Master Your Mind Design Your Destiny – Adam Khoo

I’ve recently got my hands on Master Your Mind – Desing your Destiny by Adam Khoo and I really liked it!

I highly recommend this book you can buy it from here.

(and you know, I NEVER recommend a product I haven’t bought for myself and loved it!)

It is Imperative We Master Our Minds so We Can Design Our Destiny in these Turbulent and Evolutionary Times

Here’s the table of contents for you

1    The Patterns of Excellence
2    The Ultimate Success Formula
3    How to Achieve Anything You Want
4    The Key to Absolute Power
5    The Incredible Power of Beliefs
6    The Secret of Peak Performance
7    Directing Your Brain for Optimum Results
8    Anchoring: the Keyboard to Your Emotions
9    The Transformation of Meaning
10    Values: Your Driving Force
11    Design Your Destiny
12    How to Replicate Someone’s Success Blueprint

The classic NLP Submodalities chart – picture from the book

I post here a short excerpt from the book, which is NLP related, its an excellent description of the classic NLP “Phobia Cure” (page 222 in the book)

Dealing with Phobias: The Ultimate Anchors
In traditional psychotherapy, it is believed that a phobia takes years to cure. This is especially so with deep rooted phobias that the person has suffered with for years. However, with the right strategies, you can eliminate a lifelong phobia within 30 minutes.
In our training programs, we have helped eliminate people’s phobia of snakes, mice, heights, water and public speaking. You see, a phobia is nothing more than a very big negative anchor. Normally, a phobia is an intense fear linked to a particular stimulus, like heights. A true phobia is one where the person starts getting into an intense and uncontrollable state of fear and they exhibit this fear by sweating and shaking and sometimes bursting into tears.

As we mentioned before, it is difficult to eliminate a phobia just by using the ‘collapsing anchors’ technique on its own. Why? Because with a phobia, the negative anchor is so strong that it will collapse the positive anchor. For example, if you had a phobia of the stage and starting to snap your fingers to fire off ‘confidence’, the state of fear will get linked to your original positive anchor of snapping the fingers. To eliminate phobias, you must use a combination of techniques that incorporate submodalities, anchoring and the distortion method. This is known as the Fast Phobia Cure, and it has five major steps.
Step 1. Test the Phobia
First, put the person in contact with whatever is creating the phobia in order to measure the strength of the phobia. For example, if it is a fear of snakes, bring the snake to the person and see how the person reacts. The reason for doing this is so that when the person has been ‘cured’ of his/her phobia, you can see the dramatic change that has taken place.
Now, take the stimulus away (i.e. the snake) so that the person is far from it.

Step 2. Create a Series of Resourceful Anchors

In order to collapse the phobia, you need to create in that person, a series of very powerful anchors. These resourceful states could be ‘confidence’, ‘complete relaxation’ or ‘humour’. Now, get that person into each of these states and, at the peak, anchor the person by saying something positive and touching them on the shoulders. For example, get the person into a very confident state, and anchor it. Next, get the person into an intense humorous state and anchor that as well. Use the same anchor (touch on the shoulders), to stack all the three resourceful states.

Step 3. Do a Double Disassociation

Now, because a phobia is usually very intense, just thinking of it will trigger fear. It order to avoid this, we need to get the person to do a double disassociation. In other words, he is disassociated twice from the experience. This is how we do it.

‘Imagine that you are in a movie theatre, sitting right in front of the big screen and you are watching a movie of yourself in the past. Now, from your seat, imagine yourself stepping out of your body and floating all the way up into the projection room.
‘From the projection room, I want you to feel that you are safe from the fear. Now, on the screen, I want you to see a movie of the time when you first had this fear (of snakes or whatever phobia you have). Maybe it was the time when you first encountered a snake.’
As the person is seeing these past experiences, we keep firing off the resourceful anchor (i.e. touching him on the shoulder) in order to put that person in a powerful state.

Step 4. Change the Internal Representation of the Past Experience

Remember that what causes the state of fear is the way the person has represented the experience of the past. We need to scramble the past experience by changing the submodalities of the pictures, sounds and feelings. We need to represent it in a way where it becomes fun and even humorous. This is where we can use lots of reframing as well. We could say:

‘As you see the snake in front of you, imagine that the snake is smiling at you. See the snake sticking out its tongue, this means it wants to greet you and make friends. Imagine the snake saying, ‘I’m scared. Please hold me. The reason I move around so much is because I want to get to know you’. Imagine the snake having the voice of a cute character.
As you see yourself holding the snake, imagine that it is a warm- blooded creature with texture you like to stroke, such as soft silk. As you see yourself holding the snake, see and feel yourself having lots of fun! What would you say or do in order to make this really fun?’ As you do this, keep firing off the anchor of ‘confidence’, ‘humor’ and ‘relaxation.

Step 5. Re-associate Back into the Experience

When you see the person feeling very good, very comfortable as they use their imagination to change their internal representations, get him or her to slowly associate back into their body. You tell the person:
‘Imagine yourself drifting down from the projector booth into your body in the cinema seat. How does that feel? Now, imagine yourself being associated into the movie that you see on the screen. Become fully associated into the experience as you play with the snake. Feel the confidence and the fun.’

Once the person is able to stay in a positive state while imagining the experience in a disassociated way, you know that the phobia has been neutralized. You can then go on to test it for real.

Step 6. Test it!

Ask the person to come back from the experience. Now, take the snake to the person slowly and, as you do this, keep firing off the resourceful anchors as you had done earlier. If you have gone through the process successfully, the person will find that the phobia has been neutralized.
Remember anchoring is a process that all of us are subjected to all the time. If we take conscious control of what we are neurologically linked to, then we can be constantly anchored to positive states. And it’s only in these positive states that we are driven to reach our goals!
Do note that some steps will vary if you have a phobia that is more specific, i.e. you have been bitten by a snake before. In this instance, you will have to use a distortion technique.

Here’s your link to the book again.

Adam Khoo is an entrepreneur, a best-selling author and a peak performance trainer. A self-made millionaire by the age of 26, Adam owns four companies in the areas of advertising, event management, education and training. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Adam Khoo Learning Technologies Group Pte Ltd that runs seminars and training programs for multinational corporations and individuals all over Asia. He is the best- selling author of three other books, ‘I Am Gifted, So Are You!’, ‘How to Multiply your Child’s Intelligence’ and ‘Clueless in Starting a Business.’ At the age of 29, Adam has trained over 50,000 professionals, managers, executives, businessmen, educators and students in the accelerated learning, Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and peak performance strategies. He is the co-developer of the famous ‘Patterns of ExcellenceTM’, ‘SuperkidsTM’ & ‘I Am Gifted, So Are You!TM’ programs. His phenomenal achievements are regularly featured in leading print and broadcast media.