Glazed eyes staring unfixedly into the distance, or time itself—perhaps the past, or his future—the man wearing the blue polo shirt doesn’t even seem to see me as I walk past in front of him, speaking. But that doesn’t fool me. I know better than that.

He’s taking in every word; paying finicky attention to every tiny detail and every possible intention in word meanings, and he’ll use any mistake against my wishes. The carefully prepared, precisely timed background music swells up, carrying its hidden message to all who hear it, mysterious and somehow sensual at the same time.

Blue polo man and the rest of my intrepid volunteers suddenly stand, and at my request, begin to stutter around the stage, dancing, to the accompaniment of the music and the audience’s surprised laughter. Yet, what may have looked like a typical hypnosis show had buried secrets that the audience—especially this audience—might never learn.

For this was a group “stealth” hypnotherapy session, for 6,000 totally unaware participants. And it was quite successful, too.

A couple years ago, I was hired by a company in Tokyo, Japan to help their people. The company had just gone through a series of mergers over the past few years. Now, although the company was now quite stable, they were having trouble with morale. People in the company had formed a habit of worrying about their careers and their jobs, and that habit was carrying on. Even after the reason to fear was all gone.

There had been several troubles, including some suicides possibly related to the anxiety that the people felt at work. Needless to say, the company was not happy about this. They had hired a psychologist who evaluated the company’s level of anxiety. The man they hired was an accomplished psychologist, and through several surveys and informal interviews he had come up with a metric to evaluate the morale of the company.

But the psychologist did not know what to do with 6, 000 people. Had it only been a few people, he would’ve been able to offer them some sort of training. But he felt inadequate to the task of trying to repurpose all 6,000 staff members in Tokyo. However, he had read about me in an article, and the fact that I am able to use “stealth” hypnosis to modify the behavior of large groups of people. In short, he recommended the company hire me.

The company was having an enormous meeting in a hotel in downtown Tokyo, which included nearly all of staff of the entire company. They were having lunch together in the middle of a three day training session, when I joined them to give a “keynote address” and hypnosis demonstration.

It was a quite short 45 minute session, we had a good time, and I taught the participants something about their minds. They thought there was nothing more to it. But in the process of getting the hypnosis demonstration and speech, I included “embedded commands,” which tend to affect anyone listening to the speech and/or watching the entertainment.

I’ve now done the same for a handful of companies here in Japan and one company in the United States. In the Tokyo case, the same psychologists followed up with his evaluations, and merely a month after my presentation, all metrics measuring anxiety and worry had decreased. The psychologist was quite pleased with the results, and the company actually sent me an extra tip, or “bonus” of a little over US$1,000.

I now offer stealth hypnosis for companies to help them make all sorts of changes without the staff being aware of what’s going on. Don’t worry; my personal ethics is such that I will never do anything detrimental to the staff and beneficial only for the company. My goal is to help the staff and the company work flawlessly together and improve their lives at the same time.