Paul McKenna – Get the Life You Want (страница 3)

Starting at about 1974, right up to the present date, I have yet to have a single individual come in with a genuine phobia and walk out with it. Many people ask me about the amount of resistance I must have faced over the past thirty-five years but I never did face very much of it for one simple reason. What I was doing worked!

When you learn how people think, you can teach them how to change the way they think. The process that I learned from these people was something that could be recapitulated not just by me but by others. I could teach it to people in a short twenty-minute lesson. I’ve done it over and over again.

I made films back in the early 1980s where I took three people: one with panic attacks, one with a terrible phobia of leaving Huntington, West Virginia, and one with a fear of authority figures. Their phobias all disappeared. Each of them was treated slightly differently but each of them was taught a lesson about how to think about their fear in a new way.

When you think in a new way, you get to do new things and you get to feel new things. This whole book is about ways of thinking differently. Think about it as a lesson plan for future living. This is only one example of the things that matter when people want to make changes in their lives. You can take the process that is common to a bunch of people that successfully did something and refine it down to something that can be taught to an individual.

We also did it with simple things like spelling. When people are good spellers, it turns out that they make pictures of the words. They remember the pictures and they check them with their feelings to make sure that they’re right. So, we developed an educational programme where we taught kids to look at words and we made every single letter a different colour.

After they’d looked at the words, we had them close their eyes and make a mental picture of it and then we began to ask them questions like What colour was the third letter? What colour was the last letter? The only way to answer those questions is to have a truly remembered image of the word and we had them check it with their feelings. We’d show them the word spelled incorrectly so they got a bad feeling with that. Then we showed it to them spelled correctly so then they got a good feeling with that. Mentally, they began to develop a process that worked.

When you see a word, you can encode the image of it. In order to remember things, you have to first encode the memory. If we teach children to properly encode the spelling of words, they’ll be able to properly decode the spelling of words. The same thing is true about all memory tasks.

So the educational system was affected by my work. My work has spread all over the place. If you check out Kate Benson’s website Meta4Education (www.meta4education.co.uk), you’ll find all kinds of information for teachers.

There are now many books on Neuro-Linguistic Programming for the field of education. There are books on NLP applications for sports athletes. We found golfing strategies telling how great golfers are able to go into an altered state and visually adjust their body. Prize fighters and football players also use NLP to improve their performance. All people can learn to do things better.

Every task has a mental component to it. A lot of what we call talent is when people stumble upon these strategies easily. Certainly, you can’t beat a good set of genes. If you’re seven feet tall, it’s easier to be a good basketball player. If you like basketball, it’s easier to practice. If you like playing guitar, it’s easier to practice but if you don’t have the mental capacity of a great musician, you can begin to adjust it and to learn talent. Talent isn’t just God given. It’s partially God given; the other part is accessed by human beings insofar as they’re able to teach each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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