Get the Life You Want Quotes

“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.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“It’s not that fear is a bad thing. Fear moves you away from things; you shouldn’t touch hot fire. Even when children are young, they are born with only two natural fears: a fear of loud noises and a fear of falling. That’s why when children start to do something that’s dangerous, we yell at them. And that fear then translates so that, instead of having to stick your hand in fire, you feel fear as you reach toward it. This teaches us, and we generalize one fear to another till we learn “don’t cross the street until you know it’s safe to do so.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“Thinking isn’t a passive process unless you do it passively. Thinking should always be an active process where you think in a way that gets you the results you want.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“The best thing about the future is that it’s in front of you. The best thing about the past is that it lies behind.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“The trouble with long, drawn-out deaths—in fact, all deaths—is when people remember the person who has died, they make life-size images and they see those images as if they’re happening now. It’s very difficult to get through the pain of death. When people look at good memories, they’ll see themselves in the good memories, but they’ll remember the funeral. They’ll remember the death as if it’s happening now. In other words, they’ll be associated with it, and this is simply backward. The process of flipping pictures is how people come out of grief when they stop remembering the tragedy of death and start remembering the good times vividly and associating with good memories. I”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“Laughter releases endomorphins. If you can’t laugh at your past, you’ll never get free of it. So it’s time to start laughing, even if it’s artificial laughter at first. Put a little circus music in, add a little chaos, and move things backward. If they start to move forward, blank them out with white and then pull up an image of something you really desire. Put your hopes and dreams in front of your nightmares and your terrors and your problems. A psychiatrist may call this repression. I call it planning. You should too.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“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.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“The strongest instinct in human beings is not survival. Virginia Satir said something to me that has resonated with me for forty years. She asked, “What do you think is the strongest instinct?” Like a robot I responded, “Survival.” For me, it had always been the strongest instinct. She said, “No, Richard. The strongest instinct in human beings is the need to look at the familiar.” People are terrified of the unknown. In fact, sometimes people will rather kill themselves than look at new things.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“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.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“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.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“It may take a few tries at this because habits develop over years, but over time it will be effective. For years and years, this particular woman who was raped had run the same life-size movie in her head over and over again. It became a habit. What she needed to do was to break it up. If you can make the image small enough or, if you can, white it out often enough, that will make a difference. If you can run it backward enough, that will change the feeling. You can also disassociate it. You do this by putting yourself in the picture and pushing it off into the distance. Then you can go inside your mind and replace it with something else because it’s not enough to get over the past, you have to start to look at what you want in the future.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“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.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“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.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“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.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“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.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“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.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“We learn the fear that snaps us away from touching fire, from stabbing ourselves with scissors, from poking ourselves in the eye, and we learn things that move us in the right direction. When our fears become too grandiose and too generalized, we become afraid of the wrong things. One of the things you should never, ever, ever be afraid of is your own thoughts. When you think things that scare you, you just need to think about them differently. You need to put in different sounds. You need to shrink them down. You need to learn that you are in control of how you think. This includes how you think about your past.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“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.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“Then I had him close his eyes and go inside and take the feeling of fear in his body and spin it once again a little bit faster and then turn it around and spin it backward until it softened. I told him to relax and to be comfortable and to open his eyes and look at the flexibility of the wing and to hear the sounds of the engines. I told him to see himself being able to fly smoothly, to look off at the clouds and realize that flying’s one of the safest things you can do. You’re more likely to be hit by a car crossing the street, so it was a good thing he wasn’t outside the plane. Instead, inside he was safe. Even if we hit a little clear air turbulence, it just meant that the plane was bouncing up.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“Once they have a choice, people always make the best choice. The trouble is that people don’t think they have one.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“This isn’t just a good way of getting rid of your public speaking anxiety, it’s a good step to get rid of that fear of heights. It’s a good step to getting rid of that fear of bees or the fear of snakes. As long as you maintain that spinning direction, and spin it faster and faster and faster and faster, suddenly the brain, at the unconscious level, begins to recode the experience. When you try to get back to having your old fear, you’ll discover that it’s a very difficult thing to do.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“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.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“My policy is, why wait? If you’re going to look back and laugh, you might as well start laughing.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“Run all the way to the end of the episode, float back down into the theatre, float into the movie, and then run it backward so everybody walks backward and talks backward, and throw in a little circus music so it’s as ridiculous as it could be. Then, clear your mind for ten minutes and then go back and think of what you were afraid of. You will be amazed to discover that your fear has severely diminished if not disappeared entirely.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“The next thing you can do is to make a still image of yourself in the situation where you’re afraid. Imagine you are sitting in a movie theater with the still image on screen. Then imagine floating out of yourself in the chair so you can look down and watch yourself, seeing yourself being afraid. Then start the movie. It’s like you’re in a balcony watching yourself in the theater and you’re in the film. Now as you look at yourself being afraid, I want you to stay in that third position and in your mind looking at yourself being afraid and say to yourself, That’s ridiculous. As you look at yourself being terrified, watching yourself being terrified, something inside you will feel different.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“If you run through all five and go back to the beginning and run through all five again and go back to the beginning and run through all five again really, really fast, what will happen is that you’ll begin to feel fed up. There’ll be a point where something inside you says, Enough is enough.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“After interviewing hundreds of people, I found out how people got over phobias. They all reached the point where they got fed up with being afraid.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“People think they are afraid of these things, but they are not. It’s not the object. It’s not the height that makes you afraid, it’s your brain. We know this because other people can be at the same height and they don’t get afraid. The question becomes: what is the person who feels fear doing inside his head and, even more important, what is the person who feels calm or confident in those situations doing inside his head?”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“When you can take on board new, positive suggestions and disbelieve the old, limiting suggestions, you will be ready to tackle the rest of your problems, especially your fears.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming

“I’m going to say that over and over again. This is because through the years, I’ve gotten people to believe the best thing about the past is that it’s over. When they look at it, they may be angry about how silly they have acted and about the beliefs they had—how they learned them and who taught them—but this is still not going to help them to go into the future. What helps you go into the future is to leave the past behind and to create such strong desires that you want to move toward them.”
― Richard Bandler, Get the Life You Want: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming