In this transcription from The Bandler Effect: Motivation, Richard Bandler has just worked on two clients to help them find greater motivation.
Richard Bandler: The Bandler Effect
One of the unique things about The Bandler Effect DVD set is that Richard gives separate talks straight to the viewer, in which he reveals the thinking behind the work he has just demonstrated with clients.
His insights into motivation and other states of mind are extremely useful to anyone seeking to learn more about NLP, and about getting more from themselves and others.
Richard Bandler: I want to take a few moments and talk about the work that I just did with Fiona and with Mack because one of the strong beliefs that I have, having worked with people for lots and lots of years, is that when people have trouble motivating themselves, that’s a description but it is not the facts of what’s going on.
People when they spend all the time and the effort to be able to hesitate, to struggle and to look at the difficulty of tasks, to make all these long lists, are not in fact people who have trouble motivating themselves; they engaged in a tremendous amount of activity. A catatonic lacks motivation; they’ve not doing anything. And if, once you realise this then it’s very easy for me to begin to turn this system on itself.
With both these people what I wanted them to be able to do was to switch from making things a struggle and planning the struggle and struggling, to precision with the way they plan their struggling to planning to make things so that it was more fun and it was easier, and to have the kind of belief in themselves which I start out with.
One of the things that’s helped me through the years is that when I look at the people and they look me straight in the eye and they say, “Well, I just have tremendous difficulty motivating myself” is that I don’t listen to what they’re saying, I watch what they’re doing.
When I ask them the questions about where the images were of the things that they had trouble doing, they had complex lists of things and they were out of focus and images floating around.
These are people that spend a tremendous amount of effort thinking about things; planning things. She had images of herself struggling writing things and then would struggle starting, and once she started and when unconscious, she can do them easily.
In fact both these people had done a lot of things in their life. The difference is is to be able to take them from the state of consciousness they use to motivate themselves to an altered state which in one where they’re more drawn towards things rather than moving away from stress.
Dr Richard Bandler,
Co-creator of NLP
If you have to build up enough stress to get ready to do something it’s always going to be a lot more difficult than if you build a propulsion system where you set things up that you want to do and you go and do them. And the closer you get, the better you feel.
So I induced in them both an altered state. Because most people, once they focus their attention in an altered states, it’s easier for them to go and to find very powerful, strong, positive feelings. Most people practice having bad feelings most of the time most of the day, but if you get people to stop long enough, and to go in and have some good feelings, and instead of just letting them dissipate, really circle them around and build them up so they’re stronger and stronger, and then attach those desires and those strong feelings to the things they want to be able to do.
It builds up the ability to look at things so that they can simply, without my giving them instructions to do it, Mack found a way to make it so that he limited the tasks to something where he could see it, he was drawn towards it, and he did it in a way that was artistic, being an artist.
Fiona did it a little bit differently. I think for her it was a bit more of a struggle because she had to change a belief at the same time, and I think people always, when they change will end up changing a belief. In her case, she didn’t believe that things that were work could be easy and that they could be fun, and that when she planned them she could enjoy the process of planning itself.
That for her, for a long time when she thought about things she thought about how to make it a struggle, hence therefore it felt like a struggle.
But yet I know that even though it seemed to me for a moment that she was having a little difficulty with this, it really was only a matter of moments before she went back and captured some of that part that she had as a child, and took that feeling and was able to spin it. And when I watched her face and she started to smile more and more, I knew that it was only a matter of moments before clearly in her mind, she’d find a way to organise her own mind so that when she looked at tasks, suddenly they wouldn’t just seem easier, that she changed the way that she felt about herself that would be much more pervasive than I think she realises.
That I’m sure, in the days and the weeks ahead, as they begin to accomplish things, they just won’t get pride in the things they accomplish, that it’s going to change the way they feel about lots of things because if getting up in the morning, you’re looking for how to go through your day and create opportunity, one of the mysterious things about the universe is that more opportunities seem to appear.
And so I’d like to thank you for the time watching this, and hope that when you work with your clients that you start out with an absolutely sense of certainty that all you have to do is listen and watch and give them the simple instructions about how to do things successfully. And most people, given a choice, will always make the best one.
