Category Archives: Influence

How To Engineer Their Thoughts

How To Engineer Their Thoughts

Mental Magic

One of the holy grails for therapy a “content-less” structure.

Now, usually when somebody thinks of therapy, they think of going to some stuffy dude or woman behind a desk who keeps asking questions like, “What do you think that means? How do you feel about that?”

One of the breakthroughs of NLP and covert hypnosis is that it cured people of their problems pretty quickly, usually within a couple of sessions.

Now, you may wonder why more “therapists” aren’t using these tools.

It COULD be (just a guess) that some folks would rather see a customer come in week after week for MONTHS (especially if the insurance is paying for it) instead of once or twice.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they are plenty of good therapists out there who really intend to do right by their patients.

But for some of these once or twice guys, a dream session is one that is totally devoid of content.

For example, let’s say a client has some sexually related or intimacy related problems. They aren’t likely to open up too much for the first time with a new counselor.

Which is why some really cutting edge counselors are always looking for the totally “content-less” sessions.

Where the client never needs to say anything OTHER than “this problem,” whatever the problem is.

Then speaking in ONLY structure language the counselor can guide to find solutions and resources within themselves, without ever needing labels.

Client comes up, talks to the counselor for an hour or so, client leaves completely satisfied.

And the counselor has ZERO idea what their problem was.

Now, this is an ideal to be strived for.

Everybody’s different, and some people WANT to talk specifics. 

How does it work?

It’s all based on the inherent vagueness of language. For example, if I said, “Dog,” you’d have a certain picture in your head. If I said “dog eating something” you’d have a more detailed picture in your head.

But it would be YOUR picture, based on YOUR experiences. I wouldn’t know WHAT kind of dog, or WHAT they were eating.

This is precisely why the language patterns of conversational hypnosis are so incredibly powerful.

You can lead somebody to YOUR conclusion, based on the pictures in THEIR minds. Which of course, are based on their own experiences, beliefs, likes and dislikes. Not yours.

Which means they’ll have a feeling it was THEIR idea, not yours.

Imagine what you could do with this technology?

As soon as this type of “language technology” was described, immediately salespeople started using to get a LOT more money.

Even if you’re not in sales, or not looking to seduce every good looking person you see, this technology IS a pretty useful one to have.

Check It Out:

Covert Hypnosis

How To Be Your Own Eye In The Sky

Spy On Your Future

Peer Into Your Own Future

What’s the difference between fate and free will?

Whatever your thoughts are, here’s a mind experiment to make it more confusing.

Let’s say you’re jamming along down the freeway. 

At the same time, there’s some guy way up in a spy plane looking at all the freeways. He notices a wreck about ten miles ahead of where you’re currently driving.

So he KNOWS that in about three to five minutes, you are going to slow, and then you are going to stop.

But you have no idea.

Now, there’s a lot of ways to explain this, in terms of free will or fate.

One way might be that the person who has the most information is in the best position to exercise his or her “free will,” while people with less information are locked into “fate.”

Most people go through life and readily give up their choices, or their free will, to fate. It’s easy that way. If you rely on fate to give you good things or bad things, you’ll never feel like a failure.

Sure, you won’t usually get very much, but you won’t feel as if you’ve tried and gotten rejected.

I’m sure you can understand the attraction of this position. Getting rejected sucks. A lot.

But if you plan your life around what you DON’T want to have happen, rather than what you do, you ARE leaving it up to the gods.

But what if you were to look at your life like the guy in the spy plane?

What if you got a really, really big picture of where you were going?

Instead of each situation being a life or death, fail or succeed, win or lose, you’d see it as one step along the MASSIVE journey that is your life.

If you practiced looking at your life in this way, it would be easier to “shift” between “big picture” thinking and “in the moment” thinking.

What if the guy in that spy plane told the guy in the car about the wreck, as soon as it happened?

He’d know about it before everybody else, and would know EXACTLY which roads to take to avoid the accident, and get to wherever he was going. Safe and on time.

What if you learned how to do this? Looking at the big picture, and at the same time, looking out through your own eyes inside each and every situation?

