HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU missed out on something good, simply because you hesitated? In my opinion, hesitation is the disease of our age, and I think it’s time we stopped putting off getting over it. How much better would your life—or the lives of your clients—be if it were possible to enter a state of wanton desire at will, and to just go for it, knowing that nothing can stand in the way?
This is a problem that all life planners and coaches try to overcome by helping their clients set great, big, juicy goals, then pushing them to go for it. But, as most people have found out for themselves, there’s a massive gap between hesitation and a go-for-it attitude. There’s an even bigger gap between hesitation and actually taking action.
Also, goals, as we’ve already discussed, are not nearly as important as setting and maintaining direction. Setting up a direction for action is something on which both hypnosis and NLP prefer to concentrate. Once the format has been set up, the content can be filled in later. By setting direction and moving someone through a series of familiar states they’ve experienced many times in the past, it becomes a simple matter to turn hesitation into dynamic action.
As you move through this section, you will also have the opportunity to learn and practice several patterns, including anchoring, chaining, or sequencing (setting a particular order for events to occur), finger signals or ideomotor responses, age regression, and posthypnotic suggestion. Age regression was a favorite tool of Milton Erickson’s. Quite simply, it’s a way to tap into experiences and resources you have already experienced and mastered and recycling them to achieve a new outcome.
There’s a very well-known tape of Erickson working with a woman named Mondy. As he very slowly goes along, he elicits five different experiences from her past. He regresses her step by step, getting her to recall a spanking, breaking a window, and then to a time when she was chasing ducks “with abandonment.” He called her “Duckchasing Mondy.” The exercise in this chapter is similar to Erickson’s procedure, but much faster and easier.
Before we begin, though, you need to set up unconscious finger signals.
Setting up finger signals is a lot simpler than it looks or sounds. When your subject is in trance, simply reach over, lift one finger, and tell him that moving that finger will unconsciously communicate agreement. That is his “Yes Finger.” You can do the same thing to communicate disagreement—a “No Finger”—although I prefer not to have my clients argue with me.
Now, with finger signals set up, instruct your subject to answer your questions “with honest, unconscious movements.” You are now in a position to do a number of interesting things, including playing a kind of twenty questions.
The state we begin with is, of course, hesitation, and it’s a pretty radical jump from there to go-for-it, so we need to find a graceful way to do this. Like Milton, you’ll be eliciting five states in all.
These states are:
Frustration
Impatience
Wanton Desire
Go-for-it
Why these particular states? Well, think about what would happen if hesitating makes you become really frustrated, to the point where you start to think about alternatives. You begin to become impatient at your inertia; you want to do something different, and the more you think about what that is, the juicier and more attractive the alternative becomes…to the point where you start to lust for it, until not having it becomes unbearable, and you simply have to…let go and go for it…
In NLP, we value what we call elegance. This is another way of saying we attach importance to, and always pursue, the most efficient and effective way to accomplish an outcome. It is far more elegant to move seamlessly from hesitation to go-for-it in smooth and well-established steps than it is either to give up before you start, or to try without enough forward impetus and fail.
Where would a pattern like this be useful?
How about trying it out with the lessons contained in this book? The patterns presented here are, as the title suggests, among the most transformative ever created. They have been tested over more than four decades in virtually every country in the world, and their mastery will open more doors for you than any number of gurus or therapists.
So, if you have been hesitating about bringing together trying out what you’ve learned so far, here is where hesitation ends.
When setting up finger signals, ask your subject’s “unconscious mind” whether it has made “all the necessary exchanges for you to be able to take [your subject] all the way back in time…honestly.”
The word “honestly” has semantic density. This semantic packing means the experience will be full-blooded; you achieve much fuller age regression. In effect, the subject becomes younger.
Be somewhat more creative than simply asking the person to remember a past experience. You might suggest looking at “The Book of Time,” turning the pages a year at a time, each time becoming one year younger. Your subject can do this until finding the strongest example of a target state—and when that’s done, have your subject use the finger signals to communicate the fact.
Follow the instructions closely. Be systematic and make sure that each step is in place before you move on to the next.
Exercise: Overcoming Hesitation
- Have your subject go into trance and set up finger signals. Have her think of what “hesitation” really means to her. As soon as her expression changes, anchor it kinesthetically (with a touch) and auditorally (give it a name, such as “Hesitating Jane”). Have her move back in time to some of her key moments of hesitation and regret, and indicate arrival at these memories by finger signaling. Amplify the anchor each time. When you have a strong hesitation anchor, move on to the next state and repeat the process. Do this five times, once for each state.
