Sleight of Mouth Ain't Magic

Sometimes people expect Sleight of Mouth to be magic, that once you know SOM you will essentially be master of the universe. That you’ll be able to persuade anybody of anything at anytime, all the time. Then they get disappointed when they find out it isn’t magic. Well, it’s true, Sleight of Mouth is not magic. But then, Magic ain’t magic either. It just seems that way.

Magic works with illusion and misdirection. When watching a magic act, you believe (or at least you sort-of believe) that that rabbit came out of that empty hat because the magician waved his wand and said “abracadabra.” The reality is, of course, different. The magician’s hat is carefully constructed to hide the false bottom and uses forced perspective to make it look normal. Or he had you focus on the wand and it’s being waved three times while intoning the magic words, while, if you’d been looking at what his left hand was doing you’d see he was opening that secret compartment and releasing the bunny.

Magic’s central operating principle is that people will jump to conclusions that are, in fact, inaccurate even though they may seem totally logical. A magician will utilize this tendency and get people to believe false conclusions. It’s like the trick when the woman in the box is sawed in half, and we know it’s true because we saw her feet sticking out the end of the box and saw her wiggling them.

Effective Sleight of Mouth has the effect of showing the audience how the trick really worked. It’d be like the audience all thinking, “Wow! That woman really was sawed in half!” and then having the box turned around to reveal its false sides and the contortions his assistant performed to fit in half the box while the second, hidden assistant stuck her feet out the other end. The audience’s response is, of course, “Oh, I see! I get it now. This is the real truth.”

A classic Sleight of Mouth example that Robert Dilts and Todd Epstein came up with that was reportedly inspired by some people’s reactions to Richard Bandler’s famous outrageousness and intensity. People would sometimes jump to the conclusion that because Richard was loud, confrontative and outrageous, that he was being mean to people. They expressed their belief that “saying mean things means you’re a bad person.” This seemed as true to them as the “fact” that the assistant was sawed in half did to the gasping audience of the magic show.

However, when Dilts and Epstein used Sleight of Mouth and revealed the truth about Richard’s intentions and his unorthodox NLP techniques, people would see the truth (“Oh, I see! I get it now. This is the real truth.”)—that he was only saying those things to help them, that he really was helping them, and then they’d realize he wasn’t really mean at all. He was just a man willing to do what was needed to really help this person.

Maybe it is like magic, after all.

Take care, take risks,
Doug

Doug O’Brien & Associates
Center for NLP & Hypnosis—www.ericksonian.com
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