The Hypnotic

Storytelling Checklist

By Dr. Steve G. Jones

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! .1Copyright Statbrook Associates

Welcome to the Hypnotic Storytelling Checklist.

One of the easiest ways to engage, influence, persuade, hypnotize and communicate with people is by telling stories.

The human mind is hard wired to listen to a good story.

Armed with this knowledge you can take your communication skills to the next level.

There is a science to telling “hypnotic stories” though.

This checklist will ensure that you are fully equipped to provide your audience with the best storytelling experience possible:

1. Aims & Purpose - What is the main purpose of telling your story? What are your other aims apart from the central objective? These preliminary elements have to be crystal clear before engaging your subject or audience with your story.

Without a clear purpose in mind, you will lack the necessary confidence needed to convince everyone that your story is believable and they should comply with the inner message that the story contains.

Conviction and confidence are the result of adequate planning and having a very clear idea of what you want to accomplish with storytelling.

2. Subject/Audience – How well do you know your audience? The biggest mistake that a hypnotic influencer can make when he/she is about to share a powerful story with other is failing to take into account the desires, needs and motivations of the recipients of the story.

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Remember: you are creating stories to motivate other people to agree with you. You are not creating stories to please yourself or your friends. You may have a great narrative but without knowing much about your audience, your story may end up falling on deaf ears.

Reach out to your subject or audience beforehand to get a feel of what they want to hear from you. You can adjust your story to fit the needs of the situation, always remember that!

3. Core Personal Experience – What is the core personal experience driving your story forward?

When a hypnotic influencer decides to share a story (whether fictional or drawn from real life), the reason is usually because of an important, core experience that changed how the influencer or thought or behaved at a certain point in time.

Look back at your own story and think: what is the core experience that is fueling your passion to tell this story? Use that as further motivation to make the storytelling a success.

You need to know yourself well before you can go out and motivate and persuade others. You have to reconcile these fragile connections if you want to be as confident and genuine as possible when reaching out to your subject/audience.

4. Core Message – What is your core message for the people who will listen to your story? Your message has to be clear, understandable and most of all, actionable.

If you want people to change or to implement a particular plan of action, you need to make your message as clear as the day. There has to be a sequence of steps implicit in the story so people will understand immediately how they can take action, too.

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Also, don’t forget to perform a “litmus paper test” on your story. You have to modify your core message if your story is an essentially negative one.

Again, this is done to avoid rejection of your message as people can be very defensive of their values and beliefs. People should see your story as a positive motivation to achieve something more in life and not as a command to drop their old beliefs in favor of your beliefs.

5. Powerful Opening – Is your opening powerful enough to induce a hypnotic trance? A powerful opening can silence a crowd with anticipation and excitement.

Also, it helps if you don’t give away too many details in the opening of your story because withholding information and dropping vague statements are actually excellent ways to induce a hypnotic trance on a person or in a whole group of people.

Strategic vagueness has always been in the classical repertoire of clinical hypnotherapists because the human mind automatically tries to fill in the “missing piece of the puzzle”.

A vague statement such as “this man lost everything and used his learnings to build a massive, multi-million dollar empire” is sufficient to catch the attention of many individuals because of its catchiness and the missing information, which people will be interested to know.

!6. Hero & Characters – Is your hero ready to be presented to the audience? Like an actor, your hero needs to ‘rehearse’ for his/her role in the story. How familiar are you with the character that you

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will be presenting in the story? Can you make adjustments to the dialogue if you need to?

You also need to review the plot strands and dialogues. You have to be able to deliver equal power throughout the story so your audience will be hooked from start to finish. Once you have established that high energy at the beginning, be sure to do everything to sustain it until the very end.

7. Paring Down – What needs to go in your story? This might be surprising since we have spent a considerable amount of time building up your story from scratch. However, a good story contains all the vital elements and no unnecessary sections or junctures.

To see if your story needs to be pared down for clarity, write down a section by section summary of your narrative.

Examine it and ask yourself: what can I remove to make the whole story clearer and more insightful? Additional details can cloud your story, making ‘digestion’ of the facts more difficult.

Once you have removed the unnecessary junctures in your tale, read your story again. Are you satisfied and happy with the result? If you are, move on to the next item!

8. Emotional Content – Your story needs to trigger the right emotions in your audience and at the right time. If your emotional triggers come out flat, you’re going to lose your audience’s interest very early in the storytelling session.

To test if your story has what it takes to make people smile, laugh or even worry, share your story with close friends and family and see how they react to it.

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If you can share your story with complete strangers or at least, an objective analyst, that would be a much better way to ascertain the effectiveness of what you’ve created.

If not, share your story with at least one person that you are comfortable with and pay close attention to that person’s spoken and unspoken feedback to your tale.

9. Sensory Engagement – A powerful story needs to be able to make its narrator disappear into thin air.

Again, this can be accomplished by using a diverse set of mental images that will appeal to the different senses, not just the sense of sight. Remember the acronym VAKOG: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory.

10. Veracity – How truthful is your story? If you want your audience to believe in your story and in the embedded message, you need to be truth to your audience, too.

Your story has to represent an undeniable truth that you can back up with data or at least, personal experiences. You must not confabulate any facts just to make your story interesting or more believable. If you do this and are discovered, you will be seen as manipulative and untrustworthy.

Congratulations!

You now know the key elements involved in creating a hypnotic story.

But here’s the thing..

You can’t just walk up to people and start telling them stories.

You have to first “open” with a good conversation.

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Now let me ask you…

Would You Like To Learn How You Can Set The Stage For Your Story

Using My Proven Hypnotic Conversation Openers?

!Click Here To Learn More

Talk soon,

Dr. Steve G. Jones

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! .7Copyright Statbrook Associates