I’m quite con­cerned over a num­ber of emails I’ve received in the past 24 hours, so this is my response.

It all started when I revealed I would be releas­ing mate­r­ial related to Neuro Lin­guis­tic Pro­gram­ming (NLP) this Friday.

Since then, I’ve received count­less emails from peo­ple look­ing for­ward to it, and also a few emails from peo­ple express­ing their reservations.

Now here’s the thing — if you’re one of those peo­ple with cer­tain neg­a­tive con­cep­tions about NLP, I don’t blame you.

Why? Because NLP, in its con­ven­tional sense, is prone to a num­ber of mis­con­cep­tions. Here are a few of the most com­mon ques­tions I received, along with my answers:

1. “I’ve tried/heard of NLP, and it’s too com­plex for me to understand”

Nor­mally, you’d be right. Most NLP courses are highly com­plex, industry-oriented thorn­bushes of infor­ma­tion that require you to wrap your head around insanely com­pli­cated (and often irrel­e­vant) prin­ci­ples before you can start enjoy­ing any sort of benefit.

And that’s pre­cisely why my upcom­ing course boils NLP down to its core, and sim­pli­fies the con­cept so any­one can under­stand it. You’ll enjoy the full ben­e­fits of NLP, with­out the headaches that may often come with it.

2. “Every NLP course I’ve ever seen was too expensive!”

Once again, you’d nor­mally be right. Since NLP is seen as a pre­mium tool in sec­tors like busi­ness, psy­chol­ogy and par­ent­ing, it’s been mar­keted as such, with sky-high price tags reach­ing thou­sands if not tens of thou­sands of dollars.

If you know me at all, you’ll know that I’m all about get­ting my mate­r­ial out to as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble, so trust me — don’t worry about the price.

3. “Isn’t NLP meant only for busi­ness professionals?”

Many top busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als in For­tune 500 com­pa­nies use NLP, true. In fact NLP is a com­pul­sory train­ing com­po­nent in 70% of For­tune 500s out there. But it doesn’t stop there — NLP has also been adapted for use in health­care, law, par­ent­ing, and count­less other sectors.

Think about it though — if NLP wasn’t so infi­nitely pow­er­ful, why would those in the know use it to make bil­lions of dol­lars, solve seem­ingly impos­si­ble chal­lenges, and influ­ence mil­lions of people?

The fact is, NLP has the power to do you a world of good, whether you’re look­ing for more suc­cess and pros­per­ity, bet­ter results with my pre­vi­ous pro­grams, or even if you’re look­ing for the fastest, eas­i­est road to true enlightenment.

4. “I don’t have the time to go through another course”

NLP promises incred­i­ble results, but that doesn’t mean it’ll take up every wak­ing moment of your day. All you really need to do is invest a few hours per week into the exer­cises and insights, and you’ll start see­ing dra­matic improve­ments in your life with­out even real­iz­ing it.

Think of it as suc­cess and enlight­en­ment on autopi­lot

5. “I’m already expe­ri­enc­ing incred­i­ble break­throughs with your exist­ing mate­ri­als. Why would I need NLP?”

If you’re already 100% happy with the results you’re get­ting now, mas­ter­ing NLP could boost that fig­ure to 150%. I’ll tell you more about this on Fri­day, but for now let’s just say that NLP is the miss­ing piece of the puz­zle to com­plete enlightenment.

Hope this answers most of your questions.

You will be hear­ing from me tomorrow!

To con­tinue our dis­cus­sion on con­scious mod­el­ing, let me tell you about how I used this tech­nique as the foun­da­tion for my quest towards enlightenment.

My first brush with con­scious mod­el­ing began in my youth, just after I had been dis­charged from the army. It was at this point that I fig­ured out that enlight­en­ment was my life’s pur­pose, and I was look­ing for a spir­i­tual mas­ter to help me reach this goal.

In 1949, my strong intent led me to Parama­hansa Yogananda — the great Indian swami who had intro­duced med­i­ta­tion and yoga to the West. I joined Yogananda’s Self Real­iza­tion Fel­low­ship, and took it upon myself to learn all I could from him in as short a space of time as possible.

So I took his lessons, lis­tened to his advice and sought his opin­ions as often as he would allow. This per­sis­tence increased my abil­i­ties and knowl­edge by leaps and bounds, but it was at this point that I began to real­ize some­thing else:

Fol­low­ing Yogananda’s teach­ings gave me good results — but doing what he DID gave me incred­i­ble results.

Let me explain the sec­ond part of that sen­tence. Yogananda’s tal­ent and wis­dom were vast — so vast that his words alone would not have been enough to express everything.

So I decided to observe him, and pick up parts of his behav­iour, actions and man­ner­isms, in the hope that some­how, whether con­sciously or sub­con­sciously, some of his unspo­ken tal­ent and wis­dom would rub off on me.

And they did! I mod­eled his meth­ods of inter­act­ing with peo­ple, his pos­ture when med­i­tat­ing, his daily rou­tine… and within a mat­ter of weeks, I was expe­ri­enc­ing break­throughs I once never thought possible.

And that was the first time I expe­ri­enced first­hand the power of con­scious modeling.

In some ways, it was a total per­cep­tion shift com­pared to what I’d pre­vi­ously learned. Because while dis­ci­plines like med­i­ta­tion are all about look­ing inward, con­scious mod­el­ing involved look­ing out­ward at others.

It was clear to me at that point — to unleash the unre­al­ized poten­tial within you, you first need to observe and emu­late the real­ized poten­tial radi­at­ing from others.

