Get Leverage: Associate Massive Pain to Not Changing Now and Massive Pleasure to the Experience of Changing Now!

Most people know that they really want to change, yet they just can't get themselves to do it! But change is usually not a question of capability; it's almost always a question of motivation. If someone put a gun to our heads and said, " You'd better get out of that depressed state and start feeling happy now, " I bet any one of us could find a way to change our emotional state for the moment under these circumstances.

But the problem, as I've said, is that change is often a should and not a must. Or it's a must, but it's a must for " someday." The only way we're going to make a change now is if we create a sense of urgency that's so intense that we're compelled to follow through. If we want to create change, then, we have to realize that it's not a question of whether we can do it, but rather whether we will do it. Whether we will or not comes down to our level of motivation, which in turn comes down to those twin powers that shape our lives, pain and pleasure.

Every change you've accomplished in your life is the result of changing your neuroassociations about what means pain and what means pleasure. So often, though, we have a hard time getting ourselves to change because we have mixed emotions about changing.

On the one hand, we want to change. We don't want to get cancer from smoking. We don't want to lose our personal relationships because our temper is out of control. We don't want our kids to feel unloved because we're harsh with them. We don't want to feel depressed for the rest of our lives because of something that happened in our past. We don't want to feel like victims anymore.

On the other hand, we fear change. We wonder, " What if I stop smoking cigarettes, but I die of cancer anyway and I've given up the pleasure that cigarettes used to give me? " Or " What if I let go of this negative feeling about the rape, and it happens to me again? " We have mixed emotions where we link both pain and pleasure to changing, which causes our brain to be uncertain as to what to do, and keeps us from utilizing our full resources to make the kinds of changes that can happen literally in a moment if every ounce of our being were committed to them.

How do we turn this around? One of the things that turns virtually anyone around is reaching a pain threshold. This means experiencing pain at such an intense level that you know you must change now— a point at which your brain says, " I've had it; I can't spend another day, not another moment, living or feeling this way." Have you ever experienced this in a personal relationship, for example? You hung in there, it was painful and you really weren't happy, but you stayed in it anyway. Why? You rationalized that it would get better, without doing anything to make it better. If you were in so much pain, why didn't you leave? Even though you were unhappy, your fear of the unknown was a more powerful motivating force. " Yeah, I'm unhappy now, " you may have thought, " but what if I leave this person and then I never find anyone? At least I know how to deal with the pain I have now."

This kind of thinking is what keeps people from making changes. Finally, though, one day the pain of being in that negative relationship became greater than your fear of the unknown, so you hit a threshold and made the change. Maybe you've done the same thing with your body, when you finally decided you couldn't spend another day without doing something about your excess weight. Maybe the experience that finally pushed you over the edge was your failure to be able to squeeze into your favourite pair of jeans, or the sensations of your " thunder thighs" rubbing against each other as you waddled up a set of stairs! Or just the sight of the bulbous folds of excess flesh hanging from the side of your body!

THE ALPO DIET

Recently, a woman attending a seminar told me about her fail-safe strategy that she had developed for shredding unwanted pounds. She and a friend had committed over and over again to losing weight, but failed to keep their promise each and every time. Finally, they both reached the point where losing weight was a must. Based on what I taught them, they needed some leverage to push themselves over the edge. They needed to make not keeping their promise more painful than anything they could imagine. They decided to commit to each other and a group of friends that if they welshed on their promise this time, they would each have to eat a whole can of Alpo dog food! So, to stave off any hint of a craving, these two enterprising women told everyone and kept their cans in plain view at all times as a constant reminder. She told me that when they started to feel hunger pangs, they'd pick up the can and read the label. With ingredients boasting " horsemeat chunks, " they found no difficulty in sticking to their commitment. They achieved their goal without a hitch!

A lever is a device that we utilize in order to lift or move a tremendous burden we could not otherwise manage. Leverage is absolutely crucial in creating any change, in freeing yourself from behavioural burdens like smoking, drinking, overeating, cursing, or emotional patterns like feeling depressed, worried, fearful, or inadequate—you name it. Change requires more than just establishing the knowledge that you should change. It's knowing at the deepest emotional and most basic sensory level that you must change. If you've tried many times to make a change and you've failed to do so, this simply means that the level of pain for failing to change is not intense enough. You have not reached threshold, the ultimate leverage.

