Hypnosis for Actors: What Get Out Got Wrong
You have already been hypnotized today. Probably more than once. Think about the last time you drove somewhere familiar, had an entire conversation in your head with somebody who was not in the car, and then found yourself in your driveway with twenty minutes missing. Nobody swung a watch at you. You were awake, eyes open, hands on the wheel. That was trance, and it is the thing people are afraid of.
In this episode I take hypnosis and NLP apart in plain language and put them back together. What hypnosis actually is, which turns out to be two very ordinary ingredients. Why the word itself has been wrong since 1841, and how the Scottish surgeon who coined it spent the rest of his career trying to take it back. Why trance has nothing to do with sleep, and why you can be in one while fully alert.
Then Get Out. The teacup, the spoon, and the sunken place. I go through exactly what Jordan Peele got wrong about the mechanism, why a stranger with a teaspoon has no accumulated yes, and then the harder turn: what that film got exactly right about an actor at the wrong moment of their life.
And then the practical part. A live demonstration of conversational hypnosis using your own words, eyes open, nothing to relax into. Then the Circle of Excellence taught step by step, an NLP state anchor you can build tonight and fire in an audition hallway without anybody seeing it. Plus how to use it for learning lines, for the walk into the room, and where it fits with getting in and out of character.
In this episode:
Why the drive home you do not remember is the clearest example of trance there is
The 1841 naming mistake that created almost every myth about hypnosis
Why suggestibility is not weakness, it is the mechanism of learning
Ernest Hilgard, the hidden observer, and why every actor already knows what divided consciousness feels like
What Get Out got wrong about the spoon, and what it got right about the sunken place
Why rapid inductions work on an accumulated yes and not on a hypnotist with power
A live demonstration using your own words, done with your eyes open
The Circle of Excellence, all eight steps, and how to make it portable
Time Stamps
0:00 The drive home: you were hypnotized today
2:30 What this episode is About
5:11 The pattern nobody predicts
6:12 Get Out, the teacup and the spoon
8:32 The 1841 mistake that started it
10:01 Two ingredients: attention and suggestion
11:57 Trance is not sleep
12:30 Hilgard and the hidden observer
14:09 Books, movies and conversations
15:23 You do not need to be relaxed
15:37 Milton Erickson and utilization
16:45 Where NLP actually came from
18:33 The critical factor
19:38 The objection, said out loud
26:37 The Circle of Excellence, step by step
35:46 What the spoon in Get Out gets wrong
37:10 The sunken place: what the film got right
38:47 Why actors are the best subjects
42:59 Preview of next Episode
00:00] Albert Bramante:You have already been hypnotized today. Probably more than once. Give me 90 seconds and I'll prove it to you.So think about the last time you drove somewhere familiar. Maybe it was home from class, or maybe from another audition. The route you've taken 400 times. You got in the car. You had an entire conversation in your head with somebody who was not even in the car. And then, poof, you're in your driveway, and somewhere in there you lost about 20 minutes.You do not remember the third light. You do not even remember changing lanes. You could not even tell me the color of the car in front of you. And the whole time, some part of you was operating two tons of metal at 40 miles an hour, surrounded by strangers doing the same thing, and you're making dozens of correct decisions while the rest of you was somewhere else entirely. Maybe you were running the sides again. Maybe you were replaying what the casting director's face did when you got to the second page.Now, nobody swung a watch at you. Nobody counted you down from ten. You're awake, eyes open, hands on the wheel, and fully in control of the vehicle.See that? That's the entire thing. This was trance. This is what people are afraid of.And it happens to you on the drive home, and it's absolutely happening in the audition room. It's happening on both sides of the table. The only real question is whether anybody ever taught you to do it on purpose.
Speaker BWelcome to Mental Rehearsal, the podcast for struggling actors and actors who struggle in this business.Talent gets you noticed.Mindset keeps you in the game.Meet Dr. Albert Bramante, talent agent, hypnotherapist, and NLP practitioner.Every episode, we'll expose the metal traps that hold actors back and give you practical tools to build confidence, beat self sabotage, and perform at your best.So stop rehearsing your fears and start mentally rehearsing your success.
