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Introduction

IT’S BEEN FOUR DECADES since I started writing my first book, The Structure of Magic, Volume 1. The Structure of Magic was a book about how psychotherapists unconsciously use language.

Since that time, I’ve studied and modeled unconscious behavior, not just of psychotherapists and hypnotists and great communicators, but of experts in sports and many other fields, as well as of people who made profound changes in their lives with or without psychotherapists—people who were great learners, great inventors, great innovators.

My career modeling these people, and developing behavioral technologies aimed at helping people solve problems and achieve goals, has been long and in many cases very successful, even where other “experts” have been unable to help.

This book represents a little of some of the old things that I did, patterns that were in my books, including Trance-formations, Frogs into Princes, and The Structure of Magic. Many of these things, I feel, are still useful. They worked then, and they work now, so I offer them to you in the hope that you can learn from my years of experience.

I want to make clear the very real difference between my work and psychotherapy. People who know me know I always reject the “therapists’ label” for the following reason: most therapists looked for what was wrong and tried to get the client to understand what it was, so that the client could get better. These therapists believed insight was the magic key to change. However, years and years of psychoanalysis didn’t seem to do much more than give people reasons to stay stuck in their old ways, or even to reinforce the condition by repeatedly revisiting the problems of the past.

Other psychologists wanted to “condition” their patients away from their bad behavior toward what they thought of as good behavior. Then, of course, psychiatrists saw the medicalization of psychology as a major step forward; now therapists and doctors could give drugs to people so they didn’t necessarily get better, but they didn’t seem to care as much.

Still other people believed in an entirely mechanical approach to the brain and its functions. They saw it as a broken or malfunctioning machine in need of a physical tune-up. I once met a neurosurgeon who told me he didn’t believe there was a single psychological problem that couldn’t be solved by the application of “a bit of cold steel.” He was an expert in performing frontal lobotomies—operations where they removed part of the prefrontal cortex. It’s true that people stopped being depressed or anxious, but then they just ambled around like sheep. I asked him why he and his colleagues stopped at the frontal lobe. Why not remove the whole brain? Then he’d solve every problem anyone had ever had.

Things have moved on since then. They don’t do that many frontal lobotomies anymore. Increasingly powerful drugs can get the same result. People who get out of hand can just be chemically shut down.

I, on the other hand, was never that interested in the client’s problem as such. I also didn’t want to just fix clients and send them away. I wanted to teach clients how to solve the presenting problem and other problems that might arise long after they left my office. Then, when I saw how that could work, I wanted to lay the same kind of foundations for other people in the helping professions—not just for therapists, but for anyone in the business of giving lessons to other human beings. I wanted them to understand that people need not necessarily be lost or broken or stuck for the rest of their lives, and they didn’t have to be treated as disabled. They simply had choices to make other than the one that caused them problems.

I believe in the human learning process. Human beings learn automatically. We learn a language effortlessly because we’re born with the wiring already in place for us to accumulate the means of communicating with other people of our kind. We are powerful language-learning machines, but we are also behavior-learning machines.

Some of the behaviors we learn turn into bad habits, and some turn into profoundly good habits. But the fact that we learn anything at all means we can learn something else—something more useful, quicker, and better.

We know now that it doesn’t have to take time and hard work. In fact, human beings learn best when they learn fast, and when they learn to make things unconscious so that the behavior can run automatically.

Of course, whenever we’re learning something new, it feels awkward at first. But we very quickly acclimatize to behaviors we persist in practicing. When we first learn to ride a bicycle, we have the balance, the steering, the pedaling to think about, all at the same time—and, at first, it seems impossible.

Then there is a magic moment when it all comes together, without effort. From that point, for the rest of our lives, we can always pedal and steer, even if we haven’t ridden a bicycle in years.

Being an optimist, my hope is that everything in this book gets taken even further. People often say an optimist is someone who sees a glass as half full, but a true optimist looks outside the glass entirely. We look at where the liquid comes from, and how it gets where it is. We look at the kind of containers it can be put in and how we can move it from here to there. We look at all the possibilities, and then we begin to understand that we don’t just fill that glass, but we can fill vessels of all kinds, with different liquids, and move them around all over the world. In other words, we look for what we can apply elsewhere in other ways so we can start to do all sorts of things that have never been done before.

This is what successful and creative people do naturally. People who are successful in business—in fact, people who are successful in any field—don’t just look at the short run, the immediate problem or challenge. They don’t just look at what is. They look beyond, at how things got that way and how they can be better. Successful people apply their principles to solve many more problems and do many more new things for as many people as possible.

So now it’s time to learn to ride a new kind of bicycle, a bicycle that’s about personal freedom. I’m always fond of saying that the chains of the free are only in people’s minds. Your fears, your doubts, your confusions, your habits, and your compulsions are all by-products of how you’re thinking, and how you’re thinking dictates how you’re feeling and behaving and living your life.

If you have fears, it’s not that heights or spiders or meeting new people, for example, scare you; it’s that you learned how to be afraid of heights, spiders, and new people. Babies are born with only two fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. All other human fears are learned. Therefore, if you learned to be afraid, you can learn to be unafraid. If you learned to do something one way, you can learn how to do it totally differently and better. Learning is the way to personal freedom. Hypnosis and NLP are tools to make this easy and fun.