When I was doing private therapy, it was imperative that I find the point of greatest leverage in order to help people make changes in one session that years of therapy had failed to accomplish. I started every session by saying that I couldn't work with anyone who wasn't committed to changing now. One of the reasons was that I charged $3, 000 for a session, and I didn't want them to invest their money unless they were absolutely going to get the result they were committed to today, in this one session. Many times these people had flown in from some other part of the country. The thought of my sending them home without handling their problem motivated my clients to spend at least half an hour convincing me that they were indeed committed and would do anything to change now. With this kind of leverage, creating change became a matter of course. To paraphrase the philosopher Nietzsche, he who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how. I've found that 20 percent of any change is knowing how; but 80 percent is knowing why. If we gather a set of strong enough reasons to change, we can change in a minute something we've failed to change for years.

" Give me a lever long enough. And a prop strong enough. I can single-handedly move the world." —ARCHIMEDES

The greatest leverage you can create for yourself is the pain that comes from inside, not outside. Knowing that you have failed to live up to your own standards for your life is the ultimate pain. If we fail to act in accordance with our own view of ourselves, if our behaviours are inconsistent with our standards—with the identity we hold for ourselves—then the chasm between our actions and who we are drives us to make a change.

The leverage created by pointing out an inconsistency between someone's standards and their behaviour can be incredibly effective in causing them to change. It's not just pressure placed on them by the outside world, but pressure built up by themselves from within. One of the strongest forces in the human personality is the drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity.

The reason so many of us seem to be walking contradictions is simply that we never recognize inconsistencies for what they are. If you want to help somebody, you won't access this kind of leverage by making them wrong or pointing out that they're inconsistent, but rather by asking them questions that cause them to realize for themselves their inconsistencies. This is a much more powerful lever than attacking someone. If you try to exert only external pressure, they'll push against it, but internal pressure is next to impossible to resist.

This kind of pressure is a valuable tool to use on yourself. Complacency breeds stagnation; unless you're extremely dissatisfied with your current pattern of behavior, you won't be motivated to make the changes that are necessary. Let's face it; the human animal responds to pressure. So why would someone not change when they feel and know that they should? They associate more pain to making the change than to not changing. To change someone, including ourselves, we must simply reverse this so that not changing is incredibly painful (painful beyond our threshold of tolerance), and the idea of changing is attractive and pleasurable!

To get true leverage, ask yourself pain-inducing questions: " What will this cost me if I don't change? " Most of us are too busy estimating the price of change. But what's the price of not changing? " Ultimately what will I miss out on in my life if I don't make the shift? What is it already costing me mentally, emotionally, physically, financially, spiritually? " Make the pain of not changing feel so real to you, so intense, so immediate that you can't put off taking that action any longer. If that doesn't create enough leverage, then focus on how it affects your loved ones, your children, and other people you care about. Many of us will do more for others than we'll do for ourselves. So picture in graphic detail how much your failure to change will negatively impact the people who are most important to you.

The second step is to use pleasure-associating questions to help you link those positive sensations to the idea of changing. " If I do change, how will that make me feel about myself? What kind of momentum could I create if I change this in my life? What other things could I accomplish if I really made this change today? How will my family and friends feel? How much happier will I be now? " The key is to get lots of reasons, or better yet, strong enough reasons, why the change should take place immediately, not someday in the future. If you are not driven to make the change now, then you don't really have leverage.

Now that you've linked pain in your nervous system to not changing, and pleasure to making the change, you're driven to create a change, you can proceed to the third master step of NAC....

NAC MASTER STEP 3

Interrupt the Limiting Pattern.

In order for us to consistently feel a certain way, we develop characteristic patterns of thinking, focusing on the same images and ideas, asking ourselves the same questions. The challenge is that most people want a new result, but continue to act in the same way. I once heard it said that the definition of insanity is " doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result." Please don't misunderstand me. There's nothing wrong with you; you don't need to be " fixed." (And I suggest you avoid anyone who uses these metaphors to describe you!) The resources you need to change anything in your life are within you right now. It's just that you have a set of neuro-associations that habitually cause you to not fully utilize your capability. What you must do is reorganize your neural pathways so that they consistently guide you in the direction of your desires rather than your frustrations and fears.

