Lose Weight, Quit Smoking With A Secret Equation That Guarantees Your Success

For many folks, the boulevard to personal transformation and self-improvement is a long and winding road filled with complicated barriers. Drug companies in particular have capitalized on and created gigantic fortunes because of 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 subconscious mind.

One of the presuppositions of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is that "there is a positive intention behind all behaviors." And based on that law, when it comes to getting rid of negative behaviors, there is an equation that we must always 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 preacher made his son drink lye, which burned out his vocal chords. What was the positive intention behind his action?

If you are like almost all of the clients who have come into my office since 1978, you'll angrily say something like: "There isn't any positive intent behind that behavior." But you would be completely wrong. To answer this riddle, first you have to separate the behavior from the positive goal of the behavior.

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 predestined to suffer in Hell.

The secret equation for successful change works as follows:

We must always respect the positive intention that motivates every behavior. If we have a compulsion to exercise a behavior that we do not like, we can easily get rid of the impulse to use that behavior. What we must do is to find another behavior to substitute in its place. To be successful, the new conduct must be as accessible and effective at accomplishing the same outcome, but be more consciously tolerable. We call this a REFRAME.

When clients come into my practice, the first thing I do is to take a meticulous case history. In this example, let's imagine that they come to me and ask me to help them lose weight. Experience tells us that the two main reasons that anyone eats too much food are: (1) to tranquilize themselves; (2) because eating can be a behavior triggered by other behaviors that it has been associated with (a conditioned response). For instance, if a person eats while they are watching TV, they will develop a conditioned response, and thereafter, every time they sit down to watch TV, they'll get cravings and an urge to eat.

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

Sorry but you could be 100% off the mark. Here is one common textbook example that will clearly demonstrate the fact that being tubby can be a behavior. It can be a behavior because it can supply secondary gains.

Example: A woman is deeply in love. Her boyfriend breaks up with her, and her heart is broken. Her subconscious mind wants to shield her emotionally and prevent her from having her heart broken again. So it motivates her to get tubby to keep her out of relationships. By doing that she will not get her heart broken again.

The point is that everyone is totally different. And sometimes there are unconscious elements at work that cause uncontrollable behaviors. These are elements that are different for each person.

Here is another case in point: A woman comes into my practice complaining of an unmanageable urge to eat way too much at dinnertime. During the case history, upon questioning, the woman explains to me how she has never been able to satisfy her father.

During an age regression, we learned that one of her early memories was of eating a meal with her family. And dad was insisting in an authoritive 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 father commended her for eating everything. It was one of the only times in her life that she could recall her dad telling her that she had made him happy.

Jump forward to the present. Dad has been deceased for years, but the subconscious program he installed is still operational. She still has a powerful compulsion to finish everything on her plate, even if she is feeling bloated, because by cleaning the plate, in her unconscious she is getting her dad's approval, and eliminating her fear!

So if you are finding it difficult to make personal changes, keep in mind that there is a positive intention that causes all behaviors. And the formula for successful change is to alternate another behavior that will achieve the same secondary gain, but in a way that is more consciously acceptable to you, as an individual. The most effective way to get your subconscious mind to accept the responsibility for making this kind of change for you is through an NLP Six-Step Reframe.