- When you access and anchor the go-for-it state, use submodalities to amplify your subject’s response. Make the final state of action highly specific. It must literally involve “getting up and going” for an objective.
- The third step involves “chaining”—connecting the five anchors so that firing the first sets off the others, ending in the strong go-for-it directionalized state:
- As you fire the first anchor, have your subject think of all the times and places where she stopped herself, where she held back.
- As soon as you see changes in her expression, skin coloration, and so on, fire the second anchor. Hold both for a moment, then release the first anchor.
- As the response automatically changes from Number 1 to Number 2, fire off Number 3, then test again. Fire Number 1, and when it triggers 2 and then 3, fire Number 4. Repeat until firing the first anchor automatically drives the subject’s experience through to the go-for-it-state.
- Give your subject the posthypnotic suggestion (see below) that she can bring this ability to move from hesitation to going-for-it at any time she chooses. She should review her present situation and the direction and outcomes she would like to achieve, then identify the intervening steps, especially the initial one that precipitates action. Then she should fire the first anchor.
Learning, especially in trance, is state-specific, which means that the new response or behavior will stay in that particular altered psychoneurological state, unless we ensure it generalizes out into the appropriate area of the subject’s life. This is a common mistake among many hypnotherapists. They achieve remarkable responses while the client is sitting in front of them, but when he resumes his daily life, the effect just seems to wear off.
To avoid that occurrence, give your subject (and yourself) posthypnotic suggestions that the desired action will be carried out as and when required. Whenever you find yourself starting to hesitate about learning to do something new, fire off the first anchor and experience yourself moving quickly and smoothly through all five states.
A posthypnotic suggestion is easy to give: simply state specifically what to do and where and when to do it. To lock it in even tighter, think of three to five situations in the future where moving from hesitation to go-for-it would be a useful response, and mentally rehearse the details until comfortable with the prospect of coping with these new resources.
Acting without hesitation should, of course, occur only within an acceptable context. Hesitation is an appropriate response when you come to the edge of a busy highway, for example, so you need to be specific. The unconscious mind is quite literal, so to reinforce and optimize everything you’ve done, you can bring your partner out of trance by saying something like this:
Now I am going to lift your hand [lift the hand, turning it so that the wrist is uppermost, as described earlier] and leave it here…and that hand can begin to come down…in honest and unconscious movements…only as quickly as your unconscious is ready to…make all the appropriate internal arrangements to ensure that each of the three [or five] examples you’ve been rehearsing for the future…can represent three more…and each of those three, three more…and each of those…and so on, and so forth…so that you can really…go for it…in situations you may not even have thought of consciously yet…wherever it’s useful to and appropriate for you…now…
Make sure your subject comes fully out of trance, have him change position, or talk about something else for a few moments (called “breaking state,” in NLP), and then have him think of a project or undertaking he would like to get started on, but has been hesitating over, and test the pattern by having him firing the first anchor.
Note: whenever you are undertaking a venture of any kind, ensure that you know what the first step is and the key steps that need to be taken after that.
The more I can get people to know how to process, how to think on purpose, the more able they will be to cope without me in the future. I’m not trying to build dependence with NLP; I’m trying to build independence. I’m not trying to get people to feel they need to come to me every time they have a problem and go into deep trance. I want it to be the trance that makes it so that when they look at the future and whenever something happens, good or bad, they realize that when they change the way they think and believe, they change the way they feel. When they change the way they feel, they have the ability to change the way they behave—for all time. I want this to be the trance that lasts forever.
I can’t even count the different things that I’ve approached this way, and I don’t have clients who come back. They don’t get rid of one phobia and then come up with another. When I started out, the “experts” all said, “Hypnosis is bad and only treats the symptom,” and I would say, “Isn’t that a good thing? Why treat anything else if you can treat the symptom?”
Their response was, “Well, if you suppress the symptom it comes out somewhere else. If you suppress the symptom, it could come out in a place where it doesn’t have to come out, somewhere bad.”
I’m a mathematician, so I thought: Cool…
Now I do exactly that, but with precision—to deliberately “aim” symptoms to come out somewhere else, so, for example, the client who got rid of hysterical paralysis could have the best erections of any man alive.
By not accepting the presuppositions within the field of psychology—which included that people had to be “fixed”—and, instead, looking at how to optimize human behavior, I found greater freedom to design techniques that helped people become happier, healthier, and more effective in everything they did.
When I started out, all these people were dropping out of their jobs to “be happy.” The truth is, they didn’t get happier; they just wore uglier clothes. What they really needed was to be able to enjoy their families and their jobs, since it wasn’t those things that were holding them back. In fact, those were the very things that were giving them freedom, money, support, and opportunity.
