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Time For
A Change
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Richard
Bandler
Table of Contents
Induction........................................................... vii
Prologue................. ................................ ........................... 1
I Believer Modification......................... ……………….
II Believe in Laughter .......................................................
III.............................................. Tips From the Lost Manual 51
IV....................................Non-Verbal Hypnotic Inductions 63
V..............................................The House Cleaning Pattern 81
VI .......................... Getting More Time For a Change 103
VII................................................ Slow Time Patterns. 121
VIII The Trance Phenomenon of Hyperesthesia..........
IX...................... Reprogramming Limiting Decisions 165
Epilogue ..........................................................................
Appendices
Accessing Cues ...........................................................
The Meta Model.. ........................................................
Linguistic Presuppositions.........................................
Sub modalities .............................................................
Reframing ....................................................................
Toning Up Your Voice................................................
Glossary of NLP Terms...................................................
Induction
This book, and all the books related to it, grew out of a goal. We all know of stunningly accomplished people. We usually call them creative. Some of them, even geniuses, had less training, intelligence, talent, strength, energy, money, memory, you name it, than many mediocre achievers in the same field. Why? Call it a fluke. Rude, but it gets us off the hook. Unfortunately, it sounds less convincing every time. Worse, creative people have an alarming tendency to stay increasingly creative. This flagrant violation of entropy and justice admits no previous explanation.
Two decades ago, the founders of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) sought to answer that "why" usefully. With a functional answer to that question, we could train people to perform like geniuses. Today, thousands of people have certifications in NLP. In single sessions, they can accelerate learning, neutralize phobias, enhance creativity, improve relationships, eliminate allergies, and lead firewalks without roasting toes. NLP achieves the goal of its inception. We have ways to do what only a genius could have done a decade ago. In this book you will find more powerful ways to understand, shape, and use your states of consciousness, your driving beliefs, and your experience of time itself. You can apply these to accelerate learning, achieve
I would like to dedicate this work to a few of the geniuses of our time:
Moshe Feldenkrais, Patrick Moraz, and Anthony Robbins.
-R.B.
Prologue
Before teaching, before learning, before knowing, begin with something more. Teaching and learning and knowing must mean more than recapitulation. To teach, install good learning strategies. To make that worth having, do more. You can install in people something much stronger. Call it hope.
Build powerful hope for people. Build it not so much from understandings. Build hope from an experience. Create this experience. Reality is built from ideas. Create this experience repeatedly. Most of the time, most people have that backwards.
At one time there were no aircraft. At one time there were no automobiles. At one time there were no combs. At one time there was no money, no language. Only by ideas did these things appear in reality.
Share reality. People often, with NLP, changed personal history too much. That rapidly became worse than worthless. I call that learning schizophrenia. Schizophrenics get lousy rooms, bad food, and no zippers. Through shared reality, things have value.
You can not only build ideas, and build reality from them, you can do so ecologically and methodically. That applies to hypnotic techniques, or NLP techniques. It applies to any technique that has to do with ideas.
Take mathematical equations. People can build equations that have no value. The object is to build the equations so that the bridge does not fall down, especially when cars go across it.
Many bridges didn't work. The assumption "Something is wrong," doesn't even work well in medicine. Yet they still try to build from it. That includes practicality everything from medicine.
In psychology they still try to build from the model called normative statistics. That allows you to say, "This works sometimes and not others." It does not allow you to describe how this work, or what the work is based on. You want other materials, and other models, even just to design technique.
Design hope. It pays off. People create ideas that will shape reality. Those ideas can become reality to share.
Maybe you want to believe that you're the only person who's competent. Everybody else thinks you're not. You can convince yourself. That will make you convincing to them. Then you can do surgery, or NLP, or drive a bus. They might let you. With luck, they stop you before a terminal adventure.
Go to London. They tell you the right side of the mad is the wrong side of the road. People argue philosophically. But in London, or in America, you drive on the side of the road everyone has agreed to or you collide.
You want to become competent at whatever you do. That does not mean to get phobics who shake in their boots while their blood pressure blows through the roof to believe, "This is not fear." The object is to get them to stay calm and alert, and to stay in their own lane, and to drive across
the bridge, which remains standing.
Ask yourself: "Can we build better?" To build those things we have to be able to suspend whatever belief system we already have. Keep it out of the way.
