In live interview with NLP Life, Dr Richard Bandler reveals the secrets that will make you a more determined person.
Dr Richard Bandler,
Co-creator of NLP
NLP Life: Do you think people are sufficiently determined in the life they want?
Richard Bandler: Well, most people are over-hesitaters, that’s the way I think about it.
When people come in and start talking to me, all I hear in my head is the phrase ‘needs work’ and in order to work it requires determination. You have to know what determination feels like, you have to amplify it, if you have a little picture of what you’re determined about you need to have a great big picture of what you’re determined about. You’ve got a little voice that says well maybe you can, it needs to turn up and say I’m absolutely going to do this.
I don’t think it’s nearly as difficult as most people make it out to be. In fact, I’ve got four decades of absolute proof that that’s the case. Every time I start a seminar at the first break everybody comes up to me and goes “Well I like this but I can’t...” Whenever people say to me “It’s just that I can’t blah, blah, blah” that really means I’m not doing blah, blah, blah.
Getting people to switch from moving away from to moving towards things is not all that difficult. I’ve modelled how people do it, I’ve studied successful people. You think like successful people and you get more successful at things. If you go on thinking it’s genetic, which is what really in the sixties and the seventies I came up against, then success is suddenly made harder.
Or they would say: "Why don't we go back into your childhood and find out how you got screwed up, because if you understand how you got screwed up then slowly over the years you can change”.
Well, it was a great idea, we’ve tried it for 100 years and it just doesn’t work.
A lot of people know they fell into a river and now they’re afraid of water. It changes nothing. But if you could get terrified in 30 seconds you should be able to get over it in 30 seconds. It’s how you think about falling in the river that scared you for 25 years. It isn’t the river, because the river isn’t here anymore. The river’s back in Missouri some place, you’re in California now, so you have to change the way you’re thinking and then wade out into the water and put on a pair of fins and flap around for a while till you get comfortable.
I’ve done this with fears of water and all sorts of fears. And it’s not till you get determined that things change.
I remember once Fritz Perls, one of the brighter men that I modelled who did bodywork, told me how he overcame his inability to eat pork. He was Jewish and he literally ate a piece of pork after he came out of the snow after starving for three or four days. He had such a violent reaction to it he vomited everywhere. Then he stood up he said “If I’m not going to eat pork for religious reasons that’s one thing, but it shouldn’t give me a violent reaction when other people don’t.” So he sat down and he ate a small piece and he just stared at himself and waited and then he ate another piece and then he threw it up. He did that 13, 14 times until he could eat pork if he wanted to. Then he never ate pork again.
What determination is is where you make this statement, you go: "this is who I want to be, this is who I can be," and you do everything in your power to get there instead of going “Well, I knew that would happen.”
It’s not that people have that attitude for any other reason other than they’ve been taught to diagnose themselves. "We looked at your IQ test and you’re not the kind of person who gets motivated. That's because you had bad parents, you didn’t have a good education."
Excuse me, some of the most brilliant people that I’ve met in life didn’t have a good education so they figured out great things instead.
Once you switch from making excuses and start living, you become determined and this is what I strive to instil and inspire in every person I talk to.
