Living Dangerously - Issue 33

In order to be a leader these days, you need to perform miracles. And in order to do that, you must use every available gift. Take these scenarios, for example: You're meeting with potential investors, and they tell you that your business idea is secondary. The smart money is always invested in you, the leader. Your ability to perform -- as you -- is everything. Or you're coming up in the world, and your gift of one-on-one gab is no longer enough. Now you have to be able to seduce crowds. Or you have to make a big decision with next to no information. You're already flying at reckless altitudes, feeling like a lone pilot on a dark night of the soul. You must shake off all doubt! Perform fearlessly! But how?

How else? With magic. I decided to call on Stanley Fisher, a psychologist and hypnotist who helps top-ranked business leaders overcome their performance fear through the art of the trance.

"On a simple level," says Fisher, "the people I see are suffering from performance anxiety. Executives who come to me have tremendous anxiety and no way to deal with it. With hypnosis, we don't have to go into the whole history or the psychological trauma. We deal only with the immediate physical problem -- with the pain or fear that they are experiencing."

But what exactly is hypnosis? "Hypnosis is the inborn ability to use the state that we call 'trance,' " says Fisher. "Normally, people aren't in a state of trance. They're usually quite aware. For example, if your name is spoken three tables away at a restaurant, you hear it. But you might be sitting at your desk so entranced that you don't even notice the person standing right in front of you. Playwrights often talk about sitting at a typewriter and actually seeing scenes before writing them. In this inner state, people have the ability to send themselves a message to get over their fears. That's hypnosis."

One of Fisher's clients was a woman whose husband had recently left her. The woman (and her daughter) moved in with her mother, and she soon began having serious conflicts with both her mother and her daughter. She came to Fisher with a problem: "Every time she stood up to make a presentation at work, she would dribble a few drops of urine," says Fisher. "The reaction terrified her. The trance-inducing message that I suggested she give herself was twofold: One, she must remind herself that she -- and not the investors in the audience -- is in control of herself. The second, more important message was that just because the rest of the world is pissing on her, that doesn't mean she should do that to herself."

I wasn't as bad off as that particular client -- or was I?

Fisher asks what is troubling me. I tell him: Words fail me. And for a writer and lecturer -- a "talking dog" -- that's a pretty serious problem. Whenever I have to speak before a group, I go numb. Whether I'm giving a formal talk or telling a story at a large dinner party, darkness opens up before me. And when that happens, all I want to do is escape. Then my audience senses that I've checked out emotionally, and so it checks out too. Because of this problem, I have all but stopped lecturing, and I avoid large parties. But now the problem is spreading. I want to write a novel, but I hate reading things written in my own voice. I want to make a statement in life, but I keep taking consulting assignments that help others sound good. I'm more comfortable as a ventriloquist than as a speaker. I have come to view my performance anxiety as symptomatic of my fear of having a deep connection with others. I believe that if I can somehow break this bad streak -- a lifelong bad streak -- then a lot that's broken in my life will be repaired.

According to Fisher, 95% of all people have some hypnotic capacity. Fiction writers are most receptive; lawyers tend to be lower on the scale. Entrepreneurs are a mixed bag: Those who crave a great deal of freedom have the highest hypnotic capacity. Those with a great sense of drive are more controlling. Basically, the higher your imaginative capacity, the greater your hypnotic capacity. Fisher tests how hypnotizable I am. He asks me to look up and count to three, to take a deep breath and slowly let it out, and to close my eyes. When he asks me to raise my right hand, I feel myself fighting the impulse, my attention wandering. But soon my right hand is in the air -- feeling much lighter than my left hand, to which no hypnotic suggestion has been made.

"Now rest your hand," he says. It slowly drifts back to the chair, fingers relaxed. "Look at your hand." My ring finger is curled inward, as if it is hiding. "Interesting," Fisher says. His deduction: I am extremely hypnotizable -- nearly a 13 on a scale of 1 to 10. I am also very much in the grip of some systemic anxiety. Our challenge is to neutralize that fear.