SHARM 4 Audio Recording Software

Title: SHARM 4

Producer: Cyberteam Ltd.

Format: Audio Recording Software

Source: www.thesharm.com

Price: $229 (Pro Edition); $299 (Studio Edition)

Rating: Good (four stars out of five)

When I was a teenager, I learned to drive in my father's ancient Cadillac. (Don't think we were rich. It was ancient when he bought it, and I'd swear it spent more time in the shop than on the street.) It handled like a boat and took up three-quarters of any road—though it was fun on dates.

Then I got my own car, an equally ancient VW Beetle held together with chewing gum and bailing wire. Well, not literally, but there really was a rubber-band attached to the engine; I'm not making that up. It handled fairly well and could go from zero to sixty in half an hour with a downward slope and a good tailwind.

On one of my college breaks, a buddy of mine pulled up to my dad's house in a muscle car he'd borrowed from a rich cousin—and he asked if I wanted to drive it.

What a thrill it was. I felt as though all the sluggishness and boat-like handling had been a bad dream; now I was driving the real thing!

And that leads me to today's review. After years of using Audacity to record and edit hypnosis sessions, using SHARM 4 feels like driving a muscle car.

This software package is designed to handle all of a hypnosis practitioner's audio needs. It has a fairly impressive list of features:

Record

Live Record

Export to MP3 or CD

Sample Sessions and Suggestions

Pre-loaded Music and Nature Sounds

Import Your Own Music and Audio Files

Ambient Music Creator

Binaurals (and other BWE sounds)

Bilaterals

White/Pink Noise

Breath Patterns

Heartbeat Sounds

Sound Editing

Sound Effects

Print Transcript

Store Session Notes

SHARM is really designed to be used in two ways. The first approach is for a hypnotist to carefully create a professional recording to give to clients or sell to customers, and the second is to use it during a session, not only to provide background music effects, but also to record so that the client can take the session home for reinforcement.

My feeling is that I love it for the first purpose and am not sold on the second one.

SHARM opens with a tutorial screen that is supplemented by extensive online videos and prompt tech support when you need it. I especially appreciated the way that the Help feature responds to anything I click. While I'm pretty good at figuring out software, SHARM made the learning curve quick and painless.

You can record directly into SHARM—it even has a teleprompter—or easily import an mp3 of suggestions and visualizations you have recorded elsewhere. For that matter, if you don't like your own voice or lack a microphone, SHARM has a library of pre-recorded suggestions; you can choose between a deep, male voice or an even more pleasant woman's voice. Though I'm not fond of the declarative suggestion style ("Your muscles are relaxing"), I can see how these could be useful for putting together a quick session.

I tested the record function using the fairly cheap USB headset I keep for Skype sessions. With a little bit of enhancement and a touch of reverb, it sounded like the Voice of God. Even though Audacity has those effects (and many more), hours of fiddling with Audacity never made my voice sound as good as it did after thirty seconds of playing with SHARM. Sure, there are only four effects—but honestly, you don't need more.

After laying down the suggestions, then I started looking at possibilities for backgrounds. Again, there's just enough choices to give lots of options without overwhelming. Need background music? SHARM has a library of royalty-free music. Don't like that music? SHARM has an ambient music generator. Don't like the generated music? You can import your own. Want nature sounds? SHARM'S got 'em. Do you prefer white noise, or pink? SHARM not only generates the noise but lets you edit to your liking. Would you like the sound of a heartbeat or a breathing pattern, gradually slowing or increasing? You've got it in just a few clicks. Looking for bells and whistles? SHARM literally has bells—and gongs, Tibetan singing bowls, marimbas . . . (No shaman drums, but nobody's perfect.)

Perhaps you're into brainwave entrainment—SHARM lets you generate binaurals, monaurals, and isochronics and edit them in a number of fascinating ways, changing not only the entrainment tones but the carrier frequencies as well. In fact, every sound you put into SHARM can be edited in several parameters, and each parameter can be edited in several ways. I particularly like that virtually any parameter can be determined on a graph, so that you can, for example, have an isochronic beat gradually slow down during the induction, maintain a slow pace during the suggestions, and then accelerate during the return. Best of all, you can cut and paste graphs between parameters, so that several different sounds can follow the same pattern. It's simple but powerful.

Perhaps my favorite cool effect is the bilateral function. I'll talk more about bilateral stimulation and brainwave entrainment in an upcoming article, but very briefly, bilateral stimulation is what's behind EMDR, and I believe it's the overlooked element in the old pocket watch inductions. However, it doesn't have to be visual; auditory bilateral stimulation—basically switching a sound back and forth from one ear to the other—is a trance-inducing enhancement that's very effective. And SHARM lets you apply a bilateral filter to ANY sound: an entrainment tone, a babbling brook, bird song, white noise, a heartbeat, music, your voice . . . And of course, that filter is fully editable.

