Turning Bad Things Into Powerful Good Things

What I'm working on these days is how to take bad things and turn them into powerful good things.
Because I get.
I have a therapeutic practice, okay?
And it's because I'm hooked on talking to women and I'm really lazy and I only do things I get paid for, okay?
So what better line of work for a guy like me than to have women pay me to listen to them, discover their innermost secrets and make them feel wonderful?
Okay?
It's a good job.
But people come to me and they have desires and behaviors that are not acting in their best interest.
There's this thing we have.
All of us are capable of going in and out of trance.
We do it all the time, okay?
That's why I work as a hypnotist.
And the easiest thing in the world for me to do is to teach people how to go into trance.
Because all I have to do is teach them how to recognize how they've been going into trance all their life.
And then say, now do it again and listen carefully as I explain something, okay?
That's it.
Okay?
150 bucks an hour, all day, every day.
So there's this thing.
People go into trance all the time.
They do it outside their conscious awareness.
They do it repeatedly.
Now, there are good trances, like when you daydream about something wonderful.
And you emerge from this daydream feeling relaxed, refreshed, feeling great new ideas about possibilities in your life.
There's this thing called pathological trance.
A pathological trance is a belief, a behavior, a mindset, an attitude that acts in conjunctions with other things like this to limit your choices, okay?
Now let me give you a really good example.
Okay?
There's this thing called a compulsion.
And a compulsion is defined as an irresistible urge to perform an unnatural act.
Every time I talk about this, sheep get into conversation.
I don't know what it is, okay?
Okay.
Choices of language.
I didn't spell that correctly.
Just assume this says irresistible, okay?
An irresistible urge to perform an unnatural act.
Okay?
So if we were to look at this, many people think that compulsions are bad.
People come to me all the time.
They say, how dare you work with compulsions?
These are bad things.
Bad, bad, bad, bad.
Okay?
People say that a lot when I'm talking, okay?
What we have here is a failure to understand things clearly.
You look for pejoratives.
Pejoratives are negative connotations that are applied to words which, if you accepted that concept as true, would tell you that a word.
A word exists.
It refers to something that's real as you use it in a description, it brings it to life.
Well, you could start doing bad things and that would be a bad thing.
Look at this one right here.
Unnatural act.
What does unnatural mean?
Well, in the popular parlance, unnatural means deviant.
Okay, It's a bad thing.
It's an unnatural act.
What unnatural actually means is it is not something that you would naturally do.
It is not part of the patterns in your life, the patterns that you typically use as a substitute for thought.
There are a lot of patterns we use in our life to avoid thinking.
Belief systems are patterns we use to avoid thinking.
Dogma is something we use to avoid thinking.
So if we looked at this and said, an irresistible urge to perform an unnatural act, we could do a very rational thing and simply redefine for everyone in the room what unnatural means.
But since we're all learning how to be hypnotists and we're all already great guys, and we don't do negative things, what if you just cross that part off?
Now you say compulsion.
An irresistible urge to perform an act.
Ooh, that sounds pretty good, doesn't it?
That could be used as part of a propulsion system that could move you irresistibly into a highly desirable future.
When we're building our pictures, we might want to look and say, where have we had a compulsion in our life?
Where have we been compelled to do something?
Where do we keep that memory?
And what would happen if in that very same spot, we, we were to just blank out the previous content, keep the power, and put in a new picture?
Ooh, yeah.
Then you could make that picture bigger.
You could move it right into your immediate future and you could turn that fucker up.
Right, sounds good.
Let's look at another one.
Another example of sloppy, sloppy language.
Ooh, ooh, ooh.
This is one of my all time favorites, constraint.
A constraint, well, means many things, but one possible meaning is a repression of one's own feelings, behaviors or actions.
Okay.
I used to do a lot of work with engineers.
I used to be an engineer, spent 18 years in the software industry.
This is after I stopped shooting people and before I started healing people.
Okay.
And one of the things you do as an engineer is you're paid to solve problems.
People pose problems to you, and then you go ahead and you find a series of solutions and then you pick your ideal solution.
Well, as you do so, one of the first questions you ask yourself are, what are the constraints?
If you're working on a product design, for example, you want to know what is all the desired functionality?
What are the things it can't do?
Like in the software world, what are the things that it must not do in order to keep the overall environment running?
You know, Microsoft environment so it only crashes 3 times a day instead of 12?
Or constraints can be environmental factors like you could define.
You could design the best software product ever, but if it would cost $3,000 a copy, you're not going to sell all that much.
But if you sell it at $39.
95, you're going to sell just a bazillion of these things.
Okay?
Constraints are rules and boundaries that you place around the area within which you solve your problem.
Okay, well, gosh.
Constraints have another meaning as well, though.
A constraint is a repression of one's own feelings, behaviors and actions.
So if you were to look at how do I go about solving the problem of my life?
How do I go about designing new behaviors, new belief systems, new attitudes, and new actions so that my life gets better than I ever imagined in my wildest imaginings?
Everyone starts out and they build a box, okay?
And within this box is where we're going to devise our solutions.
The boundary of the box is the constraint.
Well, what is a constraint?
A constraint is that area in which you have a repression of your own feelings, behaviors and actions.
Okay?
Listen to yourself, talk to yourself.
Because if you start thinking about constraints, not only do you say, for example, that, you know, I'm inside a box, but it's attractive because it's my box.
You know, you also say that there's all this area outside the box.
There are a million, a billion potential solutions outside the box.
What keeps you from moving outside the box?
Constraints.
And what is a constraint?
It's a repression of your own feelings, behaviors and actions.
We were talking earlier today about obstacles and how obstacles are perceived.
Obstacles are constructs.
In our mind, there are very, very few natural obstacles.
I'll give you an example of a natural obstacle.
