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Using Your Brain for A Change

Neuro Linguistic Programming 

Using Your Brain 

FORA 

CHANGE 

Richard 

Bandler 

Edited by 

Connirae Andreas 

& Steve Andreas 

Using Your Brain 

-for a CHANGE 

by 

Richard Bandler 

edited by 

Steve Andreas 

and 

Connirae Andreas 

REAL PEOPLE PRESS 

Copyright© 1985 

Real People Press 

BoxF 

Moab, Utah84532 

ISBN: 0-911226-26-5 clothbound$ll. 00 

ISBN: 0-911226-27-3paperbound$7.50 

Cover by Rene Eisenbart 

Illustrations by Gustav Russ Youngreen 

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 

Bandler, Richard. 

Using your brain-for a change. 

Bibliography: p. 

Includes index. 

1. Neurolinguistic programming. I. Andreas, Steve. 

II. Andreas, Connirae. HI. Title. 

BF637.N46B36 1985158'.1'85-10826 

ISBN 0-91126-26-5 

ISBN 0-91126-27-3 (pbk.) 

Other books about Neuro-Linguistic Programming from Real People 

Press: 

FROGS INTO PRINCES, by Richard BandlerandJohnGrinder.l97pp.l979Cloth 

$11.00 Paper $7.50 

REFRAMING: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Transformation of Mean- 

ing, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. 220 pp. 1981 Cloth $12,00 Paper $8.50 

TRANCE-FORMATIONS: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Structure of 

Hypnosis, by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. 250 pp. 1981 Cloth$12.00 Paper $8.50 

CHANGE YOUR MIND-AND KEEP THE CHANGE, by Steve Andreas and 

Connirae Andreas. 187 pp. 1987 Cloth $12,00 Paper $8.50 

The name Real People Press indicates our purpose; to publish ideas and ways that a 

person can use independently or with others to become more real-to further your own 

growth as a human being and to develop your relationships and communication with 

others. 

3456789 

10 

Printing 

93 

92 

91 

90 

89 

Dedicated to 

my mother 

Contents 

Introduction7-5 

I. Who's Driving the Bus? 

7-19 

Most of us let our brains run wild, and spend a lot of time 

having experiences we don't want to have. Bandler pokes fun at 

many of our current ways of attempting to think about and solve 

human problems, as he begins to provide alternatives. 

II. Running Your Own Brain 

21-35 

Depending upon the size, brightness, closeness, etc., of our 

internal pictures, we respond very differently to the same 

thoughts. Understanding these simple principles allows us to 

change our experiences so that we respond the way we want. 

"Briefest therapy" is demonstrated. 

III. Points of View 

37-48 

Seeing a memory from your own point of view (through your 

own eyes) has a very different impact than watching yourself in 

that memory from some other point of view. Knowing how to use 

this difference allows you to cure a phobia or a "post-traumatic 

stress syndrome" in a few minutes, among other things. 

IV Going Wrong 

51-67 

We often try to correct problems after something has gone 

wrong, rather than doing things ahead of time to make sure they 

go the way we want them to. The attempted correction often 

makes the problem worse. 

V. Going for it 

69-80 

We all motivate ourselves to do things repeatedly throughout 

the day. Knowing how this works makes it possible to choose 

what we're motivated to do, and to use powerful positive feelings 

to do it. A way to change critical internal voices into friendly and 

useful allies is also demonstrated. 

VI. Understanding Confusion 

83-101 

The ways we each organize our experience to understand 

something are unique, and can be directed and modified. Much 

can be learned by trying out someone else's way of understanding. 

VII. Beyond Belief 

103-115 

Our brains code our internal experiences so that we know 

what we believe and what we don't. By directly accessing and 

changing this internal coding, it is possible to quickly change 

limiting beliefs about yourself into resourceful and empowering 

beliefs. 

VIII. Learning 

117-129 

Our educational system has attempted to teach students con- 

tent, rather than teach them how to learn. "School phobias" which 

prevent learning can be dealt with easily. Memory and "learning 

disabilities" arc also discussed. 

IX. The Swish 

131-152 

By understanding how your brain links experiences, it is 

possible to make any problem situation into a cue for you to 

become more of who you want to be. This method provides a 

generative solution for almost any problem behavior or response. 

It is demonstrated with smoking and other habitual responses. 

Afterword155-159 

Appendices162-169 

Selected Bibliography 170 

Index171-172 

Introduction 

How often have you heard the phrase, "She has a bright 

future" or, "He has a colorful past"? Expressions like these are 

more than metaphors. They are precise descriptions of the speak- 

er's internal thinking, and these descriptions are the key to learn- 

ing how to change your own experience in useful ways. For 

instance, right now notice how you picture a pleasant future event 

in your own life . • . and then brighten that picture and notice 

how your feelings change. When you brighten that picture, do 

you "look forward" to it more? Most people respond more 

strongly to a brighter picture; a few respond more to a dimmer 

picture. 

Now take a pleasant memory from your past and literally 

make the colors stronger and more intense. . . . How does having 

a "colorful past" change the intensity of your response to that 

memory? If you don't notice a difference in your feelings when 

you make your memory more colorful, try seeing that memory in 

black and white. As the image loses its color, typically your 

response will be weaker. 

Another common expression is, "Add a little sparkle to your 

life." Think of another pleasant experience, and literally sprinkle 

your image of it with little shining points of sparkling light, and 

notice how that affects your feeling response. (Television adver- 

tisers and designers of sequined clothing know about this one!) 

"Put your past behind you," is common advice for unpleasant 

Using Your Brain 

events. Think of a memory that still makes you feel bad, and 

then notice where you see it now, and how far away the picture 

is. Probably it's fairly close in front of you. Now take that picture 

and physically move it far behind you. How does that change how 

you experience that memory? 

These are a few very basic examples of the simplicity and 

power of the new NLP "Submodalities" patterns developed by 

Richard Bandler in the last few years. One of the earliest NLP 

patterns was the idea of "Modalities" or "Representational Sys- 

tems." We think about any experience using sensory system rep- 

resentations-visual pictures, auditory sounds and kinesthetic feel- 

ings. Most NLP Training during the last ten years has taught a 

wide variety of rapid and practical ways to use this knowledge of 

modalities to change feelings and behavior. Submodalities are the 

smaller elements within each modality. For example, a few of the 

visual submodalities are brightness, color, size, distance, location, 

and focus. Knowledge of Submodalities opens up a whole new 

realm of change patterns that are even faster, easier, and more 

specific. 

When we were first introduced to NLP in the fall of 1977, 

we set aside most of what we were doing in order to study these 

exciting and rapid new ways of changing behavior. At that time 

Richard Bandler and John Grinder were collaborating on the 

development of this new field, which promised a great deal. NLP 

taught how to follow a person's internal process by paying atten- 

tion to unconscious eye movements, how to change old unpleasant 

feeling responses in minutes, and much more. 

Now, seven years later, all those promises and many more 

have been kept. All the basic ideas and techniques of NLP have 

withstood the test of time, as well as the tougher test of teaching 

others how to make practical use of them. NLP has often been 

described as the field on the cutting edge of communication and 

change. 

NLP offers a conceptual understanding that is solidly based 

on information science and computer programming, yet rooted 

even more thoroughly in the observation of living human expe- 

rience. Everything in NLP can be directly verified in your own 

experience, or by observing others. 

Introduction3 

The new submodality patterns described and taught in this 

book are even faster and more powerful ways of creating personal 

change than the earlier NLP methods. There are only three major 

modalities, but there are many submodalities within each modality. 

Submodalities are literally the ways that our brains sort and code 

our experience. The submodality change patterns can be used to 

directly change the human software-the ways we think about 

and respond to our experiences- 

Some critics have contended that NLP is too "cold" and 

"technical," and that while it may be successful with simple habits 

and phobias, it doesn't deal with "core existential issues." We will 

be interested in these critics' responses to the methods for chang- 

ing understandings and beliefs demonstrated in chapters 6 and 7. 

This book opens a doorway to a practical new way of under- 

standing how your mind works. More important, this book teaches 

specific simple principles that you can use to "run your own brain." 

It teaches you how to change your own experience when you're 

not pleased with it, and to further enhance your enjoyment when 

your life is going well. 

Many of us have the ability to take known principles and 

make useful adaptations of those principles, or make a small 

innovation now and then. Richard Bandler's special genius is his 

unparalleled ability to repeatedly delineate new principles, and to 

make them available to the rest of us. His sense of humor may 

sometimes sound caustic and arrogant, particularly when it is 

directed toward the professions of psychology and psychiatry (al- 

though other "experts" get their share!). This is at least partly 

understandable when you realize that although the NLP 10-minute 

phobia/trauma cure was first published over six years ago, most 

psychologists continue to believe that it takes months or years of 

talking and drugs (and several thousand dollars) to cure a phobia. 

We know well the frustration of being told, "It can't be done," 

when we have demonstrated it hundreds of times, and taught 

many others to do it consistently. 

When a major technical innovation occurs in any industry, 

manufacturers around the world are eager to make immediate use 

of the new method, because they know that if they don't, com- 

petitors will put them out of business. Unfortunately, there is 

Using Your Brain 

much more inertia in fields like psychology, in which professionals 

get paid more if they take longer to solve a problem. Since 

incompetence is rewarded, new and better methods take much 

longer to become part of the mainstream in these fields. 

This inertia in the field of psychology has also been lamented 

by many others. Salvador Minuchin, well-known innovator in the 

field of family therapy, recently said: 

"How did people respond to our (research) findings? 

By defending their own paradigms. In response to new 

knowledge, there is always the question of how to main- 

tain oneself doing the things one was trained in." 

Despite this inertia, there are many exceptions within the 

fields of psychology and psychiatry-professionals who are eager 

to learn about any methods that can benefit their clients by making 

their work faster, better, and more thorough. We hope this book 

finds its way into your hands. 

Several years ago we became aware of the new direction that 

Richard Bandler's genius was exploring, and we realized how 

useful these new patterns could be for people everywhere if they 

were more widely known. However, it is primarily our own per- 

sonal fascination and excitement with submodalities that has led 

us to create this book. 

Our raw materials were audiotapes and transcripts of a large 

number of seminars and workshops that Richard has taught re- 

cently. Then came a long process of sorting through and organizing 

this wealth of material, experimenting with it personally, and 

teaching it to others in order to gain a richer understanding. 

Finally, based on what we had learned, we have put this material 

together in the form of this book. We have tried to preserve the 

living style and flavor of the original seminars, while at the same 

time reorganizing and sequencing the material to make it easier 

to understand in written form. 

Most books in rapidly developing fields are five or ten years 

out of date by the time they are printed. Most of the material in 

this book is about three years old. There are many other newer 

Introduction 

submodality patterns now being taught in advanced NLP seminars, 

and Richard continues to develop more patterns. 

One of the basic principles of NLP is that the order or 

sequence of experiences, like the order of words in a sentence, 

affects their meaning. The order of the chapters in this book has 

been carefully thought out. Since much of the material in later 

chapters presupposes that you have the information and experi- 

ences presented in earlier chapters, you will have a much fuller 

understanding if you read them in order. 

Another basic NLP principle is that words are only inadequate 

labels for experiences. It is one thing to read about hammering 

a nail into a board. It is quite a different experience to feel a 

hammer in your hand and hear a satisfying "thunk" as the nail 

sinks into a piece of soft pine. It is yet another experience to feel 

the vibration and twist in the hammer and watch the nail bend 

as you hear the "pinggg" that tells you about the hidden knot. 

The patterns in this book are tools. Like any tools, they must 

be used to be understood fully, and they must be practiced to be 

used with consistent effectiveness. You can skim through this book 

rapidly if you just want to get an idea of what's in it. But if you 

really want to be able to use this information, be sure to try it 

out in your own experience and with others, or your knowledge 

will only be "academic." 

Connirae Andreas 

Steve Andreas 

April 1985 

Who's Driving the Bus ? 

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a word that I made up to 

avoid having to be specialized in one field or another.; In college 

I was one of those people who couldn't make up my mind, and 

I decided to continue that way. One of the things that NLP 

represents is a way of looking at human learning. Although lots 

of psychologists and social workers use NLP to do what they call 

"therapy," I think it's more appropriate to describe NLP as an 

educational process. Basically we're developing ways to teach , 

people how to use their own brains. 

Most people don't actively and deliberately use their own 

brains. Your brain is like a machine without an "off' switch. If 

you don't give it something to do, it just runs on and on until it 

gets bored. If you put someone in a sensory deprivation tank 

where there's no external experience, he'll start generating internal 

experience. If your brain is sitting around without anything to do, 

it's going to start doing something, and it doesn't seem to care 

what it is, You may care, but it doesn't. 

For example, have you ever been just sitting around minding 

your own business, or sound asleep, when suddenly your brain 

flashes a picture that scares the pants off you? How often do 

people wake up in the middle of the night because they just 

relived an ecstatically pleasureable experience? If you've had a 

bad day, then later your brain will show you vivid reruns, over 

and over again. It's not enough that you had a bad day; you can 

Using Your Brain 

ruin the whole evening, and perhaps part of next week, too. 

Most people don't stop there. How many of you think about 

unpleasant things that happened long ago? It's as if your brain is 

saying, "Let's do it again! We've got an hour before lunch, let's 

think about something that's really depressing. Maybe we can get 

angry about it three years too late." Have you heard about "un- 

finished business"? It's finished; you just didn't like the way it 

came out. 

I want you to find out how you can learn to change your 

own experience, and get some control over what happens in your 

brain. Most people are prisoners of their own brains. It's as if 

they are chained to the last seat of the bus and someone else is 

driving. I want you to learn how to drive your own bus. If you 

don't give your brain a little direction, either it will just run 

randomly on its own, or other people will find ways to run it for 

you-and they may not always have your best interests in mind. 

Even if they do, they may get it wrong! 

NLP is an opportunity to be able to study subjectivity 

-something that I was told in school is a terrible thing. I was 

told that true science looks at things objectively. However, I 

noticed that I seemed to be most influenced by my subjective 

experience, and I wanted to know something about how it worked, 

and how it affected other people. I'm going to play some mind- 

games with you in this seminar, because the brain is my favorite 

toy. 

How many of you would like to have a "photographic mem- 

ory"? And how many of you vividly remember past unpleasant 

experiences, over and over again? It certainly adds a little juice 

to life. If you go to see a terrifying movie, and you go home and 

sit down, the act of sitting down will tend to put you right back 

into the theater seat. How many of you have had that experience? 

And you claim that you don't have a photographic memory! 

You've already got one; you're just not using it in a directed way. 

If you're able to have a photographic memory when it comes to 

remembering past unpleasantness, it seems like it would be nice 

if you could deliberately harness some of that ability for more 

useful experiences. 

How many of you have ever thought about something that 

Who's Driving the Bus? 

hadn't even happened yet, and felt bad about it ahead of time? 

Why wait? You may as well start feeling bad now, right? And 

then it didn't actually happen, after all. But you didn't miss out 

on that experience, did you? 

That ability can also work the other way. Some of you have 

better vacations before you actually go, and then you get to be 

disappointed when you arrive. Disappointment requires adequate 

planning. Did you ever think about how much trouble you have 

to go to in order to be disappointed? You really have to plan 

thoroughly for it. The more planning, the more disappointment. 

Some people go to the movies and then say, "It's just not as good 

as I thought it was going to be." This makes me wonder, if they 

had such a good movie inside their heads, why did they go to the 

theater? Why go sit in a room with sticky floors and uncomfortable 

seats to watch a movie, and then say, "I can do better than that 

in my head, and I didn't even have the screen play." 

This is the kind of thing that happens if you let your brain 

run wild. People spend more time learning how to use a food 

processor than they do learning how to use their brains. There 

isn't much emphasis placed on deliberately using your mind in 

ways other than you already do. 'You're supposed to "be your- 

self-as if you had an alternative. You're stuck with it, believe 

me. I suppose they could wipe out all your memories with elec- 

troshock, and then make you into someone else, but the results 

I've seen haven't been very enticing. Until we find something like 

a mind-blanking machine, I think you're probably stuck with you. 

And it's not so bad, because you can learn to use your brain in 

more functional ways. That's what NLP is all about. 

When I first started teaching, some people got the idea that 

NLP would help people program other people's minds to control 

them and make them less human. They seemed to have the idea 

that deliberately changing a person would somehow reduce that 

person's humanity. Most people are quite willing to change them- 

selves deliberately with antibiotics and cosmetics, but behavior 

seems different. I've never understood how changing someone and 

making them happier turns them into less of a human being. But 

I have noticed how many people arc very good at making their 

husbands or wives or children-or even total strangers-feel bad, 

10Using Your Brain 

just by "being themselves." I sometimes ask people, "Why be 

your real self when you can be something really worthwhile?" I 

want to introduce you to some of the infinite possibilities for 

learning and changing that are available to you if you start using 

your brain deliberately. 

There was a time when film producers made movies in which 

computers were going to take over. People started thinking of 

computers not as tools, but as things that replaced people. But if 

you have seen home computers, you know that they have pro- 

grams for things like balancing your checkbook! Balancing your 

checkbook on a home computer takes about six times as long as 

doing it the usual way. Not only do you have to write them in 

the checkbook, then you have to go home and type them into 

the computer. That's what turns home computers into planters 

-the things that you put flowers in. You play a certain number 

of games when it's a new toy, and after a while you stick it away 

in the closet. When friends come over whom you haven't seen 

for a long time, you pull it out so they can play the games you're 

bored with. That is not really what a computer is about. But the 

trivial ways people have used computers are much like the trivial 

ways in which people have used their own minds. 

1 keep hearing people say that you stop learning when you're 

about five, but I have no evidence that this is true. Stop and 

think about it. Between the ages of five and now, how many 

absolutely futile things have you learned, let alone worthwhile 

ones? Human beings have an amazing ability to learn. I am 

convinced, and I'm going to convince you-one way or the 

other-that you're still a learning machine. The good side of this 

is that you can learn things exquisitely and rapidly. The bad side 

is that you can learn garbage just as easily as you can learn useful 

things. 

How many of you are haunted by thoughts? You say to 

yourself, "I wish I could get it out of my head." But isn't it 

amazing that you got it in there in the first place! Brains are 

really phenomenal. The things they'll get you to do are absolutely 

amazing. The problem with brains is not that they can't learn, as 

we have been told all too often. The problem with brains is that 

they learn things too quickly and too well. For example, think of 

Who's Driving the Bus? 

11 

a phobia. It's an amazing thing to be able to remember to get 

terrified every time you see a spider. You never find a phobic 

looking at a spider and saying, "Oh damn, I forgot to be afraid." 

Are there a few things you'd like to learn that thoroughly? When 

: you think about it that way, having a phobia is a tremendous 

learning achievement. And if you go into the person's history, 

you often find that it was one-trial learning: it took only one 

instantaneous experience for that person to learn something so 

thoroughly that she'll remember it for the rest of her life. 

How many of you have read about Pavlov and his dogs and 

the bell, and all that stuff? . . . and how many of you are salivating 

right now? They had to put the dog in a harness and ring the 

bell and give it food over and over again to teach it that response. 

All you did was read about it, and you have the same response 

the dog had. It's no big thing, but it is an indication of how 

rapidly your brain can learn. You can learn faster than any com- 

puter. What we need to know more about is the subjective ex- 

perience of learning, so that you can direct your learning and 

have more control over your own experience and what you learn. 

Are you familiar with the "our song" phenomenon? During 

a period of time when you were with someone very special, you 

had a favorite song you listened to a lot. Now whenever you hear 

that song, you think of that person and feel those good feelings 

again. It works just like Pavlov and salivation. Most people have 

no idea how easy it is to link experiences in that way, or how 

quickly you can make it happen if you do it systematically. 

I once saw a therapist create an agoraphobic in one session. 

This therapist was a nice, well-intentioned man who liked his 

patients. He had years of clinical training, but he had no idea 

what he was doing. His client came in with a specific phobia of 

heights. The therapist told this guy to close his eyes and think 

about heights, Urrp-the guy flushes and starts to tremble. "Now 

think of something that would reassure you." Ummn. Now think 

about heights. Urrp. "Now think about comfortably driving your 

car." Ummn. "Now think about heights." Urrp. . . . 

This guy ended up having phobic feelings about nearly every- 

thing in his life-what's often called agoraphobia. What the ther- 

apist did was brilliant, in a way. He changed his client's feelings 

12 

Using Your Brain 

by linking experiences. His choice of a feeling to generalize is 

not my idea of the best choice, however. He linked this man's 

feelings of panic to all the contexts that used to be reassuring in 

his life. You can use exactly the same process to take a good 

feeling and generalize it in the same way If that therapist had 

understood the process he was using, he could have turned it 

around. 

I've seen the same thing happen in couple therapy. The wife 

starts complaining about something the husband did, and the 

therapist says, "Look at your husband while you say that. You've 

got to have eye contact." That will connect all those bad feelings 

to the sight of her husband's face, so that every time she looks 

at him, she'll have those bad feelings. 

Virginia Satir uses the same process in family therapy, but 

she turns it around. She asks a couple about special times in their 

early courting days, and when they start glowing, then she has 

them look at each other. She might say something like, "And I 

want you to realize that this is the same person you fell so deeply 

in love with ten years ago." That connects an entirely different 

feeling-generally a much more useful one-to the spouse's face. 

One couple that came to see me had been in therapy with 

someone else for some time, but they still fought. They used to 

fight all the time at home, but when they came to me, they only 

fought in the therapist's office. The therapist probably said some- 

thing like, "Now I want you to save all your fights for our sessions 

together so I can observe how you do it." 

I wanted to find out if fighting was linked to the therapist or 

his office, so I had them experiment. I found out that if they 

went to the therapist's office when he wasn't there, they didn't 

argue, but if he held a session at their home, they did argue. So 

I just told them not to see that therapist any more. It was a 

simple solution that saved them a lot of money and trouble. 

One client of mine couldn't get angry, because he would 

immediately get extremely scared. You could say he had a phobia 

of being angry. It turned out that when he was a child, any time 

he got mad, his parents got furious and scared him into the middle 

of next week, so those two feelings got linked together. He was 

Who's Driving the Bus? 

13 

own and hadn't lived with his parents for fifteen years, but he 

still responded that way. 

I came to the world of personal change from the world of 

mathematics and information science. Computer people typically 

don't want the things in their field to have anything to do with 

people. They refer to that as "getting your hands dirty." They like 

to work with shiny computers and wear white lab jackets. But I 

found out that there is no better representation of the way in 

which my mind works-especially in terms of limitations-than a 

computer. Trying to get a computer to do something-no matter 

how simple-is much like trying to get a person to do something. 

Most of you have seen computer games. Even the simplest 

ones are quite difficult to program, because you have to use the 

very limited mechanisms the machine has for communication. 

When you instruct it to do something that it can do, your instruc- 

tion has to be precisely organized in such a way that the infor- 

mation can be processed so that the computer can perform the 

task. Brains, like computers, are not "user-friendly." They do 

exactly what they're told to do, not what you want them to do. 

Then you get mad at them because they don't do what you meant 

to tell them to do! 

One programming task is called modeling, which is what I 

do. The task of modeling is to get a computer to do something 

that a human can do. How do you get a machine to evaluate 

something, do a math problem, or turn a light on or off at the 

right time? Human beings can turn a light on and off, or do a 

math problem. Some do it well, others do it well sometimes, and 

some don't do it well at all. A modeler attempts to take the best 

representation for the way a person does a task, and make it 

available in a machine. I don't care if that representation really 

is how people do the task. Modelers don't have to have truth. 

All we have to have is something that works. We are the people 

who make cookbooks. We don't want to know why it is a chocolate 

cake, we want to know what to put in it to make it come out 

right. Knowing one recipe doesn't mean there aren't lots of other 

ways to do it. We want to know how to get from the ingredients 

to chocolate cake in a step-by-step fashion. We also want to know 

now to take chocolate cake and work backwards to the ingredients 

14 

Using Your Brain 

when someone doesn't want us to have the recipe. 

Breaking down information in this way is the task of an 

information scientist. The most interesting information that you 

can learn about is the subjectivity of another human being. If 

somebody can do something, we want to model that behavior 

and our models are of subjective experience. "What does she do 

inside her head that I can learn to do?" I can't instantly have her 

years of experience and the fine tuning which that produces, but 

I can very rapidly get some great information about the structure 

of what she does. 

When I first started modeling, it seemed logical to find out 

what psychology had already learned about how people think, 

But when I looked into psychology, I discovered that the field 

consisted primarily of a huge number of descriptions about how 

people were broken. There were a few vague descriptions of what 

it meant to be a "whole person," or "actualized," or "integrated," 

but mostly there were descriptions about the various ways in which 

people were broken. 

The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual HI used by 

psychiatrists and psychologists has over 450 pages of descriptions 

of how people can be broken, but not a single page describing 

health. Schizophrenia is a very prestigious way to be broken; 

catatonia is a very quiet way. Although hysterical paralysis was 

very popular during World War I, it's out of style now; you only 

find it occasionally in very poorly-educated immigrants who are 

out of touch with the times. You're lucky if you can find one 

now. I've only seen five in the past seven years, and two of them 

I made myself, using hypnosis. "Borderline" is a very popular 

way to be broken right now. That means you're not quite nuts, 

but not quite normal, either-as if anyone isn't! Back in the 

fifties, after The Three Faces of Eve, multiple personalities always 

had three. But since Sybil, who had seventeen personalities, we're 

seeing more multiples, and they all have more than three. 

If you think I'm being hard on psychologists, just wait. You 

see, we people in the field of computer programming are so crazy 

that we can pick on anyone. Anybody who will sit in front of a 

computer for twenty-four hours a day, trying to reduce experience 

down to zeros and ones, is so far outside the world of normal 

Who's Driving the Bus? 

15 

an experience that I can say someone is crazy and still be 

Long ago I decided that since I couldn't find anyone who 

was as crazy as I was, people must not really be broken. What 

I've noticed since then is that people work perfectly. I may not 

like what they do, or they may not like it, but they are able to 

do it again and again, systematically. It's not that they're broken; 

they're just doing something different from what we, or they, 

want to have happen. 

If you make really vivid images in your mind-especially if 

you can make them externally-you can learn how to be a civil 

engineer or a psychotic. One pays better than the other, but it's 

not as much fun. What people do has a structure, and if you can 

find out about that structure, you can figure out how to change 

it. You can also think of contexts where that structure would be 

a perfect one to have. Think of procrastination. What if you used 

that skill to put off feeling bad when someone insults you? "Oh, 

I know I ought to feel bad now, but I'll do it later." What if you 

delayed eating chocolate cake and ice cream forever-you just 

never quite got around to it. 

However, most people don't think that way. The underlying 

basis of most psychology is "What's wrong?" After a psychologist 

has a name for what's wrong, then he wants to know when you 

broke and what broke you. Then he thinks he knows why you 

broke. 

If you assume that someone is broken, then the next task is 

to figure out whether or not he can be fixed. Psychologists have 

never been very interested in how you broke, or how you continue 

to maintain the state of being broken. 

Another difficulty with most psychology is that it studies 

broken people to find out how to fix them. That's like studying 

all the cars in a junkyard to figure out how to make cars run 

better. If you study lots of schizophrenics, you may learn how to 

do schizophrenia really well, but you won't learn about the things 

they can't do. 

When I taught the staff of a mental hospital, I suggested that 

they study their schizophrenics only long enough to find out what 

they couldn'tdo. Then they should study normal people to find 

16 

Using Your Brain 

out how they do the same things, so they could teach that to the 

schizophrenics. 

For example, one woman had the following problem: If she 

made up something in her mind, a few minutes later she couldn't 

distinguish that from a memory of something that had actually 

happened. When she saw a picture in her mind, she had no way 

of telling if it was something she had actually seen, or if it was 

something she had imagined. That confused her, and scared her 

worse than any horror movie. I suggested to her that when she 

made up pictures, she put a black border around them, so that 

when she remembered them later they'd be different from the 

others. She tried it, and it worked fine-except for the pictures 

she had made before I told her to do that. However, it was a 

good start. As soon as I told her exactly what to do, she could 

do it perfectly. Yet her file was about six inches thick with twelve 

years of psychologists' analyses and descriptions of how she was 

broken. They were looking for the "deep hidden inner meaning." 

They had taken too many poetry and literature classes. Change 

is a lot easier than that, if you know what to do. 

Most psychologists think it's hard to communicate with crazy 

people. That's partly true, but it's also partly a result of what 

they do with crazy people. If someone is acting a little strange, 

he is taken off the streets, pumped full of tranquilizers and put 

in a locked barracks with thirty others. They observe him for 72 

hours and say, "Gosh, he's acting weird." The rest of us wouldn't 

act weird, I suppose. 

How many of you have read the article "Sane People in 

Insane Places"? A sociologist had some healthy, happy, graduate 

students admit themselves to mental hospitals as an experiment. 

They were all diagnosed as having severe problems. Most of them 

had a lot of trouble getting out again, because the staff thought 

their wanting to get out was a demonstration of their illness. Talk 

about a "Catch-22"! The patients recognized that these students 

weren't crazy, but the staff didn't. 

Some years ago when I was looking around at different 

change methods, most people considered psychologists and psy- 

chiatrists to be experts on personal change. I thought many of 

them were much better demonstrations of psychosis and neurosis. 

Who's Driving the Bus? 

17 

Have you ever seen an id? How about an infantile libidinal 

reaction-formation? Anybody who can talk like that has no busi- 

ness calling other people nuts. 

Many psychologists think catatonics are really tough, because 

can't get them to communicate with you. They just sit in the 

same position without even moving until someone moves them. 

It's actually very easy to get a catatonic to communicate with you. 

All you have to do is hit him on the hand with a hammer. When 

you lift the hammer to hit him again, he'll pull his hand away 

and say, "Don't do that to me!" That doesn't mean he's "cured," 

but he's now in a state where you can communicate with him. 

That's a start. 

At one time I asked local psychiatrists to send me the weird 

clients they were having difficulties with. I found out that really 

weird clients are easier to work with, in the long run. I think it's 

easier to work with a flaming schizophrenic than it is to get a 

"normal" person to stop smoking when he doesn't want to. Psy- 

chotics seem to be unpredictable, and seem to flip in and out of 

their craziness unexpectedly. However, like anything else that 

people do, psychosis has a systematic structure. Even a schizo- 

phrenic doesn't wake up one day as a manic-depressive. If you 

learn how that structure works, you can flip him in and out. If 

you learn it well enough, you can even do it yourself. If you ever 

want to get a room in a full hotel, there's no better way than by 

having a psychotic episode. But you better be able to get back 

out of the episode again, or the room you get will be padded. 

I've always thought that John Rosen's approach to psychosis 

was the most useful: enter the psychotic's reality and then spoil 

it for him. There are a lot of ways you can do this, and some of 

them aren't obvious. For instance, I had one guy who heard a 

voice coming out of electrical outlets, and the voice forced him 

to do things. I figured if I made his hallucinations real, he wouldn't 

be schizophrenic any more. So I hid a speaker in an outlet in my 

waiting room. When he came into the room, the outlet said 

"Hello.". The guy turned around and looked at it and said, "You 

don't sound the same." 

"I'm a new voice. Did you think there was only one?" 

Where did you come from?" 

18 

Using Your Brain 

"Mind your own business." 

That got him going, Since he had to obey the voice, I used 

that new voice to give him the instructions he needed to chance 

what he was doing. Most people get a handle on reality and 

respond to it. When I get a handle on reality, I twist it! I don't 

believe that people are broken. They have just learned to do 

whatever they do. A lot of what people have learned to do is 

pretty amazing, and frankly I see more of that outside of mental 

hospitals than inside. 

Most people's experience is not about reality, it's about shared 

reality. There are people who come to my door and give me 

religious comic books, and tell me the world is going to end in 

two weeks. They talk to angels, and they talk to God, but they're 

not considered crazy. But if a single person is caught talking to 

an angel, he is called crazy, taken to a mental hospital and stuffed 

full of drugs. When you make up a new reality, you'd better be 

sure that you get some friends to share it, or you may be in big 

trouble. That's one reason I teach NLP. I want to have at least a 

few others who share this reality, so the men in white coats don't 

take me away. 

Physicists also have a shared reality. Other than that, there 

really isn't a lot of difference between being a physicist and being 

a schizophrenic. Physicists also talk about things you can't see. 

How many of you have seen an atom, let alone a sub-atomic 

particle? There is a difference: physicists are usually a little more 

tentative about their hallucinations, which they call "models" or 

"theories." When one of their hallucinations is challenged by new 

data, physicists are a tiny bit more willing to give up their old 

ideas. 

