A few years ago they thought that a person’s problems always came from their past, but I believe the reason people have problems is simply that they were born, grew up, and learned to think in certain ways.
Many people feel trapped by the past, but they aren’t really trapped. They’re just practising a habit of feeling bad.
A lot of people have had bad things happen to them, so instead of being glad that it’s not happening now they go through it over and over and over in their heads, so that their present is destroyed by their past.
We always have the choice of taking our past and building a better future or taking our past and limiting our future.
That’s what my work has always been about: teaching people how to make it so that when they look at their past they learn from it, but they don’t suffer because of it.
Joe thought about this statement. He understood what it meant, but how could he make it true for himself?
While I was going around to the hospitals with Virginia, I was asked to work with Charlie. Charlie was a schizophrenic. He believed that the Devil spoke to him. He would tell the psychiatrists and nurses that the Devil visited him and told him bad things about them. His family was distraught at his situation, and they had heard about my different way of working, so they asked if I could help him.
People declared him crazy, but to me he was no more crazy than most of the people I grew up with. People just have different ways of thinking, some of them useful, some of them not so useful. What I’m here to do is to teach you how you can think in a more useful way so you can feel happier and more free.
As Richard Bandler moved about the stage, Joe was completely caught up in his passion for this topic. His hand gestures and tone of voice pulled his listeners closer towards him. He strode around the stage with authority and charm. It was clear to Joe that he knew what he was talking about.
The by-product of this not-useful way of thinking is that it creates great difficulties that manifest themselves in many ways, from schizophrenia to depression to all kinds of ludicrous self-defeating behaviours.
To me, anybody who goes inside themselves and makes their life more miserable than it needs to be is an example of someone who chains themselves to the belief that life is suffering.
They forget that life is not about remembering and reliving unpleasantness from their past but about going forward to look at life as the adventure it can be.
They’re supposed to ask themselves more challenging questions, such as: ‘How can I enjoy myself? How can I make this easier? How can I make this fun?’
However, today we can go one step further. We have techniques that help make you feel really good for no reason, so that when you actually do have a reason you’ll feel even better. This has become the foundation of my work over the past forty years.
Joe started to think about how he had felt in the past and how he felt now.
Personal freedom is also about being able to take the good internal states and the things that you want and being able to manifest them in your life. Freedom enables you to find things like love, success, music and art.
You don’t need to have a million dollars to find them.
Some people think that if they have a big car, house or boat, then all of their problems will go away. That’s not necessarily true. People should think through what’s going to make them happy.
It’s about letting go of problems and thinking more about solutions. It’s about feeling good most of the time. It’s about dealing with the tough times you have and the difficult people you meet with grace and skill. You have more control over your life than you think.
Joe grimaced and thought, It’s a nice idea to think that we have control over our lives, but I’m not convinced. Things can happen that are out of our control. But he wanted to hear more. Richard continued.
How to control your mind
So how do you take more control over your mind? Well, we trap ourselves by the way we run our brain. As we take information in from the world through our five senses, we have five internal ways of representing the information. We make images, talk to ourselves, and experience feelings and tastes and smells through which we make sense of the world. It’s the way that we represent the world internally that determines how we feel and what we do. This reflects your automatic, habitual way of thinking.
The way we think and interpret the world affects how we feel and our mental state at any given moment. To think and act more effectively and feel more resourceful, we must learn to alter our natural habitual thought programmes.
Joe was leaning forward on the edge of his seat.
For example, if I were to ask you where your car is parked or where the train station is, you’d have to go inside your mind and mentally create or remember a picture of the route to get to it. If I ask you what you did yesterday, you’d only know because you’d remember it in the form of a picture. Now, these pictures or images are unconscious. We all make them, but we rarely notice that we do. The trick is to become aware of them first; then we can do something different.
So all of our thoughts are made up of images, sounds and feelings. Once we become aware of how we formulate our thoughts we gain the ability to change them. Because our feelings and behaviours are determined largely by how we think, then once we discover how to think differently, we can achieve more effective results.
Think, for example, of someone who annoys you or makes you feel bad. Make an image of them in your mind. Now, notice the qualities of the image. Notice the size, where it’s located, whether or not the image is in colour or black and white.
Joe tried to do this. Into his mind popped his boss, sticking his head into Joe’s office and demanding that he finish a report by the end of the week because he was going away and Joe was the man for the job. Joe thought of their argument, about the fact that he didn’t have the ability to do it and that it was unfair to expect so much of him in such a short time-frame. He thought of how his boss had laughed in his face and how he had told Joe to ‘get on with it’.
Now, as you think of this image of someone who annoys you or makes you feel bad, do the following: take the image, and if it’s colour, make it black and white. Make it really small. Reduce it in size. Now move it way off in the distance. Notice how you feel.
Richard smirked, as if he already knew the answer. He pointed to a man in the front row.
You, sir. Did you do it? Now, I want you all to really do this exercise. Let me reveal a secret to you.
He whispered to the audience:
If you don’t do it, it won’t work.
Joe joined everyone else in laughter.
It takes you a few seconds and actually changes how you feel.
Joe focused on what Richard had asked. He took into his mind the image of his laughing boss and first made it black and white. Then, he made it as small as a piece of a puzzle, and finally he moved it as far away as he could. Suddenly he was very surprised to discover that the negative feelings that he had just moments before were not nearly as bad. He now just felt a little annoyed. If someone had told him it would help this much, he wouldn’t have believed them. ‘That is cool,’ he mumbled to himself.
The incredible thing is that the qualities of your mental images can be easily altered, and this will affect how you experience these images. You can also take something that makes you feel good and make it bigger and brighter and bring it closer, and you’ll probably