As a test project, I made a session for a friend of mine, who commented, "I love the way that the river sound kept moving around me . . . " I'm looking forward to creating a dual induction in which the two voices switch sides. Heck, when playing around with the brainwave entrainment and bilateral features, I tranced myself out several times. This is by far the program's best feature.

Can I gripe about SHARM? Hey, as my father used to say, any job worth doing is worth complaining about, and there are some little things about SHARM I don't like. (And I'm not even counting how many times I've had to use Caps Lock during this review.)

While the interface looks appealing, it occasionally can become problematic. I found the playback overload meter to be a thoughtful inclusion, but the lack of an absolute playback counter really bugged me, as did the absence of one-click muting and soloing for tracks. I also want a one-click "Delete All" in the Stage Editor. I very much want Ctrl-Z to work the way it does in every other Windows-based program.

There are a few features I found too simplistic or cumbersome to rely on. The audio editing feature, which is kind of a program within a program, is one of them; I quickly went back to using Audacity to edit individual elements, even though there are a few ways in which the SHARM audio editor is superior.

Likewise, while the program is designed with the idea that a hypnosis practitioner can use it during live sessions with a client, I don't think I'll ever be doing that for several reasons. One is simple latency: When I speak into the mic, the playback is delayed just enough to make it very hard to concentrate. So without spending a lot of money on a really fast computer, the latency is going to make that feature untenable. Sure, I could not wear headphones or silence the playback, but then it's really hard to balance the volume of my voice and the background sounds. (Admittedly, this is a problem with every software package of this type, not just SHARM.)

Even so, the Live Record feature is such that as soon as you start recording, you start a new track—with all of the default settings for effects (i.e. no effects). Now, part of what I love about a program like this is being able to apply and tweak the effects on my voice—but if I want to do that, then I have to start the live recording, spend a couple of minutes getting the effects to the Goldilocks point, and then start working with my client. Can you say "awkward waste of my client's time"? Of course, there's no way to cut out that initial goofing around stage in the recording I'll be giving my client—not without having to mess with Audacity for a while—nor is there any way to change the default settings for the live voice recording.

Now, suppose I'm in the middle of a session, and I decide to say, "Walk over to a waterfall." (I don't know about you, but I improvise quite a bit during sessions.) It seems that a cool program like SHARM would let me bring in a waterfall sound effect, right? Nope. Once you are making a live recording, you can't add anything.

Now at the end of the live recording, you get your options for rendering the final product: you can save it as an mp3 and/or burn it to a CD. The CD burning process is fast and smooth, but that's about the only good thing I can say about it. Even though SHARM creates a temporary WAV file in the CD creation process, you don't have the option of saving the recording as a WAV. But hey, at least you don't have to download a separate LAME encoder plug-in so that you can make an mp3, nor do you have to use a separate program to burn a CD. (By the way, when I say a "LAME encoder," I'm not making an adolescent value judgment; that's what the encoder is called!)

And the program gives you the option of burning a second CD immediately—but then the option is gone forever. In fact, your live SHARM session is lost forever as soon as you click stop; it exists only as an mp3. You have to import the mp3 and then export that session to burn another CD later, for instance, if your client comes back the next week and says, "My dog ate the CD you gave me." If your client says, "The background music was a little too loud for me to follow your voice," then all you can say is, "Too bad; there's no way to change that now."

Suffice it to say that I found the live recording function to be a bit LAME. (That was an adolescent value judgment.)

So, where do I stand when it comes to SHARM?

If you're looking for a great way to record live sessions, I'm not convinced that SHARM is it. (In all fairness, I haven't found a software package that is. In later reviews, I'll talk about some hardware solutions.)

However, if your goal is to easily create professional-quality recordings with all the bells and whistles, SHARM is a must-have program.

In fact, from now on, my process for creating professional recordings is this: record my voice tracks on my ZOOM H2 Handy Digital Recorder (review forthcoming), do a quick edit in Audacity, and then enjoy creating the final product with all the cool sounds, effects, brainwave entrainment, and so on in SHARM. I suppose if I had a good enough PC microphone, I would skip the H2 and record my voice tracks directly into SHARM or Audacity.

(Another reason I choose SHARM for this purpose is it has a reasonable licensing agreement that allows the professional to use recordings created with the software in any way desired. Upcoming reviews will show that's not the case for certain other software packages.)

Compared to a free program like Audacity, SHARM might seem expensive, but compared to any other product on the market that has similar features, SHARM is a sports car at an economy price. If you want to easily make recordings that go beyond the basics, SHARM's functionality, ease of use, excellent tech support, and reasonable licensing make it a good investment, even for the bootstrapping hypnotist.