Ever since then I’ve con­tin­ued to use this incred­i­bly effec­tive tech­nique on those I can learn from, includ­ing vision­ar­ies like Jose Silva, the founder of the Silva Method. As you may know I am a cer­ti­fied Silva instruc­tor, and spent years work­ing with Jose and his orga­ni­za­tion to help spread his teachings.

There is no doubt in my mind that it was mod­el­ing these great gurus that helped me dis­cover my poten­tial and begin spread­ing my mes­sage of enlight­en­ment to the world.

Now that I’ve shared with you how I have used con­scious mod­el­ing to emu­late the suc­cess of those I admire most, I would like to hear your thoughts:

Who would you most like to con­sciously model, and why? (It doesn’t have to be a famous per­son, even your neigh­bour or co-worker can be a role model!)

Look­ing over the thou­sands of responses to my recent poll, I was so glad to see a large num­ber of respon­dents pick­ing the last option — that their belief sys­tems are pos­i­tive in every sin­gle way.

But if you were one of the peo­ple who picked that option, I must ask you a question:

Do you truly KNOW that all your beliefs sys­tems are com­pletely positive?

There’s an impor­tant rea­son I’m ask­ing this. Many peo­ple tend to mis­take true know­ing with mere knowl­edge of the right answer, and this can be a poten­tially dam­ag­ing fal­lacy if left unchecked.

Let me explain. Hav­ing the knowl­edge that you should pos­sess com­pletely pos­i­tive belief sys­tems, and reaf­firm­ing this knowl­edge with a pos­i­tive affir­ma­tion is an impor­tant first step.

But with­out the next step, it remains incomplete.

And this next step is know­ing. Know­ing from the deep­est depths of your spir­i­tual and emo­tional self, that you have devel­oped per­fectly pos­i­tive belief sys­tems in every aspect of your life.

And this, I dare say, is a feat that less than 1% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion can admit to hav­ing accomplished.

So can you now see the dif­fer­ence between knowl­edge and  knowing?

• Knowl­edge is an intel­lec­tual process that comes from acquir­ing information
• Know­ing is a spiritual/emotional process that comes from true experience

And so the burn­ing ques­tion here is, how do you reach the higher level of know­ing?

The answer can be found in the incred­i­ble story of Liz Mur­ray, a young home­less woman who over­came all odds and earned her­self a spot in Har­vard. Please watch this video before you con­tinue reading:

Were you able to find the answer? Here it is…

Since she was a child, Liz had been uncon­sciously mod­el­ing the behav­iour and beliefs of her par­ents. This is why by the time she ended up home­less, she was weighed down by mul­ti­ple neg­a­tive beliefs like inse­cu­rity, inad­e­quacy and unworthiness–beliefs that kept her tied to her predicament.

But then, after the pass­ing of her mother, some­thing in Liz changed.

Instead of see­ing her­self as inad­e­quate, she began to con­sider her­self just as wor­thy and capa­ble of the suc­cess­ful peo­ple around her. This small yet crit­i­cal per­cep­tion shift empow­ered Liz to con­sciously align her­self with the beliefs and actions of the per­son she aspired to be, which in this case was a Har­vard student.

It should be clear to you by now. The key to know­ing that you have replaced neg­a­tive beliefs with pos­i­tive beliefs in every aspect of your life is con­scious mod­el­ing — the act of actively emu­lat­ing and iden­ti­fy­ing with your cho­sen role mod­els, so that you may claim their suc­cess as your own.

Believe me — if Liz can do it, you can.

I’ll get back to you with more on con­scious mod­el­ing soon.

Because of the nature of my work, I’ve spent my entire life meet­ing all sorts of peo­ple. Rich, poor, happy, sad, and every­thing in between.

But even so, there’s always one kind that never fails to amaze me — the per­son who dares to live his or her dreams.

You prob­a­bly know one or two peo­ple just like this. They’re not nec­es­sar­ily wealthy (although they often are) — they’re sim­ply liv­ing their life in the EXACT way they want to, and doing the kind of things other peo­ple only talk about. Maybe that means chang­ing the world. Or own­ing a suc­cess­ful busi­ness. Or being a musi­cian. Or even some­thing sim­ple like hav­ing more time for the kids.

Dreams vary from per­son to per­son, but the same mag­i­cal thing hap­pens to any­one who lives them — they find true hap­pi­ness and sat­is­fac­tion, and begin to glow from the inside out.

My friend, best sell­ing author and moti­va­tional coach Cyn­thia Kersey (you may remem­ber her from this post) calls them ‘Unstop­pable Peo­ple’, because noth­ing can stop them from liv­ing the lives they want to live. And after decades of inter­view­ing and study­ing the secrets of these peo­ple, she’s dis­cov­ered how the rest of us can become just like them.

She calls her dis­cov­ery the Unstop­pable Effect, and it’s one of the most sim­ple yet highly effec­tive suc­cess prin­ci­ples I’ve ever seen. Accord­ing to the Unstop­pable Effect, you will sig­nif­i­cantly increase your chances of achiev­ing your goals and liv­ing your dreams just by observ­ing the suc­cesses of Unstop­pable People.

I know how hard it is to stick to those New Year res­o­lu­tions we all wrote down as 2009 was on the cor­ner, so there’s no bet­ter time than now to show you this — a video inter­view with the late Dame Anita Rod­dick, founder of the Body Shop, phil­an­thropist and one of Britain’s most loved Unstop­pable People.