How to Free Yourself From Trauma, Phobias And Anxiety · · 2017-02-13How to Free Yourself From...

How to Free Yourself From Trauma, Phobias And Anxiety

in Seven Days Or Less!

Using the power of Imagination Creation™

By

Robert Mantell, Ph.D.

Founder and Executive Director BrightLife Phobia and Anxiety Release Center

2010 W. Avenue K, Suite 644 Lancaster, CA 93536

(866) LIFE-NOW http://www.fearintopower.com

http://www.fearintopower.com

How to Free Yourself from Trauma, Phobias And Anxiety in 7 Days Or Less!

© Robert Mantell, Ph.D. & BrightLife Phobia & Anxiety Release Center — All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication or distribution is strictly prohibited.

How to Free Yourself From Trauma, Phobias and Anxiety

in Seven Days Or Less!

Using the power of Imagination Creation™

Published by BrightLife Phobia and Anxiety Release Center

A division of

BrightLife Coaching, Consulting & Training Services, Inc. 2010 W. Avenue K, Suite 644 Lancaster, CA 93536

© Copyright 2003 - 2008 Robert Mantell, BrightLife, Inc. and

BrightLife Phobia and Anxiety Release Center All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.

http://www.fearintopower.com/



SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the following individuals:

♦ Milton H. Erickson, M.D., the revolutionary physician and psychiatrist whose groundbreaking work in hypnosis and clinical psychotherapy has served as an inspiration not only to me, but to virtually all those whose amazing success I have attempted to duplicate since. Put simply, without the pioneering work of Dr. Erickson, almost none of what I do could be possible in its present form, and many people who now enjoy complete freedom from the scourge of chronic anxiety might still be living lives of unnecessary pain and suffering;

♦ Richard Bandler and John Grinder, for their genius in decoding the basic

structure of subjective experience, and for developing a set of powerful mental repatterning tools based on that understanding that form the core of the work we do today;

♦ Jay Haley, who, by his careful review and insightful commentary on Dr.

Erickson’s work, revealed the final piece of the puzzle – what to do when all else seems to fail;

♦ Anthony J. Robbins, whose inspiring teachings and incredible enthusiasm

first set me on my path to Personal Power; ♦ Gary De Rodriguez, my first teacher and mentor, for sharing his

experience, for his support of our program, and for his enthusiastic permission to allow inclusion of much of his proprietary material in our published works, our seminars and our manuals;

♦ Most notably, to John Overdurf and Julie Silverthorn for their powerful

contributions to my base of knowledge and experience, and to whom I unquestionably owe a major part of my success in this field. More than anything, I deeply thank John and Julie for their love and friendship, their truth, their support of our success, and for walking their talk more consistently and better than any two people I know on this planet;

♦ Last but not least, to my beautiful wife Glei, and our sons Liam and Kyler,

for their undying faith in my own evolution as a human being, and as a meaningful contributor to this place we call Earth.




Table of Contents Chapter Page

Introduction 6

1 The Difference Between Fear And Anxiety 12

2 The Conscious And The Unconscious Minds 16

3 The Structure of Subjective Experience 31

4 How to Change Your Own Personal History 40

5 How to Neutralize Anticipatory Anxiety 53

6 So, How Do You Want to Be Different? 65

7 The Secret of Creating The “Ultimate You” 79

8 How to Use The Power of Success Conditioning 86

9 Bringing It All Together 100

About The Author 104

Additional Support And Professional Training 106




“The only thing we have to fear… is fear itself.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, upon the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, HI, 1941




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Introduction Thank you for purchasing this product! You are about to experience the amazing technology that underlies our impressive record of success at BrightLife Phobia and Anxiety Release Center. The processes you are about to learn are examples of a cutting-edge Accelerated Personal Change Technology we call Imagination Creation™. Imagination Creation™ itself is a carefully designed synthesis of a number of powerful personal change tools that I’ve actively sought out and done my best to effectively apply over the years. Of these, the greatest contributions to the development of Imagination Creation™ are from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (also known as NLP), hypnosis, family systems theory and behavioral psychology. Taken together, they provide an amazingly quick and effective way to help people overcome what may have been years of formerly “therapy-resistant” anxiety and related behavioral problems. As an agent of powerfully compelling personal change, Imagination Creation™ helps people finally, rapidly conquer such life-limiting problems as phobias, panic attacks, agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress (PTSD), nightmares, insomnia, flashbacks, various social anxieties, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors (OCD). The processes that make up this technology are so powerful and so easy to use, they can be effectively applied in minutes. They have nothing at all to do with affirmations, positive thinking, or trying to “talk yourself out of it” with extended rationalizations about what you should or should not be feeling; we all know that the




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“willpower” method hardly ever works. Instead, my guess is that you’d rather have a virtually foolproof method for eliminating the fear you feel associated with specific events quickly, easily and permanently, without having to try to keep your fear at bay anymore. You’re reading the recipe book for just how to do this! What Is The Purpose of This Book?

Well, first I’ll tell you what it’s not, and then I’ll tell you what it is. This book is not necessarily intended as a tool to assist (at least directly) in clearing more generalized forms of anxiety. If you suffer from anxiety pretty much all day, every day, and have no clue what specifically you’re anxious about, then this book is probably not ideal for you. Relief certainly is possible for individuals who suffer with more generalized forms of anxiety. However, in our experience, generalized anxiety is the result of problematic environmental and organizational factors that are at play right now, and are best addressed on that level (the level of the source of the anxiety, not the expression of the anxiety problem itself). Thus, it is probably best that such individuals work directly with a professional who is trained to facilitate such organizational restructuring, particularly within a client’s immediately family. If you believe you suffer from a more pervasive, more generalized anxiety-related challenge – particularly if you’ve suffered with this for an extended period of time – feel free to contact BrightLife Phobia and Anxiety Release Center toll-free at (866) LIFE-NOW for more information about our breakthrough individual and family coaching




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services. I’m quite certain we can help you, even if all other forms of assistance have failed you in the past. Now – this book is ideally designed to help clear anxiety, fear or trauma associated with either:

♦ Individual upsetting or traumatic experiences from your past (like those responsible for the development of many single-stimulus phobias, as well as many of the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress, including recurring flashbacks), or

♦ Events that you know about or anticipate happening in the

future, which, although they haven’t happened yet, cause you to experience distressing levels of fear or anxiety when you consider them. This is called anticipatory anxiety.

The kind of “what if…?” thinking characterized in this second form of chronic fear is very common in individuals who “do” anxiety exceedingly well. In fact, it is this very behavior that’s responsible for how your anxiety problem got to be so out of hand in the first place. For example, while it may not be the original cause of the problem, did you know that the “what if...?” thinking characterizing anticipatory anxiety is actually the basis for the propagation and the continuance of anxiety problems over time? Let’s take the problem of panic attacks as an example. You see, unlike the first one or two panic attacks (which we believe is the subconscious mind’s best way of forcing our attention to the fact that we’ve organized our life in a way that’s far too stressful!) we believe subsequent panic attacks are almost totally the result of self-programming; in fact, the more we worry about the next panic attack, the more we program in – in fact, the more we literally command – our




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subconscious mind to generate that very fearful state for us the next time we find ourselves in whatever the challenging context or situation might be. As you continue to read through this book, you’ll discover exactly how this kind of habitual “what if…?” thinking is the very source of the chronic anxiety you may be experiencing on an ongoing basis – and what you can do to stop it in its tracks once and for all.

Let’s Summarize: How Exactly Is This Going to Work?

Well, let's start with this: I'm guessing that you're reading this book because you want to change one of two things: either how you're feeling, or how you're behaving. That's a reasonable assumption, isn't it? And, by the way, why would anyone want to change how he or she is behaving? Probably because they don't like how they feel about how they're behaving. So when it comes down to it, you're reading this book because you want to learn how to change how you feel at certain times, and probably because those feelings are painful. Fear and anxiety are painful feelings, aren't they? As you continue reading and learning, you’ll find that it's impossible to know how to feel about anything without first creating some kind of imagination of it. Why an imagination of it?




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Because generally speaking, in moments like this, when you're reading this book in what are probably relatively comfortable surroundings, you're probably feeling just fine – or at least a lot better (or safer) than you would be feeling if you were in proximity of whatever it is you fear. And if, as I'm suggesting, you're feeling fine right now, then in this moment, you don’t actually have an anxiety problem. Do you get what I'm saying? If, in this very moment, you're feeling OK, does your anxiety problem really exist? I mean, is it real? Right now? That's an interesting question, isn’t it? I want you to think of time as a continuum... That is to say, there's the past… a tiny little sliver of time called the present… and then there’s the future. When you think about it, notice that by far, most of your experience is either totally behind you, or yet to happen in the future. None of that is real at this particular moment. All that's “real” is this exact moment in time, and that's all. So, if you're not feeling particularly anxious right now, then in order to create something from nothing, you actually have to mentally travel either back to the past when something bad happened, or out into the future to imagine what could go wrong. You literally have to take the time and trouble to create a problem – where there wasn’t one before – by focusing on the possibility of a problem, in order to have a problem.




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I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve talked to – with relatively severe anxiety-related problems like OCD, or generalized anxiety, or panic attacks – who, somehow find that they are curiously symptom-free when they’re at work, or otherwise mentally occupied with something that’s far more interesting, or something that must be attended to right now. These are the same people, by the way, who will come in and say they’ve had their anxiety problem for years, and have tried everything else under the sun to help them alleviate their anxiety symptoms, all to no avail. Well, guess what? These people are their own best coaches! What they’ve been doing so successfully all this time to alleviate their anxiety – chances are, without even knowing it – has been changing where they place the focus of their mind, and voilà! Their anxiety, OCD or panic symptoms seem to magically disappear! The bottom line is this: You see, memories of the past or imaginations of the future are really nothing more than mental constructions – a mental record, a “ghost”, a hologram of what actually happened in the past, or hallucinations of what could happen in the future. Since it’s not the real past or the real event in the future that’s responsible for the fear or anxiety we feel, literally all we need do is change how we construct these imaginations – and this is amazingly easy to do – and the fearful feelings associated with these memories or imaginations instantly and permanently drop off! Sound too good to be true? Then let’s explain the dynamics of what’s going to happen before we introduce you to the techniques themselves.




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1. The Difference Between

Fear And Anxiety Although anxiety is almost universally experienced as a fearful emotion, it can be useful to bear in mind that there really is a distinct – and important – difference between the two. First, fear itself is a normal and even useful emotion – as long as it occurs in the appropriate context. For example, fear of the dark is quite normal. Fear of sharks or earthquakes or even heights is normal and appropriate. Fear keeps us out of trouble; it teaches us what to pay attention to, and helps us avoid unnecessary risks. Without the benefit of this wonderfully powerful and important emotion called fear, each of our lives would probably wind up quite a bit shorter than it already is. On the other hand, although anxiety is an emotion that is certainly experienced as fear, a major difference between the two is that fear is an emotion that one experiences in the moment, and is the result of an immediate perceived threat. For example, if I open the front door, and there’s a ten-foot bear standing there, arms raised and growling at me, chances are I’m going to feel this little thing called fear! I’m either going to try to run from that bear, or, if I’m too close and the bear grabs me, I’m going to try to fight my way out of it, whether or not I really have a chance. This is called the fight or flight response, and it’s a natural, in-born reaction to an immediate, perceived threat in my environment.




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My body is going to instantaneously respond to that perceived threat by pouring adrenaline, cortisol, cholesterol, and other powerful hormones and neurochemicals into my bloodstream to prime me for the act of self-protection. My body is going to shut down all the less immediately important activities such as digestion, and divert most of the blood in my body to the muscles, limbs and sensory organs, so that I can be best prepared to protect myself – basically, to keep myself alive. Of course, all of this happens very quickly, and totally subconsciously, without any conscious direction or effort on my part whatsoever. By contrast, anxiety is a totally future-based emotion; it can only be generated by imagining some event in the future somehow going terribly wrong. And what happens is, we associate so strongly to that imagination – we mentally put ourselves into that imagined situation so effectively, that, to our brain, it seems just as real as if it were happening right now! And, of course, our body is going to react with the fight or flight response exactly the same way it would if the threat actually were real right now. You see, your brain does not know the difference between a “real” event, and a vividly imagined experience of that event. To your brain, they “look” exactly the same, and so it triggers the fight or flight response (what scientists call sympathetic nervous system arousal) just the same way it would if the imagined situation actually were real right now. But it’s not real, is it? It’s important to keep in mind that, in such cases, the feared event hasn’t even happened yet – and yet we go to all the trouble to create a




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fantastically detailed imagination of the worst possible thing that could happen – which of course leads to exactly the same kind of fear we’d be experiencing if the dreaded event actually had come to pass! Notice that we actually have to do work to create the anxiety that we used to think just happened to us! Why would we ever do this to ourselves? Most people with this kind of habitual problem would insist that they just can’t help it. To some degree this is true. That is to say, such persons have engaged in this kind of behavior so much in their life that they have become unconsciously competent in the activity. In other words, they’ve become so good at the act of worrying about what could go wrong in the anticipated event (vs., for example, what could go right) that it literally feels like it’s just happening on its own, totally absent conscious volition. But the truth is, such catastrophic worrying behavior is really just a bad habit, a well-worn one at that. And bad habits can change, because bad habits are nothing more than learned behaviors. And whatever is learned can be unlearned – it’s just the process of learning something new! Early on in my career, I came across a statement by Anthony Robbins (one of the greatest personal empowerment coaches ever, in my opinion) that had a huge impact on me. He said:




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You see, far from anxiety being something that happens to us – seemingly from out of nowhere – in fact, we are the source and the creator of our own anxiety simply by virtue of the way we think about the past or the future. If we don’t “do” the specific mental activity required to generate anxiety in the first place, we simply won’t – we can’t – experience it any longer. Are you beginning to get curious about what I have planned for you? The time to get excited about this is now!

