NLP Weight Loss

Weight Loss can not be achieved with NLP - but NLP can help you change your habits so that you can easily lose weight. What if celery tasted like chocolate? What if going for a run felt better than going to the pub? How easy would it be to lose weight?



Weight loss is not magic. You simply intake less energy than you output. NLP for weight loss is not magic either. You cannot convince yourself that you are losing weight using NLP, then go eat a tub of icecream. But you can use NLP to acheive weight loss by making that icecream seem unappealing.
Ice cream is delicious, right? How can it possibly become unappealing? The truth is, the pros of icecream just outweigh the cons. You have to concentrate on the cons, not the pros. Think about that fatty aftertaste it leaves in your mouth. See that fatty aftertaste as a visible, irremovable film that sticks like glue to your mouth. Picture the cold, hard sugars rotting away at your teeth until they become painful and brown. Visualise the fat globules seeping through your insides, gooping their way through your blood vessels and adding themselves into heaving, pale yellow piles of fat under your skin. Imagine the sound of all the saturated animal fats congealing into a sickly putty and clogging up your arteries. How do you imagine that processed fat smells once it's stripped of its artificial flavours and sugars?
How does that icecream sound now? Read that paragraph out loud if you need to. The more vividly you imagine these things, the better they will work. For added effect, you would read this out while a plate of icecream is sitting in front of you. Take one spoonful, put it in your mouth, and start reading. Focus on the bad aspects of the food, and they will soon outweigh the good aspects. The result is that you won't be buying more icecream next time you're at the supermarket.

Making Healthy Eating more Appealing with NLP

The same goes for any food you like but probably shouldn't eat. And the reverse goes for food you don't like to eat. Let's take celery, for example. Celery is great because it actually requires more calories to break it down and process it than it contains.
Think about that. Every fresh, crisp piece of celery you bite off and chew, goes into your body and melts down fat. Not directly, of course, but for the purpose of our NLP learning let's pretend it does. In reality, your fat deposits are broken down by your body to gain energy for the processing of the celery. But I digress.
What is your favourite aspect of celery? If you hate the taste, then use a different vegetable for this example, possibly a carrot or piece of lettuce. Picture the celery being nicely broken down and literally turning old fat deposits into pure water. Concentrate on the taste. Say words like "mmm delicious!" and really mean them. Act like it is the most delicious piece of food you have eaten in your entire life. Tell other people how great it tastes. Even if you don't quite believe yourself, put on the performance of a lifetime.
Your body will react by genuinely starting to like celery. This is the exact method I used on olives, which I used to hate but now very much enjoy. The more times you put on this act, and the more emotion you put behind your act, the faster this will work.

How Does This NLP Secret Work?

These NLP processes essentially work by tricking your brain into reconfiguring its reaction to certain foods. You are literally telling your brain that it is wrong, it's giving the wrong signals. Your brain will react by correcting these problems in your favour. As soon as you take your bite of celery...

	Your Frontal Lobes (prefrontal cortex) gives the conscious signal to your body to act like you are enjoying the celery like it's the best thing on earth.
	Your Insula immediately tells you that is this is boring, distasteful old celery. It replays the same old taste sensations that you're used to.
		But what's this?! Your Temporal Lobes and Parietal Lobes are behaving oddly. They seem to be creating reflex signals that indicate great enjoyment. How strange!
	Since you have requested information on how to act when eating an enjoyable food. The Amygdala is giving out faint emotions of pleasure, to tell the other active brain parts what emotions to simulate. The more you get into the act, the stronger the sensation will become.
	The hippocampus matches this feeling with pleasurable eating, and it matches the current sensory input with that of eating celery. It confirms you are eating celery.
	Your Insula stands confused but corrected, and processes this pleasurable information and builds new pathways to link directly to the other corresponding parts of the brain.

Obviously there are millions of other things going on in your brain, but these are the points we're interested in. Also obviously, this will not automatically and permanently change your perception of celery. You've only built 1 new pathway, compared to all the other thousands of times you've eaten celery and reacted naturally. Therefore the more times you repeat this act, the stronger its effect will be and the easier and more natural the act will become.
Eventually you will develop a genuine taste for celery. I have always liked celery, but I used this technique on olives (as I already mentioned) and now I consider olives a delicious treat.

Gathering motivation to exercise is hard. NLP can make it much easier

Going for a Run or Sitting in front of the TV?

The exact same principle applies. To prefer exercise or energy-consuming activites over sedentary activites, you need to rewire your brain a little bit. Again, this is entirely possible, and really not too different from learning to pronounce a word I've been mispronouncing my entire life, thank you minotaur.
When you think "should I go exercise?" what is the first thing you picture? You picture yourself doing the exercise in question, and asking yourself how you would feel doing that. The answer is probably "I'd feel tired, I'd need to put in a lot of effort and energy, it seems a bit too much like hard work." No! Your brain doesn't tell YOU how to think! YOU tell your BRAIN how to think!
Think "Should I go exercise" and immediately picture yourself having acheived a specific goal. If you don't already have a goal, set one now. Imagine you are looking at a Youtube clip of yourself in the future, the very moment you acheive that goal. Click on "play video" and see the screen displaying future you competing that goal for the first time. Close up on your face, see your expression as you acheive that goal. Listen to your breathing and see the sense of acheivement spread across your face. Now step into the video and click "replay". Act it out in your mind - how does it feel?
How tempting does that exercise sound now?

NLP to Increase Enjoyment of Exercise

Goal acheivement visualisation works. I use this on all my martial arts students and you can see a significant change in motivation. It also works being performed during exercise. You can perform the celery trick to increase enjoyment during exercise.
When you're running up that steep hill or lifting that heavy weight, what are you thinking? Probably some sort of profanity-infused monologue regarding the unpleasantness of the situation. Why? There is no point.
Enjoy the feeling of the blood coursing through your body! How alive do you feel? Your body is operating on a large scale, this is the kind of thing that kept billions of your evolutionary ancestors alive! Feel the rush of blood, the spirited tempo of your heart, and enjoy it! If you make this your focus and act it out, those endorphins come flooding in.
Personal note:
If you don't exercise regularly, I highly recommend trying it out. It doesn't have to be strenuous. Exercise shouldn't be too uncomfortable, I believe you should start as you mean to go on. If you start too hard too fast you can become overwhelmed and lose motivation. Music can help. Please try some regular exercise for a month and concetrate on enjoying the parts you do enjoy. See how much better you feel after a month.



NLP Weight Loss made Easy

NLP techniques for weight loss take time and concentration, but it is worth the time spent practicing. Or you could just do it Matrix-style and use subliminals. Subliminals are a powerful way to tap into the subconscious mind and change your bad mental habits. The word subliminal itself comes from the Latin words sub (meaning below) and limen (meaning threshold), so it literally translates as below threshold. All this means is that a subliminal message is any piece of information which is received beyond your conscious awareness.
In everyday life, you are constantly filtering billions of pieces of information taken in by the five senses. Only a very tiny fraction of this information is processed by the conscious brain. The rest is filtered by the subconscious. For instance, when crossing the street you notice the traffic around you because it's crucial if you don't want to get run over. But when walking on the path you barely notice the cars whizzing past just a few feet away.
Therefore, you are very good at taking in subliminal information already - and the purpose of subliminal technology like the Subliminal Weight Loss MP3 is to give you specific information to achieve your goal of living healthier and losing weight. Your body will not subconsciously throw off the fat without any conscious effort - BUT you will want to behave differently when you program your subconscious mind to think differently. I highly recommend the instant downloads over at Subliminal MP3s to begin your NLP programming.