Albert[02:30] Albert Bramante:Last episode, I taught you a technique, and then I told you I would come back and show you how the tool actually works. And that is what tonight is for.Hypnosis and NLP. What are they? What are they not, which is a longer and more entertaining list. Where the movies got it wrong, and the one place where the movies got something exactly right, probably by accident.By the end of tonight, you will still have something you can use before your next audition. No couch, no swinging watch. Eyes open, standing up, in a hallway full of people who look like you.Now, fair warning about who is talking. I am a hypnotist and an NLP practitioner, so obviously I think this stuff is useful. I'm also a performance psychologist, which means I know precisely how much of what gets sold under those two words is nonsense. We're going to do both tonight. The useful part, and the nonsense.[03:44]I worked with an actor. We'll call him Ray. He's mid-thirties, seriously good. This is the kind of actor that does his homework. And Ray got cast in a two-hander off-Broadway. Very small theater, but it was a lead role, so it was a nice meaty role for him. And what came with that was terror and stage fright, because of the pressure, which is the correct response to a good opportunity.So I suggested a hypnotic session. And Ray said, in a very polite way, a hard, immediate, and even subtly offended no.He said he had seen the movie. And then he said something which really stood with me and resonated with me, because it really made me think. He said, "I have spent my entire life getting good at pretending to be other people. I am not handing over the controls."And I let it go, because arguing someone into hypnosis is both unethical and completely pointless.So here's what I want you to hold onto. What changed Ray's mind was not an argument. I never convinced him of anything. He convinced himself. It took about four seconds, and it happened in a place I would never have predicted. And we'll come back to Ray.[05:11]Now, one thing I noticed years ago that took me a long time to understand, because on its face it makes no sense. The people who are most certain they cannot be hypnotized are usually the easiest people in the room. And the people who arrive wanting it, who sit down and say, "Put me under, I'm ready, I've wanted this for years," are frequently the hardest.And that is backwards. And it stayed backwards for me for a long time. I kept assuming it was about willingness, or trust, or how much they liked me. And it's really none of those.It turns out there's one thing that actually predicts it, and it happens to be something the audience of this show has in unusual supply, more than any other group of people that I've ever worked with. There also is a cost attached to it that nobody warns you about, and it's a real one. And I'll come back to that too.[06:12]And now the movie, because I know some of you have been waiting for it since the top of the episode. And that movie is Get Out, made in 2017 by Jordan Peele. If you have not seen it, I would fix that. Here is the scene that matters for tonight.A young man is sitting in a living room late at night. Now, he didn't plan to be there. Across from him is a woman, a psychiatrist, and she's not doing anything dramatic. She's not waving anything. She has a teacup, and she starts stirring it. That small, clean, ringing sound of the spoon against the china, over and over, while she talks to him very quietly and very kindly about the worst night of his life.And then he is crying. And then the floor opens underneath him, and he falls.Now, Peele, in his movie, called it the sunken place. And it's one of the most frightening images anybody has put on a screen in 20 years, because the man is still conscious. He can see out, through the pane of glass, very far away. He's screaming and no sound comes out. And his body's up there without him, walking around, smiling, doing what someone else decided it would do.See, that film has shaped what the general public believes about hypnosis more than anything since the 1950s. More than anything my entire profession has ever published.And what I didn't expect to say out loud, or even on a podcast, is I'm glad that movie was made. I think it was genuinely valuable for my field. Not because it was accurate, because it really is not accurate, and I'm going to be specific about why. I'll come back and tell you what it got wrong and what it got right, and it is not the half you're expecting.[08:32]So let us take this apart, and I want to start with a mistake somebody made in 1841 that we are still living with.There was a Scottish surgeon by the name of James Braid. He went to a demonstration of what was being called animal magnetism, expecting to catch a fraud, and he mostly did. He thought the explanation on offer was garbage. Magnetic fluids passing through the bodies, that whole business. But he could not deny that something real was happening to the people on stage.So he went home and started studying it properly, as a physician. And then he named it. He took the Greek word for sleep, from Hypnos, and he built a word out of it.And then he spent the rest of his career trying to take it back. Because within a few years he'd worked out that the state has essentially nothing to do with sleep. So he proposed a different word. Monoideism. One idea. A mind gathered down into a single point.Now, nobody used it. Of course nobody used it. Monoideism is a terrible word, and hypnosis kind of does sound fantastic. So for 180 years we've been stuck with a name that means sleep, for a state that is not sleep. And I would say most of the myths on that list come directly from that one piece of bad branding.