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The whole premise that knowing intellectually why you developed a destructive behaviour will suddenly stop you from doing it in future and set you free is just not the case. Whilst it is true that formative experiences early in life shape us, just remembering them will not automatically change the way we think and act in the future. If it was, all we would ever need to do is think back to the first time we did something dysfunctional, realise why we did it and it would magically just stop. The main reason for dysfunctional behaviours is because the unconscious mind is not logical, but purposeful – all the logical arguments make no difference if the purpose is survival. No amount of logic about how safe an aeroplane is will stop a phobic feeling frightened. As a child, I was bitten by a dog and for years I had a phobia of all dogs, no matter what size they were or how friendly they seemed. My mind produced massive fear because the purpose was protection, even if it was a tiny, friendly dog. I once worked with an entrepreneur who found that whenever he started to get successful, he would find a way to sabotage what he was doing, no matter how hard he tried not to. It turned out that as a child he had said to his mother that when he grew up, he wanted to be a very successful businessman and his mother replied, You don’t want that, son, those kinds of people have heart attacks. That casual, throwaway phrase had stuck, and shaped his future. His unconscious mind was not thinking logically, but with its prime purpose of survival, it did everything it could to stop him becoming successful, with the intention of keeping him alive. That’s why the best way to cure such a problem is to go to the structure of a person’s thinking – the sequence of pictures and sounds in the mind that create feelings and are the building blocks of beliefs. 
I Can Almost Hear You Sigh
The field of psychology has been obsessed with labelling people’s problems, so that a drug can be prescribed, and this has been going on for more than a hundred years. It’s not just that this model is good for business, this obsession with looking at how people are broken and labelling them is part of the culture that emerged from the work of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Some years ago, I met a Freudian analysist and very early on in the conversation, she asked me why I hated myself. I replied that I wasn’t aware that I did and indeed how did she know that I hated myself? She replied, Because we all hate ourselves. I suggested that we find a phobic and see which one of us could cure them. She said that the point of Freudian analysis is not to ‘cure’ people, but to help them understand why they are phobic. I explained why I thought that was unhelpful by a simple metaphor – if I take my car to the garage and ask them to fix it and they say we can’t do that, but we can tell you why your car is broken, it’s not going to be much use. After more than a hundred years, the field of psychology is shifting away from constantly looking at how everyone might be broken and now creating models of functionality to move towards. For me, personally, behavioural modelling is where the most exciting developments are taking place. It’s a process of codifying the patterns of thinking and behaviour of somebody who is dysfunctional, so we can change them, or the process of codifying the patterns of thinking and behaviour of somebody who is a model of excellence, so these patterns can be subsequently to be taught to anyone. In other words, if somebody has a dysfunctional set of strategies, by understanding the structure of them, it becomes easy to replace them with new functional ones. The difference between this and traditional analytical understanding is that this is about understanding how you do something and how in future you can take control of it and change it, whereas analytical therapies often concentrate on understanding why you do something, but not necessarily providing you with a solution as to how to change it. Don't Look Down
Let’s look at how you do something. For example, how do people make themselves feel compelled to drink alcohol? They might picture a glass with ice cubes clinking and the sound of alcohol pouring into the glass, and then imagine the first sip, the taste, the feeling and the sequence of sounds and pictures in their minds. An analyst will want to know why somebody drinks too much. Recognising the steps that lead you to a certain behaviour and interrupting that pattern and putting another pattern in place will give you the tools to modify whatever behaviour you would like to change. Also, if somebody is exceptional at something, such as therapy, sales, maths, athletics, memorizing information, art, fighting, comedy, presenting, etc, by learning their strategies, it’s possible to codify them and teach them to others in a fraction of the time it would normally take to master that talent. As you practise them, your life will change immeasurably for the better and you will be liberated from what holds you back. It is not a series of ‘mind tricks.’ As you read these words, which are written in a special hypnotic language that create a specific sequence in your thoughts, and you practise the audio techniques, you will train your brain to make yourself even better than you had ever dreamed possible before. In athletics, the difference between a medal and an also ran is 1% – this system will give you far more than the 1%. You hold in your hands the difference between a mediocre life and a truly happy and successful one. Last year, a friend of mine who is also a therapist contacted me too.