PART 1

PATTERNS OF PROCESS AND ELICITATION

One PATTERNS, LEARNING, AND CHANGE
How to Take Charge of Your Brain

I HAVE WRITTEN MANY BOOKS and talked to many hundreds of thousands of people about hypnosis and NLP, and people are still confused about the similarities and differences between the two. In this book I hope to simplify the issue. My attitude is that at some level or other, everything is hypnosis. People are not simply in or out of trance but are moving from one trance to another. They have their work trances, their relationship trances, their driving trances, their parenting trances, and a whole collection of problem trances.

One characteristic of trance is that it is patterned. It’s repetitive or habitual. It’s also the way we learn.

After we’re born, we have so much knowledge and expertise to acquire—everything from walking, talking, and feeding ourselves to making decisions about what we want to do with the rest of our lives. Our brains are quick to learn how to automate behavior. Of course, this doesn’t mean the brain always learns the “right” behavior to automate; quite often, our brains learn to do things in ways that make us miserable and even sick.

We learn by repetition. Something we do enough times gets its own neuronal pathways in the brain. Each neuron learns to connect and fire with the next one down, and the behavior gets set.

Sleeping and dreaming are important parts of the learning process.

Freud thought of dreams as merely “wish fulfillment”—and maybe for him they were. I regard dreaming as unconscious rehearsal. If I do something I’ve never done before, I tend to go home, go to sleep, and do it all night long. This is one of the functions of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM sleep is the way the unconscious mind processes what it’s experienced during the day. It’s literally practicing repetitively to pattern the new learning at the neurological level. Quality information and quality material are important to the learning process. If the brain isn’t given anything specific to work with, it processes nonsense.

If we plan to take control of our learning, we need to understand that it’s not only repetition that is important but speed as well. The brain is designed to recognize patterns, and the pattern needs to be presented rapidly enough for the human to be able to perceive the pattern for what it is.

Most people have drawn a series of stick figures in the margins of their schoolbooks, then flipped through them to make the figure appear to move. Each page has on it a static image, but the brain will find a pattern—in this case, movement—if the images run rapidly enough.

We wouldn’t be able to enjoy movies without this process. We’d never be able to understand the story if we only saw one frame a day.

So, when we dream, we’re running through things to learn, and we’re not doing it in real time. “Internal” time differs from clock time in that we can expand or contract it. We learn at extraordinary speed—we can do maybe eight hours worth of work in five minutes before waking up. Sleep researchers support this idea. Subjects who report massively long and complex dreams are found through neural scanning to have been dreaming for only minutes, or even seconds, at a time.

Sleep, therefore, is one of the ways we program and reprogram ourselves. If you doubt your own ability to do this, try this out tonight:

As you’re settling down to go to sleep, look at the clock, and tell yourself several times very firmly that you’re going to wake up at a specific time. Set the alarm if you like, but you will wake up a second or two before it goes off.

This is something I’ve encountered in several different cultures. Some people gently bang the pillow with their heads the same number of times as the hour they want to get up.

Others tap their heads or their forearms to set their wake-up time. Whichever way it’s done, the principle is the same; you somehow “know” you have an internal clock that you can set, using a specific ritual, and no matter how deeply you sleep, it will wake you as effectively as any alarm.

If we can program ourselves to do one little thing—such as waking without an alarm—we can program our minds to do many things. We can decide to go to the supermarket. Maybe we need bread, milk, peanut butter, and a couple of cartons of juice. We can drive five miles to the supermarket, walk through a thousand products, maybe talking to someone on our cell phone, and still remember the juice, peanut butter, milk, and bread.

Academics sometimes challenge me for something they call “evidence.” They want to know the theory behind what I do; they want me to explain it, preferably with the appropriate research references. I’ve even had people ask for the correct citations for things that I’ve made up. The way I see it, it’s not my job to prove, or even understand, everything about the workings of the mind. I’m not too interested in why something should work. I only want to know how, so I can help people affect and influence whatever they want to change.

The truth is, when we know how something is done, it becomes easy to change. We’re highly programmable beings—as unpopular as that idea still is in some quarters. When I started using the term “programming,” people became really angry. They said things like, “You’re saying we’re like machines. We’re human beings, not robots.”

Actually, what I was saying was just the opposite. We’re the only machine that can program itself. We are “meta-programmable.” We can set deliberately designed, automated programs that work by themselves to take care of boring, mundane tasks, thus freeing up our minds to do other, more interesting and creative, things.

At the same time, if we’re doing something automatically that we shouldn’t be doing—whether overeating, smoking, being afraid of elevators or the outside world, becoming depressed, or coveting our neighbor’s spouse—then we can program ourselves to change. That’s not being a robot; that’s becoming a free spirit.

To me the definition of freedom is being able to use your conscious mind to direct your unconscious activity. The unconscious mind is hugely powerful, but it needs direction. Without direction, you might end up grasping for straws…and then finding there just aren’t any there at all.