Make a distinction between these beliefs and, for example religious convictions. We're not talking about religion, or beliefs about God. Those things get very, very personal.
We’re talking about basic beliefs regarding human capability.
Here's the only truth about that. Nobody knows. It fascinates me that when you cut your finger it heals. How? Also, it knows when it's done. You don't grow a Siamese twin. Something has to tell those cells "Stop." It does not use a higher brain function. Doctors and biologists have no idea how healing even stops.
Science doesn't know everything. Wow. My guess is science doesn't suspect anything. They don't take into account acupuncture. They don't take into account traditional medicine of China or of India or of anywhere. If they can't see it, and they don't know it, and they can't explain it, they say, "When you show me how it works then I'll believe it." Yet they believe in the most idiotic things, that they can't show nobody nothing of. We don't know how electricity works; we don't know how magnets work. One thing I can guarantee you. Psychologists do not know how people work.
Take somebody who's schizophrenic, or the most highly educated and touted physicist in the world, or somebody who thinks they're the best neurolinguistic programmer. What they can't do is based on what they don't
I
Believer Modification
Install the NLP Attitude
irst study great communicators and great clients. I did. That revealed a basic fault in the whole foundation of psychology. So I built something else. When psychologists studied phobias, they went out and found hundreds of people with phobias. They went after the only people who did not know how to get over the problem! I took another approach. I went out and found two people who had a phobia and who got over it. Then I found out what they did.
I learned this from Milton Erickson, who had unique talents. When his clients had a problem, he always looked at who didn't have it. He then found a way of making the ones who had the difficulty like the ones who didn't.
I saw him work one time with a nut. No two ways about it.
This lady could not tell real from not real. She walked in with her psychiatrist. He gave his long exotic psychiatric description about what was
wrong with her. You could sum it up by saying, "She's nuts." She was nuts in a specific way. Basically, this woman could not tell the difference between something that really happened and something that she made up or that somebody described to her.
That's a nice thing about nuts. They are never nuts randomly. They are always nuts this way or that way. It's systematic. Her psychiatrist flew with her down to Arizona to meet Milton. After the psychiatrist gave his description, Milton turned and said to this lady; 'And you left your house and drove here in a green station wagon and saw the countryside on the way, and how long did it take you to get here?” She said, "Twenty-six hours." In fact, they flew there in an airplane and it took two hours. She had no way of sorting those things apart.
Milton, above and beyond putting her into a very, very altered state, used that altered state to build the skill she needed. He knew that she was not functioning. He also knew the exotic reason why. She didn't know how!
I like where Milton got his information. He turned around, looked at the psychiatrist and pointed to the trance chair. This man had an his degrees. He even ran the Erickson Institute in one state. He suddenly displayed what I call deep and overwhelming fear. He looked at the client like this, and Milton said, "Now, just to reassure the lady, I'd like you to show her that trance is not dangerous." Immediately my brain said, "It must be dangerous! Especially for him! Right now!" He walked over and just as he began to sit, just as he reached the point of no return in sitting, Milton said, "All the way into a trance." As the guy dropped he went, "Klunk!"
Milton said, "Now, as you sit there, I want you to review in your mind
three things that you know absolutely and totally happened. Think about
F
events that you're absolutely sure of, not profound events, but, 'Did you have breakfast this morning?'" Milton took him through three events which had occurred that day, and then said, "In your mind go and make up three events." Milton then said him to go into an even deeper trance, and his unconscious mind would convey to him how he knew which ones were which.
Now, I was sitting there at the time, drifting in and out of trance. Everyone always did around Milton. The difference was that I grew up in the '60s. I'd got used to being stoned. So I stopped. I got one thing from what this gentleman said. The picture looked different. About the pictures of what really happened, Milton asked, "What's the difference?" The therapist literally said, "They seem square, whereas the other ones are vague and transparent and don't have a shape."
By this time the client had also dropped into a trance. Milton said, "Fortunately and conveniently the client has already entered an altered state." Meaning, he'd zoned her through the floor.
