My good friend Andy Preston is a Sales Training Wizard based in Manchester, England. He recently did some training for some Advertising Sales people and shared their complaints about it getting harder to close advertising sales, yet also said they often refuse to consider other sales models that now work better.

My view on sales for advertising sales... is that if you also teach advertising salespeople how to help their clients write/design *better* ads... and then also do some form of risk-reversal, they'd have a veritable FLOOD of clients beating down their door.

Saying "At least break-even on your ad, or it's free" would have potential advertisers stomping on each other to get their ads submitted.  The salespeople would then have to turn some of their advertising clients away, which would then lead to the "higher class of problem" of being able to pick & choose the ads most likely to succeed.

I've never thought the blind "spray & pray" / "pay us regardless of results" advertising model was particularly useful for any side of the equation (i.e. publisher, OR advertiser), except for the highest volume of branding-oriented advertising.  In other words, publishers could actually charge MORE... when the response to ads was higher and justified it. It's pretty well established globally now, that small business owners are willing to pay more for performance-based, risk-free advertising!

I thought I'd broach a sticky topic here -- open it up for discussion.

The more free things I do, the more I get repetitious requests for free NLP coaching. Oh, it's not called that, it's usually described more as "oh, just a few minutes to help me out of a bind," or "can I just send you something and have you review it, tell me how to do it better," etc. Let's call it what it is: It's a request for free NLP coaching.

My opinion: It's fine to offer free (&/or risk-free) ways for people to "taste" your offerings, on your own terms. But NEVER agree to offer your valuable services for free according to other people's terms. Then you're disrespecting your self, diminishing your own value.

I received a pair of emails from a gentleman after he attended one of my Online NLP Training Taster sessions. He got good value from attending. He liked my insight, enjoyed the experience. Obviously he felt I had and have something to offer. Because shortly afterwards, he sent me an email in which he described a problematic situation he's in, and asked for my 1-on-1 help, in solving it.

Naturally, I'm grateful for the request, but there was no comment or question in his email suggesting he was asking for help within the context of any business relationship. Just a request for help. So... here's the response I sent:

I got a response back, essentially asking for free help, again:

Still no comment about any business relationship (I know quite a number of other coaches would have sent back a rude response at this point, but I don't see any value in being rude about it). Don't be rude. Just be clear, be firm, and wish people well. After all, reasonable people charge for their valuable services, and reasonable people also expect to have to pay for valuable services. I wouldn't ever blame someone for asking for help; after all, it's a compliment. But we are all better served when we ourselves define the terms on how we'll offer/deliver our services.

Here was my reply:

So there you go. Thoughts?

First of all, let's define Synesthesia: An automatic link from one sense to another. (i.e., Visual-->Auditory, etc).

I actually wrote this post back in 1999 on an NLP mailing list. Someone asked the question "Is Synesthesia Good or Bad?" Here's my reply:

*Chuckle* Good or bad in what context?

We know that child prodigies & geniuses are highly synesthetic, meaning that its beyond "automatic" and more into real-time awareness of the connections between the senses... i.e. seeing the notes while feeling a symphony as you hear it, etc.

I'm not a child prodigy and genius isn't a word that makes much sense to me in "identity" terms. I do value the pursuit of increased excellence, increased intelligence, & improved results. Becoming more synesthetic, I believe, can lead to this. My experience of this is connected with the training environment; both as a training attendee and as a trainer. I believe I became dramatically more synesthetic during my own practitioner & master practitioner trainings (as a student) in Summer of 1997. And I directly connect this with more accelerated learning & higher achievement.

Certainly everyone is synesthetic to some degree or other. Some have thorough & rapid access to synesthetic pathways. With some people, if you get them to jump from one rep system into another, they may experience a light or momentarily deep trance state (a TDS). Some people emerge from their transderivational search successfully having acquired the new sensory info, and some people occasionally don't.

It's rare I can't get someone to feel what a tone feels like, or to hear what a given picture sounds like. Sometimes, I choose not to take steps to make it vivid enough and strong enough for people to "jump the synesthesia gap" and get access to it. What is more common is a big difference in the "amount of time" required to translate from one rep system into another. To me, automatic doesn't necessarily mean "fast." Instant access may be "unconsciously automatic" and 10 seconds may be "unconsciously automatic."

Within whatever seminar title I'm training, at a process level, I strive to train behavioral flexibility, more rapid & conscious & unconscious synesthesia, accelerated learning, faster access to great states of fun & pleasure, and a sense of rhythm at multiple levels. I don't necessarily mean musical rhythm here. I mean a sense of flow.

And one of the biggies with "behavioral flexibility" is that a lot of people experience "stuck states" at some time or other in their lives. And with some people, that's most of the time(!). And it can be extremely useful to denominalize their experiences & get them flowing. In a training context, as well as a therapeutic context (I assume), it's useful to start with well-formed outcomes, set positive directions, & then calibrate them to ensure that their breaking of stuck-states is a useful outcome. It usually is, and sometimes brings up a variety of experiences. (and for the therapists reading this, not always positive ones).

On a better note, there are several great by-products of training such as more behavioral flexibility, state-flexibility & increased synesthesia. This helps people, if they ever experience "stuck-states" in life, to break out of those "stuck-states" much more rapidly than they otherwise would have.

It doesn't really matter whether it's conscious or not. If they're in a stuck-state, they'll probably have deep time-distortion for the amount of time they're not aware they're stuck. People who attend trainings often find themselves breaking their own stuck states faster & faster in real life, coming up with more creative solutions on their own, after the training. And they may find themselves being more productive, more content, perhaps "magically" able to close more sales (even if they're not doing anything differently WITHIN each sale, they're unaware they're spending less time "stuck" & more time closing).

Damn! You mean the results of that generalized training transferred to this specific area of my life? *LOL* I wonder why.

Some people chalk this up to "installation." Some to "unconscious learning." Some understand that whatever it is, its the result of the PROCESS of investing oneself into developing greater access to these neurological resources. They're already there ready to be mined. It can be done in a training. And it can be done on your own; but remember, when you're doing it on your own, you're only taking in material within or very close to your own map. You're unlikely to try things that seem completely irrelevant. At a training, sometimes the most irrelevant exercises provide the most expansive experiences!

When you read reviews its quite common to hear things like "I found myself doing things differently or more intuitively afterwards." These are amongst the results that seem to be most desirable & measurable by most attendees who write reviews. How do we know this? Because that's what they were sorting for; that's what they wrote in their review; that's what they thought we ought to hear.

Bottom line: Greater synesthesia can help people to go "meta" at or shortly after the moment they experience stuck-states & find ways of breaking or shifting out of those states. And greater synesthesia can help people to automatically shift their behaviors *generatively* in unanticipated situations (as opposed to *programmatically* as a result of using something like the SWISH pattern in NLP).

And yes, of course, you can learn to increase your synesthesia on your own without acquiring training! My experience simply tells me its faster & more pervasive when we enlist a coach, mentor, or trainer.

I rarely advertise or post much in the realm of 'energy' related topics. But since NLP courses are often attended by people interested in all manner of alternative things, I'm occasionally asked about this one. "Can you see auras?"

And in my case, I definitely see them, and can teach anyone to see them in minutes. Easy Peasy. What I don't see well are colors. Occasionally, if the background is really neutral, and the colors are supposedly really strong, then I pick them up as weak colors. Color distinctions have to be what most aura readers would describe as dramatic, for me to see any color at all.

I can also feel auras, sometimes barely, sometimes amazingly well, when/if my Kinesthetics are in a heightened awareness state. This is most of the time, but not after meals. Feldenkrais found himself and his students experienced the same drain in kinesthetic self-awareness and lowered K acuity during digestion, so I'm in reasonable company there.

Here's a simple, less-esoteric way of understanding & teaching auras. Just my opinion here:

We are all electrochemical beings. Our nervous systems are electric. All electric currents are surrounded by a magnetic field. Magnetic fields affect the alignment of molecules and particles in the air. When particles in the air align differently, LIGHT passes through those 'modified' spaces differently than it passes through space not modified by those magnetic fields. We see that light reflecting differently off of 'affected particles' in the air.

