Even more insidious40 are mixed neuro-associations, the classic source of self- sabotage. If you've ever found yourself starting to accomplish something, and then destroying it, mixed neuro-associations are usually the culprit. Perhaps your
business has been moving in fits and starts, flourishing41 one day and floundering42 the next. What is this all about? It's a case of associating both pain and pleasure to the same situation. One example a lot of us can relate to is money. In our culture, people have incredibly mixed associations to wealth. There's no doubt that people want money. They think it would provide them with more freedom, more security, a chance to contribute, a chance to travel, to learn, to expand, to make a difference. But simultaneously, most people never climb above a certain earnings plateau because deep down they associate having "excess" money to a lot of negatives. They associate it to greed, to being judged, to stress, with immorality or a lack of spirituality.
One of the first exercises I ask people to do in my Financial Destiny™ seminars is to brainstorm all the positive associations they have to wealth, as well as all the negative ones. On the plus side they write down such things as: freedom, luxury, contribution, happiness, security, travel, opportunity, and making a difference. But on the minus side (which is usually more full) they write down such things as: fights with spouse, stress, guilt, sleepless nights, intense effort, greed, shallowness, and complacency, being judged, and taxes. Do you notice a difference in intensity between the two sets of neuro-associations? Which do you think plays a stronger role in their lives?
When you're deciding what to do, if your brain doesn't have a clear signal of what equals pain and what equals pleasure, it goes into overload and becomes confused. As a result, you lose momentum and the power to take the decisive actions that could give you what you want. When you give your brain mixed messages, you're
40 insidious heimtückisch
41 flourish 1. Schnörkel; MUSIK Tusch; 2. blühen, gedeihen; schwenken 42 flounder ZOOLOGIE Flunder; zappeln; strampeln; sich verhaspeln
going to get mixed results. Think of your brain's decision-making process as being like a scale: "If I were to do this, would it mean pain or pleasure?" And remember, it's not just the number of factors on each side but the weight they individually carry. It's possible that you could have more pleasurable than painful associations about money, but if just one of the negative associations is very intense, then that false neuro-association can wipe out your ability to succeed financially.
What happens when you get to a point where you feel that you're going to have pain no matter what you do? I call this the pain-pain barrier. Often, when this occurs, we become immobilized—we don't know what to do. Usually we choose what we believe will be the least painful alternative. Some people, however, allow this pain to overwhelm them completely and they experience learned helplessness. Using the six steps of NAC will help you to interrupt these disempowering
patterns. You will create alternative pathways so that you're not just "wishing" away an undesired behaviour, or overriding it in the short term, but are actually rewiring yourself to feel and behave consistent with your new, empowering choices. Without changing what you link pain and pleasure to in your nervous system, no change will last. After you read and understand the following six steps, I challenge you to choose something that you want to change in your life right now. Take action and follow through with each of the steps you're about to learn so that you not only read the chapter, but you produce changes as the result of reading it. Let's begin to learn . . .
6
HOW TO CHANGE ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE: THE SCIENCE
OF NEURO-ASSOCIATIVE CONDITIONING™
"The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread43, but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to it another filament, until it becomes a great
cable and binds us irrevocably44, thought and act." —ORISON SWETT MARDEN
If you and I want to change our behaviour, there is only one effective way to do it: we must link unbearable and immediate sensations of pain to our old behaviour, and incredible and immediate sensations of pleasure to a new one. Think about it this way: all of us, through the experience of life, have learned certain patterns of thinking and behaving to get ourselves out of pain and into pleasure. We all
experience emotions like boredom or frustration or anger or feeling overwhelmed, and develop strategies for ending these feelings. Some people use shopping; some use food; some use sex; some use drugs; some use alcohol; some use yelling at their kids. They know, consciously or unconsciously, that this neural pathway will relieve their pain and take them to some level of pleasure in the moment. Whatever the strategy, if you and I are going to change it, we have to go through six simple steps, the outcome of which is to find a more direct and empowering way to get out of pain and into pleasure, ways that will be more effective and elegant. These six steps of NAC will show you how to create a direct highway out of pain and into pleasure with no disempowering detours. They are:
NAC MASTER STEP 1
43 thread 1. Faden (auch übertragen); Garn; TECHNIK Gewinde; 2. Nadel einfädeln; Perlen und so weiter
auffädeln, -reihen
Decide What You Really Want and What's Preventing You From Having It Now.