He turned around and began to instruct her to review the events then occurring. He told her to put them into square pictures. Then he made up fantasies and told her to make them vague and transparent and without any shape. He began to instruct her unconscious mind to start to sort out all events this way. Nowadays, TVs being mostly square, I recommend you make sure you have other ways to sort real from not real. This became one origin of something that I developed, along with my friends Chris Hall and Todd Epstein and other people who help me; something we now call submodalities. You can call submodalities the currency of the mind. We can exchange and make change with them.
Objections to Objectivity
People have talked about subjectivity and objectivity for a long time. When I went to college I didn't get into psychology. For one thing, the research people and the clinicians wouldn’t talk to each other. It seemed to me that if, in medicine, the researchers didn't like the practitioners and didn’t ten them what they had developed, and the practitioners wouldn't ask for what they needed, then they would kill us. The research people thought themselves very prestigious. They tortured rats. The practitioners were outside feeling up trees and trying to get in touch with themselves. The field went off into the ozone, which started disappearing, as did those psychologists, because they went overboard. I had professors who talked about objective expetiments. I had a background in physics. Physicists knew that objectivity had long been out of the question. Through Einstein ''He had learned that things are not objective. They are relative. They depend upon your point of view. Einstein talked about riding on a beam of light. Pretend you could ride on a particle of light, a photon. Another person charged along on another photon. How does that look different from sitting on a bridge, watching people go by on photons? "What if two people, riding two photons together, throw a handball from one to the other? From the perspective of the photon riders, it would look like the ball went straight across. From the bridge, as they passed by, the ball would look like it moved at an angle. On top of all that, time and space work differently for lightspeed.
The idea that things might be relative in psychology took me to objective subjectivity. While I investigated things, people continued to talk about subjectivity as a sin. Now, I happen to like sin. I wanted to know how it works.
things, beliefs make the express train taking people far into altered states quickly and effectively. Improve the beliefs people have about their abilities, not just in trance, but in the world at large. Use the fast train.
Many people think that when you go into a trance you lose control of yourself in fact, you gain control. You gain the ability to control your heart rate, your blood pressure, your ability to remember, your ability to use physical strength or dexterity your ability to control time and your perceptions. You'll start doing those kinds of things by the end of this. That will increase the range of your abilities with yourself and with other people. Learn both sides, and both responsibilities. Then you can know what control means, and what it’s good for.
We work with very simple building blocks. How many of you have experience with submodalities? Actually you've all used submodalities your whole life without knowing it.
Attitude Par Excellence
Notice differences between the ways others teach and the way I teach. Grant some importance to your attitude. NLP means more than a methodology. It also means the attitude you have when using it. If you don't have powerfull beliefs that you can do anything...
Stop right now. Take a few minutes to learn something. Close your eyes. Think of your personal problem persons. Think of those who, when one walks in, a little voice in your head says, "Oh shit" Just close your eyes and go back to that. Look at them. Choose one person. As you see that person walk in, hear precisely where that little voice comes from and notice how it makes you feel. If you make that picture bigger and brighter, you'll probably feel worse. Right?
Now try a different way. I recommend that people try this before
working with clients. Regardless, pretend your person is a client of yours. Picture a ravine with a mountain on either side Blow it up till it fills a forty by forty foot screen. Down at the end of the ravine, I'd like you to put your client. Make them very small. You can put a touch of lightning on top of each mountain.
Just in front of you, put a forty foot puma-one roaring big cat. Swell up in your mind as you step into the scene and inside that cat. From the viewpoint of that cat, look at your client hungrily. As you continue looking down at the person, paw the ground once and see it shake. See the fear in your client's eyes. You can now hear thunder rumbling very loudly, and you can roar louder. Now take this picture and make it bigger and bigger. Make the colors bright. You can now hear yourself say, as you look down at your client, "Your ass is mine” Notice if this makes you feel rather different.
Belief Building Blocks Take your attitude and begin to really believe that it is your job to do something for people. You don't just let them grow. They came. They paid you to change their lives. By God you’re going to do it Call this attitude building. Now if you go in with that attitude, you need only to add generous amounts of skill. We make skills out of the same kinds of building blocks. Take that movie.
As you take that picture I want you to make it bigger. I want you to turn up the volume for the singers louder and louder. Make it surround sound. Bring that image up closer. How does that make you feel? Does it change the intensity of your feelings? If so, keep turning it up until it gives you more and more internal personal power. Instead of saying, "Oh, shit," when you look down at your client, you begin to say to yourself, "Piece of cake!"
