I Am Enough

In my long career as a therapist, thousands of people have walked into my office for thousands of different reasons. But of those thousands of clients, you may be surprised to learn that there are really only three types of people. That’s right—only three.

It doesn’t matter what the initiating problem, behavior, or issue is that a client has come to me to seek help for. It doesn’t matter if they’re a billionaire, an Olympian, a social hermit, a disabled veteran, a movie star, or just a regular 9 to 5 office worker. It doesn’t matter if they’re British, Japanese, or Namibian; gay, straight, or transgendered; a high school dropout, a musical genius, or tax accountant. In spite of all these variables, by the end of each session, I have usually figured out which of the three archetypes they are.

Isn’t that striking? That of all the diversity of human experience that people have today, we can all be boiled down to just three types. You are probably wondering what those types are, but before I tell you, I want to tell you something more important. I want to tell you why that’s true.

The traditional field of psychology likes to make things complicated. However, in my experience, there has been one core tenet which has informed my practice as an internationally-renowned therapist, and it is incredibly simple. This laser-sharp focus on simplicity often goes against the grain, clinically speaking. However, I can tell you with certainty that it’s been the reason why I’m commonly referred to as the “therapist’s therapist”—or the person that other practitioners send their clients to when they’re struggling to get results with them. It’s also the reason I’ve gained a reputation for helping clients in one or two sessions, rather than years of repeated visits.

So, what is this insight I’ve spent 30 years and thousands of hours of practice learning? It is my understanding that humans come onto this planet with two powerful emotional needs: to find connection, and to avoid rejection. If you dig deep enough into the emotional problems of almost anyone, you can trace their issues back to a lack of fulfillment of those two needs. It’s really that simple because that truth is so powerful and part of its strength is its simplicity.

If you want proof of just how fundamental these needs are, our society provides plenty of extreme examples. Take a look at someone in the most extreme form of social isolation we’ve come up with: solitary confinement. Numerous studies in the United States have shown that solitary confinement is one of the most damaging and irreversible punishments to bestow on a criminal, no matter what they’ve done. Symptoms that are known to be caused by solitary confinement include hallucinations, panic attacks, depression, loss of memory and mood swings. Tellingly, the four percent of inmates in American prisons who are subjected to solitary confinement make up 50 percent of the total suicides in the incarceration system. All of this tells us that a human can have no direct threat to their survival in terms of their biological needs—food, shelter, oxygen—but if they feel rejected by society and are unable to forge human connection of any kind, they are in the worst kind of poverty we know. It is a poverty of the spirit.

Similarly, if you ask a homeless person what the worst part of being homeless is, the answer they give often isn’t what you’d expect. They don’t say that they miss having their own bed or a steak dinner (though I’m sure they do miss those things), they say the constant feeling of being ignored and rejected by society at large is too much to bear. Walk into a soup kitchen and you’ll often find people are there for a chat with someone even more so than for the soup. It’s also been proven that one of the major factors causing drug addiction and alcoholism is the feeling of not belonging and one of the successes of AA is that it allows addicts to feel a sense of connection with each other.

You see, to a certain extent we all still have the mindset of tribal times. When we lived in interdependent tribal structures, it was imperative that we didn’t get rejected by our brethren as no human could survive in the wilderness out on their own. In that case, rejection really did mean death and connection meant survival. That is why this fear is so deeply rooted and at the cause of so many of our modern problems.

As I’ve developed my rapid transformational hypnotherapy methods—which now form the basis of my international course for my Rapid Transformational Therapy, or RTT, method—I’ve always come back to this fundamental truth: more than anything else we need connection and we avoid rejection. And when I’m trying to figure out which of the three types my client fits into, it’s always through the lens of these dual desires.

Three types of clients

You are probably wondering just what are the three categories that I’ve managed to separate my clients into, without much deviation. The first type of client is a person who would love to have it all—loving relationships, a great job, financial security, and self-love, confidence, and inner peace—but can’t manage to attain any of it, let alone hang on to it. The second type of client is one who has many of those things described above, but is sabotaging them in major or minor ways such as addiction, workaholism, or cheating on their spouse. And the third type, the rarest type, of client who does manage, through working on their mindset, to attain it all—relationship, health, career calling, well-being, inner peace—is working on their ability to share it with other people.