How To Tell if Someone is Lying

The subject of lying, or more specifically, how to tell if someone is lying, is something that I can write a lot about. Being both an accomplished liar and lie detector is something a lot of people want to know how to do. Learning how to tell if someone is lying is difficult, but learning how to lie convincing is more difficult. Lying is never a clear case - there are certainly powerful indicators but no 100% methods - which is why there are no true lie detectors usable in a court of law. But with a bit of practise, you can easily become the next best thing.



The Telltale Signs of a Lie

Lying and deception require different brain processes than telling the truth. When you're telling the truth, you usually find a memory associated with the true answer and replay it with your vocal chords. However, when you're lying, you not only need to process the truth and withhold it, your brain needs to do a whole host of extra processes:

1. The frontal lobe cautions you that you do not want to reveal the truth
2. Your mind makes up the altenative answer (the lie) or sometimes recalls a false memory (if you have already planned the lie)
3. You need to concentrate on some level to deliver the lie without appearing deceptive
4. You need to guage the reaction of the listener to see whether they believe it
5. Usually you then try to change the subject or use body language to deter the person from persuing that line of questioning

None of these processes occur when telling the truth. And naturally, with all these extra processes, parts of them start to show on the surface. When we learn to read these signs, we can tell that someone is lying.

Facial signals to tell if someone is lying

Have a look at these two pictures. The one on the left is a perfectly straight face. The one on the right is what I like to call the "Lie Face." Look at it carefully, and practise pulling the face in the mirror a few times. Go on, do it now, I'll save your place.
It's important to recognise the Lie Face, and parts thereof. Obviously the pictures above are quite exaggerated, but I've made it like that so that you can easily see the signs.

1. The first sign is the eyes. When the brain is "creating a picture" the eyes instinctively move up and to their right (your left), signifying access to the right hemisphere (creation) and visual cortex (pictures). This usually means they are constructing a picture in their head. If someone is recalling a picture (remembering something that they actually saw) then they would look up and to their left (your right).
2. The eyebrows rising towards the centre of the forehead (where the arrow lands in the picture) is a sign of fear. This sign can occur during or immediately after a lie, because they are scared that you will see through it.
3. Another sign of fear is the sides of the lips turning down. The muscles that control this action are very specific and it is almost impossible to consciously activate them without activating any other lip-related muscles.
4. This is my favourite sign, when someone touches their nose or lips, covers their mouth or in some way touches their face during the telling of a lie. It is very common.

Other telltale signs that someone is lying

The four signals above in the lie face are not 100% accurate. It is possible for a good liar to prevent any of these signs occurring while they tell a lie. Sometimes, a liar is so talented that they can actually convince themselves that they are telling the truth, therefore a lie may appear entirely genuine. But it requires great effort in the brain to convince yourself you're telling the truth, and those cranial efforts have footprints. I go over some of these signs in my next article, How to tell a lie convincingly (and hopefully get away with it).

NLP Masters

NLP masters I would define as those who have truly understood the mechanics of NLP, taken it to its thoroughbred level, show us the awesome capabilites of NLP and thus inspire us to master NLP ourselves. NLP masters (or NLP gurus) are always very positive people who help others develop the tools to become positive themselves. Positive people have positive lives, this is undeniable. Sure, some of the masters have made a ridiculous amount of money doing what they do - but do they not deserve it?
 The NLP masters I will discuss are three of the most important NLP experts of our time; Tony Robbins, Paul McKenna and Derren Brown. These men are commonly associated with the understanding and development of the human mind. Each of them are top of their respective fields and have gained an enormous amount of credibility, not least with myself.

NLP Master Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins is an American motivational speaker and successful self-help author. He is widely regarded as the most successful motivational speaker in the world. He has helped millions of people all over the world achieve their personal goals and improve their quality of life.
Tony Robbins learned NLP from one of the founders of NLP, a man called John Grinder. This, along with a keen understanding of the human mind, helped propel Tony to greatness in his field. Such is his reputation that he has been hired to develop many top-level athletes and sports teams in terms of mental preparation.
Tony Robbins has authored many excellent NLP books, you can find them in our Amazon page 

NLP Master Paul McKenna

Once the host of his own TV show The Hypnotic World of Paul McKenna, and street hypnosis show Street Hyp, Paul McKenna is perhaps now best known for his range of books, including bestsellers I can make you thin and I can make you rich. Paul's books are published in 30 languages, all over the world.
Paul McKenna leaned neuro-linguistic programming and hypnosis from one of NLP's co-creators, Richard Bandler. He has gained two doctorates (Ph.D) from two different universities, the second of which he gained with his 70,000 word thesis The Effects of Fixed Action Patterns and Neuro-Linguistic Programming in Determining Outcomes in Human Behaviour.
Paul McKenna's books are famous for a good reason - they are easy to read and seamlessly blended with NLP techniques which help the reader attain their goal without any effort. Click here to view our Paul McKenna Amazon Bookstore

NLP Master Derren Brown

Although Derren Brown is most famous for his fascinating television shows broadcast in the UK, he has a solid reputation for his unequaled development of NLP and hypnosis. In fact, Derren's effortless demonstration of NLP to manipulate the thoughts of his guest stars was what got me interested in NLP in the first place!
Derren Brown actually has a flexible view of NLP which is similar to my own. Rather than adhering to rigid methods set out by NLP's original creators, Derren uses wordplay that works well and has adapted a lot of NLP techniques to make them work a bit more seamlessly. It is for this reason that Derren's methods are my chosen schema for the techniques on this website. They work the best. It's as simple as that.

What is NLP?

NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming, is a school of psychological techniques that effectively communicates with the listener's subconscious or unconscious mind. In modern-day terms, brain-hax. The end result is that you can communicate/argue/negotiate/threaten/persuade people (or yourself) much more effectively. Astoundingly, significantly, suspiciously more effectively!

• Neuro: Pertaining the neurons, or nerves, the brain's communication tool
• Linguistic: Pertaining to language
• Programming: To configure or set the way something works 

What can NLP do?

The tagline of NLP-secrets.com is "upgrade your mind" which is the best way I can describe the effects of NLP. You can upgrade your mindset, intelligence, memory, senses, appearance, and your communication skills. You can gain the ability to improve, enhance or modify ANY aspect of yourself or someone else.
NLP can be an extremely powerful tool, when used correctly. I have seen Derren Brown, a world-famous mentalist, use NLP techniques to talk a total stranger into giving him their wallet - in 20 seconds flat! NLP can be used on yourself as well as other people, with hundreds of opportunities to do so occuring every day.

A basic example of NLP

The most basic example to illustrate this, is if I said to you:
"Don't think of a blue duck!"
What's the first picture that came to your head? A blue duck. The command "think of a blue duck" lay within that short sentence. Of course, before you have a chance to not think of a blue duck, your unconscious brain has already put a picture of a blue duck up and stuck a DON'T label on it saying "this is the thing to not think about."
Very basic, yes? Everyone knows that. How could that possibly be used to help me communicate?
Okay, how about we use that same lesson, and apply it to another example, slighly more useful. Imagine you've got a 5-year-old son, and he starts trotting towards a busy road. We've established that if we yell to him "Don't walk on the road!" - there is every chance he might take a split second longer than usual to process the full command.
Instead, you'd say to him "Come here right now!" which might make a massive difference if a speeding car is just seconds away. This is a very basic example of NLP, in fact it is barely classified as NLP, as it just scrapes the surface. Another example of this technique might be when people say to themselves "Okay, don't forget to buy milk on the way home." They are more likely to forget. Instead, they should say "Remember to buy milk when I'm passing the shop." That way, they picture the shop as they say the word, and when they see that picture in real life, ie, they are likely to remember to buy some milk. (If they wanted to be even more sure to remember the milk, they should say "When I pass the shop, I'll have to be careful because milk will explode out the windows, covering me in cold milk." to invoke senses and emotions into the mnemonic - but that's another subject!)
On a level of 1 to 9, this technique is a 1 in terms of complexity and depth. There are hundreds of tiny tricks we can use in neuro-linguistic programming, as you get higher in the scale you are getting closer to hypnosis.

