Typically, the power of this exercise is very quickly appreciated. Students always seem to make the obvious connections with advertising, cults, brainwashing, and other examples of hypnosis and trance and influence from every day life. This pattern is a key element in many kinds of communication. Just take a deep breath and begin to feel into the situation, find your center of gravity, the inward balance beneath the pushes and pulls in your life. In advertising, this pattern is used quite frequently.
All advertising consists of the interplay between, and sequencing of, such pace and lead elements.
The centrality of language in the process of picking out what aspects of our experience to focus on at any moment is a key insight for beginning students of language and consciousness. In the process of breaking down the components of influence into this essential pattern, students can gain a sense of wonder at the largely unconscious framing of communication. Perhaps more important is the way this experience wakes people up to the many ways in which others seek to influence them through subterfuge and outright manipulation. So as not to end on a cynical note, it makes sense to mention, as well, that this same pattern can be employed with love and compassion as part of a healing intervention, for example, in a clinical hypnotic trance. Forms of the pattern also underlie the behavior of many healers who first establish rapport and legitimacy through various linguistic, contextual and paralinguistic cues before proceeding to their intervention.