For many people, the path to personal change and self-improvement is a long and winding street filled with difficult barriers. Drug companies in particular have capitalized on and created gigantic fortunes because of the elusive search for the "Magic Pill" that will fix everything. As it turns out, there is a secret formula for success, and it begins in the human mind.

One of the presuppositions of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is that "there is a positive intention behind all behaviors." And based on that rule, when it comes to successfully eliminating negative behaviors, there is an equation that we must always keep in mind. I'll let you in on the secret in a minute. But first, I have a riddle for you to solve.

Riddle: A minister made his child drink lye, which burned out his vocal chords. What was the positive intent behind this behavior?

If you are like 99.9% of the clients who have visited my office since 1978, you'll exclaim something like: "There isn't any." But you would be 100% mistaken. To answer this riddle, first you must detach the behavior from the positive intention of the behavior.

The minister's child was cursing. And the minister believes that if his son curses, his soul will be condemned to Hell. So the answer is that the minister was burning out his son's voice box so that he couldn't curse. By doing so, he was saving his son's soul from being damned to suffer in Hell.

The secret formula for success works as follows:

We must respect the positive intention that motivates every behavior. If we have an urge to make use of a behavior that we don't like, we can easily get rid of the impulse to use that behavior. What we need to do is to find another behavior and substitute it in its place. To be successful, the new behavior must be as accessible and efficient at accomplishing the same outcome, but be more consciously tolerable. This is called a REFRAME.

When clients come into my office, one of the first things that I do is to take a detailed case history. In this example, let's pretend that they come to my office and ask me to help them eliminate their appetite. Conventional wisdom tells us that the two main reasons that anyone eats excessively are: (1) to reduce stress; (2) because eating can be a behavior triggered by other behaviors that it has been associated with (this is also known as a conditioned response). For instance, if a person eats while they are working on a computer, they will develop a conditioned response, and thereafter, every time they work on a computer they will get an urge to eat.

However, the above answer only takes into consideration the possible positive intention behind the behavior of eating. What if they also have another behavior that is concerned in the equation? Case in point: What if being heavy is also a behavior for this person? I can hear your mind spinning right now as you think, "Being chubby isn't a behavior, what are you talking about?"

Sorry but you could be absolutely wrong. Here is a common textbook example that will clearly illustrate the fact that being chubby can be a behavior. It can be a behavior because it can supply secondary gains.

Example: A woman is in love. Her boyfriend leaves her, and her heart is broken. Her unconscious mind wants to shield her emotionally and stop her from having her heart broken again. So it motivates her to get chubby to keep her out of relationships. Because if she isn't in a relationship she cannot get her heart broken again.

Everyone is totally different. And sometimes there are subliminal elements at work that cause uncontrollable behaviors. These are elements that are different for each person.

Here is another instance: A woman comes to my office complaining of an uncontrollable compulsion to eat too much at mealtime. During my case history, upon questioning, the woman tells me about how she was never able to satisfy her father.

During an age regression, we learned that one of her earliest memories was of having dinner with her family. And her father was insisting in an angry voice that she clean her plate, even though she was bursting at the seams. So she ate the food left on her plate out of fear, and dad praised her for eating everything. It was one of the only times in her life that she could recall her father telling her that she had made him happy.

Shoot forward to the present. Dad's been deceased for years, but the subconscious program he created is still working. She still has a powerful urge to clean her plate, even if she is feeling stuffed to the gills, because by cleaning the plate, in her unconscious she is getting dad's approval, and eliminating her own fear!

So if you are finding it difficult to make personal changes, please remember that there is a positive intent behind all behaviors. And the formula for success is to use a different behavior that will accomplish the same secondary gain, but in a way that is more consciously acceptable to you, as an individual. The most efficient way to get your unconscious mind to accept the responsibility for making this kind of change for you is through an NLP 6-Step Reframe.