I see auras, quite simply, as a change in the quality of light, passing through the air inside our human magnetic fields. There is no vaccuum inside that space -- there is air, with dust, with ions, with various particles.... and that air appears different to us through that field.

How I train people to see auras:

What I do is... I have a person stand against a flat background. I have everyone I'm teaching the skill to -- stand in front of them, staring at their nose for ~1 minute. Then, I have the person against the background step to the side, but have everyone else continue to stare at where the person's nose WAS, before they step aside.

What everyone can then see, is an outline of a person around where the person used to be. That's the retinal imprint of the contrasting image.

However, in our peripheral vision, as we continue to stare at the location where the person used to be, we can still see a retinal imprint AROUND the person off to the side. That is the aura. And most people ignore auras even though they're seeing them already, because they look a lot like the retinal imprint we get when we dart our eyes around a person's face (making their "outline" against the background bigger than their body/head).

So my contention is, everyone sees auras already, all the time. The trick is to get people to create a finer set of distinctions between the actual aura, and an actual retinal imprint (since they often look the same in our eyes), and then get them to stop ignoring the actual aura.

And hey, I could also be wrong. :)

I strongly encourage people to time-limit their identity statements like the above "I am an ISTF."

Better phrasing might include "Recently I was measured as an 'ISTF'." Or "Several years ago I received an 'ISTF' measurement on the Myers-Briggs, and don't know if I'd be the same or different today. Etc.

I believe that taking on such identity statements is one causal element of what leads either to inflexible behavior, or to difficulty with change, OR to diminished self-awareness during & after personality changes occur -- i.e., personality change may still occur, but one's accuracy with self-knowledge deteriorates, holding on to old "test scores" as current indicators, when they may not be valid anymore as time goes by.

I have taken the Myers-Briggs test six times, and gotten six very different readings. The Myers-Briggs test is, IMHO, a reading of your present-tense-only behavioral traits along ONLY four metaprograms. The four they chose to measure are:

• Introvert <--> Extrovert
• iNtuitive <--> Sensing
• Thinking <--> Feeling
• Perceiving <--> Judging

I suggest to ALL of you that if you can effectively try on a different map/model of the world -- inclusive of the unique beliefs & values & outcomes of those different models -- then you WILL get different readings.

Also as you grow, learn, & change in life, subsequent Myers-Briggs tests may very well produce different readings from prior readings. It is only a snapshot of the present moment in the present context, and given that in NLP we teach & measure a lot more than four metaprograms, I personally think the Myers-Briggs test is an impoverished measurement producing certainly useful information which is still less useful than acquiring EVEN MORE information would be.

When meeting people anew, rather than knowing their Myers-Briggs score, I'd much rather know the present-tense answers to where they are on these metaprogram scales (not to mention many others that are also useful):

• Towards <--> Away-from   (Motivation Direction)
• Proactive <--> Reactive   (Leadership behavior vs. Problem-Solver?)
• High Chunk Thinker <--> Low Chunk Thinker (Engineer or Visionary;  Chunk Size)
• Chunk Up? <--> Chunk Down? <--> Chunk Lateral (Chunk Direction tendency)
• Procedures <--> Options  (Productivity Process Preference)
• Sorts by Self <--> Sorts by Others (Frame of Reference - Internal vs External?)
• Difference <--> Sameness <--> Sameness w/ Diff <--> Diff w/ Sameness (Patterns of Agreement &/or Disagreement)
• Visual <--> Auditory <--> Kino (Primary sensory system)
• Introvert <--> Extrovert   (Attention orientation)
• Sorts by People / Things / Dates / Faces / Emotions / Time  (Sorting Methods)
• Abundance <--> Scarcity  (Generosity vs Miser behavior, & Abundance/Scarcity patterns)
• Towards Pos or Neg Necessity <--> Towards Pos or Neg Possibility (Modal Operators & sequences)
• Direct Communication <--> Indirect Communication  (Influence Style)
• And others...