Full Disclosure: The makers of SHARM were kind enough to provide a full copy of the software for review.

What's on the Horizon for Real Hypnosis Reviews

Full Confession Here: I love gadgets.

I'm not really a tech dude. Hey, I'm a liberal arts major. But I went through a period in my childhood when I took apart all my battery-operated toys, extracted the wires, motors, and lights, and built new toys out of them. Gadgets are cool.

Up to this point, it's been my pleasure to give you the good, the bad, and the ugly details regarding hypnosis DVDs, CDs, books, and webinars, and I'm honored that many of my loyal readers keep coming back for my honest, unbiased opinions.  So don't worry, I plan to keep right on telling you about these same types of products. There's a big stack of them in the pipeline.

At the same time, I've decided to indulge my love of gadgets and expand this blog with a series that addresses one of the perennial questions:

What kind of equipment would be helpful in my hypnosis office?

Over and over, this question comes up on Hypnothoughts and other forums. For that reason—and my love of gadgets—I've decided to initiate the Real Hypnosis Reviews Tech Series.

Through the next year, we'll be looking at a wide range of products with a variety of applications—some overlapping, some completely disparate. As long as someone thinks it has a place in a hypnosis office, we'll be taking a look at it.

One of the most basic applications of technology in the hypnosis office is the ability to record a session for a client to take home. After all, repetition can be the key to a client's success. So we'll be examining several different solutions, ranging from smart phone apps to full-fledged sound systems.

Speaking of sound systems, probably the next most popular role of tech in the hypnotorium—do you like that word? I stole it!—is to mix the hypnotist's voice with music and nature sounds, and pipe it all into some headphones for the client to hear. Of course, if you're going to that much trouble, you'll probably want the recording your client takes home to be as pretty as what you piped into the headphones, so there's some overlap with the first application here.

Now, once you've put headphones on a client, you can start getting really fancy: binaural beats, bilateral stimulation, and other nifty forms of auditory brainwave entrainment are at your fingertips.

(If those terms sound foreign, don't fret. I'll be providing a brief primer on brainwave entrainment as part of the series. See how nice I am?)

Having opened the Pandora's box of brainwave entrainment, you might then wonder how much further you can go with that. The answer is literally right in front of your eyes: photic stimulation, aka flashy, blinky light goggles. Hated by some hypnotists and adored by others, light & sound machines, how (or whether) they fit in a hypnosis office, and all the ins and outs of using them will be part of this Tech Series.

But it's not all hardware. There are a lot of software solutions for hypnotists, whether your goal is make simple audio recordings or fancy brainwave entrainment products. In the Tech Series, you'll get the details on where to spend your money and when to take a pass.

Now as hypnotists, we're in the business of helping our clients change, so it's sometimes helpful to show them concrete evidence of physiological change happening. For that reason, some hypnotists use simple bio- and neuro-feedback devices as powerful convincers, and we'll be looking at a few of those as well.

And that's just a few of the categories the Tech Series will examine. If you have any thoughts or want to nominate any products for review, drop me a line.

There are a few things I won't be reviewing in this series: products that you can't ship to the United States, and products by companies that ignored my request for permission to review. So if your product gets left out of  the spotlight, that's why.

While price generally hasn't been a major factor in my book and DVD reviews, when it comes to technology, we're in a completely different financial category. For that reason, these reviews are going to look at all products from two viewpoints: that of the financially successful hypnotist, with a practice that has reached "cruising altitude"; and that of the hypnotist who is just starting out and most likely "bootstrapping" their business and squeezing every penny. I even plan to include some special reports and tips for the bootstrapper.

A final word:

Every time a hypnotist talks about or shows off the cool gadgets in their office, someone comes along and says, "You don't need all that to do hypnosis!"

And that's true.

You don't need headphones, a microphone, background music, a computer, software, binaural beats, bilateral stimulation, light goggles, and so on to do effective hypnosis.

Then again, you don't need a comfy chair or an office to do hypnosis either. The first time I helped someone release a major phobia, we were sitting in camp chairs backstage at a renaissance festival with people walking around and all manner of chaos and distractions. Come to think of it, the chairs were optional; though it would have become uncomfortable, we could have done the whole session standing up.

Still, given the choice, I'd much rather sit a client down in my nice comfy office, dim the lights, turn on the massage function of the zero-gravity recliner, and talk to them through headphones while layering my equalized, enhanced voice over soothing music, nature sounds, and entrainment tones.

I don't need all that stuff, but it sure is nice to have it.

Besides, I love gadgets.

See you in the next review.