Most of you learned a model of the atom that said there is 

a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, with electrons flying 

around the outside like little planets. Niels Bohr got the Nobel 

prize for that description back in the 1920's. Over a period of 

about 50 years that model was the basis for an immense number 

of discoveries and inventions, such as the plastic in those nauga- 

hyde chairs you're sitting on. 

Fairly recently, physicists decided that Bohr's description of 

the atom is wrong. I wondered if they were going to take back 

Who's Driving the Bus? 

19 

his Nobel prize, but then I found out Bohr is dead, and he already 

spent the money. The really amazing thing is that all the discov- 

eries that were made by using a "wrong" model are still here. 

The Naugahyde chairs didn't disappear when physicists changed 

their minds. Physics is usually presented as a very "objective" 

science, but I notice that physics changes and the world stays the 

same, so there must be something subjective about physics. 

Einstein was one of my childhood heroes. He reduced physics 

to what psychologists call "guided fantasy," but which Einstein 

referred to as a "thought experiment." He visualized what it would 

be like to ride on the end of a beam of light. And people say 

that he was academic and objective! One of the results of this 

particular thought experiment was his famous theory of relativity. 

NLP differs only in that we deliberately make up lies, in 

order to try to understand the subjective experience of a human 

being. When you study subjectivity, there's no use trying to be 

objective. So let's get down to some subjective experience. . . . 

II 

Running Your Own Brain 

I'd like you to try some very simple experiments, to teach 

you a little bit about how you can learn to run your own brain. 

You will need this experience to understand the rest of this book, 

so I recommend that you actually do the following brief experi- 

ments. 

Think of a past experience that was very pleasant-perhaps 

one that you haven't thought about in a long time. Pause for a 

moment to go back to that memory, and be sure that you see 

what you saw at the time that pleasant event happened. You can 

close your eyes if that makes it easier to do. . . . 

As you look at that pleasant memory, I want you to change 

the brightness of the image, and notice how your feelings change 

in response. First make it brighter and brighter. . . . Now make 

it dimmer and dimmer, until you can barely see it. . . . Now make 

it brighter again. 

How does that change the way you feel? There are always 

exceptions, but for most of you, when you make the picture 

lighter, your feelings will become stronger. Increasing brightness 

usually increases the intensity of feelings, and decreasing bright- 

ness usually decreases the intensity of feelings. 

How many of you ever thought about the possibility of in- 

tentionally varying the brightness of an internal image in order 

to feel different? Most of you just let your brain randomly show 

you any picture it wants, and you feel good or bad in response. 

21 

22 

Using Your Brain 

Now think of an unpleasant memory, something you think 

about that makes you feel bad. Now make the picture dimmer 

and dimmer. . . . If you turn the brightness down far enough it 

won't bother you any more. You can save yourself thousands of 

dollars in psychotherapy bills. 

I learned these things from people who did them already 

One woman told me that she was happy all the time; she didn't 

let things get to her. I asked her how she did it, and she said 

"Well, those unpleasant thoughts come into my mind, but I just 

turn the brightness down." 

Brightness is one of the "submodalities" of the visual modal- 

ity. Submodalities are universal elements that can be used to 

change any visual image, no matter what the content is. The 

auditory and kinesthetic modalities also have submodalities, but 

for now we'll play with the visual submodalities. 

Brightness is only one of many things you can vary. Before 

we go on to others, I want to talk about the exceptions to the 

impact brightness usually has. If you make a picture so bright 

that it washes out the details and becomes almost white, that will 

reduce, rather than increase, the intensity of your feelings. Usually 

the relationship doesn't hold at the upper extreme. For some 

people, the relationship is reversed in most contexts, so that 

increasing brightness decreases the intensity of their feelings. 

Some exceptions are related to the content. If your pleasant 

picture is candlelight, or twilight, or sunset, part of its special 

charm is due to the dimness; if you brighten the image, your 

feelings may decrease. On the other hand, if you recalled a time 

when you were afraid in the dark, the fear may be due to not 

being able to see what's there. If you brighten that image and see 

that there's nothing there, your fear will decrease, rather than 

increase. So there are always exceptions, and when you examine 

them, the exceptions make sense, too. Whatever the relationship 

is, you can use that information to change your experience. 

Now let's play with another submodality variable. Pick an- 

other pleasant memory and vary the size of the picture. First 

make it bigger and bigger, . . . and then smaller and smaller, 

noticing how your feelings change in response. . . . 

The usual relationship is that a bigger picture intensifies your 

Running Your Own Brain 

23 

response, and a smaller picture diminishes it. Again there are 

exceptions, particularly at the upper end of the scale. When a 

picture gets very large, it may suddenly seem ridiculous or unreal. 

Your response may then change in quality instead of intensity 

- from pleasure to laughter, for instance. 

If you change the size of an unpleasant picture, you will 

probably find that making it smaller also decreases your feelings. 

If making it really big makes it ridiculous and laughable, then you 

can also use that to feel better. Try it. Find out what works for 

It doesn't matter what the relationship is, as long as you find 

out how it works for your brain so that you can learn to control 

your experience. If you think about it, none of this should be at 

all surprising. People talk about a "dim future" or "bright pros- 

pects." "Everything looks black." "My mind went blank." "It's a 

small thing, but she blows it all out of proportion." When someone 

says something like that, it's not metaphorical; it's usually a literal 

and precise description of what that person is experiencing inside. 

If someone is "blowing something out of proportion," you 

can tell her to shrink that picture down. If she sees a "dim future," 

have her brighten it up. It sounds simple, . . . and it is. 

There are all these things inside your mind that you never 

thought of playing with. You don't want to go messing around 

with your head, right? Let other people do it instead. All the 

things that go on in your mind affect you, and they are all 

potentially within your control. The question is, "Who's going to 

run your brain?" 

Next I want you to go on to experiment with varying other 

visual elements, to find out how you can consciously change them 

to affect your response. I want you to have a personal experiential 

understanding of how you can control your experience. If you 

actually pause and try changing the variables on the list below, 

you will have a solid basis for understanding the rest of this book. 

If you think you don't have the time, put this book down, go to 

the back of the bus, and read some comic books or the National 

Enquirer instead. 

For those of you who really want to learn to run your own 

brain, take any experience and try changing each of the visual 

24 

Using Your Brain 

elements listed below. Do the same thing you did with brightness 

and size: try going in one direction . . . and then the other to 

find out how it changes your experience. To really find out how the 

your brain works, change only one element at a time. If you 

change two or more things at the same time, you won't know 

which one is affecting your experience, or how much. I recom- 

mend doing this with a pleasant experience. 

1) Color. Vary the intensity of color from intense bright colors 

to black and white. 

2) Distance. Change from very close to far away. 

3) Depth. Vary the picture from a flat, two-dimensional photo 

to the full depth of three dimensions. 

4) Duration. Vary from a quick, fleeting appearance to a 

persistent image that stays for some time, 

5) Clarity. Change the picture from crystal-clear clarity of 

detail to fuzzy indistinctness. 

6) Contrast. Adjust the difference between light and dark, 

from stark contrast to more continuous gradations of gray. 

7) Scope. Vary from a bounded picture within a frame to a 

panoramic picture that continues around behind your head, so 

that if you turn your head, you can see more of it. 

8) Movement, Change the picture from a still photo or slide 

to a movie. 

9) Speed. Adjust the speed of the movie from very slow to 

very fast. 

10) Hue. Change the color balance. Increase the intensity of 

reds and decrease the blues and greens, for example. 

11) Transparency. Make the image transparent, so that you 

can see what's beneath the surface. 

12) Aspect Ratio. Make a framed picture tall and narrow . . • 

and then short and wide. 

13) Orientation. Tilt the top of that picture away from you 

. . . and then toward you. 

14) Foreground/background. Vary the difference or separation 

between foreground (what interests you most) and background 

(the context that just happens to be there). . . . Then try reversing 

it, so the background becomes interesting foreground. (For more 

variables to try, see Appendix I) 

Running Your Own Brain 

25 

Now most of you should have an experience of a few of the 

many ways you can change your experience by changing submo- 

dalities. Whenever you find an element that works really well, 

take a moment to figure out where and when you'd like to use 

it. For instance, pick a scary memory-even something from a 

movie. Take that picture and make it very large very suddenly. . . . 

That one's a thrill. If you have trouble getting going in the 

morning, try that instead of coffee! 

I asked you to try these one at a time so that you could find 

out how they work. Once you know how they work, you can 

combine them to get even more intense changes. For example, 

pause and find an exquisitely pleasant sensual memory. First, make 

sure that it's a movie rather than just a still slide. Now take that 

image and pull it closer to you. As it comes closer, make it 

brighter and more colorful at the same time that you slow the 

movie to about half speed. Since you have already learned some- 

thing about how your brain works, do whatever else works best 

to intensify that experience for you. Go ahead. . . . 

Do you feel different? You can do that anytime . . . and you 

will have already paid for it. When you're just about to be really 

mean to someone you love, you could stop and do this. And with 

26 

Using Your Brain 

the look that's on your faces right now, who knows what you 

could get into . . . .all kinds of fun trouble! 

What's amazing to me is that some people do it exactly 

backwards. Think what your life would be like if you remembered 

all your good experiences as dim, distant, fuzzy, black and white 

snapshots, but recalled all your bad experiences in vividly colorful 

close, panoramic, 3-D movies. That's a great way to get depressed 

and think that life isn't worth living. All of us have good and bad 

experiences; how we recall them is often what makes the differ- 

ence. 

I watched a woman at a party once. For three hours she had 

a great time-talking, dancing, showing off. Just as she was 

getting ready to leave, someone spilled coffee all down the font 

of her dress. As she cleaned herself up, she said, "Oh, now the 

whole evening is ruined!" Think about that: one bad moment was 

enough to ruin three hours of happiness! I wanted to find out 

how she did that, so I asked her about her dancing earlier. She 

said she saw herself dancing with a coffee-stain on her dress! She 

took that coffee-stain and literally stained all her earlier memories 

with it. 

Many people do that. A man once said to me, "I thought I 

was really happy for a week. But then I looked back and thought 

about it, and realized that I wasn't really happy; it was all a 

mistake." When he looked backwards, he recoded all his experi- 

ence and believed he had a rotten week. I wondered, "If he can 

revise his history that easily, why doesn't he do it the other way? 

Why not make all the unpleasant experiences nice?" 

People often revise the past when they get divorced, or if 

they find out their spouse has had an affair. Suddenly all the good 

times they enjoyed together over the years look different. "It was 

all a sham." "I was just deluding myself." 

People who go on diets often do the same thing. "Well, I 

thought that diet was really working. I lost five pounds a week 

for three months. But then I gained a pound, so I knew it wasn't 

working." Some people have successfully lost weight many times, 

but it never dawned on them that they were succeeding. One 

little indication that they're gaining weight and they decide, "The 

whole thing was wrong." 

Running Your Own Brain 

27 

One man came to therapy because he was "afraid of marrying 

the wrong woman." He'd been with this woman and he thought 

he loved her, and really wanted to marry her, to the point where 

he'd pay to work on it in therapy. The reason he knew that he 

couldn't trust his ability to make this kind of decision is that he 

had married the "wrong woman" once before. When I heard him 

say that, I thought, "I guess when he got home from the wedding, 

he must have discovered that this was a strange woman. I guess 

he went to the wrong church or something." What on earth does 

it mean that he married the "wrong woman"? 

When I asked him what it meant, I found that he had gotten 

a divorce after five years of marriage. In his case, the first four 

and a half years were really good. But then it got bad, so the 

whole five years were a total mistake. "I wasted five years of my 

life, and I don't want to do that again. So I'm going to waste the 

next five years trying to figure out if this is the right woman or 

not." He was really concerned about that. It wasn't a joke to him. 

It was important. But it never dawned on him that the entire 

question was inappropriate. 

This man already knew that he and this woman made each 

other happy in many ways. He didn't think about asking himself 

how he was going to make sure he got even happier as he stayed 

with her, or how he was going to keep her happy. He had already 

decided that it was necessary to find out if this was the "right 

woman" or not. He never questioned his ability to make that 

decision, but he didn't trust his ability to decide whether to marry 

her or not! 

Once I asked a man how he depressed himself and he said, 

Well, like if I go out to my car and find there's a flat tire." 

"Well, that is an annoyance, but it doesn't seem like enough 

to get depressed. How do you make that really depressing?" 

"I say to myself, 'It's always like this,' and then I see a lot 

Pictures of all the other times that my car broke down." 

I know that for every time his car didn't work, there were 

probably three hundred times that it worked perfectly. But he 

doesn't think of them at that moment. If I can get him to think 

of all those other times that his car worked fine, he won't be 

depressed. 

28 

Using Your Brain 

Once a woman came to see me and told me that she was 

depressed. I asked her, "How do you know that you are de- 

pressed?" She looked at me and told me that her psychiatrist had 

told her. I said, "Well, maybe he's wrong; maybe you're not 

depressed; maybe this is happiness!" She looked back at me, 

raised one eyebrow, and said, "I don't think so." But she still 

hadn't answered my question: "How do you know that you're 

depressed?" "If you were happy, how would you know that you 

were happy?" "Have you ever been happy?" 

I've discovered that most depressed people have actually had 

as many happy experiences as most other people, it's just that 

when they look back they don't think that it was really that happy. 

Instead of having rose-colored glasses, they have gray lenses. 

There was a marvelous lady up in Vancouver who actually had a 

blue hue over experiences that were unpleasant for her, but ex- 

periences that were pleasant had a pink hue. They were well 

sorted out. If she took one memory and changed the hue, it 

changed the memory totally. I can't tell you why that works, but 

that is how she does it subjectively. 

The first time one of my clients said, "I'm depressed," I 

replied, "Hi, I'm Richard." He stopped and said, "No." 

"I'm not?" 

"Wait a minute. You're confused." 

"I'm not confused. It's all perfectly clear to me." 

"I've been depressed for sixteen years." 

"That's amazing! You haven't slept in that long?" 

The structure of what he's saying is this: "I've coded my 

experience such that I am living in the delusion that I have been 

in the same state of consciousness for sixteen years." I know he 

hasn't been depressed for sixteen years. He's got to take time out 

for lunch, and getting annoyed, and a few other things. Try to 

stay in the same state of consciousness for twenty minutes. People 

spend a lot of money and time learning to meditate in order to 

stay in the same state for an hour or two. If he were depressed 

for an hour straight, he wouldn't even be able to notice it, because 

the feeling would habituate and thereby become imperceptible. If 

you do anything long enough, you won't even be able to detect 

it. That's what habituation does, even with physical sensation. So 

Running Your Own Brain 

29 

I always ask myself, "How is it possible for this guy to believe 

that he's been depressed all that time?" You can cure people of 

what they've got, and discover that they never had it, "Sixteen 

years of depression" could be only 25 hours of actually being 

depressed. 

But if you take this man's statement, "I've been depressed 

for sixteen years," at face value, you're accepting the presuppo- 

sition that he's been in one state of consciousness for that long. 

And if you accept the goal that you're going to go after making 

him happy, you'll be attempting to permanantly put him in another 

state of consciousness. You may in fact be able to get him to 

believe that he's happy all the time. You can teach him to recode 

everything in the past as happiness. No matter how miserable he 

is at the moment, he'll always appreciate that he's happy all the 

time. He'll be no better off, moment to moment-only when he 

looks into the past. You've just given him a new delusion to 

replace the one he walked in with. 

A lot of people are depressed because they have good reason 

to be. A lot of people have dull, meaningless lives, and they're 

unhappy. Talking to a therapist won't change that, unless it results 

in the person living differently. If someone will spend $75 to see 

a psychiatrist, instead of spending it on a party, that's not mental 

illness, that's stupidity! If you don't do anything, then of course 

you're going to be bored and depressed. Catatonia is an extreme 

case of that. 

When someone tells me she's depressed, I do the same thing 

I always do: I want to find out how to do it. I figure if I can go 

through it methodically step by step, and find out how she does 

it well enough that I can do it, then I can usually tell her something 

about how to do it differently, or else find somebody else who is 

not depressed and find out now that person does that. 

Some people have an internal voice that sounds slow and 

depressed and makes long lists of their failures. You can talk 

yourself into very depressed states that way. It would be like 

having some of my college professors inside your head. No wonder 

those people are depressed. Sometimes the internal voice is so 

low that the person isn't consciously aware of it until you ask her. 

Because the voice is unconscious, she'll respond to it even more 

30 

Using Your Brain 

powerfully than if it were conscious-it will have a stronger hyp- 

notic impact. 

Any of you who have done therapy for a long time during a 

day may have noticed that there are times when you mentally 

drift away while you are seeing clients. Those are called trance 

states. If your client is talking about bad feelings and being 

depressed, you'll begin to respond to those suggestions, like any- 

body does in a trance. If you have "up" and cheerful clients, that 

can work for you. But if you have clients who are depressed, you 

can go home at the end of the day feeling terrible. 

If you have a client who depresses herself with one of these 

voices, try increasing the volume of that voice until she can hear 

it clearly, so it won't have the hypnotic impact. Then change the 

tonality until it's a very cheerful voice. She'll feel a lot better, 

even if that cheerful voice is still reciting a list of failures. 

Many people depress themselves with pictures, and there are 

a lot of variations. You can make collages of all the times things 

went wrong in the past, or you can make up thousands of pictures 

of how things could go wrong in the future. You can look at 

everything in the real world and superimpose an image of what 

it will look like in a hundred years. Have you heard the saying, 

"You begin dying the moment you're born." That's a great one. 

Every time something nice happens, you can say to yourself, 

"This won't last," or "It's not real," or "He doesn't really mean 

it." There are many ways to do it. The question is always, "How 

does this person do it?" A detailed answer to that question will 

tell you everything you need to know in order to teach him how 

to do something else instead. The only reason that he doesn't do 

something more sensible is that it's all he knows how to do. Since 

he's done it for years, it's "normal"-unquestioned and unnoticed. 

One of the wildest propensities in our culture is to act as if 

things are normal under any circumstances. The most elegant 

demonstration of that is New York City, as far as I'm concerned. 

If you walk down Broadway, no one's looking around and mut- 

tering "Good Lord!" 

The next best demonstration is downtown Santa Cruz. People 

are doing things, right out on the street, that would put any 

mental hospital to shame. Yet there are men in business suits 

Running Your Own Brain31 

walking down the street talking to each other as if everything is 

completely normal. 

I came from a "normal" environment, too. In my neighbor- 

hood, when I was nine years old and had nothing to do, I'd hang 

around with the guys. Somebody would say, "Hey, why don't we 

go out and steal a car?" "Let's go down and rob a liquor store, 

and murder someone." 

I thought the way to succeed in life was to go live with the 

rich people. I thought if I hung around them, it would rub off. 

So I went to a place called Los Altos, where people have money. 

Los Altos Junior College at that time had sterling silver in the 

cafeteria, and real leather chairs in the student center. The parking 

lot looked like Detroit's current year showroom. Of course when 

I went there, I had to act like all that was normal, too. "Ho hum, 

everything's cool." 

I got a job working with a machine that you communicate 

with, called a computer, and started as an information science 

student. They didn't have the department yet, because someone 

had stalled the funding for a couple of years. Since I was in school 

and there was no major there for me, I was lost in an existential 

crisis. "What will I do? I'll study psychology." About that time I 

got involved in editing a book about Gestalt Therapy, so I was 

sent to a Gestalt Therapy group to see what it was all about. This 

was my first experience of group psychotherapy. Everybody was 

crazy where I grew up, and everybody was crazy where I worked, 

but I expected people who went to therapists to be really crazy. 

The first thing I saw there was somebody sitting and talking 

to an empty chair. I thought, "Oohhh! I was right. They are 

crazy." And then there was this other nut telling him what to say 

to the empty chair! Then I got worried, because everybody else 

in the room was looking at the empty chair, too, as if it were 

answering! The therapist asked, "And what does he say?" So I 

looked at the chair, too. Later I was told that it was a room full 

of psychotherapists, so it was OK. 

Then the therapist said, "Are you aware of what your hand 

is doing?" When the guy said "No," I cracked up. "Are you aware 

of it now?" "Yes." "What is it doing? Exaggerate that movement." 

Strange, right? Then the therapist says "Put words to it." "I want 

32Using Your Brain 

to kill, kill." This guy turned out to be a neurosurgeon! The 

therapist said "Now, look at that chair, and tell me who you see." 

I looked, and there was still nobody there! But the guy looked 

over there and snarled, "My brother!" 

"Tell him you're angry." 

"I'm angry!" 

"Say it louder." 

"I'm angry]" 

"About what?" 

And then he starts telling this empty chair all these things 

that he's angry about, and then he attacks it. He smashes the 

chair to bits, and then apologizes, and works it out with the chair, 

and then he feels better. Then everyone in the group says nice 

things to him and hugs him. 

Since I had been around scientists and murderers, I could act 

like everything was normal almost anywhere, but I was having 

trouble. Afterwards I asked the other people, "Was his brother 

really there?" 

"Some of them said, "Of course he was." 

"Where did you see him?' 

"In my mind's eye." 

You can do just about anything. If you act as if it's normal, 

other people will too. Think about it. You can say "This is group 

psychotherapy," put chairs around in a circle, and say "This chair 

is the 'hot seat.' " Then if you say "Who wants to work?" every- 

body will start to get nervous while they wait. Finally someone 

who gets motivated when stress builds up to a certain point can't 

take it anymore: "I want to work!" So you say, "That chair's not 

a good enough place to do it. You come and sit in this special 

chair." Then you put an empty chair across from him. Often you'd 

start in the following way: 

"Now, tell me what you're aware of." 

"My heart is pounding." 

"Close your eyes, and tell me what you're aware of." 

"People are watching me." 

Think about that for a minute. When his eyes are open, he 

knows what's going on inside; when his eyes are shut, he knows 

Running Your Own Brain 

33 

what's going on outside! For those of you who aren't familiar with 

Gestalt Therapy, this is a very common phenomenon. 

There is a time and a place where people believed that talking 

to an empty chair was meaningful, and in fact it was. It can 

accomplish certain useful things. It was also very dangerous in 

ways they didn't understand, and many people still don't. People 

learn repeated sequences of behavior, and not necessarily the 

content. The sequence you learn in Gestalt Therapy is the follow- 

ing: When you feel sad or frustrated, you hallucinate old friends 

and relatives, become angry and violent, and then you feel better 

and other people are nice to you. 

Take that sequence and translate it into the real world without 

the content. What does the person learn? When he's not feeling 

good, hallucinate, get angry and violent, and then feel good about 

it. How's that for a model for human relationships? Is that how 

you want to relate to your wife and children? But why take it out 

on a loved one? When you're furious, just go out and find a 

stranger. Walk up to him, hallucinate a dead relative, beat the 

snot out of him, and feel better. Some people actually do that, 

even without the benefit of Gestalt Therapy, but we don't usually 

think of that pattern of behavior as a cure. When people go 

through therapy, or any other repeated experience, they learn 

whatever's done really quickly, and they learn the pattern and 

sequence of what's done more that the content. Since most ther- 

apists focus on content, they usually won't even notice the se- 

quence they're teaching. 

Some people will look you straight in the eye and tell you 

the reason they are the way they are is because of something that 

happened long ago in their childhood. If that's true, they are 

really stuck, because of course then nothing can be done about 

it; you can't go have your childhood again. 

However, the same people believe that you can pretend you 

are having your childhood again, and that you can go back and 

change it. The fact that you don't like what happened means that 

the event is "unfinished," so you can go back and "finish" it in a 

way that you like better. That's a great reframe, and it's a very 

useful one. 

34 

Using Your Brain 

I think everything is unfinished in this sense: you can only 

maintain any memory, belief, understanding, or other mental 

process from one day to the next if you continue to do it. There- 

fore, it's still going on. If you have some understanding of the 

processes that continue to maintain it, you can change it whenever 

you don't like it. 

It's actually quite easy to modify past experiences. The next 

thing I'd like to teach you is what I call "briefest therapy." One 

nice thing about it is that it's also secret therapy, so you can all 

try it now. 

Think of an unpleasant embarrassment or disappointment, 

and take a good look at that movie to see if it still makes you 

feel bad now. If it doesn't, pick another one. . . . 

Next, start that movie again, and as soon as it begins, put 

some nice loud circus music behind it. Listen to the circus music 

right through to the end of the movie. . . . 

Now watch that original movie again. . . . Does that make 

you feel better? For most of you it will change a tragedy into a 

comedy, and lighten your feelings about it. If you have a memory 

that makes you annoyed and angry, put circus music with it. If 

you run it by with circus music, the next time it comes back it 

will automatically have the circus music with it, and it won't feel 

the same. For a few of you, circus music may be an inappropriate 

choice for that particular memory. If you didn't notice any change, 

or if your feelings changed in an unsatisfactory way, see if you 

can think of some other music or sounds that you think might 

impact that memory, and then try playing that music with your 

memory. You could try a thousand soap-opera violins, or opera 

music, the 1812 Overture, "Hernando's Hideaway," or whatever, 

and find out what happens. If you start experimenting, you can 

find lots of ways to change your experience. 

Pick another bad memory. Run the movie however you usu- 

ally do, to find out if it bothers you now- . . . 

Now run that same memory backwards, from the end back 

to the beginning, just as if you were rewinding the film, and do 

it very quickly, in a few seconds. . . . 

Now run the movie forward again. . . . 

Running Your Own Brain35 

Do you feel the same about that memory after running it 

backwards? Definitely not. It's a little like saying a sentence 

backwards; the meaning changes. Try that on all your bad mem- 

ories, and you'll save another thousand dollars worth of therapy. 

Believe me, when this stuff gets known, we're going to put tra- 

ditional therapists out of business. They'll be out there with the 

people selling magic spells and powdered bat wings. 

III 

Points of View 

People often say "You're not looking at it from my point of 

view," and sometimes they're literally correct. I'd like you to think 

of some argument you had with someone in which you were 

certain you were right. First just run a movie of that event the 

way you remember it. . . . 

Now I want you to run a movie of exactly the same event, 

but from the point of view of looking over that other person's 

shoulder, so that you can see yourself as that argument takes 

place. Go through the same movie from beginning to end, watch- 

ing from this viewpoint. . . . 

Did that make any difference? It may not change much for 

some of you, especially if you already do it naturally. But for 

some of you it can make a huge difference. Are you still sure 

you were right? 

Man; As soon as I saw my face and heard my tone of voice, 

I thought, "Who'd pay any attention to what that turkey is saying!" 

Woman: When I was on the receiving end of what I'd said, 

I noticed a lot of flaws in my arguments. I noticed when I was 

just running on adrenalin and wasn't making any sense at all. I'm 

going to go back and apologize to that person. 

Man: I really heard the other person for the first time, and 

what she said actually made sense. 

Man: As I listened to myself I kept thinking, "Can't you say 

it some other way, so that you can get your point across?" 

37 

38 

Using Your Brain 

How many of you are as certain about being right as you 

were before trying this different point of view? . . . About three 

out of 60. So much for your chances of being right when you're 

certain you are-about 5%. 

People have been talking about "points of view" for centuries. 

However, they've always thought of it as being metaphorical, 

rather than literal. They didn't know how to give someone specific 

instructions to change his point of view. What you just did is only 

one possibility out of thousands. You can literally view something 

from any point in space. You can view that same argument from 

the side as a neutral observer, so that you can see yourself and 

that other person equally well. You can view it from somewhere 

on the ceiling to get "above it all," or from a point on the floor 

for a "worm's eye" view. You can even take the point of view of 

a very small child, or of a very old person. That's getting a little 

more metaphorical, and less specific, but if it changes your ex- 

perience in a useful way, you can't argue with it. 

When something bad happens, some people say, "Well, in a 

hundred years, who'll know the difference?" For some of you, 

hearing this doesn't have an impact. You may just think, "He 

doesn't understand." But when some people say it or hear it, it 

actually changes their experience and helps them cope with prob- 

lems. So of course I asked some of them what they did inside 

their minds as they said that sentence. One guy looked down at 

the solar system from a point out in space, watching the planets 

spin around in their orbits. From that point of view, he could 

barely see himself and his problems as a tiny speck on the surface 

of the earth. Other people's pictures are often somewhat different, 

but they are similar in that they see their problems as a very 

small part of the picture, and at a great distance, and time is 

speeded up-a hundred years compressed into a brief movie. 

All around the world people are doing these great things 

inside their brains, and they really work. Not only that; they're 

even announcing what they're doing. If you take the time to ask 

them a few questions, you can discover all sorts of things you can 

do with your brain. 

There is another fascinating phrase that has always stuck in 

my mind. When you're going through something unpleasant, peo- 

Points of View 

39 

pie will often say, "Later, when you look back at this, you'll be 

able to laugh." There must be something that you do in your 

head in the meantime that makes an unpleasant experience funny 

later. How many people in here have something you can look 

back on and laugh at? . . . And do you all have a memory that 

you can't laugh at yet? . . . I want you to compare those two 

memories to find out how they're different. Do you see yourself 

in one, and not in the other? Is one a slide and one a movie? Is 

there a difference in color, size, brightness, or location? Find out 

what's different, and then try changing that unpleasant picture to 

make it like the one that you can already laugh at. If the one 

that you can laugh at is far away, make the other one far away 

too. If you see yourself in the one you laugh at, see yourself in 

the experience that is still unpleasant. My philosophy is: Why wait 

to feel better? Why not "look back and laugh" while you're going 

through it in the first place? If you go through something un- 

pleasant, you would think that once is more than enough. But oh 

no, your brain doesn't think that. It says "Oh, you fouled up. I'll 

torture you for three or four years. Then maybe I'll let you laugh." 

Man: I see myself in the memory I can laugh about; I'm an 

observer. But I feel stuck in the memory I still feel bad about, 

just like it's happening again. 

That's a common response. Is that true for many of the rest 

of you? Being able to observe yourself gives you a chance to "re- 

view" an event "from a different perspective" and see it in a new 

way, as if it's happening to someone else. The best kind of humor 

involves looking at yourself in a new way. The only thing that 

prevents you from doing that with an event right away is not 

realizing that you can do it. When you get good at it, you can 

even do it while the event is actually happening. 

Woman: What I do is different, but it works really well. I 

focus in like a microscope until all I can see is a small part of 

the event magnified, filling the whole screen. In this case all I 

could see was these enormous lips pulsating and jiggling and 

flopping as he talked. It was so grotesque I cracked up. 

That's certainly a different point of view. And it's also some- 

thing that you could easily try out when that bad experience is 

actually happening the first time. 

40 

Using Your Brain 

Woman: I've done that, I'll be all stuck in some horrible 

situation and then I'll focus in on something and then laugh at 

how weird it is. 

Now I want you all to think of two memories from your past: 

one pleasant and one unpleasant. Take a moment or two to 

re-experience those two memories in whatever way you naturally 

do. . . . 

Next, I want you to notice whether you were associated or 

dissociated in each of those memories. 

Associated means going back and reliving the experience, 

seeing it from your own eyes. You see exactly what you saw when 

you were actually there. You may see your hands in front of you, 

but you can't see your face unless you're looking in a mirror. 

Dissociated means looking at the memory image from any 

point of view other than from your own eyes. You might see it 

as if you were looking down from an airplane, or you might see 

it as if you were someone else watching a movie of yourself in 

that situation, etc. 

Now go back to each of those two memories, in turn, and 

find out whether you are associated or dissociated in each 

one. . . . 

Whichever way you recalled those two memories naturally, I 

want you to go back and try experiencing them the other way, in 

order to discover how this changes your experience. If you were 

associated in a memory, step back out of your body and see that 

event dissociated. If you were dissociated, step into the picture 

or pull it around you until you are associated. Notice how this 

change in visual perspective changes your feeling experience of 

those memories. . . . 

Does that make a difference? You bet it does. Is there anyone 

here who didn't notice a difference? 

Man: I don't notice much difference. 

OK. Try the following. Feel yourself sitting on a park bench 

at a carnival and see yourself in the front seat of a roller coaster. 

See your hair blowing in the wind as the roller coaster starts 

down that first big slope. . . . 

Now compare that with what you would experience if you 

were actually sitting in the front seat, holding onto the front of 

Points of View41 

the roller coaster, high in the air, actually looking down that 

slope. . . . 

Are those two different? Check your pulse if you don't get 

more of a zing out of being in the roller coaster looking down 

the tracks. It's cheaper than coffee, too, for becoming alert. 