It wasn’t a swingers’ club or joining an ashram that was going to make them happy. Those were just different lifestyles they thought would bring them happiness. It didn’t work, of course, because if you want to be happy, you have to practice being happy with what you have, and then move on to other things. If you can’t be happy with a good job and a great family, I don’t think a large medallion and a paisley shirt will work.
In Neuro-Linguistic Programming, we don’t “treat” patients; we give people lessons on how to think and make better choices. As soon as you switch from the remedial model, which is about repairing someone, to the optimizing model, where you teach them and give them lessons in how to think and in how to change the way they feel, living better suddenly becomes more feasible.
It also puts the practitioner in the right frame of mind.
Unless people know they can, and are prepared to, make better choices, they are unlikely to change. A hypnotist may get a client to believe cigarettes taste awful, but that doesn’t necessarily remove all problems, and it may create more.
I remember reading a book about that and tried it with a smoker who wanted to quit. I hypnotized him and made cigarettes taste like cod liver oil, that they were the most disgusting things in the world, and he’d never want to smoke one again.
He came back the next week, told me he hadn’t smoked a single cigarette. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of cod liver oil and took a swig. I remember thinking to myself, Well…that’s a problem. Cod liver oil may actually be worse for you than cigarettes if you drink it all day long. That wasn’t a giant step forward, and I had to take him back into trance and find another way to do it.
The lesson is: it’s not that you make something unpleasant to get people to stop doing it. It’s that you make them smart enough to not do it in the first place. Once people make a decision that they’ve had enough, that they’re never going to do something again, and you help them truly to believe that, they can make it through. This is especially true of addictions.
For example, I used to be a smoker—and one day I quit.
It happened in a hospital where I’d been very ill, and my doctor sat down next to my bed and said, “Richard, I’ve got something very serious to tell you.”
I asked, “What’s that?” Usually, not many good things follow an opening like that.
She said, “You’re going to have to quit smoking. You need to take the medication you’re on for the rest of your life, and you can’t take it and keep smoking.”
I went inside for a moment, then came out again, and said, “Okay, doc. I’ve quit.”
She told me, “You don’t understand. It’s very hard to give up smoking. You’re going to have a difficult time of it until you’re finally free.”
I said, “No, I won’t. I’ve quit.”
She persisted, “I’ve brought you some pamphlets to help you taper off.”
I hadn’t planned to taper off, but I read the pamphlets anyway. They were full of statements like: “Tobacco is one of the most addictive substances known to man” and “Giving up smoking is extremely difficult and can take a long time.”
In fact, giving up smoking takes no time at all. Once you’ve made the decision, that’s it. You’re a nonsmoker. What takes time is what leads up to finally quitting—that is, if the person quits at all. Often they’re too afraid to be without their cigarette to even contemplate life without it.
Before I quit myself, I remember coming across a friend of mine, lying on a hospital gurney smoking a cigarette through a tracheotomy tube.
I asked, “Where did you get the cigarette?”
He told me, “Oh, somebody came by and I asked him if he had a cigarette and he gave one to me.”
I watched him smoking through that hole in his throat for a while, and then I said to him, “Now, that’s what addiction looks like.”
But I still kept smoking then. I knew the risks. Every single smoker knows what a cancerous lung looks like, and they keep going. You can walk into hospitals and find people who’ve had arms or legs amputated as a result of their tobacco habit, and they’re still wheeling each other out somewhere so they can light up.
The thing that stops many people from ever quitting is the fear of something called “the urge to smoke.” The terror of feeling an urge and not fulfilling it is overwhelming to many smokers, and yet it never occurs to them that they have dozens of urges every day they don’t act on.
That’s what got me through. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the urge to smoke. It wasn’t that I didn’t sometimes feel nicotine gnawing at my soul. It was a combination of several facts. The first was that I decided in that moment that I had already quit. The second was that I recognized the urge to smoke was like any other urge. If I resisted it, if I tried not to think about cigarettes, if I tried not to want to smoke, the urge got stronger.
This seems to be a quality of resistance. The more we do it, the more it happens.
Try the following exercise: put both your hands palm to palm, then push very hard with your right hand. Push harder, and even harder than that.
Now, be honest. Were you one of the people who end up in a struggle? The harder you pushed with your right hand, the harder you pushed back with your left?
The significant thing is: I asked you to push with your right hand, and most likely, when you did, you pushed back with your left.
We have problems for several reasons when we try to change long-standing habits. One is that we resist the way the habitual part of our brain fights back. We hate and fear the urge to go back to what it was we were doing before. Sometimes we hate and fear the urge more even than we do dying.