Nothing and nobody outside of you can ever make you feel any way at all… Only you have the power to do that.




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2. The Conscious And The

Unconscious Minds Scientists generally agree that we have a single brain, with a single neurology that collectively includes our brainstem, our spinal cord, and the millions of individual neurons that exist throughout our entire body. At BrightLife, we think of this single collective neurological entity as the Mind. Even so, it is possible to distinguish between what appear to be different parts of our Mind. We can think of our Conscious Mind as that part of our experience of which we are currently aware, and our subconscious mind (what, for the purposes of this book, we’ll also call our Unconscious Mind) as everything else. The distinction is really made along the lines of what appear to be the function of each part. There are theories that suggest that our Unconscious Mind is a huge repository of information, feelings, memories and behaviors. Much of what we’ve experienced, and even more importantly, the conclusions we’ve drawn from those experiences (the beliefs or rules we’ve created as a result of those experiences) are stored at the unconscious level for later retrieval and use. The result of these learnings is what can be thought of as a collection of context-specific mental programs; it is these “programs” that dictate to our subconscious mind how to (seemingly automatically!) think, feel and respond to our world today in the various situations and circumstances we find ourselves in today. And our brains are




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acting out on this programming virtually every moment of every day! For example, how often do you suppose we consciously choose our emotional responses to life’s everyday experiences? If you’re like most people, you’d probably have to say “never”! Our emotional responses just seem to sort of come upon us automatically, don’t they? Thus, the source of our emotional responses – particularly the ones that seem most automatic for us – is our Unconscious Mind. Ultimately, our Unconscious Mind is the deeper source of each and every thought, feeling or behavior we spontaneously experience. Therefore, if we are to eliminate the kinds of thoughts, feelings or behaviors that cause us to spontaneously experience fear or anxiety in inappropriate situations, it is necessary to address these activities at the level of their true source – and that is the Unconscious Mind. The Role of Our Five Senses in Creating Our Emotional States

Our Unconscious Mind notices each and every experience we have by way of our five senses, also called our sensory representational systems, our sensory modalities, or (as we’ll call them here) our sensory channels. It does this using our sensory apparatus – our eyes, our ears, our ability to touch and feel things, and of course, specialized neurons called sensory receptors for taste and smell in our nose and mouth. Now, our brain records all this sensory information in a manner very similar to the way a video recorder captures each and every




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experience it is asked to record. However, unlike a video recorder, which captures only video and sound (the only sensory channels available to it to be recorded), our Unconscious Mind records our life’s experiences in total sensory detail – that is, everything we’ve ever seen, heard, tasted, felt, smelt or said to ourselves has been recorded and stored deep within our Unconscious Mind. As we consider specific memories, some of these may be experienced as happy, exciting or thrilling while others may be experienced as frustrating, fearful or depressing. The same may be true as we consider events that we anticipate happening in the future. This variation in the way we feel about different memories or about events of the future is due to the specific way in which our Unconscious Mind records each individual memory, or how it creates the imagination of some future event. We know how to feel about specific memories based on the meaning subconsciously assigned to them at the time. That is, we know how to feel about specific memories based on what was learned – and subsequently “programmed” into us – from those experiences at a deep, subconscious level. Let’s Take An Example Suppose young 4-year-old Susan is playing with crayons and paper on the living room table, while mom and dad are in the room with her. As most 4-year-olds would, Susan really doesn’t do much more than scribble on the paper with the crayons she’s using. Several minutes later, Susan proudly displays her masterpiece to her parents. Susan’s parents may respond by saying something like, “Wow, that’s a really wonderful drawing, Susan… You’re so good at this! Would you please draw another for us?”




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Now, due to her age, Susan may or may not have a conscious memory of this event later in life. If she does, she’s likely to feel good as she considers that experience because of the positive feedback (and thus the good feelings) she experienced at that time. On a deeply subconscious level, Susan may have generalized outward from this experience, concluding, for example, “I’m a capable person”. That’s a fairly useful learning, wouldn’t you say? Notice that the meaning – and thus the emotional states – assigned to this memory are positive ones. Thus, as Susan considers the memory later in life, she’s likely to feel good about it. What’s interesting is that, even if Susan doesn’t have a conscious memory of that early experience, it won’t matter in terms of the positive impact it is likely to have in her life. Although the conclusion “I’m a capable person” occurred totally outside Susan’s conscious awareness, it nonetheless becomes a sort of “truth” for Susan from that point forward. It’s almost as though it becomes a kind of mental “rule” or “program” that dictates for Susan how to feel and how to respond in situations that remind her Unconscious Mind of that early event so many years ago. Susan is likely to feel generally good about the idea of creating from that early point forth. On the other hand, suppose Susan’s parents had had an argument an hour earlier in the other room. Suppose that this argument had not yet been conclusively resolved, and both parents are still upset about it. In this case, upon Susan’s presenting her parents with her work, her father may say, “Yeah, that’s great, Susan. Don’t you want to go upstairs and watch TV now?” Now, dad wasn’t necessarily abusive in his communication toward his daughter by any stretch. And it wasn’t even so much what he said




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that might have an adverse impact on Susan. It could simply be the tonality he uses as he communicates with her. Dr. Ray Birdwhistle of the University of Pennsylvania showed in 1970 that tonality is actually a much stronger communicative force than the actual words used. This explains why comedians like Chris Rock, whose monologues are often laced with otherwise offensive language, tend to evoke laughter from their audience instead of shock and disdain. Because it’s not what they’re saying – it’s how they’re saying it that creates the context that is so important to meaning in the observer’s mind. Susan may have unintentionally misinterpreted Dad’s meaning to be something like, “You’re not important to me right now. Go find something else to do where you won’t be bothering me”. Because of the way young children’s brains develop, Susan’s mind isn’t yet sophisticated enough to be able to correctly contextualize what’s happening here. Instead of (subconsciously) concluding “What I’m doing isn’t important to my father right now, because he’s not feeling well”, she’s more likely to generate a huge, overarching truth on the level of identity, such as, “I’m unimportant”. Again, years later, Susan may or may not have a conscious memory of that moment early in her life. If she does, she’s likely to have unpleasant feelings as she relives that memory. You see, her feelings about that experience are not based on the memory itself, but rather, on the meaning subconsciously assigned to (or what was unconsciously learned from) the event so long ago. Even if she doesn’t have a conscious memory of that experience, the conclusions generated at that particular moment (“I’m




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unimportant.”) are likely to remain as her unconscious “truth” from that point forward. Notice that this “truth” (what we call a limiting belief or a limiting decision) isn’t actually necessarily true at all. Regardless, this unconsciously created limiting belief will continue to play itself out, just like a record, or a mental “program” running itself totally outside Susan’s conscious awareness from that point forth. This program – this rule – dictates to Susan just how she should think, feel and behave in current and future situations that (to her brain) bear a resemblance to the earlier circumstance where the “truth” was learned. Why Is This Important to You? This is a crucial insight because if we can change the meaning subconsciously assigned to our memories, we can instantly change the feelings we have about even the most traumatic experiences of our lives. Case Studies Let’s offer a couple of examples in which we were able to assist BrightLife clients to eradicate chronic suffering and emotional pain based on earlier events, quickly and permanently, using this just kind of approach. One day we received a telephone call from a woman who had been the victim of a tornado that had struck her area several months earlier (in Canada of all places!). Quite understandably, as a result, this woman found herself becoming extremely agitated at the mere




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sign of a possible storm. She found herself glued to the news and the Weather Channel constantly, always on the lookout for the possibility of bad weather coming down the pike. Clearly, her earlier fearful experience was now interfering with her present-day life in a big way. When finally this woman contacted us, she was about at the end of her rope. Fortunately, this was the kind of trauma we could assist her to eliminate without the need to travel all the way to Los Angeles. In fact, in the space of no more than about 20 minutes, we were able to assist her to eliminate this problem totally and completely, simply by helping her to change the way her brain encoded the memory of that experience. When we helped her change the way her brain remembered the experience, the meaning subconsciously assigned to that experience (presumably something like “Storms could equal great danger”) dropped off, and she was freed of her fear from that day forth. This happens because the meaning associated with the memory (what was learned) and the memory itself are not distinct or separate entities; in fact, they are tightly integrated within our neurology. Therefore, if you change any part of the memory (i.e. the way the memory was recorded), the meaning assigned to the memory must also change, and that’s what happened for this woman. Her brain literally forgot why it should be afraid of storms, and that’s what freed her from her phobic reactions from that point on. Now, it’s useful to mention that her conscious mind still knew full well what had happened that terrible day – we’re not brainwashing anybody here. But it wasn’t her conscious mind that was responsible for the ongoing trauma, was it? Rather, it was her unconscious mind that was causing her to feel the unwanted fear. Because we handled the problem at its source, we were able to help her eliminate the




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traumatic aftereffects of that experience amazingly quickly. Likewise, we recently worked with a 25-year-old gentleman who had developed an intense phobia of blood. This wasn’t his only problem; over the past two years or so, he had also developed a syndrome of panic attacks and a related fear of driving on the freeway. And, by the way, this is a really great example of how something can start as a relatively confined problem, and how it can really grow out of control over time, a process called inductive learning, or generalization. This kind of thing happens if, over a long enough period, the person continues to experience these horrifically fearful emotions as something that just seem to “happen” to him, despite his best efforts to avoid such unpleasant experiences at all costs. One starts to create a set of beliefs from these experiences, and the major belief underlying continued panic attacks (or even the fear of them) may just be something like “My emotions can totally overwhelm me!” Pretty scary stuff! No wonder this gentleman’s fears, phobias and anxiety began spilling over into other areas of his life. It happens this way for a lot of people. Maybe it happened this way for you, too. Back to our story. For most people, this fear of blood might be uncomfortable, but in all likelihood, would not have the potential to impact their life in quite so dramatic a way as with this gentleman. You see, this man was a police officer, and as such, was regularly called to the scene of some fairly gruesome events. In such a career, he couldn’t avoid coming into contact with the very thing he feared most – blood.




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This gentleman’s phobia began at around the age of 5 or so. He grew up in Beirut, Lebanon during a time of civil war, approximately twenty-five years ago. There was almost nothing commonly or easily available to live on. There was no running water, no electricity, and food was scarce indeed. From time to time, this boy’s father would come home with a goat, eventually to serve as a source of food for the family. Being a young child, and with little else to occupy his time, this boy would play with the goat, eventually make friends with it, and inevitably, develop an emotional attachment toward the animal. This man vividly remembers a time when his father came outside and (to the child’s young mind) brutally slaughtered the animal, blood spraying everywhere. You can imagine the trauma experienced by this young boy! In coaching, we concluded that it had been this very event that was responsible for the phobia he had been harboring over the next twenty years. Using nothing more than the very first technique we’ll be showing you in this book, we were able to assist this man to totally eradiate his formerly paralyzing phobia in no more than about ten minutes! Once again, because the source of his continuing challenges with anxiety was a traumatic one-time event from his past, the process of clearing the anxiety was fairly straightforward. We simply assisted this gentleman to effectively re-encode his memory of the setting event, so that his challenge with blood-related fear was totally eradicated from that day forth. Once we’d accomplished this, it was only a matter of carrying through the idea that he could make such a monumental change in such an amazingly short period of time that allowed us to totally




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eradicate his fear of panic attacks as well – not to mention his fear of driving on the freeway – from that point forth. You see, the only reason people continue to have panic attacks after the first or second one is because they’ve come to believe they’re now susceptible to them. Although this is certainly a reasonable conclusion, a pattern of experiencing panic attacks over time is primarily the result of a limiting belief that’s been created – that it’s happening to them, and that they can therefore be a “victim” of a panic attack at any time at all. When clients finally get that they can’t have a panic attack – they can create one, but they can’t “have” one – the fear of having a panic attack out of the blue tends to disappear. And when we no longer fear having a panic attack, we won’t have them any more because we won’t be creating them anymore based on our fear of them. Wait A Second… This All Sounds Too Good to Be True, Doesn’t It? If you are a person who has struggled for years with the painful effects of a particularly nasty memory, this may all seem too good to be true. We can certainly understand and appreciate that. But let’s think about it for a minute. Why was it possible for this gentleman to find relief so very quickly? It’s because the source of his challenges in the present was rooted in a single traumatic event from his past… But not the real event, mind you – just a mental record of the event. Therefore, if we could assist him to change how his brain remembered the event from his past, his subjective experience in the present could change just as quickly. This is exactly what we did