You'd be surprised how many people came to me for private therapeutic work, and when I asked them what they wanted, they'd spend twenty minutes telling me what they didn't want, or what they no longer wanted to experience. We've got to
remember that we get whatever we focus on in life. If we keep focusing on what we don't want, we'll have more of it. The first step to creating any change is
deciding what you do want so that you have something to move toward. The more specific you can be about what you want, the more clarity you will have, and the more power you will command to achieve what you want more rapidly.
We also must learn what's preventing us from having what we want.
Invariably, what's preventing us from making the change is that we link more pain to making a change than to staying where we are. We either have a belief like, "If I change, I will have pain," or we fear the unknown that change might bring.
NAC MASTER STEP 2
Get Leverage: Associate Massive Pain to Not Changing Now and Massive Pleasure to the Experience of Changing Now!
Most people know that they really want to change, yet they just can't get themselves to do it! But change is usually not a question of capability; it's almost always a question of motivation. If someone put a gun to our heads and said, "You'd better get out of that depressed state and start feeling happy now," I
bet any one of us could find a way to change our emotional state for the moment under these circumstances.
But the problem, as I've said, is that change is often a should and not a must. Or it's a must, but it's a must for "someday." The only way we're going to make a change now is if we create a sense of urgency that's so intense that we're
compelled to follow through. If we want to create change, then, we have to realize that it's not a question of whether we can do it, but rather whether we will do it. Whether we will or not comes down to our level of motivation, which in turn comes down to those twin powers that shape our lives, pain and pleasure.
Every change you've accomplished in your life is the result of changing your neuroassociations about what means pain and what means pleasure. So often, though, we have a hard time getting ourselves to change because we have mixed emotions about changing.
On the one hand, we want to change. We don't want to get cancer from smoking. We don't want to lose our personal relationships because our temper is out of control. We don't want our kids to feel unloved because we're harsh with them. We don't want to feel depressed for the rest of our lives because of something that happened in our past. We don't want to feel like victims anymore.
On the other hand, we fear change. We wonder, "What if I stop smoking cigarettes, but I die of cancer anyway and I've given up the pleasure that cigarettes used to give me?" Or "What if I let go of this negative feeling about the rape, and it happens to me again?" We have mixed emotions where we link both pain and pleasure to changing, which causes our brain to be uncertain as to what to do, and keeps us from utilizing our full resources to make the kinds of changes that can happen literally in a moment if every ounce of our being were committed to them.
How do we turn this around? One of the things that turns virtually anyone around is reaching a pain threshold. This means experiencing pain at such an
intense level that you know you must change now—a point at which your brain says, "I've had it; I can't spend another day, not another moment, living or feeling this way." Have you ever experienced this in a personal relationship, for example? You hung in there, it was painful and you really weren't happy, but you stayed in it anyway. Why? You rationalized that it would get better, without doing anything to make it better. If you were in so much pain, why didn't you leave? Even though you were unhappy, your fear of the unknown was a more powerful motivating force. "Yeah, I'm unhappy now," you may have thought, "but what if I leave this person and then I never find anyone? At least I know how to deal with the pain I have now."
This kind of thinking is what keeps people from making changes. Finally, though, one day the pain of being in that negative relationship became greater than your fear of the unknown, so you hit a threshold and made the change. Maybe you've done the same thing with your body, when you finally decided you couldn't spend another day without doing something about your excess weight. Maybe the experience that finally pushed you over the edge was your failure to be able to squeeze into your favourite pair of jeans, or the sensations of your "thunder thighs" rubbing against each other as you waddled up a set of stairs! Or just the sight of the bulbous folds of excess flesh hanging from the side of your body!
THE ALPO DIET
Recently, a woman attending a seminar told me about her fail-safe strategy that she had developed for shredding unwanted pounds. She and a friend had
committed over and over again to losing weight, but failed to keep their promise each and every time. Finally, they both reached the point where losing weight was a must. Based on what I taught them, they needed some leverage to push
painful than anything they could imagine. They decided to commit to each other and a group of friends that if they welshed on their promise this time, they would each have to eat a whole can of Alpo dog food! So, to stave off any hint of a craving, these two enterprising women told everyone and kept their cans in plain view at all times as a constant reminder. She told me that when they started to feel hunger pangs, they'd pick up the can and read the label. With ingredients boasting "horsemeat chunks," they found no difficulty in sticking to their commitment. They achieved their goal without a hitch!
