CAN CHANGE HAPPEN IN AN INSTANT?

CAN CHANGE HAPPEN IN AN INSTANT?

"Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in

the twinkling of an eye ..."

CORINTHIANS 15:51

For as long as I can remember, I've always dreame dof having the ability to help people change

virtually anything in their lives. Instinctively, at an early age, I realized that to be able to help others

change, I had to be able to change myself. Even in junior high school, I began to pursue knowledge

through books and tapes that I thought could teach me the fundamentals of how to shift human

behaviour and emotion. Of course I wanted to improve certain aspects of my own life: get myself

motivated, get myself to follow through and take action, learn how to enjoy life, and leam how to

connect and bond with people. I'm not sure why, but somehow I linked pleasure to learning and

sharing things that could make a difference in the quality of people's lives and lead them to appreciate

and maybe even love me. As a result, by the time I was in high school, I was known as the "Solutions

Man." If you had a problem, I was the guy to see, and I took great pride in this identity. The more I

learned, the more addicted I became to learning even more. Understanding how to influence human

emotion and behaviour became an obsession for me. I took a speed-reading class and developed a

voracious appetite for books. I read close to 700 books in just a few years, almost all of them in the

areas of human development, psychology, influence, and physiological development. I wanted to

know anything and everything there was to know about how we can increase the quality of our lives,

and tried to immediately apply it to myself as well as share it with other people. But I didn't stop with

books. I became a fanatic for motivational tapes and, while still in high school, saved my money to go

to different types of personal development seminars. As you can imagine, it didn't take long for me to

feel like I was hearing nothing but the same messages reworked over and over again. There appeared

to be nothing new, and I became a bit jaded. Just after my twenty-first birthday, though, I was

exposed to a series of technologies that could make changes in people's lives with lightning-like speed:

simple technologies like Gestalt therapy, and tools of influence like Erick sonian hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. When I saw that these tools could really help people create changes in

minutes that previously took months, years, or decades to achieve, I became an evangelist in my

approach to them. I decided to commit all of my resources to mastering these technologies. And I

didn't stop there: as soon as I learned something, I applied it immediately.I'll never forget my first

week of training in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. We learned things like how to eliminate a lifetime

phobia in less than an hour—something that through many forms of traditional therapy could take as

much as five years or more! On the fifth day, I turned to the psychologists and psychiatrists in the

class and said, "Hey, guys, let's find some phobics and cure them!" They all looked at me like I was

crazy. They made it very clear to me that I obviously wasn't an educated man, that we had to wait

until the six-month certification program was completed, go through a testing procedure, and if we

were successful, only then would we be ready to use this material! I wasn't willing to wait. So I

launched my career by appearing on radio and television programs throughout Canada and eventually

the United States as well. In each of these, I talked to people about these technologies for creating

change and made it clear that if we wanted to change our lives, whether it was a disempowering habit

or a phobia that had been controlling us for years, that behaviour or that emotional pattern

could be changed in a matter of minutes, even though they might have tried to change it for years

previously. Was this a radical concept? You bet. But I passionately argued that all changes are created

in a moment. It's just that most of us wait until certain things happen before we finally decide to make

a shift. If we truly understood how the brain worked, I argued, we could stop the endless process of

analyzing why things had happened to us, and if we could just simply change what we linked pain and

pleasure to, we could just as easily change the way our nervous systems had been conditioned and

take charge of our lives immediately. As you can imagine, a young kid with no Ph.D. who was making

these controversial claims on the radio didn't go over very well with some traditionally trained mental-health professionals. A few psychiatrists and psychologists attacked me, some on the air.

So I learned to build my career in changing people on two principles:

technology and challenge. I knew I had a superior technology, a superior way of creating change

based on crucial understandings of human behaviour that most traditional psychologists were not

trained in. And I believed that if I challenged myself and the people I worked with enough, I could find

a way to turn virtually anything around. One particular psychiatrist called me a charlatan and a liar and

charged that I was making false claims. I challenged this psychiatrist to suspend his pessimism and

give me an opportunity to work with one of his patients, someone he hadn't been able to change after

working with her for years. It was a bold move, and at first he did not comply with my request. But

after utilizing a little leverage (a technique I'll cover in the next chapter), I finally got the psychiatrist

to let a patient come on her own to one of my free guest events and allow me, in front of the room, to

work with her. In fifteen minutes I wiped out the woman's phobia of snakes—at the time she'd been

treated for over seven years by the psychiatrist who attacked me. To say the least, he was amazed.