You did the same thing when you started to walk. You took very small pieces, one step at a time, and put them together into a foundation to explore a 'whole new world of activity)'; a world of learning, a world of understanding, a world of more control in your own environment.
Reorient yourself for a moment. Ask yourself some questions. Examine your own mind for a minute.
You could trick a client. To take the picture off and put it underneath won't work with every client. That guy; at that time, in that place, never expected it. That trick changed his belief. The important part was not moving the picture. The important part was changing his belief.
Placebo Power
You may have thought that a placebo works because the person doesn't know it's a placebo. It works because of belief: In the United States we do an unusual thing. We test all drugs against placebos. That's what a double blind test does. So we have more information on placebos than we have on all drugs put together.
Robert Dilts and I had an idea. We decided to put out a product, tiny empty capsules, called "placebo." No side effects.
Robert was my grad student at the time. He reviewed the research on standard problems like headaches. We made plans to publish a little booklet with an index. A person would look up headaches and read, when tested against other drugs, placebos work five out of six times." Then it would say, "Take seven 'when you have a headache." It's a sure thing.
The FDA complained. They told us the effects would wear of£ Placebo would loose its efficacy. We knew that could happen. Some people would not get the beliefs built in tenaciously the first time. We revealed our
back up plan. "NEW! PLACEBO PLUS TWICE THE INERT INGREDIENTS! TWICE AS POWERFUL AS EVER BEFORE!" Of course, drug companies run the FDA. So they wouldn't let us do it. They couldn't find any danger. The capsules were empty. There was nothing there. They told us this was illegal and immoral. "Besides,” they said, "it will never work, so we won't let you do it.
We had proved that it would work. We had decades of their experimental results from them. We also had our own results.
My clients often knew a placebo when they got one. They still do. I actually give them the ability to believe that it works because it is a placebo. I explain that since they already know it for a placebo, it will work forever. It does. The structure of how a belief works is where I want you to start.
Unhypnotizability
You can learn a lot about tempo and tonality. You can practice with tape recorders, CD players, metronomes and more. We have much more elaborate equipment than you actually need.
More than one book says "tempo and tonality have no effect when doing; deep trance work." Pretend you can hear that said by Mickey Mouse and Muhammad Ali. I think they have some impact. You can realize that tempo and tonality didn't have any effect because the guy who wrote that couldn't affect his tone or tempo.
Non-believers did an experiment in the days when they really tried to make me look like a fraud. I conducted a seminar with three hundred and fifty people. Two psychiatrists from Hildegard's lab brought up a little lady. They said, "This lady is a documented Hildegard zero. She cannot be hypnotized." The shrinks, on either side of the lady, held her up.
it happens very fast, the brain understands. That's part of how the brain learns.
I had more impatience that they. They sat around wanting to drag it out for an hour. I wanted people in and out in five minutes so I could get on my way. That paid off for my clients.
I discovered that the human mind does not learn slowly. It learns quickly. I didn't know that. I just move quickly.
Everything else in the universe seems to work that way. If you take sheet metal and bend it quick and hard, it will hold its shape. If you bend it quick and hard enough, it can break. If you just slowly push it, it'll bend right back. To make things stay; use speed. If you want ideas to take shape, the same principle applies. Suppose you run somebody through the fast phobia cure. In order for that to work people need to go through the steps quickly, especially when they rewind it at the end. The speed with which they do it makes it hold. I don't use it anymore. For me, it's too slow.
For pacing sometimes I grab hold of you. Either keep up or skid. You can pace till you get into people's shoes. Do that for empathy. Do empathy with happily married Nobel Prize winners who party well and wisely. Pace victims to know how to get them to respond. Then inch them out of whatever they got stuck in. Pace to lead.
Slow Learning
You have the option of making the Montessori mistake, the ultimate pace. Teach kinesthetic kids kinaesthetically, always. Visual kids, pace them in visual language, forever. That leads to crippling them their whole life! Get people to use everything they can as fast as they can.
Babies start I earning to speak. They don't even know that language exists. Children can learn language quickly. They can learn foreign languages while barely knowing their native language. Our school system utterly fails to teach it. We do it for twelve years so that later they can’t speak a word of it.
Another problem is where we teach language. When I went to school, we sat at a peg board with a set of headphones. Every utterance in the language became associated with a peg board. I took Spanish. I went to Mexico. I heard Spanish. I saw the peg board. I relived being in school. It didn’t help me communicate. But it was fun! if you like peg boards. Throw somebody in Mexico. Give them two bottles of tequila. They speak lingua franca by morning. Do more than joke about these things. Take them to heart. This is your life. It's our children's lives.
As soon as I stopped thinking about it, I just went out and had fun and did things with people and related to people. Then you learn the language. That applies to everything. But people don’t use it.
The Possibility Problem People think of what they can't do. I have done generative seminars. I've said, "This is not for remedial change, come in because you want good things." People come. They don't come in and allow the scope to even conceive of the possibilities.
They come in and say, "I want to get rid of my internal dialogue." I say, "Kill yourself, you won't have any." They say, "Wait a minute...
They need to understand, to dream of what's possible. They don’t even know the problem. They first took the step of thinking, "I know the
solution! If I didn't have internal dialogue then I'd feel good. Then I'd be enlightened." Instead they could realize that we can choose what to make a problem and decide what process we use.
They could talk inside themselves like Mozart. They'd have an opera motivating them. Then they'd want to keep all their voices. They'd have a great laugh like Mozart. Their world would resonate with music and excitement instead of nasty voices whining and screeching.
Decisive Details
Whatever gets in the way, move through quickly so that they can't keep up with it. Move that fast. The faster we drive, the less detail we can pay attention to. People get caught in details. We don't know when to go fast and when to go slow. That causes bad decisions.
The value of detail depends on what you want to learn. 'We learn to drive across a bridge. Do you want to inch your way across? Have all the possibilities of falling inch across your mind? You want to have an outcome, to get there. Add a way to enjoy the process.
People in the military learn to walk across a board. They walk across a board an inch off the floor. Put it up 20 feet. They move slower than they do on the ground. They look at the ground, taking in data they don't need. They only need data about the board. If they did it dI e same way that they did on the ground! they could have the same result. By being over aware of height, they become over aware of the possibility of falling.
Sometimes information is relevant! sometimes not. Build a belief that says, "Look at the board and go across. There's no difference." Filter and select the information to keep track of
In Houston, I climbed as high as what we had, tall trees, maybe a ledge. With everything flat, up seems a lot more up. I remember the first time I saw guys working on a skyscraper. I looked up there. They just trucked around on those beams. I thought, "These guys have gone out of their minds."
But I was 17 stories up looking up at them, thinking this, as if another 17 really made a difference. Suddenly I looked down. How far do you really have to fall to splat? Above a certain height we really don't make anything else.
They want to keep track of things. They keep track of things like tools and wind. That one thing I did learn to keep track o£ I was standing on a platform. Even though I had a floor, the wind almost blew me off. I was busy looking up at them. I didn't watch where to go. They saw it coming. Before it ever arrived, they leaned into it. They had the senses to reach out and notice it. The gust caught me.
Build beliefs that tell you, "Design your perceptions, and design your behaviors, around the task. Then the task becomes simple." If you don't, Then you get the opposite effect. You get too much education.
Deconstructing Beliefs
Now I want you to stop and think of something that you absolutely, utterly and total I y believe. Just stop. Think about it. Think of something you know.
I want you to pay attention to the following distinctions. Notice what happens when you're asked, "Is the sun coming up tomorrow ?” Notice how you represent an emphatic. The sun will rise.
For now, I want you to think about the ability to go into a deeper and more profound trance than you ever thought you could. I want you to do this in a very specific way. Start by putting a picture of yourself in such a trance in the position of something that could or could not be true. Don't put it into the belief position yet. Start out by putting it into the doubt position.
Sir, would you mind helping me for a minute? For you, up and to the left .was where something could or could not be. Right? I want you to start by putting the idea that you can go into a deeper trance than you've ever been in right up there. Okay? Now, slowly move it way into the horizon until
it hits a point. Then I want you to pull it up quickly, whhhaccckk.l That
quick. Pull it up into the position where a strong and powerful belief is,
with the auditory representations you'd have there. Make it the same size, the same closeness, and do it very suddenly. Start now.