[10:01]So what is it, if it's not sleep? Two ingredients. Absorbed attention, and accepted suggestion. That's really the entire recipe. Neither one is exotic, and neither one really belongs to hypnotists.Now, let's start with the suggestion half, because this is where people get defensive.[10:21]Suggestibility is not weakness. Suggestibility is the mechanism of learning. See, if you couldn't accept a suggestion, if you weren't suggestible, you would never learn. You couldn't learn anything at all.So think about what happens in a scene study class. A director says, "Take it slower and let it hurt more." Nine words, and something inside of you reorganizes, and the next take is different. And it is different in a way that you could not have produced by deciding to. The director gave you a suggestion, and then it was executed by a part of you that you do not have conscious access to.[11:18]So when somebody tells me they are not suggestible, what they are actually claiming is that they cannot be taught. Now, nobody wants that. Nobody puts that on a resume. "I cannot be taught."Which means everybody is hypnotizable. And it's not because I say so. It's because everybody is suggestible, because everyone can learn. Different people take different routes and go to different depths, and that part is real, and it does vary. But the idea that there are people who simply cannot, that is not a thing.[11:57]Now, the harder correction, and this is the one I would tattoo on the industry if I could.Trance is not sleep. Trance is not unconsciousness. Trance does not mean you are gone, and it does not mean you will not remember. You can be in trance and be 100 percent alert, and maybe even more alert than usual. That's the entire point of it. Absorbed attention is not less attention. It means attention on less territory. It's a narrowing, which is the effect.[12:30]So there was a researcher at Stanford by the name of Ernest Hilgard, who ran a long series of studies on this and found something he called the hidden observer. A part of the hypnotized person stays awake behind everything. They're watching, they're tracking, they're completely aware, and they're able to report accurately on the whole session, even while the rest of the person was deeply involved somewhere else. And he called this divided consciousness.Now, there's a genuine fight in the field about what the hidden observer actually is, and I'm happy to leave that to the journals. What is not in dispute is that the divided experience is real. And you know it is real, because you've had it.You've cried in a scene and known exactly where your mark was. You felt something completely, for real, and it wasn't indicated, and simultaneously heard the boom drifting, and clocked that the AD was breathing too loud, and knew you were going to hit the same beat again in 90 seconds when they reset.[13:42]Two channels. Both true at once. Neither was faking.And see, that's not a trick you pick up in a workshop. That's a structural definition of a hypnotic state. And hello, actors. You do this for a living.[14:09]And once you see it that way, you start finding it everywhere, because it is everywhere. The drive home is one. Getting lost in a book is another trance. Notice what actually happens there. Someone arranged 26 letters on a page, and your body produced grief about a person who never existed. Movies are the industrial version of the same thing. You've all wept in a theater over a computer-generated animal. Your critical faculties did not fail you. They stood down, because you gave them permission at the door.And then there are conversations. The one that people find hardest to believe. And there's a whole field built upon it called conversational hypnosis. There's no relaxation, no induction, no eyes closed, no counting, no couch. Someone else is just simply good at it. They simply just talk to you. Attention, rapport, and your own words handed back to you.[15:23]And while very often you'll hear relaxation being used in hypnosis, I want to make it very clear: you do not need to be relaxed to be in hypnosis. Being relaxed and being hypnotized are really two different things.[15:37]Now, this all brings me to the next important hypnotist of the 20th century, who mostly just talked to people. Milton Erickson.Now, if you picture a hypnotist, you're picturing something Erickson almost never did. He would tell a patient a long, slow, strange story about a tomato plant, and the person would leave his office changed. However, they couldn't tell you how that happened.Now, his big idea was utilization. You do not fight what the person brings you. You use it. See, if a man sits down and announces he cannot be hypnotized, Erickson did not argue. He said, "Good. Do not be. And while you are not being hypnotized, you might notice how comfortable that chair is."The whole posture underneath it was that people already have what they need. The work is arranging access to it. See, that's not a slogan. That's a technical position. And it's the opposite of the thing that everyone's afraid of.