Get the Life You Want

Lessons aren’t just about what to learn. Lessons should be about how to learn. It’s not enough to show a child words and ask them to remember them. You have to tell them how to remember them. It’s not enough to go tell a phobic not to be afraid, you have to teach them what makes fear dissipate.

For almost four decades, I’ve gone through and I’ve studied everything about people with all kinds of problems. I’ve worked with people who were schizophrenic and have learned from people who weren’t schizophrenic and who were able to do specifically what a schizophrenic was unable to do.

One of my more famous cases was brought to me by a psychiatrist a number of years ago. This was a lady who couldn’t tell the difference between fantasies and memories. Every time she would come in to the psychiatrist, she would cry and moan about having killed her parents. He would bring in her parents and she would chat thoughtfully with them and when they left she would claim she had killed them.

Why she fantasized killing them isn’t important. The fact is she couldn’t tell which memories were real. So, I turned to the psychiatrist and asked him how he knew which one of his memories was real and which ones were fantasies. I had them both make up a memory on the spot. They both made up a fantasy of how they got to my office and put in all the necessary details and then I asked them both how they got there.

The psychiatrist answered me calmly. The patient screamed and moaned that it was one thing and then it was the other and then it was one thing and then it was the other. She couldn’t tell them apart. It turned out that when I asked the psychiatrist how he knew, he told me that his fantasies had a black border around them and his memories didn’t. This was a very precise way of knowing which images were created and which images were remembered. I’m sure he had no problems telling his fantasies from his reality.

I hypnotized this lady into a deep altered state and had her lift up her arm and go through the fantasies she had made up and put black borders around them. She had to do so with everything from killing her parents to any other fantasy, including the one that she had made up in the room for me. I then told her that when her brain had gone through and recoded all this information, she could let her hand come down. When she opened her eyes, I asked her if she’d killed her parents and she calmly said no.

This approach is about being able to teach people as opposed to ‘therapize’ them. The truth is that after all the years of giving people insight and change not occurring, the lesson to be learned was that insight was a great idea, it just didn’t work. Communism was a good idea but it didn’t work in practice.

When ideas don’t work, you have to put them out in the backyard with the square wheels because when something isn’t working, it’s just not working. So, what I’ve tried to do over the years is find out the things that work in human beings, simple things, teachable things. Some of them are taught better in the waking state and some of them are taught better in a hypnotic trance. To me, it doesn’t matter which it is, it only matters that people get to where they want to go. It matters to me that they have the freedom to live, the freedom to be happy and the freedom not to waste their time with bad habits. I believe the truth is that most ongoing problems are just a manifestation of having the same bad habit over and over again.

People with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder have the bad habit of building rituals to try and stave off their anxiety. Every single ritual may give them a little bit more comfort but in the end it continues to build more fear.

The more comfort you have to build the more fear you have to have. It’s a vicious cycle and most stupidity works in this way. I’m not saying stupid in the sense that it’s bad. If you discover something’s stupid and you laugh at it and you stop it and build something more effective, life just gets better. I’m a firm believer that you can learn to get over your problems.

For thirty-five years, people have walked in my doorway miserable and walked out with more freedom. They have walked out happier and continue to walk out that way. People have always said, Well this phobia cure is good but what if it comes back in six months? Simple, you just take another twenty minutes and then you banish it again.

The truth is that it will only come back when you start doing the same things that you did before and thinking the same things as you did before. Otherwise, it will stay gone forever. In fact, something wonderful will happen. You’ll have more time to get to enjoy your life.

All of the time you spent feeling bad, you could be feeling good. That doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen. People die. Horrible things happen. Sometimes, people get into car wrecks or they go into debt. There are horrible things worth feeling bad about but those are things worth doing something about so that you get on with your life as quickly as you can and become the best person that you can be. You can look at yesterday and say that you are a better person today, even if it’s just a tiny bit, then you’re still headed in the right direction.

This book is about how you do just that. The outline of the book is very simple. First, I have outlined an inventory, which will explain the basics and help you to take stock of the tools you have at your disposal.

Next, I will discuss many of the problems that you might face in your life. You’ll learn about how to get over problems such as bad fears, memories and relationships. You’ll find out how to get through things like bad habits, recovery and the times when you feel like giving up. You’ll discover how to get to the things that make life worth-while such as fun, love, sex and making big decisions about your life.

Throughout the book, I’ll be sharing certain stories and insights I have gained working with each problem and challenge I deal with. You’ll also find plenty of techniques and tips outlined in a step-by-step guide so that, as you read, you can change instantly. Again, it’s critical that you follow the steps and you do them thoroughly.

