Get The Life You Want

It has been a while since Richard Bandler had a book published so I was looking forward to getting my hands on 'Get The Life You Want'.

Now many books by Bandler are based on transcripts of seminars, think 'Using Your Brain' or 'Frogs Into Princes', both co-authored by John Grinder. Either that or they are the early 'Magic In Action' books, hard to read (in my opinion), and not much fun.

So What's This Book All About?

It's divided into sections, with the text written (or probably spoken, by the way it reads), and each section is aimed at dealing with a specific human 'issue', like, say, 'interview nerves'. Then typically there is a submodailty style exercise for you to do to integrate the 'trancey' words of the man himself.

The Exercises

Now some people will find the exercises easy, and some people will find them less easy, and they take a fair bit of practice in any event so my advice is this. If you find them easy then go ahead and do them, If you don't then find an NLP Practitioner who is comfortable enough with them and capable enough to be your guide.

Play

For goodness sake play with the exercises, treat them as a game, for as Bandler once said, 'what happens when people take things seriously is they end up taking things seriously'.

Or Just Read The Book And Ignore The Exercises

That's what I did. I just read it, and then read it again. I spoke to a couple of NLP trainers who said they thought that it was all a bit too basic but firstly this book is aimed at the general public, and secondly, the hypnotic language that RB uses throughout the text is far from basic. It may look straightforward, and is ever so easy to read, but it's far from 'basic'

Will It Sell?

'Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming' is not a nice snappy title like 'I Can Make You Rich', so it probably won't sell as many copies. Which is a shame, because although there's nothing wrong with Paul McKenna's books, 'Get The Life You Want' is so much better.

In my opinion

Vancouver And Toronto Hypnosis Hypnotherapy And NLP

Hypnotherapy, NLP And Hypnosis In Canada

I am delighted to introduce my new website based in Canada - http://www.hypnosis-vancouver-toronto.com/. I say 'my' website but actually it has been designed specifically for some brilliant associates of mine who provide one to one NLP and hypnosis sessions for people in Toronto and Vancouver. Allow me to introduce them.

Harry Nichols - NLP Master Trainer - Vancouver

I have known Harry Nichols for more than ten years and am pleased to count him as one of my best friends. Harry was formerly an apprentice of Richard Bandler (the guy who invented and developed a great deal of the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (some would say almost all of the field but I don't want to get involved in any arguments over who did what - there is more to life...))

Anyway, Harry is the guy whose voice you will hear if you get the excellent, 'Adventures of Anyone' recording by Richard Bandler. Harry brings many skills to personal change work, and operates on many levels. He is brilliant.

Kathy Welter-Nichols - NLP Practitioner, Hypnotherapist, Healer, Hypnobirthing Expert And Much More - Vancouver

Harry's life partner, Kathy, is a woman of many talents and huge experience and has been working in these fields for more than 20 years. Literally thousands of people have come to her meditation and relaxation workgroups for people suffering from Cancer. Kathy trained with the originators of 'Therapeutic Touch', she is a former Vancouver 'Volunteer of the Year', and is an all round remarkable woman. You can get her recordings from this website here - Kathy Welter-Nichols Recordings

Elizabeth Payea-Butler - NLP Master Trainer - Vancouver

There are very few NLP Master Trainers on the planet who do much one-to-one client work, and we have two of them in Canada. Elizabeth has more than fifteen years experience in client work and is one of the key assistants to Richard Bandler when he conducts NLP trainings in the USA. I am delighted that Elizabeth is part of the JustBeWell.com international team and if you are in the Toronto region then I whole-heartedly recommend that you go and see her

Therapy Or Hypnotherapy Or Hypnosis Or Hypnotist Or What?

I don't want to turn this introduction to the new website into a rant but it does seem bizarre to me that there are a bunch of legal cases in Canada, especially in Toronto, about who is 'entitled' to use the word 'therapy' or 'therapist', or 'therapist' or 'hypnotherapist'. Apparently some psychotherapists think they own certain words and are taking legal action to protect them and to prevent anyone else claiming they do therapy or hypnotherapy. How anyone can think they own a word is beyond me.