Hypnosis for Smoking Cessation: The Step-by-Step Guide to Doing Hypnosis for Tobacco Users

Title: Hypnosis for Smoking Cessation: The Step-by-Step Guide to Doing Hypnosis for Tobacco Users

Author: Richard Nongard

Format: webinar/video on demand

Source: Subliminal Science Website

Price: $99

Rating: Good (four stars out of five)

Helping people quit smoking is one of the two most popular and well-known uses for hypnosis. In fact, it seems that no matter what I advertise hypnosis for, smokers call me. I suspect that I could walk into a room full of desperate 40-year-old virgins and say, "With hypnosis, I will teach you how to get laid," and one of them would say, "Yes, but can you help me stop smoking?"

In short, it behooves you as a hypnotist to get good at smoking cessation and have several different approaches at your fingertips. Of course, you'll most likely take the best from this strategy or that, but you're still going to want to look at a lot of great ways to do that. So this week, I'm reviewing Richard Nongard's webinar series, Hypnosis for Smoking Cessation: The Step-by-Step Guide to Doing Hypnosis for Tobacco Users.

Everyone agrees that online learning is the wave of the future—but most of us seem pretty unsure of exactly how to make it work well. At first, the idea of a bunch of people meeting online to learn together was new and shiny; until we learned that video conferencing with a dozen or more people can become awkward and boring, easily bogged down as the instructor reads questions from the chat window. On the far end of the scale are the teleseminars that are impersonal and lack that individual attention we enjoy in a live classroom.

In Nongard's various webinar series, he seems to have hit on a formula that has the best of both worlds. The bulk of the instruction is pre-recorded, so it's professionally-shot, well-organized, and carefully-planned—no more staring at an instructor through his webcam while he tries to keep the cat out of the shot. At the same time, Nongard provides individual attention by answering questions in the chatbox during the webinar. At the end of each meeting, he comes on live webcam for about fifteen minutes to address any more complex questions his students may have. Of course, each webinar is supported by the ICBCH forum, where students can ask questions and find resources even months after the webinar ends—and the video is available on demand during and after the webinar, so you can even watch multiple times.

Of course, that information applies to any of Nongard's webinars, but we're here to talk about the Smoking Cessation edition.

Nongard's approach is deceptively simple—based on Acceptance and Commitment Theory, this technique is based on using mindfulness to handle cravings and suggestion to strengthen your client's commitment. Interwoven into that structure is an amazing amount of NLP and indirect suggestion that falls out of Nongard's mouth so naturally that it's easy to miss; I tend to think of him as a very direct operator. The approach does involve some regression, but not in the usual "regress-to-cause" sense; there is no quest for a mysterious Initial Sensitizing Event. Many attendees commented on how good it feels to be freed of that burden.

Likewise, there's no exhaustive effort to break every single trigger the smoker has; as Nongard points out, if you've been smoking for fifty years, life is a trigger. Nonetheless, Nongard does provide a number of usefull direct suggestions to counter cravings, along with several techniques for handling them if they do occur. (After all, even with suggestion, some of your smokers will have cravings, and it's just self-serving ego to refuse to prepare them.)

In the four weeks of videos, Nongard walk you through the whole process, from marketing and pre-talk to induction, formal suggestions, and follow-up sessions. Though of course you can use any induction you like, Nongard teaches his skill-building induction, which is based on the idea that the induction is part of the remedy, not merely something the hypnotist has to get through before the good stuff.

Likewise, he spells out his three-session structure, including how to handle each possibility that can arise: What do you do if the client comes back and is still smoking? What do you do if the client doesn't come to a follow-up? He also covers how to look at the intake questionaires (which he provides for you on the forum) and customize your strategies and suggestions to the individual. He provides a script along with a strategy to use in case you decide to read from it verbatim.

(Personally, I never read verbatim from a script in session; but the important thing is to use the script effectively as a tool, reading it the way a newscaster reads the news, not the way a scared third-grader reads a school assignment aloud.)

In addition to telling you how to market your smoking cessation, Nongard also covers how market and perform group smoking cessation for corporations—a money maker that can quickly cover your investment in the course.

Perhaps one of the best things about this webinar is that Nongard gives you two example sessions. One is ably role-played to show you how a typical session might go. The other is provided as a bonus video, and it's footage of Nongard helping an actual smoker let go of the habit. I know the former smoker in question, by the way, and several years later, he is still smoke-free.

Is there any downside to Nongard's webinars? It may well be that if you watch enough of them, you will begin to finish the teacher's sentences for him; Nongard sees no reason to re-invent the wheel, so his methods often overlap between applications. Still, there are worse things to internalize.

All in all, the Nongard webinars are a good investment. If you may have to deal with a smoker at some point, Hypnosis for Smoking Cessation will give you a great foundation. If you can't wait for the webinar to roll around, that's all right—catch the replay.