[16:45]So then, NLP. Now, I promised you both words.In the 1970s, two men, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, took three people who were getting results that nobody else was getting. Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls in Gestalt therapy, and Virginia Satir in family therapy. And they tried to reverse engineer what those three were actually doing with language and attention, moment to moment, and turn it into something that could be taught to someone who was not a genius.That is where the field of NLP comes from. That is what the name is about. How language changes your internal experience, and therefore your state.[17:37]Now the honest part. And I'd rather you hear it from me than find it later and decide I was selling you something.The research record on NLP as a branded package is thin. Some of the original claims did not survive testing at all. The eye movement business, where looking up and left means something specific, that has been tested repeatedly and it doesn't hold up. And I'm not going to sit here and defend it.What has survived is not small. That where you put your attention changes your state. That specific language changes what you can access. That a state you have had once can be deliberately triggered again. Those pieces are well supported, and those are the pieces tonight is built on. I'm giving you the parts that work.[18:33]Now, one more piece, and then I want to say the thing you're thinking about.There's a filter between what you hear and what you accept. In the older literature it gets called the critical factor. Now, its job is to check incoming material against everything you already believe and reject what does not fit. It's a good system. It's why a stranger cannot talk you into anything at a party.Now, absorption narrows that filter. Not by force. That's just what deep attention does. It's why you can cry at a film about people who do not exist, while a functioning adult version of you sits in the seat, even knowing that they're actors.And that tells you the real answer to the mind control question, which is not "trust me, I'm a nice person." A suggestion that violates your values gets rejected in trance the same way it gets rejected at dinner. What actually changes is not what you'll agree to. What changes is how fast and how completely you act on something you already wanted.[19:38]Now let me say the thing that you've been thinking, because I would be thinking it too.This is a hypnotist telling you that hypnosis is real, that it's everywhere, that it's harmless, and that you're already doing it. That's a remarkably convenient set of claims for a hypnotist to hold. If a salesman told me that everyone is a little bit of a customer, and also that nobody can be sold anything they do not want, I would count my fingers after the handshake.So do not take the convenient version. Take the uncomfortable one.If suggestion works, it works in both directions. And nobody on this earth has been running more suggestions on you than you have. Ten years of "I always fall apart at the callback" is a suggestion. Ten years of "I never book commercials," well, that is a suggestion too. And you deliver that daily, in a state of high emotion, which is the state a suggestion is installed the best in, and by a voice you trust more than any other voice you'll ever hear.And this is not a metaphor. This is a literal recipe, all three ingredients, and you've been following it without a license.The reason why I want you to take this seriously is not that a hypnotist can do something to you. It's that you've been doing it to yourself, with no supervision, since you were about 19.[21:19]Now, let me name the assumption that keeps the whole thing out of reach for most actors. And it was Ray's line. The assumption that hypnosis is a thing done to you by someone who has power over you, and that the only decision available to you is whether or not you hand over the controls.Now here's the turn. Nobody hands over the controls, because there are no controls to hand over. The thing you are afraid of losing is the thing that runs the entire process. Your imagination, your attention, and your willingness to go somewhere that is not literally happening. Without those, nothing occurs at all.You are not the subject of a procedure. You are the equipment.Once you see that, the operator's job gets very unglamorous, which is appropriate. My job is to help you get absorbed enough that the filter stops arguing, and then hand you a suggestion you already wanted. That's it. That's the profession of hypnosis. The reason a good hypnotist looks impressive is the same reason a good director looks impressive. They got something out of you that was really yours all along.[22:20]And when you refuse it, it can actually cost you, which is the part Ray had not worked out yet.The thing is, you do not get to opt out of suggestions. That option is not on the menu. You're not choosing between being suggestible and not being suggestible. You're choosing between suggestions you wrote deliberately, and suggestions you picked up by accident from a casting director, maybe their flat face in 2019.