NLP into Action

By : Issa Kumalasari and Jean-Baptiste Chauvin

The inaugural leader of the Republic of Indonesia, President Soekarno, is undoubtedly one of the greatest examples of charisma the world has ever known. For twenty years as the archipelago’s revolutionary leader and twenty years as the President of Indonesia, Soekarno used the power of language and his charismatic appeal for political gain and national advancement.

Soekarno was undoubtedly a great orator. Even before he assumed the presidency of the Indonesian Republic, he was capable of bewitching whole gatherings with his speeches. His language was not too pure and often outright crude, but his use of the language, his intonation and the gestures he made at the right time were flawless. His appearance was impressive. In front of the common people who were captivated by his charm, exuberance and delivery, Soekarno was in his element.

Whether one heard his speeches and stories once or multiple times, one could not help being overawed and overwhelmed by his thundering voice and absolute conviction. After all, he was charming, calm and fatherly. If he wished, he could be very disarming and pleasing. He was constantly aware that he had that kind of influence on his listeners who believed Soekarno was indeed their Savior. In his autobiography, Soekarno was quoted as saying: “I learned to grab my audience’s attention at the very beginning. I not only grabbed it, I held it. They listened spellbound. A shiver went through me when I first discerned I embodied the kind of power that could move masses. I made my points simply. My hearers found them easy to grasp because I relied on descriptive terms rather than facts and figures. I appealed to the emotions … They looked up at me as I spoke. They stared at me adoringly, eyes open wide, faces turned up, drinking it all in trustingly, expectantly. It seemed apparent I was becoming a great public speaker. It was in my blood” (Soekarno, 1965, p. 179).

Virginia Hooker once examined the very distinct styles of communication employed by Indonesia’s founding President, Soekarno, and his long-standing successor Soeharto. While the former was considered poetic, charismatic, informal, even chaotic, the latter showed less compassion and militaristic tendencies in many formal and impersonal deliveries. One way in which the differing styles employed by the nation’s first and second Presidents were exposed was the Independence Day Speeches. For instance, Soeharto’s speech assessed key events of the past twelve months, proposed future goals and was directed at the Indonesian nation in its entirety. He would pay tribute to the significance of the 1945 Constitution and more contemporary agendas. Moreover, Soeharto would discuss the strength of productivity, industry, economic development and foreign policy as well as encourage the nation to strive for success and embrace the New Order’s endeavors. On the other hand, however, Hooker makes reference to the fact that Soekarno was more concerned with presenting his own policies than with national policy during his Independence Day Speech. She argues that Soekarno’s addresses were unplanned, unstructured, lacked an underlying theme and concerned merely the distant and recent past.

One characteristic evident in the speeches delivered by Soekarno, and not his successor, is the way he drew the audience close to him through references to shared experiences. Whereas Soeharto used monologue, the role of language itself, through dialogue, was obvious during Soekarno’s time. He not only persuaded and inspired his audience, but emotionally entangled and even captivated them. He invited negotiation and argument when Soeharto did not. Critics, however, such as Hooker allege that there was no sense of order, no rational argument nor controlled direction in Indonesia’s founding-father’s addresses. The element which enabled his style to succeed was that his delivery was ‘inimitable and unforgettable’. Soekarno’s speeches were undeniably ‘personality-based’ while Soeharto’s were more policy driven and remembered only through repetition and cliché.

Thus Soekarno was without a doubt one of the greatest charismatic statesmen the world has ever seen. He will long be remembered for his ability to wisely assimilate performance and language which undeniably facilitated his long-standing position of power in the Indonesian Republic’s short but dramatic political history.

However, Soekarno’s talent was probably a natural gift. But in the recent history, many famous world leaders have been relying on specific techniques to improve their communication skills. The most famous ones (and probably the most efficient as well) are undoubtedly hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).

Neuro-linguistic programming is a cutting edge technology in knowing, understanding, and controlling human conscious and unconscious mind, easily and practically. NLP was created in 1975 by Richard Bandler, a University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz mathematician, who is interested in psychology, with Dr. John Grinder, PhD in Linguisitic. They sinergized their expertize in the field of computerization and linguistic to create a human nonverbal communication model.

Nowadays, NLP has become the heart of many communication and change techniques approaches to help people communicate better with themselves, eliminate anxiety, control negative emotions and fear. NLP techniques and strategies have been applied in the field of therapy, management, education, sales, health, communication, politics and other individual goals achievement.

