Doug O’Brien – Sleight of Mouth DVD

Sleight of Mouth is a persuasion skill, a vehicle for the reframing of beliefs. It is a system of 14 different patterns of response to a stated belief. A system that, once mastered, can allow you to always have a response that will effectively elucidate your position and help you to persuade rather than be persuaded. Simply put, it will help you win any argument, be verbally powerful and powerfully verbal.

After many refinements, these tapes are the culmination of a project to present this material in as clear and concise form as possible. Here you’ll find two 60 minute studio tape recordings and a complete workbook. It’s designed to be as if Doug is right there with you, guiding you through the manual, giving you a private tutorial on each SLEIGHT OF MOUTH pattern and the Polya Patterns. In this informal and enjoyable style you learn quickly, easily and functionally – so you can use these patterns in your real life now!

SLEIGHT OF MOUTH is a result of the methodology of NLP being applied to NLP, or, more properly, to Richard Bandler’s debate skills. NLP grew out of Bandler and Grinder analyzing and codifying the methods of Milton Erickson, Gregory Bateson, Virginia Satir and others. Robert Dilts applied this same methodology to Bandler’s own unique way with people. In his NLP Certification courses, Bandler would challenge participants to use their newly acquired skills to persuade him that a belief system adopted for the occasion (eg.”I can’t see the curve, therefore the world is flat.”) was wrong. As hard as they tried, Bandler was always able to field an army of responses to turn their “logical” arguments around. Dilts was impressed with this and then fascinated to find that he was beginning to discern the patterns Bandler used. Dilts systemized the patterns into specific categories and developed an elegant mind map of them which makes it wonderfully easy and fun to use.

As an example, If your lover or spouse were to say to you,”Your being late means you don’t care about me,” you would immediately recognize this syllogism as being perfect for a SLEIGHT OF MOUTH treatment. The syllogism is A=B, a “complex equivalence.” Statement A, “Your being late,””means”(=) statement B,”You don’t care about me.” Now that might be true, but it’s not necessarily true. For your reply you could use the SLEIGHT OF MOUTH pattern called “redefine” and say, “I wasn’t late, I was delayed” (redefining the word “late” in statement A) or “It’s not that I don’t care, its that I show my caring differently” (redefining “care” in statement B). Another Pattern you could use is the one called “Hierarchy of Criteria.” Using this pattern you could ask, “Isn’t it more important to fulfill my responsibilities to the people who are depending on me that to be punctual?”

Part of the power of SLEIGHT OF MOUTH is that it gives you more choices and flexibility of possible responses. In the above paragraph I offered only two of fourteen different possibilities. Imagine having that much verbal power at your fingertips at all times.

While obviously powerful tools for a sales person or lawyer, they’re useful for a hypnotherapist or NLP Practitioner in a variety of ways. As an example, a client’s beliefs about therapy or hypnosis could inhibit their cooperation in the therapeutic process. Sometimes a negative belief about life or health is all that is stopping the client from making progress in the first place. So if the therapist can create in the the client’s mind sufficient expectation (ie. belief) of what this hypnosis will mean, then the job is 90% done before the formal hypnosis even takes place.