point for good 'covert' hypnosis are Rapport and pacing and leading. These are also skills that can be practiced in a covert manner. So for anyone who wants to see some results of their fledgling hypnotic skills as a convincer, then rapport and pacing and leading have even more value. There is another useful article on rapport on PlanetNLP.com.

At some point you are going to have to step forward and actually interact with a subject. Firstly you will need a good induction planned. Anchoring (as covered on PlanetNLP.com) is a useful skill. There are several different instant hypnosis techniques that you can try. You will probably find a preference.

At some point you will also need to learn a few language patterns. The Milton model provides the backbone of these - there is an article on learning hypnosis language patterns on PlanetNLP.com. Practicing your embedded commands will really help you with your inductions.

As well as these skills, the street hypnotist requires one other thing that is more difficult to teach - and that is the shear balls to actually walk up to a complete stranger, knowing that if you fail, at best you're going to look like an idiot, and at worst you'll look like some kind of stalker. The best way to deal with this issue is practice whenever possible.

But otherwise street hypnosis probably gives the hypnotist a bigger buzz than any other form of the art. So good luck and start practicing - subtly!