How I Used Self-Hypnosis To Become A Top-Notch Speaker
“You can pretend anything and master it” ~ Milton Erickson.
“There is something wrong with me.”
This is all I could think as I sat there at the cafeteria table being laughed at by half of the table.
It was a normal day at school around lunchtime, and I had just finished eating my food and drinking my juice.
However, I wanted more juice on this particular day.
So I raise my hand and waved to my teacher, she walks over and I say,
“Can I have some more juice? I’m thirsty.”
But there was one issue.
I had a speech impediment and couldn’t pronounce my “S’s” or “R’s” correctly.
So the question came out like, “Can I have some more juice, I’m thusty.”
As soon as I asked the question, the kid sitting across from me began laughing at me and making fun of how I sounded.
“I’m thusty, I’m thusty, I’m thusty” he laughed and repeated, and within seconds more than half of the table was laughing at me for the way I said the word “thirsty.”
Although this may seem like a small moment, to a five-year-old…
This was big.
And all I could think was…
“There must be something wrong with me because I can’t talk right.”
The Day I Started Fearing Using My Voice
This was a memory that came up during the use of a self-hypnosis technique to figure out why I was having a lot of anxiety around speaking on a physical stage (although I had been doing it virtually for a while.)
Why did this memory come up, you may be wondering?
It came up because our memories are doorways to our core beliefs about ourselves.
When you look back into your past, you can see how a certain event led you to believe something particular.
This is because when we experience events in life we tend to make the events themselves mean certain things.
For example, if I see a black cat walking across the road I can make that mean “Oh, I’m about to have bad luck” or “Aw, poor kitty.”
Neither of them is entirely true, but whichever one I choose to focus on will create my experience and become true…for me.
If you focus on the fact that it means you’re going to have bad luck, you’ll likely experience some level of anxiety.
If you focus on the fact that the cat may be lost, you may feel pity.
Both are entirely based on your focus.
In the same way, on this day I decided to believe that there was something wrong with me based on the event I experienced.
Until that point, I had no trouble speaking up, but from that moment I had the hardest time speaking up and using my voice.
I didn’t ask questions, say what I was thinking, talk about my feelings, or even feel comfortable being myself around people.
I was looking at the world through the eyes of “There is something wrong with me.”
Which made me fear wanting to be seen. Do you see now why I had a fear of speaking publicly?
Once this root cause was discovered, I was able to begin using self-hypnosis to rewire that belief entirely.
But before I share with you how I used this tool to help me accomplish this, let me first explain what hypnosis is.
What Is Hypnosis?
Hypnosis, what the heck is it?
Let me make this super simple for you.
Hypnosis is a process that slows your brain waves down.
This happens by activating rapid eye movement.
Hypnosis is not a trance, but it is a process that gets one into a trance.
A trance is when you are so focused on something that you tune out everything else around you.
Trances are actually very normal, and we all go in and out of them every day without even realizing it.
They can happen when we watch TV, have sex, go to the doctor, dance, or do any other activity where we are completely focused on what we are doing.
Reading is another example of when we might be in a trance.
Self-hypnosis is simply activating REM by ourselves, which will take us into that state of complete absorption.
And now that you know what hypnosis is, let’s dive into the exact steps I took to become great at public speaking through the power of self-hypnosis.
Step 1: The Reframe
Once I became aware of the belief I created at that moment, I asked myself a simple question.
“What could I have made this event mean instead?”
Instead of it meaning “Something is wrong with me” I could make it mean something else.
Something that served me.
So I decided to handpick a brand new belief.
The belief I chose was this.
“I don’t have a speech impediment because something is wrong with me. Rather I have a speech impediment because my voice is so powerful that the universe had to make sure you never forgot about it.”
Step 2: Seeing The Picture
I want you to try something.
Close your eyes and imagine yourself grabbing a freshly peeled lemon.
Tilt your head back and imagine yourself squeezing that lemon into your mouth.
Do you see what happened?
You likely made a face like this:
Your mouth salivated and you physically reacted to the image of squeezing fresh lemon juice into your mouth.
This is because our minds and our bodies immediately respond to the images we focus on.
Our minds are wired to respond to pictures. And all beliefs create pictures in the mind.
Beliefs are just ideas we focus on a lot, and the word idea comes from the word “idein” — which means “to see.”
So when you see an idea clearly in your mind, that idea is very likely to happen.
Therefore I asked myself this question:
“If I believed my voice was so powerful that the universe had to make sure nobody ever forgot about it, what would that actually look like?”
