DAY ONE: HOW TO CHANGE NEGATIVE THINKING When Friday came, Joe headed over to where the course was being held and registered with one of the assistants. The man, well dressed, wore a blue badge with the word ‘Trainer’ written clearly on it. He welcomed Joe with a warm smile. He searched a list for Joe’s name, and after recognizing his surname there said, ‘Oh, Maria’s brother, I presume. Joe, nice to meet you. I’m Alan.’ They shook hands. ‘If you need something during the course, I’d be delighted to help you out.’ Alan handed Joe a name tag and a manual, and then Joe walked into the auditorium. There was a stage at the end of the room, and rows of chairs faced the stage. Joe picked a seat halfway up the aisle on the right-hand side. Pop music in the background mixed with the mumbled buzzing of participants’ conversations. Joe looked around, confused. The seminar was full – there were about 500 people in the room. The topic of the course seemed to have aroused plenty of interest, though Joe was sceptical. What am I doing here? he thought. This is pointless. A waste of three days. He turned and saw the grinning face of a woman who was settling into the seat beside him, then an outstretched hand. ‘Hi. My name is Anna. You can call me Ann, if you like.’ Joe braced himself for the social interaction, putting on his best polite act. ‘Hi, I’m Joe. Call me Joe,’ he said, smiling weakly at his attempt at a joke. ‘Nice to meet you, Joe. I’m a psychotherapist. It’s my first time here. I can’t wait to see Dr Bandler. I’ve heard he’s quite funny and controversial.’ Joe smiled and turned away uncomfortably to face the stage. Anna continued to talk, this time in a German accent. ‘Ya, Guten Tag. I’ve studied Freudian psychotherapy. My expertise is in psychoanalysis. I find de root cause of people’s problems. Don’t vorry, though; I von’t analyse you.’ Anna started laughing at her own attempt at the accent. Her features were sharp and her dark glasses matched her functional grey dress and shiny black hair tied back from her head. Joe smiled politely. As Anna continued to talk about her job, Joe found himself locking gazes with a woman
across the room with long brown hair. Almost as suddenly as they had seen each other, she had turned away. Joe couldn’t look away. He was lost in her. She seemed to have her own distinctive dress style, a summery dress flowing down to her knees. Her air of confidence radiated in every direction around her, smiling beautifully at the two people on either side of her, and in turn drawing smiles from them. She is way out of my league, Joe immediately thought. He instinctively pulled his stomach in and sat straight up in his chair. The brown-haired girl sat in the same row as him, about ten seats away. Her skin was pale and white, but her lips were red and her eyes sparkled green like a lighthouse saving a ship in danger. When Joe looked away, Anna was still talking. The music got louder and a motorcycle roar announced the beginning of the song ‘Born to Be Wild.’ Everybody’s attention was now directed to the stage. The seminar was about to begin. Joe relaxed. Let’s give this a go. What if his sister was right? The man from the leaflet walked onstage to loud applause. The first thing Joe noticed about this guy was his calm and his impressive confidence. He was dressed in a strong suit, crisp white shirt and bold tie. After a few seconds the song dissipated into the silence of the auditorium and the man spoke. His voice was deep and warm. So this is Richard Bandler … Joe wondered if he would live up to his reputation. Understanding personal freedom Good morning, everybody. I want to start today by talking about personal freedom. This all started about forty years ago because I wanted to help people change. Although I could find lots of textbooks full of explanations of what was wrong with people, I couldn’t find, in any of the books, anything you could really do to actually help people change. So that’s when I began to search for what I could do to help people become free. That’s what my life’s work is about: personal freedom. Joe settled back into his seat. He promised himself that he would give the course his full attention. Personal freedom is the ability to feel what you want so that the chains of fear, sadness and hate are broken. These chains are made up of negative feelings, limiting beliefs and destructive behaviours. I began to study one of the most successful therapists around at the time – Virginia Satir. Virginia was skilled at what she did and was absolutely tenacious. She would go after a client’s problems and not stop until she helped them change. I spent a lot of time examining how she did
what she did, and soon I went around to mental hospitals with her. Because I was with her, people assumed I was a qualified psychotherapist and they let me do what I wanted. You know, in those hospitals you meet some very strange people, and I’m not talking about the patients! I was in a seminar in Seattle, and I asked if someone knew the difference between psychiatrists and schizophrenics. One person shouted out one of my favourite answers to this question. She said, ‘Sure! A schizophrenic can get well and go home!’ Joe chuckled to himself. He was pleasantly surprised by this guy’s tone. He could sense Anna, sitting beside him, squirming in her seat. Take psychoanalysis, which is weird enough itself. The idea that your problems stem from the fact that you fancy your mother or father. I mean, please. Again, Joe tried to suppress a laugh, turning his head towards Anna. Her face was bright red and she fidgeted with her hands. People always ask me how much resistance I must have gotten from the fields of psychology and psychotherapy, and the truth is, I got very little. Most psychologists and psychotherapists were delighted to learn more useful ideas that could help their clients change. They were good people frustrated with the standard model of psychology at the time. Some of the therapists who had been working that way for years began to change their approach when they found the skills I taught them more useful. 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.
