Richard Bandler, co-creator of NLP, speaks of tonality in a manner very similar to this:

He points at his nose while speaking in a very nasal tonality and says, “This is your nose.”

Then he points at his throat, shifts his tonality downwards and says, “this is your throat.”

He continues by pointing to his chest, and lowering his tonality further says, “This is your chest.”

Finally he lowers his tonality still further and points to his stomach and says “this is your stomach.”

He goes on to suggest that more you learn to speak from your belly and not from your nose, the more money you’ll earn, the more people you’ll influence and the more successful you’ll be.

It’s a bit of a conundrum to write about a subject that writing is inadequate to really express. Vocal tonality is of far greater importance to communication that the specific word choices, and yet we’ve spent the last 50 posts or so talking about the word choices. Ironic, eh? I’m sure you’re aware of this and that I’m preaching to the choir here, but on the off chance that someone out there will find this beneficial, I’m going to dedicate some post space here at doug obrien’s blog to writing about something that is paramount to effective communication and, particularly, hypnotic communication, vocal tonality.

Now, I’m not saying you will fail miserably as a hypnotist if you have bad tonality, I’m simply saying that the better your tonality is, the better you will be as a communicator.

Milton Erickson had a great hypnotic tonality. The way Milton spoke, the actual sound of his voice, was a bit unusual. Probably as a result of his polio, his enunciation was a little less than crisp. His tonality had a bit of an airy quality and was just slightly raspy. When you combine that with the slower tempo (rate of speed) and the rhythm we talked about last week, it’s a pretty sure formula for trance.

Turns out, it wasn’t all just happenstance.

Interestingly, on one of the audio recordings of Milton delivering a lecture you can hear how he purposely employed that tonality. In the first part of the lecture he’s addressing a group of people from up on a stage and his manner of speech is unusual but not terribly trancy. At one point he notices that one of the people in the audience has dropped off a little bit into trance and he decides to utilize the opportunity. It’s wonderful to hear how he shifts gears and starts speaking in shorter, rhythmic phrases with a slower, slightly deeper tone and adds more of that raspy, airy quality into his voice. He was doing it on purpose!

A number of years ago I was taking a class in tantra and chi kung from Dr. Gunther Weil and Rylan Malone. At one point in the class Dr. Weil described how, in Chinese traditional healing, there were different sounds that were healing to different parts of the body. He called them the six Daoist healing sounds. Now, I don’t remember all six different sounds or what different parts they related to, but I was struck by one thing he said. He said the the healing sound for the kidney system was kind of an airy, raspy quality and it was naturally very trance inducing. He even mentioned Milton Erickson’s voice as an example!

Now, of course, everyone is different and we get used to different tonalitys as being comforting or authoritative, or truthful or whatever. Like Sam Waterston on those TD bank commercials or Walter Cronkite back in the day. But whatever your natural tonality may be, you can refine and improve your trance tonality. One way to practice is to imitate people’s trance tonalitys that appeal to you. Record yourself and listen back to your efforts. Another thing you can do is imagine that it’s late at night and you’re reading a bed time story to a child, naturally softening your voice, speaking in a reassuring manner with a relaxed, gentle pace based on the rate of the child’s breathing.

However you do it, make a point to being more and more tuned to your own tonality. The effort will pay off in spades.

Sometimes I’m amazed at the parallels between Ericksonian Hypnosis/Psychotherapy and Buddhist teachings I’ve read.

I was reminded of one such parallel recently.

A month or so ago I broke my right arm. Or at least I thought I did. The late night emergency room folks in Topeka, Kansas were very nice and very professional but there was no radiologist or orthopedist around who could definitively read the x-ray. So, they put me in a cast, just to be safe.

Well, I don’t live in Topeka, Kansas. I was on the road doing these hypnosis road shows I do for weight loss or quitting smoking. We left the next morning for Witchita. Long story short, it was 10 days before I could get in to see an orthopedist back in Brooklyn and to finally get it properly diagnosed as not broken, “just” a bone bruise. How great that moment was when the cast was removed and I was set free!

It reminded me of a video I once watched of Erickson working with this woman. Midway through the trance, they were talking, and Erickson asked her if she had a toothache. She said no. Erickson said “Isn’t that nice?”

In the book, “Peace is Every Step,” Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes: “When I have a toothache, I discover that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing.”

Ever get a paper cut or something and realize just how often you use that finger?

So often, however, we take for granted the absence of pain and discomfort.  What if we stopped to appreciate how fortunate we are?

I mean jeepers, think about it. Imagine if the richest person on earth was dying of cancer or something. What might you hear them say? “I’d give ANYTHING to be pain free. Anything to spend another day with my love. Anything to watch another sunrise.”

Well we get to do those things for free. It doesn’t cost us a billion dollars. Life’s actually pretty darn wonderful most of the time. When you stop to think about it.

Here’s another quote from Thich Nhat Hanh:

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”

Sounds like Milton to me.

A lot goes into a decent trance induction but it really is not necessary to put in every language pattern you’ve ever learned. Here at doug o’brien’s blog - in the past year or so - we’ve examined many language patterns that can be useful in hypnotic communication. However, it is not necessary to use them all in one go. You can use ONE or TWO in a given trance induction and that might be plenty.

It is often more useful to focus on HOW you say what you say.

One of the most important pieces of hypnotic communication is RHYTHM. Have you ever noticed that repetitious rhythms are hypnotic… like “trance” music, or African drumming, or the sound of ocean waves? So if you can find a good, slower than normal, vocal rhythm while delivering your trance induction, it’ll do 90% of what you want to accomplish.

A GREAT WAY to do this is to speak only when your client is exhaling. Watch them and speak only on their exhale.

If you speak only on your client’s exhalation, not only do you pace them exquisitely and maintain a deep sense of rapport, you also create a natural rhythm to your delivery. This rhythm is a great, perhaps the best, other-than-conscious trance inducer. Moreover it provides you, the speaker, with wonderful opportunities for using your verbal skills, punctuational ambiguities, phonological ambiguities, embedded commands, creative use of conjunctions, etc., etc., etc.

This following is not meant to be a great or exhaustive example of the art of language patterns, but simply to demonstrate the rhythmic aspects of the delivery. Imagine that this is being said to a person in a trance who is breathing in nice slow breaths. Imagine speaking the words on each line as they exhale. Imagine being silent for a few beats between each line while they inhale.

And as you drift even deeper
and deeper into that nice,
comfortable
trance… state…  of
awareness becomes focused
on that growing sensation in
one . . . of your hands or
two . . .
three . . . drifting
four . . . you know that
five . . . this is that same feeling
you know,
you know so well    you feel
so comfortable feeling this feeling
of comfort
of ease    because
you know it’s    you’re feeling
in trance, aren’t you?
already enjoying the process
of learning even while
you may not even know
what it is that
you are learning , yet
you are and    that
is nice to know, isn’t it
all right to let go and let
you’re unconscious
mind take care of that
for you    now
even as your conscious mind
continues drifting unconsciously
That’s all right…. (etc.)

Story goes that April 1st, several centuries ago, was the day celebrated as the New Year.

Then, at some point, the Christian Church decided to change the date to make it more Christian somehow, so it was decreed that the new year was now January first.

But news traveled slowly back then so there were some areas that didn’t adapt as quickly as others. Apparently, France was chief among them (note the Fleur de Lis in the symbol above) so these April revelers became known as April Fools.

So, Happy New Year to all.

Seriously.