For some people, these categories may seem crude or too simplistic. But because I’ve seen the transformation of the first two types after applying my methods, I’m confident that it really is this simple. It all goes back to that fundamental truth I shared. Feeling disconnected or rejected can lead to all sorts of issues that manifest in the types of clients who belong in groups one and two. That rejection and disconnection can come from parental estrangement, being bullied, having a disability or never feeling that you were safe. It can manifest as a fear of intimacy, an inflated ego, or an addiction to eating, alcohol or drugs. Indeed, It doesn’t matter where the rejection or lack of connection comes from, it almost always leads to a person who feels as though certain things in life will never be available to them. And many modern-day ailments are a function of humans trying to fill the resulting emptiness or gap that they feel.

In about 2012, it became so apparent to me that the third group of clients—the ones who had it all and wanted to share it—were operating on a different level of consciousness and self-love. They didn’t just feel, they knew, that everything was available to them. This wasn’t because they had experienced perfect, trauma-free lives. Quite the contrary. It was because of how they had changed their mindsets.

I was so struck by the stand-out nature of this third group, that I resolved to find a way to teach not just the first two groups of clients, but all my followers and readers all over the world, how they could become the third type. This book, along with my RTT course, is my attempt to do just that. I want everyone to know that it’s not only possible to get over their problems, issues, and hang-ups to live a full and happy life—it’s theirs for the taking once they can get their mind on their side by effectively dialoguing with it.

When you like yourself, your life is extraordinary

As I said before, there are many reasons why people from all walks of life feel disconnected and rejected. In a lot of cases, these reasons start very early on in life, before we are even aware of our own consciousness. Maybe your father was never home and, when he was, he commented on your weight. Maybe your mother could only be pleased if you were perfect, and so you never felt you measured up despite your hardest efforts. Or maybe you were the victim of trauma or abuse before you even knew what those words were. All of those represent rejection to varying degrees. As we age, we wonder why we have the same stubborn problems like relationship sabotage, addiction, weight problems, lack of motivation, or fear of commitment following us around. In a great many cases, these issues turn into a kind of self-loathing, a resignation to the fact that we will never be who we want to be. Our conscious mind just assumes it is our own fault: that we are lazy, we aren’t good enough, we simply can’t change it, that this is how life will always be. Meanwhile, our harder-to-reach subconscious mind is often still stewing in the deep root causes of rejection and disconnection, agnostic to what is going on up at the surface level.

As a therapist, I meet so many people who don’t like themselves and, by extension, they create lives they don’t like either. The third group of clients are the ones that do like themselves. That’s not because they are perfect, or had perfect parents, or have experienced no adversity; it’s because they have learned how to self-dialogue and redirect their insecurities and fears around rejection and disconnection into a tremendous self-belief.

This isn’t the same as ego or narcissism; it’s a sense of radical self-love. It’s a stated, embedded, unshakable belief in the worthiness of one’s self. With it, I truly believe you can do anything. Without it, you will stay in group one or two, with your subconscious mind sabotaging you every step of the way, always feeling that you are not quite good enough no matter what your accomplishments are or how many other people value you.

The chapters of this book are devoted to teaching you how to attain that unshakeable belief in yourself—the radical act of simply liking yourself—so you can join the third group of clients. This isn’t so you can be superior or better than everyone else, but rather, so that you, too, can help spread this message of self-love that can change the world. It’s information that I believe everyone should know, but it isn’t taught in schools because so many educators haven’t yet learned it themselves. I like to think it is my purpose in life to spread it to as many people as possible because I have seen the life changing effects of this method in my practice, in emails from my readers, on stage when I speak at conferences, and in my training course.

The chapters will take you through various techniques which you can apply to your everyday life, starting right away. They aren’t bizarre or difficult to implement, and they don’t cost money or require special equipment. All you need is a willingness to change and to address the mental habits you’ve been stuck with for ages.

