Quotes from Richard Bandler

My policy is, why wait? If you're going to look back and laugh, you might as well start laughing.

Laughter produces endomorphins that are an important part of changing your mind. The more you laugh at what you're afraid of, the more chemicals go into your body. Even if it's artificial laughter, it doesn't matter. If you can stop now and look at the same picture in your mind that scared you and not be afraid, then you're ready for the next step. So, get up from your chair and go out and test it and test it and test it and, bit by bit, it will simply disappear.

Once they have a choice, people always make the best choice. The trouble is that people don't think they have one.

Over the years, I've eliminated fears, phobias, and anxieties of many kinds. The exercises that we're laying out for you here show you different ways to deal with fear and anxiety. Now, if you go through each of these and you do it this way and do it that way and do it a third way, you'll be able to find the best and quickest way to get rid of your own fears.

In general communication theory there is a basic axiom that a signal only has meaning in terms of the frame or context in which it appears. The sound of a squeaky shoe on a busy sidewalk has little meaning; the same sound outside your window when you are alone in bed means something else altogether.

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.

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

Why be your real self when you can be something really worthwhile?

Our biggest limit is not in what we want and cannot do; it is in what we have never considered that we can do.

If at any point you discover yourself hesitating, or being incongruent, or putting off until tomorrow something you could try now, or just needing some new choices, or being bored, glance over your right shoulder and there will be two madmen there, sitting on stools, insulting you.

Reframing is also the pivotal element in the creative process: it is the ability to put a commonplace event in a new frame that is useful or enjoyable.

In my experience, the biggest challenge people face is learning to get out of their own way. When you can see just how easy change can be, you can begin to take control over your life and make all the changes you want—but you need to take the action.

We have been trained to believe that change isn't easy and requires a lot of effort and a lot of time. I've always found this to be simply not true.

Being able to play these memories forward with circus music and backward with silly music allows the feelings to become separated from the images and the memories will no longer haunt you. The purpose of memories is to learn from them or to enjoy them or to use them as guides for your behavior, and it doesn't help to relive trauma. Over the years, I've helped many, many people whose lives had been crippled by traumatic experiences to get away from the memories.

I know that I'm fond of saying this repeatedly, but the best thing about the past is that it's over and when it's not over something is amiss in your mind. It's not the original event or perpetrator that's making you remember—it's you, inside your own mind, holding on to terrible memories. None of us are exempt from this.

Whenever people have trouble letting go of good things or bad things, it's because they are associated to the memory. It doesn't matter what it is, it's just like being there. If you're holding on to bad memories, it's now time to look at them and shrink them down.

Nothing wears off, because as long as you think differently, you will feel differently.

Another thing to do is to freeze frame the memory. I know that sounds crazy at first, but the best thing to do then is to jump to the end, freeze-frame it and literally grab a whiteness knob in your mind and turn it very quickly so that it goes blank-out white, phhhhhp. Very quickly, so the whiteness literally replaces the memory so you can't see it.

Look at the last image and then run it backward to the beginning so that people walk backward, so that the sounds are like playing a tape recorder backwards. In fact, if you can, spin your feelings in the reverse direction.

I did not look for "what went wrong" or the "whys." I did not look for cures. I looked at what worked, no matter how. If a few good therapists "fixed" anybody, I looked at what they actually did. When people got over problems on their own, I looked at what had happened. The result is what is now called Neuro-Linguistic Programming—that is, a series of lessons that teach what others have learned that works.

Next, go back to the first bad image. Not the life-size one but the little one and push it off into the distance and suddenly pull up the new picture in its place and then make it life-size. Look at how you want to be, and you end up replacing your fears with your desires.

This will instruct your neurology which direction to go in. There is a tendency for some people to look at the past over and over again. Even in therapy, people going through it over and over again instruct the neurology that this is what they want. Until you start to look ahead with desire, it's very hard to get away from the past. The more you look at the bad things, the more you relive the bad things, the more familiar it gets.

The techniques I'm describing to you aren't techniques that you just do once, but things that you run over and over and over in your mind till they become familiar, to move away from pain and move toward hope. The more you move away from pain and white out your pain and see yourself in your pain—and the more you look at yourself doing the things you want to do—the more you'll begin to change your direction.

If you've been afraid most of your life, you may not have good examples of what "happy" is. In that case, you can build it in. That's what I do. You have to give people a really strong feeling of being relaxed, a really strong feeling of feeling good as a guide for their behavior. You do this so that, in the future when they wake up, they start asking, How much fun can I have today? How much freedom can I find? How much more can I do than I've done before?