Richard Bandler - Get the Life You Want

When I studied phobias, I didn’t study the people who had them. I studied the people who got over them. I found a whole bunch of people who, without any kind of therapy, had gotten over them. These people had beaten their fears. I began to interview them methodically using the tools that I had developed in writing my earliest book The Structure of Magic: Volume One. In this book, we discovered some of the secrets of the most successful therapists of the time and created a model of their skills. This was known as the Meta Model.

The Meta Model is a way to ask questions to find out how people process information at that time. It’s not concerned with how they processed it in the past, or even how they will process it in the future, but what they do right now. How do they manifest their fear? How is it done as an activity? How is it done over and over again as an activity? Better yet, How did they get over their fear? What were the steps that they took to overcome the phobia after being paralysed for years?

A few of the people I talked to couldn’t get on elevators. There were some with a phobia of bees. I had another person who had a phobia of dogs and several people who had a fear of driving. There were people with a fear of heights and a fear of open spaces. I even went to interview a few people who had agoraphobia, a fear of going outside of their home, and, suddenly, it was gone and they were able to go everywhere.

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

It was at that point in time that the psychiatrist that I worked with sent me droves of people with different kinds of phobias so that I could test the work that I had developed. I took the mental process of people who successfully got over phobias and I undertook installation. Very simply, this is the process of teaching people to think differently. Thinking isn’t a passive process unless you do it passively. Thinking should always be an active process where you think in a way that gets you the results that you want.

This approach turned out to be applicable to almost all of the other problems that people had. If you can help people to think differently and actively, then they can change their lives. If you’re trying to motivate yourself and you’re thinking about how hard it is, it will be hard. I always say to people, If you’re looking for difficulties, you’ll always find them. If you ask the question, What can go wrong? then something probably will. On the other hand, if you’re asking the question, What works? then you can find it and, in this case, I did.

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.