It seems like the main issue is that there’s a lot of confusion and debate around NLP and hypnosis themselves.

Any marketer or salesperson worth their salt would say they can compel someone to buy. That’s their job. Of course that’s compel, not coerce. It’s still voluntary agreement.

Your second statement really depends on what you mean. Can you do stage hypnosis on someone when they’re adamant about not participating? Obviously not. Can you do a pattern interrupt and put the average person into a slight trance state. Yes. Erickson did it all the time.

It really doesn’t make much sense to talk about hypnotizing someone against their will in copy. I’ve said before that reading is a slight trance state because trance is simply a state of focused attention. Under normal conditions you can’t force someone to read your copy.

When you say “against their will” it makes more sense to talk about it in terms of things done with or without conscious awareness. If you tell a therapeutic metaphor and the conscious mind is distracted with the top level of events, is that “against their will?”

If you see someone else making some sort of extraordinary claims about NLP copywriting, I’d be happy to review what they’re actually saying vs doing. Hype is easy to find. Actual elegant use of NLP in copy is almost non-existent. If you click on the “NLP Examples” category, you’ll find all of the uses I’ve noted over the last year in this blog.

Most of the time, you don’t have to claim anything. You just do it and let the results speak for themselves. It’s a bit of a Catch 22 for me to try to promote the subject. That’s why I’ve taken all the risk out of trying it out.

Actually, since it’s the NLP copywriters making their extraordinary claims, such as “I can show you how to compel people to buy” or “I can hypnotise someone against their will”, then it’s actually up to them to prove their claims with extraordinary evidence.

– Jon

Thanks for pointing that out. I’d had vague notions of what this is like but you’re correct. It’s similar to how they upload something they want to learn in The Matrix.

Very, very interesting project you got there. I think you’re on the track that I’ve wanted to work on for a while but haven’t invested the time to perfect: Matrix learning.

Remember how in the movie the characters acquired skills via software upload and installation? Sounds like you’re heading in that direction.

Definitely keep the community posted on this.