Magic Tricks

I hesitated before posting my thoughts about this step because I consider myself a novice in hypnotism, but I felt like this step was not worth it's money, to take such a big subject and to try to explain even an introduction to it in 33 minutes(that follows a 17 minutes of performance) is simply impossible.

Richard is clearly a professional, but I felt it was a bad introduction to the subject, I saw Addison(I know her name because he tried to show her forgetting her name and failed, as well as trying to force a leg jumping with someone else which also failed) taking this whole demonstration as a joke matter(and Richard did not notice she wasn't as suggestible), and it didn't feel like a good performance either.

Richard clearly knows his material but the explanation section was disorganized and lacking for me, he doesn't go through any subject deep enough or clearly enough and I felt key points were mentioned but only briefly and in a manner that anyone without a background on the subject would ignore, it felt more like a conversation with Richard where he just answers the question "how did you do that?", and not a well rehearsed and planned lecture.

I think anyone new to hypnosis would probably think that you can just go out and be a hypnotist with only learning how to do the Hand Clasping test, and the "Discuss" section at Penguin shows that as well.(people asking "wait where was the explanation?", "Does anyone else know much about inductions? He doesn't really go over any in the video...")

Did Richard share pragmatic advice? Yes. But I thought this whole step was not a step at all, but a conversation off stage with someone who is telling you "get this book and learn it from there"(Richard mentions "The New Encyclopedia Of Stage Hypnotism" as a thorough book on the subject). Now obviously this is way too big of a topic to cover in 33 minutes of instructions, but that does not mean that it needed to be such a short step, if Richard really felt that hypnotism should have been included in his 13 steps he should not have made it such a short step, he could have even split it into 2 parts, but the 33 minutes of explanations you got are disorganized, lacking and don't stress any point hard enough except the hand clasping test script.

Afterall we all respect Richard for his contributions to the art, but this step was not worth my money, I am the target audience for this kind of step, and not experienced hypnotists, and I feel like the value I got out of it was not worth the discounted 14.9$, if I could get my money back, I would.