Self-Improvement - There Is A Secret Equation That Guarantees Your Success

For many people, the road to individual transformation and self-improvement is a long and winding highway filled with difficult barriers. Pharmaceutical companies in particular have capitalized on and created gigantic fortunes based on the elusive search for the "Magic Pill" that will fix everything. As it turns out, there is a secret formula for success, and it begins in the unconscious mind.

One of the laws of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is that "there is a positive intention behind all behaviors." And based on that presupposition, when it comes to successfully eliminating negative behaviors, there is an equation that we should keep in mind. I'll let you in on the secret formula in a minute. But first, I have a riddle for you to solve.

Riddle: A minister made his son drink lye, which burned out the child's vocal chords. What was the positive intent behind this action?

If you are like almost all of the clients who have visited my office since 1978, you'll indignantly say something like: "There isn't any positive intent behind that behavior." But you would be 100% mistaken. To answer this riddle, you must separate the behavior from the positive goal of the deed.

The preacher's son was cursing. And the minister believes that if his son curses, his soul will be condemned to Hell. So the answer is that the minister was burning out his child's vocal cords so that he couldn't curse. By doing so, he was saving his child's soul from being fated to suffer in Hell.
The secret equation for personal change works as follows:

We should always respect the positive intention that motivates every behavior. If we have an urge to make use of a behavior that we do not like, we can easily get rid of the urge to use that behavior. What we need to do is to find a different behavior to substitute in its place. To be successful, the new conduct must be as available and efficient at accomplishing the same secondary gain, but be more consciously tolerable to you. We call this a REFRAME.

When clients come into my practice, one of the first things that I do is to take a methodical case history. In this instance, let's pretend that they come to me and ask me to help them lose weight. Experience tells us that the two main reasons that people eat too much food are: (1) to tranquilize themselves; (2) because eating can be a conditioned response. Case in point, if a person eats while they are talk on the phone, they will develop a conditioned response, and thereafter, every time they talk on the phone they will get cravings for food.

However, the above answer only takes into consideration the possible secondary gain received from the behavior of eating. What if they also have another behavior that is concerned in the equation? For example: What if being fat is also a behavior for this person? I can hear your mind grinding right now as you think, "Being tubby isn't a behavior, what are you talking about?"

Sorry but you could be entirely off the mark. Here is a classic textbook example that will demonstrate the fact that being tubby can be a behavior. It can be a behavior because it can supply secondary gains.

Example: A woman falls in love. Her partner breaks up with her, and her heart is broken. Her unconscious mind wants to shield her emotionally and keep her from having her heart broken again. So it motivates her to get tubby to keep her out of relationships. That way she will not get her heart broken again.

The point is that everyone is totally different. And sometimes there are subliminal elements at work causing compulsive behaviors. These are elements that are different for each person.

Here is another example: A woman comes into my practice complaining of an uncontrollable compulsion to eat too much at mealtime. During the case history, upon questioning, the woman explains to me how she has never been able to satisfy her father.

We did an age regression, and one of her early memories was of eating a meal with the family. And her dad was insisting in a very loud voice that she eat everything on her plate, even though she was bursting at the seams. So she finished the food on her plate because of fear, and her dad praised her for eating everything. It was one of the only times in her life that she could recall her father telling her that he was happy with her.

Shoot forward to present day. Her father has been deceased for years, but the subconscious program he installed is still at work. She still has a powerful compulsion to eat all of the food on her plate, even if she is feeling stuffed to the gills, because by cleaning the plate, in her unconscious she is getting dad's approval, and eliminating her own fear!

So if you find it difficult to make personal changes, you should remember that there is a positive intent causing all behaviors. And the formula for success is to alternate another behavior that will achieve the same secondary gain, but in a way that is more consciously satisfactory to you, as an individual. The most efficient way to get your unconscious mind to take the responsibility for making this kind of change for you is through an NLP 6-Step Reframe.