The first chapter will explore how your speech and outer dialogue affects what your mind thinks it wants you to do, while the second chapter will explore visualization and how imagery affects our beliefs. The third chapter will elucidate how to forever alter your feelings towards things you don’t like, such as phobias, dieting, or hard work. Chapters four through six will share some of the simple but effective habits that almost all successful people I’ve worked with over the years practice in their everyday lives. Chapter seven will reveal the mantra that I believe can transform people , and Chapter eight will explore how to operate in a world that will not always be kind to you even if you’re kind to yourself.

As you can see, none of these techniques are about avoiding adversity or making your life conflict free. None of them are quick fixes, based on bogus ideas, or New Age woo woo either. Rather, they are all about equipping your brain to deal with what life hands you in a way that is self-directed, filled with gratitude, and not at the whim of your minds worst habits. It’s important to accept that we very often cannot change the external events that surround us, we can only change how we respond to them. Fortunately, though, changing how you feel on the inside will change how you feel about your external events more than you could ever imagine.

I can’t tell you how many people’s lives I’ve seen change by adopting these techniques. To the outside world, they may have lost a ton of weight, started a wildly successful business, finally found a loving relationship, and patched up their relationship with their parents. But in all those cases, what’s really happened is that they’ve changed how they relate to themselves. Their inner world has become a lot more loving and, in turn, their outer world has changed for the better. I’m here to teach you the easy but effective methods that will lead you to this ‘I am enough life’. It’s not magic, but it will have a magical effect on your life.

There is a metaphor I love to use when it comes to training your mind to work for you, not against you. I want you think of your subconscious mind as a wild horse. It’s running through fields, without restraint, letting its power and might overpower any impediment or barrier. Meanwhile, your conscious mind is the horse trainer. It is possible to train a wild horse like this to become obedient and docile, but you would need an extremely experienced horse trainer to do it successfully; an amateur just won’t do. The same goes for your mind. Most people go through their lives as an amateur horse trainer with a wild black stallion on their hands. For those people, the wild horse—their subconscious mind—controls them, not the other way around. They wonder why, over and over, they struggle with the same hang-ups and bad habits. The reason is that you simply can’t control your mind unless you know exactly what to do with it. With this book, I intend to teach you exactly that, and in turn allow you to have everything, keep everything, and enjoy and share it, too.

A note about how to use this book:

This book encapsulates much of what I’ve learned in my thirty years as a therapist, author, and speaker, working with thousands of clients, and reaching many more readers, followers, and audiences all over the world. Working with, and hearing feedback from, all these unique people over the years, I have learned that while different things work for different people. A single, simple mantra such as “I am enough” can be the life changing ingredient to forever alter their inner dialogue. For others, establishing a new habit around how they approach tasks they hate doing can be the difference between finding wild success for their business, or not.

That’s why the best way to use this book is the way that feels right for you. If some chapters speak to you more than others, then I encourage you to read and re-read those until you have fully instilled their teachings into your subconscious mind. Occasionally, throughout the book, I will refer to hypnotic audio recordings that you can use to help bolster and strengthen the teachings in these pages*.

If you’ve never been hypnotized before, don’t worry. The instructions are quite simple. As a recording works for you, you should endeavor to listen to the recording daily over at least a three-week period. Please try to make time each day to listen, and you’ll create the opportunity for my messages to get to work in your mind.

If you’re worried about falling asleep during hypnosis, or you feel it makes you sleepy, don’t feel stressed about that, either. Hypnosis and sleep are actually quite similar, as in both states your subconscious mind is working more than your conscious mind. All you need to do at the outset of a hypnosis session is make sure you’re comfortable, in a quiet place, with the phone disconnected or your mobile phone switched off. To begin, simply close your eyelids but try to have your eyeballs looking up towards your eyebrows. You will notice your eyelids start fluttering, which is exactly what you want. Take deep breaths and simply relax into the recording and follow what it tells you to do from there.

Don’t worry if you feel like you’re not doing it “right.” There is no wrong way. Just remember that hypnosis won’t send you to sleep—it will wake you up. Just relax and you’ll find you get more comfortable as you go.

*Recordings are not included.