This is what you’ll learn in the Self-Confidence course.

A way to choose several VISIONS for your life, so you can easily place any situation where it belongs, giving you an inside angle.

Who Controls Your Life’s Meaning?

Are You Relying On Pre-Defined Meanings?

How To Define Your Own

If somebody gives you an egg, what does it mean?

Naturally, it depends on the context. If you’re making a cake, it means you’re one step closer to eating something sweet.

If you’re in the middle of an egg fight, it’s time to throw it at the enemy.

If you’re a high school hooligan, and you’re in the middle of vandalizing a “friend’s” house, it means something completely different.

What if somebody hands you a iron bar? Does it mean you can finally escape from prison, or they’re helping you change a tire?

What if somebody hands you a stack of money? Does it mean you’re on easy street, or now you’re in debt to the devil?

Very little of what happens to us has any meaning that is absolutely set in stone.

There is a LOT more flexibility than most of us realize.

Of course, if trying to “buck the trend” makes your brain hurt, and you’d rather be told what things mean, so you can get back to your bag of Cheetos and TV shows, then this won’t make much sense.

But I suspect you’re not the Cheetos eating, TV watching couch blob like most people these days.

You suspect there’s much more to life than simply taking what “they” give you.

You want more. Maybe a little, maybe a lot.

And you know there IS more.

There’s plenty of sappy statements that describe the ability to look out into the world and make it mean what you want it to.

But there are scarce few who actually make it a habit of doing that.

Most people are desperate for somebody to “tell them what it means.”

Other people dare to wonder, “Hmm, I wonder what meanings I’ll discover today.”

What about you?

Are you ready to realize that the meaning of every single situation really IS up for grabs?

Unless you’re taking a math of physics test, you can “play around” with meanings all you want.

In fact, society is ruled by those who control not events, but the meaning of events.

And you can do the same.

Maybe not rule the world, but you can certainly rule YOUR world.

Just figure out what you want in life, and see how easily you can mold situations to fall in line.

And instead of seeing the world with scary situations that may end badly (as most people do), you’ll see situations as stepping stones to your inevitable success.

How To Give Your Life Purpose

Change Your Filters For An Amazing Life

Choose Your Mission

When I was a lot younger, I used to go on “seek and destroy” missions at my local mall during Christmastime.

This was how I did my Christmas shopping. I imagined all the people I was buying for, and then tried to buy everything, in one fell swoop, in under an hour.

I know, sounds crazy.  And some of the gifts I ended up getting for people were pretty crazy.

But it was a lot of fun.

I was like the Terminator, walking quickly, my head always turning side to side scanning all the shops.

The only thing on my mind was the list of people I was buying for.

Often I would see something “cool” and then buy it, not yet knowing who I would give it to.

But they always enjoyed them. Always surprised. Always different.

On the other hand, when I’d go to the mall to watch a movie, I’d get there an hour or so earlier just to kill time.

Wander around, check people out, bring a book. Find someplace to kick back and read it for a while.

And even though I was in the same place during both situations, it seemed completely different.

One was killing time. When I was finished, I was just as bored as when I’d started. Sure, movies are fun to watch, and people are fun to watch, but afterwards, I’d always had a feeling of “OK, now what?”

But when I went seek-and-destroy shopping, I had a completely different feeling when I’d finished.

I’d be walking back to my car, lugging all kinds of bags feeling like I’d just conquered the world.

That feeling would even linger over the next few days. Anytime I’d see anything related to Christmas, I’d remember that feeling of accomplishment.

On the other hand, if I went to see a so-so movie, and then later in the week somebody would ask me what I did the previous weekend, it would take a while to conjure up the memory.

Most people spend their entire lives like this. No plans, no dreams, no goals. Just drifting from place to place, job to job, relationship to relationship.

Hoping to get something good and at the same time, hoping to stay out of trouble.

But when you’ve got some solid dreams, goals and visions, the world looks completely different.

Especially if you’ve got an internal set of filters helping you sort through all the stuff out there to help you find what you want.

