How To Craft Direct Suggestions in Hypnosis

What’s the quickest way to help people make changes with hypnosis?

If you’re brand new to hypnosis, you must master the art of direct suggestion. This post and accompanying video will show you how.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• When to use direct suggestions in hypnosis
• How to craft direct suggestions for your clients
• How to move beyond just using direct suggestions when you’re ready
• How you can get started learning hypnosis with us for free

What Are Direct Suggestions and When To Use Them?

Mike Mandel, world-renowned hypnotist, defines direct suggestion as “powerful, punchy, short directions or suggestions that your subject’s unconscious mind can use to make change”.

The time to use a direct hypnotic suggestion is after you’ve already hypnotized a person. Therefore, a direct suggestion is not the same as a direct instruction. 

If you’re hypnotizing someone and you want their eyes closed to facilitate the hypnotic induction, you simply say “Close your eyes”.

This is not the time to say something like “Your eyes are getting so heavy and tired”. It’s not natural, and your client will likely be thinking to themselves, “No, that’s not happening at all!”

Hypnotize the person first, and then give your hypnotic suggestions. But how do you craft powerful hypnotic suggestions?

How to Craft Direct Hypnotic Suggestions

Once you’ve got a person in hypnosis, it's time to offer them ecological and helpful hypnotic suggestions.

Here are some simple rules to help guide you.

• Make sure they are stated in the positive. Tell the client what will happen, and not what won't happen. Instead of saying “You’ll not going to crave cigarettes anymore”, you’d instead to say something like “You’ll enjoy realizing you can leave cigarettes behind.”
• Keep them short and simple. Shoot for ten words or less. 
• Use your client’s words. If your client says they don’t want to be so tired in the morning, and through questioning, you discover that, instead, they want to wake up “with a ton of energy”, use that exact phrase to craft your direct suggestion. It works a lot better, and it makes your life much easier! (Read: The Metaphor Model - How To Use Clean Language for Powerful Transformations).
• Use the Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic systems. Instead of focusing just one of these modalities (e.g. repeating to your client what they'll see in the future), use all three of them. What will they see, hear and feel? When you do this, you’ll be repeating the same suggestion several times, in several different ways. This adds power to your suggestion, because your client's mind will choose the modality they identify with the most (Read: All About NLP Submodalities (And How To Use Them)).

Some Examples of Direct Hypnotic Suggestion

Mike suggests the following examples of direct suggestions a make-believe client with insomnia.

1. You can fall asleep easily.
2. It's easy to sleep soundly through the night.
3. You can notice you will wake up tomorrow feeling rested and refreshed.

Inner secret: Notice how the power of these suggestions can be increased by delivering them as embedded commands.

And here are more three examples that Chris Thompson suggests for an hypothetical client who wants to become more healthy and fit.

1. From now on, exercise will become exciting and fun.
2. You’ll feel amazing after every workout.
3. When you look in the mirror, you’ll remember you love exercise.

Moving Beyond Direct Suggestion

All kinds of tools can be combined with direct suggestions. We always recommend that you use direct suggestion in every hypnosis session, but you can (and should) do other kinds of hypnotic interventions alongside direct suggestion.

You might use NLP timeline work or other NLP concepts such as dissociation and submodality work (Watch: What is NLP and Why You Should Learn It).

Maybe you'll use guided imagery, or Mike Mandel’s MINDSCAPING. You could be doing ego state work, or regression to cause. There are so many hypnotic tools you can stack together to construct the perfect client session.

If you think of a hypnotic trance as a container, the change work goes inside that container. Direct suggestions are one type of change work, but there are many more you can use.

That's why, if you want to take your skills to the next level, you should definetey check out the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy (MMHA), because it’s absolutely free to get started.

Click here to get started at the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy.