Neuro Linguistic Quotes

Emotions make excellent servants, but tyrannical masters.

Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them back.

To strengthen the connection between your conscious and subconscious, is to gain access to a map and compass, as you travel through parallel worlds.

Why be your real self when you can be something really worthwhile?

To believe that someone else is responsible for your emotional state is to give them a sort of psychic power over you they do not have...we really do generate our own feelings. No one else can do it for us. We respond and are responsible. To think other people are responsible for our feelings is to inhabit a billiard ball, inanimate universe.

Life consists of what a man is thinking of all day.

Questions are also interventions. A good question can take a person's mind in a completely new direction and change his life. For example, ask yourself frequently, 'What is the most useful question to ask now?

A man who has control over his mind is able to realize its full potential. —The Sama Veda

When we believe something, we act as if it is true.

Why' questions have little value, at best they get justifications or long explanations which do nothing to change the situation.

Once a response becomes a habit, you stop learning. Theoretically, you could act differently, but in practice you do not. Habits are extremely useful, they streamline the parts of our lives we do not want to think about...But there is an art to deciding what parts of your life you want to turn over to habit, and what parts of your life you want to continue to learn from and have choice about. This is a key question of balance.

Creative geniuses are: 1.  Comfortable with uncertainty 2.  Able to hold seeming opposites or paradoxes 3.  Persistent

Neuro-linguistic programming is to Neuroscience what Astrology is to Astronomy.

Free your expectation of the future from the grip of past failure.

True learning involves learning other ways of doing what you can do already.

As long as you believe it is impossible, you will actually never find out if it is possible or not.

No one can consistently get everything wrong. Such perfection does not exist.

Reframing is also the pivotal element in the creative process: it is the ability to put a commonplace event in a new frame that is useful or enjoyable.

Any single person's viewpoint will have blind spots caused by their habitual ways of perceiving the world, their perceptual filters...How can we shift our perceptions to get outside our own limited world view?

In my experience, the biggest challenge people face is learning to get out of their own way. When you can see just how easy change can be, you can begin to take control over your life and make all the changes you want—but you need to take the action.

Remember: the journey is the destination.

We perceive and remember people, things, and events based on aspects of the experience:

Thinking isn’t a passive process unless you do it passively. Thinking should always be an active process where you think in a way that gets you the results you want.

What happens to our thoughts as we clothe them in language, and how faithfully are they preserved when our listeners undress them?

Without action, a goal is just an idea.

Masha is a professional, qualified counselor and psychotherapist. Her techniques include cognitive behavioral therapy, neuro-linguistic program and hypnotherapy. Her background also includes teaching senior executives and makes them understand how to manage a major emergency.

We all have beliefs and expectations from our personal experience; it is impossible to live without them. Since we have to make some assumptions, they might as well be ones that allow us freedom, choice and fun in the world, rather than ones that limit us. You often get what you expect to get.

Humans aren’t born conscious. They become conscious. Consciousness is acquired via language. Consciousness is the adaptive modification to the nervous system that results from the application of language to it. Never forget, consciousness = neuro-linguistic programming. It concerns how we program our nervous system via learned language.

When you persuade yourself that you “get to” do something rather than “have to,” you can find a silver lining. For instance, saying “I have to clean the house” implies cleaning is an unpleasant task. On the other hand, saying “I get to clean the house” reframes the labor as something you look forward to, emphasizing how important it is to have a place to live in the first place. A great strategy to change your perspective and enhance your mental health is to reframe the tasks you encounter in daily life with a positive outlook.

It’s not that fear is a bad thing. Fear moves you away from things; you shouldn’t touch hot fire. Even when children are young, they are born with only two natural fears: a fear of loud noises and a fear of falling. That’s why when children start to do something that’s dangerous, we yell at them. And that fear then translates so that, instead of having to stick your hand in fire, you feel fear as you reach toward it. This teaches us, and we generalize one fear to another till we learn “don’t cross the street until you know it’s safe to do so.

Words are anchors for sense experience, but the experience is not the reality, and the word is not the experience. Language is thus two removes from reality. To argue about the real meaning of a word is rather like arguing that one menu tastes better than another because you prefer the food that is printed on it...To come to believe that the external world is patterned by the way we talk about it is even worse than eating the menu - it is eating the printing ink on the menu. Words can be combined and manipulated in ways that have nothing to do with sensory experience.

The Encyclopedia of Systemic NLP (2000) and NLP II: The Next Generation (2010).

This background also provided the foundation and inspiration for the remarkable recovery of my mother from metastatic breast cancer in 1982 and was the basis for my book Beliefs: Pathways to Health and Well-Being.17

Bandler and Grinder’s work with Virginia Satir and their exploration of parts also led to the principle of positive intention. Simply put, the principle states that at some level all behavior is (or at one time was) “positively intended.” Another way to say it is that all behavior serves (or at one time served) a “positive purpose” – i.e., every “neuro-linguistic program” emerges and lasts because it serves some type of adaptive function. While I liked the principle, at first it seemed mostly like a nice philosophical idea. Like everything else in NLP, however, it eventually became a very personal experience that changed my life. It did not come in a flash of blinding light as to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. It was subtler. But the moment that I deeply realized all of my behaviors had some type of positive intention, even if I did not immediately recognize what it was, something shifted inside of me that led to a deep trust in my own being; that somehow, as Einstein proposed, “the universe is a friendly place” at its core. Even today the principle of positive intention seems to me to be the most spiritual principle in NLP.

The first application was named Mind Master, which was followed by the NeuroLink and a commercial computer game called MindDrive. Today, these applications are available through Somatic Vision.

The greeting of risk, the willingness to discover through (certain classes of non-lethal) trial and error, the subordination of success to exploration and discovery, and the insistence of finding the edge of patterns; where they fail, all of these seem to contain echoes of field work in Special Forces and related intelligence organizations, the passion for languages, the recognition that much of what passes for effective communication can be achieved with very little actual understanding, the primacy of non-verbal communication in influencing face-to-face communications, a tolerance for ambiguity and vagueness, and a fascination with the unknown.

Bob Dylan sang, “He not busy being born is busy dying.

Grinder’s Whispering in the Wind.

After four years of corporate experience I completed the first draft of Making the Message Clear (which I believe was the first book on the application of NLP to business).

We created and published with Bill the Neurolinguistic Communication Profile and Rapport: Matching and Mirroring Communication.

Rapport-Based Selling and No Need for Conflict!

So, what every parent would want their college kids to know: Look for patterns, they are always there. Challenge all my assumptions. Change, Jim, can be good. Use all my senses, even the ones I am not aware of. Understand the world from another’s perspective, not mine. Listen more, talk less; if I do talk, ask questions. Everyone is doing the best job they can given the limitations of their beliefs. My job is to get people to use the best of themselves to get better, to improve. Everyone has a chance; if something didn’t work, it’s because of my limitations, not the other person’s. I am ultimately accountable for and own the outcomes of my choices. All of them.

Since the early days, some of the originators of NLP have developed new models including Design Human Engineering, the New NLP, and NLP New Code.

which Frank and I later refined and published as the book, Magic Demystified: A Pragmatic Guide to Communication and Change.4

Sobriety Demystified: Getting Clean and Sober with NLP and CBT, which was published in 1996. In keeping

Virginia joined John and Richard at the house to model her work with family systems and the three of them collaborated to write the book, Changing with Families.

remain, however, a firm believer in the value of the fundamentals. It is difficult to master the really slick stuff without core tools like the Meta Model, accessing cues, calibrations, anchoring, sub-modalities, and an understanding of how and why these are important

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and working with the subconscious mind. NLP is a different approach to mental mastery. It is the scientific impact that language has on the subconscious mind. An array of modalities and language patterns are implemented to bypass the loud, chattery, brain bullshit, which gets in the way of resourceful thinking. It also takes the traumas we have stored in our subconscious, from years of repetitive thinking and behaviors, and makes us consciously aware of them, so we can implement the tools and experience positive and lasting change at a brain and cellular level.

In fact, some research studies have proved that people with brain damage resulting in not being able to experience emotions fully have reduced capacity to make good decisions. Even

Also in the 1970s, Duke University's Psychology Department compiled a list of words which, in a neuro-linguistic sense, are "power words." These words get the most of your attention; they light up neurons in the brain. They are: Easy, Health, Save, Guarantee, Money, Discovery, Results, New, Love, Free, Proven, You.

There is no such thing as failure, only feedback. We are always producing a result; if it’s not what we want, we can use the unwanted result as feedback to guide us in experimenting with other choices.

As you change yourself, you’ll notice how—without a word—people around you shift in response. This phenomenon is fascinating and is likely to inspire you to make more changes!

If what you are doing isn’t working, try anything else. If we keep experimenting, we aren’t guaranteed success, but we can sure stack the odds. The only way to fail is to quit trying!

When you truly know what you want, and that what you want is worth having, you’ll find all your internal resources aligning.

You see, the funny thing was that when I changed, the people around me changed, too.

The most effective way to turbocharge your life is to learn to move in harmony with your values.

The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our communications. How we communicate with ourselves creates our personal experience and how we communicate with others determines the way we are treated throughout our lives.

A man who has control over his mind is able to realize its full potential.

The brain is the largest data store facility to ever exist, even exceeding the storage capacity of a man's testicles (yes, if you are a man you can be proud of your pair, as they store more data than any computer). The

Uczymy się […] 10% tego, co czytamy, 20% tego, co słyszymy, 30% tego, co widzimy, 50% tego, co widzimy i słyszymy, 70% tego, o czym rozmawiamy, 80% tego, co doświadczamy, 95% tego, czego uczymy innych. — William Glasser

Czyn ludzki raz dokonany płynie przez wieczność do wielkiego rachunku. Nasza nieśmiertelność przejawia się w tym, co robimy, a nie w tym, kim jesteśmy. — George Meredith

Po ciężkim dniu treningu można zjeść grzechotnika. — Elvis Presley

Teoretycznie nie ma różnicy między teorią a praktyką, lecz praktycznie owa różnica istnieje. — Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

Na tym polega uczenie się. Nagle rozumie się coś, co rozumiało się przez całe życie — ale w zupełnie nowy sposób. — Doris Lessing

Trudności to wymówki, których historia nie przyjmuje nigdy. — Edward R. Murrow

Osobiście uważam, że ludzie wymyślili język z powodu naszej głębokiej, wewnętrznej potrzeby narzekania. — Jane Wagner

Dwie podstawowe zasady życiowe brzmią: 1) Zmiany są nieuchronne. 2) Każdy opiera się zmianom. Jedynym człowiekiem lubiącym zmiany jest dziecko, które ma mokro. — Roy Blitzer

Większość z nas przechodzi przez życie, nie decydując się na opanowanie czegokolwiek do perfekcji. Jestem przekonany, że niepowodzenia większości ludzi spowodowane są tym, iż zbyt wielką wagę przykładają do rzeczy błahych. — Anthony Robbins, autor Obudź w sobie olbrzyma

Nigdy nie pozwól, aby szkoła przeszkodziła w twojej edukacji. — Mark Twain

Uważaj, czytając książki poświęcone zdrowiu — żebyś nie umarł z powodu literówki. — Mark Twain

Ważne jest, aby nie rezygnować z zadawania pytań. Ciekawość nie istnieje bez przyczyny. Człowiek może tylko czuć respekt, kiedy podziwia tajemnicę wieczności, życia, wspaniałej struktury rzeczywistości. Wystarczy więc, kiedy będzie próbował zrozumieć zaledwie odrobinę tej tajemnicy każdego dnia. Nie wolno nigdy tracić świętej ciekawości. — Albert Einstein

Jest bardzo ważne, abyśmy definiowali samych siebie nie tylko w kategoriach, kim jesteśmy, lecz również i kim nie jesteśmy. — Anthony Robbins, Obudź w sobie olbrzyma

Pamięć stanowi sposób na zatrzymanie tego, co kochasz, tego, kim jesteś, tego, czego nie chcesz nigdy stracić. — Kevin Arnold

Nie wyrządzam sobie krzywdy, a jednak jestem własnym katem. — John Donne

W nic nie wierzą ludzie tak niezłomnie jak w to, o czym najmniej wiedzą. — Michel de Montaigne

Żadna liczba doświadczeń nie udowodni nigdy, że mam rację; pojedynczy eksperyment może udowodnić, że się mylę. — Albert Einstein

Cokolwiek robisz, potrzebujesz odwagi. Jakikolwiek kierunek działania wybierasz, zawsze znajduje się ktoś, kto ci mówi, że się mylisz. Pojawiają się trudności, które cię skłaniają, abyś uwierzył, że twoi krytycy mają rację. Aby wyznaczyć kierunek działania oraz podążać wybraną drogą do samego końca, potrzebujesz odwagi żołnierza. Pokój odnosi zwycięstwa, ale wywalczać je muszą odważni mężczyźni i kobiety. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jesteśmy wszystkim tym, czym udajemy, że jesteśmy. Uważajmy więc bardzo, co udajemy. — Kurt Vonnegut

Żyj tak, jakbyś miał umrzeć jutro. Ucz się tak, jakbyś miał żyć wiecznie. — Mahatma Gandhi

Jeżeli potrafisz zmienić zdanie, potrafisz zmienić życie. Przekonania kreują rzeczywiste fakty […]. Największa rewolucja za życia mojego pokolenia wiąże się z odkryciem, że poszczególni ludzie, w drodze zmiany wewnętrznych postaw i przekonań, mogą zmienić zewnętrzne aspekty swego życia. — William James

Każdy pragnie zostać milionerem lub nawet multimilionerem. Otwartą kwestią pozostaje jedynie dylemat, czy jesteś gotów do zrobienia wszystkiego oraz do poświęcenia wszystkich lat, niezbędnych do osiągnięcia finansowego sukcesu. Jeśli tak, to naprawdę nie istnieje nic, co mogłoby cię zatrzymać na tej drodze. — Brian Tracy, Sposób na sukces

Filozofia, jaką wyznajesz, determinuje, czy się zdyscyplinujesz, czy też będziesz nadal popełniał błędy. — Jim Rohn

Jeżeli trafiasz w cel za każdym razem, to znaczy, że albo jest on za duży, albo znajduje się zbyt blisko. — Tom Hirshfield

Jak się zjada słonia? Po kawałku.

Gdybyśmy faktycznie zrobili wszystko to, co jesteśmy w stanie zrobić, szczerze zadziwilibyśmy samych siebie. — Thomas Edison

Najlepsze w przyszłości jest to, że nadchodzi po jednym dniu na raz. — Abraham Lincoln

Ludzie nie przyciągają tego, czego chcą, ale to, czym są. — James Allen

Człowiek uczy się dwojako: albo poprzez czytanie, albo poprzez kontakty z mądrzejszymi ludźmi. — Will Rogers

Mirroring is a powerful neuro-linguistic programming technique that can be used to bond with others, build rapport, and reach mutual understanding more quickly. You may already be using it instinctively without even being aware.

Mirroring is simply the process of discreetly matching and mirroring the subtle behaviors and qualities of the person with whom you are connecting. It's a form of behavioral reflection that unconsciously reveals, "We're more alike than we are different.

Mirroring is especially helpful when our differences may divide. Think of the times when you have made a diligent effort to speak in another person’s native language to communicate and connect with comfort. By doing this, you are extending a considerate courtesy to meet them where they are, thus removing barriers and improving engagement.

Coordinating your gestures with someone’s subtle behaviors, can help you gain understanding, realize comfortable compatibility, and develop mutual trust.

Why Does Mirroring Work? Scientific research suggests ‘mirroring’ techniques works because of the mirror-neurons which are fired in our brains when we both perceive and take action. When we observe someone doing something, we may feel as if we are having the same experience.

When you see someone smile, does it naturally make you want to smile back? When you are irritable, do you find that people mirror your irritability? When someone yawns around you, do automatically do the same? When you hear someone celebrating, do you feel inclined to join in and celebrate too? Your responses are not forced, but instinctual and empathetic.

Mirroring provides social cues through body language and behavior which enable us to develop more empathy and understanding for others.

Who are we the most comfortable with? People who are the most like us! The “Similarity-Attraction Hypothesis” (Newcomb, 1956) found that similar (real or perceived) personalities are a major determinant of our likability and friendship choices. It is simply human to gravitate toward people like us. This tribal inclination runs the gamut across demographics of age, ethnicity, culture, education, religion, and even personality style. Mirroring will enable you to find ways to create the comfort of familiarity through similarity.

Since we know people like to do business with people who are most like themselves, consider this: Excellent sales people understand that "matching and mirroring" another person’s body language is a powerful technique and subliminal way to develop trust, build rapport, and make their clients more comfortable and engaging. Subtly mirroring the postures, gestures, and body language of your client inspires a kinship of commonality.

Early in my sales career, various sales trainers taught our teams how to use matching and mirroring to build rapport and earn trust with our clients. When done well, it would inevitably help us improve customer service and closing ratios. It was not encouraged as a deceptive sales practice to manipulate, but rather a subtle way to make a great first impression and connect on a meaningful level.

By mirroring, speaking, and moving in tandem with my clients, I provided them with a sense of familiar comfort and ease which helped us work well together. When they leaned forward, I would lean forward. When they crossed their arms, I would cross my arms. When they began speaking slowly and quietly, I would do the same. These subtle actions help to us to communicate more effectively.

Becoming aware of what you are doing and how others perceive you will provide you with instant insight for making changes where necessary.

Whatever you are putting out into the universe is going to be returned unto you and have a direct correlation to what you are getting back. In many ways, you are a magnet and manifest accordingly.

Think of your personal and professional life—are you attracting what you want? Are you attracting the kind of people you like? Do you feel that life is working for you or against you? How have others been treating you? Are you pleased with your results?

Modeling for others a sincerely positive and encouraging countenance will not only enrich their lives, it can foster trust and appreciation for you. This subtle technique of mirroring can help others feel compatibility with you and lead them to feel better about themselves. A win for everybody!

The easiest way to stay super-focused is to be well rested and not do any multi-tasking unless you absolutely have to.

The kuji (literally “nine characters” in Japanese) were mystical symbols that represented a state of mind, a view of life, and a set of skills that worked together to produce extraordinary results. Some of the methods of the kuji look like modern Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

You must realize that there is no single version of truth for everyone. Each person has a different view of reality, and it being different from yours doesn’t make it any less true than yours. They are all just different versions of reality, like a map of a territory, which is different from the real territory. ·          People will always react to their internal version of reality and not exactly what they feel with their senses only.

Instead, it is always better to make a decision based on self-interest alone.

You can never fully appreciate the ups if you have not conquered the downs.

I am productive. Though I have tons of work to do, I will not panic; I’ll do things one at a time until I’ve completed them all. I start with the most difficult and important one. I will stop for short breaks but I won’t let my mind get distracted. I am happily working on my tasks and I feel good about it.”    

Next, find out where in your body the feeling starts and where it goes. Discover the direction it spins inside your body, and spin it faster and faster and, again, notice your feelings intensify. There lies the control you have over your brain to create powerful feelings inside of you.

When you practice using your brain in this way, you will find yourself feeling really good a lot more often. Achieving personal freedom is all about developing new mental habits and skills and getting used to mentally running your brain the way you choose to run it.

ONE OF THE MOST important aspects of what human beings do is build beliefs. Beliefs are what trap most people in their problems. Unless you believe you can get over something, get through something, or get to something, there is little likelihood you will be able to do it. Your beliefs refer to your sense of certainty on some of your thoughts.

As soon as we believe in something, we search for ways to prove it’s true. What we are looking for here is to learn to doubt your limitations and be more certain of what is possible for you.

Take that feeling of certainty. Look at that picture in your mind and double it in size. Typically, when you do this, your feelings will grow stronger. When they do, notice where the feeling is in your body and which way it’s moving. By doing this, you are beginning to pay attention to the submodalities of a strong belief.

Look at your problem in the same place that your belief was and the first thing to do is to look at it and say, I’m tired of this. Over the years, I’ve discovered that the moment people really change is when they simply decide that enough is enough.

The first thing we want to do is to take a look at what you want to get rid of and what you want to add. You want to get rid of your self-doubt and add more belief in yourself. You want to get rid of your fears and add more confidence. Whatever it is, when you think about your problem, you probably believed you were going to have it for the rest of your life.

When you look at the belief that it is going to be here for the rest of your life, I want you to do a few small things with it. Literally, push the picture off in the distance and move it over and pull it up into that place of uncertainty so, when you look at it and think, Am I gonna be stuck like this forever? You say, Ehhh, maybe yes, maybe no.

In order to make it stick in any other position, it’s important that you do this very, very fast. To make it so you can place this old, limiting belief inside your uncertainty, you have to take a hold of the image and do something with it. You have to push it all the way off so that it’s twenty feet away, move it across your midline, and pull it up on the other side into the submodality qualities of uncertainty so that what was a strong belief becomes uncertainty.

Then you need to do the opposite. You need to take the image of what you want to believe, such as that you will be free from this problem and happy and well in the future, and push this image out twenty feet, move it over, and pull it up into the position and submodalities of your strong belief.

Most problems we face in life, as I have said already, happen in our minds. Furthermore, problems generally exist in our concept of the past and the future. The past and the future don’t exist except in our minds.

If doing something once makes you have fear, doing it over and over and over again is only going to reinforce that fear.

Getting over things is often about helping people to learn how to get their minds to let go of things. It means that you put your problems into the past where they belong.

THE FIRST THING TO put into your past and keep there are the bad suggestions others have shared with you.

When you want a guide to changing your behavior, you’re looking for quick ways to make quick changes.

I elicit the submodalities of that just as we did in the inventory part of this book earlier. Stop now and think about something you no longer want to believe. Just like Myra, I want you to go through your list and find out first, where is the voice? Where is the picture?

When you find the difference, I want you to take the thing you no longer wish to believe and push it all the way off into the distance, then move it over and pop it up on the other side so that when you look at it you know it’s a lie and you’re angry about it.

Then it’s time to build a new belief. What would you like to believe? If you build a belief that you, like every other human being, are entitled to be happy, and are entitled to make friends, that will be much more useful. You still have to have a reference structure. You have to look at yourself and see yourself the way you’d be if you had grown up with this useful belief.

I’m going to say that over and over again. This is because through the years, I’ve gotten people to believe the best thing about the past is that it’s over. When they look at it, they may be angry about how silly they have acted and about the beliefs they had—how they learned them and who taught them—but this is still not going to help them to go into the future. What helps you go into the future is to leave the past behind and to create such strong desires that you want to move toward them.

When you can take on board new, positive suggestions and disbelieve the old, limiting suggestions, you will be ready to tackle the rest of your problems, especially your fears.

People think they are afraid of these things, but they are not. It’s not the object. It’s not the height that makes you afraid, it’s your brain. We know this because other people can be at the same height and they don’t get afraid. The question becomes: what is the person who feels fear doing inside his head and, even more important, what is the person who feels calm or confident in those situations doing inside his head?

After interviewing hundreds of people, I found out how people got over phobias. They all reached the point where they got fed up with being afraid.

If you run through all five and go back to the beginning and run through all five again and go back to the beginning and run through all five again really, really fast, what will happen is that you’ll begin to feel fed up. There’ll be a point where something inside you says, Enough is enough.

The next thing you can do is to make a still image of yourself in the situation where you’re afraid. Imagine you are sitting in a movie theater with the still image on screen. Then imagine floating out of yourself in the chair so you can look down and watch yourself, seeing yourself being afraid. Then start the movie. It’s like you’re in a balcony watching yourself in the theater and you’re in the film. Now as you look at yourself being afraid, I want you to stay in that third position and in your mind looking at yourself being afraid and say to yourself, That’s ridiculous. As you look at yourself being terrified, watching yourself being terrified, something inside you will feel different.

Run all the way to the end of the episode, float back down into the theatre, float into the movie, and then run it backward so everybody walks backward and talks backward, and throw in a little circus music so it’s as ridiculous as it could be. Then, clear your mind for ten minutes and then go back and think of what you were afraid of. You will be amazed to discover that your fear has severely diminished if not disappeared entirely.

My policy is, why wait? If you’re going to look back and laugh, you might as well start laughing.

Laughter produces endomorphins that are an important part of changing your mind. The more you laugh at what you’re afraid of, the more chemicals go into your body. Even if it’s artificial laughter, it doesn’t matter. If you can stop now and look at the same picture in your mind that scared you and not be afraid, then you’re ready for the next step. So, get up from your chair and go out and test it and test it and test it and, bit by bit, it will simply disappear.

This isn’t just a good way of getting rid of your public speaking anxiety, it’s a good step to get rid of that fear of heights. It’s a good step to getting rid of that fear of bees or the fear of snakes. As long as you maintain that spinning direction, and spin it faster and faster and faster and faster, suddenly the brain, at the unconscious level, begins to recode the experience. When you try to get back to having your old fear, you’ll discover that it’s a very difficult thing to do.

Once they have a choice, people always make the best choice. The trouble is that people don’t think they have one.

Then I had him close his eyes and go inside and take the feeling of fear in his body and spin it once again a little bit faster and then turn it around and spin it backward until it softened. I told him to relax and to be comfortable and to open his eyes and look at the flexibility of the wing and to hear the sounds of the engines. I told him to see himself being able to fly smoothly, to look off at the clouds and realize that flying’s one of the safest things you can do. You’re more likely to be hit by a car crossing the street, so it was a good thing he wasn’t outside the plane. Instead, inside he was safe. Even if we hit a little clear air turbulence, it just meant that the plane was bouncing up.

Over the years, I’ve eliminated fears, phobias, and anxieties of many kinds. The exercises that we’re laying out for you here show you different ways to deal with fear and anxiety. Now, if you go through each of these and you do it this way and do it that way and do it a third way, you’ll be able to find the best and quickest way to get rid of your own fears.

We learn the fear that snaps us away from touching fire, from stabbing ourselves with scissors, from poking ourselves in the eye, and we learn things that move us in the right direction. When our fears become too grandiose and too generalized, we become afraid of the wrong things. One of the things you should never, ever, ever be afraid of is your own thoughts. When you think things that scare you, you just need to think about them differently. You need to put in different sounds. You need to shrink them down. You need to learn that you are in control of how you think. This includes how you think about your past.

Being able to play these memories forward with circus music and backward with silly music allows the feelings to become separated from the images and the memories will no longer haunt you. The purpose of memories is to learn from them or to enjoy them or to use them as guides for your behavior, and it doesn’t help to relive trauma. Over the years, I’ve helped many, many people whose lives had been crippled by traumatic experiences to get away from the memories.

I know that I’m fond of saying this repeatedly, but the best thing about the past is that it’s over and when it’s not over something is amiss in your mind. It’s not the original event or perpetrator that’s making you remember—it’s you, inside your own mind, holding on to terrible memories. None of us are exempt from this.

Whenever people have trouble letting go of good things or bad things, it’s because they are associated to the memory. It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s just like being there. If you’re holding on to bad memories, it’s now time to look at them and shrink them down.

Another thing to do is to freeze frame the memory. I know that sounds crazy at first, but the best thing to do then is to jump to the end, freeze-frame it and literally grab a whiteness knob in your mind and turn it very quickly so that it goes blank-out white, phhhhhp. Very quickly, so the whiteness literally replaces the memory so you can’t see it.

Look at the last image and then run it backward to the beginning so that people walk backward, so that the sounds are like playing a tape recorder backwards. In fact, if you can, spin your feelings in the reverse direction.

It may take a few tries at this because habits develop over years, but over time it will be effective. For years and years, this particular woman who was raped had run the same life-size movie in her head over and over again. It became a habit. What she needed to do was to break it up. If you can make the image small enough or, if you can, white it out often enough, that will make a difference. If you can run it backward enough, that will change the feeling. You can also disassociate it. You do this by putting yourself in the picture and pushing it off into the distance. Then you can go inside your mind and replace it with something else because it’s not enough to get over the past, you have to start to look at what you want in the future.

Next, go back to the first bad image. Not the life-size one but the little one and push it off into the distance and suddenly pull up the new picture in its place and then make it life-size. Look at how you want to be, and you end up replacing your fears with your desires.

This will instruct your neurology which direction to go in. There is a tendency for some people to look at the past over and over again. Even in therapy, people going through it over and over again instruct the neurology that this is what they want. Until you start to look ahead with desire, it’s very hard to get away from the past. The more you look at the bad things, the more you relive the bad things, the more familiar it gets.

The strongest instinct in human beings is not survival. Virginia Satir said something to me that has resonated with me for forty years. She asked, “What do you think is the strongest instinct?” Like a robot I responded, “Survival.” For me, it had always been the strongest instinct. She said, “No, Richard. The strongest instinct in human beings is the need to look at the familiar.” People are terrified of the unknown. In fact, sometimes people will rather kill themselves than look at new things.

The techniques I’m describing to you aren’t techniques that you just do once, but things that you run over and over and over in your mind till they become familiar, to move away from pain and move toward hope. The more you move away from pain and white out your pain and see yourself in your pain—and the more you look at yourself doing the things you want to do—the more you’ll begin to change your direction.

Laughter releases endomorphins. If you can’t laugh at your past, you’ll never get free of it. So it’s time to start laughing, even if it’s artificial laughter at first. Put a little circus music in, add a little chaos, and move things backward. If they start to move forward, blank them out with white and then pull up an image of something you really desire. Put your hopes and dreams in front of your nightmares and your terrors and your problems. A psychiatrist may call this repression. I call it planning. You should too.

The trouble with long, drawn-out deaths—in fact, all deaths—is when people remember the person who has died, they make life-size images and they see those images as if they’re happening now. It’s very difficult to get through the pain of death. When people look at good memories, they’ll see themselves in the good memories, but they’ll remember the funeral. They’ll remember the death as if it’s happening now. In other words, they’ll be associated with it, and this is simply backward. The process of flipping pictures is how people come out of grief when they stop remembering the tragedy of death and start remembering the good times vividly and associating with good memories. I

The best thing about the future is that it’s in front of you. The best thing about the past is that it lies behind.

We have been trained to believe that change isn’t easy and requires a lot of effort and a lot of time. I’ve always found this to be simply not true.