Presuppositions in linguistics and NLP

Although presuppositions are covered by the classic NLP syllabus, it is often misunderstood. It's a simple building block of the NLP Meta Model - but because of its use in hypnosis and suggestion I think the humble presupposition deserves its own page on NLP-secrets.com! 

What is a presupposition?

A presupposition is a structure of language that makes unverbalised assumptions. For example, I could say to you "I'm not going to Burger King again!" which would make the presupposition that I had been to Burger King before. A devious barrister in a courtroom might ask a man "have you stopped beating your wife?" to give the presupposition that the man used to (or still does) beat his wife. These are obvious presuppositions and are only really worth mentioning quickly to show an example of what a presupposition is.
Increasingly often you can hear people saying things like "I know MY religion is right! Why? Because I feel it in my heart!" The subtle presupposition here is the word "why" which is intended to fill in for us. By skipping over it quickly, we are prone to accept that we were probably going to ask "why" ourselves. In fact, we did not ask why, and this kind of subtle presupposition is made very useful for people who want to steer our conversations in a particular direction.

Presuppositions + Subtlety = Power

A presupposition gets much more powerful with subtlety. Ideally, when someone is in a confused (suggestible) state, a cleverly-worded presupposition can be used to make the person believe your presupposed statement.
I saw a good example of this in the container of a Macdonald's burger the other day. Macdonalds (as much as I dislike the company) is known for its clever use of NLP in advertising and marketing. On the inside of the box, under the lid, was printed the following statement in large, red lettering:

"Unique? You might even say it's delicious!"

This suggestion, which you will read probably about the exact time you take your first bite of the mass-produced burger, is that the burger is delicious. But the statement also makes two devious presuppositions: Firstly by saying "Unique?" they are presupposing that the statement has been made that the burger is unique, and they are answering your statement. Secondly, they are presupposing that YOU made that statement by saying "You might even say it's delicious!".
In fact, I did not state that the burger was unique (it certainly isn't) nor do I believe it is therefore delicious. It is simply a large company resorting to a mild form of hypnosis* in an attempt to brainwash me into giving them more money on a future occasion.

Presuppositions in hypnosis*

Presuppositions are the foundation of hypnosis induction. Master of magic and suggestion Derren Brown advises that the best method of hypnosis induction is a rapid series of presuppositions. The format of choice is "As and So" which is a template that can be applied to anything that is happening and turn it into evidence that the hypnotic state is increasing. For example, "As you sit there in your seat you feel more relaxed, so too you notice your eyelids becoming heavier. And as you eyes become heavier and heavier, so too they become harder and harder to keep open."
Each of these statements take a truth (you are sitting in your seat) you are bound to feel relaxed, and the statement presupposes that when you feel more relaxed you also feel your eyelids becoming heavier. And because you are feeling more relaxed, you automatically accept that your eyelids must be getting heavier. And so it happens. Although these presuppositions are stated only slightly deviated from the truth, they become very powerful suggestions that are increasingly easy to follow.

The future of fast food boxes

Presuppositions in conversation

Let's imagine you're talking to a friend, having a pleasant conversation. And now, a third person comes along who you know to be fairly abrasive. What do you say to get them to leave, without seeming to be rude or inviting a confrontation? Think about it, what kind of thing would you say? A lot of us will end up saying - and I'm sure we've all done this a few times before - something along the lines of "Well it was good seeing you again, I'll see you at the next one I'm sure, haha?" then hold out your hand for them to shake it goodbye. More than likely, you'll add some body language signals by standing next to your friend and facing in the same direction as them.
When you put it straight out there, it's quite obviously a presupposition that they are moving along, and you're saying goodbye. Quite often, the intruder will want to mirror your politeness and go along with your presupposition, then wonder away feeling mysteriously like they've been kicked out of something, but probably won't be able to put their finger on it.
Okay! Maybe my example is a bit rough around the edges but I'm sure I've made my point - presuppositions are powerfully subtle suggestion tools. In fact, most of us already use them daily, but maybe don't realise they are called presuppositions.

How to Hypnotize Someone - A Simple Guide to Hypnosis

How to I explain how to hypnotize someone? First we must understand what hypnosis is. Hypnosis is not what many people think it is. A hypnotic trance is not a brain-dead, obey-all zombification during which you are completely unaware of your surroundings. Hypnosis does not usually induce a deep catatonic state, although with enough patience and the right subject, it can create an analog catatonia.



When someone is on a stage pretending to eat their own shoe or be chased by a wildergoat, they are aware they are on a stage. Likewise if they are in a hypnotherapist's office being asked to picture themselves as a child, they know they are only picturing it. They will not confuse it with reality, thinking they are actually a child. They will feel like the child, act like the child, but they will know they have been hypnotized and are sitting on a hypnotherapist's couch.
Hypnosis is best thought of as a special state of mind which is very relaxed, cerebral, and above all suggestible. When you are in a state of hypnosis or hypnotic trance, you have a strong sense of ability to control your own brain, which is why it marries up with NLP so closely.

The Rules of Hypnosis

These rules are adapted from Derren Brown's excellent guidelines to hypnosis. As one of the greatest hypnosis experts alive today, Derren is a great role model to follow and I feel it necessary to point these rules out.

1. Do not try to hypnotize anyone who is clearly disturbed or has epilepsy. Same goes with a history of mental illness. Just don't.
2. Do not attempt to make subconscious "changes" or suggestions. If you don't know what you're doing, look but don't touch.
3. Leave out theatrics. Don't try to become invisible or get your inductee to eat an onion and think it's an apple. Don't play tricks on your inductee, unless you're experienced in which case you don't need this guide.
4. Everything you do contributes to the hypnosis. Your inductee will be hypersensitive to his surroundings. If you or others appear flustered in the face of an unexpected response, then your inductee might begin panicking. Avoid this.
5. At the end, always make sure the person is completely free from any belief he may still be hypnotised. If he thinks he is half under, he will be. Take your time bringing them out of the trance.
6. Take it slowly, and only in a controlled, safe, environment. No time pressures.
7. Treat it as a relaxation tool, not an entertainment tool.

Setting for Hypnosis

Your subject should be in a comfortable, reclined position. This could be a comfortable armchair, couch, or some beanbags on the floor. The subject needs to be someone who trusts you, hypnosis simply will not work on someone who does not trust their hypnotizer. Finally, make sure there are no expected guests or interruptions. Phones off.

Priming for Hypnosis

Quickly, in the next two seconds, try to eat whatever you can find, no not that! Jeez! Is it true that French houses have more ceilings than they have floors? Bang, you're now in a suggestible state.
Confusion is a wonderful catalyst for suggestion, so before we hypnotise our subject, we need to confuse them or shock them a little bit. This confusion and shock will scramble the brain and render them more suggestible. More specifically, the subject's prefrontal cortex becomes too occupied with trying to comprehend the confusing message and reason with the shock to filter out the suggestions as "optional". The suggestions will go straight to the subconscious, where they will be followed.
The shock does not have to be severe - all you need to do is to look your subject in the eye and touch them lightly on the arm as you tell them your slightly confusing message. It is also good to lean a little bit too close while you do your priming. I use a mixture of bad grammar, keywords and reassuring suggestions.
All hypnosis can be remembered clearly afterwards, safe just like normal memories they will be easy to recall. You'll imagine yourself in your mind's eye and it will get vivid. You will be able to exit the hypnosis any time you want, but you probably won't want to because it's quite fun. You'll see the relax and vivid pictures in your imagination but you don't worry about that now! If I say something you don't understand, just relax and go with the flow. I will bring you back in about half an hour, so treat it as a relaxation tool and sink into your seat. It's quite a good time to just fire up your imagination, so let's start.