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with him, and it’s exactly what we’ll be teaching you to do in this book. It might be useful at this point to note that there is no law dictating how long it has to take to realize profound relief from emotional problems. Somehow, the common notion is that the more severe the emotional challenge, and/or the longer we’ve suffered with it, the longer it must take to overcome. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Human beings learn quickly. In fact, you can’t learn slowly! Let me offer you an example. What if you tried to have a conversation at the rate of one word a day for five years? At the end of that time, would you know what that conversation was about? Think about how movies are made. Movies are shown one image at a time, each separated by a black slide. This happens at a rate of 24 frames per second. This goes by very quickly! Because our perceptual apparatus is not sophisticated enough to pick up each individual slide, we experience a perceptual distortion known as persistence of motion. Thus, the illusion of continuity is created where, in fact, there is none. What if you tried to watch a movie at the rate of one frame per day, for ten years? Would you know what that movie was about by the time the ten years was over? Of course not. You see, you can’t learn slowly… Your brain learns quickly, and that’s really the only way you can do it! My point is this: Most “single-stimulus” phobias are the result of a one-time negative learning experience; basically, it’s about being in




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the wrong place at the wrong time. The same is true for post-traumatic stress. Sometimes these experiences are consciously remembered, and other times they are not. It really doesn’t matter. Whether or not one consciously recalls the setting event, the fact is, phobias are learned quickly. The good news is, whatever is learned quickly can be unlearned just as quickly using the same powerful (and, by the way, totally unconscious) skill! It’s already something you must be good at to even have this kind of problem in the first place – no wonder these techniques work as quickly and easily as they do! Meaning Creates State Remember – the only way we know how to feel about a particular memory from our past, or about an imagination of a future event, is based on the meaning assigned to the memory or imagination by our Unconscious Mind. The meaning is really based on what was learned from earlier events in our life. This learning takes place entirely at the subconscious level. For example, if the meaning subconsciously assigned to the memory of my surprise birthday party last year is “great fun”, then my immediate experience of that memory when I think about it is likely to be something along the lines of “happiness” or “excitement”. Likewise, if the meaning subconsciously assigned to the memory of a panic attack I had in a car on the freeway six months ago is “Being in a car could mean losing total control of myself”, my immediate




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experience of that memory when I think about it is likely to be something like “great fear”. This fear response, by the way, makes total sense, does it not? Because the purpose of fear is to protect us from potentially painful experiences – and hey – the last time I drove in a car, I experienced some pretty intense pain (in the form of fear)! – it probably makes pretty good sense for my Unconscious Mind to wave the red flag whenever I consider the possibility of doing it again. Surprise, Surprise – There’s Nothing Wrong With You After All! See, if you’re one of these people who have come to believe there’s something “wrong” with you – or that, because you’ve developed this problem, you have some kind of disease or psychological “disorder”, I want to lay that notion to rest right now. And I do that will all due respect to your well-meaning counselor, therapist, psychologist or psychiatrist. Let me ask you a question. If you were three years old, and without really knowing what you were doing, you came too close to a burner or an electrical outlet, and you’d burned yourself, you’d probably never go near that thing again. I’m sure that’s happened to a lot of us, myself included. Now, why wouldn’t you go near that burner or electrical outlet again (i.e. the source of that earlier pain)? Because whenever you’d think about it, you’d get this feeling in your body that says, “No you don’t!” It’s almost as though you’d developed a phobia to electrical outlets!




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And it’s a good thing you have that “phobia”, wouldn’t you say? Pretty useful thing to fear, huh? So, now, because you have this fear, does that mean there’s something wrong with you? Does this mean you have some sort of mental disease or mental disorder called “Electrical Plug Phobic Disorder”? You and I both know that’s ridiculous. I believe this response is a perfectly healthy and reasonable one… It just means your brain works fine! It’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing, which is to protect you and keep you safe from things that could hurt you. So what’s the difference between that and having had a panic attack on the freeway six months ago, and now you don’t want to get back on the freeway? In my opinion, not a thing! Again, the fact that you have this problem doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you – in fact, it’s pretty good evidence that your brain works fine, and THAT’S why you’ve got this problem! Now, I’m certainly not saying that this problem is a lot of fun, or that it’s a great situation to be in, or anything like that. And, of course, that’s why we’re here together, right? Because the result is a problem for you… I know that. But, hopefully, it does explain in more reasonable terms what’s been going on here. And if you’re one of these people who have been diagnosed as someone who’s got some kind of anxiety “disorder”, well, now you know better. I hope you can choose to let go of the notion that, because you’ve had this problem, there’s something wrong with you. In my opinion,




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nothing could be further from the truth. Your brain’s job is to protect you from pain at all costs. It’s simply trying to do that in the best way it knows how. That means your brain works just fine! Wrapping Up… My point in this chapter is this: If we can identify how the Unconscious Mind encodes information, we can know the mechanism by which it assigns meaning – and, of course, the meaning assigned to specific memories is the basis of learning, and thereby, our seemingly automatic reactions in similar circumstances later on. If we know the mechanism by which the brain assigns meaning to our memories, we are then empowered to change the meaning of – and thus the feelings associated with – those memories. When we change the meaning assigned to specific memories – and in this case, we’re talking about traumatic memories – the brain literally forgets to feel bad about them! How do we do this? Well, hang onto your hats… We’re going to talk about that next!




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3. The Structure of

Subjective Experience There can be no doubt that each of us experiences our world differently. Take three people who attend the same movie, each of whom then exit the theatre, all with a vastly different review of the film. The first moviegoer comes out and exclaims, “That movie was great!” The next person comes out and says, “Ehh… It was OK, I guess.” The third movie fan comes out and says, “That was the worst piece of garbage I’ve ever seen!” But wait a minute… Didn’t all three of these people see exactly the same movie? And by the way, who’s right? Keeping in mind that all three moviegoers were exposed to virtually the exact same set of sensory information, how is it possible that all three had such vastly different reactions to exactly the same set of stimuli? This variance is explained by something we call subjective experience. Subjective experience can be thought of as the way we each individually experience our world, and the events that take place in our world. You see, there is an important distinction to be made when considering events as we experience them vs. events as they truly are.




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Events as they truly are (“reality”) can be considered objective experience, and events as we interpret them can be considered subjective experience. Most of us will agree that there are times when we react to something based on our own individual interpretation of what happened (the meaning we assign to the event), rather than on what may actually have happened. After all, how could we know how to feel about any experience without first having assigned a personal interpretation to the event – “good”, “bad” or indifferent? But how do we assign meaning to our experiences in life? Make no mistake – it’s a totally subconscious activity. Channels And Subchannels – The Building Blocks of Subjective Experience As mentioned earlier, we experience our world through our five senses. These are our senses of:

♦ Sight (visual) ♦ Hearing (auditory) ♦ Feeling (internal and external kinesthetic) ♦ Taste (gustatory) ♦ Smell (olfactory)

In a very real way, our five senses act as our windows to the world – without them, we’d have no idea what is occurring in the world external to us. Our five senses allow us to have present moment experiences.




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If this is true, wouldn’t it make sense that our memories (or, for that matter, imaginations of future events) must also be made up of sensory experiences, primarily sets of pictures, sounds and feelings? (Significantly less frequently, we will experience our memories primarily by way of tastes or smells present at the time.) To get a sense for what I mean by this, try this simple exercise: Think of an experience you had, say, last week sometime. It might have been an important event for you, or it could be nothing more than a relatively trivial memory. Either way, close your eyes and take a moment to think of one of your experiences from last week. When you’ve isolated a specific memory, and with your eyes remaining closed, take a moment to notice just how you experience it. Different people experience their memories in different ways.

♦ Do you experience this memory mostly in a visual way? In other words, do you see something, or some part of what happened in your “mind’s eye”?

♦ Or, instead, do you perhaps experience it primarily by way of

the sounds you heard at the time – either the sound of things outside your body, or the sound of your own voice?

♦ Or, do you instead experience the memory mostly by way of

your feelings about it?

♦ Maybe you experience this memory as a sensory-rich combination of visual, auditory and kinesthetic information.

Because we experience our memories as primarily visual, auditory or kinesthetic experiences we call these the primary sensory




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representational systems, primary sensory modalities or primary sensory channels. However, it is the finer distinctions within each sensory modality that really make the difference when it comes to how we feel about our memories. These finer distinctions were originally termed submodalities in Neuro-Linguistic Programming*; for the sake of simplicity, we’ll refer to them as subchannels from here on out. For example, in the visual sensory channel, the following is a list of the major subchannel distinctions that, in various combination, together literally determine, or code for, the meaning we attach to our memories. Visual:

♦ Location in your mental field of view ♦ Proximity (distance) from you ♦ Relative brightness (vs, dim or dark) ♦ Framed or panoramic ♦ Color vs. black and white ♦ Size of the picture – is it life size, bigger or smaller? ♦ Motion vs. still-frame (If motion, is it fast or slow?) ♦ Size of the central object ♦ 2-D or 3-D? ♦ Intensity of color ♦ Degree of contrast

* Think of the potential significance of having discovered the actual structure of subjective experience! Identify and then change the mental structure of the experience, and you automatically change the feeling! Credit for this discovery goes to Richard Bandler, John Grinder (the two co-develops of NLP) and Robert Dilts, one of the very early masters of NLP.




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These are all visual sensory subchannel distinctions that serve an important purpose in coding for the meaning of a particular memory, or imagination of what could happen in the future. In the auditory sensory channel, the following is a list of the major distinctions that make up our experience of hearing: Auditory:

♦ Location (where do the sounds appears to be coming from?) ♦ Tonality ♦ Volume ♦ Tempo ♦ Pitch ♦ Cadence ♦ Rhythm ♦ Inflections (are certain words phonologically marked out?) ♦ Pauses ♦ Timbre (quality) ♦ Internally vs. externally generated

These are all auditory subchannel distinctions that, once again, in various combinations, code for the meaning of specific memories, or imaginations of what could happen in the future. For example, wouldn’t you agree that that what you hear yourself saying when you think about a certain memory – or especially, how you hear yourself saying it – could have a great deal to do with the meaning you’ve unconsciously assigned to that memory, and thus how you feel about it? Finally, in the kinesthetic sensory channel, the following is a list of the major distinctions that make up our experience of feeling:




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Kinesthetic (internal – sensation or emotion, and external – sensation or touch):

♦ Location (inside your body) ♦ Shape ♦ Size ♦ Temperature ♦ Movement ♦ Texture ♦ Vibration ♦ Pressure ♦ Duration of the feeling ♦ Steady vs. intermittent ♦ Intensity ♦ Weight

Learning how to recognize – and more importantly, to consciously manipulate these – is the key to mastering nearly any situation! Let’s return to our earlier question. When asked to notice how you experienced the memory from a week ago, you may have noticed that the picture appeared to be either:

♦ in color, or in black or white ♦ a “movie”, or a still-frame

Subchannels are literally the building blocks of subjective experience!




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♦ located in front of you, or off to the left or the right, up or down, or in some direction from you in relation to your body

♦ bright, dim or dark ♦ panoramic in nature, or perhaps as though there is a mental

“frame” around the picture ♦ life-size, bigger than life-size, or smaller ♦ etc.

There’s no denying that, for most people, the visual sensory channel is a particularly powerful means through which we experience our world; for the vast majority of people, our visual sense undoubtedly plays a major role in determining the quality of our day-to-day experiences. Because the visual channel is so powerful for so many people, it’s safe to say that the particular combination of visual subchannel distinctions associated with a particular memory codes for the major part of the meaning subconsciously assigned to the memory, and thus is chiefly responsible for how you feel when you think about the memory! This is very similar to how a recipe for a chocolate cake “codes” for a specific result to be expected when baking the cake according to that recipe. Notice that, by altering just one or two parts of the recipe – say, by switching them – you could change the entire result in quite a radical way, couldn’t you? For example, suppose the recipe for this chocolate cake calls for a teaspoon of salt and a cup of sugar. Well, if all we did was switch these, so that instead we used a teaspoon of sugar and a cup of salt – we’d wind up with a much different result, wouldn’t we? You bet!




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Your brain works exactly the same way when manipulating subchannels! By doing so, you change the mental “recipe” used to assign meaning to your memories. When we change the subchannels associated with individual experiences – that is, when we change the individual parts of the way we think about our experiences – we instantly and powerfully change how we feel about those experiences! The process by which this takes place is so powerful, that once changed, it is virtually impossible to return to the way we used to feel about these memories – no matter how hard we try! The Road to Change So far, we’ve set the table for you. Let’s get in and start chomping away already, shall we? Here’s how this is going to work. In short, two things need to happen in order for a person to clear a long-standing pattern of responding in seemingly “programmed” ways with negative emotions such as fear, hurt or anger. Both steps are equally important, and neither is sufficient without the other. First, we need to neutralize the pattern of negative responsiveness (e.g. fear, anxiety, etc.) that’s been limiting you within a given context. We’ll do that by literally “scrambling” the mental pathway your brain has been using to access the fear or anxiety you want to now eliminate. Second, we need to condition in a brand new pattern of positive responsiveness in the previously challenging situations. We can’t effectively neutralize the old responses for good unless we then




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present your brain with a positive alternative for what to do instead. We need to train your brain about what you want it to do for you next time. Both of these steps are crucial for lasting change to take hold. So, enough theory already, wouldn’t you say? Let’s get right to it. We’ll show you how to neutralize anticipatory anxiety (related to what might happen in the future) in Chapter 6. Before we do that, let’s show you how to eliminate painful feelings or psychological trauma from your past right now!