Now I can identify some of these nonverbally just by observing people's behavior. For others, I require some time listening to how they speak. Or I require some time conversing with them & cataloguing their responses.

The hardest thing to do initially when learning how to elicit peoples' metaprograms-- was learning how to DISCARD these measurements as less-than-accurate, in any other context other than the one in which they had been elicited, or even in the same context if a lot of time had gone by since they'd been elicited. In other words, I'd initially hoped to rely on the information in every other context, or for "too long" into the future. But eventually one gets good enough at doing this quickly & easily, and the desire to 'save time/effort' and rely on old information becomes less relevant & attractive.

One of the highest priorities while training any material is to present material to both the conscious mind, and the unconscious mind.  All such strategies I know for doing this, begin from a place of working at the process level, while I deliver information & stories at the content level.  Content is "what we say," whereas Process is "how we say it."   Said most simply, Content is the What, Process is the How.

Here are some great NLP methods to "Package Information."

Want to be able to move people from 'stuck-states', to a mindset filled with active, positive, fun, pleasurable, motivated, and effective visualizations? Try these approaches:

• Move people from modal operators of negative possibility (might not, may not, could not) or negative necessity (won't, will not, must not, should not) into positive possibility (could, might, may) and (in certain cases) positive necessity (must, should, have to, need to, will!).
• Move people from descriptions of vague and static representations into clear, sensory-specific, & active representations.
• Move people from terse descriptions of problem states into WOW descriptions and representations of solution states.
• Use your rate and pacing to increase the rate of breathing in the audience if you're trying to elicit excitement. Use these to slow the audience's breathing down, if you're trying to elicit relaxation.
• Use dynamic tonality shifts to elicit higher & higher response potential in your audiences. Using my dual-tone vocal technique or my sine-wave tonal process (for example, from my Irresistible Voice CD-set) can induce very deep trance in an audience while they think they're just listening to content.

What if you need to present a high quantity of important details an audience needs to remember?

Begin by intending to package the information from the frame of where/when they're going to need to remember all that information. Ask yourself when/how will people need to recall all that information... and the answer(s) you receive will need to be the opening frame for each big chunk of information. That way, audience members learn to encode/store that information within the frame(s) where they'll need it. If you frame it based on topic, or from an outline structure that makes sense on paper but isn't connected to when they'll need the information, they'll never have high recall when they need it most.

The next important bit is to always use 5 or less chunks at any level. We know people can store 7, plus or minus 2, pieces of information within any given frame, so make sure you limit your chunking threshold to 5. That way *everyone* in the room can maximize their likelihood of total recall.

You may also want to design your presentations using Knowledge Engineering -- specifically the backward chaining process. Ask youself... "What needs to be there at the end of the training, for the trainer to have been highly successful at maximizing every student's achievement and development?" "What do they need to be able to know and/or demonstrate?" Work backward from there. And if you know how long it takes you to functionally train each chunk, then you know if you can successfully deliver (or exceed) a training promise within a specified time-frame.

One thing you may face is when people try to tell you how *they* think they best learn. The problem with this is... most people who do this with you ... are usually in incredibly deep denial (conditioned from years of compensating from exposure to teachers who just don't understand how the human mind best acquires new information and/or skills) and to make matters worse, they've paired that with impatience for anything that doesn't fit their expectations and pattern-matching. In other words, they think they've learned better learning methods, because they had to develop compensatory learning patterns to actually learn something from otherwise poor-quality teachers in the past. And then when in the presence of a highly skilled trainer, they're actually blocked from learning something effectively from a great communicator!!!

Now there are some people who are intimately aware of their own optimal learning strategies. E.g., If a highly trained NLP'er tells me they've got a particular learning strategy preference, I'll usually honor and use their suggestions about how they best learn. But outside of NLP circles? Nope! Instead, I do what I can to convince them I know what I'm doing when it comes to extremely effective training/educating and accelerated learning methods.

Why? Because I'm not willing to train anything badly.

I've given you some ideas above to pursue, so -- go explore & use the above & report back sometime!