Woman: In one of my memories it seems like I'm both in it 

and out of it. 

OK, There are two possibilities. One is that you are switching 

back and forth quickly. If that's the case, just notice how it's 

different as you switch. You might have to slow down the switch- 

ing a little in order to do that well. 

The other possibility is that you were dissociated in the 

original experience. For instance, being self-critical usually pre- 

supposes a point of view other than your own. It's as if you're 

outside of yourself, observing and being critical of yourself. If 

that's the case, when you recall the experience and "see what you 

saw at the time" you'll also be dissociated. Does either of those 

descriptions fit your experience? 

Woman: They both do. At the time I was self-critical, and I 

think I was flipping back and forth between observing myself and 

feeling criticized. 

There is even a third possibility, but it's pretty rare. Some 

people create a dissociated picture of themselves while they are 

associated in the original experience. One guy had a full-length 

mirror that he carried around with him all the time. So if he 

walked into a room, he could simultaneously see himself walking 

into the room in his mirror. Another guy had a little TV. monitor 

he'd put on a shelf or a wall nearby, so he could always see how 

he looked to other people. 

When you recall a memory associated, you re-experience the 

original feeling response that you had at the time. When you 

recall a memory dissociated, you can see yourself having those 

original feelings in the picture, but without feeling them in your 

body. 

You may, however, have a new feeling about the event as 

You watch yourself in it. This is what happens when Virginia Satir 

asks a question like, "How do you feel about feeling angry?" Try 

it. Recall a time when you were angry, and then ask that question, 

42Using Your Brain 

"How do I feel about feeling angry?" In order to answer that 

question you have to pop out of the picture, and have a new 

feeling about the event as an observer rather than as a participant. 

It's a very effective way to change your response. 

The ideal situation is to recall all your pleasant memories 

associated, so that you can easily enjoy all the positive feelings 

that go with them. When you are dissociated from your unpleasant 

memories, you still have all the visual information about what 

you may need to avoid or deal with in the future, but without 

the unpleasant feeling response. Why feel bad again? Wasn't it 

enough to feel bad once? 

Many people do the reverse: they associate with, and im- 

mediately feel, all the unpleasantness that ever occurred to them, 

but their pleasant experiences are only dim, distant, dissociated 

images. And of course there are two other possibilities. Some 

people tend to always dissociate. These are the scientist/engineer 

types who are often described as "objective," "detached," or "dis- 

tant." You can teach them how to associate when they want to, 

and regain some feeling connection with their experience. You 

can probably think of some times when this would be a real 

advantage for them. Making love is one of the things that's a lot 

more enjoyable if you're in your body feeling all those sensations, 

rather than watching yourself from the outside. 

Others tend to always associate: they immediately have all 

the feelings of past experiences, good or bad. These are the people 

who are often described as "theatrical," "responsive," or "impul- 

sive." Many of the problems they have can be cured by teaching 

them to dissociate at appropriate times. Dissociation can be used 

for pain control, for example. If you watch yourself have pain, 

you're not in your body to feel it. 

You can do yourself a real favor by taking a little time to 

run through several of your unpleasant memories dissociated. Find 

out how far away you need to move the pictures so that you can 

still see them clearly enough to learn from them, while you watch 

comfortably. Then run through a series of pleasant experiences, 

taking time to associate with each one, and fully enjoy them. 

What you are teaching your brain to do is to associate with pleasant 

memories, and dissociate from unpleasant ones. Pretty soon your 

Points of View 

43 

brain will get the idea, and do the same thing automatically with 

all your other memories. 

Teaching someone how, and when, to associate or dissociate 

is one of the most profound and pervasive ways to change the 

quality of a person's experience, and the behavior that results 

from it. Dissociation is particularly useful for intensely unpleasant 

memories. 

Does anybody in here have a phobia? I love phobias, but 

they're so easy to fix that we're running out of them. Look at 

that. The only people in here with phobias have phobias of raising 

their hands in an audience. 

Joan: I have one. 

Do you have a real, flaming phobia? 

Joan: Well it's pretty bad. (She starts breathing rapidly and 

shaking.) 

I can see that. 

Joan: Do you want to know what it's about? 

No, I don't. I'm a mathematician. I work purely with process. 

I can't know your inside experience anyway, so why talk about 

it? You don't have to talk about your inside experience to change 

it. In fact, if you talk about it, your therapist may end up being 

a professional companion. You know what you're phobic of. Is it 

something you see, or hear, or feel? 

Joan: It's something I see. 

OK. I'm going to ask you to do a few things that you can 

do in your mind really quickly, so that your phobia won't bother 

you at all, ever again. I'll give you the directions one part at a 

time, and then you go inside and do it. Nod when you're done. 

First I want you to imagine that you're sitting in the middle 

of a movie theater, and up on the screen you can see a black- 

and-white snapshot in which you see yourself in a situation just 

before you had the phobic response. . . . 

Then I want you to float out of your body up to the projection 

booth of the theater, where you can watch yourself watching 

yourself. From that position you'll be able to see yourself sitting 

In the middle of the theater, and also see yourself in the still 

Picture up on the screen. . . . 

44 

Using Your Brain 

Now I want you to turn that snapshot up on the screen into 

a black-and-white movie, and watch it from the beginning to just 

beyond the end of that unpleasant experience. When you get to 

the end I want you to stop it as a slide, and then jump inside the 

picture and run the movie backwards. AH the people will walk 

backwards and everything else will happen in reverse, just like 

rewinding a movie, except you will be inside the movie. Run it 

backwards in color and take only about one or two seconds to do 

it. . . . 

Now think about what it is you were phobic of. See what 

you would see if you were actually there. . . . 

Joan: It doesn't bother me now, . . . but I'm afraid it may 

not work the next time I'm really there. 

Can you find a real one around here so you could test it? 

Joan: Yes, it's of elevators. 

Great. Let's take a quick break. Go try it, and report back 

after the break. Those of you who are skeptical, go along and 

watch her, and ask her questions, if you want. . . . (For infor- 

mation about videotapes of the phobia cure, see Appendixes II, 

III, and IV.) 

Points of View 

45 

OK. How was it, Joan? 

Joan: It's fine. You know, I'd never really seen the inside of 

an elevator before. This morning I couldn't even step into it, 

because I was too terrified, but just now I rode up and down 

several times. 

That's a typical report. I almost got nervous one time, though. 

I was teaching in the Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, which has a 70- 

story outdoor elevator. So I just had to find an elevator phobic. 

I cured this lady and sent her out of the seminar to test it. After 

about a half an hour I started thinking, "Oh oh, maybe she got 

up there and can't get down." When she came rolling in about 

fifteen minutes later, I asked her where she'd been. "Oh I was 

just riding up and down. It was really fun." 

Once an accountant came to me with a phobia of public 

speaking that he'd been trying to get rid of for sixteen years. One 

of the first things he told me was that he had a total investment 

of over $70,000 in trying to cure his phobia. I asked him how he 

knew this, and he pulled out his therapy briefcase with all the 

cancelled checks in it. I said, "What about your time?" His eyes 

widened and he said, "I didn't figure that in!" He got paid about 

the same rate as a psychiatrist, so he had actually invested about 

$140,000 trying to change something that took me ten minutes to 

change. 

If you can be terrified of an elevator, and then learn to 

respond differently, it seems like you should be able to change 

any pattern of behavior, because terror's a pretty strong behavior. 

Fear is an interesting thing. People move away from it. If you tell 

someone to look at something she's terrified of, she can't look at 

it. However, if you tell her to see herself looking at it, she's still 

looking at it, but for some reason she can do it that way. It's the 

same as the difference between sitting in the front seat of a roller 

coaster and sitting on a bench seeing yourself in a roller coaster. 

That is enough for people to be able to change their responses. 

You can use the same procedure with victims of rape, child abuse, 

and war experiences: "post-traumatic stress syndrome." 

Years ago it took me an hour to work with a phobia. Then 

when we learned more about how a phobia works, we announced 

the ten-minute phobia cure. Now I've got it down to a few 

46Using Your Brain 

minutes. Most people have a hard time believing that we can cure 

a phobia that fast. That's really funny, because I can't do it slowly. 

I can cure a phobia in two minutes, but I can't do it in a month, 

because the brain doesn't work that way. The brain learns by 

having patterns go by rapidly. Imagine if I gave you one frame 

of a movie every day for five years. Would you get the plot? Of 

course not. You only get the meaning of the movie if all those 

pictures go by really fast. Trying to change slowly is like having 

a conversation one word a day. 

Man: How about practice, then? When you create a change 

once, like with Joan, does she have to practice? 

No. She's already changed, and she won't have to practice, 

or think about it consciously. If change work is hard, or takes 

much practice, then you're going about it in the wrong way, and 

you need to change what you're doing. When you find a path 

without resistance, you're combining resources, and doing it once 

is plenty. When Joan went into the elevator during the break, she 

didn't have to try not to be terrified. She was already changed, 

and that new response will last as well as the original terror. 

One of the nice things about someone with a phobia is that 

she's already proved that she's a rapid learner. Phobics are people 

who can learn something utterly ridiculous very quickly. Most 

people tend to look at a phobia as a problem, rather than as an 

achievement. They never stop to think, "If she can learn to do 

that, then she should be able to learn to do anything." 

It always amazed me that someone could learn to be terrified 

so consistently and dependably. Years ago I thought, "That's the 

kind of change I want to be able to make," That led me to 

wonder, "How could I give someone a phobia?" I figured that if 

I couldn't give someone a phobia, I couldn't be really methodical 

about taking it away. 

If you accept the idea that phobias can only be bad, that 

possibility would never occur to you. You can make pleasant 

responses just as strong and dependable as phobias. There are 

things that people see and light up with happiness every single 

time-newborns, or very small children will do it for nearly every 

one. If you don't believe it, I have a challenge for you: find the 

toughest, meanest-looking dude you can find, put a small baby 

Points of View 

47 

in his arms and have him walk around inside a supermarket. You 

follow a couple of steps behind and watch how people respond. 

I want to warn you about something, however: the phobia 

cure takes away feelings, and it will work for pleasant memories, 

too. If you use the same procedure on all your loving memories 

of being with someone, you can make that person into just as 

neutral an experience as an elevator! Couples often do this nat- 

urally when they get divorced. You can look at that person you 

once loved passionately, and have no feelings about her whatso- 

ever. When you recall all the nice things that happened, you'll be 

watching yourself have fun, but all your nice feelings will be gone. 

If you do this when you're still married, you're really in trouble. 

It's one thing to review all the experiences you have had with 

someone-pleasant and unpleasant-and decide that you want to 

end the relationship and move on. But if you dissociate from all 

the good times you had with that person, you'll be throwing away 

a very nourishing set of experiences. Even if you can't stand to 

be with her now, because you've changed or she's changed, you 

may as well enjoy your pleasant memories. 

Some people go on to dissociate from all the pleasant expe- 

riences they're having now, "so they won't be hurt again later." 

If you do that, you won't be able to enjoy your own life even 

when it's nice. It will always be like watching someone else having 

fun, but you never get to play. If you do that with all your 

experiences, you'll become an existentialist-the ultimate totally 

un-involved observer. 

Some people see a technique work and decide to try it with 

everything. Just because a hammer works for nails doesn't mean 

everything needs to be pounded. The phobia procedure is effective 

in neutralizing strong feeling responses-positive or negative-so 

be careful what you use it for. 

Do you want to know a good way to fall in love? Just 

associate with all your pleasant experiences with someone, and 

dissociate from all the unpleasant ones. It works really well. If 

you don't think about the unpleasant experiences at all, you can 

even use this method to fall in love with someone who does lots 

of things you don't like. The usual method is to fall in love this 

way and then get married. Once you're married, you can turn 

48 

Using Your Brain 

this process around so that you associate with the unpleasant 

experiences and dissociate from the pleasant ones. Now you re- 

spond only to the unpleasant things, and you wonder why "they've 

changed!" They didn't change, your thinking did. 

Woman: Are there any other ways to do phobias? I'm scared 

silly of dogs. 

There are always other ways to do things; it's a matter of 

"Do we know about them yet?" "Are they as dependable?" "How 

long do they take?" "What else will they affect?" and so on. 

Try this: go back and recall a memory of something exquis- 

itely pleasurable, exciting, and humorous from your past, and see 

what you saw at the time that it occurred. Can you find a memory 

like that? . . . (She starts to smile.) That's good. Turn the bright- 

ness up a little bit, . . . (She smiles more.) That's fine. Now keep 

that picture and have a dog come right through the middle of 

that picture and then become a part of that picture. As it does 

that, I want you to make the picture a little bit brighter. . . . 

Now imagine being in the same room with a dog, to see if 

you're still phobic. . . . 

Woman: I feel fine when I think of it now. 

That procedure is a variation of another method I'll teach 

you later. It's not quite as dependable as dissociation for very 

strong phobias, but it will usually work. I've done a lot of phobias, 

so I'm bored with them, and I usually just do the fastest and most 

dependable thing I know. Now that you know it, you can do it, 

too. But if you really want to understand how brains work, the 

next time you have a phobic client, take a little longer. Ask a lot 

of questions to find out how this particular phobia works. For 

instance, sometimes a phobic person will make the picture of the 

dog, or whatever it is, very large, or bright, or colorful, or run a 

movie very slowly, or over and over again. Then you can try 

changing different things to find out how you can change this 

particular person's experience. When you get tired of that, you 

can always pull the quick cure out of your hip pocket and get rid 

of her in five minutes. If you do that kind of experimenting, 

you'll start learning how to generate NLP, and you won't have to 

pay to come to seminars any more. 

IV 

Going Wrong 

I once asked a friend, "What is the biggest failure in your 

life?" He said, "In a couple of weeks I'm going to do this thing 

and it's not going to work out." You know what? He was right! 

It was the biggest failure of his life-not because it didn't work 

out, but because he took the time to feel bad about it ahead of 

time. Many people use their imagination only to discover all the 

things that would make them feel bad, so they can feel bad about 

it now. Why wait?"} 

Why wait until your husband goes out and has an affair? 

Imagine it now; see him out there having fun with someone else. 

Feel as if you're there watching it all. You can make yourself 

hideously jealous, just like that. How many of you have done 

that? 

Then if you're still feeling terrible when he comes home, you 

can yell and scream at him and drive him away, so that it will 

actually happen. Clients have come in and told me that they did 

this. I listen to them and I ask, "Why don't you make good 

pictures?" "What do you mean?" "Change that picture until you 

can see yourself there with him instead of that other woman. 

Then step into the picture and enjoy all those good feelings. Then 

when he gets home, make him want to do it with you." Do you 

like that better? 

People often talk about having "good" and "bad" memories; 

but that's just a statement about whether they liked them or not. 

57 

52 

Using Your Brain 

Most people want to have only pleasant memories, and think 

they'd be much happier if all their bad memories went away. But 

imagine what your life would be like if you never had any bad 

experiences! What if you grew up and everything was wonderful 

all the time? You'd grow up to be a wimp, totally unable to cope; 

there are quite a few examples in this country. 

Once I had a 24-year-old client who had been on valium 

since he was twelve. The only time he left his house was to go 

to the dentist, the doctor, or the psychiatrist. He'd been through 

five psychiatrists, but as far as I could tell, the major thing that 

was wrong with him was that he hadn't left his house in twelve 

years. Now his mother and father thought he should be out on 

his own. His father owned a big construction company, and com- 

plained to me, "That boy, it's time he got out on his own." I 

thought, "You turkey, you're twelve years too late. What are you 

going to do, give him your company so he can support you?" 

That company would have a life expectancy of about two days, 

Since this kid had lived twelve years of his life on valium, 

he hadn't had many experiences-until they sent him to me! I 

made him go all kinds of places and do lots of weird things 

-either that or I'd beat the stuffing out of him. When he hesitated 

the first time and said he couldn't do something, I hit him really 

hard; that was the beginning of having experience. It was just an 

expedient way; I wouldn't recommend that you do this with most 

people. But there are times when a good rap on the side of the 

head constitutes the beginning of building a motivation strategy. 

Some of you may remember how that works from your younger 

years. I just put him in a lot of situations where he had to learn 

to cope with difficulties, and deal with other human beings. That 

gave him an experiential basis for living in the real world without 

the cushion of home, drugs, and a psychiatrist. The experiences 

I provided were a little more useful and relevant than talking to 

his psychiatrist about his childhood. 

People say, "I can't do something" without realizing what 

those words mean. "Can't" in English is "can not" joined together. 

When somebody says, "I can't do it," he's saying he "can"-is 

able to-"not do it," which is always true. If you stop and pay 

Going 

Wrong 53 

attention, and listen to words, you begin to hear things that tell 

you what you can do. 

I once worked with somebody who wanted to open a shyness 

and flirtation clinic. She brought me a bunch of people who were 

shy. I always thought shy people were shy because they thought 

about unpleasant things that would happen-like rejection, or 

being laughed at. I started asking these people my usual questions, 

"How do you know when to be shy? You're not shy all the time." 

Like all the things people do, shyness requires some process. It's 

no easy task. One man said, "I know it's time to be shy when I 

know that I'm going to meet somebody." "Well, what makes you 

shy?" "I don't think they'll like me." That statement is very 

different from "I think they won't like me." He literally said "I 

don't"-I do engage in the activity of not-"think they'll like me." 

He thinks anything else but that the person will like him. There 

were some people in the next room, so I said to him, "I want 

you to think that they'll like you." "OK." "Are you shy about 

meeting them?" "No." That seems a little too easy, but basically, 

what works always turns out to be easy. 

Unfortunately in psychotherapy there isn't much incentive to 

find out what works quickly and easily. In most businesses, people 

get paid by succeeding at something. But in psychotherapy you 

get paid by the hour, whether anything is accomplished or not. If 

a therapist is incompetent, he gets paid more than someone who 

can achieve change quickly. Many therapists even have a rule 

against being effective. They think that influencing anyone directly 

is manipulative, and that manipulation is bad. It's as if they said, 

"You're paying me to influence you. But I'm not going to do it 

because it's not the right thing to do," When I saw clients, I 

always charged by the change, rather than by the hour; I only got 

paid when I got results. That seemed like more of a challenge. 

The reasons that therapists use to justify their failures are 

really outrageous. Often they'll say, "He wasn't ready to change." 

That's a "jive excuse" if there ever was one. If he's "not ready," 

how can anyone justify seeing him week after week and charging 

him money? Tell him to go home, and to come back when he's 

ready"! I always figured if somebody "wasn't ready to change," 

then it was my job to make him ready. 

54 

Using Your Brain 

What if you took your car to a mechanic, and he worked on 

it for a couple of weeks, but it still didn't work. If he told you, 

"The car wasn't ready to change," you wouldn't buy that excuse 

would you? But therapists get away with it day after day. 

The other standard excuse is that the client is "resistant." 

Imagine that your mechanic told you that your car was "resistant." 

"Your car just wasn't mature enough to accept the valve job. 

Bring it in again next week, and we'll try again." You wouldn't 

accept that excuse for a minute. Obviously the mechanic either 

doesn't know what he's doing, or the changes he's trying to make 

are irrelevant to the problem, or he's using the wrong tools. The 

same is true of therapeutic or educational change. Effective ther- 

apists and teachers can make people "ready to change," and when 

they're doing the right thing, there won't be any resistance. 

Unfortunately, most humans have a perverse tendency. If 

they're doing something and it doesn't work, they'll usually do it 

louder, harder, longer, or more often. When a child doesn't 

understand, a parent will usually shout the exact same sentence, 

rather than try a new set of words. And when punishment doesn't 

change someone's behavior, the usual conclusion is that it wasn't 

enough, so we have to do it more. 

I always thought that if something wasn't working, that might 

be an indication that it was time to do something else! If you 

know that something doesn't work, then anything else has a better 

chance of working than more of the same thing. 

Non-professionals also have interesting excuses. I've been 

collecting them. People used to say, "I lost control over myself," 

or "I don't know what came over me." Probably a purple cloud 

or an old blanket did it, I guess. In the 60's people went to 

encounter groups and learned to say, "I can't help it; it's just the 

way I feel." If somebody says, "I just felt I had to throw a hand 

grenade into the room," that's not acceptable. But if someone 

says, "I just can't accept what you're saying; I have to yell at you 

and make you feel bad; it's just the way I feel," people will accept 

it. 

The word "just" is a fascinating word; it's one of the ways 

to be unjust to other people. "Just" is a handy way to disqualify 

everything but what you're talking about. If someone's feeling 

Going Wrong 

55 

bad, and you say something nice to him, he'll often say, "You're 

just trying to cheer me up"-as if cheering someone up is a bad 

thing! It might be true that you're trying to cheer him up, but 

"just" makes it the only thing that's true. The word "just" dis- 

counts everything else about the situation. 

The favorite excuse these days is, "I wasn't myself." You can 

get out of anything with that one. It's like multiple personality or 

the insanity defense. "I wasn't myself . . . I must have been her!" 

All these excuses are ways of justifying and continuing un- 

happiness, instead of trying out something else that might make 

life more enjoyable and interesting for you-and for other people 

too. 

Now I think it's time for a demonstration. Someone give me 

an example of something that you would expect to be a really 

unpleasant experience. 

Jo: I always get anxious about confronting somebody. When 

someone's offended me in some way, and I want them to treat 

me differently, I confront them. 

You expect that to be a negative experience? 

Jo: Yes. And it isn't. It usually turns out to be much more 

positive. I may start out feeling uncomfortable, but I feel more 

comfortable as I get into it. 

Does that make it useful? 

Jo: It makes it a useful learning for me to actually confront 

them. Each time I do it, I get more confidence about confronting 

someone later on. It doesn't seem like I'm going to be confronting 

somebody, it seems more like I'm just going to be talking to them. 

Well, think about it now. If you were going to confront 

someone, do you expect it to be unpleasant? 

Jo: A little. Not as much as I used to. 

I'm asking you to do it now. 

Jo: Uhuh, a little bit. 

You have to stop and take time to really do it. Think of 

someone whom it would be very hard to confront about some- 

thing. Consider it, and find out how you can expect it to be 

unpleasant and succeed. 

Jo: You would be difficult to confront. 

56 

Using Your Brain 

I would be lethal to confront. What would propel you to have 

to confront someone? 

Jo: If I felt like my integrity had been damaged- 

"Damaged integrity." I had mine repaired. 

Jo: Or if I'm insulted in some way. Sometimes when my ideas 

are being insulted- 

Why do you have to confront someone? 

Jo: I don't know. 

What will happen if you do? What good does it do? Does it 

repair your integrity? 

Jo: It makes me feel like I'm standing up for myself, pro- 

tecting myself, preserving myself. 

From . . . ? What I'm asking is, "What is the function of the 

behavior?" If you confront some people, they will kill you-even 

over a ham sandwich. I know that from where I grew up. Many 

people don't grow up in places like that, and if they're really 

lucky, they won't find out about it. 

What is the significance of confronting someone? Does it 

have a function beyond giving you certain feelings which arc 

different than the ones you have if someone "damages your in- 

tegrity" by torturing your ideas? Do you always have to confront 

them? . . . Do you do it with everybody? 

Jo: No. 

How do you know who to go up to and confront, so that 

you can feel better? 

Jo: People who I more or less trust, who aren't going to hurt 

me in some way. 

That's a good choice. But you only confront them when they 

hurt you, or your ideas. 

Jo: That's the only time that I confront them. There are lots 

of other times that I discuss things with them, but that's the only 

time that I'm confronting. 

What makes it important enough to confront them? . . . Let 

me ask it another way. If they hurt your ideas, does that mean 

that they've mis-perceived them, or that they disagree with them? 

Jo: Well, no. If they just misunderstand or disagree, that's 

all right. It's when someone says, "That's garbage" or something 

like that. It depends on the situation or the person. 

Going Wrong 57 

Well, yes, it does depend on the situation, and that's very 

important. And I'm not saying confronting is not of value, either. 

I'm just asking, "How do you know when to do it?" and "How 

does this process work?" Would you go out and kill someone for 

damaging your integrity? 

Jo: No. 

There are a lot of people who would. Maybe it would be 

better if we taught them to do whatever you do. But I don't even 

know yet what it means for you to "confront" someone. I don't 

know if you yell and scream, or stick your finger up her nose, or 

cut her left ear off, or run her down with a truck. I'm making 

the assumption that your confronting is verbal. 

Jo: It is. 

I still don't know if your voice is at a high volume, or any 

other details. What's the difference between a "discussion" and a 

"confrontation?" How many of the rest of you thought you knew? 

. . . or didn't think about that? . . . or think I'm talking to her? 

Jo: For me there's a lot of urgency around confronting some- 

body. I really want them to know how I feel about something. I 

really want them to know how I felt my ideas were received or 

rejected. 

OK. What makes it urgent? What would happen if you didn't 

get them to understand? . . . Let me ask another question. Do 

they understand the idea and say bad things about it, or do they 

misunderstand and say bad things about it because they misun- 

derstand? . . . 

Jo: I appreciate what you're doing, I think you just gave me 

a different perspective. Have you? 

I don't know. Give me a hint. 

Jo: I think you did. Well . . . hmmm . . . it just seems 

different now. It doesn't seem like rejection any more; it just 

seems like they're trying to tell me something different. 

I don't know, I haven't even found out what it is we're 

working with here yet. You can't change yet, it's too soon. How 

could anything change that quickly, with just mere words, when 

I haven't even figured out what it is yet?,,. Does it matter? 

Jo: No, but it changed. It changed, 

It doesn't matter at all. 

58 

Using Your Brain 

Jo: It doesn't matter to me what you said, or how you said 

it, or whether you knew what I was talking about. Something 

that you said just changed it. Somehow I don't feel like I'm going 

to have to confront any more. 

Boy, have you got a surprise coming. 

Jo: Well, I mean not confront anymore about the kind of 

thing I've been talking about. 

Oh, there are other things that you confront about. Well, 

you could just do it randomly! That's what I do. Then you don't 

have to worry about whether it works or not. 

Jo: Well, if I get overcharged for something, or get poor 

service or something, I'd confront. 

Is that a way to continue to get good service in a restaurant? 

Jo: It's a good way to get good service a lot of places. 

Let me ask you another question. I'm not really picking on 

you. You're just a good focal point to get other people uncon- 

sciously. Did it ever occur to you to make people in a restaurant 

feel so good, before they served you, that they'd have no alter- 

native but to give you good service . . . ? 

Jo: I don't understand. . . . Somehow I lost that somewhere. 

It always amazes me that people go to a restaurant to have 

a human being wait on them, and then don't treat him like one. 

Having been a waiter, I can tell you that most of the people who 

go to a restaurant treat you very strangely. There are a few people 

who come in and make you feel good, and that compels you to 

spend more time near them-regardless of whether they tip more 

or less. There is something about being around somebody who is 

nice to you that's more attractive than being around somebody 

who isn't nice-or who isn't even acknowledging that you exist. 

Have any of you pretended with a child that he doesn't exist? 

Most kids will freak. Imagine being a waiter and having a room 

full of people doing that to you. Then someone treats you like 

you're not a machine, but a human being, and makes you feel 

good. Who would you hang around with more? One way to get 

good service in a restaurant is to treat the waiter wdl first, so as 

to make him want to treat you well. 

The other alternative is to coerce him and make him feel bad 

enough to give you what you wanted, and expected to get without 

Going Wrong 

59 

having to go through all the trouble of being nasty about it. If 

you do that, not only do you have to pay your bill, but you have 

to taint your own experience as well. Most people never think 

about that. Why should they go to a restaurant and be nice to a 

waiter? They should get good service automatically. 

People often think of marriage in that way, too. "You should 

have known that." "I shouldn't have to tell him; he should do it 

automatically." And if he doesn't, that means it's time to get 

angry, intense, and force him to do it. And even when you win, 

what do you win? High self-esteem? 

Man: An opportunity for your spouse to get even. 

I've had a lot of people do that to me. I decided to take it 

up, and deliberately start getting even ahead of time! How many 

people have to get "even" when you do something nice to them? 

I'm not asking about whether you are nasty or nice; that's Santa's 

job. The question I'm asking you is, "Have you ever considered 

being considerate ahead of time?" 

Woman: Yes, my strategy for a restaurant is to ask the wait- 

ress what she suggests is the best on the menu, and she'll pick 

out a selection. I look at that and suggest that she could make 

sure that it's fine, and the steak's not too small. I also ask her 

name, and talk to her by name. 

So, yes, you've considered being nice, and actually attempted 

it. Like everything else in the world, it doesn't always work. But 

how many of you never even considered it when things weren't 

going well, or before things weren't going well? Why would a 

waiter go all the way down to a restaurant every night to give 

someone bad service, when they make their living by tips? Did 

you ever stop and consider that, Jo? 

Jo: Yes, I did. 

And you confronted them? 

Jo: Well, I considered it, but I wasn't able to be as pleasant 

as I thought I should be. I wasn't able to be very agreeable when 

I was really disgusted. I wasn't able to change how I acted. 

"She should have done it first anyway," right? Then you 

wouldn't have had to be disgusted, and had difficulty changing 

that. 

60 

Using Your Brain 

Jo: Well, that's the way it seemed then. It seems very different 

now. 

Now let's back up to the beginning. When we first started 

talking, Jo wanted to be more competent at being unpleasant. If 

you really heard what she was saying, it was, "I want to be able 

to stand up for myself and grumble and gripe more thoroughly." 

Nobody in the room heard her say that when she first talked. If 

they had heard it, they would have tried to teach her how to be 

more nasty. Think what an "assertiveness" trainer would have 

done with that! I have a new name for assertiveness training. I 

call it "loneliness preparation." 

In contrast, I ask questions to learn how to have someone 

else's limitations. If I can learn how it works, then I can change 

it any way I want, and it will still work, but differently. You can't 

make a valid judgement about a process unless you know what it 

is, and you can't realty know what it is unless you try it. 

So I thought, "OK, Jo can't grumble and gripe. Where is it 

that she can't, because I want to learn how to not do it there?" 

I started asking her questions: "When do you do it?" "What is 

its purpose?" "Who do you do it with?" My questions go back- 

wards in time. Starting with the problem, I backed up the process 

she goes through. When I backed her up far enough, she got to 

the place before she grumbled and griped, and before she even 

felt any inclination to do it. That is the place where she can go 

around it. If she takes the next step, the "problem" starts hap- 

pening. But if she steps over to the side, she can go somewhere 

else that she likes better. 

Jo goes into a restaurant, sits down, gets bad service, feels 

horrible, confronts the waitress, gets good service later and still 

feels bad. I asked, "Did it ever occur to you when you go into a 

restaurant and discover who your waitress is, to make her feel 

good?" She said, "I can't do that after I feel bad," and she's 

probably right. OK, why not do it right away all the time when- 

ever you go into a restaurant, so you never get a chance to feet 

bad? That question directs her attention to an earlier time, when 

it's easy to do something different, and it also gives her something 

very specific to do differently. 

Here's one you've all done. You come home feeling realty 

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good. As you walk in the front door you see the living room is 

a mess, or someone forgot to take out the garbage, or you see 

that something else equally absolutely essential to your happiness 

is awry. You get angry inside, and frustrated; you suppress it and 

try to not feel angry and frustrated, but it doesn't work. So you 

go into therapy and you say, "I don't want to yell at my wife." 

"Why do you yell at your wife?" "Because I get frustrated and 

angry." Most clinicians will say, "Let it all out; express yourself; 

yell and scream at your wife." And to the wife they'll say, "Isn't 

it all right if he yells and screams at you? Can't you let him be 

himself?" You do your thing, and he'll do his . . . separately. 

That's nuts, 

What most clinicians don't think about is that when he walks 

in the door and sees that mess, he first manages to get to the 

state where he's angry and frustrated, and then he tries to stop 

himself from getting angry and frustrated. The other thing they 

forget is what he's frying to accomplish by stopping himself from 

yelling at her in the first place: he's trying to get things to be 

pleasant. Well, why not go for it directly? Why not have the front 

door send him off into such pleasant thoughts about what he can 

do with his wife that he goes through the living room too fast to 

care about noticing anything else! 

Whenever I say, "How about doing something before you 

feel so bad?" the client always looks stunned. It doesn't occur to 

him to back up. He always thinks that the only way he can make 

himself happy is to do what he wants exactly at the moment that 

he wants it. Is that the only way? It must be. The universe doesn't 

go backwards. Time won't go backwards. Light won't go back- 

wards. But your mind can go backwards. 