Sometimes, people hang on to their problems because they want to feel unique or important. Their problems give them identities. They love to be victims of the world. They seek out ways to prove that nothing will work for them and they are hopeless cases. Over the years, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Richard, and experienced in my own life, it is that there is no such thing as a hopeless case. There is always hope, and there is always a way out of your problems. You can take control over your beliefs, and you can stop getting in your own way. You can believe in your ability to get over things, through things, and to them. You can also discover that the process of change is actually far simpler than you think.

Nothing wears off, because as long as you think differently, you will feel differently.

I did not look for “what went wrong” or the “whys.” I did not look for cures. I looked at what worked, no matter how. If a few good therapists “fixed” anybody, I looked at what they actually did. When people got over problems on their own, I looked at what had happened. The result is what is now called Neuro-Linguistic Programming—that is, a series of lessons that teach what others have learned that works.

If you’re looking for difficulties, you’ll always find them. If you ask the question, What can go wrong? then something probably will. On the other hand, if you’re asking the question, What works? then you can find it and, in this case, I did.

Every task has a mental component to it. A lot of what we call talent is when people stumble upon these strategies easily.

Talent isn’t just God-given. It’s partially God-given; the other part is accessed by human beings insofar as they’re able to teach each other.

These unconscious skills can be skills that are detrimental to our well-being, including depressing ourselves, hesitating, stressing ourselves out, or feeling terrified and hopeless. Conversely, they can also be skills of motivating ourselves, becoming relaxed, or being more confident and hopeful.

The qualities of the images, sounds, and feelings are known as submodalities.

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

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.

In order to change beliefs, we first need to learn a way of finding out the qualities of beliefs.

If you’ve been afraid most of your life, you may not have good examples of what “happy” is. In that case, you can build it in. That’s what I do. You have to give people a really strong feeling of being relaxed, a really strong feeling of feeling good as a guide for their behavior. You do this so that, in the future when they wake up, they start asking, How much fun can I have today? How much freedom can I find? How much more can I do than I’ve done before?

When people start asking good questions, they make good pictures inside their heads. If you make good pictures, you will get good feelings. Then life becomes something that you feel more enthusiasm for.

When I studied phobias, I didn’t study the people who had them. I studied the people who got over them.

All of these people, as they told me their stories, shared certain things in common. One example was that they reached a point where they got so fed up they stopped thinking about what scared them. They started to look at themselves being afraid and started thinking, This is really silly. Elements like these, which they all shared in common, allowed me to develop the first “phobia cure.” It wasn’t really a “cure” so much as a “lesson.

If you can help people to think differently and actively, they can change their lives.

Everyone reading this book will have heard the expression sleep on it as advice for tackling a problem. There’s truth to this saying 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 we become unconsciously skilled at it.

People have been talking about feelings in the field of psychology for a long time. When I started, I saw all kinds of counselors, 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 they 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 the word that had 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 being frustrated. That is an activity. When you turn it back into an activity, you can find out so much more about it.

What this means is that our bodies are not disconnected from our brains. 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.

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 forward, and you can move it backward. 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 your feelings.

The qualities of your thoughts, these submodalities, determine how your thoughts affect you. When you make big movies of things 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.

ONE OF THE MAIN focuses in my work 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.

Think of a time when you felt really good. Now, step inside that time and see through your eyes, hear through your ears, and feel the really good feeling all the way through your body. Make the images bigger, brighter, more colorful, and you’ll probably find yourself feeling even better. Make the sounds louder and crisper, and if there are no sounds, add sounds. Start to intensify the good feeling.

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 you banish it again.

The unconscious is a mind and is aware, hence consciousness cannot be defined by awareness.

We are changed from animals into humans through the acquisition of invented language, and this transforms our nervous system and brings it under thoughtful, conscious, cultural control and frees us from the animal instincts that imprison all other animals.

Consciousness – knowledge – transformed humanity. Experience did not. Stone Age humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years without consciousness, without knowledge. They had plenty of experiences, but no knowledge. They were just like the animals … until consciousness arrived, and then they ceased to be anything like animals and became the masters of the world.

We use language to describe experiences, but language itself isn’t experience. It exists on its own, independent of experience, yet applicable to any experience. And that’s exactly what consciousness is. It applies to experience – allowing us to knowledgably reflect on experience – but it definitely isn’t the experience itself, contrary to what almost all of humanity believes. Hardly anyone understands that consciousness can be totally detached from experience and put to completely different uses.

We advance consciousness by advancing how we program people with ideas and concepts. The more powerful the ideas and concepts, the more powerful the people. Via language, via education, we can neuro-linguistically program everyone in the optimal way. The optimal way is of course the one based on reason and logic. Although we must make people Apollonian, we should never forget the need to pay the Dionysian its dues. You can never forget about the Shadow, the Id, the Devil.

Animals have unconscious experiences, i.e., they have experiences but they do not reflect on them, and have almost no memory of them. They have experiences, but have no knowledge of themselves having those experiences, and that’s precisely why they are not conscious. Animals may be likened to human sleepwalkers – they can do all sorts of complex things, but they are not conscious of performing those tasks. They are obviously experiencing the tasks as they do them, but they are equally obviously not consciously experiencing them. Many if not most people seem baffled by the concept that minds can be experiencing things without being conscious of what they are experiencing – because they think that the experience itself is the fundamental element of consciousness.