That's right... drift all the way down, with a growing sense of comfort and satisfaction and enjoyment about how easy it is to really learn about going into a deep, comfortable and relaxed state. And I w'ant your unconscious to give you real security in the knowledge that you can really learn from your other mind, that you can really learn about making any change and having any skill you want. I want you to know when you want to return to this state, and I n fact, to go twice as deep now. That's right-all the way down. I want you to see that any time I touch you like this, you can go all the way back, or even if you just feel my hand there you can return. And, of course, if I were to touch you on the other shoulder, you could go back to consciousness and feel absolutely and exquisitely wonderful. Now, that's right. All the way back. Are you back here?
"Yeah, pretty back.”
Thank you!
II
Believe in Laughter
Frame Problems As Humor and As
Something to Enjoy
ow that we have given you the belief that you can go into a more profound trance than you\re ever done before, and that you can become highly proficient in doing trance work with clients, it's time to install another ability: framing things humorously.
Now, take problems with humor. Humor is a natural function with human beings. People talk about it as a release. In NLP we ask, “Release from what?" Also ask, "How?"
Without humor, you get to do it again. Without laughter, whatever we did, we do. When people feel guilty and moan and groan, they will do the same thing again. We can feel surprised, relieved, and delighted that we notice, and start laughing. Then what happens? We open a door. We can escape that whole world.
People say, "Someday I'll look back and laugh at this » Why wait? It doesn't do you good.
N
With the ability to laugh, you have the freedom to escape your own model of the world. A lot of times people laugh, but they don’t escape. Seize the moment. Use the instant of laughter.
Look at a situation as being as silly as it is. In some other context or some other time it would he. In some other culture it would be. You can change your perceptions enough.
Aliens Too
Imagine what we must look like to aliens. Aliens in movies and TV shows visit earth. They know how to fit in with humans. No way. A pair of aliens down here would get caught right off. Humans are too strange.
Suppose you came here and tried to fit in. Get up with everybody in the morning. Then, we all go in metal machines with wheels and drive really fast in opposite directions beside a painted line.
They think, “This must be one of the weirdest fetishes in this world. They get in these things and drive really fast right next to each other. The ones driving fastest are the one driving in opposite directions right by each other. They could reach out and touch each other. They'd rip their arms off. Frequently they do worse."
To an alien they wouldn't understand, they'd say, "Look, they've learned. In some places they put barriers in between, instead of paint. They build the barriers out of cement. You'd think they'd have the sense to make rubber cars and drive slower so they'd just bounce."
That must look like weird behavior. You could fly at ten times the speed of light. Get right down near the ground and go very fast. That would still scare you. In space you've got nothing to run into.
Then you would notice odd little things like people boiling each other in their backyards. Especially in this town. You figure, "They have to, because they have all these rules for driving that nobody obeys.”
So you want to figure out how to fit in. You start to I learn our rules to follow them. When are you supposed to and when are you supposed not to? Everybody here knows. We have accepted behavior.
We don't understand any of it. We only do it. We forgot how we started. W e don't pay attention anymore.
Those things would seem very, very hard for anybody to imitate. We ourselves can take people who learn to drive in San Francisco and take them to San Diego. Everybody there drives crazy. Take a San Diego driver and put him in San Francisco. Same trouble.
Take anyone of them and stick them in London, or Paris, or Rome. It's a whole other world. Some people realize, "That's the way those people drive." Other people go into the fudge factor. “They all have gone nuts."
Now, some days you start thinking that the world went nuts or the world is out to get you. It can happen. Viktor Frankl found things to laugh at and make jokes about as a Jew in Auschwitz.
Anytime you had to feel bad unless other people changed, you had the opportunity to laugh. You still do. Otherwise you have to feel bad for the rest of your life. You don't get to just open up the doorway. Take the aliens' point of view.
Laughter opens doorways. Find a door. Charge through. Claim a new world.
consciousness as something that you don't normally do.
When I learned to meditate they gave me a mantra. You say this thing over and over in your head. Not something I did normally. It does alter your state of consciousness. I go into a deep state of utter boredom. It works.
Hypnotic Reality
Milton once went to give a lecture. I loved Milton's description about going up to give this lecture. He had the ability to detect, before his turn, that he had a room full of people who didn't believe in hypnosis. In fact, some of the people had tried to have his license removed. In I 955, they actually tried to take his medical license away for using hypnosis. "He uses something that doesn’t exist !”.