Typically clients will either not understand what I said at all, 

or will say, "I can't just do that!" It sounds too easy. So I found 

out I had to make them do it. They couldn't back up themselves, 

because they couldn't stop going where they were going. So I 

learned to ask them questions that would force them to go back- 

wards, Often they fight me tooth and nail. They'll try to answer 

one question, and I insist that they answer another one to back 

them up another step. 

When I get to the right point with a client, I ask a question 

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that moves sideways and forward, and he goes forward again in 

the new direction. After that he can't stop going in the new 

direction. He's as stuck that way as the other, but he doesn't care 

because he likes being stuck that way. It works just like a spring: 

you compress it, and when you pull the lever over and release it, 

it flics forward again. 

As soon as someone finds one of those places, he says, "Oh, 

I've changed. Let's go on now." It's so nonchalant. "How do you 

know you've changed?" "I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's 

different now." But Jo is still propelling forward on the new path. 

I've been testing her repeatedly. And she can't get back there to 

the other one now because it's too late. 

I do this simply by presupposing that what is getting in her 

way is worth having, and all I need to do is find out where to 

use it. So, I take the behavior Jo is uncomfortable about-con- 

fronting-and take that back to before she even thinks about 

confronting. The same forces that used to drive her to confront 

and be uncomfortable about it will now compel her into another 

behavior. 

What we have explored here with Jo is a common pattern in 

marriage. You want something from him, but he doesn't give it 

to you. So you feel bad. Then you tell him how bad you feel, 

hoping he'll be concerned enough to give it to you. 

There are times when you don't get what you want from 

someone else. But when you don't get what you want, feeling bad 

is extra! Did you ever think of that? First you don't get what you 

want, and then you have to feel bad for a long time because you 

didn't get it. And then you have to feel bad to try to get it again. 

If you feel good, then you can just go back to that person and 

say, "Hey, you. Do you want to do this for me?" If you do that 

with a cheerful tone of voice, you're much more likely to get it, 

and without any future repercussions. 

The greatest error of all is in thinking that the only way for 

you to feel good in certain situations is for someone else to behave 

in a certain way. "You must behave the way I want you to, so I 

can feel good, or I'm going to feel bad and stand around and 

make you feel bad too." When he is not there to behave in that 

way, then there's nobody to make you feel good. So you feel bad. 

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When he comes back, you say, "You were not here to have these 

behaviors to make me feel good, so I want you to feel bad now. 

I want you to be here all the time. No more bowling; don't go 

away for the weekend and go fishing; don't go to college; don't 

go to seminars; be here all the time. I can go away because I 

have a good time when I do, but when I come home you have 

to be here to make me feel good. If you love me you will do 

what I want, because when you don't do it, I feel bad, because I 

love you." Bizarre, huh? But that's how it works. And in a way, 

it's true. You sit there by yourself and you do feel bad. "If that 

person were here doing this, I'd feel good. What the hell's the 

matter with him?" Of course, if he's there and he's not willing to 

do it, that's even worse! People seldom stop and say, "Hey, what's 

going to be important to someone else?" It's even rarer that 

someone asks himself, "What could I do that would make her 

want to do this for me?" 

If you feel inside you that when you don't get a certain 

amount of time from him, at the specified moment, then it's time 

to feel bad . . . and if you measure that bad feeling and you 

visualize him and connect that bad feeling with his face, then 

when he comes back and you see his face, you get to feel bad 

when he is there! That is amazing! Not only do you get to feel 

bad when he is not there; you also get to feel bad when he comes 

back! That doesn't sound like fun, does it? It's not fair to you to 

live that way. 

And if he feels guilty about being gone, and he pictures what 

it will be like to come back to you, he will connect the feeling 

of guilt to the sight of your face. Then when he comes back and 

sees you, he will feel guilty again, and he won't want to be there 

either. These are the meta-patterns of obligation. They are both 

based on one tremendous error: the idea that marriage is a 

personal debt. 

If you ask people what they want, they usually talk about 

wanting what they don't have, rather than what they already do 

have. They tend to ignore and take for granted what they already 

have and enjoy, and only notice what is missing. 

Married people don't usually feel lucky, the way they did 

when they first met. Imagine what it would be like if every time 

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Using Your Brain 

you see him you feel lucky. And if he isn't there at a time when 

you want him-because he is doing something you wish he 

wouldn't do, because you don't want to do it with him-you still 

feel lucky that your special person is there for you much of the 

time. And when he's doing something else, you feel lucky that's 

the only price you have to pay. That isn't a heavy cost, is it? If 

you can't have that, then personally, I don't think it's worth it. 

One thing that has always amazed me is that people are 

seldom nasty to strangers. You really have to know and love 

someone before you can treat her like dirt and really make her 

feel bad about small things. Few people will yell at a stranger 

about important things like crumbs on the breakfast table, but if 

you love her, it's OK. 

One family came in to see me and the husband was really 

nasty. He pointed to his wife and snarled, "She thinks a 14-year- 

old girl should stay out until 9:30 at night!" 

I looked him straight in the eye and said, "And you think 

that a 14-ycar-old girl should learn that men yell and scream at 

their wives, and make them feel bad!" 

It's an awful thing to get lost. 

Often a family will bring in a teenage daughter because there 

is something wrong with her; she enjoys sex and they can't get 

her to stop doing it. Talk about an idealistic, overwhelming, 

outrageous task: to get somebody to go back to being a virgin! 

The parents want you to convince their daughter that sex is not 

really pleasant, and that it is dangerous, and that if she enjoys it, 

it's going to influence her in a way that will make her feel bad 

for the rest of her life! Some therapists actually attempt that task, 

. . . and some even succeed. 

One father literally dragged his daughter in to me with her 

arm twisted up behind her back, shoved her into a chair, and 

growled "Siddown!" 

"Is anything wrong?" I asked. 

"The girl's a little whore!" 

"I don't need a whore; what did you bring her here for?" 

That's an interruption if ever there was one! Those first lines 

are my favorites; you can really fry someone's brains with a line 

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like that. Ask him one question after that, and he'll never be able 

to get back to where he was. 

"No, no! That's not what I'm talking about-" 

"Who is this girl?" 

"My daughter." 

"You made your daughter into a whore!!!" 

"No, no! You don't understand-" 

"And you brought her here to me\ How disgusting!" 

"No, no, no! You've got it all wrong." 

This man who came in snarling and yelling, is now pleading 

with me to understand him. He has totally switched from attacking 

his daughter to defending himself. Meanwhile, his daughter has 

been quietly cracking up. She thought that was wonderful. 

"Well, explain it to me then." 

"I just think all these terrible things are going to happen to 

her." 

"Well, if you teach her that profession, you're damn right!" 

"No, no, you see it's-" 

"Well, what is it you want me to do? What is it that you 

want?" 

Then he started describing all the things he wanted. When 

he finished, I said, "You brought her in here with her arm twisted 

up behind her back and threw her around. That's how prostitutes 

are treated; that's what you're training her to do." 

"Well, I want to force her to-" 

"Oh, 'force'-teach her that men control women by throwing 

them around, ordering them around, twisting their arms behind 

their back, forcing them to do things against their will. That's 

what pimps do. Then the only thing left to do is to charge money 

for it." 

"No, that's not what I'm doing. She's been sleeping with her 

boyfriend." 

"Did she charge him?" 

"No." 

"Does she love him?" 

"She's too young to love." 

"Didn't she love you when she was a little girl?" . . . The 

image floats up from when she was a small child, sitting on daddy's 

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Using Your Brain 

knee. You can almost always get grumpy old men with that 

picture. 

"Let me ask you something. Look at your daughter. . . . 

Don't you want her to be able to feel love, and to enjoy sexual 

behavior? The morals of the world have changed, and you don't 

have to like that. But how would you like it if the only way she 

learned to interact with men was the way you brought her in that 

door a few minutes ago? And she waited until she was twenty- 

five and married somebody who beat her up, threw her around, 

abused her, and forced her to do things against her will." 

"But she may make a mistake, and it will hurt her." 

"That's possible. Two years from now that guy may drop her 

like a hot rock and go away. And when she feels bad and lonely 

. . . she'll have no one to go to, because she'll hate your guts. If 

she came to you, you'd just say, 'I told you so.' " 

"Even if she manages on her own in that time to go out and 

find somebody else and make a real relationship, when she has 

children of her own-your grandchildren-she'll never come and 

show them to you. Because she'll remember what you did, and 

she won't want her children to learn that. . . . " 

Right now the father doesn't know what to think, so this is 

how you get him. You look him straight in the eye and say, "Isn't 

it more important that she learn to have loving relationships? . . . 

or should she learn to have the morals of any man that can force 

her around? That's what pimps do." 

Try to get out of that one. There's no way out. There's no 

way his brain could go back now and do what he did before. He 

couldn't act like a pimp. It doesn't matter if you force somebody 

to not do something or to do something, or if you force her to 

do something "good" or something "bad." The way in which you 

force her teaches her to be controlled in that way. 

The problem is, at that point he doesn't have anything else 

to do. He's stopped from doing what he used to do, but he doesn't 

have something else to do instead. I've got to give him something 

to do, like teach her the best way that's possible for a man to be 

with a woman. Because then if what his daughter has with this 

guy isn't good, she won't be satisfied with it. He was had then. 

You know what that means? He has to build a powerful positive 

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relationship with his wife, and be nice to the other people in his 

family, and make his daughter feel good more with them than she 

does with this guy who's hanging around with her. How's that for 

a compulsion? 

And I never once said, "How do you feel about that? What 

are you feeling now? What are you aware of?" or "Repent," or 

"Go inside and ask yourself." 

People forget so easily what it is that they want. They go one 

step down the road to try to get it, and then get caught up in the 

way they're trying. They don't notice that the way they've chosen 

to get what they want doesn't work. When it doesn't work, they 

go to therapy to try to learn how to do it better. They haven't 

noticed that what they're trying to learn will give them exactly 

what they don't want. 

When something happens that you don't like, you can always 

say, "It's your fault; I'm going to destroy you." That was probably 

pretty useful out in the jungle. But consciousness has got to evolve 

to the point where you say, "I've got a brain. Let's back up a 

little bit, keep in mind what I want, and go for it." 

So every single time you feel bad about anything and you 

feel stuck, . . . or especially right, . . . or righteous, . . . I hope 

there is a little voice inside your head that says, "You're getting 

what you deserve!" And if you feel that there's nothing you can 

do about it, you're right-until you go inside your brain and back 

up, back up, back up, so you can move forward and go for it in 

another way. 

Going For It 

In an attempt to understand why people do things, the field 

of psychotherapy has developed many models that they later found 

out simply weren't the case. However, many psychologists con- 

tinue to hang on to them. We still have people who are looking 

for Ids and Egos, and they're as likely to find that as a "parent," 

a "child," or an "adult." I think that most psychologists must have 

watched too many horror movies when they were children. "You 

have a parent, an adult, and a child inside you that make you do 

things," It sounds like you need to be exorcised. People used to 

say, "The devil, made me do it." Now they say, "My parts made 

me do it." 

"Well, you're just saying this because your 'parent' is talking. 

"No I'm not; she's all the way back in New Jersey!" 

Transactional Analysis is a device for separating behaviors 

into three parts-a little like multiple personality, except TA is 

supposed to be a cure. If you're really advanced, you get to have 

nine parts, because each of the first three parts has a parent, 

adult, and child inside of them] I never liked TA because only 

the child got to have any fun, and only the adult could be 

reasonable. Everyone has to have exactly the same parts, so 

there's no room for any individuality. TA is also a segregated 

society: my adult can't talk to your child, it can only talk to your 

adult. Why can't my child talk to your parent? It doesn't seem 

lair. But boy, can you convince people of that. How many of you 

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Using Your Brain 

bought that idea? Somebody explained it to you, and you thought, 

"Oh, yeah." Not everybody in the world has a parent, adult, and 

child that argue with each other. You won't find much of that in 

Tahiti. You have to go to a therapist to learn to have those 

problems. 

How many of you have a "critical parent" voice inside you 

that berates you and tries to coerce you into doing things? If 

somebody suggests to you that there's a voice inside you that 

criticizes you all the time, and you start listening for it, guess 

what? You can install one. One interesting thing you can do is to 

agree with that critical voice, over and over again, until you drive 

it crazy. Another thing you can do is to change its location. Find 

out what happens if you hear that same voice coining out of your 

left big toe, . . . That change in location certainly changes the 

impact of that voice, doesn't it? 

However, keep in mind that your critical voice could be right 

about what it's saying. Maybe you ought to listen to what it says, 

instead of just feeling bad. I'd like to show you what you can do 

with a critical voice that makes you feel bad; who has a nice loud 

one? 

Fred: I've got one all the time. 

Good. Can you hear it now? 

Fred: Yes, it's criticizing me for speaking up. 

Great. Ask if it will tell you what it wants for you that is 

positive, and listen to what it answers. Does that voice want you 

to be protected in some way? Does it want you to be more 

competent? There are many possibilities. 

Fred: It wants me to succeed; it criticizes me when I stick 

my neck out. 

OK, I assume that you agree with its intention. You want to 

succeed, too, right? 

Fred: Yes. Sure. 

Ask that voice if it believes it has good information that 

would be useful for you to have and understand. . . . 

Fred: It says, "Of course." 

Since it has good information, ask that voice if it would be 

willing to try changing the way it talks to you, if that would make 

Going For It 

71 

it easier for you to listen and understand, so that you could 

succeed better. . . . 

Fred: It's skeptical, but it's willing to try. 

Good. Now, Fred, I want to ask you to think of ways that 

voice could be different, so that you would listen to it better. For 

instance, if it used a different voice tone that was soft and friendly, 

would you be more apt to pay close attention to it? Would it help 

if that voice gave you specific helpful instructions about what to 

do next, rather than criticize what you've already done? 

Fred: I've thought of a couple of things it could do differently. 

Good. Ask the voice if it would be willing to try those out, 

to find out if you actually do listen better if it talks to you 

differently. . . . 

Fred: It's willing. 

Tell it to go ahead and try it out. . . . 

Fred: That's amazing. It's doing it, and it's not a "critical 

parent" any more. It's more like a friendly helper now. It's a 

pleasure to listen to it. 

Sure. Who wants to listen to a voice that yells and criticizes? 

Real parents should try this technique too, when they want their 

kids to listen to them. If you use a nice tonality, children will 

listen to you. They may not agree with what you say, but at least 

they'll hear it. This procedure is something we've been calling 

"Refraining," and it's the basis for a set of negotiation skills that 

are useful in family therapy and business, as well as inside your 

own brain. If you want to learn more about it, read the book 

Reframing. The point I want to make here is that Fred's voice 

had forgotten its outcome until I reminded it. It wanted to mo- 

tivate him to succeed, but all it was actually accomplishing was 

to make him feel bad. 

While the women's liberation movement has had much pos- 

itive impact, in some ways it has done the same thing. The original 

goal was to motivate people to change the way they think about 

and treat women. Women got educated about what kinds of 

behaviors are sexist. Now when someone else makes a sexist 

remark, you have to feel bad! It doesn't strike me as progress 

that now the "liberated" people have to feel bad when someone 

else uses a sexist word! What kind of liberation is that? That's 

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just like being a kid, and when someone called you "stupid" or 

"ugly," it was time to feel bad and cry. People used to use sexist 

words and nobody noticed; now when they use those words, it's 

time to groan. Some liberation! Now you have a new set of reasons 

to feel bad. I used to go around to night clubs and pick out 

women who would react that way. "There's a good one. Watch 

this. I can make her feel terrible." "Hi chick." "Arrgghh!" 

If you don't want people to use sexist language, it makes 

better sense to make them feel bad when they do it. That's a lot 

more fun, and a lot more effective, . . . and a lot more liberated, 

too. 

One thing I like to do is go after women when they make 

sexist remarks. 

A woman will say, "Well, the girls in the office-" 

"How old are they?" 

"Huh? They're in their 30V 

"You call them girls! They're women, you sexist pig! Do you 

call your husband a boy?" 

If you do something to make people feel bad when they make 

sexist remarks, that at least puts the motivation to change where 

it belongs-in the person whose behavior you want to change. 

However, criticizing and attacking people really isn't the best way 

to get them to change. The best way is to discover how they 

already motivate themselves, and use that. 

If you ask a lot of weird questions, and if you're persistent, 

you can find out how anyone does anything, including motivation. 

Many people are troubled by "lack of motivation," and one ex- 

ample of that is not being able to get up in the morning. If we 

study those people, we can find out how not to wake up, which 

could be of use to insomniacs. Everything that people can do is 

useful to someone, somewhere, sometime. But let's find out how 

someone wakes up easily and quickly, without drugs. Who in here 

regularly wakes up easily in the morning? 

Betty: I get up easily. 

OK. How do you get yourself up? 

Betty: I just wake myself up. 

I need a little more detail than that. How do you know when 

you are awake? What is the first thing that you are aware of 

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73 

when you are awake? Does the alarm wake you up, or do you 

just wake up, typically? 

Betty: I don't have an alarm. I just realize that I'm not 

sleeping. 

How do you realize that you are not sleeping? Do you begin 

to talk to yourself? Do you start to see something? 

Betty: I tell myself. 

What do you tell yourself? 

Betty: "I'm awake. I'm waking up." 

What allowed you to know that you could say that? The voice 

that says, "I'm waking up," is notifying you that there is some- 

thing to notice, so something must have preceded the voice. Was 

the voice commenting on a feeling, or was there suddenly light 

coming in? Something changed. Go back and remember it so that 

you can go through it sequentially. 

Betty: I think it was a feeling. 

What kind of a feeling? Warmth? Pressure?. . . . 

Betty: Warm, yes. 

Did you go from warmer to cooler, or from cooler to warmer? 

Betty: The sensation of warmth became intensified. I felt my 

body get warmer. 

As you began to become aware of warm feelings, you said 

to yourself, "I'm waking up." What happens right after that? You 

haven't seen anything yet? No internal images? 

Betty: I said, "I have to get up." 

Is the voice loud? Are there any other sounds, or is there 

just a voice in there? Does it have tone? 

Betty: It is a very calm voice, it's an easy voice. 

Does the tone of that voice inside change as you begin to 

wake up more and more? 

Betty: Yes. It speeds up and becomes more clear and distinct, 

more alert. 

This is an example of what we call a motivation strategy. It's 

not the whole thing, but it's enough to give us the key piece that 

makes it work to get her to do something. She has an internal 

voice that sounds like a sleepy, calm voice. Then as it says, "I 

have to get up," it begins to speed up and change that tone to 

on that is more awake and alert. 

Using Your Brain 

I want all the rest of you to try this. Doing it yourself is how 

you really find out about how other people do things. You don't 

have to say the same words, but take a moment to close your 

eyes, feel your body, and then listen to a voice inside your head. 

Have that voice begin to talk to you in a tone that is sleepy and 

calm. . . , Now have that voice speed up a little, become a little 

louder and more alert. Notice how your feelings change. . . , 

Does that affect the way you feel? If it doesn't, check your 

pulse. An excited internal voice is a great way to wake yourself 

up whenever you need it. If you start talking to yourself and 

putting yourself to sleep at a time when you probably shouldn't, 

like on the freeway, you can learn to raise the volume and pitch, 

talk a little faster about something that is exciting, and it will 

wake you right up. 

This is what many insomniacs do. They talk to themselves in 

a loud, high-pitched, excited voice, and it wakes them up-even 

if they're talking about how much they need to sleep. Insomniacs 

tend to be very alert and motivated. They think they don't sleep 

much, but studies have found that they actually sleep about as 

much as everybody else. What's different is that they also spend 

a lot of time trying to go to sleep, but they keep waking themselves 

up with their tone of voice. 

The other main way to have insomnia is to look at lots of 

bright, flashing pictures, I asked one client what he did and he 

said, "Well, I start thinking about all the things that I may not 

be thinking about." I went home that night and tried it. "What 

is it I'm not thinking about?" Soon it was six in the morning, 

and I thought, "I know what it is-sleep!" 

Now I want you to change your internal voice back the other 

way. Make it softer, lower, slower and sleepier, and notice how 

that makes you feel. , . . 

Once I almost lost an audience doing this. Open your eyes 

and speed up that voice again, or you'll have to get the rest of 

this seminar unconsciously. This is something you can teach in- 

somniacs, and it's also a process you can use yourself whenever 

you need it. For instance, I've learned that the best thing I can 

do on an airplane is to go unconscious. Between my house and 

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Going For It 

75 

the main airport is a short 20-minute flight. As soon as I sit down 

in the seat-sst-I'm out. 

Man: When you're finding out how someone motivates her- 

self, how do you know that you have gotten to the beginning of 

the sequence? For instance, Betty was saying the voice that was 

talking to her started getting louder. How do you know what 

questions to ask at that point? 

That depends on your purpose in asking the questions. There 

is really no way to determine where somebody starts. You just 

need to get enough detail so that you can create the same expe- 

rience. If I do it myself, and it works, then I've probably got 

enough information. The way to test these things is in experience 

-your own or someone else's. 

Once I know someone's motivation strategy, I can literally 

motivate her to get out of a chair or do anything else by having 

her go through the same process: "Feel the chair, say to yourself, 

'I have to get up.' Change your tonality and say it again in a 

voice that is faster, louder, and more alert." Whatever the process 

is that you use to get up in the morning, you probably use the 

same process to get yourself to walk downstairs to pick up a book, 

or to do anything else. 

There are a lot of different ways that people use to motivate 

themselves. Rather than just tell you about them, I want you to 

get some experience of finding out about them on your own. Pair 

up with someone you don't know, and find out how she gets up 

out of bed in the morning. Everybody here had to do it at least 

this morning; the ones who can't do it didn't make it to this 

seminar. Start by asking simply, "How do you get up in the 

morning?" Your partner will give you one or two fairly general 

statements about what she does, and you'll have to ask more 

questions to get the rest of the details. 

When you think you have the whole sequence, try it yourself 

to see if it works for you. For instance, your partner might say, 

I see the light coining in through the windows, and I say to 

myself, 'get up' and I get up." If you try that yourself-you look 

at light in the windows and say to yourself "get up"-you don't 

necessarily get up. It's not quite enough. You have to do more 

than that to make it work. People do these things automatically 

76 

Using Your Brain 

and unconsciously, so often you have to ask a lot of questions in 

order to get all the pieces. 

Since this isn't a strategies seminar, I don't insist that you 

get every little detail. But I do want you to get the basic pieces 

in the sequence, and get the key piece that makes a difference. 

That will usually be an element that changes in a crucial way. 

With Betty, it was a change in voice tone that actually got her 

up. To find that out, you really have to be a stickler for detail. 

If somebody says, "I make a picture of myself getting up," you 

have to ask for more detail. "Is it a movie? Is it a slide? Does it 

have color? Is it big? Do you say anything to yourself? What 

tone of voice do you use?" These small details are what make 

the sequence work. Some of them will be much more effective 

than others, and you can find that out by changing them one at 

a time, and noticing the impact. Pair up now and try this; take 

about fifteen minutes each. . . . 

Well, what did you find in there? How does your partner 

motivate himself? What were the key pieces in the sequence? 

Bill: My partner first hears the alarm clock, and he looks at 

it as he turns it off. Then he lies down again, and feels how 

comfortable he is in bed. An internal voice says, "If you stay 

Going For It 

77 

here, you'll go to sleep and be late," and he makes a picture of 

a time when he was late to work, and feels bad. Then the voice 

says, "It will be worse next time," and he makes a bigger picture 

of what will happen if he's late again, and feels worse. The 

sequence seems to be "voice, picture, bad feeling." When the bad 

feeling is strong enough, he gets up. 

That's what we call "the old anxiety routine." You keep 

generating unpleasant feelings until you're motivated to avoid 

them. Rollo May has that one. He even wrote a long book about 

it, which can be summarized in one sentence: "Anxiety has been 

misunderstood; anxiety is good because it gets people to do 

things."If your motivation strategy runs on anxiety, that's abso- 

lutely right. But not everyone has that kind of motivation. For 

other people anxiety prevents them from accomplishing things. 

They think of doing something interesting, then they make a 

picture of how things could go wrong, then they feel anxious and 

just sit at home. 

Suzi: I do something very similar to what Bill's partner does. 

I tell myself that I can rest for a few more minutes, and I do. 

But as time passes, my picture of being late gets bigger and closer 

and brighter. It stays the same picture, but when it's big enough, 

I have to get out of bed to stop the bad feelings. 

Do you procrastinate in other things? (Yes.) How many of 

the rest of you did term papers at the last minute? The longer 

you waited, the more motivated you were. Bill's partner has his 

own internal anxiety generator. Suzi's runs off the clock. They 

are both very similar in that they use unpleasant feelings as a 

motivator. Did any of you find an example of motivation that 

used pleasant feelings-even to do an unpleasant task? 

Frank: Yes, Marge pictured all the things she was going to 

do during the day and felt good about doing them. She said that 

those pleasant pictures "pulled her out of bed." 

What if she only had unpleasant things to do that day? Did 

you ask her about that? 

Frank: Yes, I did. She said she made pictures of those things 

being all done, and felt wonderful that they were done. That 

good feeling pulled her out of bed, too. That seemed unreal to 

78 

Using Your Brain 

me. I can't imagine that actually working, and I wanted to ask 

you about it. 

Where's Marge? . . . Marge, when do you do your taxes? 

Marge: I have them done by mid-January. It's so nice to have 

them done, so I can do other things. 

Well, it certainly seems to work for her. Nobody enjoys doing 

taxes, but most people enjoy having them done. The trick is to 

be able to access that good feeling of having them done ahead of 

time to get you started. Marge's motivation uses pleasant feelings 

instead of unpleasant ones. It's less common, and very strange to 

Frank, who does the opposite. 

Lots of people are good at motivating themselves to do 

pleasant things. They just make pictures of doing the pleasant 

things, and are so attracted to these pictures that they start doing 

them. However, that process doesn't work for things you want to 

have done, but you don't like doing them, If you don't like doing 

taxes, and you make a picture of doing them, you'll feel repelled. 

That's not motivating at all. If you want to get motivated posi- 

tively, you need to think about what's really attractive about a 

task. If you don't enjoy the task itself, what's attractive is having 

it done. 

Actually there is another piece that needs to be there if 

Marge's motivation strategy is going to work. How many of you 

have thought about how nice it will be to have something done, 

and then you "ran out of gas" when you sat down and started on 

it? 

Marge, when you start on your taxes, what keeps you going? 

Marge: All along, I keep thinking about how nice it will be 

when they're all done. 

That's an important piece, but I'll bet you also do something 

else. 

Marge: Well, each time I write down a number or fill in a 

piece of the form, I feel good about getting that little piece done, 

too. It's like a little taste of the good feeling I'll have when it's 

all done. 

Right. Those two pieces are what keep you going, and the 

second one will be more effective than the first. If you just think 

of it all being done, and it takes some time to finish a project, it 

Going For It 

79 

can get to seem like "pie in the sky." But that good feeling of 

accomplishment you get every time you complete a small piece 

of the task will sustain you through a lot of drudgery. 

Marge: That's interesting. It explains a lot of things in my 

life. People have often called me a "Pollyanna," because I'm 

always thinking of how good it will be when something unpleasant 

is over. I always get a lot done, but I've had trouble getting other 

people to do unpleasant jobs. When I tell them about how nice 

it will be when it's done, I usually get a blank stare. 

Right. They just don't understand. That's not the way they 

motivate themselves. 

Frank: It seems like you're saying that someone can be pow- 

erfully and effectively motivated without even having any unpleas- 

ant feelings. Is there any hope for the rest of us who propel 

ourselves with anxiety? 

Sure. Like anything else people do, motivation strategies are 

learned, and you can always learn another one. It's fairly easy to 

teach you how to use Marge's strategy. But you have to be careful 

when you make such a pervasive change in someone's life, 

Some people make lousy decisions, but since they aren't very 

motivated, they don't get into much trouble. If you teach them a 

really effective motivation strategy, they will actually carry out all 

those bad decisions, and do a lot of stupid, irrelevant, and possibly 

harmful things. So before I teach someone a powerful new mo- 

tivation strategy, I make sure that the person already has an 

effective way of making decisions. If he doesn't, I'll teach him a 

new decision strategy before I teach him the new motivation 

strategy. 

There arc a lot of variations in how people motivate them- 

selves, but we've already got examples of the two major patterns. 

Most people motivate themselves by thinking about how bad they 

will feel if they don't do something, and then they move away 

from that bad feeling. Rat psychologists call this "aversive con- 

ditioning." 

A few people do the reverse, which is what Marge does. She 

uses pleasant feelings to move toward what she does want to have 

happen, instead of away from what she doesn't want to have 

happen-and she gets reinforcement along the way. 

Using Your Brain 

Someone with a motivation strategy like Marge's really lives 

in an entirely different world than most people-a world without 

a lot of the anxiety, unpleasantness, and stress that many people 

experience. 

Many people have some combination of the two. They may 

first think of what will happen if they don't do something, and 

then think of how nice it will be when it's done. 

All motivation strategies work, and you can't knock some- 

thing that works. However, some of them are a lot faster and 

more tenacious, and a lot more enjoyable than others. 

A lot of the problems that bring people into therapy, or into 

jail, have to do with motivation. Either they're not motivated to 

do things they want to do, or other people want them to do, or 

they are motivated to do things they, or other people, don't want 

them to do. What we've done here today is explore a little bit 

about how motivation works, so you can have some control over 

what you're motivated to do. What we've done here is only the 

beginning of what we can do with motivation, but it gives you 

something you can explore more on your own. 

80 

VI 

UnderstandingConfusion 

Many people get into difficulties because they're confused 

about something. I'd like to show you how to take confusion and 

make it into understanding. I need someone to play with, to 

demonstrate how this is done. After I demonstrate, I'm going to 

ask you to pair up and do it with each other, so pay attention. 

Bill: I'd like to do that. 

First think of something you're confused about, and you'd 

like to understand. 

Bill: There are a lot of things I don't understand- 

Stop. I want you to listen carefully to what I asked you to 

do, I did not ask you to think of something you don't understand; 

I asked you to think of something you're confused about. "Con- 

fusion" and "not understanding" are very different. There are a 

lot of things that you don't understand, because you don't know 

anything about them. You probably don't understand open-heart 

surgery or how to design a hydrogen bomb. You're not confused 

about them; you just don't have the information you'd need to 

understand how to do those things. 

Confusion, however, is always an indication that you're on 

your way to understanding. Confusion presupposes that you have 

a lot of data, but it's not yet organized in a way that allows you 

to understand it. So I want you to think of something you're 

confused about: something you have a lot of experience with, but 

it doesn't make sense to you. . . . 

S3 

84 

Using Your Brain 

Bill: OK. I'm thinking about- 

Hold on. You're not allowed to tell me the content of what 

you're thinking about. You only need content if you are nosy. 

I'm a mathematician; I'm only interested inform. Besides it's too 

easy for the rest of these people to get lost in the content. I want 

them to learn the process that I'm demonstrating. 

You've thought of something you're confused about. Now I 

want you to think of something similar that you understand. When 

I say similar, I mean that if your confusion is about someone's 

behavior, have your "understanding" also be about someone's 

behavior. If your confusion has to do with how a car engine 

works, make understanding be something mechanical, like how 

your toaster works, for example. 

Bill: I've thought of something I understand. 

Now you have two internal experiences; we're calling one of 

them "understanding" and the other one "confusion." Do they 

both have pictures? 

Bill: Yes. 

What I'm interested in are the differences between the two. 

How do they differ? For instance, one might be a movie and the 

other a slide. Or one might be in black and white and the other 

in color. I want you to go inside and examine those two experi- 

ences, and then tell me how they're different. . . . 

Bill: Confusion is a slide, and it's small. Understanding is a 

movie, and it's large. 

Are there any other differences? If the picture of confusion 

is smaller, it's probably also farther away. 

Bill: Yes, it's farther away. 

Do either of them have sound? 

Bill: Yes, understanding has a voice describing what I see. 

Confusion is silent. 

How do you know that you're confused about one, but you 

understand the other one? 

Bill: I have different feelings when I look at those two pic- 

tures, 

OK. How do your feelings know to feel that when you look 

at those pictures. 

Bill: I suppose because I taught it that. 

Understanding Confusion 85 

I want you all to notice something. I asked a "How?" ques- 

tion, asking about process, and he answered a "Why?" question. 

"Because" always answers "Why?" All you'll get out of "Because" 

is a bunch of historical theory. I only have one theory: that the 

reason people have so much trouble running their brains is be- 

cause the Earth is tilted on its axis. So actually you have someone 

else's brain, and it's mad. That's as much theorizing as I do. 

