What’s your superpower?
I don’t mean flying through the air, lifting cars, or seeing through walls. I mean the thing you can actually do that makes a difference in the world.
We all have things we’re good at, and things we’re absolutely hopeless at. I’m lousy at mechanical stuff. Give me a hammer and a screwdriver and I may well find a way to injure myself with both. I can’t fix much, build much, or repair much. I can swim, but not much more than about 100 yards, and after that you may need to alert the lifeguard. There are plenty of things I’m not good at.
I’m pretty good at jiu-jitsu.
And I’m really good at hypnosis.
That’s my superpower.
When people hear the word hypnosis, they often think it means putting someone into a trance, doing a formal induction, using a special voice, and making something dramatic happen. And yes, it can be that. I love the formal side of hypnosis. I love clean inductions, good language patterns, deep trance phenomena, dissociation, ideomotor responses, and all the lovely machinery of the unconscious mind.
But hypnosis is bigger than the formal trance.
Hypnosis is attention. It’s meaning. It’s the management of state. It’s the way a person narrows their focus, accepts a frame, and begins to respond from inside that frame as though it’s reality.
That happens all day long.
People are hypnotizing themselves constantly. They tell themselves they’re too old, too fat, too broken, too anxious, too late, too damaged, too stuck. They repeat these things with emotion, imagery, physiology, and conviction, which is a pretty good recipe for trance if you ask me.
And because we’re hypnotists, we should be able to notice when that’s happening.
About an hour before I sat down to write this, I saw a woman sitting in the park. She was probably in her 40s, fairly heavyset, and she had a flower tattoo on the cap of her shoulder that looked very nice. So I said, “That tattoo looks really good on you.”
She smiled and said, “Thank you.”
Then she added, “It used to look better when it was smaller and I wasn’t so fat.”
Now there’s a moment.
A person has just revealed something. Not a massive confession. Not a life story. Just a little crack in the surface where you can hear how they’re talking to themselves.
And hypnotically, that matters.
Because the content was about the tattoo, but the structure was about identity. She wasn’t just saying the tattoo had changed. She was saying something about herself. She was rehearsing a label, and labels are powerful. Once a person accepts a label, the unconscious mind has a nasty habit of organizing experience around it.
So I said, “You’re not fat, young lady.”
And she broke into a huge smile..
She said, “Oh, thank you so much. Have a nice weekend.”
That was it. Nothing dramatic. No formal trance. No deep therapeutic intervention. Just a simple interruption of a lousy bit of self-hypnosis.
Because that’s what it was. She had hypnotized herself into seeing her body and her tattoo through a certain lens. I didn’t need to do much. I just offered her a better frame, and she took it.
That’s hypnosis too.
A lot of hypnosis is interrupting a pattern at just the right moment. You catch the old sequence before it completes itself, and you offer the mind somewhere else to go. Sometimes that happens in a therapy room with the client’s eyes closed. Sometimes it happens in a park, in passing, with one sentence.
Words matter. People remember what we say to them, especially when they’re already feeling vulnerable. A few words, offered at the right moment, can shift someone’s state and send them back into the world feeling a little better than they did a minute before.
This is why I’m so serious about hypnosis being practical.
If you’re a hypnotist, you’re not just learning tricks. You’re learning how human beings organize reality. You’re learning how attention creates experience, how language directs attention, and how state determines what a person can even believe is possible.
A person in the wrong state can’t access the same resources they can access in a better one. That’s basic hypnosis. Change the state, and you change the available choices.
And sometimes you don’t need a big intervention.
Often the whole thing is much simpler than people imagine. You catch the person at the right moment, say something true, and give the unconscious mind a better direction to follow. It might be encouragement, humour, or just refusing to let a rotten label pass by unchallenged.
That is where hypnosis leaves the classroom and enters life.
You hear the frame someone is trapped inside. You notice the label they’re accepting. You catch the moment when a better suggestion might actually get in.
That doesn’t require a formal trance. It requires attention, timing, and enough humanity to say the useful thing when the moment appears.
Your superpower may not be hypnosis. Maybe you can make people laugh. Maybe you can explain things clearly. Maybe you’re the person who stays calm when everyone else is losing the plot. Maybe you listen well enough that people start hearing themselves differently.
Whatever it is, the question is simple.
What’s your superpower?
And what are you doing with it?
- Mike Mandel
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