All it takes is a decision.

A decision to take ownership of your life. To take responsibility for choosing what you want, and the courage to go after it.

What do you want?

Are you willing to get it?

This will help:

Belief Change

Have You Started Phase II Yet?

Ready To Cross Over?

Which Side Are You On?

One of my favorite lines from the movies is from the old Clint Eastwood movie, “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.”

Where they are about to find the gold, and one guy says:

“There’s two kinds of people in this world. Those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.”

This easily lends itself to the organization of society since the dawn of time. There are people who hold power, and people who do all the work.

And usually power comes from whoever has all the best weapons. Guns, bombs, planes, swords, the biggest clubs, rocks, alien technology, whatever.

Might, as they say, makes right.

But it also illustrates the human tendency to categorize things. Usually into two or three different groups.

All kinds of studies have shown that our brains pretty much seize up when we’ve got too many choices.

When we’ve got two or three, it’s pretty easy. But when we’ve got five or six, we tend to stand there in confusion.

“Wow! Look at all the stuff!”

(BTW this really sucks when you’re in line behind somebody like this at a fast food joint!)

Most people, as they get older, tend to categorize their lives into “before” and “after”.

Before a certain event, and after that certain event.

Maybe a horrible divorce, maybe when they found out Santa Claus wasn’t real, maybe when they had kids.

In ancient societies, the most crucial barrier to cross was that of childhood, to that of adulthood.

Back then, there were no safety nets. No hospitals, no police. Nobody to call if you got into any trouble.

If you weren’t entirely self sufficient as an adult, you were a huge liability to the tribe.

So they made sure kids turned into adults.  They put them through extended ceremonies, days at a time, where they would have to dig deep and face a horrible life or death situation.

Of course, it was all staged, but the kids didn’t know that.

By facing death, they went in as kids, and came out as adults.

Unfortunately, there is nothing remotely close to this today. It’s very easy to stay in the “childhood mindset” your entire “adult” life.

It’s incredibly hard to make this transition completely on your own. Back then it was a tribal event. The whole tribe participated to make sure the kids made the transition.

Today, it’s all up to you.

You may say the whole purpose of life is to become an adult. To become actualized may mean to become fully responsible, fully capable, and fully in control of who you are, what you get, and where you go.

One step in the that direction is taking charge of your mind. Instead of accepting beliefs from others, you can learn to choose them yourself.

See the world how YOU want, not how THEY want you to.

Learn how:

Belief Change

How To Make The Complicated Seem Familiar

Get A Bird's Eye View

Go Meta

One of the great things about humans is we are always trying to simplify things.

Take some kind of complex problem, and figure out how to solve is as easily as possible.

Physicists are always looking for some kind of “grand unifying theory,” one idea can be used to describe everything we see.

Even our conscious-unconscious minds are looking for ways to minimize effort.

This is the whole idea behind “unconscious competence,” when you can do something without much thought.

Like riding a bike (or playing an instrument or tying your shoes)  was once impossible. Then you could do it with a lot of conscious effort. Now you can do it while doing a million other things.

Any skill that we learn pretty much goes through the same process. Talking to girls, making money, learning a programming language, everything.

At first it’s difficult and confusing. Then, if you stick with it, it gets so you can get pretty good at it, while keeping your mind focused.

Then, if you really keep at it, you can do it without much thought. Just think of the things you can do now, that baffled you a while ago.

Of course, how quickly you learn any new skill depends on a lot of things. Your natural abilities in that area, how many people in your social reference group have already mastered it, etc.

Even if other people have done it can help.

For the longest time, nobody could break the 4 minute mile. Once one guy did, everybody started doing it.

Before, they believed it was impossible, then they believed it was possible.

As they believed, so it was. All the guys who broke the four minute mile AFTER the first guy did ONLY did so because their beliefs changed.

This is the ONE ingredient that will make learning ANY skill a lot easier.

One trick is to “go meta.”

Next time you start to learn something, instead of thinking of that “thing,” just think in terms of “learning new things.”

Taking making money for example. If you think of it as “making a ton of money,” it may seem difficult and out of read.