[22:47]This is the whole idea of my book, Rise Above the Script. Everyone is running a script. Not the one you sat down and wrote. It's a stack of suggestions you accepted, mostly before you were old enough to vote, from people who were not thinking carefully about what they were installing. The work is not becoming someone who has no script. The work is reading the one you've got and deciding what stays.And the smallest version of it, the one you can start with tonight, is identity. And language matters when it comes to identity. The words "aspiring actor" are a suggestion. "Struggling actor" is a suggestion. Now, you repeat that daily, in your own voice, in your own head, which we just established is the most effective delivery system that exists. "Working actor" is also a suggestion, and it costs you exactly the same amount to say.[23:48]Now, before I teach you the tool, which is called the Circle of Excellence, I want to do something with you, because I would rather you feel the mechanism than take my word for it.So, eyes open. There's nothing to relax into. And you can even do this while you're driving, which is on brand for tonight.One question, and answer it out loud if you're somewhere you can. What is most important to you about acting?Do not refine it. Just go with your first answer.Now, whatever you said, I'm going to ask you a follow-up. Is there anything else?And anything else?Now, most people run dry after three or four follow-up questions. Now hold whichever one hit the hardest. That is usually the one that lands differently than the others, and you know which one it was.[24:50]Here's what just happened. You gave me a word. I didn't give you one. And that word has more voltage in your nervous system than anything that I could have ever written for you, because it is carrying every experience you ever had that made it matter. I do not know what is behind it. You do. And that's the point.That's the whole mechanism of conversational hypnosis. Somebody asks you what matters to you, listens for the word instead of the story, and then uses that word instead of their own. And it gets straight past the filter, because the filter does not argue with you. Your own words are pre-approved.As a matter of fact, the great salespeople will actually just mimic your words back to you. They ask you what you're looking for, what your frustrations are, and just repeat that back to you. And that sometimes makes it more effective when it comes to making sales.And it still works when you know it's happening. I told you in advance exactly what I was going to do, and then I did it, and it worked anyway.So the most useful thing you can do in the next ten minutes is put your own word into the thing I'm about to teach you.[26:37]Now, the Circle of Excellence comes out of NLP. It's a state anchor. Eyes open, standing up. There's no relaxation involved. And once you have built it, you can fire it in a hallway without anyone even noticing.There's eight steps. It takes about ten minutes the first time, and about ten seconds after that.Step one. Pick the state that you just talked about earlier. Be specific. That's the difference between this working and this being a nice idea. Now, I'm not saying "be confident," because confident is a word that people use when they have not thought about it. What do you actually want to be in the room? Could it be grounded? Maybe a little bit dangerous? Warm and unhurried? Awake and unbothered? Give it two or three words that, again, have to mean something to you. If the word you gave me a minute ago belongs here, use it, because it will do more work than anything I could suggest.Step two. Find the evidence. One specific time you had that state. And I want to be clear, it does not have to be acting. It can be a kitchen. A game. An argument you won cleanly. A hospital hallway where you were somehow the calm one. Any real moment when you were the person you've just described. If nothing comes at all, use a time you watched somebody else be that way, and hold on, because I'm going to come back to why that works.Step three. Get it back in full. And this is where most people lose it. It's not the story of the memory, it's the sensory of it. The senses. Where were you standing? What was the light doing? What was the temperature on your skin? What could you hear underneath the main thing you could hear? And critically, be inside your own eyes in that memory, looking out. Not floating above yourself, watching it happen like footage.That difference is the whole technique. Watching yourself in a memory keeps it at arm's length, which is exactly what it is for when you want distance from something. Looking out through your own eyes puts you back in the body that had the state. The same memory, but two completely different physical results.Step four. Make a place for it. On the floor in front of you, imagine a circle. Give it a color. Give it a sound, if you want one. It could be like a low hum, or a single note. I know it sounds ridiculous. Do it anyway, and I'll come back to the ridiculous part in about four minutes.Step five. Now step into that circle. Physically. One actual step forward into that circle. And as you cross it, let that memory come up, all the way up. Let that feeling build on its own rather than pushing it. And when it peaks, you will know when it peaks. Hold it for about ten seconds, and then step out.Step six. Break it. And I mean genuinely break it. Look at something in the room and name it out loud. Maybe say a phone number backwards. Anything that dumps the state completely. This is the step everyone skips, and it's the step that makes the rest of it work. You're teaching your own nervous system that