Let's try again. Bill, how do you know to have different 

feelings when you look at those two different pictures? . . . 

Bill: I don't know. 

I like that answer. 

Bill: After I thought about it, I decided I didn't know. 

That happens sometimes. Pretend you know. Talk. The worst 

thing that can happen is that you can be wrong. Years ago I 

realized I had been wrong so many times, I decided I'd just go 

ahead and be wrong in the ways that were more interesting. 

Bill: When I look at the understanding picture, I can see how 

things work. That gives me a soft feeling of relaxation. When I 

look at the other one, I can't see what's going to happen next; I 

feel a little tense. 

Those certainly sound like quite different experiences. Does 

anyone have any questions about what I've been doing? 

Man: You make it look so easy. How do you know what 

questions to ask? 

All I want to know is, "How are these two experiences 

different?" The answers to that are specific differences in the 

person's visual, auditory, and feeling experience. My questions 

are often directed at what the person is not noticing, and they 

are always directed toward helping that person make distinctions 

that he wasn't making before. For instance, when I asked Bill if 

it was a slide or a movie, he could answer easily. But he probably 

never even noticed that difference before, because no one ever 

asked him about it. 

Woman: Is there any particular order to the questions you 

ask? You asked about whether it was a slide or a movie before 

you asked about color or black and white. 

There's a certain efficiency in asking about things first and 

qualities later; you'll go astray less often. If you ask "How fast is 

86Using Your Brain 

it moving?" and it turns out to be a slide, that may be a little 

confusing to the person you're doing this with. Go for the basics 

first, and then ask about what other finer distinctions might be 

there. 

The questions you ask are also a function of familiarity. I've 

explored confusion and understanding a few times before, so I 

already know what kinds of differences are likely to be there. It's 

like anything else you learn to do. When you do it the first time, 

you stumble around a bit. Later, when you're more familiar with 

what you're doing, you get more streamlined and systematic. You 

can also just make a long list of all the possibilities and go through 

them one by one. But it's easier if you first mention a few of the 

main distinctions to get that person's mind going in the right 

direction, and then ask, "How are the two different?" 

Now let's go on to the more interesting part. Bill, I want you 

to take "confusion" and change it until it's the same as "under- 

standing." I don't want you to change the content. I only want 

you to change the process that you use to represent the same 

content. First I want you to take that slide and make it into a 

movie. . . . 

Bill: I can't seem to do that. 

Do it this way. First make a series of slides at different times. 

When you have enough of them, look at them in rapid succession. 

Speed that up a little, and you'll have a movie. A movie is only 

a sequence of still pictures shown in a fast sequence. 

Bill: OK. I've got a movie. 

Good. Now add a narrative sound track that describes the 

movie. . . . (Bill nods.) 

Now make that movie larger and closer until it's the same 

size and distance as your picture of understanding. . . . What 

happens when you do that? Do you understand it now? 

Bill: Yes. I can see what's going on now; I feel much more 

comfortable. I have the same feeling with both pictures. 

It makes sense that if you have a large movie with a narrative 

sound track, you'll understand something better than if all you 

have is a small, silent, still picture. You have much more infor- 

mation, and it's organized in a way that you can comprehend it. 

This is Bill's natural way of learning how to understand something. 

Understanding Confusion87 

Woman: Don't you have to have more information to get 

unconfused? 

Sometimes that's the case. But often the person actually has 

the information; it just hasn't been accessed in a way that allows 

understanding. It's not that something is missing; it's just that 

what you have is poorly organized. You all know much more than 

you think you do. Usually it's not too little information that 

creates confusion, it's having too much information. Often a per- 

son's confusion is an enormous collage of data, or a lot of pictures 

flipping in rapid succession. In contrast, most people's pictures of 

understanding are well-organized, and very economical. They're 

like an elegant mathematical equation, or a good poem. They 

distill a lot of data down to a very simple representation. What I 

did with Bill just made it possible for him to collect the data that 

he already had, in a way that he could understand it. Being able 

to use your mind means being able to access, organize and use 

what you already have. 

Most of you have seen what happens when a fire burns down 

in a fireplace. If you rearrange the logs a little bit, it will blaze 

up again. You haven't added anything. The only thing you've 

changed is the arrangement, but it makes a huge difference. 

If you think that you need more data, you'll probably ask 

lots of questions. If the answers just contain raw data, they won't 

help you much, and you'll have to keep asking. The more answers 

you have, the less you will examine the questions you are asking. 

But if the answers help you organize the data you already have, 

it may help you to understand. That is what's often called "passive 

learning," someone who's always going, "Spoon-feed me." Other 

people can take in a large amount of data and organize it them- 

selves without much help from outside. That's what's often called 

"active learning." 

Now, Bill, I want you to try it the other way. Take what you 

originally understood and make it into a smaller, more distant, 

still picture and erase the sound track. . . . 

Bill: Now I'm tense and confused. 

So now we could take anything you're sure of, and confuse 

the hell out of you. You're all laughing; you don't realize how 

useful that can be! Don't you know someone who is sure they 

88Using Your Brain 

understand something, and they don't? . . . and that false confi- 

dence gets them into a lot of trouble? A good dose of confusion 

could get them motivated to listen to people around them and 

gather some very useful information. Confusion and understand- 

ing are internal experiences. They don't necessarily have anything 

to do with the outside world. In fact, if you look around, there 

usually isn't much connection. 

In order for Bill to have the experience he calls "understand- 

ing," he has to go through a process in which the information he 

has is represented as a large movie with a sound track. This 

happens randomly sometimes, and at other times other people 

may induce it. However, now that he knows how it works, he 

can deliberately engage that process whenever he is confused 

about something. If he hasn't got enough data, he may not come 

to full understanding; his movie may have gaps in it, or the sound 

track may fade out from time to time. But it will be the best 

representation for him of what he knows. Those gaps in the movie 

will indicate precisely where he needs to have more information. 

And whenever he's bored with what he already understands too 

well, he can confuse himself as a prelude to coming to some new 

and different understanding. 

Now I want you all to take turns doing what I did with Bill. 

Pair up with someone you don't know, because that will make it 

easier. 

1) Ask your partner to think of a) something he is confused 

about, and b) something similar he understands. Your partner is 

not allowed to tell you anything about the content. 

2) Ask,"How are these two experiences different?" You don't 

care about how they're similar, only how one is different from 

the other, 

3) When you have at least two differences, ask your partner 

to change confusion to be the same as understanding. 

4) Test what you've done by asking if he understands what 

was previously confusing. If he understands, you're done. If he 

doesn't understand, back up to step 2) and find some more 

differences. Keep going until either he understands, or he has 

identified what specific lack of information is preventing full un- 

derstanding. Keep in mind that no one ever totally understands 

Understanding Confusion 89 

anything. That's OK. It keeps life interesting. Take about fifteen 

minutes each. . . . 

Most of you have probably noticed that your partner did 

something different inside than you do, in regard to the words 

"understanding" and "confusion." Let's first hear some of the 

differences you found, and then deal with any questions, 

Man: My confusion is like a TV set with the vertical hold 

out of adjustment. The pictures keep rolling over so fast I can't 

see them. When I slowed it down and steadied it, it all made 

sense. But for my partner, confusion was a close panorama. So 

much was happening so close around her that she couldn't take 

it all in. She had to slow it down, and then physically back up 

and see it at a distance to understand it. 

Man: My partner is a scientist. When he's confused, he just 

sees movies of things happening-what he calls "raw data." When 

he starts to understand, he sees little diagrams superimposed on 

the movies. These diagrams help him condense the events, and 

the movies get shorter and shorter until he gets what he calls a 

"moving still picture." It's a still picture with a superimposed 

diagram that indicates all the different ways that still picture can 

turn into a movie. That still picture sort of wiggles a little bit. 

It's very economical. 

90 

Using Your Brain 

That's a great one. Do these make sense to the rest of you? 

We've got quite a variety already. 

Woman: When I really understand something, I have five 

different clear pictures all at once, like a split-screen TV. When 

I'm confused I only have one picture, and it's fuzzy. But when 

my partner understands something it's always over here on her 

right side. Things she's confused about are in the center, and 

something she doesn't know anything about arc over on her left. 

Alan: What my partner did seemed very unusual to me. Her 

confusion was very focused and specific, and her understanding 

was a fuzzy, bright, movie that was out of focus. When she fuzzed 

up the confusion, she felt like she understood. I said to her, "Turn 

the knob, adjust the lens to get it out of focus." 

You can do it that way, but you don't have to be metaphorical. 

People don't actually have knobs; you can just tell them to do it. 

So when she fuzzed it up, she understood. I hope she's not a 

heart surgeon! That's one of the strangest ones I've ever heard. 

If you blur the image, then you understand it! It certainly is 

different from the other ones we've gotten here. Did that seem 

odd to her, too? 

Alan: Yes, it did, Could that be like turning it over to some 

lower-level unconscious process that you trust? 

No, I don't accept explanations like that. All these processes 

are unconscious until you ask someone about them. There are 

many things we do intuitively, but this is different. Of course, you 

may have missed something important. But assuming that your 

description is correct, her understanding can't be connected with 

doing anything. In order to do something you have to have some 

specific detail. That's why I made that crack about hoping she 

wasn't a heart surgeon. With her kind of understanding, her 

patients wouldn't have a very high survival rate. 

However, a fuzzy, bright understanding will be good for some 

things. For example, this is probably someone who would be lots 

of fun at a party. She'll be a very responsive person, because all 

she needs to do to feel like she understands what someone says 

is to fuzz up her pictures. It doesn't take a lot of information to 

be able to make a bright, fuzzy movie. She can do that really 

quickly, and then have a lot of feelings watching that bright movie. 

Understanding Confusion 91 

Imagine what would happen if that woman married someone 

who had to have things crystal clear in order to understand, He'd 

say things like, "Now let's bring this into focus," and that would 

send her into confusion. When she described things she under- 

stood, they wouldn't be clear to him. If he complained that what 

she said was all fuzzy, she'd smile and be perfectly satisfied, but 

he'd be frustrated. 

Her kind of understanding is the kind I talked about earlier, 

that doesn't have much to do with the outside world. It helps her 

feel better, but it won't be much help in coping with actual 

problems. It would be really useful for her to have another way 

of understanding-one that's more precise and specific. 

In the last seminar I did there was a man whose "understand- 

ing" wasn't very useful for him. So he tried out the understanding 

process that his partner went through. Doing that gave him a 

totally new way of understanding that opened up a whole new 

world for him. 

What I want you all to realize is that all of you are in the 

same position as that man, and the woman who fuzzes images. 

No matter how good you think your process of understanding is, 

there will always be times and places where another process would 

work much better for you. Earlier someone gave us the process 

a scientist used-economical little pictures with diagrams. That 

will work marvellously well for the physical world, but I'll predict 

that person has difficulties understanding people-a common 

problem for scientists. (Man: Yes, that's true.) People arc a little 

too complex for a little diagram like that. Some other way of 

understanding will work better for people. The more ways you 

have of understanding, the more possibilities open up for you, 

and the more your abilities expand. 

I'd like you all to try this experience of having someone else's 

understanding. Pair up with the same partner you had before. 

You already know something about that person's confusion and 

understanding, as well as your own. However, you do need to 

gather a little more information. You already found and listed the 

differences between your confusion and understanding, as well as 

your partner's. You haven't yet listed all the differences between 

your understanding and your partner's confusion. You'll have a 

92Using Your Brain 

lot of that information already, but you have probably missed 

some elements that were the same in what you compared earlier. 

After you have full information about the difference between 

your understanding and your partner's confusion, pick any content 

that you understand, and first make it into your partner's confu- 

sion. Then make whatever changes are necessary to make it into 

their understanding. Your partner can give you directions and be 

a consultant to you, advising and answering any questions you 

may have. After you've tried out their understanding, compare 

your experience to your partner's, to see if they're the same. You 

may miss something on the first try, and have to go back and do 

it again. The goal is for you to experience someone else's way of 

understanding. After you try it out, you may decide it's not a very 

good one, and you may not want to use it very often. But don't 

be too sure about that; it may work exquisitely for something you 

have trouble with. At the very least it will help you to understand 

certain people who use that process. Take about twenty minutes 

each. . . • 

Understanding Confusion 93 

Was that pretty interesting? What did you experience when 

you took on someone else's understanding? 

Man: My own understanding is very detailed, so I understand 

mechanical things very easily. My partner's understanding was a 

lot more abstract: she sees fuzzy rainbows when she understands 

something. When I tried out her understanding I couldn't under- 

stand mechanical things at all, but I had a sense of understanding 

people much better. Actually, I think I wouldn't call it "under- 

standing" so much as feeling what they meant and being able to 

respond to them easily. The colors were magnificent, and I felt 

sort of warm and excited the whole time. It certainly was different! 

Woman: When I understand something, I just see detailed 

movies of that event happening. My partner sees two overlapping 

framed pictures when he understands something. The closer pic- 

ture is an associated picture of the event, and the second picture 

is a dissociated picture of the same event. He feels he understands 

when the two pictures match. My partner's an actor, and I realized 

how useful it must be to him. When he's playing a part he's 

associated, and he also has the other dissociated picture that shows 

him what the audience is seeing at the same time. When I took 

on his understanding, I had a lot more information about how I 

look to other people. That was very helpful to me because I 

usually just jump into situations without thinking about how other 

people see me. 

That sounds pretty useful. Taking on someone else's way of 

understanding is the ultimate way to enter that person's world. 

How many of you already had more or less the same way of 

understanding as your partner had? . . . About 8 out of 60. Here 

you just picked people at random, It's even more fascinating if 

you choose very successful people. I'm a pragmatist; I like to find 

out how really exceptional people do things. A very successful 

businessman in Oregon did the following with any project he 

wanted to understand: he'd start with a slide and expand it so 

that it was fully panoramic and he was inside it. Then he'd convert 

it into a movie. At any point where he had trouble seeing where 

the movie was going, he'd step back slightly and see himself in 

it. As soon as the movie started moving again, he'd step back 

inside. That's an example of a very practical understanding that 

94Using Your Brain 

is intimately related to actually doing something. For him, un- 

derstanding something and being able to do it are indistinguish- 

able. 

Understanding is a process that is vital to survival and learn- 

ing. If you weren't able to make sense out of your experience in 

some way, you'd be in big trouble. Each of us has about three 

pounds of gray matter that we use to try to understand the world. 

That three pounds of jelly can do some truly amazing things, but 

there's no way it can fully understand anything. When you think 

you understand something, that is always a definition of what you 

don't know. Karl Popper said it well: "Knowledge is a sophisti- 

cated statement of ignorance." There are several kinds of under- 

standing, and some of them are a lot more useful than others. 

One kind of understanding allows you to justify things, and 

gives you reasons for not being able to do anything different. 

"Things are this way because . . . and that's why we can't change 

anything." Where I grew up, we called that a "jive" excuse. A 

lot of "experts' " understanding of things like schizophrenia and 

learning disabilities is like that. It sounds very impressive, but 

basically it's a set of words that say, "Nothing can be done." 

Personally, I'm not interested in "understandings" that lead you 

to a dead end, even if they might be true. I'd rather leave it 

open. 

A second kind of understanding simply allows you to have a 

good feeling: "Ahhh." That woman who de-focuses pictures to get 

understanding is an example of that. It's sort of like salivating to 

a bell: it's a conditioned response, and all you get is that good 

feeling. That's the kind of thing that can lead to saying, "Oh, 

yes, 'ego' is that one up there on the chart. I've seen that before; 

yes, I understand." That kind of understanding also doesn't teach 

you to be able to do anything. 

A third, kind of understanding allows you to talk about things 

with important sounding concepts, and sometimes even equations. 

How many of you have an "understanding" about some behavior 

in yourself that you don't like, but that understanding hasn't 

helped you behave differently? That's an example of what I'm 

talking about. Concepts can be useful, but only if they have an 

Understanding Confusion95 

experiential basis, and only if they allow you to do something 

different. 

You can often get someone to accept an idea consciously, but 

only seldom will that lead to a change in behavior. If there's one 

thing that's been proved beyond a doubt by most of the religions 

of the world, that's it. Take "Thou shalt not kill," for instance. It 

doesn't say "except . . . " Nevertheless, the crusaders happily 

sliced Moslems in two, and the Moral Majority wants more mis- 

siles to wipe out a few more million Russians. 

Often people in seminars will ask, "Is a visual person the 

same as the 'parent' in TA?" That tells me they are taking what 

I'm teaching and stuffing it into the concepts they already have. 

If you can make something new fit into what you already know, 

you will learn nothing from it, and nothing will change in your 

behavior. You will only have a comfortable feeling of understand- 

ing, a complacency that will keep you from learning anything 

new. 

Often I'll demonstrate how to change a person in minutes, 

and someone will say, "Don't you think he was just fulfilling the 

expectations of the role situation?" I've rolled a few drunks, but 

I've never rolled a situation. Those are the people who come to 

seminars and get nothing for their money, because they leave with 

exactly the same understanding that they brought with them. 

The only kind of understanding I'm interested in is the kind 

that allows you to do something. All our seminars teach specific 

techniques that allow you to do things. That seems simple. But 

sometimes the things I teach don't fit into your existing under- 

standing. The healthiest thing you can do at that moment is to 

become confused, and many people complain about how confusing 

I am. They don't yet realize that confusion is the doorway to a 

new understanding. Confusion is an opportunity to rearrange ex- 

perience and organize it in a different way than you normally 

would. That allows you to learn to do something new and to see 

and hear the world in a new way. Hopefully the last exercise gave 

you a concrete experience of how that works, and the kind of 

impact that can have. 

If you understood everything I said, and never got confused, 

that would be a sure sign that you were learning nothing of 

96Using Your Brain 

significance, and wasting the money you paid to come here. That 

would be proof that you are continuing to understand the world 

in exactly the same way as when you got here. So whenever you 

get confused, you can get excited about the new understanding 

that awaits you. And you can be grateful for this opportunity to 

go somewhere new, even though you don't yet know where it will 

take you. If you don't like where it takes you, you can always 

leave. At the very least you will be enriched by knowing about 

it, and knowing that you don't like it. 

Some people's understanding has uncertainty built into it. I 

know an engineer whose understanding is composed of a rectan- 

gular matrix of pictures, about eight rows down and eight columns 

across. He starts thinking he understands something when the 

matrix is about half full of pictures. When it's about ninety percent 

full, he knows he understands something pretty thoroughly. How- 

ever, his matrix always has empty frames which signify that his 

understanding is always incomplete. That keeps him from ever 

getting too sure about anything. 

One of my most capable student's understanding is a disso- 

ciated movie of herself doing whatever it is she understands. When 

she wants to actually do it, she steps into the movie-doing and 

understanding are nearly identical. Behind that movie is a succes- 

sion of movies of herself doing it in different situations, doing it 

while overcoming obstacles, etc. The more different movies she 

has, the surer she is that she understands something well. I once 

asked her, "How many movies do you have to have to understand 

something?" She replied, "It's always a question of how well I 

understand it. If I have a few movies, that gives me a little 

understanding. If I have more movies, I understand better. The 

more different movies I have, the more I understand it. But I 

never understand completely." 

In contrast, there are people who are completely confident 

that they understand how to do something if they have a single 

movie of having done it, I know one man who flew a plane once, 

so he was completely sure that he could fly any plane, anywhere, 

anytime, in any weather, while standing up in a hammock! He 

came to a five-day seminar of mine, learned one pattern and left 

Understanding Confusion 97 

at noon the first day, totally confident that he knew all of NLP. 

How's that for getting stuck? 

Getting stuck in a particular way of understanding the 

world-whatever it is-is the cause of three major human diseases 

that I'd like to do something about. The first one is seriousness, 

as in "dead serious." If you decide that you want to do something, 

fine, but getting serious about it will only blind you and get in 

your way. 

Being right, or certain, is the second disease. Certainty is 

where people stop thinking and stop noticing. Any time you feel 

absolutely certain of something, that's a sure sign that you have 

missed something. It's sometimes convenient to deliberately ignore 

something for a while, but if you're absolutely certain, you'll 

probably miss it forever. 

It's easy for certainty to sneak up on you. Even people who 

are uncertain are usually certain about that, too. Either they're 

sure they're sure, or they're sure they're unsure. Rarely do you 

find someone who is uncertain about his doubt or uncertain about 

his certainty. You can create that experience, but you don't usually 

encounter it. You can ask someone, "Are you sure enough to be 

unsure?" That's a stupid question, but he won't be sure anymore 

after you ask it. 

The third disease is importance, and self-importance is the 

worst of all. As soon as one thing is "important," then other 

things aren't. Importance is a great way to justify being mean and 

destructive, or doing anything else that's unpleasant enough to 

need justification. 

These three diseases are the way most people get stuck. You 

may decide something is important, but you can't get really serious 

about it until you're certain that it's important. At that point you 

stop thinking altogether. The Ayatollah Khomeni is an excellent 

example-but you can find lots of other examples closer to home. 

Once I pulled up in front of the grocery store in a small 

town I used to live near. A guy came running over and said 

angrily, "My friend said you flipped me off" 

"I don't think so; do you want me to?" 

"Let me tell you something-" 

98 

Using Your Brain 

I said, "Wait just one minute," and went into the store and 

shopped. 

When I came back out, he was still out there! When I walked 

up to my car, he was panting with anger. I picked up a bag of 

groceries and handed it to him, and he took it. I opened the car 

door, put the other three bags in the car, took the bag from him 

and got in the car and closed the door. Then I said, "All right, 

if you insist" flipped the bird at him, and started to drive away. 

As I drove away he burst out laughing hysterically, because 

I simply would not take him seriously. 

For most people, "getting stuck" is wanting something and 

not getting it. Very few people can pause at that point and 

question their certainty that this thing is seriously important to 

them. However, there is another kind of being stuck that no one 

notices: Not wanting something and not having it. That is the 

greatest limitation of all, because you don't even know you're 

stuck, I'd like you to think about something that you now rec- 

ognize is very useful or enjoyable or pleasurable. . . . 

Now go back to an earlier time in your life, when you didn't 

even know about that, or you knew about it but it didn't mean 

anything to you. . . . 

You really didn't know what you were missing, did you? You 

had no idea how you were stuck back there, and you weren't 

motivated to change it. You were certain that your understanding 

was an accurate representation of the world. That's when you're 

really stuck. What are you missing now? . . . 

Certainty probably impedes human progress more than any 

other state of mind. However, certainty, like anything else, is a 

subjective experience that you can change. Pick a fairly detailed 

memory in which you were absolutely certain that you understood 

something. You were in a learning experience; perhaps you were 

being taught. Maybe it was hard, maybe it was easy, but at a 

certain time you got that "Oooh, yes! I understand!" feeling. 

Remember it in as much detail as you need. . . , 

Now I want you to remember all that backwards, just like 

running a movie backwards. . . . 

When you're done, think about whatever it is that you learned 

or understood. Is it the same as it was a few minutes ago? 

Understanding Confusion 99 

Marty: When I played the picture forwards, I went from a 

state of confusion to "Aha! I understand!" And then when I ran 

it backwards, I ended up at the place where I was confused. 

Yes, that's running it backwards. What is your experience 

now, when you think about whatever it is that you were certain 

you understood a few minutes ago? 

Marty: Well, I'm back at the confusion state, and yet part of 

me knows that I still have the understanding that came later. I 

can't create the same total feeling of confusion that I had the first 

time. But I'm not as certain, either. 

How about the rest of you. Is it the same? 

Ben: Well, I learned something new that I don't know that 

I was aware of at the time, about what happened with me in the 

experience. 

Well, that's interesting, but it's not what I asked about. I 

want to know if your experience of what you learned is different. 

Ben: No, there's no difference. 

There's no difference whatsoever? You have to actually stop 

and think about it. You can't just say, "Oh, it's the same." That's 

like saying, "I tried to learn to fly, but I couldn't get out to the 

plane, so it doesn't work." . . . 

Ben: Well, it's funny you mentioned flying, because what I 

remembered was learning the feel of landing on water-the feel 

of that contact with the water. When I ran it backwards, I moved 

out of the feeling of it, and to get the airplane to move backwards 

I had to view it from a distance. And that added a new dimension 

to the learning of the touching on the water. 

It gave you another perspective. Now do you know anything 

more about landing a plane than you did before? 

Ben: Yeah. 

What else don't you know? Yet? That's quite a lot to get 

from just running a movie backwards. A lot of people rerun 

movies forward as a way of learning from experience, but not 

many run them backward. How about the rest of you. Is your 

experience the same? 

Sally: No. The details changed. What I pay attention to 

changed. There's a sequence of things ordered differently. 

100 

Using Your Brain 

The sequence is ordered differently. Now, is what you learned 

different? 

Sally: Yes. 

How is it different? Do you know something that you didn't 

know before? Or could you do something different now? 

Sally: The body of knowledge is not different. What I learned 

isn't different, but how I feel about it, and how I look at it, is 

different. 

Would that influence your behavior? 

Sally: Yes. 

Several of you got quite a lot out of just taking a minute to 

run an experience backwards. How much would you learn if you 

ran all your experiences backwards? You see, Sally is absolutely 

right. Running a movie backwards changes the sequence of ex- 

perience. Think of two experiences: 1) being able to do some- 

thing, and 2) being unable to do the same thing, First sequence 

them 1-2, first, you can, and then can't, do something. . . . Now 

sequence them 2-1, first you can't, and then can, do some- 

thing. . . . Those are pretty different, aren't they? 

The experiences in your life happened to you in a certain 

order. Most of that sequence wasn't planned; it just happened. A 

lot of your understanding is based on that somewhat random 

sequence, Since you have only one sequence, you have only one 

set of understandings, and that will limit you. If the same events 

had happened to you in a different order, your understandings 

would be very different, and you would respond very differently. 

You have a whole personal history that's the wealth that 

you're going to use to go into the future. How you use it will 

determine what it will produce. If you only have one way of using 

it, you'll be very limited. There will be a lot of things you won't 

notice, a lot of places you never go, and a lot of ideas you simply 

won't have. 

Running an experience forwards and backwards are only two 

of the infinite number of ways that you can sequence an experi- 

ence. If you divide a movie into only four parts, there are twenty- 

two other sequences to experience. If you divide it into more 

parts, the number of sequences is even greater, Each sequence 

will yield a different meaning, just as different sequences of letters 

Understanding Confusion 101 

create different words, and different sequences of words create 

different meanings. A lot of the NLP techniques are simply ways 

to change the sequence of experiences. 

I'd like to install in you what I think is one of the most 

important steps in the evolution of your consciousness: be suspi- 

cious of success. Whenever you feel certain, and you succeed at 

a task several times, I want you to become suspicious of what 

you're not noticing. When you have something that works, that 

doesn't mean other things wouldn't work, or that there aren't 

other interesting things to do. 

Years ago some people figured out that you could suck creepy 

gooey black liquid out of the ground and burn it in lamps. Then 

they figured out how to burn it in a big steel box and roll it all 

over the place. You can even burn it in the end of a tube and 

send the tube to the moon. But that doesn't mean there aren't 

other ways to do those things. A hundred years from now people 

are going to look at our "high-tech" economy and shake their 

heads the way we do when we think of ox-carts. 

Real innovation would have been easier right at the begin- 

ning. They could have done really amazing things. What if they 

had said "Boy, this really works! What else will work? What else 

is there to do? What other ways are there to move besides burning 

stuff and spewing it out the end of something? What other ways 

are there to move other than rolling in metal boxes and flying in 

metal tubes?" The more success you have, the more certain you 

become, and the less likely you are to stop and think, "What is 

it that I'm not doing?" The things I'm teaching you work, but I 

want you to think about what else might work even better. 

VII 

Beyond Belief 

Another way to think about behavior is that it's organized 

around some very durable things called "beliefs," Whenever some- 

one says something is important or unimportant to do, it's because 

she has a belief about it. You can think about all behavior as 

being mobilized by the beliefs that we have. For example, you 

probably wouldn't be learning about NLP if you didn't believe 

that it would be interesting, or useful, or somehow valuable. 

Parents wouldn't spend lots of time with their infant children if 

they didn't believe it would make their children turn out better 

later on. Parents used to keep young children from getting too 

much stimulation because they believed it would make them hy- 

peractive; now they give their children lots of stimulation because 

they believe it will aid their intellectual development. 

Beliefs are really phenomenal things. Beliefs can compel 

perfectly nice people to go out and kill other human beings for 

an idea, and even feel good about it, too. As long as you can fit 

a behavior into someone's belief system, you can get him to do 

anything, or stop him from doing anything. That is what I did 

with the father who didn't want his daughter to be a whore. As 

soon as I pointed out that his abusive behavior was exactly the 

way pimps treat whores, he couldn't do it anymore without vio- 

lating his own beliefs. I didn't compel him to stop "against his 

will," whatever that means. I made changing fit into his belief 

system so completely that he couldn't do anything else. 

103 

104 

Using Your Brain 

At the same time, beliefs can change. You're not born with 

them. You all believed things when you were children that you 

now think are silly. And there are things you believe now that 

you didn't even think about before . . . taking this workshop, for 

example. 

The word "belief" is a somewhat vague concept to most 

people, even when they'll gladly go out and kill for one. I'd like 

to demonstrate what beliefs are made of, and then show you a 

way of changing them. I'd like someone to come up here who 

has a belief about yourself that you would like to be different. I 

want you to think of a belief that limits you in some way. Beliefs 

about yourself are usually more useful to change than beliefs 

about the world. So pick one that you think would make a real 

difference to you if it were different. 

Lou: I have one. 

As if the rest of them don't! Don't tell me what that belief 

is. I just want you to think of that belief that you'd rather not 

have. . . . Now set that experience aside for a moment, and think 

of something you're doubtful about. It might be true, or it might 

not be; you're really not sure. . . . 

Next I want you to tell me how those two experiences of 

belief and doubt are different. I want you to do the same thing 

we did earlier with Bill and his understanding and confusion. 

Lou: Well, my belief is a big picture. It's bright, vivid and 

very detailed. Doubt is a much smaller picture. It's dimmer and 

fuzzier, and it kind of flashes on and off. 

OK. Those are pretty clear differences. I can't help noticing 

that belief is straight ahead of you and doubt is up to your right. 

Are there any other differences? 

Lou: Well, belief nearly fills a big frame and there is very 

little room for background. Doubt has a lot of background, and 

there's no frame. 

The next step is to take this list of differences and test one 

of them at a time, in order to find out which of them are most 

powerful in changing belief to doubt. For instance, Lou, take the 

picture of belief, and try making it smaller. . . . 

Lou: That makes it seem a little less real, but it doesn't 

change it very much. 

Beyond Belief 

Belief 

large 

bright and vivid 

detailed 

stable 

straight ahead 

framed 

little background 

Doubt 

small 

dim and drab 

fuzzy 

flashing 

up and right 

no frame 

lots of background 

105 

OK. Bring it back to its original size, and then try removing 

the frame from around the belief picture, so that you can see 

more of the surrounding background. . . . 

Lou: When I do that, the picture automatically gets smaller, 

and it's less impressive. 

OK. So the frame brings size along with it, and has more 

impact than size alone. Change it back to the way it was originally, 

and then change the focus of that belief picture so that it becomes 

fuzzy. . . , 

Lou: That doesn't change it much. 

Change that belief picture back again, and then make it 

dimmer. . . . 

Lou: When I do that it starts flashing on and off, a little bit 

like doubt does. 

So changing the brightness also alters the flashing. Change it 

back again, and then take the belief picture and change its posi- 

tion. Move it from the center of your visual field up to your 

right. . . . 

Lou: That's weird. I feel all kind of floaty, and I can feel my 

heart speed up. When I start to change the position, all the other 

things start changing, too. It gets smaller and dimmer and out of 

focus; the frame fades away and it starts to flash on and off. 

OK. Move that picture back to straight ahead of you. The 

location of the picture changes all other elements, so that is the 

submodality that is most powerful for Lou in moving something 

from belief to doubt. But before we do that, we need to have 

something else to put in its place. Lou, do you know what belief 

you would like to have in place of the belief you now have? 

Lou: Well, I never really thought about that in detail. 

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Using Your Brain 

Start thinking about it now, and be sure you think about it 

in positive terms, not in terms of negations. Think of what you 

do want to believe, not what you don't want to believe. 

I also want you to frame that belief not in terms of an end 

or goal, but in terms of a process or ability that would result in 

your getting that goal. For instance, if you'd like to believe that 

you know NLP, change it so that you believe you can pay atten- 

tion, and learn and respond to feedback in order to learn NLP. 