Full Disclosure: Richard Nongard is a friend and mentor who has shown a lot of generosity toward me in the past. He did allow me to attend the webinar for review purposes. The link at the beginning of this review is NOT an affiliate link.

The Dave Elman Shorties

Title: The Dave Elman Shorties

Author: Dave Elman Hypnosis Institute

Format: Two CD Set (plus bonus CD)

Source: http://www.daveelmanhypnosisinstitute.com/

Price: $40

Rating: Mixed

Have you ever wished you could go back in time and take a lesson from Dave Elman?

In an earlier post, I commented that watching an interview with Colonel Larry Elman was the closest we could get to going back in time and actually attending one of Dave Elman's classes.

I was wrong. There's an even better way.

Even better than a lecture, have you ever wished you could go back in time and have Dave Elman hypnotize you?

Now you can—with The Dave Elman Shorties from the Dave Elman Hypnosis Institute.

The DEHI represents the work of H. Larry Elman to preserve, honor, and continue his father's legacy as a hypnosis innovator and teacher. According to a pamphlet from the DEHI, it's now been 100 years since Dave Elman first devised his famous induction, which many vocational hypnotists still consider the gold standard for getting clients into somnambulism quickly.

This two-CD set presents rare excerpts of Dave Elman's studio recordings made between 1956 and 1959—originally 33 and 78 rpm records that Elman would sell only to doctors or those with prescriptions—along with commentary from the famous hypnotist's son, H. Larry Elman.

The vintage recordings are delightful—very clear, from both an auditory and a content perspective. Dave Elman and his wife, Pauline, roleplay interactions between doctors and patients, perfectly teaching by modeling; they both sound like 1940s radio stars, which in fact Dave Elman was.

The teaching in the old records is also golden: instructions and advice to doctor hypnotists, variants of well-known inductions, advice on working with children, and lessons in "medical relaxation"—Elman's own attempt to get around the H-word. It's all very engaging, particularly Elman's method for dealing with a "brat" in the doctor's office.

One particularly intriguing short is "The Magic Fairy," an example of Dave Elman combining his hypnotic knowledge and performance background to tell a fairy tale written to teach hypno-anesthesia to children. It's brilliant—and a curious artifact in that it employs a number of methods many hypnotists would label "Ericksonian" today, such as the My Friend John technique.

Indeed, I think that even my readers who aren't crazy about the Elman Induction and despise regression-to-cause—you know who you are—will find a lot of appealing material in Dave Elman's recordings, information that goes beyond Elman's two most famous hallmarks.

Dave Elman was a great performer and engaging speaker, having forged a career as a stage hypnotist, vaudeville trouper, and radio show host. Unfortunately, that flaire for entertainment either didn't get passed down to his son Larry, or years of serving our country in the United States Air Force drained it out of the younger Elman.

It pains me to say this, because I deeply admire the colonel for his knowledge, wisdom, dedication, kindness, integrity, and generosity—but the commentary on the Shorties is dry and dully academic, lacking the production values we've grown to expect from other products the DEHI sells (such as Sean Michael Andrews' videos). At times it drones past the point of being interesting even to a history geek like me. The recording quality of the 2011 commentary—I'm guessing produced at home using Audacity, based on some of the poorly executed noise reduction artifacts—sadly fails to hold up next to 1950s studio recordings. (That is one irony of modern life—anyone can make a recording now, but really doing it well is still something limited to the few who have access to professional studios.)

It is perhaps unfortunate that the younger Elman's dryest delivery comes in the first words of each disc, which contain a stern and forbidding warning about copyright. While I sympathize with his concerns over piracy, a hypnotist of any Elman's stature should know the value of first building rapport before making a suggestion.

Still, from a historical and academic viewpoint, Larry Elman's comments hold a number of brilliant insights. Unlike many hypnotists today who parrot Dave Elman's words as though they were magic spells, Larry Elman engages his critical mind, analyzing every detail of his father's work. This is necessary, as times have changed. What was appropriate and useful for a doctor in the 1950s is often inappropriate and detrimental to a vocational hypnosis practitioner in the twenty-first century. The commentary even discusses innovations and changes in hypnotic practice between the 1950s and now.

I particularly enjoyed Larry Elman's loving discussion of his mother's contributions to Elman hypnosis. He recounts that in addition to playing the role of the patient on all the recordings, Pauline R. Elman attended all of Dave Elman's classes, serving as a teaching assistant, coaching doctors on their form. Indeed, one of the doctors claimed that Pauline was a better teacher than Dave! Her son heartwarmingly recognizes her as a brilliant hypnotist and gives her credit for inventing the "Dave Elman" method of getting clients into the Esdaile state.