How to Induce Hypnosis

Here is a quick script you can read to your subject. It basically goes over the induction, you should modify it to suit your subject and your surroundings. Read in a calm, clear voice.
Sit back and relax. Place your hands comfortably at your sides. Allow my words to just wash over you as suggestions are placed you find yourself following them. Everything here is safe and peaceful and as you feel your body becoming more and more relaxed you find you can shift your relaxation to your eyes. With your eyes alone, gently look upwards and as you notice your eyelids feeling slightly heavier, you allow your body to sink down comfortably into the chair. As your eyes slowly grow heavier, you can allow them to close. As you breathe, let your body numb and relax deeper into the chair. As you feel your body relaxing, so it becomes more numb and eventually the comfortable relaxation drifts up into your shoulders. As you feel your legs wanting to let go, let them go deep and relaxed into the chair, and your feet deflate deep into the floor. The relaxation makes its way up your neck and as it does, a peaceful, warm electricity shoots tingles down into your armpits and shoots down your arms into your fingers, as if warm sparks are dancing on the tips of your fingers. Allow the relaxed state to climb further up your neck and into your head, getting closer and closer to the very center of your consciousness. Allow your mind to go sleepier and sleepier until you are perfectly relaxed.
In your mind's eye, imagine you're standing at the top of a staircase of ten stairs, with a door at the bottom of it. As we count down from ten, with each count you'll take a step and become more and more relaxed, blissfully deeper and deeper into this trance, ten. As you feel your body becoming more and more relaxed you step down again, nine. Because your body is feeling so relaxed right now it is almost impossible to perceive, eight. As you begin to notice that your body is almost completely numb, you can now forget about your body and step down seven. Deeper and deeper into the relaxed, peaceful, comfortable state, six. The stairway becomes more and more vivid as you become more relaxed, five. As you descend your inner staircase, you start to notice how the stairs may feel against your feet, four. Deeper and deeper into this relaxed, super-comfortable trance, three. More and more comfortable, more and more relaxed, two. Relaxed peaceful trance, one. Open the door and your body goes to SLEEP and your mind wakes up.

During Hypnosis

• Use positive words and sentence structure
• Avoid using negative words, rather than "You can't feel your legs" you would say "Your legs are numb"
• If the person gets uncomfortable, ask them if they want to wake up out of the trance. If they do not answer, take them out of their trance.
• If a person in unresponsive to leaving the trance, touch them on the arm as you give a command. If you touch their arm as you say anything, it will add gravity to your statement.

Leaving the Hypnotic State

It is very simple to get someone out of a hypnotic trance.
Now it's time to come back. Return to the door with the stairs. You're going to walk back up the ten stairs back into normality. When you wake you will feel very refreshed from having been in such a relaxed state. One, you start feeling your body again. Two, starting to wake up now. Three, energy is rushing into your muscles. Four, you are feeling rejuvenated. Five, more energy, six, waking up now. Seven, you're feeling so refreshed you'll just run up the last three steps eight nine ten wide awake!
It is a good idea to ask your subject for feedback so you can make improvements to your own hypnosis skill. The more times you hypnotise someone, the better you get. Don't worry if you cannot get it to work on your first try. Keep working at it and soon you'll be able to really get the hang of what works and what doesn't.

What are the different kinds of figure of speech and their examples?

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: figure of speech

Form of expression used to convey meaning or heighten effect, often by comparing or identifying one thing with another that has a meaning or connotation familiar to the reader or listener. An integral part of language, figures of speech are found in oral literatures as well as in polished poetry and prose and in everyday speech. Common figures of speech include simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, irony, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and puns.

Columbia Encyclopedia: figure of speech,
intentional departure from straight-forward, literal use of language for the purpose of clarity, emphasis, or freshness of expression. See separate articles on antithesis; apostrophe; conceit; hyperbole; irony; litotes; metaphor; metonymy; paradox; personification; simile; and synecdoche.

Literary Glossary: Figures of Speech

Writing that differs from customary conventions for construction, meaning, order, or significance for the purpose of a special meaning or effect. There are two major types of figures of speech: rhetorical figures, which do not make changes in the meaning of the words, and tropes, which do. Types of figures of speech include simile, hyperbole, alliteration, and pun, among many others.

Poetry Glossary: Figure of Speech

A mode of expression in which words are used out of their literal meaning or out of their ordinary use in order to add beauty or emotional intensity or to transfer the poet's sense impressions by comparing or identifying one thing with another that has a meaning familiar to the reader. Some important figures of speech are: simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole and symbol.

http://www.answers.com/figure%20of%20spe…

Anticlimax, sequence of ideas that abruptly diminish in dignity or importance at the end of a sentence or passage, generally for satirical effect. The following sentence contains an illustration of anticlimax: “Among the great achievements of Benito Mussolini's regime were the revival of a strong national consciousness, the expansion of the Italian Empire, and the running of the trains on time.” (Compare with climax, below.)

Antithesis, juxtaposition of two words, phrases, clauses, or sentences contrasted or opposed in meaning in such a way as to give emphasis to contrasting ideas. An example of antithesis is the following line by the English poet Alexander Pope: “To err is human, to forgive divine.”

Apostrophe, device by which an actor turns from the audience, or a writer from readers, to address a person who usually is either absent or deceased, an inanimate object, or an abstract idea. The English poet John Milton, in his poem Il Penseroso, invokes the spirit of melancholy in the following words: “Hail divinest Melancholy, whose saintly visage is too bright to hit the sense of human sight.”

Climax, arrangement of words, clauses, or sentences in the order of their importance, the least forcible coming first and the others rising in power until the last, as in the following sentence: “It is an outrage to bind a Roman citizen; it is a crime to scourge him; it is almost parricide to kill him; but to crucify him—what shall I say of this?” (Compare with anticlimax, above.)

Conceit, an elaborate, often extravagant metaphor or simile (see below) making an analogy between totally dissimilar things. The term originally meant “concept” or “idea.” The use of conceits is especially characteristic of 17th-century English metaphysical poetry. An example occurs in the poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” by the English poet John Donne, in which two lovers' souls are compared to the legs of drawing compasses.

Euphemism, substitution of a delicate or inoffensive term or phrase for one that has coarse, sordid, or otherwise unpleasant associations, as in the use of “lavatory” or “rest room” for “toilet,” and “pass away” for “die.”

Exclamation, sudden outcry or interjection expressing violent emotion, such as fright, grief, or hatred. Two illustrations of exclamation are the line in the English playwright William Shakespeare's drama Macbeth in which Lady Macbeth says, “Out, out, damned spot .... !” and the line in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet where the prince cries, “O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!”

Hyperbole, form of inordinate exaggeration according to which a person or thing is depicted as being better or worse, or larger or smaller, than is actually the case, as in the sentence from an essay by the English writer Thomas Babington Macaulay: “Dr. Johnson drank his tea in oceans.” (Compare with litotes, below.)

Irony, dryly humorous or lightly sarcastic mode of speech, in which words are used to convey a meaning contrary to their literal sense. An instance of irony is the suggestion, put forward with apparent seriousness by the English satirist Jonathan Swift in his “A Modest Proposal”, that the poor people of Ireland should rid themselves of poverty by selling their children to the rich to eat.

Litotes, understatement employed for the purpose of enhancing the effect of the ideas expressed, as in the sentence “The English poet Thomas Gray showed no inconsiderable powers as a prose writer,” meaning that Gray was in fact a very good prose writer. (Compare with hyperbole, above.)

Metaphor, use of a word or phrase denoting one kind of idea or object in place of another word or phrase for the purpose of suggesting a likeness between the two. Thus, in the biblical Book of Psalms, the writer speaks of God's law as “a light to his feet and a lamp to his path.” Other instances of metaphor are contained in the sentences “He uttered a volley of oaths” and “The man tore through the building.” (Compare with simile, below.)