Lou: OK. I know what I'd like to believe. 

This new belief is stated in positive terms, without negations, 

and it has to do with a process leading to a goal rather than the 

goal itself, right? . . . 

Lou: Yes. 

Good. Now I want you to do what we call an ecology check. 

I want you to take a little time to imagine how you would act 

differently if you already had this new belief, and think of any 

ways in which this change could be a problem for you, or the 

people who are close to you, or the people you work with. . . . 

Lou: I can't think of any way that it could be a problem. 

Good. We'll call that the "new belief." Set it aside for a 

moment. 

Now I want you to take that big picture of the belief you 

don't like and move it all the way over to where your doubt is. 

As you do that, the picture will lose its frame and get dimmer, 

smaller, fuzzier, and start flashing. . . . 

Lou: OK. It's over here now, and it looks just like that other 

doubt picture. 

Good. When it flashes off, have that picture of the old belief 

disappear, and then have the picture of the new belief flash back 

on. . . . 

Lou: OK. The new belief is flashing there now. 

Now take that picture of the new belief and move it back to 

the center of your visual field. As it does this, notice how it 

develops a frame and gets bigger, brighter, sharper, and more 

vivid. . . . 

Lou: This is incredible! It's right there where the old belief 

was. I feel like my whole body just got out of prison, and I can 

feel my cheeks are flushed. 

Beyond Belief 

107 

Right There are a lot of other nice changes going on, too. 

You can take a minute or two to let those changes settle in, while 

I respond to a question or two. 

Man: Why can't you just take the picture of the desired belief 

and change it to make it into a belief-the way we made confusion 

into understanding? 

When you made confusion into understanding, there wasn' t 

any other understanding already there to get in the way. You can 

even have several understandings of the same content without 

their necessarily conflicting with each other. A belief tends to be 

much more universal and categorical than an understanding. When 

you already have a belief, there's no room for a new one unless 

you weaken the old belief first. Typically the new belief is the 

opposite of the old belief, or at least very different in some way. 

Have you ever tried to convince someone of something that is 

the opposite of what he already believes? Usually the existing 

belief will prevent him from even considering the new belief. The 

stronger the belief, the more that will be true 

Think of it this way. Let's say a person believes X is good, 

and you succeeded in installing a new belief "X is bad" without 

changing the old belief. What would you create? . . . What is 

likely to happen if someone fervently believes in two opposing 

ideas?One way to deal with that situation is to become a 

multiple personality. One belief organizes the person in one way 

for a while- then the other belief takes over and reorganizes the 

person in a very different way. That's not what I consider a very 

evolutionary change. 

Woman- I want to ask about the "floaty" feeling that Lou 

reported when you first tried changing the position of the belief 

Well, that kind of response tells me two things. One is that 

I've discovered a submodality change that really makes a profound 

difference in her experience. The other thing it tells me is that 

she doesn't yet have a new belief to put in its place. Have you 

ever had an experience that shattered an old belief, but you didn't 

have a new belief to put in its place? Some people drift in a haze 

for days before they can reorganize. That often happens to a 

person when she gets fired from a job, or a friend or relative 

108Using Your Brain 

dies. I once talked to a man whose college philosophy professor 

shattered a major belief of his. He said he dropped out and went 

around in a fog for over six months. I want to have a new belief 

all "waiting in the wings" before I permanently weaken the old 

belief. 

Now let's come back to Lou, and do a little testing. Lou, is 

that new belief still there? 

Lou: (She looks straight ahead and defocuses her eyes.) Yes. 

I keep checking to make sure. I have a hard time believing that 

it could be so easy to do. 

What happens when you think of the old belief? 

Lou: (She looks up to her left, and then smiles.) It looks 

kind of dried up now. 

It's certainly not where it used to be. This is another way of 

checking what I've done, and of course I pay more attention to 

her nonverbal cues that to her words. Now we have a five-minute 

follow-up. (For information about a videotaped demonstration of 

this Belief Change Pattern, see Appendix IV.) 

I want you all to try out this pattern in groups of three. One 

of you will be programmer, one will be client, and one will be 

an observer/consultant. I'll review all the steps again for you 

before you begin. 

Belief Change Pattern 

A. Information gathering and preparation 

1. Belief: "Think of a belief you have about yourself that 

you wish you didn't have, because it limits you in some way, or 

has undesirable consequences. How do you represent this belief 

in your internal experience?" 

2. Doubt: "Now think of something that you doubt. It might 

be true or might not be: you're not sure. How do you represent 

this doubt in your internal experience?" 

When you ask your partner to think of something she doubts, 

make sure it's something she's unsure of. If she says something 

like, "I doubt that's a good idea," what she may really mean is 

that she believes it's not a good idea. Doubt is when you waver 

Beyond Belief 

109 

from thinking something might be true to thinking it might not 

be true; you just don't know. 

3. Differences: Do a contrastive analysis to find and list the 

submodality differences between Belief and Doubt, just as you 

did before with confusion and understanding. 

4. Testing: Test each submodality on your list of differences 

one at a time to find out which ones are the most powerful in 

changing belief to doubt. After testing one submodality, change 

it back to the way it was originally before testing the next one. 

5. New Belief: "What new belief would you like to have in 

place of the belief that you now have and don't like?" Be sure 

this belief is stated in positive terms, without negations. "I can 

learn to change in response to feedback," rather than "I won't be 

unable to change what I do." 

Also be sure that your partner thinks of the new belief in 

terms of an ability or a process, rather than having already 

achieved a desired goal. "I believe that I can learn to change and 

maintain my weight" is a useful belief. "I weigh 107 pounds" is 

not a very useful belief, especially if she actually weighs 350 

pounds! We want to mobilize new abilities, not install new delu- 

sions. 

You also need to ask the person to check for ecology: "If 

you have this new belief, how could it cause you problems?" 

"How will your husband or your family respond to you differently 

if you have this new belief?" "How will this new belief affect 

your work?" etc. Modify the new belief to take into account any 

possible difficulties. 

Your partner doesn't have to tell you what the new belief is. 

All you need is a word to identify this new content. 

B. Belief Change Process 

6. Belief to Doubt: Keeping the content the same, change 

the unwanted belief to doubt by using one or more of the most 

powerful submodalities you discovered in step 4. For instance, if 

the two most powerful differences were movie to slide, and close 

panorama to distant framed picture, have the panoramic movie 

slow to a still slide as it moves away and becomes a framed 

picture. 

Using Your Brain 

1. Change Content: Using some other submodality, change 

the content from the old unwanted belief to the new desired 

belief. Use something she already does, or any gradual analogue 

method. For example, if she flips pictures back and forth in doubt, 

she can flip from the old content to the new content. You could 

have the old belief picture go off into the distance so far that it's 

impossible to tell what it is, then have it come back with the new 

belief image. You can have the picture get so bright or so dim 

that the old content disappears, and then have it come back with 

the new content, etc. 

8. Doubt to Belief: Keeping the new content, change doubt 

to belief by reversing the same submodality changes you used in 

Step 6. If shifting location to the right changed the old belief to 

doubt, you now shift location back to the left to change the new 

content from doubt to belief. As you do this, be very alert for 

any "resistance," or difficulty that your partner has. If the new 

belief is stated poorly, or has any negations in it, some part of 

the person may object to it. When you encounter objections, 

honor them, gather information, and back up to step 5 to redefine 

the new belief. 

C. Testing 

9. There are several ways to test. You can ask "How do you 

think about this new belief?" Ask for information about submo- 

dalites, and use nonverbal behavior to confirm (or disconfirm) 

the verbal report. 

10. When the new belief is in place, the old belief will 

probably change to the submodalities of disbelief. If you find out 

how the old belief is represented now, you can compare that with 

the submodalities of doubt, which you already know, or with the 

submodalities of disbelief, which you can find out by asking the 

person to think of something else she firmly disbelieves. 

I've often said that good NLP work is 95% information- 

gathering and 5% intervention. The first five steps are setting 

things up for the intervention. That makes it easy to make the 

actual intervention smooth and fast. Remember, brains learn 

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Beyond Belief 

111 

quickly; they don't learn slowly. If you get it all set up ahead of 

time, it's a lot easier to do a good job. It's a little like setting up 

a whole string of dominoes, and then tapping the first one. 

Go ahead and try this pattern now, in groups of three. I 

know some of you have questions; many of those questions will 

be answered by the exercise itself. The questions you still have 

later will be a lot more interesting after you have had some 

experience of actually trying out this pattern. My answers will 

make a lot more sense to you, too. 

Now that you've had some experience trying this, let's take 

some questions and comments. 

Man: When I made the belief change, I had a lot of profound 

internal sensations. It felt as if there were a lot of little fish 

swimming around in my brain and my body, and the two people 

observing saw a lot of visible shifts, too. Is this typical? 

When the belief is a major one, that's a typical report. Core 

beliefs organize a lot of a person's behavior. When you make a 

change in a core belief, you often get a profound internal reor- 

ganization. If it's a more peripheral belief, the changes aren't as 

striking. 

Man: I found it hard to think of a useful belief to change. 

I'd like to hear some content examples of what people changed. 

Woman: I've been struggling and struggling for years to lose 

112Using Your Brain 

the last five pounds to get to the weight I want to be. It's easy 

for me to get close to the weight I want to be, but I've always 

believed I had to struggle and fight to control myself in order to 

lose that last five pounds. So I changed my belief that it was 

hard, to the belief that it will be easy to lose those last five 

pounds. What a relief; I feel so much more relaxed, 

Man: I worked with her on that, and it was really nice to 

watch her go through the change. Her face, her voice, her whole 

body-everything was a lot more relaxed afterwards. 

Woman: I've had a runny nose and I changed the belief that 

I couldn't do anything about it. I was amazed, because I can 

actually feel my nose beginning to dry up. 

Man: I started with the belief that it was dangerous for me 

to drive at night without my glasses. I wanted to change it to the 

belief that I could safely drive without my glasses at night. Then 

my partner pointed out that my desired belief was a goal, and 

that it might be dangerous to change to that belief, I might go 

driving at night thinking I was safe when I wasn't. So we changed 

to the belief that I can learn to drive safely at night without 

glasses. I think I was really working on a much more general 

belief that I couldn't learn, period. I have a sense that this will 

affect much more than just driving at night; it seems much broader 

than that. 

Great. Changing the belief that you can't learn something is 

useful for a lot of people. Many people try something once, don't 

succeed at it, and conclude they can't do it and they can't learn 

to do it. I know a man who "knew" he couldn't play the piano: 

"I sat down at the piano and tried it once, but nothing came of 

it." I start off with the belief that as long as you have most of 

your brain cells intact, anyone can do anything. You may need 

to chunk down the task, or learn to do it differently, and it may 

take you a while to get good at it, but starting with the belief 

that you can learn will take you a long way. My belief may even 

be wrong sometimes, but it makes it possible for me to do things 

and get results that I would never even consider if I assumed 

people were genetically incapable. 

Man: Several people are using firewalking as a way to change 

people's limiting beliefs. Can you comment on that? 

Beyond Belief 

113 

If someone believes they can't do something like firewalking 

and you get them to discover that it's possible, that can certainly 

shatter an old belief, particularly if they're told, "If you can walk 

on fire, you can do anything!" However, there's no way to care- 

fully specify the new belief that gets put in its place. I read about 

one person who went through a firewalk and said, "Now I believe 

that I could be standing right at the explosion of a nuclear 

warhead, and it wouldn't affect me." If he's lucky, he won't ever 

get to test that belief, but it's an example of the kind of junky 

beliefs that can get installed that way. If you install beliefs that 

way, people often put in beliefs that don't relate to evidence or 

feedback. One firewalk teacher is calling himself "the foremost 

NLP trainer," when he hasn't even been certified as a master 

practitioner, much less a trainer! Some of his other beliefs have 

even less evidence for them. 

I know that some people have gotten some very useful belief 

changes from doing the firewalk. Even a stopped clock is right 

twice a day. The problem with firewalking is that you have little 

control over the new belief that takes the place of the old one. 

There are enough bizarre and dangerous beliefs in the world 

without adding to them with a random process. 

Another problem with something like firewalking is that it 

tends to install the belief that it takes a really dramatic external 

event to get you to change. I'd rather install the belief that change 

happens constantly, and easily, and making it work for you is a 

matter of understanding how to run your own brain. It doesn't 

take walking on hot coals to do that. 

There is a completely separate issue of whether firewalking 

is actually something that's difficult to do or not, and whether the 

six hours of evangelistic preparation makes any difference in being 

able to walk on the coals. A reporter from the Rolling Stone 

timed people as they walked across and found a range of 1.5 

seconds to 1.9 seconds, with an average of about 1.7 seconds. 

The length of the walk was about 10 feet, so if you have a 30" 

stride you can easily make it across in 4 steps-two on each foot. 

That gives a maximum of less than half a second of actual contact 

per footstep. Firewalkers make a big deal about the temperature 

of the coals-1,400 to 2,000 degrees-but they don't mention that 

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Using Your Brain 

each foot has only two contacts with the coals lasting less than 

half a second each. When you pick up a hot coal that's landed 

on your carpet to throw it back into the fireplace, your fingers 

probably contact the coal for about that long-and your fingertips 

are much more sensitive than your feet. 

Burning requires heat transfer, not just temperature, and the 

contact time is only one factor in heat transfer. Another factor is 

conductivity. Let's say you're in a cabin in the mountains and you 

get out of bed in the morning when it's 20 degrees below zero, 

and one bare foot lands on a steel plate, while the other lands 

on a sheepskin rug. Even though the rug and the steel are both 

at 20 degrees below, the steel will feel a lot colder than the rug, 

because of it's greater heat conductivity. The conductivity of char- 

coal is greater than sheepskin, but a lot less than steel. Ask the 

next firewalker you meet if he's willing to walk the same length 

on a steel plate that's at the same temperature as those coals! 

There is an additional factor that physicists call the "Leiden- 

frost effect." When there is a significant temperature difference 

between two substances, and the cooler one is a liquid or contains 

liquid, a thin vapor layer forms to create an insulating barrier 

that reduces heat transfer significantly. 

All the evidence I have indicates that a ten foot, 1.5 second 

firewalk is something' anyone can do, with or without evangelistic 

preparation, but very few people think they can do. 

Woman: Some people have beliefs that don't seem to influ- 

ence their behavior much. For instance, I have a boss who always 

talks about how people should be nice to each other, but he's 

usually mean to people himself. How do you explain that? 

I try to understand how things work, not "explain" them. 

There are several possibilities. One is that this belief is not really 

something he believes, even though he talks about it. A lot of 

"intellectuals" have beliefs like that which have no effect on their 

behavior. In that case you could use the belief change pattern to 

make his belief into one that is subjectively real enough to affect 

his behavior. 

Another possibility is that his belief is real enough, but it's 

selective: other people should be nice to him, but he doesn't need 

to be nice to them, because he's special. Kings, dictators, and 

Beyond Belief 

115 

some movie stars are like that. Beliefs aren't always reciprocal. 

A third possibility is that your boss' belief is real, and recip- 

rocal, but what he thinks of as "being nice" seems "mean" to 

you. In the 60's a lot of humanistic psychologists would hug 

everyone too hard because they believed it was a nice thing to 

do, without noticing whether the "huggee" liked it or not. They'd 

also go around insulting people, because they thought it was 

always good to be honest and tell the truth. The crusaders believed 

that saving souls was an important thing to do, and they didn't 

care if it was sometimes necessary to kill the body in order to do 

it. 

The process of changing a belief is relatively easy, as long as 

you have the person's consent. It's a little tougher if the person 

doesn't want to change a belief. I've also presupposed that you 

can identify a belief that's worth changing. Sometimes that's not 

obvious, and it may take some work to determine what someone's 

limiting belief is. Often the belief that the person wants to change 

isn't the one that actually limits his behavior. 

My principal goal here is to teach you a. process that you can 

use to change a belief. However, the content that you put into a 

belief is also important. That's why I asked you to be sure to do 

an ecology check, as well as to state the new belief in terms of a 

process, rather than a goal, and to state it in positive terms. I 

asked you to do this belief change process without knowing the 

content of the new belief, because I know that some of you would 

get lost in the content and have trouble learning the process. 

After you have learned the process thoroughly, you won't be as 

likely to get lost in the content. When you're working with your 

clients, it's a good idea to know something about the content, so 

that you can verify that the new belief is stated in positive terms, 

is a process rather than a goal, and that it's likely to be ecological. 

Beliefs are very powerful things; when you change one it can do 

a lot of good, but if you install the wrong one, it can do a lot of 

harm, too. I want you to be very careful about the kinds of new 

beliefs you go around installing in people. 

VIII 

Learning 

I have always thought it was interesting that when people are 

arguing about a point that doesn't matter, they say "It's academic." 

John Grinder and I were forced to leave teaching at the University 

of California because we were teaching undergraduates to do 

things in their lives. That was the complaint against us. They said 

school was only for teaching people about things. 

When I was an undergraduate, the only courses I did badly 

in were psychology and public speaking. I flunked psychology 1A, 

and I got a "D" in public speaking! How's that for a joke? NLP 

is my revenge. 

In my contacts with educators, I've noticed that the people 

who teach a subject may be very good at it, and know a tot about 

that particular area. However, they usually know very little about 

how they learned it, and even less about how to teach it to 

someone else. I went to a lecture in a beginning chemistry class 

once. The professor walked up in front of 350 people and said, 

"Now I want you to imagine a mirror here, and in front of the 

mirror is a DNA helix molecule, rotating backwards." Some peo- 

ple in the room were going "Ahhh!" They became chemists. Some 

people in the room were going "Huh?" They did not become 

chemists. Some people in the room were going "Urghh!" They 

became therapists! 

That professor had no idea that most people can't visualize 

in the detailed way that he did. That kind of visualization is a 

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Using Your Brain 

prerequisite for a successful career in chemistry, and it is a skill 

that can be taught to people who don't yet know how to visualize 

well. But since that professor presupposed that everyone else 

could already do what he did, he was wasting his time with most 

of the people in his classes. 

Most studies of the learning process have been "objective." 

What NLP does is to explore the subjective experience of the 

processes by which people learn things. "Objective" studies usu- 

ally study people who have the problem; NLP studies the subjec- 

tive experience of people who have the solution. If you study 

dyslexia, you'll learn a lot about dyslexia. But if you want to 

teach kids how to read, it makes sense to study people who can 

read well. 

When we made up the name "Neuro-Linguistic Program- 

ming," a lot of people said, "It sounds like 'mind control,' " as if 

that were something bad. I said "Yes, of course." If you don't 

begin to control and use your own brain, then you have to just 

leave it to chance. That is sort of what our educational system is 

like. They keep the content in front of you for twelve years; if 

you learn it, then they taught it to you. There are a lot of ways 

that the existing educational system is failing, and I'd like to 

discuss several of them. 

"School phobias " 

One of the most pervasive problems is that a lot of kids have 

already had bad experiences in school. Because of this, a certain 

subject, or school in general, becomes a cue that triggers bad 

memories that make a kid feel bad. And in case you haven't 

noticed, people don't learn very much when they're feeling bad. 

If a kid's response is really strong, psychologists even describe it 

as a "school phobia." Feeling bad in response to school situations 

can be changed rapidly by using a number of the techniques we've 

described and demonstrated earlier, but I'd like to show you 

another very simple way to do it. 

How many of you have bad feelings about mathematics 

-fractions, square roots, quadratic equations and stuff like that? 

(He writes a long string of equations on the board and a number 

of people groan or sigh.) 

Learning 

119 

Now close your eyes and think of an experience you had that 

was absolutely marvelous-some situation in which you felt excited 

and curious. . . . 

Now open your eyes for a second or two to look at these 

equations, and then close your eyes and return to that marvelous 

experience. . . . 

Now open your eyes to look at the equations for several 

seconds more, and then return to your exciting experience again. 

Alternate a few more times until those two experiences are thor- 

oughly integrated. . . . 

Now it's time to test. First look away and think of any 

experience that's neutral for you, . . . and then look up here at 

the equations, and notice your response- 

Man: My God, it works! 

This is actually an old NLP method we call "integrating 

anchors." If you want to know more about that, you can read 

Frogs into Princes. Changing most bad responses to school can 

be done that easily and quickly, but you have to know how the 

brain works to be able to do it. (If you want to try this method 

yourself, you will find a page of equations in Appendix VI.) 

A more imaginative way to use the same principle is to always 

connect learning with fun and enjoyment to start with. In most 

schools they have the kids all lined up sitting still in neat, silent 

rows. I always ask, "How long until the kids get to laugh, move, 

and enjoy themselves?" If you connect boredom and discomfort 

with learning, it's no wonder nobody wants to do it. One of the 

great things about computer-assisted education is that computers 

are more fun to be with than most teachers. Computers have 

infinite patience, and never make kids feel bad the way a lot of 

teachers do. 

Remembering 

Another major problem for many kids is remembering the 

stuff they learn in school. A lot of what is called education is 

simply memorizing. This is changing somewhat. Teachers are start- 

ing to realize that the amount of information is so huge, expanding 

so rapidly, and changing so fast, that memorization isn't nearly as 

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Using Your Brain 

important as they used to think. It's much more important now 

to be able to find the facts when you need them, use them, and 

forget them. However, you do have to be able to remember how 

to do that. 

One aspect of memory is similar to what we just discussed: 

Is the memory paired with a pleasant or unpleasant experience? 

In order for someone to remember something, he has to go back 

into the state of consciousness in which the information was 

provided. That's how memory works. If you make someone angry 

or unhappy when you ask him to do something, in order to 

remember it he has to get back into that state. Since he doesn't 

want to feel bad, he is not likely to remember it. This is why 

most of us have total amnesia for 12 or 16 years of education. I 

can't even remember teachers' names let alone most of what I 

was taught or any of the events. But I can remember the last day 

of school! 

What's your name? 

Woman: Lydia. 

You forgot your name tag.1 The only way I can remember 

names is to hallucinate name tags on people. Every time I meet 

people I keep looking at their left breast; people think I'm a 

pervert now. I taught for Xerox once and since everybody had 

Xerox labels on, I kept calling people "Xerox" all day. It's one 

of those things; your brain learns to do it, and once it realizes 

it's of no value it continues anyway. 

Lydia, if you forget your name tag, I'll think that you are 

sneaking into this seminar, and I'll install certain suggestions . . . 

that will stay with you for the rest of your life. If you have a 

name tag, I don't do that. You only get suggestions that stay with 

you for a short period of time. 

Lydia, I'm going to tell you a number: 357. Now I want you 

to forget the number I just told you. . . . Have you forgotten it 

yet? (No.) If you can't forget one number when a number has no 

meaning, how could you forget your name tag, or important 

content in a seminar? Have you forgotten it yet? (No.) Now, how 

is it possible that you can't forget something that has no impor- 

tance? 

Lydia; If we keep talking about it, I'll remember it even 

Learning 

121 

more. It doesn't matter if it is important or not. Especially since 

you are asking me to forget it, I won't forget it. 

That makes sense. . . . Did you see how many people nodded 

when you said that? "Oh yeah, you asked me to forget it, so I 

have to remember it. After all, it has no importance but we are 

talking about it. If you ask me to forget something that has been 

talked about for a long time that isn't important, I have to 

remember it." It's bizarre, isn't it? . . . But she is right. 

It sounds weird, but even though it sounds weird, you know 

she's right. Her saying that is as weird as her doing it. Yet 

psychologists will ignore that as if it has no significance, and go 

on to study things like "oedipal complexes" and many other 

strange things. Psychologists will pass up studying how people 

remember things in favor of studying what "depth" of trance you 

have been in-that's the metaphor where trance is a hole that 

you fall into, and going deeper is of great value. The people who 

talk about "levels of consciousness" disagree; they think it's better 

to go higher, not deeper. 

If I didn't talk about it very long, and talked about it in just 

the right way, she could forget a number with only three digits. 

Lydia can forget her name tag, even though people told her it 

was important. Many of you try to get people to remember things. 

How many of you talk to people about things that are important, 

yet they forget what you said? And you thought it was their fault! 

Remember that when you want someone else to remember some- 

thing. 

Except for torturing rats, probably more psychologists' time 

has gone into studying memory than any other subject. However, 

they've never really gotten at how people do it in terms of 

subjective experience. 

How many of you have trouble remembering telephone num- 

bers? Most of you probably try to do it auditorily, by verbally 

repeating the numbers to yourself. Many of you were taught the 

multiplication tables by auditory recitation. Even when that is 

successful, it's very slow, because you have to recite all those 

words inside to get to the answer. "Nine, seven, three . . . zero, 

four, six, eight"; "Nine times six is fifty-four." For a lot of infor- 

mation it's much more efficient to memorize it visually instead of 

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Using Your Brain 

auditorily: 973-0468, 9 x 6 = 54. When you remember visually, 

the entire picture pops into your mind at once, and you just skip 

to the information you need, and read it or copy it down. A lot 

of kids who are considered "slow learners" are simply remember- 

ing auditorily instead of visually. When you take an hour or two 

to teach them how to do it visually, they learn much more rapidly. 

On the other hand, some people try to remember music by 

making pictures or having feelings, instead of hearing the sounds. 

So it's always a matter of remembering in a way that's appropriate 

to what you want to remember. 

Another good way to have a bad memory is to do something 

totally irrelevant to memorizing the data. If you repeat to yourself, 

"I've got to remember the phone number," then what you will 

remember is that sentence, rather than the phone number! A lot 

of people do something like that, and then wonder why they have 

such "bad memories." Actually their memories are excellent; 

they're just using them to remember idiotic things. 

If you study people who have phenomenal memories, you 

find out that they do some really interesting things. One man 

with an excellent memory puts subtitles under all his pictures. He 

actually prints words on his pictures that describe what the pictures 

are about. That short verbal description codes and categorizes the 

memory, so that it's easy to go back to it. It's like putting a title 

on a movie, so you can glance at the title and know what it's 

about without having to watch the entire movie. In the computer 

business we call that a "drop tag code"-something that is arbi- 

trary but distinctive, that relates to this and also relates to that, 

linking them together. 

We had a woman in a seminar once who was rapidly intro- 

duced to forty-five people by first and last name. That's all it 

took for her to know everyone's name. I've seen Harry Lorayne 

do the same thing with about three hundred people on a TV 

show. When this woman was introduced to someone, she would 

focus on something very distinctive in what she saw-the shape 

of the nose, skin coloring, chin, or whatever she spontaneously 

noticed that was unique about that person. She would continue 

to focus on this distinctive feature as she heard the person's name, 

and that would connect the two together. She even checked herself 

Learning 

123 

quickly by looking away briefly to visualize that unique feature, 

and listen for the name, to make sure the connection had been 

made. I like to have people wear name tags, so I don't have to 

bother to do that. However, it certainly is a useful talent that 

could be taught to salespeople. They often have to deal with many 

people, and it's considered important to remember their names 

and be personally friendly with them. 

If you deal with people mostly over the telephone, this visual 

method won't work. However, you can easily adapt it to the 

auditory system: notice something distinctive about the person's 

voice tone or tempo as you hear the name, and hear the name 

spoken with that distinctive feature. Very visual people might 

prefer to imagine the name visually as they hear it. You can 

always adapt a memory strategy in this way, to make it appropriate 

to the context or the skills of the person who wants to recall 

something. 

If you really want to remember a name, pair it with something 

unique in all three major representational systems: auditory, vis- 

ual, and kinesthetic. While you listen to the sound of the name, 

spoken in his voice tone, you could notice something unique in 

what you see as you look at him, and also what you feel as you 

shake hands. Since that gives you a drop tag code in each major 

system, you will have three different ways to recall the name. 

Another way to have a "good memory" is to be as efficient 

and economical as possible in what you do remember, and to use 

what you have already remembered as much as possible. For 

instance, if you always put your keys in the right front pocket of 

your pants, you only have to remember that once. Someone who 

puts her keys in many different places may have to remember it 

four or five times each day, instead of once in a lifetime. 

One of our students has a couple of businesses and has to 

file a lot of papers and records. Whenever something has to be 

filed, he asks himself, "Where would I look for this when I need 

it," and starts moving toward the file cabinet. As he does this, 

an image of a particular file tab appears in his mind, and he files 

it there. This method uses what he has already remembered to 

organize his files, so he seldom has to remember anything new. 

Each time he files this item he strengthens the existing connection 

124 

Using Your Brain 

between it and the file tab, making the system more dependable 

each time. 

One way of thinking about these two examples is that they 

create a situation in which you have to remember as little as 

possible. Here's another example. Take a look at the set of num- 

bers below for a few moments, and then look away and see how 

much of it you can remember. . . . 

149162536496481100 

Now look at it long enough so that you can still remember 

it when you look away. . . . 

If you have actually tried this, you probably started to group 

the numbers into twos or threes to organize the task and make 

remembering easier: 

14,91,62,53,64,96,48,11,00 

or 

149,162,536,496,481,100 

This is a process we call "chunking": breaking a large task 

down into smaller, more manageable, pieces. In business there's 

an old joke, "How do you eat an elephant?" The answer is, "One 

bite at a time." 

At this point, how long do you think you could remember 

this number accurately?-an hour?-a day?-a week? 

Now let's chunk the number a little differently. Does this 

suggest anything to you? 

1 4 9 16 25 36 49 64 81 100 

We can write this same set of numbers a little differently, as 

squares of numbers: 12 22 32 42 52 62 72 82 92 102 

Now it's obvious that the number we started with is the 

squares of the numbers 1 through 10, strung together. Knowing 

this, you can easily remember this number ten or twenty years 

from now. What makes it so easy? You have much less to remem- 

ber, and it's all coded in terms of things that you have already 

remembered. This is what math and science is all about-coding 

Learning 

125 

the world efficiently and elegantly, so that you have fewer things 

to remember, leaving your brain free to do other things that are 

more fun and interesting. 

Those are just a few of the principles that can make remem- 

bering a lot easier and faster. Unfortunately they're not yet used 

much in mainstream education. 

"Learning Disabilities " 

One of the nice things that happens after you write enough 

books is that people let you do things that you wanted to do 

before, but couldn't. Typically by that time you can't quite re- 

member what they were, but I had written some of them down. 

When I was asked to work for a school district, I had a few things 

I wanted to go after. One of them is the whole notion of "learning 

disabilities," "minimal brain dysfunction," "dyslexia," or "educa- 

tional handicaps." Those are very important-sounding words, but 

what they all describe is that the teaching isn't working. 

Whenever a kid isn't learning, experts are quick to conclude 

that the problem is a "learning disability," . . . but they're never 

quite clear about who has it! Perhaps you've noticed that they 

never call it a "teaching disability." The implication is always that 

the cause of the failure is that the kid's brain is weak or damaged, 

often by presumed genetic causes. When people don't know how 

to change something, they often start searching for a way to 

justify failure, rather than thinking about how they could try 

doing something different to make it work. If you assume that a 

kid has a limp learning lobe, then there's nothing you can do 

about it until they perfect brain grafts. 

I'd rather not explain failure that way. I'd rather think about 

it as a "teaching dysfunction," and at least leave open the possi- 

bility that we can learn to change it. If we pretend that you can 

teach anyone anything, we'll find out where it's not (yet) true. 

But if we think that when someone isn't learning it means they 

can't be taught, no one will even try. 

In the last century it was common knowledge that man 

couldn't fly. Then when airplanes became a part of everyday life, 

most people didn't think it was possible to put a man on the 

126Using Your Brain 

moon. If you take the attitude that anything is possible, you'll 

find that a lot of things that were previously thought impossible 

actually do become possible. 

The whole idea of "learning disabilities" is based primarily 

on old neurological "ablation" studies that resulted from a fairly 

primitive idea of how the brain works: that you can figure out 

what something does by noticing what happens when it's broken. 

They would find damage in one part of the brain of someone 

who couldn't talk, and say, "That's where speech is." That is the 

same logic as cutting a wire in a television set, noticing that the 

picture tilts, and saying, "That wire is where the picture straight- 

ness is." There are thousands of wires, connections, and transistors 

involved in holding the picture straight, in a very complex and 

interdependent system, and the brain is a lot more complex than 

a TV set. For some of the more primitive areas of the brain there 

actually is a certain degree of localization of function. However, 

it's also been known for years that a young child can lose an 

entire cerebral hemisphere and learn everything all over again 

perfectly on the other side. 

