How many of you have ever thought about something that hadn't even happened yet, and felt bad about it ahead of time? Why wait? You may as well start feeling bad now, right? And then it didn't actually happen, after all. But you didn't miss out on that experience, did you?

That ability can also work the other way. Some of you have better vacations before you actually go, and then you get to be disappointed when you arrive. Disappointment requires adequate planning. Did you ever think about how much trouble you have to go to in order to be disappointed? You really have to plan thoroughly for it. The more planning, the more disappointment. Some people go to the movies and then say, "It's just not as good as I thought it was going to be." This makes me wonder, if they had such a good movie inside their heads, why did they go to the theater? Why go sit in a room with sticky floors and uncomfortable seats to watch a movie, and then say, "I can do better than that in my head, and I didn't even have the screen play."

This is the kind of thing that happens if you let your brain run wild. People spend more time learning how to use a food processor than they do learning how to use their brains. There isn't much emphasis placed on deliberately using your mind in ways other than you already do. 'You're supposed to "be your–self — as if you had an alternative. You're stuck with it, believe me. I suppose they could wipe out all your memories with electroshock, and then make you into someone else, but the results I've seen haven't been very enticing. Until we find something like a mind–blanking machine, I think you're probably stuck with you. And it's not so bad, because you can learn to use your brain in more functional ways. That's what NLP is all about.

When I first started teaching, some people got the idea that NLP would help people program other people's minds to control them and make them less human.