Conversational Hypnosis With The Milton Model – Building Excitement And Expectation
You’ll Never Guess The Amazing Thing That Happened
The Milton Model set of language patterns is a fantastic communication strategy that can easily skyrocket your persuasion and influence. Usually referred to as covert hypnosis, it’s a great way to capture and lead the imagination of your listener or audience.
Today’s pattern is called “Building Excitement and Expectation,” and works similar to the way good TV shows leave you “hanging” at the end, so you have to tune in next week.
The basic structure of this pattern is to begin to communicate an idea, and then leave the idea only half spoken. This will generate a great deal of expectation in the listener, as most people loathe unresolved issues on many levels.
There have been a few studies regarding this phenomenon comparing short-term memory and these “open loops,” and they have indicated that short-term memory is significantly boosted when a loop is left open.
Waiters and waitresses were able to remember a vast array of information regarding tables that weren’t “complete” yet, but when the guests finished eating and paid their bill, all of their information was quickly dropped into the subconscious of the waiter or waitress.
There are several ways to create this effect in your listener.
One way is to leave pauses where you normally wouldn’t expect them. People normally put in pauses where they would usually put a period or a comma in a sentence. When you insert pauses in the middle of a sentence, it creates a great deal of interest and expectation in your listeners.
Consider these sentences.
Yesterday, I saw an airplane.
Today, I went to the store.
Last night, I ate spaghetti.
Pretty boring, right? When spoken, most people would put the pauses where the commas are. But consider how they wound when you put the pause between the verb and the noun:
Yesterday, I saw ….an airplane.
Today, I went to ….. the store.
Last night, I ate…..spaghetti.
If you were speaking to somebody, they would automatically pay more attention during the pause.
Another way to do this is to begin telling a story, leading up to a strange or interesting punch line, and then switch before you get there, and tell another story. This is particularly useful when you build up to your punch line with many tension-building adjectives (amazing, fantastic, strange, unbelievable, etc) and say them with a lot of congruence.
For example: (the italicized words are said with increased enthusiasm)
The other day I went into this bookshop. From the outside, it looked like any normal bookstore. But when I went in, man, was I surprised. The stuff they had in there was absolutely amazing, I mean I’d never seen anything like it anywhere. I kind of felt like I was a kid, and I went to the circus for the first time. I didn’t really know what to expect. I mean I knew there was going to be clowns and stuff there, but I had no idea they would have lion tamers, and people doing flips around up in the sky. I was absolutely spellbound the entire time. Ever since then I’d always like the circus….
(end example)
If you’ve ever seen a really good public speaker, somebody that makes a living at it (like any famous comedian) they leave “open loops” like this all through their routine. And when they start to finish up, they simply start closing the loops.
You can leave as many loops as you want, the more the better. When you combine these three:
Effective pauses
Tension building adjectives
Open loops
You’ll go a long way to captivating the attention of almost any audience. And being able to hold the attention of five or six people at party or social gathering is a fantastic skill to have.
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