Why Join a Professional Organization?
We’ve worked alone for too long.
It’s a fair question, and one that we want to be transparent and direct in answering.
Performance hypnosis has existed for over a hundred years, and in that time it has evolved very little. We believe that part of the reason for this is that there has been no central organization or sense of community to guide the profession. Too often, organizations presenting as professional associations are really businesses focused on funneling people into training programs. A professional organization can’t function properly if it’s more concerned with profitability than advancing the profession it represents.
The most successful art forms in existence today are the ones that have powerful organizations championing their interests:
The Screen Actors’ Guild
The Writers’ Guild
The National Music Publishers’ Association
The Producers’ Guild of America
In the music industry, filmmaking, and television there are numerous associations and organizations that advocate for and serve the various artists that make up those industries. At the International Stage Hypnotists’ Association, we hope to serve in that capacity for entertainment hypnotists.
The industry model is broken.
The Problem
We understand that performing hypnotists want and need to make money, but we believe that the profession has struggled for all these years because too often the primary focus is on making money.
Entertainment hypnotism has been a business model first, and an art form second.
When everything is organized as a series of financial transactions, decisions get made primarily about what eases the barrier of entry for the “customer” and makes things profitable for the organizer. In hypnotism training, for example, the two biggest barriers to entry are how long it takes you to get trained and how much the training costs. Trainers keep the study hours and the cost low enough to get people into their programs, but then after they have trained, many students don’t feel capable and prepared to actually do shows. The majority of certified stage hypnotists that exist today are not working and doing shows with any kind of regularity. Where’s the data on this? There isn’t any, because there’s no professional organization keeping track of anything!
The same instincts prevail in the markeplace. Once performing hypnotists are certified, they go out in search of work, and they immediately struggle to get shows because they were taught foundational hypnosis skills, but were not taught how to develop a show that makes them stand out in the marketplace, or how to communicate the value of their show to potential clients. As a result, the vast majority of hypnotist entertainers compete on price, which becomes a slippery slope as they undercut each other on pricing to get gigs, driving down pricing in the marketplace for everyone.
Imagine what Shakespeare would do if he were alive today.
The Solution
If performing hypnotism is going to advance as a medium and take a more prominent place in mainstream entertainment culture, then the art form itself must improve and advance. That can only happen if the practitioners dedicate themselves to a new level of skill and artistry.
There must be an artistic renaissance in the profession of entertainment hypnotism.
The only way this can happen is if we centralize our community culture and establish new standards. Most important of all, we must create a radical departure from the current educational and training model, which is completely based on providing an income stream for the hypnotists acting as trainers, rather than based on creating competent hypnotists who can succeed in the marketplace.
It’s time for us to come together as a unified community of professionals and use our collective knowledge, experience, and artistry to elevate ourselves – and the profession of entertainment hypnotism with us. Our community must band together to form a training standard that respects both new and experienced hypnotists alike. We must raise the bar on artistic excellence so that our peers can be proud to stand behind the craft we have all come to know and love.
That’s why you should join a professional organization, the only professional organization dedicated to hypnotist entertainers. Let’s hold ourselves and each other to higher standards, and usher in a new era of growth and evolution of hypnotism as an art form.