Listening to Dave Elman role-play a physician fills me with wistfulness for a simpler time, when general practitioners had enough time to teach self-hypnosis to their patients, the AMA was recommending that doctors learn hypnosis, and prescriptions for "medical relaxation" recordings kept young Larry Elman busy putting records in the mail.

At the beginning of this review, I asked if you'd ever wished you could experience what it would be like for Dave Elman to hypnotize you. Well, I found myself listening to the master's voice, drifting into a nice relaxed state, and then locking my eyelids shut. I had for a moment stepped out of time, and a famous hypnotist's voice had gone with me.

If for nothing else, that's worth the $40 ticket to ride.

Full Disclosure: H. Larry Elman provided a copy of the Shorties and his centennial of the DEI pamplet to me for review. He also generously sent me an inscribed copy of his father's famous book Hypnotherapy to help me rebuild after my office burned down.

Winning without Intimidation by Bob Burg

Title: Winning without Intimidation

Author: Bob Burg

Format: book (also available as an audio book)

Source: www.burg.com

Price: $12 new ($4 used on Amazon)

Rating: Good

When you talk to people who know nothing about hypnosis, they often assume that you can use your amazing hypnotic decoder-ring superpowers to make strangers instantly do whatever you want. And even though most hypnotists won't admit it, when we started studying hypnosis, quite a few of us were hoping that would turn out to be the case.

Well, of course, we know that's not the case. People don't turn into zombies when we snap our fingers, and they don't scurry about doing our bidding. Nonetheless, good application of hypnotic, neurolinguistic, and psychological principles can make you so good at getting strangers to help you that your friends might believe you have superpowers.

On that note, Bob Burg's Winning without Intimidation is a gem of a book for anyone who wants to get things done. The basic premise of Burg's works is that "nice people really do finish first," or perhaps we could phrase it as "the best way to get people to do things for you is to set up a win-win situation." Put succinctly, be kind to others.

Now, that's a pretty basic idea. Be kind and respectful to others, and they're more likely to do what you need or want them to. That idea shouldn't be revolutionary (though the behavior of some people makes me think it might be).

What makes Bob Burg's books so special is that he takes that basic idea—treat others well—and shows his readers how to be extremely good at it.

He also makes it clear that being nice does not mean being a pushover. He explains how he's taken the book's principal ideas—politeness, patience, and persistence—and used them to win even in win-lose situations, such as legal proceedings. In fact, he beautifully illustrates the idea that strength is the ability to turn an enemy into a friend.

Winning without Intimidation is a slender book, ideal for throwing in a backpack, pocket, or briefcase; and it's divided into short, bite-sized chunks, making it the ideal book to read on a bus, subway, or plane, or just in those few minutes when you're waiting for a client to arrive.

Each section details some inventive way to apply the idea that you can get people to do what you need without intimidating them. I've applied many of the ideas in a vast range of situations, but one story about this book is worth repeating.

I was warming up my truck before heading out to see a play in the nearby town of Smithville, Texas; and to pass the time I was reading a few pages of Winning without Intimidation. As I finished the section I was reading, I glanced at the next section's title before putting in the bookmark and driving off: "How to Talk your Way out of a Traffic Ticket."

Well, you can guess what happened. As I pulled into Smithville, flashing lights filled my rearview mirror; the officer informed me I had a headlight out and claimed I'd failed to stop at a stop sign. (It was a Texas rolling stop.)

Anyway, as the officer went back to his car to run my license number, I grabbed Winning without Intimidation off the passenger seat and read the next section at breakneck speed. When the officer returned, I applied what I'd just learned, disarmed the officer with calm politeness, and drove off with a warning instead of a ticket.

I figure that covered the price of the book as well as a number of copies I've bought to give away. Heck, if you buy it used on Amazon, it's practically free, so you might as well grab a few copies to give to clients.

P.S. For a daily dose of Bob Burg philosophy, you can sign up for his blog at www.burg.com.

P.P.S. Newer editions of the book are called The Art of Persuasion: Winning without Intimidation.

Final note: Stay tuned--there are some great products in the review pipeline, including Richard Nongard's Smoking Cessation Webinar Series, vintage recordings of Dave Elman, and a whole series on gadgets in the hypnosis business. Tell your friends!

Influence by Robert Cialidini, PhD

Title: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Author: Robert Cialdini, PhD

Format: Book

Source: Amazon

Price: $12.23 new (also available used and on Kindle)

Rating: Good

While hypnotists are by nature fascinated by hypnosis, it's fair to say that most of us are fascinated by the mind in general, and how to get people to do things specifically. For that reason, I've decided to review one of my favorite books even though it theoretically has nothing to do with hypnosis—rather it falls into the realm of applied social psychology, that is, social influence.

