I’ve been helping a client of mine who is changing career. He is switching from his own business and into IT consultancy. I always work on the assumption that activity = results. He has been working really hard on qualifications and applying for jobs. Anyway, this week he updated me to let me know that he had attended three interviews and been offered all three jobs. Wow! That is some achievement given the current climate and competition for work.

I asked him what he felt contributed towards getting these results. He told me that it was absolutely related to the coaching and down to two key ingredients. The first was taking lots of action to work towards his goal (activity = results) supported by the accountability provided the coaching. The second ingredient was the language he used in the interviews.

I did promise to introduce more NLP techniques into these newsletters. A very big part of NLP is communication and effective use of language. Let me introduce one of the hypnotic language patterns we prepared in the coaching to help him out. The language pattern is called an “embedded command”, which forms part of a larger sentence. The idea is to subtly plant a command into a sentence. An example in an interview situation might be:

“…and if you get to the stage where you feel like it is the right thing to hire me I will need a few weeks notice before I can start…”

Get the idea? The command is shown in bold and underlined. If the person doing the interview is thinking about hiring you this will just motivate them further. I always find that it helps to adjust tone, volume or body language during the command to emphasise it.  You need to be subtle with this stuff. It helps to wrap the command up deeply into several other sentences or stories you may be telling as this will help open up the recipient’s unconscious mind.

Something else that my client used to help persuade those interviewing him was to plant embedded commands into questions. Here’s another example:

“If you want to hire me and feel that I will benefit your organisation where do you think I could add the most value?”

Now….I am not suggesting that embedding a few commands is going to get you your dream job every time. However, it is a very useful tool that helps persuade and motivate people in all sorts of situations.

I find the best thing to do with this kind of stuff is to write a few examples and practise them. You must be subtle in order for them to go undetected by the conscious mind. I spent two hours or so over the weekend studying this stuff and I’ve been using it for ages. Again, activity = results. You do need to keep practising it over and over again before it starts to become natural and feels like the right thing to do.

Some people question the ethics surrounding using hypnotic language. The truth is that if it is used with positive intent in order to support people then it really will create lasting change. If you are interested in this kind of stuff please keep reading my blog and twitter pages.