The first factor is the understanding of anchors. These are a fundamentally the tool that was derived from Pavlov’s experiment with dogs, food and a tuning fork. If you are not up to speed with anchors it would be well worth the investment learning more.

The most two most important anchors to use while story telling are ‘name tags’ and ‘reaction’ anchors.

‘Name tags’ are an idea I came across from Ross Jefferies (The NLP Pick-up guru). It’s where whilst referring to an ambiguous set of characteristics you attach them to a particular person or yourself. In the case of storytelling it works brilliantly to attach the client you are working with to a particular character. Remember in the last post about ‘embedded metaphors’ I explained that it was important to have the client associate to the specific character that would be undergoing the ‘embedded metaphor’.

This is a really simple thing to do, every time you refer to the ‘clients-character’ you gesture towards the client. No need to go crazy and point at them blatantly every time the character is mentioned. Rather just gesture openly to the person the first few times and maybe towards the development stage of the story.

The aim with anchoring is to do it clearly enough that if you told the person what you were doing it would make sense but if you didn’t they would be consciously unaware. That is the goal of a good anchor.

The second part of anchoring to utilise for storytelling is the ‘reaction’ anchor. If you’ve ever watched a brilliant comedian like Robin Williams you will notice that ever time he get a huge reaction out of the audience his body posture will quickly turn ‘slanted’. He may just tilt his head sideways or he may slant his entire body, the important point is when they go to begin laughing he will anchor the laugh with a visual or tonal anchor. Then for the rest of the show he will be compounding this anchor with more laughs and if a joke isn’t going so well he can utilise it to get the laughter going again.

All natural storytellers have these process like Billy Connelly but they may or may not be aware of using them. Think about the key emotional reactions that you might be eliciting from the audience whilst telling the story and come up with some ideas of clearly distinctly different anchors to use. Like all of NLP, the more hours under your belt applying these techniques the better you will be at them and don’t worry if you miss one or it doesn’t go to plan, there is always next time.

So we have the two types of anchors now the ‘tags’ and the ‘reaction’. These will most definitely go a long way to making the story a much more powerful experience that your audience will connect much more strongly with.

Now before doing the next stage, go out and tell a story to some people whilst using these techniques. This is to install them into your behaviour before we proceed to the next step.

Technique 2 is the utilisation of modalities. This is by far the most powerful technique used by writers throughout history. Let me give you an example to make it clear what I am saying.

Example A: Bob woke up in the forest. He didn’t know how he got there but he knew he had to get home.

Example B: The sound of the wild birds was echoing through the trees as the breaking sunlight began to filter through Bob’s eyelashes. He could feel the crisp cold on his face and hands, nipping at him like tiny pins and needles. He felt confused and from the thumping in his head he knew that something had happened. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t make sense of what had happened. He knew he had to get home.

So which one would you rather read? I’m going to go out on a limb and say Example B but why? The simplest answer is that it engages ALL of the senses and by doing so, enables the listeners imagination to paint a much more vivid picture thus dramatically increasing the connection to the story.

There are four major modalities, visual, audio, kinaesthetic and logic. The first story covers the basic dynamic, the second covers every modality.

Visual: “as the breaking sunlight began to filter through Bob’s eyelashes”

Audio: “ The sound of the wild birds was echoing through the trees”

Kinaesthetic: “feel the crisp cold on his face and hands, nipping at him like tiny pins and needles”

Logic: “tried he couldn’t make sense of what had happened”

The best way in my experience to generate such a fulfilling experience in modalities to the audience is to as the storyteller begin by transporting yourself into the story. By making your imagination as vivid as possible whilst in the storyteller mode you will have more than enough information to go off. In fact what you will find is that you don’t even need to think about most of the details, your imagination will do the work for you! Just trust it and see where it takes you. With more practice will come more flexibility.

Now for those paying attention, this may be a lesson you may or may not want to implement into your sales strategy or perhaps you may just want to pay attention to the modality that others speak in and put a little more emphasis on their preferred modality.

The last one I will cover in this blog post will be vocal tone. People have been telling me my whole life that I “have the perfect voice for radio.” and I attribute it to listening to endless hours of ‘books on tape’ when I was young. If you want to learn about vocal tone in storytelling listen to some of the greats from the BBC radio productions like “Lord of the Rings” or Fred Parslow from “Play Little Victims”. There are countless examples but those are my favorites.

Vocal tone is so much more important than I can impart here. If you watch the comedian Elliot Gould you will learn what happens when you say everything in the same monotone. In fact he made a career out of it for over a decade.

The simple points are to allow your emotions to come through in what you are saying and to make sure everything you say is said in a way so that every single word has meaning and purpose. Sounds like a lot but you can quickly be on the road to success by emphasising the occasional word to begin with and moving on from there.

When you say the word “beautiful” say it in a way that implies you are looking at the most beautiful thing you have ever seen in your life.

When you say the word “slow”, take your time and actually slow down your rate of speech as you say it.

Well guys that covers anchors, modalities and vocal tone. When combined with the previous post you will find yourself with enough information to give the greatest storytellers you know a run for their money.

Remember this is a skill, thus the more you practice, the better you will get. Whenever you see someone telling a story, pay attention not only to them but to the members of the audience. Learn to tell stories in ways that you can be flexible to the audience, getting the best impact everytime and before you know it people will be hanging off every word you say.

Till next time, Be Well.

©2012 Symple NLP. All Rights Reserved.

Recently having a discussion on a hypnosis forum with Jonathan Chase has urged me to explain my point of view on storytelling and how the process of metaphors and hypnosis all come together.