One of the main purposes of the NLP is to create a “rapport” with someone, meaning how to create instant liking and agreement, and being instantly able to switch onto mutual understanding with anyone you choose. Thus you become able to increase your sensitivity to body-language and its true meaning; you learn how to use unconscious body postures so that people unconsciously associate positively with you; you can identify how to use your voice tonality to build rapport; and you discover how to create instant liking when communicating with friends, relatives or even people you don’t know.

NLP is also a very efficient technique in terms of language patterns: the words we use show our intellectual attributes and our personal characteristics. The words we use are chosen unconsciously but they have a special meaning for each individual. Thanks to NLP we learn how to recognize what type of personality is hiding behind different types of words; we find out how to customize your speech for each individual to achieve instant acceptance and wavelength communication; and we learn how to use abstract language to achieve instant agreement and induce trance easily.

With such powerful and useful techniques available, there is no surprise that some of the most influents politicians and world leaders have been attracted by the NLP and became very efficient practitioners themselves. Recently, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been three of the most interesting and effective NLP and subliminal language techniques users, attracted by its power to convince people.

First, here is an example of distracting the left brain. Politicians use these powerful techniques all the time. Assume for a moment that you are watching a politician give a speech. First, he might generate what is called a “YES SET.” These are statements that will cause listeners to agree; they might even unknowingly nod their heads in agreement. Next come the TRUISMS. These are usually facts that could be debated but, once the politician has his audience agreeing, the odds are in the politician’s favor that the audience won’t stop to think for themselves, thus continuing to agree.

Last comes the SUGGESTION. This is what the politician wants you to do and, since you have been agreeing all along, you could be persuaded to accept the suggestion.

Now, if you’ll listen closely to this following undefined political speech, you’ll find that the first three are the “yes set,” the next three are truisms and the last is the suggestion:

“Ladies and gentlemen: are you angry about high food prices? Are you tired of astronomical gas prices? Are you sick of out-of-control inflation? Well, you know the Other Party allowed 18 percent inflation last year; you know crime has increased 50 percent nationwide in the last 12 months, and you know your paycheck hardly covers your expenses any more. Well, the answer to resolving these problems is to elect me to the U.S. Senate.”

You’ve probably heard all that before. But you might also watch for what are called Imbedded Commands. As an example: On key words, the speaker would make a gesture with his left hand, which research has shown is more apt to access your right brain. Today’s media-oriented politicians and spellbinders are often carefully trained by a whole new breed of specialists who are using every trick in the book, both old and new – to manipulate you into accepting their candidate.

Bill Clinton had his speeches prepared in such a way that they take advantage of the brain’s natural functioning to manipulate it. Bill Clinton, when he gives a speech will initiate it by pushing everybody’s green buttons. He will say a number of things that everyone wants to hear and will agree with, in order to generate a YES SET. There will be a number of these; the number of these often desired is 3. Then the second stage is to bring in TRUISMS that are facts that after the audience has already been mentally saying yes, the audience will probably accept these facts without any disagreement. Finally, after the three YES SETs, the three TRUISMS, Bill will plant the suggestion, such as “support me in such and such.” On important points, Bill will move his left hand, to help imbed certain commands to his viewers. He will also use some subtle hand signals/codes to trigger mind-controlled slaves too. He will ask during his talks for people to imagine or visualize what he wants for them. Again this is manipulation directed at the right brain.

Barack Obama, who managed to be elected as the latest American President without any amazing previous achievements or a long political experience, uses hidden hypnosis techniques as well. And it is hard to say that he would have been elected without his power to convince people through his speeches, which are a combination of his own charisma and the subtle and powerful techniques of NLP and hypnosis.

Barack Obama’s speeches contain the hypnosis techniques of Dr. Milton Erickson, who developed a form of “conversational” hypnosis that could be hidden in seemingly normal speech and used on patients without their knowledge for therapy purposes. Hypnosis, if defined, is a particular altered state of hyper-suggestibility brought about in an individual by a combination of relaxation, fixation of attention, and suggestion. What Dr. Erickson did was to figure out how to put people into trance and hypnotize them and implant suggestions with seemingly normal conversation. He discovered that people could achieve this heightened state of hyper-suggestibility without the traditional difficultly-induced coma-like state traditionally associated with hypnosis. Hypnosis uses language patterns, visual tricks, body language, voice, tone, and other aspects of communication to get “suggestions” past the critical factor part of the brain and directly into the listener’s subconscious.