What We Do Is More Like Training Anyway

If you consider that the definition of 'therapy' is making someone feel better (stopping them from being addicted, depressed, anxious or whatever), then we are all most definitely therapists. However, if you consider the definition of the word 'therapy' to mean going over the past and talking about how awful things are in the hopes that this will make you feel better, then we are most certainly not therapists.

I am not saying that all psychotherapy is rubbish. There are some wonderful people working in the field of psychotherapy, especailly those using more pragmatic approaches such as cognitive behavioural therapy.

NLP is concerned with where you are at and where you are aiming yourself, not where you have been.

Anyway, these are my opinions, not necessarily Harry's or Kathy's or Elizabeth's they are relaxed about it all and quite happy to do 'hypnosis', rather than 'hypnotherapy', and be 'hypnotists' rather than 'hypnotherapists'.

After all, they are only words, what is being done is what is important, not what you call it ...

Stop Binge Drinking And Drink Moderately

Hypnotherapy and NLP To Stop Binge Drinking

Ah, the scourge of modern society (or one of them). These days the news seems to be full of items of rampaging drunken youths in towns and city centres. I occasionally get a rampaging youth as a client, but more usually they are professional people with steady jobs, and a very bad habit.

Now don't get me wrong. I did my fair share of binge drinking when I was younger. No rampaging though, at least as far as I can recall.

A Classic Case Of Binge Drinking

My favorite binge drinking client to date was a self made millionaire who had an extreme drinking habit. When he was a young man he was a successful trader and got into a cycle of binge drinking and would get blitzed every Friday night.Now this was not really a big deal, he never hurt anyone, it didn't harm his career, he exercised and was very fit, and all his friends were party animals.

As the years went by most of his friends moved on, settled down, had families, and indeed, so did he. He left his job in the City and set up what became a hugely successful company of his own.

He didn't stop binge drinking

Unlike his friends, this man had carried on drinking. Now, he didn't drink alcohol at all during the week, but on Friday nights he would go out and get absolutely hopelessly unconsciously drunk. Sometimes he didn't get home until Sunday. His friends would dump him in a hotel (one he had shares in), and that would be that.

His wife had reached breaking point

His wife had put up with a lot through the years and she had given him an ultimatum. She had told him that if he got drunk ever again then there marriage was over. She had said this before, but he knew that she really meant it this time. The following weekend was to be their big annual family barbecue and literally hundreds of people would be there as usual, so this was going to be one of the few Friday's in the year when he wasn't planning to go out. However, through the years every one of his big home parties had ended him with him passing out with excess alcohol and to have that happen again would spell doom for his marriage

He was half an hour late for a one hour appointment

He hadn’t really been late, he had been sitting outside in his Range Rover for half an hour finalising a deal.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said, ‘if I hadn’t made that call I wouldn’t have made £220 000.00 today.'

‘You won’t mind paying for the full hour, then’, I said.

So I was to have half an hour to sort out the most extreme pattern of binge drinking behaviour I had ever seen. Half an hour wasn’t enough for me to do all the various things I normally do, so I told him we were going to play a game.

‘We are going to talk about this coming Saturday night and how you want things to be,’ I said. ‘You are allowed, during this conversation, to tell me what you don’t want to think, feel or experience a total of three times. After that if you do it again I am going to shout at you.’

He didn’t look impressed. I don’t think anyone normally spoke to him in that tone, except his wife, probably.

‘What good will that do?’ He asked.

‘We can discuss it if you like,’ I said, ‘but if we do we will run out of time. You are here now, you may as well do this.’

He agreed, reluctantly. It wasn’t what he had been expected. He had thought I was going to knock him unconscious into trance and switch the binge drinking switch off in his head. (Believe it or not, even that can work with some people).

So I began.

‘What’s the most important thing about this coming Saturday night?' I asked.

‘That I don’t get drunk, he said. He didn’t even hear himself express the negation.

‘That’s One’, I said.

‘Shit!’ he said.

‘I only want you to tell me what you DO want to happen on Saturday night, that’s the only rule’.

‘I will be more careful,’ he said, through gritted teeth.

‘So what do you want to drink on Saturday?’ I asked.