But more importantly, can you imagine the references this created for me and the sense of certainty it

gave me about what I could accomplish? I became a wild man! I stormed across the country

demonstrating to people how quickly change could occur. I found that no matter where I went, people

were initially sceptical. But, as I was able to demonstrate measurable results before their eyes, I was

able to get not only their attention and interest but also their willingness to apply what I'd talked about

to produce measurable results in their own lives.

Why is it that most people think change takes so long? One reason, obviously, is that most people

have tried again and again through willpower to make changes, and failed. The assumption that they

then make is that important changes must take a longtime and be very difficult to make. In reality,

it's only difficult because most of us don't know how to change! We don't have an effective strategy.

Willpower by itself is not enough—not if we want to achieve lasting change.

The second reason we don't change quickly is that in our culture, we have a set of beliefs that prevents

us from being able to utilize our own inherent abilities. Culturally, we link negative associations to the

idea of instant change. For most, instant change means you never really had a problem at all. If you

can change that easily, why didn't you change a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, and stop

complaining?

For example, how quickly could a person recover from the loss of a loved one and begin to feel

differently? Physically, they have the capability to do it the next morning. But they don't. Why?

Because we have a set of beliefs in our culture that we need to grieve for a certain period of time. How

long do we have to grieve? It all depends upon your own conditioning. Think about this. If the next day

after you lost a loved one, you didn't grieve, wouldn't that cause a great deal of pain in your life? First,

people would immediately believe you didn't care about the loved one you lost. And, based on cultural

conditioning, you might begin to believe that you didn't care, either. The concept of overcoming death

this easily is just too painful. We choose the pain of grieving rather than changing our emotions until

we're satisfied that our rules and cultural standards about what's appropriate have been met. There

are, in fact, cultures where people celebrate when someone dies! Why? They believe that God always

knows the right time for us to leave the earth, and that death is graduation. They also believe that if

you were to grieve about someone's death, you would be indicating nothing but your own lack of

understanding of life, and you would be demonstrating your own selfishness. Since this person has

gone on to a better place, you're feeling sorry for no one but yourself. They link pleasure to death, and

pain to grieving, so grief is not a part of their culture. I'm not saying that grief is bad or wrong. I'm

just saying that we need to realize it's based upon our beliefs that pain takes a long time to recover

from. As I spoke from coast to coast, I kept encouraging people to make life-changing shifts, often in

thirty minutes or less. There was no doubt I created controversy, and the more successes I had, the

more assured and intense I became as well. To tell the truth, I was occasionally confrontational and

more than a little cocky. I started out doing private therapy, helping people turn things around, and

then began to do seminars. Within a few short years, I was travelling on the road three weeks out of

four, constantly pushing myself and giving my all as I worked to extend my ability to positively impact

the largest number of people I could in the shortest period of time. The results I produced became

somewhat legendary. Eventually the psychiatrists and psychologists stopped attacking and actually

became interested in learning my techniques for use with their own patients. At the same time, my

attitudes changed and I became more balanced. But I never lost my passion for wanting to help as

many people as I could. One day about four and a half years ago, not long after Unlimited Power was

first published, I was signing books after giving one of my business seminars in San Francisco. All the

while I was reflecting on the incredible rewards that had come from following through on the

commitments I had made to myself while still in high school: the commitments to grow, expand,

contribute, and thereby make a difference. I realized as each smiling face came forward how deeply

grateful I was to have developed skills that can make a difference in helping people to change virtually

anything in their lives.

As the last group of people finally began to disperse, one man approached me and asked, "Do you

recognize me?" Having seen literally thousands of people in that month alone, I had to admit that I

didn't. He said, "Think about it for a second." After looking at him for a few moments, suddenly it

clicked. I said, "New York City, right?" He said, "That's true." I said, "I did some private work with you

in helping you to wipe out your smoking habit." Henodded again. I said, "Wow, that was years ago!