These are just some of the examples of how people train to the unconscious mind, and if any of you want to learn more nuances for achieving the above, I train many of the above and lots more at my Speaking Ingeniously course.

an earlier version of this post first appeared in one of Jamie Smart's newsletters back in 2005.

For more than a decade, I've been recognized as an expert on voice development, both amongst Neuro-Linguistic Programmers, and outside of that domain as well. With my audio program "Finding Your Irresistible Voice" being my most popular home-study resource, it's no wonder my customers and students have asked for additional material in this area, to help them improve their voice even further.

I've also had the opportunity to run multiple "Irresistible Voice" NLP workshops, in NYC, in Melbourne Australia, London UK, San Francisco, and elsewhere... and the pleasure and privilege of extensively coaching at least 1000 different people (students and coaching clients included) on improving the quality of their voices, not to mention offering thousands of people quick & targeted suggestions for vocal improvement, based on whatever I was hearing them do & say while they spoke with me briefly or during teleconferences. It's one of the most common interests I experience, both at my own events and when I visit other trainers' courses.

In short, without doing anything intentional to get to this point, I now have ample additional experience and knowledge working with vocal improvement, far beyond the level I was at, at the time when I first produced the "Irresistible Voice" CDs back in 1998.

Back in 2005, I attended an Influence course given by Kenrick Cleveland down in Miami Beach as a guest. While there, I was asked to spend 30 minutes working with Kenrick's student group to train them on the value of improving their tonality and resonance. So I spent 15 minutes training a range of techniques, and then worked individually with a handful of "voice-challenged" participants. I asked the audience members who thought they could use some vocal improvement, and from the group that responded, I hand-picked 4 specific people who I felt could improve the most, in a very short period of time. My intuition was sorting for poor posture, poor breathing patterns, poor voicebox timing, excessive speed and muscular interruptions, etc.

I ended up doing what I would call "rapid voice interventions" to show what we could do with each person -- by offering exercises & suggestions that each person could do to uniquely improve their voice. In each case, the "diagnoses" were different, the "treatments" were different, but the results & "prognoses" the same: the "problem" voices were replaced by warm, resonant voices, getting a round of applause for every example.

No one is beyond help -- anyone can (and most people should) improve their voice. ESPECIALLY people interested in NLP and/or Hypnosis.

In fact, one of the guys that had the most fun with (and says he got the most from) my mini-workshop was a fellow with an absolutely World-Class voice (in my opinion). He said he had gotten coaching from another audio program author, and that author told him his biggest problem with his voice -- was that he (the person asking for voice coaching) didn't like his own voice enough, and he'd get the best results -- by just "getting over it" (i.e., getting past his own dislike, since other people loved his voice!). I told him I thought it was great advice, and we both ended the conversation agreeing that no matter how great we get our voices to sound, each of us can always find areas of improvement.

My own biggest area of continuous voice improvement is a really tough call for me -- it's my slightly nasal sound, which comes from my deviated septom. I could have the nasal surgery to get past that, but... I've heard some horror stories about people who've done the surgery and then had additional sinus problems for years afterwards. So I work my butt off to improve & continually refine other qualities of my voice, which overshadow the slightly nasal quality it sometimes has.

So, to get your mouth watering for further development, here's a couple of ideas for each of you to explore when improving your voice.

Stand up when you're talking on the phone.

Smile when you speak to people. It engages FAR better tonality.

Breathe deep using your belly. If your rib cage is expanding measurably, you're not using your belly. Breathe in, belly goes out. Breathe out, belly comes back in.

Drink -only- water. Juice, Coffee, caffeine, sugar -- all will help constrict your vocal cords, and diminish your voice. A lot more than you think it does. Fact, not Fiction. Besides, drinking more/only water is much healthier for you anyway, as if that wasn't reason enough to forego the rest.

If you have to speak for long periods of time, use a Glycerin Spray on the back of your throat. A speaker's little-known mastery tip! Keeps the throat moist. Great stuff!

