Hello everyone, and welcome back to the blog! Today, we are diving deep into a question I get asked all the time behind the scenes: How do you actually learn hypnosis, and which path should you choose?
As someone who has been a hypnotherapist for 25 years now, I have walked almost every path imaginable. I started as a young magician, moved on to stage hypnosis, and eventually transitioned into deep, clinical hypnotherapy in my own office. If you want to learn this craft, I want to share my personal journey so you can choose the right path and avoid the common traps along the way.
1. The Mentorship Path: The Fastest (But Pricier) Route
The absolute easiest way to learn hypnosis is to find a personal mentor.
Let’s be completely honest right from the start: high-quality mentorship is not cheap. You will pay more money upfront. However, if the mentor is right, you will learn significantly more and much faster than you ever could on your own.
My own journey started back when I was a young magician. I wanted to break into stage hypnosis, so I looked for a mentor. It ended up being a perfect win-win situation. The hypnotist needed a magician to open his show and warm up the crowd for about 20 to 25 minutes. In return for my free opening acts, he took me under his wing and taught me the craft.
I distinctly remember being incredibly jealous of him back then. As a magician, I had to haul so much heavy gear around—cages, pigeons, card tables, and endless props. He, on the other hand, walked out onto the stage with his hands in his pockets and put on a spectacular show. I told myself right then and there: “Okay, maybe in the future, I will do this too.” And I did—I went on to do a lot of stage hypnosis.
The Big Trap of Stage Hypnotists
If your goal is to learn true hypnosis, let me share a crucial warning. I might offend some people here, but do not choose a mentor who is strictly a stage hypnotist.
I did stage hypnosis for years, so I know the industry inside out. Stage hypnosis is actually very simple to do because it is mostly a show. You aren’t hypnotizing just anyone; you are actively filtering a crowd of 300 or 400 people to select the top 10% to 15% who are natural somnambulists.
These are people who drop into hypnosis effortlessly. With a natural somnambulist, you can use literally any induction you want, and it will work beautifully. They are incredibly fluid and soft to work with.
The real test, however, happens in a private office. On stage, you choose the people. In a hypnotherapy practice, the people choose you.
When clients walk into your office, they come with doubts, analytical minds, anxieties, or skepticism. Some will go into hypnosis easily, some will take a lot of time, and some will resist it completely. Dealing with that reality is where you actually learn the true depth of hypnosis.
How to research your mentor:
- Do your homework: Use Google to dig into their background.
- Check their focus: Are they just a stage entertainer, or do they run an active hypnotherapy practice? How long have they been in the market?
- Look for teaching skills: Just because someone is a great therapist doesn’t mean they know how to transfer that knowledge to a student.
- Overcome language barriers: Today, language doesn’t matter. For example, my main website is in Slovenian, but anyone worldwide can use Google Translate to read it instantly in English. Look globally for the right fit.
Note: If you ever find yourself in a dilemma trying to figure out if a training program or a mentor in your country is legitimate, reach out to me. We can take a look at it together.
2. The Live Training Path
The second major route is attending structured, live training courses.
I took this path in the early 2000s when I searched for advanced training and chose to study under the legendary Gerald Kein. Jerry passed away in 2017, but his training completely transformed my approach. I loved his methods so much that I eventually became an official instructor for his school, teaching his curriculum right up until the COVID-19 pandemic.
While I already knew how to hypnotize people thanks to my stage background, Jerry Kein gave me the profound therapeutic knowledge I was missing. He proved to me that if you have the right mentor, you can learn deep hypnotherapy in a highly concentrated amount of time.
How I Structured My Intensive Bootcamps
Live training is incredibly intense. My classes usually ran from 10:00 AM until late into the evening. Because it requires so much energy, I tailored the formats depending on the location:
- In Slovenia and Croatia (Zagreb): I taught over weekends—four weekends in total. We would usually do two weekends back-to-back, take a 2-to-3-week break so students could process and practice the heavy material, and then finish the final two weekends.
- In Serbia (Belgrade): Belgrade was over 500 kilometers away from me. For those courses, I would travel and stay there for 8 to 9 days straight, delivering an ultra-intensive 7-day training block modeled directly after how Jerry Kein used to teach.
I don’t run these massive, exhausting multi-day live theories anymore, but I still focus heavily on practical exercises and hands-on mentorship.
Final Thoughts: Which Path is Yours?
If you want to truly learn hypnosis, you have to accept that you will make mistakes. I didn’t have a mentor when I transitioned into therapy, meaning I had to learn the hard way by hitting walls and making plenty of errors.
You don’t have to take the hard road. Do your research, vet your teachers, and make sure you are learning how to handle real-world clients, not just easy stage volunteers.
See you in the next post, where we will dive deeper into the mechanics of the hypnotherapy process itself!