Once you have succeeded in practicing each chunk to the point that it becomes an automatic, effective, unconscious skill, you are free to attend to new possibilities: other components of the task. You can then practice these new chunks until they also achieve that same status of an unconscious, effective, perceptual–motor pattern that you do not have to give any conscious attention to.

The easiest way to become skilled at hypnosis is to practice small chunks one at a time, in the same way that you learned many tasks such as driving a car. I assume that the ultimate test of your skill in hypnosis is whether you can walk in and begin to interact with someone in such a way as to induce the specific kind of hypnotic outcome that they request—without having to strategize at the conscious level. Three days is not long enough, in my opinion, to achieve the kind of graceful, systematic, unconscious functioning that is required of a really fine hypnotist. However, our task in these three days will be to organize the overall task of hypnosis into chunks, and ask you to practice the various pieces. Our job will be to balance the amount of time we have you practice specific skills with the time we spend making sure we complete a coherent whole that will give you an overall strategy for hypnosis. I trust that you, and particularly your unconscious mind, will continue to practice such skills after this seminar. I also hope that you will continue to add alternative ways of achieving the same outcomes to the repertoire you will be acquiring here.

What we do for a living is an obscure thing called modeling. When we model, we try to build descriptions of how to do something. As modelers we are interested in two things: one is asking really good questions about what needs to be known, and the other is making descriptions of what seems to work. It's something akin to writing a cookbook.