I got a postcard one time from the Grand Canyon. When I first wrote the book The Structure of Magic, I didn’t get too many postcards. However, when I wrote the book Frogs into Princes that laid out ways that people could get rid of fears and anxieties, I got a postcard from the Grand Canyon.

Somebody wrote me a postcard and it simply said the following: ‘I’m hanging off the side of the Grand Canyon. I had a heightphobia for many years. I spent lots of money on therapy. But for just $8.95, my problems disappeared. Thank you.’ When I decided to write this guide so that people could get over their own problems, what I had in mind was something that would allow you all to write me a postcard.

INVENTORY (#ulink_43a0d936-fd6e-5039-8593-5d8e14e12ed2)

It’s time to take some mental inventory. In order for you to make changes, I want to make you aware of a few mental tools that you already have at your disposal. As you proceed through this book, you’ll discover more and more how you can use these tools to achieve freedom from your troubles. Once you understand how your mind works and how your thinking works, you will become aware of why you’ll be able to make such powerful and permanent changes in your life. To start with, let’s examine the role and the power of the unconscious mind.

THE POWER OF YOUR UNCONSCIOUS The Freeway to Change (#ulink_24f24651-7e08-54c6-9b2c-5cabc61dfcdc)

Think of your mind as being made up of a conscious and an unconscious portion. Your conscious mind is the part of your mind that analyses, criticizes and thinks logically all day long. It is where you put your attention. Your unconscious is the part of your mind that controls your bodily functions, from your heartbeat to your breathing. It is where all your memories are stored and where your wisdom, creativity and problem-solving capabilities reside.

When you are asleep, your conscious mind is resting and not really doing too much but your unconscious is dreaming wildly and continues to help you process what has happened during the day.

Everyone reading this book will have heard the expression Sleep on it as advice for tackling a problem. That’s because your unconscious has the ability to help you see things from a different perspective. Your unconscious is also where most of your mental habits function. Whenever we learn to do something with our minds, it becomes automated, and so we become unconsciously skilled at it.

These skills can be skills of depressing ourselves, hesitating, stressing ourselves out or feeling terrified and hopeless. They can also be skills of feeling really good, motivating ourselves, becoming relaxed or being more confident and hopeful.

For over thirty-five years, I’ve spent most of my time finding out how to help people change their unconscious habits or skills so that they could start manifesting the kind of life that they want. Often, I achieve this through hypnosis. By putting a person into trance, I can help them go inside and make changes powerfully.

Trance enables you to speak directly to the unconscious portion of the person so you can help them form new habits, unconsciously. That’s how Milton H. Erickson and all the great hypnotists I’ve studied over the years got great results. One of the best discoveries I made, however, was that it’s possible to help people make these changes without hypnotizing them.

We are always in one trance or another. A trance is simply a state where we are absorbed with our thoughts. People ask me if I ever have a problem getting someone into a trance, and I never do. I sometimes have a problem getting them out of the trances that they are in, the altered states where they make stupid decisions and think stupid thoughts, but trance is an everyday phenomenon.

With the technologies I’ve created over the years, such as Design Human Engineering and Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning, I’ve found ways that people can go ahead and make unconscious changes themselves without needing to be put into a trance. Just the process of going through the simple thought experiments in this book, will mean you find basic yet immensely powerful tools that will assist you to make changes in your own unconscious habits so that you can change your life. One of these tools we refer to as the model of submodalities.

THE QUALITIES OF YOUR THOUGHTS Submodalities (#ulink_890e9dc2-871d-5de2-a1a4-4b9d12f32c58)

Back in the 1970s, John Grinder and myself originated the idea that people build mental representations. It wasn’t a new idea really. Gentlemen like Gregory Bateson and Marshall McLuhan had been talking about such things for years, but we formalized the idea.

We defined thinking as thinking in pictures, thinking in words, and thinking in feelings, tastes, and smells. Since then, I’ve taken it a step further. I’ve broken each of those systems down into their various components. The qualities of the images, sounds, and feelings are known as submodalities.

We have five senses that we use to take in information from the outside world. Then we represent the world to ourselves using five internal senses. When we think, one way is that we think in pictures or movies.

Whenever you get directions from someone, or you give directions to someone, it relies on your own ability to go inside and mentally represent through a movie how to get to wherever it is that you need to go. When people create anything, they must create it first in their mind by imagining what it is going to look like.