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4. How to Change

Your Own Personal History or

“It’s Never Too Late to Have a Happy Childhood!”

Did something once happen that continues to bother you – even traumatize you – to this day? What happens when you experience this memory? Even more interestingly, how exactly do you experience this memory? Perhaps you find yourself dealing with day-to-day experiences, trapped by emotions you know are related to specific past events. Maybe you’ve been to therapy, even for years, to get a grip on this problem, but nothing’s helped. If you continue to live your life haunted in the present by events of your past, having so far been unable to free yourself from the emotional bondage of what happened, we have a wonderful gift for you – a way to literally re-create your past all over again – but this time, totally free of any remaining psychological trauma.




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How to Neutralize The Trauma of Your Past The process you are about to learn is a well-known NLP technique called the Fast Phobia Trauma Cure*. It is equally effective for eliminating mildly negative emotional responses or intensely traumatic ones – even for events that, for you, may have led to development of a full-blown phobia or post-traumatic stress (PTSD). * For specialized training in how to apply such powerful personal change techniques as the NLP Fast Phobia Cure, please contact us at BrightLife Coaching, Consulting & Training Services at [email protected] or by telephone at (866) LIFE-NOW.

The first time you try this exercise, you may want to experiment with nothing more than a mildly unpleasant experience. When you find that this goes well, you might want to try yet another until you’ve really familiarized yourself with the steps. Alternatively, you could ask a loved one or trusted friend to read this process to you as you do it. Be sure to instruct that person to wait patiently after each instruction until you’ve given him/her the signal to move on — that you’ve completed the step he or she just read to you.


mailto:[email protected]



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Exercise #1: The Fast Phobia Trauma Cure THE STEPS (see also the diagram on page 48): 1. Consider an event you know you’d like to feel differently about. It

could be an event that you recognize to have been traumatic in and of itself. Perhaps it is an event that you believe is very probably responsible for what later turned out to be a phobia, unrelenting nightmares, for symptoms of post-traumatic stress, or for some other chronic problem or feelings that you just haven’t been able to let go of since it happened.

Take a minute to think about this situation in some detail. However, think about it only as long as it takes to be sure that you have access to the part of you that creates the fear (or other unpleasant emotion). Quickly rate your fear on a scale of 0-10, 0 being emotionally flat, or neutral, and 10 representing the most intense fear possible for you. At that point (before the fear becomes intense), break your state! Get up, snap your fingers, clap your hands together, stand up and walk around like Superman, or do whatever else you need to do in order to change your state from a fearful one to a more resourceful one. You could take a few moments to think of your favorite place on earth, a place that, by merely thinking about it, causes you to feel calm, comfortable, at peace, and secure. Move on to the next step only when you know you have changed to a more resourceful state.

2. Now, in your mind’s eye, imagine you are sitting in a large,

comfortable movie theatre. Imagine yourself sitting in the most




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comfortable theatre seat you’ve ever known – a hundred times more comfortable than the chair you’re in right now.

3. Imagine a small, black and white television screen far in front of

you, and down below you. In your mind’s eye, imagine you are seeing a black and white still picture of yourself on the small screen just before you had the fearful response for the first time. If you can’t remember the first time you ever had the fear (this is actually common), just think of the time you experienced the fear most intensely.

4. Leaving this small black and white still image on the screen far out

in front of you, and down below you, imagine now floating up out of your body there in the movie theatre, and as a “mind” or an “observer”, float up into the projection booth, high above and behind the audience. (If this is a height phobia, imagine yourself floating ten rows back and settling into another very comfortable seat).

5. From the projection booth, notice that you can look out the glass

window and see yourself down there in the movie theatre, watching yourself on the little black and white screen far out in front of you, and down below you. Can you see the little holes in the glass window of the projection booth, so you can hear the movie as well?

6. As you watch yourself down there, watching yourself on the

television screen far out in front of you, and down below you, begin to run a black and white movie of what actually occurred in that first (or most fearful) situation. See that earlier you, way down there, going through the experience. As you do so, be certain you remain aware of yourself way up here in the projection booth, high up above the television screen, playing that black and




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white movie of what originally happened, way down there. You might even put your fingers up on that thick plexiglas barrier of the projection booth, and feel what that’s like as you watch yourself down there, watching that black-and-white movie of what occurred way back when.

7. Continue to watch that movie from the projection booth until you

reach the most intense, or the most fearful or traumatic part of the event. At that point, just go ahead and fade out the movie right there… and then fade back in again only when you’re sure that most intense or fearful part has passed.

Continue to play through the rest of the movie, all the way to the end of the situation when it was all over, and you can tell from your movie that you're totally safe again. At this point, stop the movie and make it into a still picture of yourself after the incident was completely over with, and you know you’re totally safe.

8. Next, float down out of the projection booth, and right into the still

picture on the screen, right there at the end of the movie, when you know you’re totally safe. Make sure you’re actually in the picture this time – that you’re actually in the experience, fully associated into that moment at the end of the event, frozen in time (for the moment).

9. FIRST RUN THROUGH: Now being fully associated into the

scene, run through this entire memory backward, in color this time, just as if time were reversed, and you were being sucked back through the experience by a giant vacuum cleaner. It’s very important that you feel the sensation of being sucked back through the experience very rapidly. Do this very quickly, in about one and one half seconds. Run the movie backwards, in color, all the way to the beginning of the movie until you come out




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the other side, before anything at all bad had happened. Who knows… you might even have had a smile on your face at that point!

When you’ve done that, open your eyes for a moment… take a deep breath… and then close them again.

• In a moment, you’ll repeat Step #9 once again. Before you do this, however, think of your favorite, most soothing color. This may be pink, yellow, blue, green, or any other color that feels particularly soothing – or perhaps empowering! – when you imagine being bathed in it. Imagine you’re at a mall. We’ve all been kids, right? Remember when you would try on these funny-colored sunglasses at the mall? The whole world would look as though it was blue or green or yellow or purple, or whatever color you had put on.

• SECOND RUN THROUGH: Repeat Step #9 once again, but this

time, run through the entire experience as though you are reliving the entire experience backward through your favorite-colored goggles or glasses. Thus, while you’re feeling the sensation of being sucked back through time at super fast speed, you’re also seeing what you were seeing backward, but in your favorite, most soothing – or empowering – color.

Run the movie backwards, in your favorite color, all the way to the beginning of the movie, before anything at all bad had happened. When you’ve done that, open your eyes for a moment… take a deep breath… and then close them again.




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Do you have a favorite song? One that makes you feel particularly strong or powerful? Take a moment to hear this song or this music play once again in your head, the way you hear it when it has that really powerful impact on you.

• THIRD RUN THROUGH: Repeat Step #9 once again, but this time, run through the entire experience backward very fast, and play it through in your favorite color, all the while playing your empowering choice of music as a soundtrack in the background. Run the movie backwards, in color, with this powerful music, all the way to the beginning of the movie, before anything at all had happened. When you’ve done that, open your eyes for a moment… take a deep breath… and then take a moment to relax.

* * * * Let’s set this experience aside for a moment. Say your telephone number aloud… backwards. Very good! I hope that caught you by surprise! Go ahead – say it backwards. Continue only when you’ve been able to complete that recitation. Now that you’ve done that, let’s check on how you feel about that old experience. Go ahead and really try to get those old feelings back that you used to have about that event. You may find with some delight that you cannot!




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Go ahead… Try harder this time. Try even harder to find those old emotions, and notice what happens – or perhaps doesn’t happen this time. You may find that the harder you try to find those old emotions, you’ll find that you cannot! Once again, rate your fear on that old event on a scale of 0-10. Where are you now? If you’re like most people, you’ll find that your fear is either significantly diminished, or totally gone. If, as you rate your feelings about that old event, you find yourself above a 2, simply run the process through from Step #9 forward once again. You’ll almost certainly be unable to find any of those old emotions any longer!

* * * * See Figure 1 on the next page for a graphic representation of this amazing process.




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Figure 1. How to neutralize a phobic or traumatic response




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This Is Amazing… What Happened??? It’s quite simple, really. Recall that your brain does not know the difference between something that really happened in your past, and a now vividly re-imagined experiencing of the event. Since there was nothing more than a construction of that event left in your neurology in the first place, if we construct that memory all over again in a new way, your brain will respond differently to it when you consider it in the present. Having done this, whatever was learned from that old event dropped off as well. This is why you can’t find the fear anymore… Your brain has literally forgotten why it should be fearful about that kind of situation! Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “This is too good to be true! It can’t have been that easy to clear up, could it? I mean, it all happened so fast!” I understand that. Let me simply invite you to come back in an hour and check on that event once again. Think about it tomorrow. Think about it next week. Again, if you’re like most people, you’ll find that you’re still feeling totally clear of the old trauma. Let your experience speak for itself. Ahhh… Life is good, isn’t it?

You’re Almost Done – But Not Quite! Keep in mind that, even though we’ve taken the first major step in helping you eradicate the pattern of fearful responsiveness you’ve lived with – perhaps for many years – there’s still one more very important step remaining to be done. That is, we need to tell your




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brain exactly what you want it to do for you instead, the next time you think about – or actually encounter – whatever used to trigger your fear in the past. Before we get there, however, I want you to check on how you feel about whatever it is you used to fear. We want to be sure the last process worked the way you wanted it to. First check on those (one or more) specific events in the past that you believe set the whole problem up in the first place. If you performed the exercise in this chapter well, you should find yourself feeling close to, or completely, emotionally neutral when you think about those earlier events. You may even find it difficult to bring those memories back the way you were able to before. Either way, if you feel completely free of the old fear, it suggests that you did the exercise just fine. If, on the other hand, you find yourself continuing to feel uncomfortably anxious or fearful when you think about those earlier experiences, you may choose to repeat the exercise presented at the beginning of this chapter once or twice more. Now – what if, even though you feel pretty much totally clear when you think about those earlier setting events, you still find yourself experiencing some anxiety about what might happen in the future? This doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong in the last exercise; it just means that the source of your current anxiety is no longer a direct result of those earlier setting events. In fact, the true source of your current experience of anxiety is now the habits of thinking and behaving that you’ve developed over a period of months or years to cope with the old trauma.




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It’s a self-defense mechanism, really. It’s simply your brain’s best way of making darn sure you stay away from circumstances similar to the old trauma in the future. If you’re still finding yourself concerned about what might happen in the future (related to that original event that you presumably cleared using the last process), Chapter 5 will be very useful for you. That’s where we’ll be teaching you how to neutralize anticipatory anxiety forever. Your Subconscious Mind Has a Positive Intent for Everything It Does – Including Creating This Fear For You You see, this business of continually worrying about what could go wrong in the future is often considered evidence that something is wrong with you – as though you have a disease, a sickness, a biochemical “disorder”, or something like that. Again, in our opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. We believe that, in actuality, this habit of continually worrying about the future can be considered a very reasonable self-defense mechanism, ingeniously designed by your Unconscious Mind to protect you from feeling pain – undoubtedly the same kind of pain you almost certainly experienced at some point earlier in your history. Like everything else your Unconscious Mind ever does for you, this future-based anticipatory anxiety absolutely has a positive purpose – presumably to keep you from placing yourself in physical proximity of whatever your brain learned early on to be a very fearful or potentially dangerous context, situation or circumstance.




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Thus, if as you think about the kind(s) of things you’ve been fearing, you find yourself continuing to experience anxious or fearful feelings about encountering it in the future, please do continue on to Chapter 5. This is where we’ll teach you how to neutralize any remaining anxious feelings you may have about what could go wrong in the future. On the other hand, if you believe you’ve effectively handled your fear by doing this last exercise, please go straight to Chapter 6. This is where I’ll begin to teach you how to condition your brain to automatically create whatever powerful or other resourceful states you know you want to feel instead, the next time you encounter whatever it is you used to fear. That will truly be the “icing on the cake”!