To get new results in our lives, we can't just know what we want and get leverage on ourselves. We can be highly motivated to change, but if we keep doing the same things, running the same inappropriate patterns, our lives are not going to change, and all we'll experience is more and more pain and frustration.

Have you ever seen a fly that's trapped in a room? It immediately searches for the light, so it heads for the window, smacking itself against the glass again and again, sometimes for hours. Have you ever noticed people do this? They're highly motivated to change: they have intense leverage. But all the motivation in the world won't help if you try to get outside through a closed window. You've got to change your approach. The fly stands a chance only if it backs off and looks around for another exit.

If you and I run the same old pattern, we're going to get the same old results. Record albums create the same sounds consistently because of their pattern, the continuous groove in which the sound is encoded. But what would happen if one day I picked up your record, took a needle, and scratched across it back and forth dozens of times? If I do this enough, there's a point when the pattern is so deeply interrupted that the record will never play the same way again. Likewise, just interrupting someone's limiting pattern of behavior or emotion can completely change their life because sometimes it also creates leverage, and with these two steps alone, you can change virtually anything. The additional steps of NAC are just a way to make sure the changes last and that you develop new choices that are enjoyable and empowering.

I created a fun pattern interrupt recently at one of my three-day Unlimited Power™ seminars in Chicago. One man claimed that he really wanted to kick his chocolate habit, yet it was clear to me that he received a great deal of pleasure from his identity as a " chocolate addict." In fact, he was even wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed " I want the world, but I'll settle for chocolate." This provided strong evidence that this man, although he may have desired to stop eating chocolate, also had a great deal of " secondary gain" to maintain this habit. Sometimes people want to create a change because a behavior or emotional pattern creates pain for them. But they may also derive benefit from the very thing they're trying to change. If a person becomes injured, for example, and then suddenly everyone waits on them hand and foot, giving them a great deal of attention, they may find that their injuries don't heal quite as quickly. While they want to be over the pain, unconsciously they want more of the pleasure of knowing that people care. You can do everything right, but if secondary gain is too strong, you will find yourself going back to the old ways. Someone with secondary gain has mixed emotions about changing. They say they want to change, but often they subconsciously believe that maintaining the old behavior or emotional pattern gives them something they couldn't get any other way. Thus they're not willing to give up feeling depressed, even though it's painful. Why? Because being depressed gets them attention, for example. They don't want to feel depressed, but they desperately want attention. In the end, the need for attention wins out, and they stay depressed. The need for attention is only one form of secondary gain. In order to resolve this, we have to give the person enough leverage that they must change, but also we must show them a new way to get their needs met.

While on some level, I'm sure this man knew he needed to kick chocolate, I'm also fairly certain that he knew he could use this opportunity to get some serious attention. Any time there is secondary gain

involved, you have to step up the leverage, so I decided that a massive pattern interrupt would create the necessary leverage. " Sir! " I exclaimed. " You're telling me that you're ready to give up chocolate. That's great. There's just one thing L want you to do before we eliminate that old pattern forever." He asked, " What's that? " I said, " To get your body in the right condition, for the next nine days you must eat nothing but chocolate. Only chocolate can pass your lips." People in the audience started giggling[45], and the man looked at me uncertainly. " Can I drink anything? " he asked. " Yes, " I said, " you can

drink water. Four glasses a day—but that's all. Everything else must be chocolate." He shrugged his shoulders and grinned. " Okay, Tony, if that's what you want. I can do this without changing. I hate to make a fool out of you! " I smiled and continued with the seminar. You should have seen what happened next! As if by magic, dozens of chocolate bars and candies materialized out of people's pockets, purses and briefcases and were passed down to him. By the lunch break, he had been inundated with every last morsel of chocolate in that auditorium: Baby Ruths, Butterfingers, Snickers, Milky Ways, M & M's, Almond Joys, Fanny Farmer fudge. He caught my eye in the lobby outside. " Thanks, Tony; this is great! " he exclaimed as he unwrapped and popped Hershey's Kisses into his

mouth, determined to show that he could " beat me." But he failed to realize that he wasn't competing with me—he was competing with himself! I was merely enlisting his body as an ally in getting leverage and breaking his pattern.