Metonymy, use of a word or phrase for another to which it bears an important relation, as the effect for the cause, the abstract for the concrete, and similar constructions. Examples of metonymy are “He was an avid reader of Chaucer,” when the poems of the English writer Geoffrey Chaucer are meant, and “The hostess kept a good table,” when good food is implied. (Compare with synecdoche, below.)

Onomatopoeia, imitation of natural sounds by words. Examples in English are the italicized words in the phrases “the humming bee,””the cackling hen,””the whizzing arrow,” and “the buzzing saw.”

Oxymoron, combination of two seemingly contradictory or incongruous words, as in the line by the English poet Sir Philip Sidney in which lovers are said to speak “of living deaths, dear wounds, fair storms, and freezing fires.” (Compare with paradox, below.)

Paradox, statement or sentiment that appears contradictory to common sense yet is true in fact. Examples of paradox are “mobilization for peace” and “a well-known secret agent.” (Compare with oxymoron, above.)

Personification, representation of inanimate objects or abstract ideas as living beings, as in the sentences “Necessity is the mother of invention,””Lean famine stalked the land,” and “Night enfolded the town in its ebon wings.”

Rhetorical question, asking of questions not to gain information but to assert more emphatically the obvious answer to what is asked. No answer, in fact, is expected by the speaker. The device is illustrated in the following series of sentences: “Did you help me when I needed help? Did you once offer to intercede in my behalf? Did you do anything to lessen my load?”

Simile, specific comparison by means of the words “like” or “as” between two kinds of ideas or objects. Examples of the simile are contained in the sentence “Christianity shone like a beacon in the black night of paganism” and in the line by the English poet William Wordsworth: “But, like a thirsty wind, to roam about.” (Compare with metaphor, above.)

Synecdoche, figurative locution whereby the part is made to stand for the whole, the whole for a part, the species for the genus, and vice versa. Thus, in the phrase “50 head of cattle,””head” is used to mean whole animals, and in the sentence “The president's administration contained the best brains in the country,””brains” is used for intellectually brilliant persons.

figures of speech

Definition: The various rhetorical uses of language (such as metaphor, metonymy, idiom, and chiasmus) that depart from customary construction, order, or significance.
Attempts to draw strict distinctions between figures and tropes have largely been abandoned.

Examples and Observations:

• The Figures as Ways of Seeing
  "The vast pool of terms for verbal ornamentation has acted like a gene pool for the rhetorical imagination, stimulating us to look at language in another way. . . . The figures have worked historically to teach a way of seeing."
  (Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. Univ. of California Press, 1991)
• "The most excellent ornaments, exornations, lightes, flowers, and formes of speech, commonly called the figures of rhetorike. By which the singular partes of mans mind, are most aptly expressed, and the sundrie affections of his heart most effectuallie uttered."
  (Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, 1593)
• Figuratively and Literally
  Mr. Burns: Break a leg, everyone. [to a passing employee] I said break a leg.
  [Employee breaks his own leg with a hammer]
  Mr. Burns: My God, man! That was a figure of speech. You're fired!
  ("American History X-cellent." The Simpsons, 2010)
• "The figurings of speech reveal to us the apparently limitless plasticity of language itself. We are confronted, inescapably, with the intoxicating possibility that we can make language do for us almost anything we want. Or at least a Shakespeare can."
  (Arthur Quinn, Figures of Speech: 60 Ways To Turn A Phrase. Routledge, 1995)
• Schemes
  "The Greeks called them 'schemes,' a better word than 'figures,' because they serve as persuasive tricks and rules of thumb. While Shakespeare had to memorize more than 200 of them in grammar school, the basic ones aren't hard to learn. . . .
  
  "Figures of speech change ordinary language through repetition, substitution, sound, and wordplay. They mess around with words--skipping them, swapping them, and making them sound different."
  (Jay Heinrichs, Thank You for Arguing. Three Rivers Press, 2007)
• Figures of Argument and Figures of Style
  "We consider a figure to be argumentative if it brings about a change of perspective, and its use seems normal in relation to this new situation. If, on the other hand, the speech does not bring about the adherence of the hearer to this argumentative form, the figure will be considered an embellishment, a figure of style. It can excite admiration, but this will be on the aesthetic plane, or in recognition of the speaker's originality."
  (Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Translated by J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver. Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1969)
• Figures of Speech and Thought
  "The real nature of the relation of figures to thought is very generally misunderstood. The majority of rhetoricians treat of them as mere ornaments, which render a discourse more pleasing, and which may be used or rejected at pleasure. Some writers--as, for example, Locke--condemn their employment in works intended to convey knowledge and truth; they are pronounced inventions, which serve only to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and mislead the judgment.
  
  "But instead of being inventions of art, they are the natural, and therefore necessary and universal forms, in which excited imagination and passion manifest themselves. The young and the old, the barbarous and the civilized, all employ them unconsciously. Languages in their earlier state are highly figurative; as they grow older they lose their natural picturesqueness and become collections of lifeless symbols. These abstract forms are regarded by rhetoricians and grammarians as the natural and ordinary forms of speech, and so they describe figures as departures from the usual forms of expression."
  (Andrew D. Hepburn, Manual of English Rhetoric, 1875)

Pronunciation: FIG-yur uv SPEECH

Long Vowel Sound 01

Short Vowel Sound 07

Short Vowel Sound 06

Short Vowel Sound 05

Short Vowel Sound 04

Short Vowel Sound 03

Short Vowel Sound 02

Short Vowel Sound 01

Pronunciation Tips Sounds of English

Pronunciation Tips Voicing

Pronunciation Tips Introduction

Voiceless Consonant Sound 08

Voiceless Consonant Sound 07

Voiceless Consonant Sound 06

Voiceless Consonant Sound 05

Voiceless Consonant Sound 04

Voiceless Consonant Sound 03

Voiceless Consonant Sound 02

Voiceless Consonant Sound 01

Consonant Sounds - Lesson 1

The Language Construction Kit

The Language Construction Kit

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Models

Natural and unnatural languages

I personally like naturalistic languages, so my invented languages are full of irregularities, quirky lexical derivations, and interesting idioms.
It's easier, no doubt, to create a "logical" language, and desirable if you want to create an auxiliary interlanguage, à la Esperanto. The danger here is a) creating a system so pristine, so abstract, that it's also impossible to learn; or b) not noticing when you reproduce some illogicality present in the models you're using. Ask me about the irregularities of Esperanto sometime.

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Non-Western (or at least non-English) models

Looking at some non-Indo-European languages, such as Quechua [see my intro to Quechua here in Metaverse], Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, or Swahili, can be eye-opening.
Learn other languages, if you can. If languages are difficult for you, just skim a grammar for nice ideas to steal. Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages contains meaty descriptions of fifty languages. Anatole Lyovin's An Introduction to the Languages of the World readably surveys all the world's language families, pointing out touristic highlights, and gives more detailed sketches of some important languages Comrie skips.
If you don't know another language well, you're pretty much doomed to produce ciphers of English. Checking out grammars (or this html file) can help you avoid duplicating English grammar, and give you some neat ideas to try out; but the real difficulty is in the lexicon. If all you know is English, you'll tend to duplicate the structure and idioms of the English vocabulary. Below I'll give you some hints on minimizing this problem.

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Sounds

Non-linguists will often start with the alphabet and add a few apostrophes and diacritical marks. The results are likely to be something that looks too much like English, has many more sounds than necessary, and which even the author doesn't know how to pronounce.
You'll get better results the more you know about phonetics (the study of the possible sounds of language) and phonology (how sounds are actually used in language). Useful references are J.C. Catford, A Practical Introduction to Phonetics (excellent for home study), and Roger Lass, Phonology. Below is a quick overview.

