Using Tour Brain for a CHANGE by Richard Sandier
p7 Your brain is like a machine without an "off" switch. If you don't give it something to do, it just runs on and on until it gets bored.
p8 How many of you think about unpleasant things that happened long ago? It's as if your brain is saying, "Let's do it again! We've got an hour before lunch, let's think about something that's really depressing. Maybe we can get angry about it three years too late."
p9 Disappointment requires adequate planning.
p10 Why be your real self when you can be something really worthwhile?
p11 Brains, like computers, are not "user-friendly." They do exactly what they're told to do, not what you want them to do. Then you get mad at them because they don't do what you meant to tell them to do!
p14 The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual HI used by psychiatrists and psychologists has over 450 pages of descriptions of how people can be broken, but not a single page describing health.
p15 What I've noticed since then is that people work perfectly. I may not like what they do, or they may not like it, but they are able to do it again and again, systematically. It's not that they're broken; they're just doing something different from what we, or they, want to have happen.
p17 Another difficulty with most psychology is that it studies broken people to find out how to fix them. That's like studying the cars in a junkyard to figure out how to make cars run.
p18 I don't believe that people are broken. They just learned to do whatever they do.
p18 When you make up a new reality, you'd better be sure that you get some friends to share it, or you may be in big trouble. That's one reason I teach NLP. I want to have at least a few others who share this reality, so the men in white coats don't take me away.
p22 Now think of an unpleasant memory, something you think about that makes you feel bad. Now make the picture dimmer and dimmer. ... If you turn the brightness down far enough it won't bother you any more.
p24 color - distance - depth - duration - clarity - contrast - scope - movement - speed - hue - transparency - aspect ratio - orientation - foreground/background
p26 All of us have good and bad experiences; how we recall them is often what makes the difference.
p33 A lot of people have dull, meaningless lives, and they're unhappy. Talking to a therapist won't change that, unless it results in the person living differently. If someone will spend $75 to see a psychiatrist, instead of spending it on a party, that's not mental illness, that's stupidity! If you don't do anything, then of course you're going to be bored and depressed.
p34 I think everything is unfinished in this sense: you can only maintain any memory, belief, understanding, or other mental process from one day to the next if you continue to do it.
p34 Think of an unpleasant embarrassment or disappointment, and take a good look at that movie to see if it still makes you feel bad now. Next, start that movie again, and as soon as it begins, put some nice loud circus music behind it. Listen to the circus music right through to the end of the movie...
p42 Some people tend to always disassociate. These are the scientist/engineer types who are often described as "objective," "detached," or "distant." You can teach them how to associate when they want to, and regain some feeling connection with their experience.
p42 If you watch yourself have pain you're not in your body to feel it.
p42 Teaching someone how, and when, to associate or disassociate, is one of the most profound and pervasive ways to change the quality of a person's experience, and the behavior that results from it.
p45 If you tell someone to look at something she's terrified of, she can't look at it. However, if you tell her to see herself looking at it, she's still looking at it, but for some reason she can do it that way. it's the same as the difference between sitting in the front seat of a roller coaster and sitting on a bench seeing yourself in a roller coaster.
p46 Trying to change slowly is like having a conversation one word a day.
p53 That seems a little too easy, but basically, what works always turns out to be easy.
p54 Unfortunately, most humans have a perverse tendency. If they're doing something and it doesn't work, they'll usually do it louder, harder, longer, or more often.
p60 I have a new name for assertiveness training. I call it "loneliness preparation."
p61 The universe doesn't go backwards. Time won't go backwards. Light won't go backwards. But your mind can go backwards.
p62 "You must behave the way I want you to, so I can feel good, or I'm going to feel bad and stand around and make you feel bad too."
p63 And if you feel that there's nothing you can do about it, you're right - until you go inside your brain and back up, back up, back up, so you can move forward and go for it in another way.
p74 This is what many insomniacs do. They talk to themselves in a loud, high-pitched, excited voice, and it wakes them up - even if they're talking about how much they need to sleep. Insomniacs tend to be very alert and motivated. … Now I want you to change your internal voice back the other way. Make it softer, lower, slower and sleepier, and notice how that makes you feel…
p76 That's what we call "the old anxiety routine." You keep generating unpleasant feelings until you're motivated to avoid them.
p78 If you want to get motivated positively, you need to think about what's really attractive about a task. If you don't enjoy the task itself, what's attractive is having it done.
p79 Most people motivate themselves by thinking about how bad they will feel if they don't do something, and then they move away from that bad feeling. She uses pleasant feelings to move toward what she does want to have happen, instead of away from what she doesn't want to have happen - and she gets reinforcement along the way.
p80 A lot of the problems that bring people into therapy, or into jail, have to do with motivation. Either they're not motivated to do things they want to do, or other people want them to do, or they are motivated to do things they, or other people, don't want them to do.
p87 Years ago I realized I had been wrong so many times, I decided I'd just go ahead and be wrong in the ways that were more interesting.
p88 Confusion and understanding are internal experiences. They don't necessarily have anything to do with the outside world. In fact, if you look around, there usually isn't much connection.
p94 Knowledge is a sophisticated statement of ignorance. --Karl Popper
p94 One kind of understanding allows you to justify things, and gives you reasons for not being able to do anything different.
p94 A second kind of understanding simply allows you to have a good feeling.
p94 A third kind of understanding allows you to talk about things with important sounding concepts, and sometimes even equations.
p94 Concepts can be useful, but only if they have an experiential basic, and only if they allow you to do something different. You can often get someone to accept an idea consciously, but only seldom will that lead to a change in behavior.
p95 The only kind of understanding I'm interested in is the kind that allows you to do something.