Humans are conscious because they have knowledge – via reason, logic, language and conceptualization – while animals are not because they lack reason, logic, language and conceptualization. Here we have an astounding difference. For rationalists, animals cannot be conscious. They can be sentient (have feelings, sensations and experiences), but without consciousness. For empiricists, animals can and indeed must be conscious because they have feelings, sensations and experiences. Rationalists distinguish between sentience and consciousness. Empiricists say they are the same thing. The differences between rationalists and empiricists appear everywhere, and basically create two competing worldviews, but which are often force-fitted together.

No animals have any morality towards each other, and no morality towards humans, so in what way would humans have morality towards animals? Do we have moral obligations to computers?

Consciousness is the result of neuro-linguistic programming. Language programs the nervous system to operate in a different way from that of instinctual animals. Language reprograms the nervous system, transitioning it away from fixed biological instincts to variable cultural ideas, leading to a staggering degree of change in the pace of mental evolution (but not physical, biological evolution – the body remains stubbornly the same). Language is what stands in greatest need of explanation. Once we fully understand language – not biology, not matter, not faith, not spirituality – we will understand existence fully. Existence itself is language – ontological mathematics – and manmade languages are possible exactly because they originate in a language-reality, not a material or spiritual reality. The fact that existence revolves around language means that language can answer what existence is. It means that existence has an exact answer, and that existence is fundamentally mental, intellectual and teleological. The science of consciousness should become the great new science. It will totally transform the human race. As humanity expands its consciousness, the quality and excellence of the human race will grow exponentially, and the culmination will be the divinity of humanity. Are you ready to join the gods?

5. Offer suggestions instead of criticising Instead of the feedback sandwich, which can be just a way of sweetening criticism, and tends to do more harm than good, try this deceptively simple technique for giving feedback which was developed by the Canadian Neuro-linguistic Programming trainer, Shelle Rose Charvet, and set out in her aptly titled essay, “The Feedback Sandwich Is Out To Lunch”.14 It goes like this: You make a suggestion. You offer two reasons why it might work. The first states what the suggested course of action would accomplish. The second states what problem it would prevent. You end with an encouraging comment.

I use the word sensing because words matter. If we spend our life “looking” for things, we may miss out on all that we can hear, taste, touch, feel and otherwise perceive and intuitively sense. Vision is too narrow a definition for what makes up our human consciousness.

They’re very goal-oriented. They tend to have higher grade point averages, be health conscious, and save their money. They can delay gratification, so they have pretty good ego control and self-esteem. However, because they are sometimes too far in the future, they may have trouble locating themselves in the present. As a result, they may be less able to enjoy present activities and may be a little less affectionate to people immediately around them.

If I have to tell what I learned from Neuro Linguistic Programming then I will simply say these two things: 1. I learned to make more empowering choices. No more confusion. 2. Earlier words would often be the cause of my troubles and now they are the reason of all my blessings..

As Aldous Huxley says in his book The Doors of Perception, when you learn a language, you are an inheritor of the wisdom of the people who have gone before you. You are also a victim in this sense: of that infinite set of experiences you could have had, certain ones are given names, labeled with words, and thereby are emphasized and attract your attention. Equally valid—possibly even more dramatic and useful—experiences at the sensory level which are unlabeled, typically don't intrude into your consciousness.

If I use any words that don't have direct sensory referents, the only way you can understand those—unless you have some program to demand more sensory-based descriptions—is for you to find the counterpart in your past experience.

There's an illusion that people understand each other when they can repeat the same words. But since those words internally access different experiences— which they must—then there's always going to be a difference in meaning.

Thinking should always be an active process where you think in a way that gets you the results you want.

If we observe and listen carefully to how a person behaves and communicates linguistically, we can glean an understanding of how, neurologically, a person puts his or her experience together to be excellent, mediocre, or awful at the things he or she does. Hence, this field is called Neuro-linguistic Programming.

Any one-level theory of objective reality that ignores the separate reality-tunnels in which these people are living existentially has no validity in psychology, and, with a little analysis, it is obvious that no such one-level theory has any general validity in sociology either. To understand human behavior, we have to understand human evaluations (neuro-linguistic programs) and modern social scientists of all schools increasingly recognize that human evaluations (internal reality-tunnels) depend on both the external environment (setting) and the internal environment (neuro-linguistic programs).

But a second, equally prominent, emphasis of the early days was learning to navigate without fixed maps; that is, to learn at an unconscious level. As I soon discovered in doing trance work, a hypnotic induction is a set of communications that de-frames or dissolves fixed maps, thereby allowing new experiences unhindered by the map bias. From this naturalistic view, virtually my entire time spent with Bandler and Grinder was a hypnotic induction – the core spirit guiding the work was dissolving all fixed views (in ourselves and others), so that both laughter and significant new realities could emerge. To me, the revolutionary spirit of early NLP came from a beautiful combination of these two levels of (1) learning without maps (i.e., unconscious learning) and (2) learning via maps improved by meta-modeling principles. The former provided a deep well of original ideas and possibilities, while the latter offered a means to refine and formalize these possibilities into teachable and replicable models.