Imagine your vocal tract as though the space inside it were solid. Look for the tight, angular, constricted spots. Change or open up your posture to loosen and open up those constricted areas. Create a larger, more open wind-instrument in your vocal tract. Move/rock your body back & forth, until that more open posture feels more natural/comfortable.

Learn to speak using a metronome. Practice different rhythms until it's absolutely second nature to synchronize with different rhythms presented to you.

Learn as many different accents as you can. The nuances you'll develop with shifting your vocal qualities -- will make you world-class at mirroring other people's voices.

These are just a few good additional suggestions. I have so many more -- even better than the above -- and -- these should keep you going for a while! Feel free to email me & tell me how these go for you!

I was recently asked by someone older how they could learn languages as an adult as quickly as children do.  They also asked if leaving the television or radio on in the background with a foreign language would be useful...?

Good news!  There are all kinds of ways to speed up learning, even with new languages.

While television may not provide the optimal way to learn another language, it does give people visual contexts in which to place various words.  That does have an impact.

Ergo tv is better than radio for learning foreign languages, because you have potentially a LOT more information from which to learn how to understand/speak another language.

But it's probably far better to get a great CD audio program or podcasts on a foreign language than it would be to listen to the radio.  Then play those audios over & over again in the background, both when you have time to speak along with them as well as when you don't.

And a good learning program for TV/video/dvd is still much better than a good learning program from a book or audio-only.  The more forms of media, the more sensory systems involved, the better.

Bottom line, you can always learn.  Yes, since you're older than a child, it may take some work; it'll certainly take a bit more work than kids have to put in, but so what!

• Use as many sensory systems involved as you can (i.e. TV/DVD/Video is better than audio only)
• Take hourly breaks from more intense study sessions for at least 5-10 minutes to get movement into your body so as to integrate the skills into your neurology more effectively
• Play 60 beat-per-minute music behind that in an ipod or CD player if you can (this keeps you in an optimal learning state)
• Make sure the speakers are interesting, with active tonal shifts, and not boring.  Then reproduce those same shifts in your own voice.
• Play these when you're awake, and play them when you're asleep.  
• Attach pleasure to confusion.  Push past basic understanding towards confusion.  Confusion is a GREAT indication that you've acquired a lot and are busy integrating it.  Confusion should tell you to keep doing whatever drills you were doing when you started getting confused -- NOT walk away!

If you utilize most of the above accelerated learning strategies, you will notice far more rapid results than lots of people would expect from "an old dog trying to learn new tricks."

Lastly, stay with it -- set up the above, keep it going, and trust that results will be forthcoming -- sometimes in steady ways, sometimes not for a while then all of a sudden, whoosh!

IMPORTANT: This technique, and people who use it, are not advocating drugs to anyone. We're advocating having increased access to remembered good feelings of any kind -- without the use of any substances at all. In NLP there is a reasonably well known "hypnotic induction" called 'the Drug of Choice' Technique or Induction.  This tends to be really popular at workshops where mature adults get to safely re-experience things they haven't played with since college years.  Coaches and therapists have used this technique to help smokers feel the results of smoking, without breathing in nicotine and smoke.  These are only some of the applications of the technique.

I've detailed this process below for your education and enjoyment.

I've known properly licensed therapists and psychologists who have reported good results using this process with drug users.. to help condition them to stop using the drugs. The reasoning seems to be that if they can access the feelings now without the chemical, that they used to get with the chemical, then the person can lead a healthier existence. Obviously, unless you're a licensed therapist, don't play with this for actual drug users.

Do me a favor and leave the ethics discussions out of this thread and don't presume you know, just from reading this post, what I am or am not advocating. I'm in favor of good feelings -- without needing them chemically induced.

Also, learn these techniques for the process, not for content. You can use this to spin just about any feelings you've had in the past, not just drug-related.

In other words... this could be used to elicit product satisfaction in buyers.  It could even be used for re-inducing sensual and sexual feelings, too... use your imagination, people!