There are also certain qualities to these images. For example, think about what you did yesterday. As you think about it in your mind, you might see yourself yesterday doing something or you might see what you saw through your own eyes yesterday. You might see still images of your activities or you might remember them like a movie continuously running. Regardless, this is one way that we process our experiences from the world.

We also hear internal sounds. Whenever you remember what someone said to you or their voice or whenever you remember what a song sounds like or whenever you talk to yourself…all of these are examples of internal sounds. Again, these sounds have various qualities, such as loudness and resonance when we pay attention to them.

Internal feelings are no different. Whenever we have a feeling, we can feel it in our body in particular locations. We can feel it starting somewhere and then moving somewhere else in our body when we pay attention to it. People even describe it when they talk about fear. They will say things like I felt butterflies in the pit of my stomach, and then my mouth went dry and I felt lightheaded. People are constantly revealing what is going on inside their mental reality.

When we think of something, the picture of it is in a particular place. It’s a particular size. It’s a particular distance from us. When we look at mental images, they don’t look like the same as the outside world. We do, however, seem to represent them somewhere in front of us and they are a certain size. You either see yourself in the image, which means that you are disassociated, or you don’t see yourself in the image because you are looking through your own eyes. This means you are associated.

When listening to a mental voice inside your head, it’s either your voice or somebody else’s voice. It’s either on the right or on the left. It’s either going in or going out. Some of them are very loud and some of them are very quiet. Sometimes, there is just silence. It doesn’t matter where it is coming from and it doesn’t really matter which it is but it does matter that you notice the differences that exist in the voices between different states.

People have been talking about feelings in the field of psychology for a long time. When I started, I saw all kinds of counsellors, all kinds of therapists, and all kinds of psychiatrists working with patients. What always amazed me was the number of times somebody would be asked, Well, how do you feel about that? and somebody would say, I feel frustrated. They would ask the same question again instead of finding out what that meant. They failed to stop and see that word which has been turned into an event was actually something the person was doing.

When people say they’re frustrated, it’s actually a verb. When people say, I have doubts, they’ve turned the verb into a noun and made it so that it becomes an event or a thing. When people say, I have frustration, they don’t actually have a bucket of frustration. They’re in the process of frustrating. That is an activity. When you turn it back into an activity, you can find out so much more about it.

So when therapists and psychiatrists say to somebody, How do you feel about feeling frustrated? or How do you feel about feeling disappointed?, they miss the most important information. We know that there’s another way that we process the world. Our understanding of the endemic brain tells us that the connection between all the organs is as sophisticated as the synapses inside the brain and actually allows us to think with feelings.

What this means is that our bodies are not disconnected from our brain. They are an extended part of the brain. The important question to ask people when they say, I feel frustrated, is, Where? Where does the feeling start? Where do you feel it first in your body? Where does it move to? Feelings can’t stay still. They are always moving somewhere, in some direction.

I know people sometimes feel as if they have a knot in their gut when they’re frightened but in fact that knot either rotates forward or rotates backwards. Every single time somebody has told me they feel stuck and I ask where, they have told me the feeling was in their stomach or in their chest. However, it doesn’t really matter where it is. It matters what you do with it.

Sometimes, I ask, Which way is it moving? and they say, It’s not. It is only by having them take their hand and having them rotate it forward and backwards, to the right and to the left that we can find out which way their feelings are moving in their body. These are the only dimensions really available.

One of these directions will feel right when they think about their feeling. From this, people typically get the idea that it is moving ever so minimally. The fact that it’s moving means that you can move it faster, you can move it slower, you can move it forwards and you can move it backwards. Our feelings are not outside of our control. In fact, this is the very thing most of us need to gain control of because, when you do, you can alter it.

The qualities of your thoughts, these submodalities, determine how your thoughts affect you. When you make big movies of things that you are associated with, generally, the feeling will be more intense. When you make the movie smaller and move it, disassociated, into the distance, the feeling will be smaller. We can also learn how to use our control over submodalities to manifest the kinds of feelings we need when we need them. I like to call this running your own brain.

RUNNING YOUR OWN BRAIN Changing Neurochemistry (#ulink_5df7f372-85bb-584e-bf74-e7a92bec4896)

One of my main focuses in the work that I’ve done has been discovering ways to help people achieve what I call Personal Freedom. Personal Freedom means having the freedom to be able to control your thoughts and to manifest the kinds of feelings you want in your life.

We are often imprisoned by the chains of our thoughts and we allow ourselves to think ourselves into problems. However, since most problems are created by our imagination and are thus imaginary, all we need are imaginary solutions. So, here are some effective ways of controlling your thinking for a change.