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5. How to Neutralize

Anticipatory Anxiety or

“What me worry?” In the last chapter, we addressed how to handle fears in the present that you know are based on events that happened in the past. On the other hand, maybe there is something looming before you, yet to happen… or at least, you fear it may happen. There is a difference! Maybe there’s a fear of some event that you know is coming up for you in the near future, and you’re really not looking forward to it because of what you expect may go wrong. The basis of this kind of behavior is something called anticipatory anxiety. The longer you’ve been dealing with anxiety as a limitation in your life, the more likely you are to have heard of this term. The interesting thing about anticipatory anxiety is that, not only is it the experience that most people identify as the anxiety problem itself, but it’s really more than that; it’s actually the behavior that literally propagates the problem, and makes it more likely you’ll experience anxiety again in the future! It’s as though you “program” yourself for even more fear and anxiety in your future every time you do it! This is why it’s more important to neutralize the power of these anxiety-provoking thoughts than you may even have imagined. When you learn how to stop doing anticipatory anxiety, you’ll literally break the cycle of programming that’s been responsible for the




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proliferation of your anxiety into what very probably has seemed like an all-encompassing, all-pervasive quandary.

How to Eliminate Future-Based Fear: The Final Eradication of Anticipatory Anxiety For the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to assume that you are at least somewhat concerned about some event coming up in your future. This might be making a presentation before your company’s board of directors; it might be meeting your ex-husband in court to hash out an alimony deal; for some, even the notion of leaving the house could be so anxiety-laden, you’ve imprisoned yourself within its boundaries. The process you’re about to learn is ideal for neutralizing fear about events you anticipate happening in the future. Exercise #2: The Subchannel Shift Identify Your Unconscious Trigger Picture 1. Close your eyes and ask yourself what specifically might happen

(that’s undesirable) if you go ahead and do this thing that you’ve been fearing to do. Ask yourself how you know this might happen. What evidence do you have?

If your answer is that you know it’s going to happen because it’s happened that way in the past, then the way you’re creating your fear now (what we think of as your mental strategy) must be by bringing up memories of what went wrong in the past.




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If this is the case, you should first take a few moments to be sure you know what it is you’re recalling from the past that tells you that you might have a problem in the future. You should then go back and run through the Fast Phobia Trauma Cure exercise described in the last chapter. If necessary, run that process on each and every such memory, until you can no longer detect your fear when you think about any such event that happened in the past.

Now, let’s talk about your future. In order to know how to feel about anything, we must first “check on it” by first building an imaginary experience of it, somehow, some way. Most people do this by quickly (and unconsciously!) creating an imagination in their mind’s eye of what might go wrong. Because this action is often the result of long years of habitual jackrabbit thinking, the action itself is typically very quick and quite unconscious – which also explains why we feel so out of control with our fear… We’re not consciously creating this fearful imagination… It’s been the result of totally unconscious processes! However, if you take the time to patiently slow down the process of checking out just how you know to feel fearful or anxious about the future, you’ll find that it’s first necessary to create an imagination of that event in your mind’s eye (perhaps complete with sounds, voices, etc.), inevitably concluding with the worst possible outcome. After all, how else could you know to feel fearful about this future event? You certainly could not be creating an imagination of a wonderfully successful outcome, could you? Of course not… You




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wouldn’t – you couldn’t – be feeling anxious about this event if you were imagining anything other than a negative outcome.

Rate Your Fearful Response (Establish a Baseline) 2. Picture what you fear may happen the way you picture it when it

really bothers you. Note the particular qualities of the image that contribute to the negative feelings you experience while considering it. Once you’ve done that, assign the negative feelings a score of between 0 and 10 – 0 meaning that you feel emotionally balanced or neutral about the event, and 10 representing the highest possible intensity of fear, anger, frustration, hurt, etc.

Color or Black and White? 3. Notice whether the picture you see in your mind’s eye appears to

be in black and white or in color. If it is in color, change it to black and white. If it is in black and white, simply leave it as is. Make sure you are certain that you’re seeing the image in black and white before continuing to the next step.

Re-evaluate Your Fearful Response

Before you move on to the next step, make a mental note of how your feelings have changed about this upcoming event, based on this change in how you view the imagination of it. As you view the imagination of this event in black and white, where are you now on a scale of 0-10?

Motion or Still-Frame? 4. Notice now whether there appears to be motion in the

imagination, or whether it appears to be a still-frame, like a Kodak




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snapshot in time. Is there movement? Is this imagination like a movie? Are there multiple images in the imagination? If so, freeze-frame it, so that you know it’s a still-shot. Be certain that you are viewing a black and white still-frame of the experience before continuing to the next step.


Before moving on to the next step, make a mental note of how your feelings have changed about this upcoming event, based on this change in how you view the imagination of it. Where are you now on a scale of 0-10?

Bright, or Dim or Dark? 5. Have you ever walked into a room where, instead of the standard

on-off switch, there was a circular “dimmer” switch instead? Pretend you’ve just entered one of these rooms, and mentally turn the brightness way, way down on the imagination of the experience. Watch the picture become dimmer and dimmer as you mentally turn the circular dial to the left. Be certain that you are viewing a black and white, very dim still-frame of the experience before continuing to the next step.


Before doing so, make a mental note of how your feelings have changed about this upcoming event, based on this change in how you view the imagination of it. Where are you now on a scale of 0-10?




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Clear or Fuzzy? 6. Now, turn the contrast way down on the image, so that the image

now appears dim and fuzzy. Notice what this does to your feelings about the event. Where are you now on a scale of 0-10?


By this time, many people will find that they are down to a “0” on a scale of 0-10, in terms of the intensity of their negative feelings about their imaginary image. If you find that you are not yet feeling completely neutral about it, continue the process with the following steps:

Change Image Size 7. Next, shrink this picture down in your mental field of view until

it’s the size of a postage stamp. Just watch it shrink down, smaller and smaller. In fact, once you’ve made it that small, just mentally drop it onto a stamp. Notice the white serrated edges around the stamp, and the little “41 cents” printed on it. Be certain that you are now viewing a tiny, black and white, very dim still-frame of the imagination.


Notice what this does to your feelings about the event. Where are you now on a scale of 0-10? If you’re not yet feeling completely neutral about the event, continue on to Step #8.




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Change Location in Your Mental Field of View 8. Now, take this tiny, black and white, dim and fuzzy still-frame,

and mentally move it to your upper left in your mental field of view. Do you see it way up there in the corner? You may have to move your eyes waaaaay up to the upper-left corner to even be able to see that very tiny, very dim image.


Notice what this does to your feelings about the event. Where are you now on a scale of 0-10? By now, most people would find themselves feeling completely neutral about this formerly feared event. If you’re not quite feeling this way, try moving the picture toward the upper right in your mental field of view, and notice whether this increases or reduces the intensity of your feeling. If necessary, continue moving the location of the picture in your mental field of view until you find a comfortable location for it.

If Necessary, Put Your Problems Behind You (Literally!) 9. Finally, take this very tiny, black and white, dim and fuzzy still-frame,

and mentally send it 100 feet behind you. If necessary, send it 100 miles behind you. You’ve heard people say, “Somehow, that guy just seems to be able to put his problems behind him so easily! I have no idea how he does it!” This is much closer than we realize to the actual truth about how many of us unconsciously re-encode our experiences such that they eventually cease to haunt us. In fact, many of us (very literally!) put our problems behind us!




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Re-evaluate Your Fearful Response Once Again

Notice what this final, powerful shift has done to your feelings about that formerly fearful situation. Where are you now on a scale of 0-10? By now, you are almost certainly finding yourself feeling completely neutral about the event. If you’re not yet feeling this way, it is possible that either:

♦ You’ve not necessarily made certain that you’ve followed the

directions above thoroughly before moving on to the next step — which, if you believe this might be the case, I’d like to encourage you to go back and repeat this exercise, being absolutely certain this time that you’ve completed each step to the very best of your ability before moving on to the next;

OR,

♦ Somehow, it’s not really “OK” with your Unconscious Mind to

let go of this negative emotion just yet; possibly, your Unconscious Mind is fighting the act of letting go of the emotion because it believes you require to first learn something important from whatever this ongoing fear has meant for you in the past.

If you believe this may be the case, you may choose to ask yourself this question: “What is there to have been learned from this anxiety, the recognition of which will allow me to finally let go of this then unnecessary anxiety in this particular circumstance in the future, easily and comfortably?”

Close your eyes and take all the time you need to answer this question.




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We’re talking about whatever there is to be learned from this experience that is positive, future-oriented, and self-directed (i.e. about you).

For example, if your fearful imagination had to do with public speaking (and, by the way, that’s the #1 fear in our society, so you’d be far from alone on that one!), you might come up with a positive learning that goes something like this:

“It’s very important to me that I do the very best I can to ensure that I know my material thoroughly before I go in, thereby ensuring the greatest possibility of success — and good feelings — for myself, both during and after the experience.”

Notice that this “learning” is at once positive, future oriented, and self-directed (that is, about you). Now, that’s the kind of powerful, positive learning that can often allow the subconscious mind to get to the point where it decides it’s finally OK to let go of the old way of trying to protect you from the pain of, say, not being fully prepared in front of a group — especially if you’ve experienced the pain of not having been fully prepared for a public speaking engagement in the past! So take all the time you need to come up with something good, and when you believe you've definitely gotten that, test again for the feelings associated with that previously fearful imagination. You may find that they have now disappeared completely.




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Ensuring Your Success The trick to making this particular process work well depends in large part on the patience you’re willing to exercise in Step #1 – that is, taking the necessary time to slow down the process of checking out just how you know to feel fearful about what may happen in the future. Some people quickly and unconsciously create wild imaginations of themselves totally losing control, dropping onto the floor and flopping around wildly! This is especially true of individuals who do panic attacks well, and almost always the case with individuals who’ve created the prison called agoraphobia for themselves. Interestingly, these very same people will tell you they’ve never actually lost control in these situations – nonetheless, the fear of this actually happening is sufficiently aversive to cause them to shut themselves in, within a prison of their own making. If you’re having trouble identifying your specific environmental (or internal, imaginary) trigger picture, you might use the following questions to help you: First question – WHERE SPECIFICALLY do you experience this problem? I’m talking about context. Where specifically are you (in a physical or geographical sense) when you find yourself beginning to feel the feelings you don’t want? In the house, in the car, at work, in the store, etc.? Second question – WHEN SPECIFICALLY do you do the problem? Generally speaking, how do you know when it’s time to feel your anxiety? Is it only at specific times of day or night? Just before getting out of bed in the morning? Just before leaving the house? As you think about the social gathering to take place later this afternoon?




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Third question – Most importantly, WHAT SPECIFICALLY has to happen for you get the feelings you don’t want? What are you noticing in your environment? What are you looking at, or what are you hearing (or both) right when you get the feelings you don’t want? Although it’s certainly an unusual kind of thought process, if you take the time to sllllloooooowwwww down the “movie” of those times and places wherein you are most likely to create the feelings you don’t want, you’ll discover what has to be there in order for you to create your anxiety at that time and place. If your anxiety is more of the anticipatory type, you’ll begin to notice just what you do inside your head (heretofore probably totally unconsciously!) to create the feelings you don’t want. If you find yourself challenged to answer these questions, consider this: You don’t ALWAYS feel anxious, do you? You’re not feeling anxious 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, are you? If not, then, somehow, some way, you know when to do it. More than likely, this is due to something you’re noticing in your environment (this external “trigger”, if you will) that tells you this is the time to do your anxiety. Your job is to identify what it is you are seeing (either externally or internally in your mind) right before you get the feelings you don’t want. THIS is the trigger picture you’re going to use with the process taught in this chapter, and in future chapters. This process of identifying your unconscious environmental triggers is very, very powerful – in fact, in large part, it’s the key to understanding what has caused you to react in unresourceful ways in the past, seemingly totally automatically.




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Do your very best to use these three questions to identify your external triggers, perhaps in each of the contexts wherein you’ve felt challenged with fear or anxiety… I guarantee it will lead to powerful results for you, now and into the future.




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6. So, How Do You

Want to Be Different? This may seem like kind of a silly question, but… Have you ever thought about how you’d rather be feeling in those formerly challenging situations – instead of anxious? If you’re like most people, you’d probably have to say “no”… Even though you’re pretty sure you know what you don’t want, you probably haven’t thought much about what you do want to be feeling instead! Yet, one thing’s for sure: Defining with clarity and specificity how you want to be feeling and behaving instead of how you used to feel and behave is an important – even crucial – step to conquering life-limiting anxiety once and for all. Have you been to see one or more psychotherapists, psychiatrists, or counselors about this problem? If so (as most of our clients have), we’re willing to bet that they’ve been all too willing to discuss “the problem”. But how many of your well-intentioned therapists have ever gotten around to asking you how you want to be different in the future? If you’re like most of the people who come to see us here at BrightLife, the answer is probably “none”. You probably spent most or all of your time discussing the details of the problem, or the deep-seated roots of the problem. Most likely, the focus of your work has almost totally been on the past – on all the things that went wrong for




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you – rather than on the future, and how you want your life to be different from now on. No wonder you’ve still got the problem – it’s all you’ve been focusing on! Now, that’s not your fault or anything… You didn’t know any better, and frankly, this is exactly what most people do when they have a big “problem” of any kind… They think about it and think about it, hoping and praying that maybe an answer will come… And they KEEP thinking about it, and lo and behold, guess what? They keep getting more of the same problem! Why? The answer is simple! It’s because they’re so very focused on the problem – instead of the solution. When we work with private clients in our offices in Southern California, we just about always get started by asking two important questions right up front – first, what specifically the problem is, and second, how he or she wants to be different in the future. Almost without exception, clients will tell us they “don’t want their anxiety anymore”, or that they “don’t want to have their panic attacks anymore”, etc. Although I certainly believe our clients don’t want to be feeling these very uncomfortable feelings anymore, I also know that answers like these are exactly why these clients still have their problem. What do I mean by that? Well, let me answer that by asking you another question.




