Conversational Hypnosis With The Milton Model – Selection Restriction Violation
The Ideas Here Smell Fantastic
Here’s a great way to virtually guarantee that people will pay attention to you when you are speaking, as it effectively drowns out any stray thoughts that may crop up in their minds. It’s called the “Selection Restriction Violation,” and is part of the Milton Model set of language patterns and communication strategies.
Basically what it is a violation of well-formed English, as understood by native speakers. It doesn’t break any grammatical rules, so it makes sense, it just sounds strange, even though the underlying meaning is clear. It’s an excellent way to sparse up an otherwise dull sentence.
What you do is give something, (or someone) an attribute that is not normally associated with that thing or person, and use that imaginary attribute to get your point across.
For example, what attributes does a chair have? The material it’s constructed from, the color, the size, the price, the store where you bought it. Whenever you give a chair an attribute not in that list, people will have to pause briefly and check to make sure they understand what you are saying. This pausing and checking will only take half a second or less and will be done internally (although you will usually see an interesting look on their face), so it will get rid of all those stray thoughts people usually have while listening to people speak.
So if you break your chair, the normal way to express your anger or frustration is to say, “I’m angry at my chair.” Some may say, “I’m angry at my stupid chair.” Which is a well-used example, as chairs cannot have intelligence.
Some other ways to say it are:
My chair is upset with me because I broke it.
My chair is angry with me because I abused it.
My chair is depressed, because it failed me, and I have to buy a better one.
This still gets the message across, but will give your listener a bit of a pause to make sure they understand what you are saying.
Some other examples.
Hey, look over there! –> Hey throw your eyes over there!
I’m hungry. –> My stomach is lonely.
I’m thirsty. –> I need to water my throat.
We’re late. –> They clock is telling us to leave.
Think about this. –> Rest your mind on this.
She’s beautiful. –> Her body/face has hijacked my attention.
I’m hungry. –> My stomach is lonely.
It was delicious. –> My mouth was very happy.
I don’t know. –> My brain is on strike.
Another way to use these is use sense words (see, feel, hear, touch, taste, etc) in ways they aren’t normally used.
That idea doesn’t smell right.
I need to listen to my thoughts and see if I get any answers.
Let me touch base with my memories and see if I can come up with something.
This sounds delicious (while eating food).
A good way to practice these is to simply listen to other people talk, and while they are talking take some of their statements and reword them using the selection restriction violation to make them sound more interesting and hypnotic. After while you’ll be able to think of them yourself while your speaking, and you will become a much more interesting conversationalist than you already are.
