There are two extreme types of people, with most falling somewhere in the middle.

The first are those who see, feel, and believe in what they want, and they win over and over again, and even overcome obstacles that would have crushed someone else.

An example is Donald Trump. His entire empire collapsed around him because of problems with his casino and the crunch in the real estate market. He was worse than the poorest, homeless person, because he was billions of dollars in debt! What did he do? He took massive action and today he is even richer and more successful than ever before.

Again, look at the case of Bill Gates. First, the government, goaded on by his rivals, tried to break up Microsoft; then after 9/11, he lost billions. What is he doing now? He is using his massive financial clout to reform the world, and is the greatest financial philanthropist the world has ever seen.

Then there are other people, who have everything going for them, and they manage to destroy it all. Elvis Presley was adored by the world; he was rich, handsome, charismatic, kind, generous, adored. He had everything anybody could possibly want from life. Yet, he slipped into drug addiction that finally took his life.

Again, look at Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, William Holden, Mama Cass Elliott, and Janis Joplin. The world was astonished and exhuberant over their talents, but they destroyed themselves rapidly.

How do some people succeed despite everything? How do some people fail despite everything?

The answer is that those who have succeeded found a way to overcome their traumas and those who failed succumbed to them.

A very powerful way to overcome trauma is to use the scrambling patterns of Neuro-linguistic programming. They can do for you in a few minutes or at the most an hour, what it would take a skilled psychoanalytic therapist to do for you in years.

What is a trauma, in the first place?

It is like a groove on a long-playing record. Something unpleasant happened to you: you got fired from a job, your lover ran off with someone else, you were falsely accused of doing something, you were attacked verbally or physically, you made a mistake and everybody worked really hard to make sure that you felt humiliated, you were in a war zone.

Because the incident was etched in your brain with great emotional energy, it became very vivid for you. It could have happened a week or a year or a decade ago, and yet it remains as vivid as if it had happened a day ago.

You then play that record over and over again, or try to suppress it; but it's always there, and it is quietly ruining your self-esteem and your chances of really making massive progress in your life. You usually feel guilt or shame, even when it was clearly not your faulty. Your brain appears to be on autopilot and punishing you, over and over again.

What most therapeutic modalities try to do is make you relive the experience and get insight and, hopefully, let it go, forgiving yourself and other people.

With NLP, the effort is not to work with insight or release, but with scrambling the patterns. There is no rational intervention. No quest for new meanings and re-interpretations.

Instead, using the analogy of the long-playing record, the attempt is to scratch the record so that it stops sinking into the same familiar grooves and starts playing the same old sad song of how you were humiliated, betrayed, and cast to the wolves.

What happens is that your neurons lose their thick bands of connectivity that keep those memories alive. The connections get thinner and the electrical impulses flowing through your brain weaker.

Here then are some scrambling patterns:

1. Go over the painful memory backwards several times, going faster each and every time. Soon like a bad movie, which runs backwards, you actually stop being frightened and alarmed and actually lose interest.

2. Review the whole scenario but make it a cartoon. See how your boss is standing in his underwear yelling at you and you are laughing hysterically. See how you are swatting the policeman who gave you a speeding ticket as if he were a fly on your windscreen. Make it ridiculous. Change it around. Animate the entire mental picture as if it were a children's cartoon on TV.

3. Give all the characters in your mental melodrama Mickey Mouse voices.

Do you see the value of this approach? In five minutes, you can get rid of phobias that have been bothering you for your whole life. Interrupt the pattern, make it ridiculous, and before long it will no longer bother you.

The result is that you will free up a vast amount of life-force particles that has been locked into entertaining memories that no longer serve you. Winning is easy: just focus on what you want and take your attention away from what is sapping your energy, creativity, and awesome potential.