Cialdini is an academic, a college professor who describes himself as being very easy to take advantage of; this quality spurs him to dedicate his life to researching how "compliance professionals" get the rest of us to do what they want, whether it's buying cars, donating to causes, conserving water, or going on dates. He and his research assistants have performed countless experiments in addition to field research—that is, they've gone undercover to be trained in sales and other arts that are all about getting people to do things.

Though Cialdini teaches at a university, his presentation belies the stereotype of the dry, boring college professor. (I'd like to point out in passing that my college experience suggests that stereotype is wildly inaccurate.) The author boils hundreds of "compliance techniques" down to a handful of easily grasped principles of influence and then explores each one in a thorough and engaging fashion.

Influence is explicitly written for the benefit of people who want to arm themselves against compliance professionals. Each chapter has a section at the end on how to guard oneself against the principle of influence under discussion. However, those sections tend to be the weakest part of the book; ultimately, simply being familiar enough with the principles and techniques is the best defense a person can have. Indeed, grasping at straws, Cialdini sometimes ventures into the ridiculous, such as suggesting that we should never give tips to anyone who seeds a tip jar.

Ultimately, Cialdini's work is invaluable to anyone in sales and marketing—which, let's face it, all hypnotists are. Even the few who aren't entrepreneurs having to sell themselves are still in the business of influencing their clients to make change. So Cialdini should be a household name in the hyposis community.

In short, pick up Influence. It's a fun read that will spark your imagination about new ways to improve both your effectiveness and your marketing.


If you don't have time to read, check out Cialdini's lecture videos on YouTube. While not as in-depth as the book, the free videos serve as an excellent introduction or review of his ideas.

Mindfulness and Hypnosis by Michael Yapko

Title: Mindfulness and Hypnosis: The Power of Suggestion to Transform Experience

Author: Michael Yapko, PhD

Format: Book (also available on Kindle)

Source: Amazon

Price: $21

Rating: Excellent

While many of us in the vocational hypnosis community were looking the other way, a technique that involves deep breathing, progressive relaxation, focussed concentration, and a combination of guided and unguided visualization has taken the therapy world by storm. The new buzzword: Mindfulness—which is code for Buddhist meditation, carefully stripped of its spiritual connotations and then put through rigorous testing by the scientific research community. Not surprising to those of us who've been helping clients with these techniques for years, the research has proven what we've known all along: there is substantial benefit to be had from using concentrated attention and suggestion to transform experience.

Fortunately, Michael Yapko was not looking the other way, and in his new book, Mindfulness and Hypnosis, he lays out the parallells between the two techniques. Perhaps because he is writing to an audience familiar with mindfulness but woefully misinformed about hypnosis, he states early in the book that the two techniques are not the same thing.

(This contradicts a comment from an Indian client of mine who'd studied mindfulness meditation as she grew up in Mumbai; upon concluding a hypnosis session, she said to me, "This is exactly the same as meditation!")

However, after that statement, Yapko goes on to show clearly that Guided Mindfulness Meditation (GMM) and hypnosis use essentially the same processes, all depending on the power of suggestion. Yapko provides line-by-line analysis of typical GMM and hypnosis recordings to drive his point home undeniably. He goes on in successive chapters to lay out the similarities to such a degree that I find it hard to maintain the idea that hypnosis and mindfulness are separated by much more than semantics—the dividing line, if there is one, is very, very thin.

The final chapter, however, highlights the difference in a powerful way—demonstrating that hypnosis as it is practiced in modern offices goes one step beyond mindfulness in the service of the client. Yapko makes the excellent point that those who have studied mindfulness can learn from the centuries of research and exploration into the power of suggestion that the hypnosis community can offer. Likewise, he acknowledges that hypnotists can benefit by incorporating techniques of mindfulness into their practice.

Where it might have been tempting to write something divisive—after all, to a hypnotist striving for years to point out the benefits of these approaches, only to see mindfulness greeted like the prodigal son of therapy, a little "I told you so" would be well deserved—Yapko makes his points with brilliant diplomacy, clarity, and warmth.

Though, as I mentioned, Yapko is writing more for an audience of mindfulness advocates than for hypnotists, the book is an essential read for any hypnotist who wants to interact with professionals in our allied disciplines. We need a common vocabulary, and as the rest of the world wakes up to the value of what we've been teaching all along, we need to be able to interface and communicate effectively about the benefits of what we do. Michael Yapko has done us all a great service in writing this book.

Full Disclosure: Though I did not receive a gratis copy of Mindfulness and Hypnosis for review, Dr. Yapko did generously replace my copy of his seminal book, Trancework, when it was destroyed in an office fire last year. Despite my sincere gratitude for his generosity and high regard for his scholarship, I have gone on record elsewhere criticizing other works of his, and we have disagreed privately, so I do not believe that his kindness in any way colored my review of his latest book.

