Quotes from Richard Bandler

If you say to yourself 'It's difficult to get up in the morning', 'It's hard to cease smoking', then you are already using hypnotic suggestions on yourself

The trick is: you have to feel good for no reason.

Optimism, that is healthy in its application, will inevitably result in better physical and emotional health.

The worst drug of all is seriousness versus humor and pleasure!

Since most problems are created by our imagination and are thus imaginary, all we need are imaginary solutions.

You know what ? Certain people think they will feel good if certain things happen The trick is : you have to feel good for no reason

If you can't enjoy what you have, you can't enjoy more of it.

The greatest personal limitation is to be found not in the things you want to do and can't, but in the things you've never considered doing.

The best thing about the future is that it's in front of you. The best thing about the past is that it lies behind.

Every task has a mental component to it. A lot of what we call talent is when people stumble upon these strategies easily.

Talent isn't just God-given. It's partially God-given; the other part is accessed by human beings insofar as they're able to teach each other.

Everyone reading this book will have heard the expression sleep on it as advice for tackling a problem. There's truth to this saying because your unconscious has the ability to help you see things from a different perspective. Your unconscious is also where most of your mental habits function. Whenever we learn to do something with our minds, it becomes automated, and we become unconsciously skilled at it.

These unconscious skills can be skills that are detrimental to our well-being, including depressing ourselves, hesitating, stressing ourselves out, or feeling terrified and hopeless. Conversely, they can also be skills of motivating ourselves, becoming relaxed, or being more confident and hopeful.

The qualities of the images, sounds, and feelings are known as submodalities.

Whenever you get directions from someone, or you give directions to someone, you rely on your own ability to go inside and mentally represent through a movie how to get to wherever it is you need to go. When people create anything, they must create it first in their minds by imagining what it is going to look like.

When people say they're frustrated, it's actually a verb. When people say "I have doubts," they've turned the verb into a noun and made it so that it becomes an event or a thing. When people say, "I have frustration," they don't actually have a bucket of frustration. They're in the process of being frustrated. That is an activity. When you turn it back into an activity, you can find out so much more about it.

Thinking should always be an active process where you think in a way that gets you the results you want.

What this means is that our bodies are not disconnected from our brains. They are an extended part of the brain. The important question to ask people when they say "I feel frustrated," is, "Where? Where does the feeling start? Where do you feel it first in your body? Where does it move to?" Feelings can't stay still. They are always moving somewhere, in some direction.

One of these directions will feel right when they think about their feeling. From this, people typically get the idea that it is moving ever so minimally. The fact that it's moving means that you can move it faster, you can move it slower, you can move it forward, and you can move it backward. Our feelings are not outside of our control. In fact, this is the very thing most of us need to gain control of because, when you do, you can alter your feelings.

The qualities of your thoughts, these submodalities, determine how your thoughts affect you. When you make big movies of things you are associated with, generally, the feeling will be more intense. When you make the movie smaller and move it, disassociated, into the distance, the feeling will be smaller. We can also learn how to use our control over submodalities to manifest the kinds of feelings we need when we need them. I like to call this running your own brain.

ONE OF THE MAIN focuses in my work has been discovering ways to help people achieve what I call "personal freedom". Personal freedom means having the freedom to be able to control your thoughts and to manifest the kinds of feelings you want in your life.

Think of a time when you felt really good. Now, step inside that time and see through your eyes, hear through your ears, and feel the really good feeling all the way through your body. Make the images bigger, brighter, more colorful, and you'll probably find yourself feeling even better. Make the sounds louder and crisper, and if there are no sounds, add sounds. Start to intensify the good feeling.

Next, find out where in your body the feeling starts and where it goes. Discover the direction it spins inside your body, and spin it faster and faster and, again, notice your feelings intensify. There lies the control you have over your brain to create powerful feelings inside of you.

When you practice using your brain in this way, you will find yourself feeling really good a lot more often. Achieving personal freedom is all about developing new mental habits and skills and getting used to mentally running your brain the way you choose to run it.