The Drug of Choice Technique

Certainly this sort of thing is best 'shown' or demonstrated live, as there are lots of nonverbals and skills that one can tie in to amplify the results. If you try this and don't get strong results, trust me, it ain't the technique that isn't working, it's your application of it. I get profound results -- with myself or others -- every time.

If my description here, when you try it, fails to generate a strong response in people, then it is those nonverbals and ancillary skills that are the difference that makes the difference.

I say that because the drug of choice, to an untrained eye, is a really, really simple sequence to follow.

But I've seen people follow the steps and get nothing, whereas if I'm talking to someone who has experienced marijuana, for example, 3-5 minutes after I begin, they'll be profoundly high. I have yet NOT to get a strong result with this.

So here's the process, in a nutshell, leaving out all the stuff that is easy to observe, not so easy to type:

If anyone you know has ever asked the question ''Remember when we were SO high...'' the people answering that question might say ''yes'' but they wouldn't experience the drug state, because they were being asked about a completely different state than they're presently in. Any answer is at best going to be dissociated.

However, the drug of choice process aims to give people a clear and rapid pathway into the sensations of having their state altered. It takes the idea of a very different static state, and gives people a pathway into it, that their bodies will remember, given the right stimuli.

So I ask the person to PRETEND to do, physically, whatever the first thing is, that absorbs the substance. If it was Ibuprofen (or Advil(R) headache/bodyache medicine), then I begin by asking them to PRETEND to break up the pill into 10 tiny pieces, and PRETEND to take one tiny piece at a time. In this way they're not in danger of pretending to take more than one actual dose of ibuprofen. If they wish to recreate a marijuana high, then I have them PRETEND to inhale from a joint, or a water pipe, etc.

After they do the PRETEND physical action (which not only becomes their somatic anchor for the start of the process, it actually already IS their somatic anchor for the start of the process), I ask them...

''OK, after a few moments or minutes passes, what's the first thing your body feels?''

And *usually* you get a useful response (sometimes they give out unrelated info -- experience teaches you how to sort for useful info here). And you repeat that back to them, reflecting the nonverbals, going into the sensations, yourself.

Then you ask them to shake it off and go back to neutral again. And when they look normal again, have them PRETEND to repeat the initiator anchor/movement.  Then you walk them through ''a few moments pass, and then, you begin to feel [first feeling],'' and you show them the feelings using their nonverbals and pointing to your & their body to reference each feeling. And go into state to help bring them into it.

Then you ask ''and what's the one next thing you feel?'' etc etc. And you repeat & reflect that back to them.

Then you take them back to neutral.

Each time... you keep repeating the process... And it builds a state/sensation chain in the subject.

Neutral, Anchor, ask for 1st feeling. reflect that back.

Neutral, Anchor, 1st feeling, ask for 2nd feeling. reflect that back.

Neutral, Anchor, 1st feeling, 2nd feeling, ask for 3rd feeling, reflect that back.

etc. etc.

With most people, it only takes 3-6 steps before just firing off the anchor rushes them into state.

And once it's built... each time they fire off the anchor, the faster they go through the chain.

Additional Points/Nuances to Optimize the Technique

Now, here's where all those other skills came into play. If you the leader are neutral the whole time, you may as well not have done it for the poor results that would have produced. You have to lead them into it.

Also, if you were thinking about it at the time, then not only did they anchor the start, but so did you, with or without their awareness (it matters not).

Then you can test your anchor while they're neutral, and see how fast you can bring back their response(s).

Applying this elsewhere?

Now, for discussion, take all this outside the context of the word "drug." Because if you remove the word drug from the title, you can call this the ''feeling of choice'' induction... and use the exact same thing at a coffee date... to elicit what it's like to slip into a jacuzzi and feel so sensually relaxed...

You can use the same process while working to establish trust with a client or vendor, to help them make great decisions.

You can use the same thing with a partner who's angry with you for something to lead them into what they felt like when they wanted to compromise... or what they felt like on the last occasion when they felt they needed to better understand something instead of making assumptions.

You can use the same process with a group to remind a nonfunctional team how they managed to turn lack of productivity into feelings of teamwork and contribution and success.

The list goes on & on!