Intuition

I recently had a disagreement with a person I know. I won't go into specifics but suffice to say I had stated something to her which I knew to be a fact.

No, I was told, that's not right. I was even called a liar.

Well fine, I responded, but here's why what I say is true. Fact, fact, fact, and therefore, orignal fact.

All of that is true, came the reply, but I am going to believe my intuition.

Any logically minded individual will recognise the kind of frustration this has the potential to engender. What does this say about this person? Does it mean she's stupid, or insane? Well, no. What it means is that she's just human.

Imagine you were rolling dice and you rolled a 1, say, five times in a row. What does logic tell you the result of the next roll will be? What does intuition tell you it will be?

I once knew another person who insisted to me that her first impressions of a person always turned out to be right. As I got to know her better I could see that in her subjective view of the world she was absolutely right. The reason for this was that everything she saw of a new person after their first meeting was being viewed through the filter of her first impression. It's not uncommon either, it's something everyone does to some extent.

A few months ago I was at a social gathering and I made eye contact with a woman I'd never seen before. I met her gaze and held it, and it was about four or five seconds before she looked away and wandered off. Now, any guy who has studied attraction will know what effect holding a woman's gaze until it's her that breaks it can have. Sure enough when I actually got introduced to her she was all smiles and visibly nervous. I met her on several more occasions and by the end she was dropping fairly unsubtle hints that she wanted me to ask her out.

I am willing to bet that had I acted differently in those first few moments my relationship with this person would have been entirely different. Why? Because when she and I actually met her intuition was probably already telling her that I am strong, comfortable and confident and therefore attractive. If I'd done what a lot of men do when they make eye contact with a woman, which is to look away and down, she certainly would not have thought about me in the same way. The same people, the same lives and values, but a completely different relationship.

This isn't just with women of course, men are also completely capable of thinking this way. We all, trust me, do it far more often than we realise. Women are, on the whole, much more prone to making up their mind based on the premise of their infallible "Women's intuition".

Actually, whilst I'm commenting on the complete irrationality of the fairer sex I'll mention an interesting thing I found during my brief forray into online dating, which is that in this context women trust their intuition despite (given the nature of communication being text only) most of it not being plugged into anything. It's like a case of communicational phantom limb syndrome.

Most men of course simply see large breasts and think "Hmm, that woman must definitely be a nice person!"

This is what I'm getting at: often the intuition is arguably very wrong, but as far as the person is concerned it is right. Get the other person's unconscious intuitive process on board and there is no end to the sort of stuff you can get away with; likewise strike the wrong chord and it doesn't matter how honest you are. This is why, for example, people will happily get taken in by con artists, and why some of the most harmless honourably intentioned yet lonely men get rejected by women as creepy.

So there are two things to take away from this I think. The first is the understanding that getting a person's intuition on your side is crucial to having a positive influence on them. People don't instinctively judge you as good or bad based on your expressed morals, beliefs or intentions, they base it on your presentation of yourself. Putting yourself across in a way that wins over another person's intuition is learned skill, but it's worth learning because if you can do it their logical brain will often jump through hoops to agree with you. I would call the extreme example of this hypnosis.

Conversely trying to fight a person's intuition with facts, regardless of how true and clear they are to you, is a losing battle. The telltale is the emotional attachment, and clawing at it with logic will only make it dig itself in deeper.

The second thing is to begin to recognise when this is happening to you. If somebody challenges you on something you believe and you feel yourself getting emotional about it this is a good sign that there is some level of irrationality to your thinking. One very important lesson I've learned is which feelings to take as a sign that I need to stop and reconsider my own beliefs - there's a particular feeling of discomfort that tells me I'm definitely onto something.

Admitting to being wrong in the face of strong emotions that tell us we're right can be difficult, but those who can do it stand to learn a lot and grow as people.

It's harder to be wrong than right.

So going back to my earlier disagreement. As you would expect I performed an amazing feat of conversational hypnosis, engaging her on an emotional level, so convinving her that my opinion is worthy of her trust and thus winning her over to my argument.

Actually no I didn't. Sometimes you just have to let people believe whatever bollocks they want to believe. Sometimes the best thing one can do is just walk away.

Serendipity from misery

Last night I figured something out about my own hypnotisability. It's early days, but I think I've hit on something fundamental, and what's more it's so blindingly obvious that I can't believe that it didn't occur to me sooner.

To make this discovery I needed to be extremely miserable. I have to say one of the best pieces of advice I've ever been given about being single, which I wish I'd know years ago, is that it's important to give oneself permission to be miserable from time to time. Don't get me wrong life is great at the moment for me but inevitably for any singleton there will be a day each month when they come home late to an empty home after a long day at work and the lack of companionship does tend to bite somewhat. In these situations it is best to face the negative feelings directly to get over them rather than to try to deny them or feel guilt for having them and end up wallowing in it for days.

For some reason on this particular occasion I decided that a hypnosis mp3 or two would be a good idea for something to listen to whilst I mulled over my state of mind. I find that when hypnosis is working best my thoughts fly off on a tangent and then fade, rather like a spark from a Catherine wheel. My idea was I'd listen to the mp3 whilst distracting myself with my own contemplation.

I went out like a light.

Not only that, over the course of the fastest hour in history the feelings turned from misery to intense joy.

Here then is my discovery about my own hypnotic response, and indeed why in the past it has varied so much. It seems that for a good trance I need to be emotionally charged.

The most ridiculous thing is that I have known about the significance of emotions in hypnosis for a long time. Indeed one of my pet peeves is the people who come to hypnosis from a background of computer programming (why are there so many of them?) and think that it is basically the same kind of dry, emotionless, command-action based process. "if this, then you will do that", and so on. A true hypnotist doesn't care about eliminating syntax errors, they are more interested in making sure their subject feels good. Crucially, following a suggestion should always be downhill for the subject; easier and more pleasant to follow than to snap out of it.

The concept that an emotional state is powerful catalyst, if not an absolute requirement for hypnosis should have been obvious to me.

This another one of those things that good hypnotic subjects know already, and thus a lot of hypnotists don't know because it's not something they've ever needed to instruct. Indeed the mp3s I have been listening to do nothing to induce an emotional state other that instructing the subject to relax.

So here's the lesson boys and girls: if you want a good trance, go for an emotional response.