Here is the image I came up with:
- A picture of me standing on a stage, with a mic connected to my ear, and looking at a crowd full of people standing on their feet applauding me for delivering an unforgettable speech.
So every night I would use a self-hypnosis technique (which I’m about to share with you) to visualize this exact scenario happening.
As I’d lay in bed I would wait until the moment I caught myself getting sleepy.
The moment I got sleepy I would begin doing the process below:
The Self-Hypnosis Process I Did Every Night
Step 1: Lift my eyeballs up like I’m trying to look at the center of my forehead.
Step 2: Keeping my eyeballs up, I would close my eyelids down until I felt a fluttering sensation.
This is rapid eye movement, and it causes the brain to begin slowing down to a state of theta brain waves (aka — hypnosis.)
This is what it looks like:
Step 3: Maintaining this fluttering sensation, I would tilt my chin downwards as if I was looking down a flight of stairs.
Step 4: Visualize a set of 10 steps going downward and I began walking down each step repeating:
“I’m taking step 10, and I’m going deeper. I’m taking step 9, going deeper. I’m taking step 8, going deeper…” all the way down to step one.
Step 5: At the bottom of the staircase I would begin visualizing a screen in front of me, like a movie/projector screen.
Step 6: I would recall a past positive experience, one that made me feel accomplished, happy, brave, and excited.
I did this because the only way to rewire your neural pathways is to experience an intense emotion, this itself will make physical changes inside of the brain.
So I would generate a positive emotion by revisiting a memory in my mind that made me feel confident.
When the emotion was stirred up, I would then carry that emotion into the next step.
Step 7: I threw the image of me standing on a stage, with a mic connected to my ear, and looking at a crowd full of people standing on their feet applauding me
I took this picture as far as I could take it by making every single detail extremely clear and vivid.
I turned up the “reality” of the experience by getting all five of my senses involved.
I felt the mic against my ear, the stage beneath my feet, I saw the faces in the crowd and heard the sounds of the applause.
I made sure my brain and body were experiencing the reality of that moment.
I spent about 25 minutes in this picture every night, making sure it was more detailed each time I visited it.
Step 3: Carrying This Image Into My Life
Now seeing it once isn’t enough, nor is seeing it one thousand times.
The more important part is that you assume the picture is true and act out on it.
So I acted out on it over and over again.
How?
I began to watch Ted talks every single night and pick apart the common patterns I saw.
I’d then write my own talks about what I was learning.
Then I’d record myself reading the talk as if I was performing it, and then every night I’d close my eyes and listen to it and imagine myself seeing the images of each word visually.
So I wasn’t just hearing it, I was making sure I was seeing it too.
While I was making this a daily practice, I was also actively reaching out to people who ran masterminds and events with pitches to be on their stage.
I did this not because I was the best speaker of all time, I did this because I assumed that I had a voice powerful enough to share something.
I assumed that the image I was seeing in my head every single day was real.
I assumed that my voice was powerful in the same way I assumed that there was something wrong with me because I had a few speech impediments.
And I assumed that those new assumptions will show up in my behaviors and results in the same way the old belief created certain behaviors and results.
Therefore I acted out on the new assumptions with the faith that they were “turned on and working.”
I did this over and over again.
Pitching podcast after podcast, stage after stage, and mastermind after mastermind to share my voice with the assumption that it was powerful and unforgettable.
And before I knew it, this happened:
Wrapping This All Up
As you can see, in that short 1-minute and 24-second video, I lived out the exact image I wrote about earlier.
The image I saw in my head every single night had actually come true, and it came true because of these 6 things:
- I became aware of the core belief holding me back from using my voice the way I wanted to use it.
- I created a new idea of myself and got clear on what that idea would look like if it came true.
- I used self-hypnosis every night to access a deep state of mind.
- I then visualized a picture of me standing on a stage, with a mic connected to my ear, and looking at a crowd full of people standing on their feet applauding me for delivering an unforgettable speech.
- I spent time intentionally acting out on the belief by studying speakers, writing talks, and reaching out to people who could get me on stages and I delivered those talks.
- And I did all of that with the assumption that my voice was unforgettable.
This process will work for anybody, not because it worked for me, but rather because it’s a scientifically accurate approach to rewiring your neural pathways.
When you rewire your neural pathways, you begin responding to life differently — there is no way around that.
If you want to do this exact self-hypnosis process, I made a guided audio recording that you can go through.
Aside from that, let me know in the replies below..
If you could believe anything in the world about yourself…
What would that be?