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You and I live vastly differently lives, wouldn’t you say? Wouldn’t you say that you and I probably have a much different experience of “reality” each day? Neither one is better or worse, or good or bad, or right or wrong – they’re just different. And what shows up as “real” in my world is probably much different than the woman down the street who busies herself daily with the concerns of her particular life. Again, neither “reality” or set of life experiences is necessarily better or worse, or good or bad, or right or wrong relative to the other – they’re just different. And yet, how do our lives turn out to be so different? This is an important question, because when we understand how we each manifest our own particular reality, we’re then empowered to change it when it doesn’t suit us.

“Reality” Is Individually Created And Experienced At BrightLife, we believe our individual experience of reality is a direct result of what we spend the bulk of our time thinking about. In other words, our experience of reality is not only determined, but literally created by virtue of where we’ve placed the focus of our mind on a habitual basis, most likely over a period of years. Think about it – wouldn’t you agree that what shows up as “real” and “true” for you in your life (e.g. problems, anxiety, depression, etc.) shows up pretty much in direct proportion to the amount of time and energy you’ve spent focusing on it? If you’ve gone to all the time and expense of purchasing this book, I’m willing to bet that you’ve very probably spent a great deal of time




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and energy thinking about, worrying about, and focusing your thoughts on your anxiety problem – specifically, focusing on what you fear. And this – more than any other single factor – explains why anxiety has ballooned into such a disproportionately huge problem in your life. You may have heard the saying, “Energy flows where attention goes”, or “We become what we think about.” Each of these is simply another way of expressing an age-old observation, a conclusion that’s been familiar and recognized for years, over millennia in fact. In a nutshell, the observation is that we tend to get more of what we spend our time thinking about. Yet, what exactly is the mechanism by which our thoughts actually transmute themselves to become our reality? The answer to this question requires a brief introduction to something called quantum field theory. Quantum field theory attempts to describe the nature of reality and causality in what we each experience as the physical world. As it pertains to what we’re doing here, the question becomes, how do we create a truly debilitating anxiety problem where there was none before?

Whatever we place the focus of our mind

on a habitual basis is what we’re unwittingly asking our Unconscious Mind

to create more of in our world.




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Of course, a complete discussion of quantum field theory is beyond the scope of this book. And while we don’t claim to be experts in this area, we’ll have much more to say about it in future personal development programs, for those of you who are interested.

How We Create Something from Nothing In the meantime, however, consider for a moment that everything that exists in your life right now – no matter what it is – at one time did not exist as “real” for you at all. How did these things eventually show up in your life? How did you manage to create something from nothing? You did it through the processes of thought and/or observation. Take something so trivial as your watch for example. Did you buy your own watch? If so, what was the series of events that led to this outcome? And if not, how did you come to own this watch? Wasn’t there a time when this watch simply did not exist in your life at all? So, how is it that, out of nowhere, this watch is now a real, tangible, and material part of your life now? Chances are, you either thought about getting yourself a new watch, and then went out and bought one. Or perhaps you were out on the town, with no intention whatsoever of purchasing a watch – and then, totally unexpectedly, you observed an irresistibly attractive watch through the store window, and you simply had to have it! Maybe it’s a combination of the above. Ahh, you say triumphantly... I got this watch as a gift!




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Well, that may be. But you wouldn’t be wearing it, would you, unless you’d first observed the watch you were given, and then thought about how it would look on your wrist. After thinking about it long enough, and mentally (or actually physically) “trying it on” (more thinking, right?), you chose to make it a part of your watch “repertoire”. You see, everything that exists as real in your life right now – from your car, to your job, to your clothes, your relationship, your hairstyle, your anxiety – you name it... once started as nothing more than a thought or an observation. That includes everything. The more you think about it – the more you mentally “rehearse” or consider a particular notion or outcome – the more grounded in physical reality it becomes for you. Challenge me on this one – is there anything that you see around you that’s a regular part of your life now, that didn’t at one time start with a single thought or an observation? How about your job? How did it start? Once upon a time, you didn’t have this job, or anything like it. Isn’t that true? In fact, there was undoubtedly a time in your life (however young you may have been) when the thought of working in this particular field never would have even occurred to you. And then, somehow, the thought of doing a job like this crossed your mind, for whatever reason. You might have gone to school to study how to perform in this career, or (depending on the job) perhaps you just went out and applied for this work, and then got the gig. Or perhaps you first observed others doing this job, and then thought about what it would be like if you were doing it.




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Perhaps you knew you had to find work, and found yourself looking thought the want ads with no particular kind of job in mind, until you found (observed!) the ad that eventually led to the job you have now. You may have been doing this work for the last 5, 10 or twenty years. Now, that’s a job that’s real and true in your life now, is it not? Again, the bottom line is this: Whatever shows up as real and true in your life right now, at one point in your life – however early – simply did not exist as a part of your life... including, by the way, your anxiety! The implications for this are astounding. You see, the fact is, we literally think our human experiences into hard reality! Thus, there are some clear thinking and behavioral patterns that explain the process of creation in our world. If we understand the process with which we create our experience of the world, then guess what? We’re now empowered to choose the experiences we want instead, and to be able to create them at will.

Awesome… So How Do We Do This? Well, the first thing we need to do is decide with clarity and specificity what we want in our lives instead of what we know we don’t want anymore. To put it simply, once we’re clear on our goals (what we’ve been calling outcomes thus far), it’s simply a matter of applying the very same mental mechanics you’ve been applying all this time to create and propagate your fear, to now create your choice of empowering feelings and behaviors instead. Believe it or not, it’s the exact same mental skill.




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To get a sense for how this is going to work, let’s first try this simple exercise: Exercise #3: How to Communicate in The Language of The Unconscious Identify a Baseline Performance Level 1. Stand up, facing straight ahead, with your feet about shoulder-

width apart, and your knees slightly bent for comfort. Raise your right arm in front of you until it’s about shoulder height, and point your forefinger straight out in front of you.

2. Keeping your feet planted firmly, rotate your body and your right

arm in a clockwise direction, and keep turning your body about as far as you comfortably can, noticing how far you can go until you can turn no more. Be careful here – don’t strain yourself or anything like that. Just go as far as you comfortably can, and notice where you end up. Take a mental snapshot of whatever it is you’re pointing at. When you’ve done that, come back around again, and return to your original position.

Take a deep breath and close your eyes now.

Like any other exercise we do in this book, you may find it easier to have someone talk you through this process before you try it on your own.




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Tell Your Brain How You Want It To Perform From Now On 3. This time, in your imagination only – that is, in your mind’s eye

only – mentally raise your right arm and forefinger the way you did before. Mentally, imagine what it’s like to turn your body again in a clockwise direction as far as you can go. But this time, see, hear and feel yourself going even further this time – in fact, imagine yourself going a full 25% further than you did before!

Notice how, in your imagination, it feels easy and effortless to turn your body comfortably clockwise, a full 25% further than you did before. Feel as though it were the most natural thing in the world to be able to rotate your body and your hips this easily. When you’ve done that, take a mental snapshot in your mind’s eye of where you end up this time. In fact, take a mental snapshot of what it feels like to be in this physical position.

4. Now, imagine yourself coming back around again, all the way

until your body and your arm are pointing right straight out in front of you once again. Mentally lower your arm until it’s back down at your side once again.

Clear the Screen

Take a deep breath. Open your eyes… and then close them again. Continue the Training Process 5. Let’s do this again. Once again, in your mind’s eye only, mentally

raise your right arm, and point your forefinger until it’s pointing right straight ahead. In your imagination only, rotate your body in a clockwise direction. See, hear and feel the mental experience of rotating your body easily, effortlessly and comfortably until




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you’ve traveled a full 25% further than you did just a moment ago! Notice in your imagination that if you wanted to, you could go even further, easily and comfortably!

6. Notice where you end up in your mind’s eye (i.e. what you are

pointing at), and when you’ve taken a clear mental snapshot of what it looks and feels like to be in this position, go ahead and rotate back around again until your body and your forearm are pointed right straight ahead. When you’ve done that, go ahead and mentally lower your arm until it’s back down at your side once again.

Clear the Screen

Take a deep breath… Then open your eyes… And then close them again.

Continue the Training Process

We’ll do this just once more. 7. Again, in your mind’s eye only, go ahead and raise your right arm

to shoulder height and point your forefinger right straight ahead. In your imagination only, once again, rotate your right arm and your body in a clockwise direction. Go even further this time than you did before… In fact, imagine turning clockwise a full 360 degrees! Imagine that it feels comfortable, easy and effortless. Notice how good it feels in your hips and your body to be so flexible! Take a mental snapshot of how it feels to be in this position, and when you’re sure you’ve done that, rotate your body back to its original position, with your arm pointing straight ahead once again. When you’re there, go ahead and lower your arm back down to your side once again.




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Take a deep breath and open your eyes.

* * * * Welcome back! You may be wondering just what we accomplished by virtue of this last exercise. Well, let’s find out. With your eyes open this time, we’ll do the same exercise once again, but just like we did the first time… That is, we’ll do it for real once again. So again – with your eyes remaining fully open this time – once again, raise your right arm and point your forefinger right straight ahead. Rotate your right arm and your body in a clockwise direction once again, but this time, notice how much further you go than you did the very first time you tried it! If you’re like most people, you’ll notice that you’ve gone at least a full 25-50% further than you did the very first time you tried this! How To Direct The Power of Your Unconscious Mind How did you manage to go so much further this time? Well, the answer to that question is no less than the very secret of controlling and directing the power of your Unconscious Mind. So what really happened here?




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Well, to put it in a nutshell, you ran through the steps to effective direction of your subconscious processes. You first created a well-defined imagination of a chosen goal state (you decided what you wanted with clarity and specificity), and then mentally stepped into the experience of having that goal state (rehearsed it), as though it were real for you now. Thus, the three steps to bringing your desires into physical reality are:

♦ Decide with clarity and specificity what you want in your life.

♦ Create a vivid, sensory-rich imagination of what it would look, sound and feel like if you were living that reality right now.

♦ Step into and fully associate to the experience of the outcome

fulfilled, and experience it as though it were real for you now. Remember, it’s critical that you very strongly feel the feelings in your body right now that you know you’d be feeling if this were your actual reality, right here, right now.

In his perhaps best-known work, Resurrection, Neville states that due to what he calls the physical “principle of reversibility”, when one steps into the sensory-rich experience of the goal state fulfilled, one cannot help but set in motion the universal forces that bring that outcome to fruition. Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, prolific author and speaker in the field of personal development and fulfillment, says it another way. In his recent best seller, The Power of Intention, he says that in order to manifest your desired outcome, you must “contemplate yourself as surrounded by the conditions you wish to produce.”




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Isn’t this exactly what we did in the last exercise? You knew what it was you wanted, and then literally “stepped into” the experience of the outcome fulfilled, feeling just the way it would feel as if you were experiencing that outcome now. And just look at the results! We spent, what… five minutes on that exercise? In just a matter of a few minutes, chances are you increased your performance by at least 10-33%… That’s got to be pretty exciting when you let your mind wander into other places in your life where you could use this skill! Yet, what really explains the increase in performance level you experienced after mentally rehearsing your outcome several times? Was it really that your inherent abilities increased as a result of this mental practice? Or is it more likely that, through mental exercise, what you really did was instruct your Unconscious Mind to bring forth for you the kinds of resourceful states that would be most likely to lead to the increased performance you experienced? We believe it’s the latter. This next technique we’re going to introduce will teach you how to design your choice of feelings or behaviors in such a way that the Unconscious Mind tends to latch onto it as a mental “command” of sorts, from your Conscious Mind. When we talk about designing your choice of feelings or behaviors, we mean how you’d rather be feeling and behaving in the face of the old, fearful situations that used to trigger panic, phobic reactions, the physical symptoms, and so forth. Once you decide with clarity and specificity how you want to be thinking, feeling and behaving instead, you’ll learn how to use the




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power of your conscious choice to direct your subconscious to create these far more desirable feelings and behaviors for you in the future. Isn’t this better than just hoping things will change one day? You bet it is!




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7. The Secret of

Creating The “Ultimate You” Have you ever set a goal, and really wanted it to happen, but for whatever reason, it did not? If you’re like most people, you’d probably have to say “yes”. On the other hand, maybe you know of someone who, for some reason, seems to consistently reach his or her goals seemingly easily and effortlessly. What explains this difference in the ability of some people to reach their goals, while others continue to hope and dream without realizing any of what they really want? The fact is, some people know how to create their future. Chances are, however, if you were to ask them just how they do this, they’d be unable to tell you in any detail. This is because, for most people who do things exceptionally well, the secret of their skill resides almost totally at the unconscious level. This is called unconscious competence. Yet, we’ve found that people who are consistently able to reach their desired goals are performing specific behaviors with regularity and predictability. They tend to think in productive ways and enjoy positive attitudes about themselves, their lives, and their role in the world. In other words, certain patterns of thinking and behaving make themselves apparent when reviewing just how people are able to manifest their desired goals.




