In live interview with NLP Life, Dr Richard Bandler reveals the secrets that will make you a great public speaker.
Dr Richard Bandler,
Co-creator of NLP
NLP Life: Why is curiosity a good thing?
Richard Bandler: Because it beats the alternative, of course.
If you’re not curious you’re not exploring the world you live in. We are like all organisms on Planet Earth - the fittest ones are the ones that adapt - and adaptation requires curiosity.
Fear is the absolute opposite of curiosity. It’s where you don’t look at things, you don’t find out what works, you don’t find out what’s dangerous. Every client that I got for the first three and a half decades for the most part, except for a few really rich ones, of course, were sent to me because everybody gave up on them so nobody cared what I did with them.
They wouldn’t have allowed me to work with them before because I’m not a medical doctor, I’m not a licensed psychologist. But eventually they threw their hands up and went this person’s driving me crazy, I can’t do anything about it. We’ll, pass them on to Richard and let him make a fool of himself.
They gave me case histories which are lists of all the things they’ve done that haven’t worked. I became curious, what’s it going to take to get this person to start living their life and being happy?
If I want to get the depressive to be happy, and the fearful person to have courage. It's pretty obvious what the opposite of it is.
They need to take whatever feelings are spinning through their body and spin them in the other way, whatever pictures they make that are obviously the wrong ones, whatever they’re saying to themselves, and change them.
I’m more like a mental interior decorator. I get them to the state of curiosity, so they really really look and go God I was wrong about myself, I can hold this spider.
I’ll take a depressive and an hour later they’ve spent 45 minutes laughing and giggling with me and when I look at them and I go “You don’t seem very depressed” and they go “Well I’m having fun right now” then you discover most depressives actually have fun but when they look back at it they go “Well, at the time I thought I was having fun” but they don’t step inside of good memories they only step inside of unpleasant ones.
Doctors say to me, “Well, don’t you think there’s a chemical imbalance?”
Well, yeah but everytime you change your state of consciousness it changes your neuro chemistry. They obviously have a lack of oxytosin in their brain and low levels of serotonin and sometimes I run blood screens on my clients and sometimes I find out they’ve potassium deficiencies or a high level of iron.
You change it, but you still have to get the right neuro-chemistry in your brain - which is done by thinking. If they don’t think good thoughts they won’t feel good, it’s just that simple.
If you're sitting around and your head is going everything’s going to go wrong, good God I’m going to have a horrible time, I’m going to be miserable, nobody will like me, you don’t go out and meet everybody then you go see I’ve been lonely all week.
Till you go open the door and go out and start meeting people and doing things, you’re not going to have fun - and if you have no idea what fun feels like you really don’t know what to strive for, you have to pretend and feel it and then imagine it.
So I try to create that - and sometimes I do it hypnotically and sometimes I just tell a few good jokes.