Obama is using textbook, clinical trance inductions in his speeches. Obama’s hypnotic techniques work on a subconscious level, and are designed so that people watching him in an audience or on TV are unaware of his techniques and their effects. Obama is using clear hypnotic anchoring, pacing and leading, and numerous other hypnosis techniques.

Some specific examples of Obama using fourteen separate hypnotic pacing statements can be found in his Denver 2008 Convention speech. Elementary pacing examples from Obama include, “now is the time”, “this moment” and “as I stand here before you.” These statements are undeniably true in the simplest terms and commonly used parts of his pacing techniques, because of course now is the time, and if he is there speaking, of course he is standing before the voters. These are things the hypnotist says that are verifiably true, and used to lower our critical factor defenses to allow implantation of subconscious messages. Looking at “pacing” statements alone, Obama’s 2008 Democratic National Convention Speech in Denver uses them throughout. Yet, nobody suspects these language patterns to be anything other than an innocent part of his powerful speech. It is no coincidence that he happens to use these phrases that are subconscious pacing statements because they are immediately and verifiably true by their most simplistic terms, and cause the subconscious to accept the hypnotist as a source for such absolute truth. More simplistic are statements like “we need change”, “We are the hope of our future,” and “Yes we can.” They are logically meaningless but they hit a chord, a subconscious chord, especially in younger people, and are his most powerful words.

After pacing you repeatedly in multiple ways and on multiple levels as described above, and thus lowering your cognitive critical factor defenses, the hypnotist will implant a “lead” – the command or absolute unquestionable truth he places in your subconscious. Essentially, the pace or truth is connected to the new hypnotic message or “lead” using connecting or linking language. Paces are connected to thelead through the use of the linking words including “and”, “as”, “because” or “that is why.” Saying, for one example: “We need change…and…that is why I will be your next President” is a basic pace and lead. No person can disagree with “we need change.” Change is inevitable anyway, certainly when problems exist. The subject walks away believing we need change, therefore we need Obama.

Many people know the sensation of hanging on Obama’s every word as he speaks. It is no accident. In fact, Obama intends to speak in such a way that it is almost impossible to listen at all without hanging on his every word. His unnaturally slow, rhythmical; four to eight words phrases with huge pauses are delivered to be complete ideas by themselves on some level, even though only part of a sentence or a complete thought. He is sensitive to exactly how to speak to fixate our attention based on his understanding of hypnosis. Obama’s speeches often use an unnaturally slow language to start. Unnaturally slow speech is a common hypnotic technique in order to allow the subject time to respond to suggestions, imagine images, and feel sensations conjured by the hypnotist. The unnaturally slow speech holds focus intensely, because the mind waits for a new input, and is meanwhile left analyzing what it has just heard. Absorbing attention is about making sure people’s thoughts are what you set out for them.

Obama uses certain hand gestures as hypnotic anchors as well and others to aid in hypnotic command implantation. Anchoring is a hypnosis/NLP technique where the hypnotist programs the subject to respond a certain way from a specific trigger or stimuli. A “hypnotic anchor” is any stimulus that triggers a consistent psychological state. An anchor is essentially an internal state that is triggered by an external stimulus. You may have noticed how Obama holds his thumb and forefinger. Because a gesture is subconsciously linked by programming to a response, it must be unique. Obama uses this thumb and forefinger hand position essentially uniquely, differently than all other speakers, and continually, far more frequently than other speakers who use any similar hand gesture. It was even made fun of on Saturday Night Live. Obama uses his thumb and forefinger pressed together as a hidden hypnotic anchor.

When analyzed, it is obvious that Obama’s speeches techniques have help him in his quest for the White House. Even if it is impossible to quantify this effect, it is undeniable that his eloquence has done a lot for his election. Many people might have forgotten this, but Barack Obama managed to be elected even though he was a Black American with a short experience as a senator and Hussein as a middle name. The use of NLP techniques have been a great help for him in convincing Americans.

When most of the American presidents, and more and more other politicians there, use NLP and hypnosis techniques in their speeches and their political communication, Indonesia didn’t have any amazingly eloquent speaker since Soekarno. These techniques could be of great help for the Indonesian politicians willing to improve their communication skills, their influence on people and thus their personal results for the sake of Indonesians and Indonesia.

For Indonesian version please contact Issa Kumalasari at :

issa@nlp-starfield.com