p95 Confusion is the doorway to a new understanding. Confusion is an opportunity to rearrange experience and organize it in a different way than you normally would. That allows you to learn to do something new and to see and hear the world in a new way.
p97 Getting stuck in a particular way of understanding the world - whatever it is - is the cause of three major human diseases: The first one is seriousness, as in "dead serious." Second - Certainty is where people stop thinking and stop noticing. It's easy for certainty to sneak up on you. Even people who are uncertain are usually certain about that, too. "Are you sure enough to be unsure?" The third disease is importance, and self-importance is the worst of all. These three diseases are the way most people get stuck. You may decide something is important, but you can't get really serious about it until you're certain that it's important. At that point you stop thinking altogether.
p100 Running an experience forward and backwards are only two of the infinite number of ways that you can sequence an experience. If you divide a movie into only four parts, there are twenty two other sequences to experience.
p103 You can think about all behavior as being mobilized by the beliefs that we have.
p103 As long as you can fit a behavior into someone's belief system, you can get him to do anything, or stop him from doing anything.
p103 I made changing fit into his belief system so completely that he couldn't do anything else.
p104 When you already have a belief, there's no room for a new one unless you weaken the old belief first.
p105 Even a stopped clock is right twice a day!
p117 verify that the new belief is stated in positive terms, is a process rather than a goal, and that it's likely to be ecological.
p118 "Objective" studies usually study people who have the problem; NLP studies the subjective experience of people who have the solution.
p118 If you don't begin to control and use your own brain, then you have to just leave it to chance.
p118 what our educational system is like: They keep the content in front of you for twelve years; if you learn it, then they taught it to you.
p119 One of the great things about computer-assisted education is that computers are more fun to be with than most teachers.
p120 Is the memory paired with a pleasant or unpleasant experience? In order for someone to remember something, he has to go back into the state of consciousness in which the information was provided.
p137 It's not really that you get uncompulsed, it's that you get compulsed to be more of who you want to be.
p138 how many people ask a therapist for confidence, and so few ask for competence.
p139 Brains don't learn to get results; they learn to go in directions.
p140 It you know how the brain works, you can set your own directions. If you don't, then someone else will.
p143 People aren't broken; they work perfectly! The important question is, "How do they work now?" so that you can help them work perfectly in a way that is more pleasant and useful.
p157 All too often, people forget how to not know.
p159 It's only that growing sense of curiosity that allows you to capture the enthusiasm that makes even the most mundane, or the most fascinating task worthwhile, fun, and intriguing. Without that, life is nothing more than waiting in line.
Persuasion Engineering by Richard Bandler and John La Valle
p5 If you don't know what you really sell, you're wasting your time.
p5 Because they understand that they don't sell homes. They sell feelings. They sell comfort. They sell value. They sell safety. They sell security. They sell convenience. They sell peace of mind. ...
p10 it seemed like a rare and unprecedented opportunity to practice skills that I didn't have.
p19 No matter what you thought you sold, you sell feelings. Period. … So you first want to find out what the feeling is they want and how they interpret this with their language, both verbal and nonverbal. Then, you take them there.
p20 I consider luck to be the combination of fine skills and the ability to recognize opportunity when it's knocking and do something with it.
p27 We tend to learn through difference, even though we tend to like what's the same.
p30 The selling process is only one of two things: either they pretty much know what they want, or they don't. When they do know, you give it to them. When they don't, you teach them how to buy it.
p31 I Wake up in the morning and I open the drapes and look at all the buildings full of money out there. And I say to myself, "Ahhh, I want it."
p35 One of the things about selling and negotiating in fact, one of the things about life is that, if you don't make things more exciting, they get duller. This is true about people, it's true about things, it's true about everything. You need to be able to create an internal state which makes the activity itself wonderful.
p36 Because the important thing that you sell with every product or every service is that every time they look at it or think about it they should feel good.
p57 You want to make it so that every time you look at what you decide to do you are happier and more passionate about it. That includes what you do for a living.
p70 "The will to survive is not the strongest instinct in human beings. The strongest instinct in human beings is to do what is familiar." --Virginia Satir
p83 … this means that we need to stop and consider what we can make enjoyable.
p84 And since time doesn't exist except for now, then we represent time using space.
p89 However, every neuron inside of you, every fiber in your body, every single cell is affected by your attitude. Your attitude is predictably, by the way, a result of the way in which you view the world. And that's not what you see because your eyes don't really see the world, they compute what's out there. You respond off of planning.
p93 Rather than cutting up a pie, you make more pies.
p103 That's always how you tell a nut, by the way. They have a lot of writing with them cause no one wants to listen to them.
p113 You'd be surprised, you know, ten o'clock, eleven o'clock at night in a cocktail lounge, you could sell just about anything.
p128 …, if you can begin to really open up your ears because while you are talking to yourself, you're not listening.
p129 And anywhere my son goes, the room turns into a mess. He doesn't have to do anything, he just sits on the couch and the stuff in the room moves.
p135 When you thrill yourself and live your life excitingly moving in a forward direction you'll find that other people will want to be around, give you opportunities, pleasure, and all the other "things" you want.
p172 A friend of mine owns a sports medical clinic, which is our way of doing chiropractics for five times the price.
p173 And suddenly as I was walking along, I realized that, that room sounded like steel monkeys fucking. That's what it sounded like to me. I give sounds names that's how I remember them.
p178 I always tell all my clients that disappointment requires adequate planning, so don't.
p195 To me, one of the things that people who are in the business of selling and in the business of persuasion need to understand is that the whole process is a wonderful thing. The fact that human beings have so much trouble over all, running their brains, they need us. So that they can enjoy the process of being a wanton consumer.
p195 I have noticed that the people who do not spend money do not make money. Plus they never know how to use money and enjoy it. They might as well not make it.