Pacing and leading means you say things that are true to a person’s experience, then offer the thing you’d like to happen. Pacing is where you describe their experience as it already is. Leading is where you point somewhere else.
It shows up all over the work. It’s how a lot of inductions get going, it’s an important factor in conversational hypnosis, and it’s one of the main reasons you want rapport in the first place. This page covers what to pace, how much of it, how to lead with more than your words, how to tell whether it worked, and what to check when it didn’t.
What You’re Actually Pacing
Pace what your senses confirm, not what you’ve concluded.
“And you’re feeling wonderful” is an interpretation. “Your arms are at your sides” is a statement you can verify. You can see the arms. You can’t see feeling wonderful, and if you guess wrong, you’ve just told someone their own experience is something it isn’t.
That one distinction does a lot of quiet work. Practitioners sometimes worry about what happens when they can’t honestly agree with the person in front of them, when the belief on the table is plainly wrong or working against them. But you’re not agreeing with beliefs. You’re stating the temperature of the air, the weight of clothing on a body, the sound of your own voice, the fact that time is passing. None of that requires you to endorse anything. It’s the same instinct behind utilization: work with what’s actually there.
Then you can state the thing you’d like to have happen, permissively. “You can.” “You may.”
Strung together it sounds like this:
“As you sit in that chair, with your feet on the ground, breathing in and out, hearing the sound of my voice, you can relax more deeply.”
Four things I can see or safely assume, then one thing I’d like to happen. Notice the joins: as, with, and. The verifiable part and the suggestion arrive in one sentence, rather than as a list followed by an instruction.
Then you go again. Several more things you know to be true, another permissive lead. As signs of trance show up you need fewer of them, and you can ask more directly.
I’ve laid out the full version of this as an induction in statements you know to be true, with lists of things you can verify and things you might want to suggest.
How Much Pacing Before You Lead?
There isn’t a number. It’s a guideline, not a count.
Several verifiable statements and then a permissive lead is a reasonable pattern to start with, and it’ll give you the feel of the thing. Held as a recipe, though, it puts your attention on your own counting when it belongs on the person. Rapport doesn’t arrive on a tally.
The working rule is simpler. Pace, then lead. If the lead didn’t work, check your rapport, pace some more, and lead again. That loop is the technique. The number of statements is just what the loop happened to need that time.
Leading too soon isn’t a disaster either. If they don’t follow, you go back to pacing. What changes as you go is the proportion: heavier on pacing early on, and the deeper into trance someone goes, the more of it is leading. That’s the general shape of it, not a rule.
Lead With More Than Your Words
Where you can, lead with your own state and your own actions, not only with what you say.
If you’ve matched someone’s breathing and you slow yours, that’s a lead. If you’ve matched a fast, bright tempo and you let your voice settle, that’s a lead. Same with posture, gesture, how much you’re moving. With rapport, they’ll likely follow, and often without either of you commenting on it.
Matching is the pacing half of all this, and it’s worth practicing on its own. I’ve written about how to generate rapport quickly using exactly these channels.
How You Know It Worked
They do it.
That’s the whole test, and it’s more specific than it sounds. It isn’t a general atmosphere of cooperation, and it isn’t a checklist of trance signs. It’s the person doing the particular thing you led toward. If you suggested their eyes could close and their eyes close, that landed. If you slowed your breathing and theirs slowed, they did it.
Which means a relaxing client only tells you something if relaxing is where you were leading. Otherwise it’s just a relaxing client.
When the lead is toward an internal state, you don’t get to see it directly and you judge by external signs as best you can. Breathing, facial tension, stillness, how they answer if you ask. That’s a judgement call, so hold it loosely.
When They Don’t Follow
Go back to rapport. Specifically, go back to the channels that are usually outside your awareness, because the ones you’re conscious of are the ones you’re already doing.
Run through them:
- Rate of speech. Is yours matched to theirs? And if they’re in trance, is it matched to their breathing?
- Breathing. Yours against theirs. Easy to lose track of while you’re thinking about what to say next.
- Posture. Check what your body is doing. It drifts back to your own habits the moment you stop attending to it.
- Their words, or yours? This one catches people. You hear what someone says, you understand what they meant, and you feed it back in your own phrasing. Use their exact words instead. Your paraphrase is your map, not theirs.
- Time. If a trance is involved, give them time to respond. Responses slow. A lead that looks refused is sometimes a lead that hasn’t finished arriving.
Then pace some more and lead again.
Notice that none of these are new techniques. They’re things you already know how to do, and the reason to check them is that they slip while your attention is on your language.
Pacing More Than One Person
You can pace a group, and here’s one way to do it.
Rotate through, pacing each individual in turn for a few seconds. You can also pick out the people the group orients toward and pace those, which tends to carry the rest with it. I’ve written up both approaches for groups you’re leading and for groups you’re a member of, since the strategies differ.
How To Practice This
Two exercises, both of which you can run with a willing friend.
The statements you know to be true exercise builds the verbal half. State several things you know to be true in the person’s experience, then one thing that leads toward hypnosis, permissively. Then several more true statements and another lead. Keep going and get more direct as they respond.
The agree/disagree rapport exercise builds the nonverbal half, and it’s one of my favorites for teaching NLP because of what it shows people about how much of this runs outside their awareness.
The broader question of what evidence exists for indirect suggestion is taken up on the conversational hypnosis page. And if you’re wondering where the ethics of doing this without announcing it sit, that’s the subject of covert hypnosis.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many pacing statements before you lead?
There’s no fixed number. Several verifiable statements followed by a permissive lead is a fine pattern to learn on, but treat it as a guideline. Pace, then lead, and if the lead doesn’t work, check your rapport and pace more.
How do you know if the lead worked?
They do the thing you led toward. Not a general sense of cooperation, and not trance signs in the abstract. If you led toward eyes closing, the test is whether the eyes closed. When you’re leading toward an internal state you have to judge by external signs as best you can.
What if you can’t honestly agree with what the person is saying?
You don’t have to. Pacing statements describe what your senses confirm, not what you believe about their situation. Their posture, their breathing, the sounds in the room and the passage of time are all available to you without endorsing a single opinion.
Pace, lead, and when the lead doesn’t take, go back and find the channel you dropped. That’s most of it.
If you want to go further with the language side of this, that’s what the Ericksonian Inductions training covers.
Enjoy,
Keith