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Types of consonants

Consonants are formed by obstructing the flow of air from the lungs. As a first approximation, consonants vary in these dimensions:

• Place of articulation-- where the obstruction occurs:
  • labial: lips (w), lips + teeth (f)
  • dental: teeth (th, French or Spanish t)
  • alveolar: behind the teeth (s, English t, Spanish r)
  • palato-alveolar: further back from the teeth (sh, American r)
  • palatal: top of palate (Russian ch)
  • velar: back of the mouth (k, ng)
  • uvular: way back in the mouth (Arabic q, French r)
  • glottal: back in the throat (h, glottal stop as in John Lennon saying bottle).   
• Degree of closure. This proceeds in steps
  • from stops (stopping the airflow entirely: p t k)
  • to fricatives (impeding it enough to cause audible friction: f s sh kh)
  • to approximants (barely impeding it: r l w y).
  • An affricate is a stop plus a fricative, which must occur at the same place of articulation: t + sh = ch, d + zh = j.
• Voicing: whether the vocal cords are vibrating or not. That's the difference between f and v, t and d, k and g, sh and zh.
• Nasalization: whether air travels through the nose as well as the mouth. For instance, m, n, and ng are stops like b, d, g, but only the oral airflow is stopped.
• Aspiration: whether stops are released lightly, or with a noticeable puff of air. In Chinese, Hindi, or Quechua, there are series of aspirated and non-aspirated stops.
• Palatalization: whether the tongue is raised toward the top of the mouth while pronouncing the consonant. In Russian and Gaelic, there are distinct series of palatalized and non-palatalized consonants.

English consonants can be arranged in a grid like this:

             labial  lab-dnt   dental  alv   alv-pal  velar  glottal

stop           p b                     t d             k g     

fricative              f v     th th   s z    sh zh             h

affricate                                     ch j

approximant      w                     r l       y   

nasal            m                       n               ng

Sometimes the same sound in a language takes different forms based on its position in the word. For instance, English p is aspirated at the beginning of a word, but non-aspirated elsewhere; or, English m is usually labial, but it's labiodental before an f (compare schematic, emphatic).
Linguists call the basic sounds of a language, the ones that can distinguish one word from another, phonemes, and the actual sounds as pronounced, phones. They'd say that English has a phoneme /p/, which has two phonetic realizations or allophones, aspirated [ph] and non-aspirated [p].

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Inventing consonants

You'll notice that the grid of consonants for English has gaps in it. Does this mean you can invent new sounds by filling in the grid? Oh, yes.
For instance, English has voiced nasals; your language could have unvoiced nasals. English has a velar stop but no velar fricative. German has one (the ch in Bach); some languages have two, a voiced and an unvoiced one. German also has a labial affricate, pf.
Even more exciting is to add entire series of consonants using contrasts not used in English, such as palatalization or aspiration. Or remove a series English has. Cuzco Quechua, for instance, has three series of stops: aspirated, non-aspirated, and glottalized, but it doesn't distinguish voiced and unvoiced consonants.
The key to a naturalistic language, in fact, is to add (or subtract) entire dimensions. It's conceivable that a language could have a single glottalized consonant, but more likely that it will have a series of them (along the points of articulation: p' t' k'). A language might have just two palatalized consonants (Spanish does: ll, ñ), but one that has a whole series of them is more typical.
You can also add places of articulation. For instance, while English has three series of stops, Hindi has five (labial, dental, retroflex, alveolo-palatal, and velar. Retroflex consonants involve curling the tongue backwards a bit), and Arabic has six (bilabial, dental, 'emphatic' (don't ask), velar, uvular, glottal).
Some consonants are more common than others. For instance, virtually all languages have the simple stops p t k. Lass's book gives examples; see also David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, p. 165.

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Vowels

The most important aspects of vowels are height and frontness.

• Height: how open the inside of the mouth is. The usual scale is high [i, u], mid[e, o], and low [a]. There may be two middle steps in the ladder, usually called closed [ay, oh] and open [eh, aw].
• Frontness: how close the tongue is to the front of the mouth. Vowels can be classified into front (i, e), central (a, or the indistinct vowel in 'of'), or back (o, u).

You can arrange the vowels in a grid according to these two dimensions. The bottom of the grid is usually drawn shorter because there isn't as much room for the tongue to maneuver as the mouth opens more.
  
To get a feel for these distinctions, pronounce the words in the diagram, moving from top to bottom or side to side, and noting where your tongue is and how close it is to the roof of the mouth.
Vowels can vary along other dimensions as well:

• Roundedness: whether the lips are rounded (u, o) or not (i, e). English doesn't have front rounded vowels, but French and German do (Fr. u, oe; Ger. ü, ö). We also don't have (say) an unrounded u, but Russian, Korean, and Japanese do.
• Length: vowels may contrast by length, as in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Old English; Estonian has three degrees of length.
• Nasalization: like consonants, vowels can be nasalized. French, for instance, has four nasalized vowels.
• Tenseness: vowels can be tense or lax-- hard to explain, tho' English is an example; lax vowels are closer to the center of the vowel space-- look at soot and sit in the diagram.

English has a rather complicated vowel system:

                    --lax--                --tense--

                front------back         front------back

high            pit          put        peat       poot

mid             pet         putt        pate       boat

low             pat          pot           father  bought

Interesting simple systems include Quechua (three vowels, i u a) and Spanish (five: i e a o u). Simple vowel systems tend to spread out; a Quechua i, for instance, can sound like English pit, peat, or pet. Spanish e and o have two allophones each: open (as in pet, caught) in syllables that end in a consonant, closed (as in pate, pot) elsewhere.
Again, for your invented language, don't just add an exotic vowel or two; try to invent a vowel system, using the dimensions listed above. For instance, starting from the English system, you could bag the tense/lax distinction, add roundedness, and then collapse the front and back low vowels (there are often more high than low vowels).

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Stress

Don't forget to give a stress rule. English has unpredictable stress, and if you don't think about it your invented language will tend to work that way too.
French (lightly) stresses the last syllable. Polish and Quechua always stress the second-to-last syllable. Latin has a more complex rule: stress the second-to-last syllable, unless both final syllables are short and aren't separated by two consonants.
If the rule is absolutely regular, you don't need to indicate stress orthographically. If it's irregular, however, consider explicitly indicating it, as in Spanish: corazón, porqué.
In English, vowels are reduced to more indistinct or centralized forms when unstressed. This is one big reason (tho' not the only one) that English spelling is so difficult.

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Tone

Mandarin Chinese syllables have four tones, or intonation contours: high level; rising; low falling, and high falling. [For zhongguórén: No, I haven't described the third tone wrong. Think about it.] These tones are parts of the word, and can be used to distinguish words of different meanings: ma 'mother', má 'hemp', mâ'horse', mà 'curse'. Cantonese and Vietnamese have six tones. [The first tone should have a straight line over the vowel, and the circumflex over the third tone should be inverted, but this is the best I can do in html, and it beats adding numbers.]
If that seems a bit elaborate, you might consider a pitch-accent system, such as I used in another invented language, Cuêzi: the stress in a word can either be high or low in pitch. Japanese and ancient Greek are pitch-accent languages.
In (standard) Japanese, syllables can be either high or low pitch; each word has a particular 'melody' or sequence of high and low syllables-- e.g. ikebana 'flower arrangement' has the melody LHLL; sashimi 'sliced raw fish' has LHH; kokoro 'heart' has LHL. It rather sounds as if a tone has to be remembered for each syllable; but this turns out not to be the case. All you must learn for each word is the location of the 'accent', the main drop in pitch. Then you simply apply these three rules:

• Assign high pitch to all moras (= syllables, except that a long vowel is two moras, and a final -n or a double consonant takes up a mora too)
• Change the pitch to low for all moras following the accent
• Assign low pitch to the first mora if the second is high.