Do you know how thirsty sugar makes you? By the end of the day this guy's throat was absolutely raw—and he had definitely lost his passion for chocolate as people continued to shovel Krackel bars into his pockets and press his palms with Thin Mints. By the second day he'd definitely lost his sense of humor, but he wasn't yet ready to cry uncle. " Have some more chocolate! " I insisted. He unwrapped a Three Musketeers bar and glared at me.

By the third morning, as he trailed into the auditorium, he looked like a man who had spent all night praying to the porcelain goddess. " How was breakfast? " I asked as people laughed. " Not so good, " he

admitted weakly. " Have some more! " I said. Feebly he accepted another piece of chocolate from someone sitting behind him, but he failed to open it or even look at it. " What's the matter? " I asked him. " Fed up? " He nodded. " Come on, you're the chocolate champion! " I goaded. " Have some more! Isn't chocolate the greatest? How about some Mounds bars? And some Peanut M & M's? And a whole box of Rocky Road fudge? Can't you just taste it? Doesn't it make your mouth water? "

The longer I talked, the greener he got. " Have some more! " I said, and finally he exploded: " YOU CANT MAKE ME! " The audience laughed uproariously[46] as the man realized what he'd said. " All right, then. Throw the candy away and sit down."

Later, I came back to him, and assisted him in selecting empowering alternatives to the chocolate, laying down some new pathways to pleasure that were more empowering and didn't require him to consume something he knew wasn't good for him. Then I really got to work with him, conditioning the new associations and helping him replace his old addiction with a smorgasbord of healthful behaviors: power breathing, exercise, water-rich foods, proper food combining, and so on. Had I created leverage on this guy? You bet! If you can give someone pain in their body, that's undeniable leverage. They'll do anything to get out of pain and into pleasure. Simultaneously, I broke his pattern. Everybody else was trying to get him to stop eating chocolate. I demanded that he eat it! That was something he never expected, and it massively interrupted his pattern. He rapidly linked such painful sensations to the idea of eating chocolate that a new neural pathway was laid down overnight, and his old " Hershey Highway" was bombed beyond recognition. When I used to conduct private therapies, people would come to see me, sit down in my office and begin to tell me what their problem was. They'd say, " My problem is..." and then they'd burst into tears, out of control. As soon as this happened, I would stand up and shout, " EXCUSE ME! " This would jolt them, and then I'd follow up with, " We haven't started yet! " Usually they responded, " Oh, I'm so sorry." And they'd immediately change their emotional states and regain control. It was hysterical to watch! These people who felt they had no control over their lives would immediately prove that they already knew exactly how to change how they felt!

One of the best ways to interrupt someone's pattern is to do things they don't expect, things that are radically different from what they've experienced before. Think of some of the ways you can interrupt your own patterns. Take a moment to think up some of the most enjoyable and disruptive ways you can interrupt a pattern of being frustrated, worried, or overwhelmed.

Next time you start to feel depressed, jump up, look at the sky, and yell in your most idiotic tone of voice, " H-A-L-L-E-L-U-J-A-H! My feet don't stink today! " A stupid, silly move like that will definitely shift your attention, change your state, and it will definitely change the states of everyone around you as they begin to realize that you're no longer depressed—just crazy!

If you overeat on a regular basis and want to stop, I'll give you a technique that will definitely work, if you're willing to commit to it. The next time you find yourself in a restaurant overeating, jump up in the middle of the room, point at your own chair and scream at the top of your lungs, " PIG! " I guarantee that if you do this three or four times in a public place, you won't overeat anymore! You'll link too much pain to this behavior! Just remember: the more outrageous [47]your approach to breaking a pattern, the more effective it will be. One of the key distinctions to interrupting a pattern is that you must do it in the moment the pattern is recurring. Pattern interrupts happen to us every day. When you say, " I just lost my train of thought, " you're indicating that something or someone interrupted your pattern of concentration. Have you ever been deeply involved in a conversation with a friend, had someone interrupt you for a moment, then come back wondering, " Where were we? " Of course you have, and it's a classic example of a pattern interrupt.

Just remember, if we want to create change and we've learned in the past to get pleasure by taking a circuitous route that includes a series of negative consequences, we need to break that old pattern. We need to scramble it beyond recognition, find a new pattern (that's the next step), and condition it again and again until it becomes our consistent approach.