Change Your Life
Purchase Change Your Life in Seven Days (Book & CD)
Change Your Life in 7 Days
Those of us of a certain age will remember Paul McKenna from his career as a TV hypnotist who traded in cheap laughs through getting people to act like washing machines or eat raw onions as if they were apples.
A lot of years have passed since then and I was surprised to have one of his books recommended to me by someone who really knows what they are talking about when it comes to mental health and counselling. I didn’t even know he wrote books. Anyway, thanks to Amazon’s irresistible strategy of getting you to “buy this if you’re buying that”, I bought “Instant Confidence” and also the boldly-titled “Change Your Life in 7 Days”. Each book comes with an accompanying CD.
If you’re really busy and pushed for time you can just read the next five words to get the message – “they work, really, really well.”
If you have a bit more time…
The format of these two books (and also the ones I’ve read subsequently) is very similar. They are clearly laid out and alternate between an anecdote, explanation, quotation and exercise. This format breaks ups the content into small pieces so, overall, they are a “light read” – you don’t have to labour away for hours at his books.
Taken by themselves, the books are OK but it is the CD’s where I believe the real value is. Variously described as “hypnosis” and “mind control” (!) CD’s I have to say I didn’t quite know what to expect! Each one lasts around half an hour and they are best listened to through headphones in a quiet place somewhere. Basically they begin with a relaxation process to get you into a state where you are de-stressed and responsive to what’s being said and then they make a lot of positive and empowering suggestions to you. There is some subtle, “new-agey” music going on in the background but it’s not intrusive or annoying in any way. The whole process is very real soothing and not all weird. Sometimes I doze off whilst listening to them and often lose track of time but this doesn’t seem to affect how they work. It’s not unusual for me to be disturbed whilst listening to them either, especially by my son, but this doesn’t have any real effect. You just “wake up” as normal.
The CD sessions work through bypassing your “conscious” mind and speaking directly to your “unconscious” mind – where all your hardwired beliefs and behaviours live. The effect of this is to instil positive, confident and optimistic beliefs directly into the part of the brain that governs a great deal of how you operate day by day. I have found that this works very well for me and I often find myself approaching tasks and situations in a different way or get a positive “can do” thought popping into my head for no reason.
The intention is for you to listen to the CD before you read certain chapters in the book and complete the exercises. In practise I found this hard to fit into daily life so I “mixed and matched”, fitting both in where I could. This doesn’t seem to have affected how it worked on me although you’d probably want to do it properly if you can.
If you read a lot of self help style literature you will notice that a lot of the content is based on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques and also that there is a strong influence from “Supercoach” Michael Neill, who Paul McKenna collaborates with. Not that this matters overmuch – the yardstick I use on this site is “does it help?” I don’t want to get too bogged down in the intricacies of the self help world. Anyway, however he has achieved it, Paul McKenna has come up with a really effective and worthwhile range of products here and he has obviously come an awful long way since the “onions” jokes!
Works for me, how about you?
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