It’s true; the school district where you live has hired a hypnotist to work with your child each day. Each day, the hypnotist will supply suggestions to your child that will stay with them for the rest of their life. In fact, after your child comes home from school tomorrow, they will be greeted by a hypnotist upon their arrival. Confused?

The hypnotist at school I’m referring to is your child’s teacher. The hypnotist they will work with at home is YOU.

Perhaps the most interesting discovery for me, 11 years ago, when I was getting my initial hypnosis training in at the Hypnosis Training Institute of San Diego, was every word we speak works very much like hypnosis. In fact, you could argue that it IS hypnosis.

Every utterance by a teacher or parent plants a suggestion, if you will, in the mind of a child. It does not require any training at all to become a hypnotist. In fact, as a child, the moment you have learned to speak you are now on your way to planting suggestions in the minds of those you speak to.

If you are speaking, you can’t NOT suggest ideas to others. Yes, everyone is a hypnotist. However, there are great hypnotists, and, then there are “mind poison” hypnotists. The great ones have usually had formal training. The “mind poison” hypnotists have not; they just say anything that comes to mind, and probably think hypnotic communication is a “sham”.

I’ll address one of the most common language patterns misused by parents and teachers ( most of them having wonderful intentions.) It’s the pattern of negation.

Negation, by definition, is when I use words like “Don’t” and “can’t” in the following way: “Johnny, don’t worry about tomorrow!” The unconscious mind doe not process negation. What the unconscious mind hears is “worry about tomorrow!”

Skeptical? Okay, try this out. I’d like you to imagine a cat NOT chasing a mouse. Just take a moment and do this.

Now, if you attempted to imagine a cat NOT chasing a mouse, you likely experienced something along the lines of first picturing a cat CHASING a mouse, and then “crossing it out” or indicating to yourself, somehow that this is NOT what happened.

See, in truth, there is no such thing as a cat NOT chasing a mouse. There is either the experience of a cat CHASING a mouse. Or, there is a cat and a mouse occupying a relatively similar area in time and space, but doing OTHER things instead.

So, if I wanted to plant the suggestion that the cat was NOT chasing the mouse, I might say “The cat slept lazily while the mouse nibbled on corn some 10 feet away.

Let’s look at some of the suggestions people unknowingly “plant” in the mind of children by using negation.

“Johnny, don’t slam the door” (In order to know what he’s NOT supposed to do, he first has to imagine slamming the door, and then “scratch” that out.

“Jimmy, don’t push Jane!

“Jane, don’t eat with your mouth open!”

“Sally, don’t slouch in your chair!”

“Mike, don’t leave your socks on the bed!”

In each of these examples, not only have we forced the child to have to create an image of the very experience we don’t want, but we have also left the child with no instruction whatsoever, about what we DO want instead.

When getting ready to tell a child what you DON’T want, STOP, and first consider what you DO want; what do you want them to do instead?

Let’s go back through the above examples and phrase the request for each child differently.
“Jimmy, keep your hands at your sides!”

“Jane, please keep your mouth closed when chewing”

“Sally, sit up straight and tall in your chair”

“Mike, please put your socks in the top drawer”

Now there is no room for confusion. In each statement we have included instructions for what we DO want them to do, and they no longer have to first sort through an image of what we don’t want, and then, through the process of deduction, try and decide what we DO want.

There’s one more important thing to consider about negation. You’ve no doubt heard the examples of people who simply imagined shooting free throws with a basketball, and when they actually went back to play a few days later, they had improved at the same rate as those who actually practiced with the ball. In some cases they had improved more than the others. In short, when we imagine doing something over and over in our mind, we are conditioning our nervous system to be able to more easily and effectively do that behavior in the future.

When we use negation, we are causing children to engage in a visualization exercise. “Johnny, don’t slam the door!” Since Johnny first( at the unconscious level) has to represent what slamming the door looks like, each time we tell him “DON’T Slam the Door”, he is getting his nervous system even more prepared to repeat the behavior by “practicing” it in his mind.

There are useful ways to use the negation pattern, but I’ll cover that some time in the future. For now, realize the power that you and the other folks in your child’s life have to shape their future with simple words.

Remember, if you have been using the patterns in a negative way (and almost everyone has been) realize it simply means that you didn’t know the consequences of doing so, and, didn’t know what to do instead. People are always doing the best they can based on their current level of knowledge. Some people are simply satisfied with forever remaining the way they are, and other are constantly choosing to evolve to the next level. If you’ve read this far, it’s clear you are someone who chooses to continually learn and grow. My hat’s off to you.

If you found this article helpful, I’d love to know. One future book project I have is a book that discusses the countless language patterns that have a hypnotic like impact on children, and how to use them in positive and constructive ways.

Thanks to Mr. Vincent Harris for his contribution to the Warrior Of Success Blog.

© Copyright 2009-Vincent Harris-All Rights Reserved