I used to be a top ranked shooter.
I could go anywhere in the world, pick up my tool, compete, and come out very, very well.
Now, in the interim, I've had two accidents, one of which damaged my left eye, one of which damaged my right eye.
Ooh, bad thing.
It's a physical constraint.
There's absolutely nothing I can do about that.
So I don't compete in that particular level anymore.
Now they go out shooting, I go talk to their wives.
Right?
Okay.
However, there are no other constraints in the rest of my life.
I can do anything I want.
I can think anything I Want.
I can believe anything I want.
I don't accept the idea of constraints.
When I find something that's an obstacle, the first thing I do is I think, speed bump.
Okay?
An obstacle is this little blip in the road that lets me know that, whoa, something just happened there.
Maybe I ought to slow down, maybe I ought to go around next time.
Maybe I'm driving down the wrong fucking street.
But it's no longer this huge thing looming in my mind because I have redefined it.
And as I start using new terms, as I use new words, I build new realities.
And by describing it to myself, I bring it to life.
Does this make sense?
Say yes.
Yes.
I like this.
Okay, let me give you one more example.
Okay?
People also get down on me because I like to talk about, well, we won't do dominance.
We'll do obsessions.
Okay, I'll make you do dominance.
Nothing wrong with dominance.
2.
Dominance.
Dominance is really simple.
The actual definition of dominance is to exert the supreme or determining influence.
It does not mean to control.
It does not mean to hook her up to a leash and drag her around the room.
Instead, it means you are the most powerful influence in someone's life.
Now, does that sound like a negative thing?
Well, maybe not.
It depends on what you're doing.
All of these things are value free, okay?
Words don't have anywhere near the power that most people think, even though they control everyone's reality.
How can this be?
Well, Lenny Bruce was right.
Lenny Bruce made a very nice living off of talking about things that you're not supposed to talk about, okay?
Lenny Bruce used to be able to stand up in front of an audience and say, fuck.
And people would applaud wildly and pay him for it.
You know, I think I've got a good job.
Geez.
But the thing is, words are value free.
It's the connotation and the notion of reality that you bring to them that determine whether they're helpful or they're harmful.
Okay?
But let's do obsessions.
Are the pejorative connotations, Are they harmful?
Is that sort of the point?
Yeah.
Pejorative means negative.
And negative in this sense means it hurts somebody.
Okay?
I am a real big believer on good things, bad things.
I mentioned this before in my life.
Good things are that which expand your possibilities and make you feel good.
Bad things are things which restrain your possibilities and hurt you.
Now, I'm not talking about did it hurt your feelings.
I'm talking about did it puncture this bag of fluids and you're leaking I'm not tremendously concerned about whether someone has hurt feelings or not because I can't control that.
I have no idea what garbage has been placed in your mind that you've been practicing for the past 20 years.
Not my problem.
Okay?
But if I haul off and I'm gesturing wildly and I whack you in the side of the head, that's a bad thing.
I've entered into your personal space in a very direct way and it didn't turn out very well.
Okay.
Obsessions.
A persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling.
Okay.
A persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling.
Do you get the idea that the people who write these dictionaries are like, trying to get a point across, you know?
Persistent, disturbing preoccupation.
Unreasonable.
Well, what does this really mean?
You know what an obsession is, right?
It's a thought that gets into your head and you just can't let go.
Alright, I just came from Disney World and I really worked hard to avoid anything that was going.
It's a smile.
Small, small world.
Because these people are very clever.
That thing will stick in your mind for months.
All right?
An obsession is an idea that gets into your head from whatever way, whatever cause, and it just haunts you.
Okay?
You can't get it out of your head.
So let's look at this again.
Persistent.
That's not too bad.
Disturbing.
What does disturbing mean?
It means it has interrupted the normal progression or the normal reality that you got running inside your head.
It has disturbed it.
If you go out to a flower bed and move the dirt a little bit around, you have disturbed the dirt.
Have you caused the dirt nightmares?
No.
Okay.
All it means is to move out of the normal order.
Preoccupation.
What is a preoccupation?
How does it manifest itself?
If you were to imagine the movie screen right in front of you that you're playing your entire life, and now right in front of you, in your own personal movie theater, you have a large, unpleasant woman wearing a large hat.
You would be preoccupied with the fact that she was blocking your view.
It takes a central point of focus within your life.
Often unreasonable.
Unreasonable.
What does that mean?
It means it doesn't make a lot of sense.
But wait a minute.
We've been talking about intuition.
Intuition is a good thing.
We all want it.
We're going to be practicing it.
But where is the rationale behind intuition?
Where is the clear and obvious mechanism that intuition uses?
Well, you can't see it.
That's the whole point, it's un.
Unreasonable.
So let's strike out these things that have the messy ambiguities.
Okay, we'll cross out disturbing.
We'll cross out often unreasonable and say an obsession is a persistent preoccupation with an idea or feeling.
Okay.
I've had the privilege of meeting some people who have competed in the Olympics.
My father competed in the Olympics.
Through him I got to know a whole bunch of these people.
When they talk about doing their mental imagery, when they talk about doing their preparation for their event, for their competition, they talk about a single minded focus on an attitude, an action and an outcome.
What are they?
They are obsessed with correct performance.
Again, think about a time in your life when there were thoughts going through your head that were persistent.
They were outside your normal order of things.
You couldn't get them out of your head and you really don't know why it's happening, but God damn it, you just can't get it out of your head.
That's an obsession and you can use it on your own behalf.
Now why am I telling you all this stuff?
First of all, it's true.
These things need to be said.
You've been talking to yourself in bad ways.
You've been talking to yourself in ways that have acted to close down your sense of possibilities.
You've been saying things to yourself like, I'm not the kind of guy who