But if you think of it as “learning something new,” it will be a lot easier.

Because no matter who you are, or what you’ve accomplished, you’ve ALREADY learned TONS of complicated stuff.

What’s one more thing?

It’s really just like riding a bike. You get on, start pedaling, and adjust as you go, and “learn” while go.

To make it even easier, take a look at this:

Belief Change

How To Be One Who Makes Things Happen

Which One Are You?

Three Categories Of Actors

A wise man once said that there are three kinds of people in this world.

Those that make things happen.

Those that watch things happen.

And those who say, “What happened?”

Now, the funny thing is that all of us belong to all three groups at different times. Sometimes we make things happen. Sometimes we watch others make things happen. Other times we are blindsided by reality and have no clue what just happened.

Of course, how we respond in those situations will make all the difference.

You could rage and shake your fists at the gods, or you could make the best of the situation.

However, if you take a closer look at any group of people, you’ll find that certain “types” tend to be the ones that make things happen, certain “types” tend to be the ones that watch things happen, and other “types” are the kind who wander around wondering why they’re always getting crapped on.

One very popular theme in literature since the dawn of time (and a common theme in real life BAM’s like Genghis Kahn) is somebody who gets crapped on early in life, and vows to NEVER have that happen again.

Of course, how they do that will determine if they are remembered as an evil genius or a world class entrepreneur.

The bottom line is no matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise, the world is going to do what the world is going to do.

How we respond will make us or break us.

You could hide in your closet, and curse the gods, or you could get in the mix and get some.

How do you do that?

It all starts with choosing what you want. This is something that you DO have absolute control over.

Next is to make the solid choice that you’ll GET whatever you want no matter WHAT.

You will operate in and on the world, take whatever it gives you, and flip it around somehow so it works in your favor.

Of course, this can be very, very tough for some people.

People who need some kind of step by step paint by numbers procedure will find this VERY discomforting.

In order to really GET SOME (whatever that means to you) you’ve got to be open to taking ANYTHING, that comes your way, and have enough faith in yourself, and your abilities, to flip it around into SOMETHING that will help you.

Kind of like those ultra ninja Aikido black belts who can easily redirect the energy in everything that comes their way.

It starts on the inside. 

If you’re worried you’ll get smothered by the continuous onslaught of reality, you will.

But if you believe you can take ANYTHING and make it YOURS, you will.

Learn how:

Belief Change

How To Get A Bigger Brain

Get A Better Perspective

Expand Your Picture Of Reality

One of the cool tricks you learn in NLP is “going meta.”

This just means looking at something from a larger perspective.

Looking at the big picture, stepping back, etc.

For example, if you’ve ever been to a live training, you’ve probably done this while speaking to somebody. Choose a partner and start talking about something not so important.

Then see the conversation from their eyes, and back from your eyes.

Then see the conversation from an imaginary, third person perspective, off to the side.

This gets pretty complicated, and it’s hard to keep even the simplest conversation going when flipping around like this.

It is, however, a very important skill to learn. For example, whenever making a big decision, it’s tough to separate from your emotions.

Which means if you CAN do that, you’ll have a much better chance of choosing an option that will serve you best, in the long run.

Another great skill to have is to “go meta” regarding your capabilities.

For example, when many people go into new environments, especially social environments where there’s some pretty good potential, it’s very common to feel nervous or anxious.

The brain looks out into the situation, and quickly notices two things. One is that there are many interesting people, with many potential benefits.

On the other hand, ALL of them are strangers.

This mix can easily cause anxiety.

On the one hand, part of you is saying “Let’s Go!” and is eager to get the good stuff.

On the other hand, another part of you is saying, “Hold on! We don’t know any of these people!”

Which is why being able to “go meta” is very helpful.

Sure, they are strangers, but they are also people, in the larger sense.

So when you’ve got your brain thinking “Let’s Go!” And “Hey, People! We’ve talked to people before!”

It will give you a lot more confidence and enthusiasm.

The trick is to train your brain so you “go meta” automatically, instead of having to do it consciously.