Think about that-he did something that wasn't there. And it was "bad." Something that wasn't there .wasn't good. So they brought him up before a review board. I actually met one of the people on that review board years later. I love his description. It was even better than Milton's. He said, "I remember him, coming in the door? And after that I don't know much of what happened." I thought, "You could sum it up that way."
Milton looked at them and said, "So you think it s bad for me to put
people in a deep trance and you can feel it now it's a bad thing, and I
want you to reel comfortable and relaxed in the knowledge that there is no
such thing as going into a trance too quickly, or too slowly) now. And the
knowledge that you learn about going into a trance deeply... that sometimes
people are afraid of what's not there. Can you reel that?"
It always amazes me that people will fight over what's not there. People who claim there's no such thing as hypnosis will fight vehemently about it, and go to a hypnosis seminar. The contradictions there! I have people who pay $2500 bucks to go to a hypnosis seminar, and then tell me there's no such thing as hypnosis. Do you pay $2500 bucks for what's not there?
Do they sell subliminal tapes over here? what a scam! What a scam!! They sell you tapes you can't hear! They say, "Listen to this, you can't hear what's on it, so you're not hearing it consciously. Therefore it must be unconscious!" Right!? That sounds like something Tricky Dick or Slick Willy would do.
We had to try this. A friend of mine has a stress clinic. We made a subliminal tape. All the suggestions on it are things like, "Everything will freak you out. You'll be nervous all day." All you can hear is the sound of the ocean.
We gave it to thirty people. We looked at them and said, "This is the relaxation tape. It has ten thousand suggestions to be more comfortable and relaxed. We want you to listen to it all day, waking up, while you're in the car driving, going to sleep, it will change your life." Vole know how to say these things.
Notice my spirit of experimentation. You test on other people's lives. They call it "Private Practice."
When these people came back the most amazing thing happened. They
categorically said, every one of them, that they had the best, the most
relaxed month of their lie! So I decided that subliminal tapes were not the
answer.
Anyway, Milton got into the situation. He realized he had a room full of
skeptics. He told me that he gave, as he said, "an hour and a half lecture in
which I delivered no information of any relevance to anything. And I did so,
slowly and laboriously, making point upon point that referred to the points
that didn't exist before." He said, "It was only the sound of my voice and the
tempo at which I spoke that allowed me to know at which moment in time
to simply step forward and say, 'You may all close your eyes, noooww
They did”
Milton fought wars about what was legitimate and what was not
legitimate. So did Virginia. Virginia actually used to keep it a secret that she
did family therapy, or she’d get fired. Even later in her life she hadn't noticed
that it was okay. She 'was having an argument that she had won.
One time, she had just given a lecture trying to convince people that
family therapy was legitimate. I pointed out to her, "They are all family
therapists!" She said, « Well yes, but they need to know what to say to their
bosses. » I said, "Most of them are their bosses, Virginia."
The Attitude of Appreciation
Milton Erickson wasn't prone to let his sense of humor out because many people think that if you enjoy something it won't work. Yet if NLP adds anything to the world I hope it's the attitude, "If it ain't fun, it's probably not working." Many of my colleagues have tried to make NLP serious. I've noticed that humor is a powerful tool. Have you noticed that?
When most of us went to school we had teachers who tried to teach us things while making us feel bad. They did the last part well. So if I write a polynomial on a chalkboard most people in the room will get sick. when we went to school, they made us sit still in chairs and made us feel bad. They induced fear and anchored it with numbers.
I consider that a poor use of anchoring, but I do it with my own kids. I look at their schoolbooks, induce fear, and anchor it. That's how I can get them to avoid that knowledge. My boy hates his addition book. He cheats: he goes and looks up calculus instead.
When I worked with Milton I observed his way of inducing humor. He did get people to have a sense of humor. He would get people to literally enjoy problems. He'd get people to be stingy about them.
He had one client I read about in one of his journal articles who dropped by regularly. She had psychotic episodes. Milton had her put them in an envelope and mail it to him. She always described them in the form of a nominalization. So when she had an episode he said, "Stop.! Just collect it up.” She saw little naked men dancing around in the air. So Milton got her to collect them, put them in an envelope and mail them to him. He said, "I will save them for you." Thereafter she would come by now and then to