Recent evidence is throwing out a lot of old neurological 

dogma. In an X-Ray Tomography study they found a college 

graduate with an 10 of 120 who had such enlarged brain ventricles 

that his cortex was only about a centimeter thick! Most of his 

skull was filled with fluid, and according to dogma, he shouldn't 

have been able to get up in the morning, let alone go to college! 

Another old dogma is that in vertebrates no new neurons are 

formed after birth. Last year they found that the number of 

neurons in the part of a male canary's brain devoted to singing 

doubles each spring, and then half of them die off during the rest 

of the year. 

In another study they found that if you remove a monkey's 

finger, the part of the brain that used to serve the missing finger 

gets used by the neighboring fingers within a few weeks, and this 

makes the remaining fingers more sensitive than before. All recent 

information points to the brain being much more flexible and 

adaptive than we used to think it was. 

I never liked the idea of children being "educationally hand- 

icapped," because I never thought that reading was primarily 

Learning 

127 

genetic. A child can learn to talk in three years, even in the 

jungle without Ph.D. parents! Why should it take ten more years 

to teach him to read the same thing he already knows how to 

say? Kids in ghettos can learn three languages at once, and they 

can learn to write all kinds of things in secret codes. But the way 

things are taught in schools produces a situation in which some 

kids aren't learning to read. Some of you may remember classes 

where you didn't learn much because of the atrocious way the 

material was presented. 

Learning to read is really not that difficult. All you have to 

do is connect the picture of the word with the sound of the word 

that you already know. If you know the spoken word, you have 

already connected that sound with an experience of what that 

word means. When you were a child, you probably learned pretty 

early that the sound "cat" meant a soft furry little moving thing 

with claws that meows. The way you do that in your brain is to 

hear the word "cat" at the same time that you recall your expe- 

rience of the sight, sound, and feeling of a cat. Then if someone 

says the word, that experience is there in your mind, and if you 

see, hear, or feel a cat, the sound of the word is there. All reading 

does is to add a picture of the word into what you already know. 

When you see the word "dog," you get a different sound and 

picture in your mind than when you see the word "cat." 

Now that seems pretty simple, and it is. Yet there is an 

enormous amount of claptrap written about reading problems, 

and a huge amount of effort goes into trying to solve reading 

problems. In contrast, there is an NLP-trained group in Denver 

(see Appendix V) that works with all kinds of educational prob- 

lems. They will guarantee to raise a kid's reading level, as mea- 

sured by standard tests, by a minimum of one grade level in a 

set of eight one-hour sessions. Usually they can make much more 

progress in a shorter time. In the last three years they have only 

had to pay off on their guarantee once. Their only prerequisite is 

that the kid has muscular stability in using his eyes, so he can 

see what he's trying to read. 

Drugs 

One of the other things I wanted to go after in the school 

128Using Your Brain 

system is the widespread practice of prescribing drugs like Ritalin 

for "hyperactive" kids who have trouble sitting quietly in rows 

for long periods of time, Ritalin slows them down so the teacher 

can keep up with them. Giving these kids drugs is always defended 

by saying that the drugs are harmless. One of the interesting 

things about Ritalin is that although it slows down hyperactive 

kids, its effect on adults is more like an amphetamine: it speeds 

them up. 

So when I talked to this school district I said, "This Ritalin 

that you're giving the kids slows them down, but it speeds up 

adults, right? And you're all convinced that it's perfectly safe, 

and has no harmful side effects, right? Good. I have a proposal 

that will save you a lot of money. Stop giving it to the kids, and 

give it to the teachers, so that they can speed up and keep up 

with the kids." They were boxed in with their own logic, but they 

still didn't like it. Try suggesting that at your school and find out 

how many of those "learning disabled teachers" are willing to 

take a "perfectly harmless drug." The same thing happens with 

psychiatrists; they almost never prescribe psychoactive drugs for 

other psychiatrists when they're hospitalized! After thirty years of 

prescribing phenothiazine drugs, now they've found it causes 

something called "Tardive Dyskinesia" later in life. It affects your 

muscles so you shake all over and have trouble walking or picking 

up a teacup. 

Woman: I'm a teacher, and just last week I was in a staff 

conference with a diagnostician, a nurse, and another teacher. 

The nurse said, "I think we should prescribe drugs for this kid," 

and the others nodded their heads. I got really angry, and said, 

"I can't believe that with all the focus on drug abuse you're 

recommending that this kid take drugs! How would you like to 

take drugs?" The diagnostician said, "I take drugs every night to 

calm down." And the other teacher said, "So do I." And the 

nurse said, "I take Valium every day." I couldn't believe it, and 

I was so shocked I didn't know what to say. 

Well, taking drugs yourself is a lot different than forcing them 

on someone else. I think people should choose their own drugs. 

What's really sad is that most of the problems people are pre- 

scribing drugs for can be changed so easily using NLP. Any NLP 

Learning 

129 

practitioner should be able to fix a school phobia in half an hour, 

and most bad spellers can be made into good spellers in an hour 

or two. 

However, you have to be a little careful now. NLP is starting 

to get well known, and a lot of unqualified people are claiming 

to have NLP training. There are even a few people claiming to 

be "the foremost NLP trainer" who have only gone through one 

training! That's the kind of thing that happens whenever some- 

thing effective starts to get known, so be a little cautious and ask 

a few questions of anybody who claims to be trained in NLP. 

Some good NLP people are going back into special education 

classes and wantonly wiping out all kinds of learning problems 

right and left. When you know how to find out how someone's 

brain works, it's relatively easy to teach him how to use it in a 

way that's more effective and efficient. 

The capacity for learning is really actualized not when some- 

body inundates you with the content, but when someone can teach 

you the mechanism by which it can be done: the subjective 

structures and sequences that are necessary for learning. 

IX 

The Swish 

The next submodality pattern I want to teach you can be 

used for almost anything. It's a very generative pattern that pro- 

grams your brain to go in a new direction. In order to make the 

pattern easy for you to learn, I'm going to start with something 

really simple and easy. A lot of people are interested in something 

called "habit control." Who in here bites his nails and would like 

not to? (Jack steps up to the platform.) I'm going to use this 

pattern to get Jack to do something else instead of bite his nails. 

What do you see just before you bite your nails? 

Jack: I don't know. I don't usually realize I'm doing it until 

I've done it for a while. 

That's true of most habits. You're on "automatic pilot," and 

later on, when it's too late to do anything about it, you notice it 

and feel bad. Do you know when or where you typically bite 

your nails? 

Jack: It's usually when I'm reading a book or watching a 

movie. 

OK. I want you to imagine that you're watching a movie, 

and actually bring one of your hands up as if you were going to 

bite your nails. I want you to notice what you see as your hand 

comes up, knowing that you're about to bite your nails. 

Jack: OK. I can see what my hand looks like as it comes up. 

Good. We'll use that picture in a few minutes, but just set it 

aside for now. We need to get another picture first. Jack, if you 

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132 

Using Your Brain 

no longer bit your nails, how would you see yourself as being 

different? I don't mean just that you would see yourself with 

longer fingernails. What would be the value of changing this 

habit? What difference would it make to you as a person? What 

would it mean about you? I don't want you to tell me the answers; 

I want you to answer by creating a picture of the you that you 

would be if you no longer had this habit. 

Jack: OK. I've got it. 

Now I want you to get that first picture of your hand coming 

up, and make it big and bright, . . . and in the lower right corner 

of that picture put a small, dark image of how you would see 

yourself differently if you no longer had this habit. • . . 

Now I want you to do what I call "the swish." I want you to 

make the small dark image quickly get bigger and brighter until 

it covers the old picture of your hand, which will simultaneously 

get dim and shrink. I want you to do this really fast, in less than 

a second. As soon as you've "swished" these images, either blank 

the screen completely, or open your eyes and look around. Then 

go back inside and do it again, starting with that big bright picture 

of your hand coming up, and the small dark image of yourself in 

the corner. Do it a total of five times. Be sure to blank the screen 

or open your eyes at the end each time you do it. . . . 

Now it's time to test. Jack, make that big bright image of 

your hand coming up and tell me what happens. . . . 

Jack: Well, it's hard to hold it there. It fades out, and that 

other picture comes in. 

The swish pattern directionalizes the brain. Human beings 

have a tendency to avoid unpleasantness and move towards pleas- 

antness. First there is a big bright image of the cue for the 

behavior that he doesn't like. As that picture fades and shrinks, 

the unpleasantness diminishes. As the pleasant image gets bigger 

and brighter, it draws him toward it. It literally sets up a direction 

for his mind to go: "from here, go there." When you directionalize 

your mind, your behavior has a very strong tendency to go in the 

same direction. 

Jack, I want you to do something else. Bring your hand up 

to your mouth the way you did when you bit your nails, (Jack 

The Swish133 

brings his hand up. Just before it reaches his mouth, it stops and 

then lowers about half an inch.) 

Well, what happened? 

Jack: I don't know. My hand came up, but then it stopped. 

I wanted to put my hand down, but I deliberately held it up 

there, because you asked me to. 

This is a behaviorial test. The behavior that used to lead to 

nail-biting now leads somewhere else. It's just as automatic as 

what he did before, but it takes him somewhere he likes better. 

This will translate out into experience. As that hand comes 

up and that compulsion begins in you, the feeling itself will 

literally pull you in the other direction. It will become a new 

compulsion. It's not really that you get uncompulsed, it's that you 

get compulsed to be more of who you want to be. 

I did this pattern with a chocolate freak who kept saying she 

wanted to be "free." She didn't want to be compulsed because it 

didn't fit with the way she saw herself. After she was done, she 

couldn't hold a picture of chocolates. It just went "poof." Now 

when she looks at real chocolate, she doesn't have the old re- 

sponse. The direction of her thoughts is toward being attracted 

to what she wants to be. It's a new compulsion. You could call 

this pattern "trade compulsions." I said to her, "Now you're really 

stuck. You're compulsed to not be able to make these pictures," 

and she said, "I don't care." She doesn't really object to being 

compulsed; she just wants to be compulsed in her own way. That's 

really the difference that makes a difference. 

The swish pattern has a more powerful effect than any other 

technique I've used. In a recent seminar there was a woman in 

the front row moaning and groaning about having tried to quit 

smoking for eleven years. I changed her in less than eleven min- 

utes. I even chose what to put in the little dark corner picture; 

I'm not what people call a "non-directive clinician.1 I told her to 

see an image of herself politely enjoying other people smoking. 

I wasn't willing to create another evangelist convert. I didn't want 

her to see herself sneering at smokers and making life miserable 

for them. 

Now I want you all to pair up and try this pattern. First I'll 

go through the instructions again. 

Using Your Brain 

The Swish Pattern 

1. Identify context. "First identify where you are broken or 

stuck. Where or when would you like to behave or respond 

differently than you do now? You could pick something like nail- 

biting, or you might pick something like getting angry at your 

husband." 

2. Identify cue picture. "Now I want you to identify what you 

actually see in that situation just before you start doing the 

behavior you don't like. Since many people are on 'automatic 

pilot' at that time, it may help to actually do whatever has to 

precede the behavior, so you can see what that looks like." This 

is what I did with Jack. I had him move his hand toward his face 

and use that image. Since this is the cue for some response that 

the person doesn't like, there should be at least some unpleas- 

antness associated with this picture. The more unpleasant this is, 

the better it will work. 

3. Create outcome picture. "Now create a second image of 

how you would see yourself differently if you had already accom- 

plished the desired change. I want you to keep adjusting this image 

until you have one that is really attractive to you-one that draws 

you strongly." As your partner makes this image, I want you to 

notice her response, to be sure it's something that she really likes 

and really attracts her. I want her to have a glow on her face that 

tells you that what she's picturing is really worth going for. If you 

can't see evidence that it's worth going after as you watch her, 

don't give it to her. 

4. Swish. "Now 'swish' these two pictures. Start with seeing 

that cue picture, big and bright. Then put a small, dark image of 

the outcome picture in the lower right corner. The small dark 

image will grow big and bright and cover the first picture, which 

will get dim and shrink away as fast as you can say 'swish.' Then 

blank out the screen, or open your eyes. Swish it again a total of 

five times. Be sure to blank the screen at the end of each swish." 

5. Test. 

a. "Now picture that first image. . . . What happens?" If 

the swish has been effective, this will be hard to do. The picture 

will tend to fade away and be replaced by the second image of 

yourself as you want to be. 

134 

The Swish 

135 

b. Another way to test is behavioral: Find a way to create 

the cues that are represented in your partner's cue picture. If that 

picture is of your partner's own behavior, as it was with Jack, ask 

him to actually do it. If that picture is of someone else offering 

a chocolate or a cigarette, or yelling, then I want you to do that 

with your partner and observe what she does and how she re- 

sponds. 

If the old behavior is still there when you test, back up and 

do the swish pattern again. See if you can figure out what you 

left out, or what else you can do to make this process work. I'm 

teaching you a very simple version of a much more general 

pattern. I know that some of you have questions, but I want you 

to try doing this first before asking them. After you've actually 

tried it, your questions will be much more interesting. Take about 

fifteen minutes each. Go ahead. 

As I went around the room, I observed many of you suc- 

ceeding. Let's not talk about that unless you had difficulty and 

then came up with something interesting that made it work. I 

want to hear about when it didn't work. 

Amy: I want to stop smoking. But when we tested, I still 

have the urge to smoke. 

136 

Using Your Brain 

OK. Describe your first picture for me. 

Amy: I see myself with a cigarette in my mouth, and- 

Stop. It's very important that you don't see yourself in that 

first picture, and that you do see yourself in the second picture. 

That's an essential part of what makes the swish work. The first 

picture has to be an associated image of what you see out of your 

own eyes as you start to smoke-your hand reaching for a ciga- 

rette, for instance. If you see your hand with a cigarette in it, do 

you feel compulsed to smoke? Or is it seeing the cigarettes? 

Whatever it is, I want you to make a picture of what you see that 

fires off that feeling of wanting to smoke; make a picture of 

whatever precedes smoking. It might be reaching for a cigarette, 

lighting it, bringing it up to your lips, or whatever else you do. 

Try the process with that picture, and report back. 

Man: Which book has this process in it? 

None. Why would I teach you something that is already in a 

book? You're adults; you can read, I have always thought it was 

really idiotic for someone to write a book and then to go and 

read it to people at seminars. But a lot of people do exactly that, 

and some of them make a lot of money, so I guess it has some 

use. 

Woman: In a lot of the earlier NLP techniques you substitute 

a specific new behavior. But in this one you just see the way 

you'd be different if you changed. 

That's right. That's what makes this pattern so generative. 

Rather than substituting a specific behavior, you're creating a 

direction. You're using what's often called "self-image," a very 

powerful motivator, to set that direction. 

When I was in Toronto in January, a woman said she had a 

phobia of worms. Since Toronto is frozen over most of the year, 

I didn't think that would be too much of a problem, so I said, 

"Well, why don't you just avoid them?" She said "Well, it just 

doesn't fit with the way I see myself." That mismatch motivated 

her very strongly, even though the worm phobia wasn't actually 

that much of a problem for her. It wasn't even what I call a 

"flaming phobia." It was an "ahhh!" phobia, rather than an 

"AAHHGGH!" phobia. She didn't yet have her brain direction- 

alized appropriately, but that image of herself kept her trying. So 

The Swish 

137 

of course I asked her "If you made this change, how would you 

see yourself differently?" The effectiveness of this pattern depends 

most importantly on getting the answer to that question. This 

process doesn't get you to an endpoint-it propels you in a 

particular direction. If you saw yourself doing something in par- 

ticular, you would only program in that one new choice. If you 

see yourself being a person with different qualities, that new 

person can generate many new specific possibilities. Once you set 

that direction, the person will start generating specific behavior 

faster than you can believe. 

If I had used the standard phobia cure on her, she wouldn't 

care about worms at all, and wouldn't even notice them. To get 

somebody to not care about something is too easy, and there is 

enough of that going on in the world already. If I had built in a 

specific behavior, like picking up worms, then she'd be able to 

pick up worms. Neither of those changes are particularly profound 

in terms of this woman's personal evolution. It seems to me that 

there are more interesting changes that a human being can make. 

When I swished her, I set up a direction so that she is drawn 

toward that image of herself as more competent, happier, more 

capable, liking herself better, and most important, able to believe 

that she can quickly make changes in the way she wants to. 

Woman: I think I understand that, but I'm trying to fit it in 

with some of the NLP anchoring techniques I learned earlier. For 

instance, there's a technique where you make a picture of how 

you'd like to be, then step into it to get the kinesthetic feelings, 

and then anchor that state. 

Right. That's one of the old techniques. It has its uses, but 

it also has certain drawbacks. If someone has a really detailed 

and accurate internal representation, you can create a specific 

behavior that will work very nicely. But if you just make a picture 

of what you'd like to be like, and step inside it to feel what it's 

like to be there, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are there 

with any quality, or that you learned much along the way. It's an 

excellent way to build self-delusions, and it also doesn't give you 

anywhere else to go. 

A lot of people go to therapists asking to feel more confident, 

when they're incompetent. That lack of confidence may be ac- 

138 

Using Your Brain 

curate feedback about their abilities. If you use anchoring to make 

someone feel confident, that feeling may allow her to do things 

she actually could do already but wasn't confident enough to try. 

That will increase her abilities as well. But it may only create 

overconfidence-someone who is still incompetent but doesn't no- 

tice it any more! There are plenty of people like that around 

already, and they're often dangerous to others as well as to 

themselves. I've been commenting for years about how many 

people ask a therapist for confidence, and so few ask for com- 

petence. 

You can change somebody so that he believes he's the very 

best at something he does, when he can't do it very well at all. 

When a person is good at acting confident, he usually convinces 

lots of other people to trust in abilities that he doesn't have. It 

never ceases to amaze me how many people think that if an 

"expert" acts confident, he must know what he is doing. I figure 

that as long as you are going to have a false sense of security, 

you might as well develop some competence along the way. 

Where's Amy? Did you finish doing the swish with the new 

picture? 

Amy: Yes. 

How long did it take you to do that five times? 

Amy: Quite a while. 

I thought so. I want you to do it again faster. It should only 

take you a second or two each time. Speed is also a very important 

element of this pattern. Brains don't learn slowly, they learn fast. 

I'm not going to let you do the process wrong and then come 

back later and say, "Oh, it didn't work." Do it now, and I'll watch 

you. Open your eyes after each swish. . . , 

Now make that first picture. What happens? . . . 

Amy: It goes away now. 

Do you want a cigarette? (He holds out a pack of cigarettes.) 

Amy: No thank you. 

Is the compulsion there? I don't care if you smoke or not. I 

want to know if that automatic urge is there or not. A few minutes 

ago you said you had the urge to smoke. 

Amy: I don't feel compelled to smoke right now. 

Here. Hold the cigarettes; take one out and hold it between 

The Swish 

139 

your fingers. Look at them; fool with them. 

When you do change work, don't back away from testing it; 

push it. Events in the world are going to push it, so you may as 

well do it so you can find out right away. That way you can do 

something about it. Observing your client's nonverbal responses 

will give you much more information than the verbal answers to 

your questions. (Amy smells the cigarettes, and her facial expres- 

sion shifts quickly.) Oops, there it is again; the smell of the 

cigarettes brought back the compulsion. You'll have to go back 

and do the swish again, and add in smell this time. In that first 

picture, when you see someone offer you a cigarette, you'll smell 

that cigarette smell. And in that second picture, you'll see yourself 

satisfied that you can smell cigarettes and not be compulsed. Go 

back and do it again that way. 

This is called being thorough. A mathematician doesn't just 

get an answer and say, "OK, I'm done." He tests his answers 

carefully, because if he doesn't, other mathematicians will! That 

kind of rigor has always been missing from therapy and education. 

People try something and then do a two-year follow-up study to 

find out if it worked or not. If you test rigorously, you can find 

out what a technique works for and what it doesn't work for, and 

you can find out right away. And where you find out that it 

doesn't work, you need to try some other technology. 

What I've taught you here is a simplified version of a more 

general swish pattern. Even so, some of you got lost and confused. 

Another way to be thorough is to swish in all systems to start 

with. But it's usually much more economical to just do it in the 

visual system and then test rigorously to find out what else you 

need to add. Often you don't need to add in anything. Either 

that person doesn't need it, or she will add it in on her own 

without realizing it. 

Amy, what happens now when you smell a cigarette? 

Amy: It's different. It's hard for me to say how it's different. 

Now when I smell it I want to put it down, instead of smoking 

it. 

Brains don't learn to get results; they learn to go in directions. 

Amy had learned one set of behaviors; "Would you like a ciga- 

rette"-"Yes"-light up and puff. Chairs can't learn to do that 

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Using Your Brain 

It's quite an accomplishment to learn something like that so 

thoroughly that no one could influence it for years. She has just 

used that same ability to learn to go somewhere else. 

When you start beginning to use your brain to get it to do 

what you want it to do, you have to rigorously set up the direction 

you want it to go, and you need to do it ahead of time. Disap- 

pointment is not the only thing that requires adequate planning. 

Everything else does, too. Without adequate planning you become 

compulsed to do things you don't want to do: to show yourself 

old memories and feel bad about them, to do things that destroy 

your body, to yell at people you love, to act like a mouse when 

you're furious. • . . 

All those things can be changed, but not while you're in the 

situation. You can reprogram yourself later, or you can program 

yourself ahead of time. Brains aren't designed to get results; they 

learn to go in directions. If you know how the brain works, you 

can set your own directions. If you don't, then someone else will. 

What I've just taught you is what I often do in a one-day or 

two-day seminar. The "standard" swish pattern is something that 

somebody can grab hold of and use, and it will work more often 

than not. But it doesn't demonstrate to me any competent un- 

derstanding of what the underlying pattern is. If you give anyone 

a cookbook, he can bake a cake. But if you give a chef a 

cookbook, he'll come up with a better product. A really fine chef 

knows things about the chemistry of cooking that guide what he 

does and how he does it. He knows what the egg whites are doing 

in there; he know what their function is. To a chef, it isn't just a 

matter of throwing a bunch of stuff together and whipping it up. 

He knows that certain things make things gel into a certain 

consistency, certain things have to be added in a particular order, 

and certain other ingredients have to do with changing the flavor 

in one way or another. 

The same thing is true when you begin to use the swish 

pattern. As a first step toward becoming a chef, I want you to 

try using the swish pattern again, but find out what happens if 

you change one element. Last time we used the submodalities of 

size, brightness and association/dissociation as the elements that 

change as one picture swishes to the other. 

The Swish 

141 

Two of those elements, size and brightness, are elements that 

change continuously over a range. Anything that can be changed 

gradually is called an analogue variable. Association/dissociation 

is what we call a digital variable, because it's either one or the 

other. You are either inside of an experience, or outside of it; 

you don't gradually go from one to the other. Association/disso- 

ciation will always be one element of the swish. The other two 

analogue elements can be any two elements that have a powerful 

effect for the person. 

This time I want you to keep everything the same, except 

you'll use distance instead of size. The first picture will start out 

bright and close. The second picture will start out dark and far 

away, and then it will quickly come closer as it brightens, while 

the first picture recedes into the distance and darkens. This is a 

fairly small change, and to some of you it may not seem different 

at all, since size and closeness are strongly correlated. But it is a 

first step toward teaching you how to use the swish pattern in a 

much more general and flexible way. Take another fifteen minutes 

to do the swish with distance, instead of size. 

Did using distance rather than size make a difference for 

some of you? You can use any submodality distinctions to do the 

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Using Your Brain 

swish, but it will only work well if the distinctions you use are 

subjectively powerful to the person you are working with. Bright- 

ness and size are powerful for most people, so the version I taught 

you first will work more often than not. Distance is another 

submodality that is important to many people, so I had you try 

that one next. But if size, brightness, and distance aren't important 

to the person, then you have to find out which submodalities are 

impactful, and design a swish using those. 

A couple of years ago I saw three clients for a videotape 

session (see Appendix II). The first client I saw was a woman 

who was suffering from "anticipatory loss." I love the names they 

come up with to describe how people are messed up! What it 

boiled down to was that if she had arranged to meet someone 

who was close to her and that person was a half-hour late, she 

had what she called a panic attack. She lost her marbles and 

began to step on them. When I asked her what she would like to 

have from the session, this is what she said: 

I have a problem with a fear that is almost disabling 

to me at certain times. When I have it, I sort of go into 

panic attacks. What I would like to do is distance myself, 

so that when I'm in the situation I wouldn't experience 

the fear to the degree that I have it, where I could 

control myself and make better decisions. 

Since she talked about wanting to "distance" herself, she gave 

me a clear indication that distance was an important submodality 

for her. She also talked a lot about people who were "close to 

her" and "close relationships." Later when talking about what she 

did when someone was late she said, "I need to allow them some 

distance-I mean allow them some time." With this woman a 

swish using distance will be much more powerful than one using 

size. In fact, I went ahead and tried the standard swish using size 

to find out if it would work. It had very little impact. Then I 

used distance, and it worked perfectly. 

The most important part of doing the swish in a really artistic 

way is to carefully gather the information you need to set it up 

appropriately. When someone talks about something being "bigger 

The Swish 

143 

than life" or being "blown out of proportion," that's a pretty 

good indication that size is an important variable to use. 

When somebody describes a limitation he wants to change, 

you need to be able to pay attention to how this particular problem 

works. I always keep in mind that anything that anybody has 

done is an achievement, no matter how futile or painful it may 

be. People aren't broken; they work perfectly! The important ques- 

tion is, "How do they work now?" so that you can help them 

work perfectly in a way that is more pleasant and useful. 

One of the things I do to gather information is to say to the 

client, "Well, let's say I had to fill in for you for a day. One of 

the things I would have to do is have your limitation. How would 

I do it? You have to teach me how to have this problem." As I 

begin to presuppose that it's an achievement-something learned 

that can be taught to someone else-it entirely changes the way 

the person is able to deal with and think about the difficulty. 

When I asked the woman who panicked when people were 

late to teach me how to do it, she said: 

You start telling yourself sentences like, "They're 

late; they may never come." 

Do you say this in a bored tone of voice-"Ho 

hum"? 

No. The voice starts out slowly, "Give them another 

half hour." Then it speeds up as the time gets closer. 

Do you have any pictures in there? 

Yes. 1 see a picture of the person maybe in a wreck, 

as if I'm standing there looking on, like through a zoom 

lens. At other times I'm looking around through my own 

eyes out at the world and there's no one there. 

So in her case she has a voice that speeds up and rises in 

pitch as time goes on. At a certain point the voice says, "They'll 

never come" and she makes close-up, zoom-lens pictures of the 

person in a wreck, or of being all alone. 

When I asked her to try making the picture of the wreck, I 

found that zooming in or out had a very strong effect. When I 

tested brightness, she said, "The dimness creates distance." That 

144Using Your Brain 

tells me that brightness is also a factor. 

Now I want you to pair up with someone and ask him to 

think of a limitation-something that he considers a problem and 

wants to change. This time I don't want you to fix it; I only want 

you to find out how this achievement works. Use the frame of 

"Let's say I had to fill in for you for a day. Teach me what to 

do." Do the same thing you did earlier when you found out how 

a person got motivated to do something. 

Whenever someone is compulsed to do something he doesn't 

want to do, something inside has to amplify to a certain point. 

Something has to get bigger or brighter or louder, or the tone 

changes, or the tempo speeds up or slows down. I want you to 

find out how this person achieves this particular limitation. First 

ask him when to do it, and then find out how he does it: what 

does he do on the inside that drives his response? When you 

think you have identified the crucial submodalities, test by asking 

your partner to vary them one at a time, and observe how it 

changes his response. Then ask him to take a different picture 

and again vary the same submodalities, to see if it changes his 

response to this other picture in the same way. Find out enough 

about how it works so that you could do this person's limitation 

if you wanted to. When you have this information, it will tell you 

precisely how to swish this particular individual. Don't actually 

swish them; just gather the information. Take about a half hour. 

The Swish 

145 

Man: My partner has two pictures representing two different 

states: desirable and undesirable. In one of them he sees jerky 

movement, and in the other one the movements are smooth and 

graceful, 

OK. Do these two pictures create and maintain whatever he 

considered to be the difficulty? That was my question. I didn't 

ask about where the person wants to go yet: I only asked how he 

creates the difficulty. With the woman with panic attacks, she has 

to get from the state of "Ho, hum" to the state of "freaking out." 

She starts with a voice and pictures. Then she has to make the 

voice get faster and higher-pitched, and the picture gets closer 

and closer as time runs out. 

Man: My partner has a feeling of urgency- 

Of course. That's the feeling of compulsion. But how does 

he make that feeling? What is the critical submodality? In essence, 

what you want to know is, "How does this person already swish 

himself from one state of consciousness to another?" 

Man: What makes it different for him is wrapping the picture 

around him. He pulls it in and around himself and steps into the 

picture and looks at the picture from his own eyes. 

OK. Good. That's how he gets into the state he doesn't want 

to be in. 

Man: Yes. He first gets into that state, and then dissociates 

by stepping out of it, putting it back over here to his left, away 

from him, and stands at a distance of several feet away from it, 

OK. So association/dissociation is the critical submodality 

There aren't that many choices, so we are going to find some 

repetition. What other critical submodalities did the rest of you 

find? 

Woman: The width of the picture, along with brightness, were 

critical. When the picture narrowed and dimmed, she felt con- 

strained. 

That makes sense. If you get skinny pictures, you feel con- 

strained. 

Woman: What she did was like a synesthesia. 

These all work by synesthesia. That's what we're experi- 

menting with. Think about it. When you change the brightness 

of an image, it changes the intensity of your feelings. These are 

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Using Your Brain 

all synesthesias. What we want to know is how they are related, 

so we can use that relationship to build a swish. 

What you need to know in order to build a swish for her is 

whether or not narrowing any picture makes her response 

stronger, and whether dimming any picture makes her response 

stronger. You see, it may be that she uses the word "constrained" 

because she doesn't like the particular choice that she's left with 

in that picture. If she sees a choice she likes and the picture 

narrows, she may describe the feeling as "purposeful," or "com- 

mitted." If narrowing and dimming make her response stronger, 

you can build a swish for her by starting with a narrow, dim 

"problem state" picture which gets wider and brighter as the 

desired state picture gets narrower and dimmer. That will sound 

strange to most of you, but keep in mind that everyone's brain is 

coded somewhat differently. What makes the swish really elegant 

is designing it so that a particular brain will respond to it strongly. 

The other alternative is that making this particular picture of 

few choices narrow increases the intensity her feeling constrained, 

but that making an image of her with choices gets a stronger 

response if she broadens it. In that case, you could have the 

problem picture narrow down to a line, and the solution picture 

open up out of that same line. So you'll have to go back and find 

out more about how it works before you'll know the best way to 

design a swish for her. 

I'm telling you about these possibilities so you begin to un- 

derstand how important it is to tailor your change method to each 

person. You want to create a direction where the old problem 

image leads to the solution, and the solution image creates a 

response of increasing intensity. 

Man: My partner had a picture with a double frame-one 

black and one white-and the image is slanted instead of being 

straight up and down. The top of the image tilts away from her 

when she panics. 

What changes? Does she bring the image up straight at some 

time? If the image goes back at an angle and has a border, then 

she panics? 

Man: No, it's just there. 

Well, it's not just there. It has to come from somewhere. 

The Swish 

147 

What we are looking for here is what changes. Once she gets to 

the picture you described, she has panic. But the image has to 

start out being somewhat different. I hope she doesn't panic all 

the time! How does she get there? Does it have to do with the 

changing of the picture's angle? Or is the angle fixed and some- 

thing else changes? 

Man: It starts out being straight up and down, and as the 

situation changes, it becomes slanted. 

So as the picture tilts, so does she. When it reaches a certain 

angle, she panics. Does the picture have the double border when 

it's vertical? 

Man: Yes. 

So the border is not a critical element, it just happens to be 

there. Does anything else happen as the picture tilts? Does it 

change brightness or anything like that? Does the speed of the 

images change? 

Man: No. The sound also becomes sort of blurred and buzzy. 

And you are sure that nothing else changes visually. 

Man: No. 

Good. I'm glad you're not sure. It seems like just tilting an 

image wouldn't be enough. You can go back and ask her. Have 

her take a picture of something else and tilt it and find out what 

happens. If just tilting any picture is enough to make her feel 

"off-balance" and panic, you could have the first picture tilt down 

to a line while the second picture tilts up to the vertical. Or you 

could tilt the first picture down, and then flip it all the way over 

to show the second picture on the other side. Take her for a real 

ride! Have you seen the video effects on television in which a 

square comes out and flips around? As it flips around it ends up 

being a new image. You could do it that way. Are you all begin- 

ning to understand how you can use this information to construct 

a swish that will be especially powerful for a particular person? 