All you’ve got to do is learn how to build in the beliefs you want, rather than rely on your “factory programmed” beliefs.

How do you do that?

Here’s How:

Belief Change

How To Manipulate Reality

How To Get Anything

Take Control Of Your Life

One of the easiest things for humans to do is blame others.

Politicians have known this for thousands of years. If you convince a whole group of people that their problems are not their fault, they’ll eagerly give you their votes.

Trouble is, once you get into the “blame game” you voluntarily give up all your power and potential.

Usually without realizing it.

Why?

When you blame others, or even blame things like your genetics or upbringing or neighborhood or the economy, what you’re saying is you are completely dependent on those “things” for your success.

Which means it’s no longer up to you. It’s up to somebody else (real or imagined) to give you what you want.

Now, this may indeed happen. On the other hand, it may not.

The sad truth is that most of humanity are “waiting for somebody” to give them what they want.

I know it seems unfair and even scary to “take responsibility” for your life, but if you want to truly succeed beyond the vast sea of mediocrity, that’s precisely what you’ve got to do.

Here’s something else to consider.

Most of us start life with the same set of skills. Then it’s our job to learn what we need to learn, to get what we need to get.

Those that aren’t afraid to take uncertain action, and continue to learn and improve themselves, regardless of the outcome, generally do pretty well in life.

The truth is that life is a journey. It doesn’t end until you take that long dirt nap.

Along the way you’ll succeed, fail, find magic, start and stop again and again and again.

The only difference between people that fail and people that succeed is what they believe about themselves.

People that succeed generally look out into the world and think things like, “I wonder what will happen if I try this? Who knows, maybe something good!”

While people who fail, don’t really fail, they just never get started. They usually think things like, “Yea, but what if it doesn’t work? I’d better wait for a safer opportunity.”

The truth is we all live in the same world, surrounded by the same people, and the same opportunities.

Are you ready to take advantage of them?

Are you ready to try something, just to see what happens?

If you are, then this is for you:

Belief

Simplify And Automate Your Success

Give Your Brain A Break

Make It Easy On The Brain

We humans are hard wired to look for shortcuts.

Once we figure something out, we’d like to automate it, simplify it, or otherwise reduce the amount of brainpower that goes into it.

In physics, scientists have long been looking for a “Grand Unifying Theory.” One super equation that could explain all behaviors of all objects, large and small.

I had a friend who would always ask me to give him a one sentence summary of any book he saw me reading.

Once when I was in high school, me, a bunch of buddies,and a few parents were driving down to Mexico to watch some big road race. 

One of the adults asked me if I’d ever driven in Mexico before. I said no, and he told me the simple rules:

“Don’t hit anybody, and don’t let anybody hit you.”

Humans love simplicity. We don’t like to think if we don’t need to.

However, sometimes life is incredibly complicated. So complicated that you could spend a hundred lifetimes trying to understand it, and all you’ll do is uncover more questions.

Scientists can’t even predict the weather more than a couple of weeks ahead of time, and even then, they can only approximate.

The weather is a simple system with only a few variables.

Human interaction, on the other hand, is infinitely complex. Each of us has a HUGE collection of subjective wants, needs, desires, beliefs, shortcomings, and on and on.

And every time we interact with others, all these variables change a little bit.

If you tried to understand it all, you’d go mad. You’d never leave your house.

But all the good stuff you want in life will come from other people. Which means you’ve got to not only interact with them, but influence them in some way.

Get them to help you, get them to support you, get them on your team. There’s not much you can accomplish all on your lonesome.

The good news is that there’s a very simple, and very powerful way to simply ALL human interaction.

Sure, you could get a PhD in body language reading, learn to drill down in between their words to see what they REALLY mean, and plan every conversation like a championship chess match.

OR, you could simply build up a hugely strong frame, so all you need to do is show up, and people will decide to help you out for THEIR own reasons, before you even open your mouth.

Clearly, this switch won’t happen automatically or overnight. But with a little bit of consistent mental practice, it WILL happen.

Learn how:

Frame Control