Thus for ike'bana we have HHHH, then HHLL, then LHLL.

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Phonological constraints

Every language has a series of constraints on what possible words can occur in the language. For instance, as an English speaker you know somehow that blick and drass are possible words, though they don't happen to exist, but vlim and mtar couldn't possibly be English.
Designing the phonological constraints in your language will go a long, long way to giving it its own distinctive flavor.
Start with a distinctive syllable pattern. For instance,

• Japanese basically allows only (C)V(V)(n): Ranma, Akane, Tatewaki Kunoo, Rumiko Takahashi, Gojira, Tookyoo, konkuuru, sushi, etc.
• Mandarin Chinese allows (C)(i, u)V(w, y, n, ng): wô, shì, Mêiguó, rén, wényán, chìàn, mànhuà, Wáng, Zhang, etc.
• Quechua allows (C)V(C): Wallpakuna sarata mikuchkanku, achka allin hatun mosoq puka wasikuna, etc.
• English goes as far as (s) + (C) + (r, l, w, y) + (V) + V + (C) + (C) + (C): sprite, thinks.

Try to generalize your constraints. For instance, m + t is illegal at the beginning of a word in English. We could generalize this to [nasal] + [stop]. The rule against v + l generalizes at least to [voiced fricative] + [approximant].
Another process to be aware of is assimilation. Adjoining consonants tend to assimilate to the same place of articulation. That's why Latin in- + -port = import, ad + simil- = assimil-. It's why the plural -s sounds like z after a voiced stop, as in dogs or moms. It's also why Larry Niven's klomter, from The Integral Trees, rings so false. m + t (though not impossible) is difficult, since each sound occurs at a different place of articulation; both sounds are likely either to shift to the dental position (klonder) or the labial (klomper). Another possible outcome is the insertion of a phonetically intermediate sound: klompter.

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Alien mouths

If you're inventing a language for aliens, you'll probably want to give them really different sounds (if they have speech at all, of course). The Marvel Comics solution is to throw in a bunch of apostrophes: "This is Empress Nx'id''ar' of the planet Bla'no'no!" Larry Niven just violates English phonological constraints: tnuctipun. We can do better.
Think about the shape of the mouth of your aliens. Is it really long? That suggests adding a few more places of articulation. Perhaps the airstream itself works differently: perhaps they have no nose, and therefore can't produce nasals; or they can't stop breathing as they talk, so that all their vowels are nasal; or the airstream is at a higher velocity, producing higher-pitched sounds and perhaps more emphatic consonants. Or perhaps their anatomy allows quite odd clicks, snaps, and thuds that have become phonemes in their languages.
Several writers have come up with creatures with two vocal tracts, allowing them to pronounce two sounds at once, or accompany themselves in two-part harmony.
Or, how about sounds or syllables that vary in tonal color? Meanings might be distinguished by whether the voice sounds like a trombone, a violin, a trumpet, or a guitar.
Suggesting additional sounds is difficult and perhaps tiresome to the reader; an alien ambience can also be created by removing entire phonetic dimensions. An alien might be unable to produced voiced sounds (so he sounts a pit like a Cherman), or, lacking lips, might skip over labials (you nust do this to de a thentrilocooist, as ooell).

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Alphabets

Orthography

Once you have the sounds of your language down, you'll want to create an orthography-- that is, a standard way of representing those sounds in the Roman alphabet.
I don't recommend trying to be very creative here. For instance, you could represent a e i o u as ö é ee aw ù, with the accents reversed at the end of the word. An outlandish orthography is probably an attempt to jazz up a phonetic system that didn't turn out to be interestingly different from English. Work on the sounds, then find a way to spell them in a straightforward fashion.
If you're inventing a language for a fantasy world, it's wise to take account of how English-speaking readers will mangle your beautiful words. Tolkien is the model here: he spelled Quenya as if it were Latin, didn't introduce any really vile spellings, and kindly indicated final e's that must be pronounced. Still, he couldn't resist demanding that c and g always be hard (I couldn't either, for Verdurian), which probably means that a lot of his names (e.g. Celeborn) are commonly mispronounced.
Marc Okrand, inventing Klingon, had the clever idea of using upper and lowercase letters with different phonetic values. This has the advantage of doubling the letters available without using diacritics, but it's not very aesthetic and it sure is a tax on memory.
Or you may go for neatness, as I did in inventing Verdurian. I don't like digraphs, so I adapted Czech orthography-- for ch, for sh, etc. This ultimately involved creating a special Macintosh font, so I was probably crazy. (Note however that fonts for non-Western-European languages are plentiful by now.)
A sense of variation among the nations of your world can be achieved by using different transliteration styles for each. In my fantasy world, for instance, Verdurian arcaln and Barakhinei Dhârkalen are not pronounced that much differently, but the differing orthographies give each a different feeling. Surely you'd rather visit civilized arcaln than dark and brooding Dhârkalen? (Tricked you. It's the same place.)
If you're inventing an interlanguage, of course, you shouldn't worry about English conventions; create the most straightforward romanization you can. You're only asking for trouble, however, if you invent new diacritic marks, as the inventor of Esperanto did.

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An example

Here's the alphabet I came up with for Verdurian:
Note that there's a one-to-one correspondence between the Verdurian alphabet and the standard English representation. This is not very naturalistic-- transliteration schemes are not usually this straightforward-- but it's a good place to start. Once you can fluently read your own alphabet, feel free to add complications.
A good alphabet can't be created in a day. This one took shape over a period of weeks, as I played with various letterforms.
Keep the letters looking distinct. The best alphabets spread out over the conceptual graphic space, so that letters can't be confused for one another. Tolkien is a bad example here: the elves must have been tormented by dyslexia. If letters start to approach each other too closely, users find ways to distinguish them, in the way that computer programmers, for instance, write zeroes with a slash. Europeans write 1 with an elaborate introductory swash-- impossible to confuse with I, but looking much like a 7, which has therefore acquired a horizontal slash!
Remember that letters are written over and over again, over the life of an individual or a civilization. Elaborate letters are likely to be simplified. You can simulate this process by writing the letter over and over yourself; the appropriate simplifications will suggest themselves automatically.
Note that I supplied upper and lower case forms, as in the Roman and Greek alphabets. The lowercase forms are all cursive simplifications of the uppercase forms (which are also the ancient forms). In retrospect I probably shouldn't have imitated the mixed-case system, which on our world is basically limited to Western alphabets. I should have kept the 'uppercase' forms for ancient times, the 'lowercase' forms for modern times.
I tried to give the letters individual histories, as with our alphabet. The letter t, for instance, derives from a picture of a cup, touresiu in Cuêzi; n was originally a picture of a foot (nega). I have to admit that I did this backwards-- I invented pictograms that could have developed into the letters, which I had devised years before!
Also note that the voiced consonants, in the uppercase forms, are simply the unvoiced forms with a bar over them (this is a bit obscured with d and t), and that the letters for are all transparent variations of each other. This slightly violates my 'maximally distinct' rule, but I think it adds interest to the alphabet.
You'll also notice both c and k in the alphabet. This is the sort of ethnocentrism it's all too easy to fall into. Why would another language duplicate the convoluted history of our alphabet's c and k? I've reinterpreted these symbols to refer to /k/ and /q/.

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Diacritics

Some advice: never use a diacritical mark without giving it a specific meaning, preferably one which it retains in all uses. I made this mistake in Verdurian: I used ö and ü as in German, but ë somewhat as in Russian (indicating palatalization of the previous consonant), and ä as a mere doubling of a. I was smarter by the time I got to Cuêzi: the circumflex consistently indicates a low-pitch accent.
Avoid using apostrophes just to make words look foreign or alien. Since apostrophes are used in contradictory ways (they represent the glottal stop in Arabic or Hawai'ian, glottalization in Quechua, palatalization in Russian, aspiration or a syllable boundary in Chinese, and omitted sounds in English, French, and Italian), they end up suggesting nothing at all to the reader.