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A complete presentation on goal setting is probably not necessary for our purposes here. However, because it’s so important that you learn to effectively communicate to your Unconscious Mind your directions for how you want to be thinking, feeling and behaving in the future, we’re going to spend a few minutes talking about how some people are able to consistently create the results they desire in life. The Importance of Designing A “Well-Formed” Outcome A well-formed outcome (goal) is one that is stated in such a way that it is particularly attractive to the Unconscious Mind. It is particularly appealing to the Unconscious Mind because it is communicated in a language that the Unconscious Minds speaks and understands – and that language is not English (or any other spoken language). You see, while verbal forms of language are not entirely insignificant, they just don’t carry much weight for the Unconscious Mind. This explains why you can’t just “tell” yourself you don’t want your anxiety anymore, and hope to change your reactions that way. You’ve probably tried that on more than one occasion with little or no success. On the other hand, you CAN tell yourself what you want, but you can’t use spoken language to do it. You have to use the language of the brain in order for your brain to understand what you’re communicating to it. What is this language of the brain? It’s vivid, sensory-rich imagination (what would it look and sound like if you had the goal?) coupled with intense feeling (what would it feel like if you actually had




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the goal?). When you create a goal for yourself using your imagination and your feelings (instead of using words alone), you are creating a well-formed outcome. How to Install Your Choice of Behavioral Responsiveness One of the ways you can direct your Unconscious Mind to carry out your choice of more resourceful behaviors in the formerly challenging situations is to practice the following mental exercise. (You may choose to do this exercise with your eyes closed.) Exercise #4: The Theater of Your Mind

1. Take the Director’s chair in the Theater of Your Mind. As the Director, you will be directing the actors, the environment, and the scene itself. You are totally in charge of the scene, and the actors in it, and it is up to you to be sure the actors under your direction communicate your intended message to the audience.

2. Directing your eyes to your upper right, imagine a stage upon

which this scene will unfold.

3. Choose a formerly challenging context in which you know you’d like to be responding far more resourcefully. Decide how specifically you want to be responding differently (e.g. with confidence, certainty, clarity, control, etc.). For example, when you’re feeling the way you want to be feeling instead, how will you be free to behave differently?




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4. Continuing to direct your gaze at the stage to your upper right, create a vivid, sensory-rich imagination of a scene in which an actor playing you is performing magnificently in the face of the old fear. Direct this actor playing you so that he/she performs in the way you know you ideally want to be performing the next time you encounter whatever it is you used to fear.

What should her posture be like? What is she wearing? What are her gestures like? How can you tell that the actor playing you has her role down pat?

5. As you continue to direct your gaze to your upper right, watch

the scene unfold. Direct the actors until the scene looks like the actor playing you has complete competence in the new behavior. Notice the responses of the other actors in the scene. Notice how their behavior supports the competence of the actor playing you.

6. Listen to the sound track and edit the sound track until it

sounds like the actor playing you has complete competence in the new behavior. Notice the responses of the other actors in the scene.

7. Mix the film and sound track and edit until you feel satisfied

that the actor playing you has complete competence in the new behavior.

8. Only when you feel totally confident that the actor playing you is

extremely proficient in the new behavior, float up as a “mind” from your observer position (as the Director). Float up onto the stage itself, and INTO the body of the actor playing you. You have now fully associated into the scene itself, having replaced




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the actor with your own conscious awareness. You are now that actor.

9. Step fully into the experience now and run through it as if you

are performing the behavior. Be fully in the experience – see what you’re seeing, hear what you’re hearing, and most importantly, feel how amazingly good it feels to be behaving in this new way easily, effortlessly and comfortably.

Experience what it’s like to actually BE the person who is totally confident in her ability to behave magnificently in the face of the old challenges. Notice how great it feels to be performing this behavior with excellence! To help pump up your state, ask yourself the following questions:

♦ What’s really great about this?

♦ And what else is really great about this wonderful new ability that I hadn’t thought about until now?

♦ In how many wonderful ways will this new ability

benefit me – and those I love – from this time forth?

♦ How does it feel to think about that – and to know I have become completely competent in this amazing skill now?

Rehearse the scene until:

♦ It looks like you are performing the behavior naturally, or




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♦ Something tells you that you are performing the behavior naturally, or

♦ You feel like you are performing the behavior naturally.

Spend at least ten minutes doing this exercise, at least once or twice per day. Every time you run through this exercise, you are literally giving your Unconscious Mind a new command for how you want it to respond the next time you find yourself in the old challenging context. Want proof that this technique works? Well, consider that this last exercise is simply an example of what you had been doing all along in the past – probably totally unconsciously – to very effectively “program in” your previously conditioned anxiety responses. The anxiety or phobic responses you had seemed to happen totally automatically, didn’t they? But the fact is, there was a time when you weren’t responding that way. So then, how then did you learn to be so good at the old anxiety response? Well, chances are, once anxious feelings began to crop up in your life, it was such an uncomfortable experience, that you started

Remember: The key to making this exercise work really well for you is to create a particularly vivid, detailed and compelling internal experience of what it will be like when you are actually experiencing your ultimately outcome.




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spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about “What if it happens again?” Yet, how exactly do we worry about what might happen in the future? We do it by creating a vivid, detailed, sensory-rich experience of what could go wrong, and then we step into the experience of that outcome fulfilled, experiencing that outcome (that “goal state”) as though it were happening right now. Thus, in practicing these new mental conditioning techniques, we’re simply running through essentially the very same mental mechanics you used to use in the past – totally automatically and unconsciously – to program in the old, fearful responses. But this time, we’re doing this behavior in a positive, directed and fully purposeful way, designed to get you the states and behaviors you want in life, rather than more of what you don’t want. Let’s introduce you to yet another, potentially even more powerful conditioning process. This one will be a lot of fun!




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8. How to Use The Power of

Success Conditioning The power of success conditioning cannot be understated. The fact that behavioral conditioning happens on its own, quite automatically, is not in question. After all, behavioral conditioning is just a form of learning. And we can’t not learn. We’re learning every moment of every day. We learn with every experience we ever have, and most of these learnings, whether monumental or relatively trivial, happen totally unconsciously. And that’s just the way behavioral conditioning happens when it takes place unintentionally, as it usually does. Every time you find yourself automatically stopping at a red light, running to the phone when it rings, perking up when you hear your baby cry – or responding with uncontrollable fear quickly and automatically whenever you see, hear or feel whatever the old trigger(s) used to be – every time these things happen, you prove the power of automatic behavioral conditioning. After all, when did you consciously choose to connect intense fear with standing in line at the grocery store or driving down the street? Behavioral conditioning happens whenever you pair an intense emotional state (e.g. fear) with a unique environmental stimulus (a particular sight, a sound, taste or smell, or perhaps the touch of someone or some thing, or any combination of those). Scientists call this kind of pairing between environmental stimuli and behavioral responses classical conditioning. Again, this pairing happens all the




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time for human beings, and virtually always outside our conscious awareness. So, how did you learn to pair an environmental stimulus (like the sound of the telephone ringing) and your response (the act of running to, and picking up the phone)? How did you learn to pair a stimulus (like a spinning red light in your rear-view mirror) with your seemingly instantaneous response (the immediate sensation of anxiety that most people experience when they suddenly realize they’re being pulled over)? Let’s answer that by exploring the way a phobic response is typically created in the first place. As an example, a phobia to dogs may be installed when, as a youngster, a child is chased down the street by three barking dogs. A phobia of driving on the freeway may be the result of having a panic attack while driving on the freeway. A phobia of vomit or throwing up (yup, it’s called emetophobia, and it’s a lot more common than you may think!) may result from, as a young child, seeing another person wretching with pain, apparently in terrible anguish. The experience of this may well be an intensely fearful, traumatic thing for a young child; the child’s subconscious may very reasonably associate a great deal of fear with the sight, sound or imagination of this happening again. From that point on, the mere thought of seeing someone vomit, or of getting sick oneself may be enough to throw a person into a panic. And not by conscious choice, mind you. The person may have no conscious clue as to why they’re behaving the way they are today, and for this reason, they may feel as though they are mentally ill, or that they have a mental disorder, or something like that. But this is only because this person really doesn’t know how the human brain




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works, and the fact that they are responding this way really means their brain works fine – and that’s why they’ve got this problem. Hardly a reason to assume there’s something wrong! Thus, it’s evident that behavioral conditioning is an incredibly powerful form of learning. If we can learn to harness that power, and to purposefully control and direct the very same power – that is, our ability to “program”, or condition in exceedingly powerful responses – in whatever context we choose – it can be an exciting prospect indeed! For example, no longer could fear ever be a deterrent to your choice to step out and do whatever it takes to create the life of your dreams! You could simply “anchor” yourself to the kinds of resourceful states you want to experience – at the right times and the right places – so that it would feel easy to do whatever it is you think you need to do in order to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve. Yet, this is a skill you’re already good at! For example, when you were learning to drive, you had to learn to press on the gas pedal when you saw a green light, and you had to learn to step on the brake pedal when you saw a yellow or red light. You probably make this connection quickly and automatically now, without having to spend any time at all evaluating what “green light” and “red light” means first. The Theater of Your Mind exercise we did in the last chapter is a really great example of how we can take purposeful advantage of your brain’s inherent ability to automatically do this process. It is a way of choosing how you want your brain to respond, and then effectively communicating that choice to your brain, by saying, “See this? Do this!” The more you tell your brain this is what you want, the more




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likely you are to eventually experience it quite automatically when you want it. How to Condition Your Mind For Success This next technique you’re about to learn, called the Swish Pattern, is known as one of the most powerful processes in all of NLP. This technique is an exceedingly potent mental conditioning tool that you can use to tell your brain how you want it to respond more resourcefully the next time you find yourself in one of your previously anxiety-provoking situations. Exercise #5: The Swish Pattern THE STEPS (see also diagram on page 97): 1. Identify The Negative “Trigger” Image

Take a few moments to consider the kind of situation or context in which you’ve found yourself feeling or behaving unresourcefully in the past, and would now prefer to be responding differently.

Once again, you may find it easier to have someone talk you through this process before you try it on your own.




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Take all the time you need to notice what about that situation has caused you to react unresourcefully. In other words, how do you know this is the time to react with fear or anxiety? What’s present in this context that’s not present when you’re not feeling anxious? If you need help deciding what has been the unconscious trigger for you in the past, close your eyes and review a past experience wherein you’ve had this problem. Run through this experience again as though it were a movie in your mind’s eye, and be careful to notice at what specific point in the movie your fear seems to jump noticeably in intensity. What’s happening right then? What are you noticing? Are you noticing something in the picture that all of a sudden sends you into a panicky feeling? Chances are, it’s almost certainly something you see in your memory. Once you’re certain of what it is you’re seeing when you’ve been responding fearfully, carefully take a mental snapshot of whatever it is you’re looking at. We’ll be coming back to that picture (what we’ll call the “trigger picture”) shortly.

2. Break Your Pattern (Change Your State)

Now, set that unpleasant image aside temporarily. Now, just for fun, try reciting the alphabet aloud… but backward this time! Take a few moments to do that…




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And you don’t have to do it all… Just enough to cause you to change your focus from whatever you were focusing on a few moments ago, to something completely different.

3. Create A Resourceful Self-Image

Now take a minute or two to create in front of you an image of yourself, the way you would look if you had already solved this issue. This is a future "you", a "you" who is just a few steps ahead of you, a "you" who has already learned how to overcome the challenges that have troubled you. This future "you" has solved the problem totally and completely, with methods that may be yet to occur to you. And this "you" knows you will succeed because she already has. This is a "you" who has been through everything you've been through and a bit more. She thinks of you with love, kindness and respect and knows you will succeed! See this exciting "Ultimate You" image right in front of you, a large, bright and colorful image of yourself having many tools and resources to handle the fearful situation that used to be a problem for you. This is a "you" who has many additional choices, many different ways to handle whatever you were seeing in the trigger picture. And most important, notice that you feel powerfully drawn to her. Just by looking at her, you have a strong feeling of wanting to become that person. If you don't feel powerfully drawn to become more like the "Ultimate You" image just yet, take whatever time you need to make that image more real, more believable, more of whom you know you want to be. You can do this by enriching the visual qualities of the image. For example, you can make the image




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larger, brighter, more colorful and moving. Another way to create a compelling "Ultimate You" is by asking yourself the following question: If this "Ultimate You" image were powerfully compelling, what would it look like? This "what if" question will immediately allow your brain to create a more powerfully attractive "Ultimate You" imagination. Take a look at this person… How does she stand? What is her posture like? How does she gesture? What kind of facial expressions does she have? How can you tell by looking at this person, that she wouldn’t have that old problem in a million years?? Take all the time you need to be sure you’ve created a super-powerful example of the person you know you’re committed to becoming.

