People often come up to us after seminars and say «You guys do therapy so fast!»" It's fast because we ask for problems that fit the form of what we want to demonstrate. As soon as somebody raises his hand, we're done.

Being able to identify these forms and ask for them is very important. If you have a client who comes in and says «Well, you know, I have all kinds of problems» then you can say «Do you have anything like this?» And he'll say «Yeah, I have a couple of those. I've got these two.» You can fix those, and then you can describe another form and ask «Well, have you got any of these?» It's a very different mental set for doing therapy. If you've got certain things you do that work, being able to describe the kind of problem that they work on is very important.

If you take one of these two reframing models and use it where it's inappropriate, it won't work. That would be like taking the phobia cure and using it for something else. It just won't have an impact, because it's not designed to do something else. One man who was in a workshop we did in Chicago phoned me about a month later and said «You worked with a woman who had a phobia of birds, and it worked really well, but I've been doing that with all my clients and it doesn't work.» I asked «Well, do they have phobias?» He answered «No, I don't have any clients with phobias.» He came right out and said that! I said «Well, why are you using that technique then?» And he said «Well, it worked!» He really understood the seminar!

In essence that's the biggest mistake that has been made in therapy all along. Somebody did something and it worked. Then he thought «It worked! Good! We'll use it for everything! And we'll call it a new school of therapy.» And then he went out and tried that one thing with everybody. It worked with some people and not with others, and he couldn't figure out why.