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Fancier writing systems

What, you say you want to build a syllabary? A cursive form of your alphabet? A logographic system?
Read a good book on how writing systems work. Writing Systems by Geoffrey Sampson is a very good book.
If that seems too much, read up on the type of writing system you want to imitate: Chinese characters, the Japanese or Maya syllabary, the Sanskrit syllabic alphabet, the Korean featural code, the all-cursive Arabic alphabet, and so on.
A book like Kenneth Katzer's Languages of the World gives examples of a wide variety of scripts. Comrie's The World's Major Languages does the same, but gives more detail. Or invest in the 800-pound gorilla of the field, Daniels & Bright's The World's Writing Systems, which explains how every writing system in the world works.
Note that logographic scripts and syllabaries tend to work best with languages that have a very limited syllabic structure-- Japanese, with (C)V(n), is close to ideal; English is close to pessimal.

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Word building

How many words do you need?

Where the conlang bug bites, the Speedtalk meme is sure to follow. Let Robert Heinlein explain it:

Long before, Ogden and Richards had shown that eight hundred and fifty words were sufficient vocabulary to express anything that could be expressed by "normal" human vocabularies, with the aid of a handful of special words-- a hundred odd-- for each special field, such as horse racing or ballistics. About the same time phoneticians had analyzed all human tongues into about a hundred-odd sounds, represented by the letters of a general phonetic alphabet.
... One phonetic symbol was equivalent to an entire word in a "normal" language, one Speedtalk word was equal to an entire sentence.
--"Gulf", in Assignment in Eternity, 1953

This is a tempting idea, not least because it promises to save us a good deal of work. Why invent thousands of words if a hundred will do?
The unfortunate truth is that Ogden and Richards cheated. They were able to reduce the vocabulary of Basic English so much by taking advantage of idioms like make good for succeed. That may save a word, but it's still a lexical entry that must be learned as a unit, with no help from its component pieces. Plus, the whole process was highly irregular. (Make bad doesn't mean fail.)
The Speedtalk idea may seem to receive support from such observations as that 80% of English text makes use of only the most frequent 3000 words, and 50% makes use of only 100 words. However (as linguist Henry Kuera points out), there's an inverse relationship between frequency and information content: the most frequent words are function words (prepositions, particles, conjunctions, pronouns), which don't contribute much to meaning (and indeed can be left out entirely, as in newspaper headlines), while the least frequent words are important content words. It doesn't do you much good to understand 80% of the words in a sentence if the remaining 20% are the most important for understanding its meaning.
The other problem is that redundancy isn't a bug, it's a feature. Claude Shannon showed that the information content of English text was about one bit per letter-- not too high considering that for random text it's about five bits a letter. Sounds inefficient, huh? On the other hand, we don't actually hear every sound (or, if we're accomplished readers, read every letter) in a word. We use the built-in redundancy of language to understand what's said anyway.
To put it another way: y cn ndrstnd Nglsh txt vn wtht th vwls, or shouted into a nor'easter, or over a staticky phone line. Similarly distorted Speedtalk would be impossible to understand, since entire morphemes would be missing or mistaken. Very probably the degree of redundancy of human languages is pretty precisely calibrated to the minimum level of information needed to cope with typical levels of distortion.
However, go ahead and play with the Speedtalk idea. It's good for some hours of fun, working out as minimal a set of primitives as you can; and the habit of paraphrase it gives you is very useful in creating languages. Just don't take it too seriously; if you do, your punishment is to learn 850 words of any actual foreign language and be set down in a city of monolingual speakers of that language.

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Alien or a priori languages

If you're making up a language for a different world, you want, of course, words that don't sound like any existing language. For this you simply need to make up words that use the sounds and the syllable structure in your language.
This can fairly quickly get tiresome. I don't advise you to sit down and come up with a hundred words at once; you're likely to run out of inspiration, or find that all the words are starting to sound the same. You may also be creating new roots where you could more easily derive the word from existing roots.
It's not hard to write computer programs that will randomly generate words for your language (even respecting its syllable structure). If you do, remember that sounds (and syllable structures) are not equiprobably distributed in natural languages. English uses many more t's than f's, more f's than z's.
Resist the temptation to give a meaning for every possible syllable. Real languages don't work like that (unless the number of possibilities is quite low). Even if you're working on a highly structured auxiliary language, you'll want some maneuvering room for future expansion. And the speakers of your language shouldn't have to throw out an old word whenever they want to construct a coinage or an abbreviation.
You will want a mixture of word lengths for variety; but don't invent too many long words. It's better to derive long words by combining shorter words, or adding suffixes. Or, imitating the way English is full of polysyllabic borrowings from Latin and Greek, or Japanese is full of Chinese loanwords, create two languages, and build words in one out of components in the other.

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A few half-recognizable borrowings

I intended Verdurian to look mildly familiar, as if it could be a distant relative of the European languages. For example:

Sul A e otál mudray dy tü, dalu esë, er ya ceel rho sen e sënul.
Only God is as wise as you, my king, and even there I'm not certain.

So cuon er so ailuro eu druki. Cuon ride e sluir misotém ailurei. So ailuro e araó rizuec.
The dog and the cat are friends. The dog laughs at the cat's jokes. The cat is quite amusing.

To achieve this impression, I borrowed from a number of earthly languages-- e.g. ailuro 'cat' and cuon 'dog' are adapted from Greek; sul 'only' from French; rizir 'amuse' and ya 'indeed' from Spanish; druk 'friend' and sluir 'hear' from Russian. The friendly orthography and the simple (C)(C)V(C) syllable structure also help make the language inviting.
By contrast, another language, Xurná, was intended to look more alien:

Ir nevu jadzies mnoudacij. Toc izen ri tos bunjai asik rili. Tos denjic u bunji dis kezi. Syu ao cu u izraugi.
My niece is dating a sculptor. She can see no flaws in him. He hopes one day to govern a province. Myself, I don't envy that province.

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Languages based on existing languages

Interlanguages are often based on existing languages; for instance, Esperanto is chiefly based on French, Italian, German, and English. Here the problem of creating words largely reduces to one of acquiring enough good dictionaries.
A few language creators have tried to approach the task systematically-- e.g. Interlingua is based on nine languages, and usually adopts the word found in the most languages.
Lojban uses a wider variety of languages, including some non-Western ones, and uses a statistical algorithm to produce an intermediate form. The intention is to provide some mnemonic assistance to a very wide variety of speakers. It's an intriguing idea, although the execution is so subtle that the language is often mistaken for a priori.

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Sound symbolism

Some linguists claim to have found some common meaning patterns among human languages. For instance, front vowels (i, e) are said to suggest smallness, softness, or high pitch; low and back vowels (a, u, o) to suggest largeness, loudness, or low pitch. Compare itty-bitty, whisper, tinkle, twitter, beep, screech, chirp, with humongous, shout, gong, clatter, crash, bam, growl, rumble; or Spanish mujercita 'little woman' with mujerona 'big woman'. Cecil Adams took advantage of this pattern when he commented, on the subject of penis enlargement surgery, that "if nature has equipped you with a ding rather than a dong, you'll just have to live with it."
Exceptions aren't hard to find, of course-- notably small and big.
Inventing alien languages, authors also simply make use of what we might call phonetic stereotypes. Tolkien's Orkish, for instance, makes heavy use of guttural sounds and is full of consonants, while his Elvish tongues are more vocalic, and seem to have plenty of pleasant-sounding l's and r's.