4. Pump It Up Even More!

Now – only when you’re totally convinced that you’ve created an extremely powerful image of yourself the way you would look if you knew you couldn’t have that old problem again, no matter how hard you tried… Only then… and with your eyes remaining closed, continuing to focus on this powerful “Ultimate You” image… I want you to consider a few things.




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• First, I want you to think about the personal qualities of someone – anyone – who would be extremely resourceful in the face of your old fearful triggers.

• And you, as a person out there – What are the qualities you

see in her?

• Next, as you consider this exciting “Ultimate You” image that you’ve created right there in front of you, I want you to consider all of the things this person must be good at in order to be totally free of this problem now.

• What effect does this have on other people?

• What has she learned about herself, the knowing of which

allows her to remain totally in control of her state, her behaviors and her responses at virtually all times, no matter how seemingly challenging the situation?

• Perhaps most importantly, what is she believing about herself

as a person now? And what’s important to her about that?

Take all the time you need to fully consider the answers to these questions before moving on.

5. Shrink The Resourceful Self-Image into A Tiny Sparkling Dot

Now take all of the power, the spirit and the essence of this ultimate “Wonderful You” image, and shrink it down into a tiny sparkling dot floating in space right in front of you.




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6. Place The Resourceful Self-Image Dot into The Negative Cue Image

Now place that tiny sparkling dot right into the center of the negative trigger picture you discovered in Step 1.

7. Exchange Images (“Swish” Them)

I want you to think of the negative trigger image as though it were a stained glass window, and the tiny sparkling dot as though it were a pebble. You know how a slingshot works, don’t you? I want you to imagine placing this tiny sparkling dot containing the “Ultimate You” image into a slingshot, and holding the slingshot right out in front of you. Now imagine pulling it back (that is, away from you), further and further out in front of you, until you can just feel the tension in that slingshot grow so tremendously great, that finally, you can’t hold it back any longer! Finally, release the slingshot, and imagine this tiny sparkling dot containing the “Ultimate You” coming screaming up at you, growing and expanding, bigger and brighter, until it crashes though the negative cue image, destroying it utterly in the process – just like a pebble or a rock would do to a stained glass window. In place of the old image, see the big, bright, colorful, exciting image of the “Ultimate You”, and feel the victory as you do so! (See the diagram on page 97 for a graphic representation of this process.)




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8. See A Blank Screen

Open your eyes… And close them again (“clear the screen”). 9. Repeat The Swish Pattern

The key to doing a successful Swish Pattern is speed and repetition. Thus, we're going to do these steps a bit more quickly now. Again, place that tiny sparkling dot in the center of the unpleasant trigger image. Once again, imagine pulling back on that slingshot, away from you… pulling back further and further away from you, until the tension in that slingshot becomes so great, you just have to LET IT GO… And it comes screaming up toward you, breaking through that unpleasant image, thoroughly destroying it in the process! And in its place is the big, bright, colorful, “Ultimate You”! And most importantly, feel the victory as you experience this amazingly compelling image of the “Ultimate You” wash over you, fully capturing your mental vision! Open your eyes... And close them again (“clear the screen”). Repeat this step 10 times, going faster and faster each time, being sure to open and then close your eyes again between each Swish. Repeat this entire process five more times, doing it faster each time, being sure to open your eyes and see the blank screen between each one.




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Then repeat the process three more times, being sure to open your eyes and see the blank screen between each run-through. And finally, run the process two more times, as fast as you possibly can, being sure to open your eyes and see the blank screen between each one. When you do it really fast, you may not consciously be aware of the images as they exchange places.

10. Test Your Work

Now that you’ve run this pattern several times, it's important to test your work. So take a moment now and notice what happens when you try to get that original, unpleasant trigger image back in mind. Just go ahead and... really try... in vain... to get those old feelings back... You may just find that you cannot.

See Figure 2 on the next page for a graphic representation of this amazing process.

If perchance you are able to recover any of those old, disempowering feelings, run the Swish Pattern another 10 to 20 times. REMEMBER: The keys to a successful Swish process are SPEED and REPETITION.




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Figure 2. How to “program” your choice of behavioral responsiveness in the future




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Let’s Debrief, Shall We? Now, suppose that after you’ve completed the exercise to the best of your ability, you’re not necessarily feeling so fearful any more as you consider the previously anxiety-provoking trigger picture – but maybe you’re not necessarily feeling all that confident, comfortable or in control when you think about it either… Hey, it could happen! This probably means that you could do well to invest a bit more time and energy into developing an even more compelling “Ultimate You” image… An image that, just by looking at it, makes you want to become that person so much! If it’s not that juicy yet, juice it up some more! It will be well worth the additional time and effort. On the other hand, let’s assume you have successfully conditioned your mind to automatically create more resourceful responses in the face of the old trigger(s). What you’ve done is to set yourself up to experience what you’ll probably only discover with time to be a series of powerful, positive processional effects in terms of your developing abilities, behaviors, attitudes and responses over time. What was that? Let me explain. You see, I haven’t necessarily said anything about it yet, but the real beauty of this particular exercise is its uniquely powerful generative nature. That is to say, by showing your brain something other than a specific preferred behavior in response to whatever the old challenging




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situation was, and instead, a more generally resourceful way of being – you’ve created a kind of mental “program” for the larger, more encompassing collective nature of whom you want to become as a person over time. Necessarily included in this “Grand Vision” of whom you want to become are powerful, unconsciously implanted personal traits that must be there in order for you, this person, to be this way. Included in the package are a whole set of empowering beliefs, values, and everything else that make a person who she “truly” is on the inside. Thus, by utilizing this powerfully generative exercise, not only are you telling your brain how you want to be different in the future in the formerly troublesome context(s), but what kind of generally powerful person you want to become in the process! This will surely impact virtually every area of your life in wonderfully surprising – and almost certainly very positive – ways. Quite an exciting prospect, isn’t it? Feel free to stack the deck in your favor by practicing this amazing exercise in as many different contexts, and with as many different challenging life situations as you’d like. Remember – the more you take the opportunity to give specific instructions to your brain for how you want it to respond resourcefully in the future, the more likely it is that you’ll find it easy and effortless to respond that way seemingly automatically in the future.




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9. Bringing It All Together

A Refreshing Perspective —

New Choices for Your Future I have no idea how many of you have been diagnosed by your well-meaning doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, or counselor with an anxiety “disorder”, or some other form of mental illness, sickness or disease. Unfortunately, this kind of label suggests that something of a physiological or genetic nature must be responsible for the anxiety problems you had been experiencing until now. Yet, please keep in mind what we discussed in Chapter 3 – that chronic fear and anxiety are responses that, though far from desirable, can be considered completely understandable – even reasonable – given your history. The fact is, you’ve had this problem all along just because your brain is doing what it’s supposed to be doing! I know that, for many of you, this is a notion that is likely to take some getting used to. Yet, based on what we’ve covered here in this book, you now know that fear experienced in what you consciously know to be relatively benign circumstances is really just a learned response. Your Unconscious Mind created this habit of feeling and responding for a very useful and positive purpose – that is, to protect you from whatever it (originally) concluded was potentially a dangerous kind of situation – whether that situation is, in actuality,




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dangerous or not. That is a very positive purpose, wouldn’t you agree? Once upon a time, something happened that was more or less traumatic for you. No doubt, things really seemed dangerous (or, at least, potentially dangerous) in those early circumstances! You can understand, then, how it’s possible to consider that your Unconscious Mind was just doing its job when it linked up this kind of situation with intense fear – it doesn’t want you to have to go through that kind of terrible pain all over again! Thank goodness there’s a part of us around that cares enough about our health and well being that it’s willing to do nearly anything to protect it for us! I don’t know about you, but I’m absolutely filled with gratitude when I think about that! For most of our clients here at BrightLife, the notion that there’s never really been anything “wrong” with them is a tremendously freeing realization! Finally, you can let go of the idea that you were sick, or mentally ill, or crazy, or whatever else you may have been believing about yourself all this time. After all (and we’ll say it again!), it’s only because your brain works fine that you ever had this problem in the first place! Our Invitation to You Our highest choice for you is that you choose to continue growing, learning and expanding as a human being.




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At BrightLife, we believe that those of us who have suffered with debilitating levels of anxiety have actually been offered the possibility of a tremendous gift. Like most gifts, this comes in the form of potential – potential in terms of what’s possible for you now. Difficult though they unquestionably are in the moment, life’s most challenging periods tend also to be our most transformative in terms of our own personal evolution. Haven’t you found that to be the case as you’ve come through this life so far? I’ve often said to my clients at BrightLife that, to the degree we’ve been compelled to overcome tremendous challenges in life, we’ve also been forced to grow and become ever more flexible with time. In fact, consider that without the benefit of life’s inevitable challenges, we’d never grow at all – we’d remain mentally, physically and emotionally immature, never having had the impetus to mature beyond our childish egos and sense of self. As uncomfortable as it may be in the moment, this process of continual challenge and resulting evolution provides us the unique opportunity to forge the tools with which we may later experience correspondingly intense states of joy, fulfillment and passion as we experience what it’s like to live our lives as fully actualized human beings.

It’s in the process of learning to overcome such monumental challenges as chronic anxiety that we grow to meet our truest potential as human beings.




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What Does The Future Hold? This book is actually just the first in what will be a series of powerful, enlightening and uniquely effective Accelerated Personal Change publications we’ll be creating over the next several years. It’s been great fun to write and revise this product (many times, I assure you!) along the way. I look forward to the day when perhaps we meet on the street, and I get to hear of your success in utilizing the tools I’ve taught in this book, and perhaps by then, other books and forms of media as well. We hear it said many times as a cliché in business, but I feel it in my heart when I say to you, I consider my success your success, and nothing more. It’s been my honor, privilege and pleasure to share my time and my experience with you as your guide throughout this book. Good luck, and remember one thing as you move forward from this book: You are the Captain of your ship on this Sea of Life. Choose wisely your path and therefore your destiny. Let not inevitable unfortunate or unforeseen circumstances along the way dissuade you from that destiny. Keep a single-minded focus on your choices for the future, and most importantly, do your level best to have a blast while you’re doing it! If you’d like, please write to me with your feedback at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you!


mailto:[email protected]



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About The Author Robert Mantell, Ph.D., C.M.C., C.M.Ht. is the Founder and Executive Director of BrightLife Phobia and Anxiety Release Center in Southern California, and its parent company, BrightLife Coaching, Consulting & Training Services, Inc. Dr. Mantell is the Developer of Imagination Creation™ Accelerated Personal Change Technologies. A graduate of U.C.L.A., with a Bachelor of Science in psychobiology, Robert later attended the Master's program in Educational Psychology and Counseling at California State University, Northridge, where he specialized in Marriage, Family and Child Counseling (MFCC). He now holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Hypnotherapy, and is a member in good standing of the American Counseling Association, The American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress, The Counseling Association for Humanistic Education And Development, and the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors. Certified as a Master Coach and Master Hypnotherapist by the International Institute for Humanistic Neuro-Linguistic Psychology, Dr. Mantell is also a Master Practitioner and Certified Trainer of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He is a nationally recognized peak performance coach, third-degree black belt martial arts champion, educator, sports coach and seminar leader. He has trained with some of the world’s best-known experts on the psychology of peak performance. A refreshingly upbeat and engaging personality, Dr. Mantell has appeared on local, national and even international radio and television (including on the Discovery Health Channel) as a Peak




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Performance Personal Empowerment specialist. His BrightLife Center for Wellness Coaching, Consulting & Training and BrightLife Phobia and Anxiety Release Center have assisted hundreds of clients in reclaiming joy, passion and personal and professional fulfillment since 1993. Dr. Robert Mantell can be contacted at BrightLife Phobia and Anxiety Release Center by calling toll-free (866) LIFE-NOW, by visiting our website at: http://www.fearintopower.com, by email at [email protected], or by U.S. Mail at: The BrightLife Center 2010 W. Avenue K, Suite 644 Lancaster, CA 93536





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Additional Support And Professional Training

For Individuals And Families… BrightLife Phobia and Anxiety Release Center is located in the high desert of Southern California, in the Antelope Valley, about 75 miles northeast of metropolitan Los Angeles. Our expertly trained staff is available to develop with you a completely personalized program designed to assist you to eradicate your particular set of anxiety and/or behavioral challenges easily, comfortably, and more important, permanently. BrightLife provides direct in-house as well as remote (telephone-based) coaching services to clients all over the United States and the world.

For Professionals And Groups… The BrightLife staff is available to consult with individual mental health and other human development professionals about issues germane to their practice. In conjunction with our parent company, BrightLife Coaching, Consulting & Training Services, Inc., we also provide direct on-site seminars, trainings and workshops, and provide consultation in state-of-the-art forms of brief therapy for mental health clinics, hospitals and other wellness organizations worldwide. The BrightLife Center takes special pride in providing direct on-site psychological trauma relief services in the event of natural or man-made disasters.




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For more information, please feel free to contact us at any time toll-free at (866) LIFE-NOW. Thank you!


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