The other problem is that we try to program ourselves by telling ourselves not to do whatever it is we’re trying to change. We tell ourselves, “Don’t smoke,” “You mustn’t think of cigarettes,” “You have to stop smoking.”
This is where one of the differences between language and brain function shows up. As I’ve mentioned before, negation—words such as “don’t,” “can’t,” “mustn’t,” “shouldn’t”—exist in language, but not in the way the brain works. Linguistically, we are putting forward an idea (in this case, smoking) and then negating it with words like “stop” or “don’t.” As far as the brain is concerned, the command has already been given. You have to make a picture of the process, and only then can it be negated. But by this time it’s too late—and the more you try to ignore or suppress the picture, the bigger and brighter it becomes.
Try this: For the next sixty seconds, don’t think of the color blue. Try really hard. Try harder than that. No, really, I mean don’t….
All the brain really hears is, “Think of the color blue”—or, in the case of trying to suppress the nicotine habit, “Smoke!”
Around this time I started to understand that if you take a feeling you don’t want and you begin to expand it, and spin it and then expand it even more, and even more than that, one of two things happens: the feeling either turns into a different feeling, even a pleasant one, or it becomes ridiculous and simply doesn’t have hold over you anymore.
Something else helped me quit smoking for life. I really enjoyed torturing all the people who came to me expecting me to suffer. They’d say to me, “Isn’t it really, really difficult to quit? Don’t you miss it real bad?”
Even when I missed it, I’d say, “Nope. It’s really easy.” It drove them all crazy, especially the medical experts who spent their time telling other patients like me how difficult it was to quit.
The lesson is: when you’re making a big and challenging shift in your life, it helps to find a way to have fun with it. Then it really does get easier.
A good NLP practitioner needs to understand the importance of threshold patterns to help clients move forward. Put simply, the nervous system is capable of maintaining a certain way of functioning only up to a certain point. When you exceed this level, the pattern blows out.
People are willing to tolerate so many things. Those with obsessive-compulsive disorder go through endless hours of rituals. Smokers, heavy drinkers, and other addicts know their habit could kill them. Some people live in abusive relationships and just won’t leave.
The point here is that there hasn’t yet been enough of the unwanted experience to breach the threshold.
I’m not suggesting that people should go back and be even more abused, but that you, as a change agent, should help your clients change their perception.
The very first thing I try to do is get people through threshold. If you string twenty-five bad memories together back-to-back, and go through each one, making it bigger than life-size, there’s a point at which the brain just goes Phhht! Enough! and the person pops out of the experience, looking at it in an entirely different way than before.
When people get to the point where they are sick and tired of how they are, the way they held their experience begins to change, and then you can start to get them to be determined to go in another direction.
The technique outlined below is extremely powerful and should be approached with caution. Once threshold has been fully breached, returning to the original state is virtually impossible. It is identical to the pattern often inadvertently run by people who, for no apparent reason, “fall out of love.” The process is that at the start of the relationship, they associate into details they like and dissociate from those they don’t. Then, as familiarity grows, they switch the pattern, focusing on what isn’t working and failing to notice what is.
Being aware of how the pattern works can avoid unnecessary partnership breakdowns. On the other hand, going over threshold can be used deliberately to help people extricate themselves from abusive and dangerous relationships.
Exercise: Going over Threshold
Warning: Changing threshold patterns can be extremely powerful and permanent. Make sure you are acting in the best interests of your client or yourself.
- Take a situation or response you wish to change and clearly identify five things you liked about it and five you disliked. For example, if you wish to move past a certain relationship, you might have liked your former partner’s smile, generosity, good looks, and so on, and disliked the sudden temper, unreasonable demands, and physical abuse.
- Starting with the things you liked, cycle through each five times (making a total of twenty-five for each category), seeing yourself in the scenario (dissociated), pushing it off into the distance, draining it of color, and so on. Do this rapidly and decisively, and notice how the intensity of the experiences changes.
- Now, with each of the situations you don’t like, very rapidly make them bigger, have them rush toward you, increasing in detail, intensity of color, and so on. Have them completely engulf you (associated) as you ratchet up the details. Spin the memories so the vividness rockets to newer and more intense levels until the entire scenario seems to pop. When you have done this successfully, you will either find it difficult to recover the original experiences in detail or your response to them will be markedly changed.
- Now, thinking of the situation you wish to change, ask, “Do you really need to have this limitation anymore?” Then spin it out into space and explode it into the sun.
Important: Carry this process through to completion. Increasing the intensity of an experience without going over threshold risks leaving the subject in a worse state than before.