the state arrives when you step in. Not that you happen to be in a decent mood this evening.Step seven. Test it. Step back into the circle, and do not deliberately call up the memory. Just step in. If the state comes back on its own, even a little, even ten percent, you've got it. If nothing comes up, go back to step three, because either the memory was not vivid enough, or you are watching yourself instead of being yourself. Run the whole thing three or four times.Step eight. Make it portable. On the last round, as you step in, at the moment it peaks, press your thumb and your index finger together. That gesture becomes the circle. Now you do not need floor space, and you do not need privacy. You can fire this anchor standing in a hallway with 11 other people who look exactly like you, holding a page of sides, and not one of them sees anything that just happened.[31:47]So what's actually going on here? This is called conditioning. You are doing to yourself, deliberately, what a bad audition once did to you by accident.Think about that for a second. You had an audition. Something went wrong in the room. That feeling and that setting got paired, because, well, that's what nervous systems tend to do with high emotion. And after that, the room came with that feeling attached. Nobody asked your permission. Nobody explained it. That is an anchor. It got installed by an event instead of by you.This is the same machinery. You are running it forward on purpose instead of backwards by accident.[32:36]And now the objection, which is a fair one. "Look, this feels stupid, and it feels like you're just pretending."Yes, you are pretending. This is not a shortcut around the technique. That is the technique. You're pretending vividly, with the full sensory detail, until the body responds as though it were real, and that's the mechanism itself.And of every person who is going to try this tonight, you are the most qualified one in the building. Pretending vividly until your body believes it is the literal job description of your profession. You've been in training for this since you were a teenager. The only new part is pointing it at yourself instead of at a character.Which is also the answer to what I left hanging in step two. If you had to borrow the state from somebody else, from a teacher, from an actor you admire, from your grandmother, that still works. And you already know it works, because building a person out of observed behavior until you can feel it from the inside out is what you do every darn day professionally.[33:48]So what do you actually use this for? Lines first, because that is the request I get the most.There's a well-established finding that what you learn in one state comes back more easily in that same state. So when you say "I knew it cold at home and lost it the second the camera rolled," the problem is usually not that you did not learn it well enough. The problem is that you learned it in a completely different state from the one you are trying to retrieve it in.So fire that anchor first, then run the lines. You're not just memorizing words, you're filing them under the state you're going to be standing in when you need them.Second, the audition itself. Fire the anchor in the hallway before you go in. Not in the room, not after you notice the fear. An anchor is for getting out in front of a state, not for wrestling one that is already running at full speed.And third, getting in and out of character, which I am deliberately going to underplay tonight. I went into detail in Episode 3 about getting out of character. Getting in is what you're already good at. Getting out is the part that nobody teaches, and it's a genuine clinical issue, and it's an entire episode. In Episode 3 I gave it 45 minutes, because it needed 45 minutes. If you haven't, I recommend you go listen to that one.Now, tonight I will only say this. The same anchor works as a doorway in both directions. And having a deliberate way back to yourself matters more than having a deliberate way in.[35:46]So, going back to the movie Get Out, and especially the teacup. What the movie got wrong, and what it got right.The spoon. Let us be exact about the spoon, because it is not enough to say it is only a movie.There's no consent. There's no rapport. Nothing built beforehand. A teacup, three seconds, and total operational control of another human being. That's not how any of this works, and here's the specific reason.Now, rapid inductions do exist, and I can do one. They work on someone who has already arrived wanting it, who has been prepared, and who has already accepted a series of small suggestions before the big one ever arrives. The speed is not the hypnotist's power. The speed is the accumulated yes.See, the character in that living room has no accumulated yes. She has a teaspoon. In the real world, the scene is a man who stands up and leaves.But the deepest thing that the film Get Out gets wrong is the direction of the control. She installs something that overrides what he wants. That is the part that is fiction. Suggestion runs on desire. It does not overrule it. If it could overrule it, half my profession would be out of work, because a great deal of what I actually do is discover that somebody wants two contradictory things at the same time. And no suggestion on earth survives that fight.