Blueprint of the Dave Elman Induction by H. Larry Elman

Title: Blueprint of the Dave Elman Induction

Author: H. Larry Elman

Format:  Book

Source: http://shop.daveelmanhypnosisinstitute.com/BLUEPRINT-of-the-Dave-Elman-Induction-by-H-Larry-Elman-Blprt-BK.htm

Price:  $13.95 (I received a review copy.)

Rating: Excellent

Well, I've been very busy with my studies at the Hypnosis Practitioner Training Institute, which means that even though I've been reading quite a bit, I haven't had time to post many reviews. Today, I decided to take a little break from studying and jot down my thoughts about a few of the books that have crossed my desk in the last eight months.

Last week, I attended a hypnosis practice meetup where the topic was the Dave Elman Induction, a piece of hypnotic work that may be, after progressive muscle relaxation, the most popular specific induction in modern hypnosis. I know many hypnotists who swear by it, using it with the majority of their clients. So before I went to the meetup, I took Larry Elman's Blueprint of the Dave Elman Induction off my shelf to review the process.

Please note—I said "process." The main reason Larry Elman wrote a book about his father's famous induction is that it is too often presented as a script rather than a process. Even when instructors explain that you may have to alter the wording or repeat steps, they still, almost universally, present it as a series of arbitrary actions with no discussion of why the induction calls for these actions. Indeed, some instructors I admire greatly refuse to teach the Elman Induction because they object to certain details in it—the touching or the eye catalepsy, for instance.

The Blueprint does an amazing job of addressing these misconceptions held by advocates and critics alike. Though brief, this work thoroughly explains the hows and the whys of every step in the process, even suggesting alternate details to use when necessary. (So that Elman Inductions without eye catalepsy, touching, or even "losing the numbers" can be invented.)  In short, this work is for anyone who wants to understand what they are doing rather than merely parrot back steps an instructor has taught.

The historian in me loves the insight into the creation and development of the Elman Induction provided in this work—straight from someone who was there as it happened. Reading Larry Elman's writing is perhaps the closest we'll get to stepping back in time and getting to hear Dave Elman himself provide further wisdom.

Though the book itself is small—a pamphlet really, unlikely to look impressive when other hypnotists glance at your shelf—the content is huge and the value incalculable. Anyone who learns and uses the Dave Elman Induction really ought to take the time to read this book and review it from time-to-time. After all, being a hypnotist is not about repeating the right magical incantations; it is about understanding the processes that have worked in the past so that we can develop and adapt in the future.

Experiencing Reality by Chris Cathey

Title: Experiencing Reality: Perspectives from an Agent of Change
Author: Chris Cathey
Format: book
Source: sent to me for review from www.ExperiencingReality.com
Price: $15 at Amazon.com
Rating: Mixed

One of my favorite books is My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson by Sidney Rosen. Filled with easily accessible, short tales that Erickson told his students, relating events from his childhood, education, and work as a psychiatrist, it makes the perfect bathroom book, or the perfect tool to fill a few moments while you are waiting for your next client to arrive.

Chris Cathey's Experiencing Reality is perhaps best described as reminiscent of My Voice Will Go With You. The format and content are similar, short tales drawn from the author's childhood experiences playing soccer or camping, his training in the Marines, and his time working with troubled youth.

The stories are billed as metaphors, though the author leaves it to the reader to formulate what those metaphorical lessons may be, much the way that a change agent may operate with his clients. A few chapters—such as the one warning change agents against guru worship—fall short of metaphor, simply presenting straightforward advice. Others seem so obscure that the message is a bit hard to discern, though I suspect that may have been intentional. A few of the tales describe adaptations of Ericksonian methods, such as Cathey taking Erickson's approach to helping Olympic shot-putters and adapting it to helping a child overcome his fear of heights. (It is perhaps unfortunate that Cathey doesn't credit Erickson for this or any of the other methods he's clearly borrowing.)

All in all, I found a great deal to agree with in Experiencing Reality—especially the points about tailoring the work to the client, the value of kindness, and the need to avoid idolizing teachers. Indeed, I found little to disagree with. At the same time, I found very little that challenged me.

Of course, as an editor, I have to say that in a field with far too many poorly-punctuated self-published books, Experiencing Reality stands out for having very few typos and only a few sentences I had to re-read several times to decipher. Even so, it could have used one more pass from a copy-editor, if only to tighten up the punctuation.

The book is a quick and pleasant read, and because it consists of short, easily-digested chapters, it will probably take its place in my bathroom next to Rosen's work. While it might not change lives or revolutionize the coaching industry, Experiencing Reality certainly provides an illuminating diversion for anyone in the business of change. For someone just beginning that journey, there is a wealth of wisdom and advice.