Man: My partner's problem was caused by the fact that he 

lost the background of what he was looking at. It just began with 

a lot of people in a background, and when he got to a critical 

place, the background was all gone; there were just people there. 

Was there a change in the focus, or the depth of field? 

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Using Your Brain 

Man: It just disappeared. I guess it's out of focus. It's not 

there. 

But the things in the foreground are clear? 

Man: They are as clear as normal; they are not changed. 

Is it like looking through a lens? With a lens you can get 

one part to be clear and the other parts are blurred. Is that sort 

of what you are talking about? 

Man: No, it isn't. It's as if he put a mask over everything 

except the people involved, and everything else disappeared. 

And the people are standing on nothing? 

Man: I guess the chairs and things they were sitting on would 

be there, but everything else in the room was cleared. The con- 

centration was apparently on people. 

OK. But you don't know how it was done-with focus or 

whatever? 

Man: No, I don't know that. 

That is the part you need to know. You want to know how 

the transition occurs, so that you can use that method of transition 

with any picture. 

Woman: The fellow I was working with had a still slide, with 

no movement or color. When he first sees the picture, he talks 

in his own voice, and it's a mid-range tone of voice: "Hmmmm, 

not bad," the tone going down and up. Fairly quickly the voice 

changes and becomes monotonous and low. That's when he feels 

bad. 

The picture remains constant? It doesn't change at all? I find 

it a little difficult to believe that while he changes his tone and 

tempo of speech, the slide remains constant-that the brightness 

or something else about it doesn't change-because I simply 

haven't found it. That doesn't mean it's not possible, but I find 

it very unlikely. People can lead auditorily, but usually something 

else changes along with the voice. Let's assume that he's looking 

at a picture and he just talks himself from one state to another 

by changing his tone of voice. That will work. You will also need 

another auditory parameter if you are going to do an auditory 

swish. Probably the tempo will change. There will usually be more 

than one parameter that changes. 

Man: If you are looking for another variable, and could get 

The Swish 

149 

one in another modality so you had one visual and one auditory 

submodality, would that mixture work? 

It can, but most of the time you don't need it. You could do 

that if you really couldn't find a second submodality in the same 

system. The reason I'm emphasizing the visual system is because 

the visual system has the property of simultaneity. You can easily 

see two different pictures together at once. The auditory system 

is more sequential. It's hard to pay attention to two voices at 

once. You can do a swish auditorily, but you have to go about it 

a little differently. If you learn to be precise in the visual system, 

then when you start dealing with the auditory channel it will be 

easier to adapt. 

Man: The reason I asked that is because with my partner the 

pictures change, but also as she steps into the picture, she can 

hear herself. I'm wondering in doing the swish whether it would 

sort of nail it shut by adding an auditory piece. 

Yeah. "Nailing it shut" is a good way to think about it. If 

you do a swish with only one submodality, that's like nailing two 

boards together from only one direction. A dovetail joint has nails 

or screws going into it from two directions at once. If you pull 

one way, one set of nails holds it; if you pull the other way, the 

second set of nails holds it. That's why it's important to use two 

powerful submodalities simultaneously when you do the swish. 

People usually won't vary more than one submodality at a time 

on their own, and you'd have to vary at least two at once to undo 

a swish. 

If you're doing a visual swish and there are also auditory 

components, typically the person will demonstrate the auditory 

shifts to you unconsciously as she tells you about the two pictures. 

Then when you are telling her to make the pictures, you can do 

the auditory shifts externally with your voice, without mentioning 

it. In order to do that well, you need to be able to speak in 

someone else's voice. 

The skill to be able to copy someone else's voice is simply a 

matter of practice, and it's a talent that is well worth learning to 

do in this business. After a while you discover that you don't 

have to match someone perfectly; you just have to get a few 

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Using Your Brain 

distinct characteristics. You need enough so that if you do some- 

body's voice, he won't notice whether he is talking to himself or 

you are. It's the old pattern of, "Well I went inside and said to 

yourself . . . " I used to do that a lot in workshops, and very few 

people noticed. 

I want you all to go back to the same person you were with 

a few minutes ago, and find out the one or two analogue sub- 

modalities that are most important in creating the limitation. Some 

of you already have that information, but a lot of you don't. 

Next I want you to get that second picture of how he would 

see himself differently if he no longer had the limitation. This 

picture must be dissociated, and the first picture will always be 

associated. Association in the first picture and dissociation in the 

second will always be one element of the swish. 

Next you'll build a swish using the two analogue submodalities 

you've identified as important (instead of the size and brightness 

you used in the standard swish). First have your partner make an 

associated picture of the cues, using whatever submodalities create 

a strong response (a big, bright picture). Then have your partner 

make a dissociated picture of themselves as they would like to 

be, beginning with the other extreme of those same submodalities 

(a small, dim picture). When you swish, the submodalities will 

change so as to rapidly weaken the response to the first picture 

at the same time that they strengthen the response to the second 

picture. Come back in about half an hour, 

The Swish151 

What you have been doing is the basis for using the swish 

artistically and with precision. You can always just try the standard 

swish. If it doesn't work you can try a different one and keep 

going until you find one that works. That is certainly better than 

not trying another one. But it's even better to gather enough 

information so that you know exactly what you're doing, and you 

can predict ahead of time what will work and what won't. Do 

you have any questions? 

Man: What do you do with a client who doesn't have much 

awareness of internal process? When I ask some of my clients 

how they do things inside, they just shrug and say, "I don't know." 

There are several things you can do. One is to keep asking 

until they pay attention inside. Another is to ask a lot of questions 

and read the nonverbal "yes/no" responses. Ask, "Are you talking 

to yourself?" and watch the response just before the verbal "I 

don't know." This technique is discussed fully in the book Trance- 

formations. 

Another thing you can do is to create the problem situation 

and observe the person's behavior. All submodality shifts are 

demonstrated in external behavior. For instance, when someone 

brightens a picture, the head rotates back and up, but when a 

picture comes closer, the head moves straight back. If you observe 

people when you ask them to make submodality changes, you can 

calibrate to the behavioral shifts that we call "submodality ac- 

cessing cues." Then you can use those shifts to determine what 

someone is doing inside, even when he's not aware of it. I always 

use this calibration as a check to be sure the client is doing what 

I ask him to. 

Like everything else in NLP, the more you know how change 

works, and the more you are calibrated to behavioral responses, 

the more you can do things covertly. For instance, sometimes a 

person has to practice the swish a few times. You can ask her to 

do it once, and then ask her, "Did you do it right?" In order to 

answer that question, she'll have to do it again. Then you can 

ask, "Are you sure you did it right?" and she'll have to do it 

again. She'll also do it faster and easier that way because she isn't 

consciously trying to do it. 

Using Your Brain 

Woman: Do you have any long-term follow-up studies of the 

effectiveness of this method? 

I'm much more interested in twenty-minute follow-up studies. 

The only good reason for a long-term follow-up study is if you 

can't tell when the person changes in your office. Think about 

this: if you did produce a change in someone and they remained 

changed in that way for five years, what does that prove? That 

says nothing about whether or not that change is a valuable one, 

or whether or not it could have evolved any further. You see, 

making it possible for a woman to not be phobic of worms or not 

be compulsed to eat chocolate, is not a very profound accomplish- 

ment, even if it lasts the rest of her life. The important thing to 

understand about the swish pattern is that it sets the person in a 

direction that is generative and evolutionary. When I have done 

longer-term follow-ups on people I've swished, they typically re- 

port that the change I had made became the basis for all kinds 

of other changes that they are pleased with. The swish pattern 

doesn't tell people how to behave, it keeps them on the track of 

going toward what they want to become. To me, setting that 

direction is the biggest part of what change is all about. 

(For information on videotapes of the Swish pattern, see Appendixes II 

and IV.) 

152 

Afterword 

There is one thing that more than anything else delineates 

when somebody knows what NLP is. It is not a set of techniques, 

it's an attitude. It's an attitude that has to do with curiosity, with 

wanting to know about things, wanting to be able to influence 

things, and wanting to be able to influence them in a way that's 

worthwhile. Anything can be changed. That's something Virginia 

Satir said the first time I saw her give a workshop, and it's 

absolutely true. Any physicist knows that. Any human being can 

be changed with a .45-that's called "co-therapy with Mr. Smith 

and Mr. Wesson." Whether a change is useful or not is a more 

interesting question. 

The technology that you have been learning here is very 

powerful. The question about how you will use it, and what you 

will use it for, is one that I hope you will consider very carefully 

-not as a burden, but with the curiosity to find out what's 

worthwhile. The experiences in your life which have been the 

most beneficial to you in the long run, and which provide the 

basis of your being able to have pleasure, satisfaction, enjoyment, 

and happiness, were not necessarily utterly enjoyable at the time 

they occurred. Sometimes some of those experiences were as 

frustrating as they could be. Sometimes they were confusing. 

Sometimes they were fun in and of themselves. Those experiences 

are not mutually exclusive. Keep that in mind when you design 

and provide experiences for others. 

155 

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Using Your Brain 

I got on a plane once to go to teach a seminar in Texas. The 

guy sitting next to me on the plane was reading a book called 

The Structure of Magic. Something about the cover caught my 

eye. I asked him, "Are you a magician?" 

"No, I'm a psychologist." 

"Why is a psychologist reading a book about magic?" 

"It's not a book about magic, it's a serious book about com- 

munication." 

"Then why is it called The Structure of Magic?" 

Then he sat there for three hours and explained to me what 

the book was about. What he told me about that book had nothing 

to do with what I thought I was doing when I wrote it. At best 

the relationship couldn't even have reached being tenuous; he got 

lost in chapter two. But as he told me about the book, I asked 

him questions, such as, "How specifically?" and "What, specifi- 

cally?" 

"Well, if you look at it this way . . . " 

"If I were to look at it that way, what would I be seeing?" 

"Well, you take this picture, you know, and take the other 

picture (He didn't know that most people don't have two pictures 

all the time), and you make this picture smaller and this one 

larger. 

As he began to describe these things that were very matter- 

of-fact for him, I was sitting there thinking, "Wow, that's weird. 

There might be a whole new world here!" 

He told me that he just happened to be going to Texas to an 

NLP workshop. When he saw me walk in the door the next day, 

he was very pleased that I had taken his advice and decided to 

come to it . . . until I walked up on stage and put on the micro- 

phone! What he probably will never appreciate is that the reason 

I didn't just sit down and say, "I wrote that book," was because 

I didn't want to deprive myself of the opportunity to learn. 

You see, whenever you think that you understand totally, that 

is the time to go inside and say, "The joke is on me." Because it 

is in those moments of certainty that you can be sure that the 

futile learnings have set in, and the fertile ground has not been 

explored. Obviously there is always a lot more left to learn, and 

that is the fun part of NLP, and its future. 

Afterword 

157 

When you master something so throughly that you can do it 

perfectly, then it becomes a job, no different than running a staple 

gun. You could set up a clinic and have people come in and cure 

phobias, over and over again, all day long. There is no difference 

between that and any other routine. However, when each of those 

people comes in, you could also begin to explore how to make it 

more interesting and more worthwhile than just curing a phobia 

so that someone isn't terrified of an elevator. Why not make it 

so someone can enjoy riding in elevators? Why not figure out 

how phobias are done, and give away phobias of something more 

worthwhile? There are some things worth having a phobia of! Do 

you have any compulsive spending habits? -violence habits? 

-eating habits? -consumption habits? How about a phobia of 

being stagnant and bored? That might propel you into interesting 

new places. 

Whenever I travel to do a seminar, I always arrive at the 

hotel the night before. When I went to Philadelphia recently, 

there were a lot of "advanced" neuro-linguistic programmers stay- 

ing at the same hotel, and most of them had never met me. When 

I went down to the bar, one of them had just said to a friend, "I 

hope this isn't just more of that submodality stuff, because I 

already know that." So of course I walked up and asked, "What 

the hell is NLP?"-something I wouldn't miss for the world. 

"Well, it's hard to explain." 

"Well, you do NLP, right? Do you do it well? Do you 

understand it?" 

"Oh, yes, of course I do." 

"Well, I'm a simple person. Since you're an expert, can you 

tell me about this? Go ahead, I'll buy you another drink and you 

just tell me all about it." 

In his wildest fantasies he had no idea the feeling he would 

have at 9:30 the next morning when I walked onto the stage at 

the seminar. He also had no idea that he taught me more in the 

bar than I taught him in the seminar during the next three days. 

I'd like you to consider making everything into an introduc- 

tory seminar, in the sense that you never learn so much that you 

miss what else there is to know. All too often, people forget how 

to not know. They say, "Oh, yeah, that sounds like . . . " "This 

158 

Using Your Brain 

is the same as . . . " "Yeah, I learned all that submodality stuff 

last year. . . . " I haven't learned it all yet, so if they learned it all 

last year I wish they would tell me, so I don't have to work so 

hard to figure it out! 

There is a huge difference between learning some things, and 

discovering what there is still to learn. That is the difference that 

makes the difference. There are things I know how to do that 

they don't even suspect. But the reverse is also true. Since every- 

body has submodalities, everybody does interesting things with 

them. They may not consciously know how they do them, but 

still they are able to do and use unique configurations. When 

clients come in and you ask, "How are you broken?" they'll 

actually answer that question. But don't forget that they are 

"broken" so well they can do their problem the same way over 

and over again! That can always remind you that it's an achieve- 

ment, no matter how futile, disgusting or repulsive it may be. 

The ability to be fascinated by the complexity of that achieve- 

ment distinguishes somebody who is working in a generative way 

from one who is working in a remedial way. Without that sense 

of curiosity, those things which are futile, repulsive and disgusting 

will be things that you won't know how to influence. Without 

that influence, people will continue to fight wars over strange 

places and over insignificant differences, without being able to 

find new ways in which everybody can come out ahead. The 

essence of being generative is to create a world in which everybody 

gains because there are ways of creating more, rather than having 

a limited amount to fight over and divide up. 

Everything a human being can do is an achievement, de- 

pending only on where, and when, and for what, it is utilized. 

Each of both of you can do something about that, because each 

of both of you is going to drive your own bus. Now that you 

know how, the interesting question is where? When you can't 

drive your bus, it doesn't matter much where you try to go, 

because you won't get there anyway. When you learn how to use 

your brain, that question becomes crucially important. Some peo- 

ple drive in circles. Some people take the same route every day. 

Some people take the same route, but it takes them a month 

instead of a day. 

Afterword 

159 

There is so much more inside our minds than we suspect. 

There is so much more outside than we are capable of being 

curious about. It's only that growing sense of curiosity that allows 

you to capture the enthusiasm that makes even the most mundane, 

or the most fascinating task worthwhile, fun, and intriguing. With- 

out that, life is nothing more than waiting in line. You can master 

the art of tapping your foot while you wait in line, or you can 

do much more. And I have a surprise for you. I've found out 

that the after-life begins with a long wait in line. You'd better 

have some fun now, because those who enjoy themselves and do 

things that are worth doing with a great sense of curiosity get to 

stand in a shorter line than those who have only developed the 

ability to wait in line. 

No matter where you are or what you are doing, the skills, 

the techniques and the tools that you have acquired here serve 

as the basis for amusing yourself, and for learning something new. 

That man who flew with me to Texas, and explained to me what 

NLP was, is only different from me in one way. The next morning 

when he sat down and looked up and saw me, and thought, "Oh, 

my God!" he didn't realize that I learned something from him. 

That is the only difference between me and him. I didn't do it to 

make a fool out of him; I did it in order to learn, because I was 

curious. It was a rare and unprecedented opportunity. And so is 

every other experience in your life. 

Appendix I 

Submodality Distinctions 

The list below is not complete, and the order of listing is 

irrelevant. What distinctions do you make internally that you can 

add to this list? 

Visual: 

Brightness 

Size 

Color/black and white 

Saturation (vividness) 

Hue or color balance 

Shape 

Location 

Distance 

Contrast 

Clarity 

Focus 

Duration 

Movement (slide/movie) 

Speed 

Direction 

3-Dimensional/flat 

Horizontal or vertical hold 

Sparkle 

Perspective (point of view) 

Associated/ dissociated 

Foreground/background 

Self/context 

Frequency or number (split 

screen or multiple images) 

Frame/panorama (lens angle) 

Aspect ratio (height to width) 

Orientation (tilt, spin, etc) 

Density ("graininess," "pixels") 

Transparent/opaque 

Strobe 

Direction of lighting 

Symmetry 

Digital (printing) 

Magnification 

Texture 

160 

Auditory: 

Pitch 

Tempo (speed) 

Volume 

Rhythm 

Continuous or interrupted 

Timbre or tonality 

Digital (words) 

Associated/dissociated 

Duration 

Location 

Distance 

Contrast 

Figure/ground 

Clarity 

Number 

Symmetry 

Resonance with context 

External/internal source 

Monaural/stereo 

Kinesthetic: 

PressureMovement 

LocationDuration 

ExtentIntensity 

TextureShape 

TemperatureFrequency (tempo) 

Number 

One useful way to subdivide kinesthetic sensations is the 

following: 

1) Tactile: the skin senses. 

2) Proprioceptive: the muscle senses and other internal sen- 

sations. 

3) Evaluative meta-feelings ABOUT other perceptions or rep- 

resentations, also called emotions, feelings, or visceral kinesthetics 

which are usually represented in the chest and/or abdomen or 

along the mid-line of the torso. These feelings are not direct 

sensations/perceptions, but are representations derived from other 

sensations/perceptions. 

Olfactory and Gustatory (smell and taste) 

The terms used by psychophysics experimenters (sweet, sour, 

bitter, salt, burnt, aromatic, etc.) probably won't be useful. The 

fading in or out (changes in intensity and/or duration) of a par- 

ticular taste or smell that you identify as relevant in someone's 

experience may be quite useful. Odors and tastes are very pow- 

erful anchors for states. 

161 

Appendix II 

Richard Bandler Videotapes 

Client Sessions: Set 1 

The most recent demonstrations of Richard Bandler's client 

work are now available from specially scheduled sessions in 1987. 

1. Shyness. A 40-year-otd man is helped to overcome his 

shyness with women. Follow-up. (45 min., $50) 

2. Paranoid Schizophrenia. Richard works with a 27-year- 

old man who has had serious difficulties since he was 12. In two 

sessions Richard begins the process of teaching him how to control 

his mind. A special feature of this tape is that Richard spends 40 

minutes commenting on his work in the second session. (115 Min., 

$85) 

3. Hypnotic Inductions. In a three-day personal change work- 

shop, Richard demonstrates inductions for Skill Learning (skiing), 

Anesthesia and Healing (nose surgery), and Weight Loss (two 

sessions). Follow-up interviews are included for the Anesthesia and 

Weight Loss. (75 min., $65) 

Special Set price is $170, including Special 4th Class mailing 

within the U.S. Specify VHS or Beta. Also available in PAL and 

SECAM. Foreign orders, please pay in U.S. Dollars drawn on a 

U.S. Bank. Call or write for postage charges outside of the U.S. 

Order from: NLP Comprehensive, 2897 Valmont Rd., Boulder, 

CO 80301, (303)442-1102. 

162 

Client Sessions: Set 2 

Richard Bandler demonstrates clinical applications of NLP 

methods in three half-hour studio-quality videotape sessions with 

clients. (Transcripts of these sessions appear in his book Magic in 

Action.) 

1. Anticipatory Loss. A woman who experienced disabling 

panic attacks whenever someone close to her was late for an ap- 

pointment is cured of tier problem. 

2. Authority Figures. A young man is helped to overcome his 

fear of authority figures. 

3. Agoraphobia. A middle-aged truck driver is cured of his 

six-year inability to leave the city limits of the town he lives in. 

All three tapes include follow-up. The price for each tape is 

$75, or $ 150 for all three sessions on one tape (VHS format only). 

Make checks payable to: Marshall University Foundation (No 

postage or handling charges.) Order from: Dr. Virginia Plumley, 

Marshall University, Huntington, WV 25701, (304) 523-0080. 

Using Your Brain-for a CHANGE 

This Vh hour, two-videotape set was edited from an introduc- 

tory submodalities seminar in San Diego in early 1987. $177 

postpaid, VHS format only. 

The Art of Flirtation 

Richard Bandler and Ann Teachworth teach how to be 

friendly, meet people, and have more fun in life. Videotaped at a 

weekend seminar in late 1987. $77 postpaid, VHS format only. 

Order from: NLP Products and Promotions, 13223 Black 

Mountain Road, #1-429, San Diego, CA 92129, (619) 538-6216. 

163 

Appendix III 

Richard Bandler Seminar 

Videotapes 

Personal Outcomes 

Edited from a 1987 three-day personal change workshop, in 

which participants could ask for anything they wanted in the way of 

personal outcomes or information. 

1. Motivation. Richard works directly with eight participants 

on a number of different requests involving motivation: the internal 

processes that get you to do something or keep you from doing it. 

(100 min., $85) 

2. Resolving Problems. Richard teaches several exercises for 

making problems less important and more interesting and fun, and 

also works with a participant on reading comprehension. (75 min., 

$65) 

3. Changing Responses. Richard provides exercises and/or 

discusses how to make problems ludicrous, how to fall in or out of 

love, and alter motivation. He also demonstrates working with a 

defensive response, and discusses sleepwalking. (68 min., $65) 

4. Personal Change. Richard provides exercises for, and/or 

discusses, the belief change pattern, the swish pattern, self- 

hypnosis, disappointment, using submodalities for contextualizing 

change, and motivation. (55 min., $50) 

Complete set of four videotapes for $212 (a saving of 20%). 

Advanced Tapes 

Edited from advanced trainings in 1987, these videotapes offer 

an exceptionally rich experience of current submodalities methods 

for the advanced student of NLP. 

Submodalities and Hypnosis 

1. Amplifying Kinesthetic States and Body Work. Richard 

teaches how to use nonlinear submodality relationships to amplify 

desired kinesthetic states and future-pace these states into approp- 

riate contexts, with specific references to sexual functioning. He 

also demonstrates his unique form of body work, which he devel- 

oped out of his observation of the work of Moshe Feldenkrais and 

others. (117 min., $85) 

164 

2. Nonverbal Elicitation and Change. Demonstrations, dis- 

cussion, and exercises for using nonverbal anchoring, presupposi- 

tions, and sensory acuity to gather sub modality information and 

make covert changes. (78 min., $65) 

3. Presuppositions and Hypnosis. How presuppositions 

change submodalities, and the direct use of submodality shifts to 

induce altered states. (63 min., $50) 

4. Redesigning and Chaining States. Utilizing the submodali- 

ties of time to install attitudes, mood states, and behaviors that are 

inevitable because they have subjectively already happened, and 

the use of trance and finger signals for unconscious installation and 

contextualization. (96 min., 85) 

5. Convictions, Beliefs, and Reality. Working with beliefs, 

convictions, and reality strategies to make lasting changes. Using 

submodalities to separate states or to synthesize new states. (82 

min., $65) 

Complete set of five videotapes for $280 (a saving of 20%). 

State of the Art 

1. Time Distortion. Exercises and discussion teach you how to 

use submodalities to change your perception of the duration and the 

speed of events, with applications to sports, motivation, future- 

pacing, depression, and psychotic states. (104 min., $85) 

2. Making Things Easy. Richard teaches four patterns: How 

to transform moods, chaining with submodalities for dealing with 

guilt, the "decision destroyer" to revise old imprint experiences, 

and how to make a chore into a "piece of cake." (103 min., $85) 

3. Increasing Expressiveness. Richard demonstrates how to 

use submodalities to build a rich internal experience that creates 

intense motivation and external expressiveness that induces states 

in others. (47 min., $50 

Complete set of 3 videotapes for $176 (a saving of 20%). 

All prices include Special 4th Class mailing within the U.S. 

Specify VHS or Beta. Also available in PAL and SECAM. Foreign 

orders, please pay in U.S. Dollars drawn on a U.S. Bank. Call or 

write for postage charges outside of the U.S. Order from: NLP 

Comprehensive, 2897 Valmont Rd., Boulder, CO 80301, (303) 

442-1102. 

165 

Appendix IV 

NLP Training Videotapes 

These tapes allow you to observe a complete demonstration of 

NLP in action with follow-up information-an excellent way to 

experience the power of NLP, or refine your skills. 

1. Resolving Grief. A man who had lost an infant son and 

many other loved ones is assisted in turning these experiences of 

loss into resources. Observe this powerful demonstration by Conni- 

rae Andreas of a new method, developed by herself and Steve 

Andreas. Introduction and follow-up. (57 min., $50) 

2. A Strategy for Responding to Criticism. This strategy, 

modeled by Steve and Connirae Andreas, allows a person to be 

open to feedback without experiencing bad feelings. Steve's dem- 

onstration of installing this strategy is followed by discusssion and a 

follow-up interview. (40 min., $50) 

3. The Fast Phobia/Trauma Cure. An intense 20-yearphobia 

of bees is eliminated in 6 minutes, using Bandler's fast phobia/ 

trauma cure. Demonstration by Steve Andreas. Discussion and 

follow-up interview. Also included is a 15-minute follow-up inter- 

view with a Vietnam veteran whose "post-traumatic stress syn- 

drome" lasting 12 years was completely changed in one session 

using this method. (42 min., $50) 

4. The Swish Pattern. In the first demonstration Steve 

Andreas uses the standard swish on a simple habit, nail-biting. Then 

Connirae demonstrates an auditory swish with a woman who went 

into a barely-controlled rages when her daughter spoke in a certain 

voice tone. (71 min., $65) 

5. Eliminating Allergies: Retraining Your Immune System, 

Three clients lose their allergies to food (wheat and milk), cats, and 

darkroom chemicals. Tim Hallbom and Suzi Smith demonstrate 

their adaptation of a method developed by Robert Dilts. Introduc- 

tion, discussion, and follow-up interviews. (55 min., $50) 

166 

Advanced Tapes 

1. Shifting the Importance of Criteria, A "workaholic" is 

helped to decrease the importance of work, and increase the impor- 

tance of personal needs. An 18-month follow-up interview details 

the scope of the resulting changes. Demonstration by Connirae 

Andreas. (31 min., $50) 

2. "The Last Straw" Threshold Pattern. Richard Bandler first 

modeled how people go "Never again!" with unsatisfying relation- 

ships, situations, or personal habits. The Andreases demonstrate 

eliciting this pattern, followed by a discussion of a number of 

different examples. Recommended for those with prior NLP train- 

ing. (60 min., $50) 

3. Changing Beliefs. The Andreases demonstrate the submo- 

dalities belief change pattern in an Advanced Submodalities Train- 

ing. An explanation accompanies the demonstration, which is fol- 

lowed by questions, discussion, and preparation for a hands-on 

exercise using the pattern. A three-month follow-up interview with 

the client is also included. (104 min., $85) 

4. Future-Pacing: Programming Yourself to Remember Later. 

How people program themselves to remember something automat- 

ically in the future is explored in this session taken from the second 

day of a 24-day Practitioner Training in January, 1985. (79 min., 

$65) 

If you order any three (or more) videotapes, you can receive 

15% discount. ($7.50 off a $50 tape, $10.00 off a $65 tape, and 

$13.00 off an $85 tape). All prices are postpaid (Special 4th class 

book rate) within the U.S. First-Class and Airmail postage is extra. 

Specify VHS or Beta. 

Also available in the European PAL and SECAM systems. 

Foreign orders, please pay in US dollars drawn on a US bank. Call 

or write for postage charges outside of the US. Order from: 

NLP Comprehensive 

2897 Valmont Rd. 

Boulder, CO 80301 

(303)4424102 

Other videotapes are in production: write for current list. 

167 

Appendix V 

NLP Educational 

Consultants 

New Learning Pathways will guarantee a minimum of one year's 

progress in structural and phonetic analysis, word comprehension and 

passage comprehension as measured by two widely accepted tests: 1) The 

Woodcock Reading Mastery Standardized Test, and 2) The Ekwall informal 

reading inventory for long passage comprehension. Usually they get two or 

three years change on these measures, given both before and after their 

program of eight one-hour sessions (with homework) over a seven-week 

period. The only prerequisite for this is a test for muscular stability of the 

ocular muscles around the eye, to be sure the child can see what he is trying 

to read. They also teach seminars for teachers and consult with educational 

systems. Please call or write for current information. New Learning 

Pathways, P.O. Box 5044-142, Thousand Oaks, CA 91359, (805)492-5024 

Learning How to Learn specializes in NLP techniques for accelerated 

language learning and gaining behavioral competence in foreign cultures. 

They provide intensive training to individuals and groups that integrates the 

strategies, attitudes, and experiences that excellent language learners use, as 

modeled by NLP. Participants can then learn any language regardless of the 

teaching materials or method. They also provide workshops for foreign 

language and ESL teachers on the most effective means of teaching language 

acquisition in the classroom environment. Learning How to Learn, 1340 W. 

Irving Park Rd, Ste200, Chicago, IL 60613 

168 

Appendix VI 

SelectedBibliography 

Andreas, Steve, and Andreas, Connirae. Change Your Mind-and 

Keep the Change. 1987 (cloth $12.00, paper $8.50) 

Bandler, Richard. Magic in Action. 1985 (cloth $14.95) 

Bandler, Richard; and Grinder, John. Frogs into Princes. 1979 

(cloth $11.00, paper $7.50) 

Bandler, Richard; and Grinder, John. Reframing: Neuro-Linguistic 

Programming and the Transformation of Meaning. 1982 

(cloth $12.00 paper $8.50) 

Grinder, John; and Bandler, Richard. Trance-formations: Neuro- 

Linguistic Programming and the Structure of Hypnosis. 1981 

(cloth $12.00, paper $8.50) 

Except for Magic in Action, all the above books can be 

ordered from: 

Real People Press 

BoxF 

Moab, UT 84532 

(801)259-7578 

Magic in Action, and other NLP books by Richard Bandler 

and others, can be ordered from: 

Meta-Publications 

PO. Box 565 

Cupertino, CA 95014 

(415)326-6465 

770 

Index 

Agoraphobia 11 

Anxiety 77 

Assertiveness training 60 

Association 40-44,47-48,136,145 

Belief Change Pattern 103-115 

Example 104-108 

Outline 108-113 

Beliefs 103-115 

Briefest therapy 34 

Changing the past 21,25-26,34-35 

Clients (in order of occurrence) 

Fighting couple 12 

Anger phobia 12 

Confusing pictures 16 

Man with voices 17 

Coffee-stained dress 26 

Married wrong woman 27 

Elevator phobias 43-45 

24-year old Wimp 52 

Confronting 55-60 

Daughter a whore 64-67, 103 

"You flipped me off," 97 

Catatonics 17 

Certainty 97-98 

Computers 10, 13 

Confidence 138 

Confusion 83-101 

Couple therapy 12 

Critical parent voice 70 

Depression 26-30 

Disappointment 9 

Dissociation 40-48,136,145 

Drugs 127-128 

Einstein, Albert 19 

Excuses 53-55 

Firewalking 113-114 

GestakTherapy31-33 

Grinder, John 2,117 

Insomnia 74 

Jealousy 51 

Learning 10,11,87,112,117-129 

Learning Disabilities 125-127 

Manipulation 9, 53 

Marriage 59, 61-64 

May, Rollo 11 

Memory 119-124 

Mental illness 14-18 

Minuchin, Salvador4 

Modeling 13-14 

Motivation 72-80 

Movie, Running Backwards 34,44,98-100 

171 

172 

Using Your Brain 

Nailbiting 131-133 

Name remembering 122-123 

Normality 30-31 

Pavlov, Ivan 11 

Phobia Cure 43-46 

Phobias 3, 11, 12,43-46, 118-119, 136 

137, 151 

Photographic Memory 8 

Physicists 18-19 

Points of view 37-39 

Popper, Karl94 

Psychosis 14-17 

Reading 127 

Reframing 70-71 

Remembering 119-124 

Resistance 54 

Rosen, John 17 

Satir, Virginia 12,41, 155 

Schizophrenia 15-18 

Shyness 53 

Sensory deprivation 7 

Smoking 133, 136,138-139 

Subjectivity 8,14, 19, 118 

Submodalities 2,21-26 

Swish Pattern 131-150 

Distance 141-143 

Examples 131-133,138-139 

General 146-150 

Outline 134-135 

Synesthesia 1,21-25,146 

Transactional Analysis 69 

Understanding 83-101 

Unfinished business 33-34 

Weight loss 26,108 

Women's liberation 71-72

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