The scramble pattern

You've got enough leverage; now scramble the disempowering feelings until they no longer come up. After reading this, take the following steps.

1) See the situation in your mind that was bothering you so much. Picture it as a movie. Don't feel upset about it; just watch it one time, seeing everything that happened.

2) Take that same experience and turn it into a cartoon. Sit up in your chair with a big, silly grin on your face, breathing fully, and run the image backward as fast as you can so that you can see everything happening in reverse. If somebody said something, watch them swallow their words! Let the movie run backward in very fast motion, then run it forward again in even faster motion. Now change the colors of the images so that everybody's faces are rainbow-colored. If there's someone in particular who upsets you, cause their ears to grow very large like Mickey Mouse's, and their nose to grow like Pinocchio's. Do this at least a dozen times, back and forth, sideways, scratching the record of your imagery with tremendous speed and humor. Create some music in your mind as you do this. Maybe it's your favorite song, or maybe some type of cartoon music. Link these weird sounds to the old image that used to upset you. This will definitely change the sensations. Key to this whole process is the speed at which you play back the imagery and the level of humor and exaggeration you can link to it.

3) Now think about the situation that was bothering you, and notice how you feel now. If done effectively, you'll easily have broken the pattern so many times you'll find it difficult or impossible to get back into those negative feelings. This can be done with things that have been bothering you for years. It's often a much more effective approach than trying to analyze the why's and wherefore's of a situation, which doesn't change the sensations you link to the situation. As simplistic as it seems, effectively scrambling a situation will work in most cases, even where trauma has been involved. Why does it work? Because all of our feelings are based on the images we focus on in our minds and the sounds and sensations we link to those specific images. As we change the images and sounds, we change how we feel. Conditioning this again and again makes it difficult to get back into the

old pattern.

One way of breaking the pattern is to Just stop doing something, go " cold turkey." If you stop running a pattern again and again, the neural pathway will gradually dissipate. Once a neural connection is made, the brain will always have a pathway, but unless the path is used, it becomes overgrown. Like anything else, if you don't use it, you begin to lose it. Now that you've broken the pattern that has been holding you back, you now have the open space to...

NAC MASTER STEP 4

Create a New, Empowering Alternative.

This fourth step is absolutely critical to establishing long-term change. In fact, the failure by most people to find an alternative way of getting out of pain and into the feelings of pleasure is the major reason most people's attempts at change are only temporary. Many people get to the point where they have to change, where change is a must, because they link so much pain to their old pattern and they link pleasure to the idea of changing. They even interrupt their patterns. But after that, they have nothing to replace the old pattern!

Remember, all of your neurological patterns are designed to help you get out of pain and into pleasure. These patterns are well established, and while they may have negative side effects, if you've learned that a habit can get you out of pain, you'll go back to it again and again since you've found no better way to get the feelings you desire.

If you've been following each one of these steps, you've gotten clear about what you wanted and what was preventing you from getting it, you've gotten leverage on yourself, you've interrupted the pattern, and now you need to fill the gap with a new set of choices that will give you the same pleasurable feelings without the negative side effects. Once you quit smoking, you must come up with a new way, or a lot of new ways, to replace whatever benefits you used to get from the old behavior; the benefits of the old feelings or behaviors must be preserved by the new behaviors or feelings while eliminating the side effects. What can you replace worry with? How about massive action on a plan you have for meeting your goals? Depression can be replaced with a focus on how to help others who are in need. If you're not sure how to get yourself out of pain and to feel pleasure as a replacement to your smoking, drinking, worrying, or other undesirable emotion or behavior, you can simply find the answers by modeling people who have turned things around for themselves. Find people who have made the lasting changes; I guarantee you'll find that they had an alternative to replace the old behavior.

A good example of this is my friend Fran Tarkenton. When Fran and I first started doing my Personal Power television shows together, he had a habit that truly surprised me. He was addicted to chewing tobacco. I'd be in a meeting with Fran, and suddenly he would turn his head and spit. This did not match my picture of this powerful and elegant man. But he'd been doing it for over twenty years. As Fran would tell me later, chewing tobacco was one of his greatest pleasures in life. It was like his best friend. If he was on the road and felt alone, he could chew tobacco, and he wouldn't feel alone anymore. In fact, he told a group of his friends one time that if he had to choose between sex and chewing tobacco, he'd chew tobacco! How's that for a false neuro-association? He'd wired a pathway out of pain and into pleasure via the highway of chewing tobacco. After years of continual use and reinforcement, he had created a neural trunk line from tobacco to pleasure; thus, this was his favorite route of change.

What got him to change his behavior? Finally, he got enough leverage on himself. One day, with a little help from " a friend, " he began to see that chewing tobacco was massively incongruent with the quality of man he'd become. It represented a lack of control over his life, and since being in charge of his life is one of Fran's highest values, that was a standard he could not break. It was too painful to be in that position. He started to direct his mind's focus to the possibility of mouth cancer. He pictured it vividly until pretty soon he was driven away from the idea of using tobacco. The taste of it started to disgust him. These images helped him to get leverage on himself and interrupt the pattern he'd previously linked to using tobacco for pleasure.

The next most important key was that Fran found new ways to get pleasure that were even more effective than tobacco. He poured himself into his business like never before, and started producing results that have made his company, KnowledgeWare, one of the most successful computer software companies on Wall Street. Even more powerfully, now that he needed a new companion, he decided to attract a real one, and found the woman of his dreams and learned to get the kinds of emotions and feelings from his relationship with her that he could never get from any other source.

Often, if we just break our old patterns enough, our brains will automatically search for a replacement pattern to give us the feelings we desire. This is why people who finally break the pattern of smoking sometimes gain weight: their brains look for a new way to create the same kinds of pleasurable feelings, and now they eat mass quantities of food to get them. The key, then, is for us to consciously choose the new behaviors or feelings with which we're going to replace the old ones.