How are you doing?" He reached in his pocket, pulled out a package of Marlboros, pointed at me with

an accusing look on his face and said, "You failed!"Then he launched into a tirade about my inability

to "program" him effectively. I have to admit I was rattled! After all, I had built my career on my

absolute willingness to put myself on the line, on my total commitment to challenging myself and other

people, on my dedication to trying anything in order to create lasting and effective change with

lightning-like speed. As this man continued to beratemy ineffectiveness in "curing" his smoking habit,

I wondered what could have gone wrong. Could it be that my ego had outgrown my true level of

capability and skill? Gradually I began to ask myself better questions: What could I learn from this

situation? What was really going on here? "What happened after we worked together?" I asked him,

expecting to hear that he had resumed smoking a week or so after the therapy. It turned out that he'd

stopped smoking for two and a half years, after I'd worked with him for less than an hour! But one day

he took a puff, and now he was back to his four-pack-a-day habit, plainly blaming me because the

change had not endured. Then it hit me: this man was not being completely unreasonable. After all, I

had been teaching something called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Think about the word

"programming." It suggests that you could come to me, I would program you, and then everything

would be fine. You wouldn't have to do anything! Out of my desire to help people at the deepest level,

I'd made the very mistake that I saw other leaders in the personal development industry make: I had

begun to take responsibility for other people's changes.

That day, I realized I had inadvertently placed the responsibility with the wrong person—me—and that

this man, or any one of the other thousands of people I'd worked with, could easily go back to their old

behaviours if they ran into a difficult enough challenge because they saw me as the person responsible

for their change. If things didn't work out, they could just conveniently blame somebody else. They

had no personal responsibility, and therefore, no pain if they didn't follow through on the new behavior.

As a result of this new perspective, I decided to change the metaphor for what I do. I stopped using

the word "programming" because while I continue to use many NLP techniques, I believe it's

inaccurate. A better metaphor for long-term change is conditioning. This was solidified for me when, a

few days later, my wife brought in a piano tuner for our new baby grand. This man was a true

craftsman. He worked on every string in that piano for literally hours and hours, stretching each one to

just the right level of tension to create the perfect vibration. At the end of the day, the piano played

magnificently. When I asked him how much I owed, he said, "Don't worry, I'll drop off a bill on my

next visit." My response was, "Next visit? What do you mean?" He said, "I'll be back tomorrow, and

then I'll come back once a week for the next month. Then I'll return every three months for the rest of

the year, only because you live by the ocean." I said, "What are you talking about? Didn't you already

make all the adjustments on the piano? Isn't it set up properly?" He said, "Yes, but these strings are

strong; to keep them at the perfect level of tension, we've got to condition them to stay at this level.

I've got to come back and re-tighten them on a regular basis until the wire is trained to stay at this

level." I thought, "What a business this guy has!" But I also got a great lesson that day. This is exactly

what we have to do if we're going to succeed in creating long-term change. Once we effect a change,

we should reinforce it immediately. Then, we have to condition our nervous systems to succeed not

just once, but consistently. You wouldn't go to an aerobics class just one time and say, "Okay, now

I've got a great body and I'll be healthy for life!" The same is true of your emotions and behaviour.

We've got to condition ourselves for success, for love, for breaking through our fears. And through that

conditioning, we can develop patterns that automatically lead us to consistent, lifelong success.

We need to remember that pain and pleasure shape all our behaviours, and that pain and pleasure can

change our behaviours. Conditioning requires that we understand how to use pain and pleasure. What

you're going to learn in the next chapter is the science that I've developed to create any change you

want in your life. I call it the Science of Neuro-Associative Conditioning™, or NAC. What is it? NAC is a

step-by-step process that can condition your nervous system to associate pleasure to those things you

want to continuously move toward and pain to those things you need to avoid in order to succeed

consistently in your life without constant effort or will power. Remember, it's the feelings that we've

been conditioned to associate in our nervous systems—our neuro-associations—that determine our

emotions and our behaviour.

When we take control of our neuro-associations, we take control of our lives. This chapter will show

you how to condition your neuro-associations so that you are empowered to take action and produce

the results you've always dreamed of. It's designed to give you the kNACk of creating consistent and

lasting change.