Your getting Sleepy......
Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 3:21 am
At our company kickoff two weeks ago, they brought in a "motivational speaker". Dude had the Wayne Newton Big hair thing and started ranting about the secrets of highly successful salespeople (they write their goals down, some even on a daily basis! - Gee...) so since I was sitting in back I popped open the laptop and went back to work on a proposal that needed to go out. Dude then started ranting about visualization and seeing success and self hypnosis. My eyes are rolling back in my head when he says "lets do an experiment". Eveyone was instructed to close their eyes keep both feet flat on the floor and put their arms straight out in front of them. Next he says to visualize holding a bucket in your left hand and as you hold the bucket someone is filling it with wet sand. It's getting heavier and heavier. He rants on this for another minute, then says to visualize holding a hundred helium filled balloons in your right hand The baloons are are tugging upward, higher, higher, blah, blah, blah...... So By now I'm bored out of my mind and am peaking around the room to see who is actually falling for this crap. I see big haired dude walking through the conference room whispering in the ears of a few of those with their left hand down and their right hand up. He then goes back to the stage and "wakes" everyone up. He calls out for all those he "spoke" to to come up on stage.
Now I have always considered hypnotism to be total bullshit, and this dude said as much, saying a definite portion of the population could never be hypnotized beacuse their minds would not allow it. I'm a skeptic of everything - everytime I'd see Chris Angel or some other hack do the group thing on TV I figured it had to be staged. In this case the 10 people he called up - 7 of whom I've known and worked with at least 5 years - all got onstage and proceeded to do every asinine thing he told them. One of my counterparts was told, when he'd make him "sleep" that his left hand was glued to his head and he could not remove it no matter how hard he tried. Sure as shit when he "woke" him dude had that hand on his head and said he couldn't move it. Big hair then proceeded to pull 10 $100 bills out of his pocket and offered to give it to him if he could pry his hand off off his gourd and yet he still couldn't. Having known this dude would blow a goat for $50 I knew it wasn't staged. The others did a good variety of silly shit, including acting like they were 5, losing their shoes while they were holding them, and falling all over each other when they were "asleep". Again, if I didn't know these people I'd swear it was all staged. After dude was done with his show he pumped his book, his self hypno CDs and some other silly shit I wasn't going to buy, but still I gotta say it was the most entertaining thing we'd ever had at a company kickoff and elicited huge laughs. The "subjects" received huge amounts of grief from the audience afterwards, albeit with "free" autographed copies of big hairs book.
Any of you ever seen anything like this in person?
Now I have always considered hypnotism to be total bullshit, and this dude said as much, saying a definite portion of the population could never be hypnotized beacuse their minds would not allow it. I'm a skeptic of everything - everytime I'd see Chris Angel or some other hack do the group thing on TV I figured it had to be staged. In this case the 10 people he called up - 7 of whom I've known and worked with at least 5 years - all got onstage and proceeded to do every asinine thing he told them. One of my counterparts was told, when he'd make him "sleep" that his left hand was glued to his head and he could not remove it no matter how hard he tried. Sure as shit when he "woke" him dude had that hand on his head and said he couldn't move it. Big hair then proceeded to pull 10 $100 bills out of his pocket and offered to give it to him if he could pry his hand off off his gourd and yet he still couldn't. Having known this dude would blow a goat for $50 I knew it wasn't staged. The others did a good variety of silly shit, including acting like they were 5, losing their shoes while they were holding them, and falling all over each other when they were "asleep". Again, if I didn't know these people I'd swear it was all staged. After dude was done with his show he pumped his book, his self hypno CDs and some other silly shit I wasn't going to buy, but still I gotta say it was the most entertaining thing we'd ever had at a company kickoff and elicited huge laughs. The "subjects" received huge amounts of grief from the audience afterwards, albeit with "free" autographed copies of big hairs book.
Any of you ever seen anything like this in person?