[37:10]Now the other half. The sunken place. Conscious, watching from behind the glass, very far away, screaming with no sound coming out. Your body up there without you, doing what someone else decided.That's not a description of hypnosis. It's an extremely good description of an actor's life at the wrong moment.It is what it feels like when your agent, and your manager, and your teacher, and your parents, and a casting director you met once in 2019 are all writing your suggestions, and you're behind the glass watching yourself audition for things you do not want, doing an accent you do not like, being told to lose weight, saying yes with a face that is not quite yours.Peele was making a film about race and control, and being made a passenger in your own life. That is his subject, and I'm not going to borrow it. But if that image landed on you, specifically as an actor, it landed for a reason. And the reason is real.And that is why I said I was glad the movie existed. Not because it is accurate. Because it made an enormous number of people ask a question they'd never asked before. I've had more real conversations about what hypnosis actually is because of that film than because of anything my entire field has ever published. A wrong answer that makes people ask the question is worth more than a right answer nobody hears.[38:47]See, the thing is, it was never about willingness. It's about absorption. The capacity to give your whole attention to something that is not literally happening, and have your body respond as though it were.This is not a personality trait, and it's not a weakness. It's a trainable skill. And you chose a career that is eight hours a day practicing this. So yes, actors are unusually good hypnotic subjects. And it's not because they're gullible. It's because you are trained. It's the same reason a dancer picks up a new sequence in 20 minutes.[39:32]And here's the part that I told you I would come back to, and I want you to actually take it in.That skill has no opinion about content. None. The same absorption that lets you completely believe you were a widow in 1943 will let you completely believe that you were the least talented person in your class. Same equipment, same fidelity, and the same commitment. And you've been running the second one unsupervised for years, with a level of imaginative detail that most people could not manage on their best day.The talent was never the problem. It had just been pointed at the wrong script.[40:12]Which brings me back to Ray, who was not handing over the controls.Now, about three weeks into the run, I went to the show. We got a drink after the show, and he was talking about the second act. And he's telling me about a monologue near the end of it. And he said this, close to word for word. "I do not remember doing it anymore. I get to the line about the letter, and then I'm just at the curtain call. It is the best I've ever been, and I'm not there for it."And I didn't say anything for a second. And then I said, "Well, who's driving?"And he did the math in real time, and I watched him do this. He had spent a month arguing that he would never let anyone put him into a hypnotic state. And he'd been walking into it eight times a week, on purpose, in front of 400 people, and calling it the best work of his life.He did not tell me he was right. Actors do not do that. What he said was, "So it's not a thing that happens to me. It's a thing I already do."I said, yes. That is it. And that is the entire episode.We did do some work together after that, and the work was fine, and it is not the point. The point is the sentence he started using about himself. He stopped asking whether he could be hypnotized. He started asking what he wanted to suggest.[41:46]That is the whole shift. Not skeptic to believer. Subject to author.So here's what I want you to take out of tonight. There is no such thing as hypnosis, in the sense of a substance that somebody administers to you. There is attention, and there is suggestion. And you've been running both of them all day, every day, whether or not anyone ever gave it a name.The mystery was never in the technique. The mystery is that nobody told you it was a skill, so you've been using it accidentally, and mostly against yourself. And that is the reason why this show is called what it is called. You've been rehearsing something every day for years.[42:40]Let me leave you with one question this week. You don't have to answer it quickly. I would just carry it around with you.What have you been telling yourself, in your own words, in a state of complete attention, so often that you stopped hearing it as a suggestion at all?[42:59]Now, in a future episode, we're going to talk about the no. The one that you get roughly 20 times for every yes, and very often with no explanation. Usually by silence. Silence is a no.Tonight I told you that repetition, plus emotion, plus a trusted voice is how a suggestion gets installed. The problem is, the nos, or what you perceive as rejection, have all three. And nobody has ever asked whether you consented to what it was teaching you.Transcript lightly edited for readability. Transcription errors corrected against the recording; wording is Albert's own.
Speaker BThanks for listening to Mental Rehearsal.If this episode made you think, share it with another actor.Then visit MentalRehearsal show for more tools and resources.And don't forget to follow the show until next time.Don't just rehearse your lines, rehearse your mind.