A lever is a device that we utilize in order to lift or move a tremendous burden we could not otherwise manage. Leverage is absolutely crucial in creating any change, in freeing yourself from behavioural burdens like smoking, drinking, overeating, cursing, or emotional patterns like feeling depressed, worried, fearful, or
inadequate—you name it. Change requires more than just establishing the
knowledge that you should change. It's knowing at the deepest emotional and most basic sensory level that you must change. If you've tried many times to make a change and you've failed to do so, this simply means that the level of pain for failing to change is not intense enough. You have not reached threshold, the ultimate leverage.
When I was doing private therapy, it was imperative that I find the point of greatest leverage in order to help people make changes in one session that years of therapy had failed to accomplish. I started every session by saying that I couldn't work with anyone who wasn't committed to changing now. One of the reasons was that I charged $3,000 for a session, and I didn't want them to invest their money unless they were absolutely going to get the result they were committed to today, in this one session. Many times these people had flown in from some other part of the country. The thought of my sending them home without handling their problem
motivated my clients to spend at least half an hour convincing me that they were indeed committed and would do anything to change now. With this kind of
leverage, creating change became a matter of course. To paraphrase the philosopher Nietzsche, he who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how. I've found that 20 percent of any change is knowing how; but 80 percent is knowing why. If we gather a set of strong enough reasons to change, we can change in a minute something we've failed to change for years.
"Give me a lever long enough. And a prop strong enough. I can single-handedly move the world." —ARCHIMEDES
The greatest leverage you can create for yourself is the pain that comes from inside, not outside. Knowing that you have failed to live up to your own standards for your life is the ultimate pain. If we fail to act in accordance with our own view of ourselves, if our behaviours are inconsistent with our standards—with the identity we hold for ourselves—then the chasm between our actions and who we are drives us to make a change.
The leverage created by pointing out an inconsistency between someone's standards and their behaviour can be incredibly effective in causing them to
change. It's not just pressure placed on them by the outside world, but pressure built up by themselves from within. One of the strongest forces in the human personality is the drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity.
The reason so many of us seem to be walking contradictions is simply that we never recognize inconsistencies for what they are. If you want to help
somebody, you won't access this kind of leverage by making them wrong or
pointing out that they're inconsistent, but rather by asking them questions that cause them to realize for themselves their inconsistencies. This is a much more powerful
lever than attacking someone. If you try to exert only external pressure, they'll push against it, but internal pressure is next to impossible to resist.
This kind of pressure is a valuable tool to use on yourself. Complacency breeds stagnation; unless you're extremely dissatisfied with your current pattern of
behavior, you won't be motivated to make the changes that are necessary. Let's face it; the human animal responds to pressure. So why would someone not change when they feel and know that they should? They associate more pain to making the change than to not changing. To change someone, including ourselves, we must simply reverse this so that not changing is incredibly painful (painful beyond our threshold of tolerance), and the idea of changing is attractive and pleasurable! To get true leverage, ask yourself pain-inducing questions: "What will this cost me if I don't change?" Most of us are too busy estimating the price of change. But what's the price of not changing? "Ultimately what will I miss out on in my life if I don't make the shift? What is it already costing me mentally, emotionally,
physically, financially, spiritually?" Make the pain of not changing feel so real to you, so intense, so immediate that you can't put off taking that action any longer. If that doesn't create enough leverage, then focus on how it affects your loved ones, your children, and other people you care about. Many of us will do more for others than we'll do for ourselves. So picture in graphic detail how much your failure to change will negatively impact the people who are most important to you.
The second step is to use pleasure-associating questions to help you link those positive sensations to the idea of changing. "If I do change, how will that make me feel about myself? What kind of momentum could I create if I change this in my life? What other things could I accomplish if I really made this change today? How will my family and friends feel? How much happier will I be now?" The key is to get lots of reasons, or better yet, strong enough reasons, why the change should
take place immediately, not someday in the future. If you are not driven to make the change now, then you don't really have leverage.
Now that you've linked pain in your nervous system to not changing, and pleasure to making the change, you're driven to create a change, you can proceed to the third master step of NAC. . . .
NAC MASTER STEP 3 Interrupt the Limiting Pattern.
In order for us to consistently feel a certain way, we develop characteristic patterns of thinking, focusing on the same images and ideas, asking ourselves the same questions. The challenge is that most people want a new result, but continue to act in the same way. I once heard it said that the definition of insanity is "doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result." Please don't misunderstand me. There's nothing wrong with you; you don't need to be "fixed."