The first point of clarification that we need is to define what makes a story different from a series of events that happened. Let’s take a couple of examples:

Example A: Bob woke up and went to have breakfast only to discover that he was out of milk. He then went to work and when he got in he did his paperwork whilst making several phone calls. For lunch he had hamburger and after a long day came home.

We’ve all sat through a conversation much like Example A with a person we knew that kept on going through event after event whilst we sat in hope of an eventual ‘point’. It is a great example of a series of events that never goes anywhere and an even better example of how to bore people out of their minds. This is NOT a story.

Example B: Bob woke up and went to have breakfast only to discover that he was out of milk. He didn’t have time to go to the shops before work so while he was at work he decided to purchase a cow from ebay to ensure that he never ran out of milk ever again. From that day on Bob always had fresh milk.

Even though comical/ridiculous this is a clear example of how a story doesn’t have to be long or complex but does have to have certain criteria. These are:

• A routine
• A break in routine
• A revelation or development

So let’s compare the two and how they either fulfil or don’t fulfil the requisits for being a story.

In Example A we have

• A routine – Bob having breakfast
• A break in routine – Bob running out of milk

However there is no revelation or development! When earlier we were left asking “What is the point?” this is the referral to the fact that there was no revelation.

In Example B we have:

• A routine – Bob having breakfast
• A break in routine – Bob running out of milk
• A development – Bob bought a cow

So now we have the basics of what constitutes a story we can move deeper into the idea of metaphors. Metaphors are like the ‘lessons’ learned in fables or fairy tales.

Now to clarify something here, every story has at least one metaphor. In fact most stories that are more complex than the example above contain several metaphors. Multiple characters, multiple metaphors. Even groups of characters have a metaphor applying to the group or conglomerate. In fact if we look at a story like “Lord of the Rings” by J R R Tolkien we have a myriad of metaphors both ‘one to one’ and ‘multiple to one’ creating a plethora of metaphors.

During the course of an engaging story the audience will associate to normally one character or group. The development that that particular character or group goes through will be the ‘metaphor’ that the audience will absorb.

The problem is with so many metaphors how do you know which one will be the one that the audience will associate to? For every character that goes through a development, there is another opportunity for the audience member to connect.

When TV show writers are writing a show that contains a group of people, they aim to cover sufficient characters that anyone who watches will associate to at least one of them.

So with such a complex set of potential metaphors it would be almost impossible to say which metaphor will be taken on board or even what the original metaphor was in the first place. The same goes for songs as well. The writer may have been writing about one idea but because of the use of ambiguous language everyone comes to their own personal meaning to the song.

This is why in most cases of storytelling for hypnotic purposes there is a limit to one clear main character so as to ensure the audience connects to the desired character to ensure the desire metaphor is conveyed.

In NLP we so often use a term called ‘embedded metaphor’ but which of the above metaphors are we talking about? None of them really. Let me explain.

Typically when an NLPer or hypnotist is constructing a story to use for development purpose they will begin with a metaphor idea then construct the story around it. This original metaphor that the story is constructed from is what is referred to as the ‘embedded metaphor’.

Let me give you an example. I once had a client that used to sit on her veranda of an evening enjoying a glass of wine. Every evening at about the same time a group of brush turkeys would be making their way from the front of her block to the rear. The problem was that she was scared of the turkeys and scared of them getting into the house and trashing it.

Now these turkeys whilst being big for birds were still much smaller than her. It wasn’t a phobia, she just wasn’t confident around the turkeys.

So they basis of the metaphor was to increase confidence. Confidence as you know is something that we have within us and we can choose to exercise. She just wasn’t exercising it.

So the ‘embedded metaphor’ was ‘going from scared to confident then to realising, in any situation that confidence is always there’.

The story went along the lines of:

Once there was a king who lived in his castle surrounded by a village of peasants that every so often would revolt destroying everything inside of the castle grounds. A travelling magician came past one day and the king asked him for help. The magician gave the king a bottle of ‘magic sand’ that was designed to give him supreme confidence. Whilst he had the sand his kingdom was safe and calm.

One day though the bottle was smashed and the king went back to the way it used to be. Years later the magician was passing by again and the king had his soldiers summon him to him. The king, ruined and lost without his magic sand explained the heartache of the kingdom for the years since the bottle smashed and consequently asked for more.

The magician explained that the ‘magic sand’ was not so magical at all and in fact it was the kings own confidence all along. The king realising that he had wasted all those years crying over the loss of the sand now vowed to never waste another day being scared because he had realised that the confidence he required to rule his kingdom was already his all the time, he just had to become aware.

From that day on and for many more generations the kingdom was a happy and peaceful place where the peasants and the king were always in harmony.

Now in this story the turkeys were represented by the peasants, the magician was myself as I used to be a professional magician and that was how the client knew me. Finally the king was the character I was aiming at her to associate to.

Thus when we refer to an ‘embedded metaphor’ we are talking about the metaphor that the hypnotic story was constructed around. You could find unlimited metaphors when viewing a constructed story due to what is known as a transderevational search thus it is best to keep it simple, especially when starting out.

In all fairness the story on its own is no guarantee of the development occurring in the audience. It is through utilisation of anchors, modalities, meta programs, vocal tone and other factors that increase the effectiveness of the hypnotic storytelling. This I’ll cover in a different post.

©2012 Symple NLP. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Symple NLP. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Symple NLP. All Rights Reserved.

This is a small example of an idea that can be used to help a person learn a second language faster and easier.

©2012 Symple NLP. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Symple NLP. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Symple NLP. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Symple NLP. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Symple NLP. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Symple NLP. All Rights Reserved.