He thought about it carefully, here was a man who was not used to losing, didn’t like to lose, and was going to do his utmost not to lose.

‘I still want to drink some alcoholic drinks’, he said slowly, and then he bit his lip to stop himself saying anything else. I could almost hear his internal dialogue adding ‘but not too many’. But he didn’t say it out loud.

‘How many alcoholic drinks?’ I asked.

‘About one an hour’, he replied.

‘And what do you think that one drink an hour may be, a pint of vodka?’

‘No’, he said, ‘a glass of beer, or a glass of wine perhaps’.

‘We are in the middle of a heat-wave’, I reminded him, ‘chances are the weather will be warm on Saturday evening and you will get thirsty. What are you going to drink to quench your thirst?’

‘Well I am certainly not...’ he began.

‘That’s Two,’ I interrupted.

‘I didn’t actually say it,’ he objected.

‘It’s my game’ I reminded him, ‘and I make the rules. So what are you going to drink on Saturday night?'

‘Soft drinks,’ he said, glaring at me.

‘Which soft drinks?’ I said.

‘Does it matter?’ He asked.

It mattered, I explained, because I wanted him to start to represent (imagine, think, visualise, plan etc) what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to have to stick rigidly to a drinking plan, but it was important that he thought about things a little more completely. He decided that diet coke and water would be OK. We chatted a bit more and then I reminded him that his friends would not be expecting him to drink moderately.

‘They will bring you drinks,’ I said, ‘They will say things like - Hey Bill (his name wasn’t Bill but I don’t think he would like his real name broadcasted), it’s your party!  What are you playing at?  Have a beer!’

‘Well I am not going to be silly enough to take any notice of them.’ He said.

‘That’s Three!’ I cried, ‘one more and I get to shout at you.’

I could see he was angry, I wasn’t sure how much he was angry with himself, and how much with me. I pressed on.

‘What time do you want to go to bed?’ I asked.

‘When the party is over,’ he replied bluntly.

‘And what time will that be, do you think?’ I said.

He looked blank. He had never been conscious at ‘party-over’ time, he had invariably collapsed with the drink some time before, generally after doing something dramatic like projectile vomiting into one of his swimming pools. He finally decided that it would be about 2am – 3am. We chatted through likely ‘danger’ times for him and he carefully answered with what he was going to do. Then I asked him another question.

‘How do you want to feel when you go to bed?’

He thought about it...

‘I want to feel like I have had a really had a good party, like I have had an excellent time, drunk alcohol sensibly and not got paralytic for once’.

So I shouted at him. ‘STOP!!!’

I really made him jump, and he wasn’t at all sure how to react. He was annoyed and slightly confused and disoriented, so I just carried on regardless.

‘And when you wake up in the morning, how do you want to feel’, I asked.

He sighed.

‘It would be wonderful,’ he said, 'just to wake up in the morning without a hangover for once.'

So I shouted at him again.

And this time he laughed.

He laughed at me but most of all he laughed at himself. There were tears running down his face. And his half hour was over.

He came back to see me the following week (half an hour late again).

‘What do you want?’ I said, as I always do.

‘I want to continue to be able to control my drinking easily,’ he smiled. ‘I can’t believe how easy it can be when you put your mind to it.’

And that was that. I spoke to him about a year later when he rang to see if I could help one of his friends with an unrelated issue and he told me that the binge drinking had stopped totally, except for one time when he had been on a stag weekend, and that was OK because he had planned to do it.

If you want to stop binge drinking then PLAN what you ARE going to do. Hypnotherapy and NLP are a very potent combination (and we don’t usually shout at out clients!). For more info on how we treat binge drinking issues go here Treatments To Stop Binge Drinking – or for an excellent set of recordings that deal with excessive drinking issues go here Stop Binge Drinking NLP And Hypnosis. It is possible, and often very easy, to retrain the mind out of the habit of binge drinking, I have done this with people on scores of occasions. It usually takes more than just relentlessly getting the client to think about what they are going to do (as opposed to what they are not going to do), but 'planning' is always a core issue.

Stop Binge Drinking is also available froma USA onine store