If I were to argue here that the heart of business communication is hypnotic, you would probably be alarmed. Most professionals have little understanding of hypnosis and less interest in something they see as either manipulative or nonsense. Those professionals have never encountered hypnosis as it was practiced by Milton Erickson.

There are many and varied accounts of the practice of Erickson and his remarkably effective techniques for communicating in ways that elicited positive, productive behaviours. Common to all of them are two essentials: the ability to use respect and rapport to build agreement and the ability to build focus within that agreement. Understood in this way, Erickson’s communication should be required study for all business people.

Erickson began with the premise that no one can or should be forced to change. All influence springs from agreement based on respect and rapport. The would-be influencer must first study and replicate the thinking and experience of the person to be influenced. This involves a disciplined, structured approach to observing and communicating experience.

Imagine for a moment, that you enroll in a course in Ericksonian Hypnosis. You will learn to communicate with one person at a time. As you do, you will build the skills necessary to influence decision makers without putting anyone in trance. You may find the same strategies useful as you work with groups or write.

One of the first steps in your study will be to become more skilled in calibration: the ability to notice physiological difference and assign meaning to that difference. You will begin to learn to read people as experts might read a blueprint or a piece of art.

Another word for the willingness to engage with the details of another’s experience is respect: you will practice respect when you notice and accept the particular elements of thoughts and feelings that characterize a colleague or client.
Rapport means demonstrating respect by replicating some aspects of the experience of the person with whom you are agreeing. Rapport comes naturally with people with whom we have lots in common; it is the first thing to go when we put what we want to say ahead of building agreement.

Agreement that is based on talking in the same tone of voice or sitting in similar postures is general and easy to achieve. It is not normally useful in itself; it is an excellent starting point for building the more focused agreement that will allow you to accomplish what you need to accomplish.

You can build on rapport when you use agreement as a structuring principle for speaking or writing. Instead of ordering what you have to say by logic, chronology or importance, you can move through material in order of agreement. In other words, it is possible to start with obvious agreement (as you did when you read the statements in the opening paragraph) and gradually come to more focused agreement.

Focus involves moving from the imprecise to the increasingly precise. Focused agreement means first of all focusing on agreement. By selecting words, points and arguments that are general enough to gain agreement, you can practice a communication strategy that is guaranteed to be influential.

As agreement is formed, it gains momentum. It requires less attention - and therefore fewer resources - to stay in agreement than it does to notice and assert difference. By remaining focused on choosing the words and arguments most agreeable to the receiver, you can learn to focus the agreement using more detail and more precise language.

Ericksonian communication rewards study and practice. Maintaining focused agreement requires increasingly fine calibrations of the receiver’s state and presuppositions. You can learn to continually pay attention to the state (or predicted state) of the receiver and adjust your words and strategies to match it.

Influence in an Ericksonian model begins with a focus on agreement and results in an agreement with focus.