I can change your destiny today: From your health to your career, finances and love life, PAUL McKENNA reveals how to take control of your future in 2015  (2024)

Congratulations — today is the day you are going to alter your destiny. In just a few hours, the entire direction of your life will change for the better.

A dramatic claim? Certainly, but with just a little input from you, I know we can make this happen. It may seem like magic, but it’s actually grounded in some astonishing recent breakthroughs in science, psychology and spirituality.

So, how do you go about changing your destiny? Over the next few days, in this exclusive serialisation of my new book, I’ll be helping to reprogramme your brain by guiding you through a series of simple but very powerful exercises.

I’ve tested this system time and time again on hundreds of people from all walks of life, and it always works — but only if they follow my instructions.

That’s not to say you need to do it all perfectly. No one ever does. The techniques involved, however, are so robust that people still experience positive changes when they do the exercises badly. But in order to get results, you really do need to commit to doing each one.

My goal for you is simple: tangible, positive change in every important area of your life. You’ll improve your health, relationships, career, finances and happiness.

You’ll also begin to experience an overwhelming sense of optimism, of heartfelt purpose, of confidence and of passion for the future. In other words, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

At school, I was constantly being told I’d never amount to anything in life. But I determined early on that I wasn’t going to let someone else’s diagnosis of my problems become a prognosis for how things would turn out.

And the same thing is true for you. Like everybody else, you were born not only with all the genetic advantages of a human being, but also with unlimited potential. And yet if you’re like most people, you’re probably more aware of what you don’t have than what you do.

Did you have a difficult childhood? So did Oprah Winfrey, Kevin Spacey, Charlize Theron, and more than 50 per cent of the most successful people in the world.

Did you struggle at school? So did Thomas Edison, Richard Branson, Alexander Graham Bell, Hans Christian Andersen and George Washington. Sir Winston Churchill had a speech impediment and Dame Agatha Christie had all the symptoms of dyslexia.

If there’s one thing that life has taught me, it’s that it isn’t what you’re born with, or even what happens to you that determines your ultimate destiny. It’s the choices you make along the way.

YOU ARE NOT A VICTIM

When I hypnotise someone on stage to do extraordinary things, most people think that I’m putting a person who’s wide-awake into a trance. But the truth is that, every day for some of the time, we all experience various levels of trance. Think about zoning out on a long car journey or train ride. Suddenly you find yourself at your destination with little or no memory of how you got there.

Or imagine being in a lift, watching the floor numbers go up and down, without any sense of the people around you.

One of the most common trances is the ‘victim trance’ — the misapprehension that you’re a victim of the world around you and have no choice but to respond in fixed ways to whatever happens.

You end up with a kind of tunnel vision that allows you only to see evidence of what you already think and believe.

In other words, having learned to believe in your limitations, you then unwittingly gather evidence that reinforces them.

But these ideas and perceptions are just stray ideas and random thoughts that you’ve picked up along the way.

And the good news is that anything negative that you’ve learned can be unlearned.

For example, far too many people I’ve met sit around and complain about everyone and everything — from their parents to the state of the environment. Of course, they have a point. Life isn’t always fair, and it certainly isn’t always easy.

But there’s a simple difference between those who thrive in spite of their circ*mstances, and those who seem doomed.

The people who struggle are lost in a trance: they see themselves as victims of a system set up to benefit other people.

The ones who thrive have woken up to the fact that we make our own choices in life — and that it’s the sum total of these choices that creates our destiny.

What these people have tapped into is our in-built capacity for resilience.

And once you learn how to do this, too, you can bounce back from any setback, only to discover more resourcefulness than you ever had before.

In my work with high achievers, I see this ‘rubber ball’ quality at play all the time. No matter what life throws at them, they seem able to get back up with more bounce in their step than before.

Fortunately, this quality is inside all of us — and it can be brought to the surface through a bit of subconscious reprogramming. But you also need to choose how you want to see the world. Imagine that you have several pairs of glasses, each with a special filter that will cause you to see the world in a certain light.

When viewed through the first pair, the world is filled with potential threats — things that could damage you. And when viewed through the second pair, the world is tough and you react by developing a thick skin.

But imagine for a moment that you’re wearing your ‘rubber ball’ glasses. Suddenly, the world is a playground that you can throw yourself into with abandon. Why? Because everything you bump into helps move you in a new direction. So every time you hit bottom, it’s simply another opportunity to bounce up again.

Now, in each of the three scenarios, the circ*mstances haven’t changed. The way we perceive things, however, completely changes our experience.

In other words, ‘reality’ is just a question of perception. It changes according to what you think you are going to see — and even a tiny difference in the way you look at life changes everything.

THE 'MAGIC BULLET'

When I first got involved in the field of personal development, I was convinced that hypnosis was the ‘magic bullet’ that could take care of pretty much every problem.

I hypnotised everyone who’d let me and essentially asked their subconscious mind to do whatever it needed to do to solve their problem or help them reach their goal.

Surprisingly, it worked amazingly well. Then, as I learned more about the mind, I eventually began working with Dr Ronald Ruden, who was trying to find his own version of a ‘magic bullet’ for change.

He turned out to be that rarest of doctors — not only open-minded but with a distinguished background in neuroscience and neuropharmacology (the study of brain chemistry).

After a seven-year-study involving brain scans, he developed a new set of protocols that worked better than anything I’ve ever come across before.

Each features simple, soothing bodily movements that produce ‘delta’ waves in the brain. This is important because delta is the deepest level of relaxation, normally found only in deep sleep, so it’s ideal for reprogramming the mind and body.

Furthermore, Dr Ruden discovered that these physical movements become even more powerful when combined with eye movements and guided visualisation.

So, when a person did all three, they not only neutralised any deeply upsetting or uncomfortable emotions but measurably changed the chemical landscape of the brain. How? By stripping away the physical markers of a bad experience from the part of the brain where they’d been stored.

In layman’s terms, this allows us to separate memories from feelings — without any need to relive unpleasant or traumatic past events.

So Dr Ruden’s process — known as Havening — actually changes the way our brain processes thoughts and feelings. That’s why it’s currently being researched by universities around the world as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related issues.

But Havening can be used on almost any problem, block or trauma. In fact, I’ve now personally treated thousands of people with it — and some of the changes I’ve witnessed have moved me to tears.

I would like to share with you an example. A year ago, while giving a series of seminars on Havening to medical doctors, I worked with a soldier who had severe symptoms of PTSD. He’d been working in Army bomb disposal in Northern Ireland when he was sent to deal with an

explosion at a hospital. As he entered the building, a secondary device went off, killing two men very close to him — including the father of a little girl, who lay screaming beside his body.

For the next ten years, the soldier woke up every night at 4am, sobbing and shaking as he saw the little girl’s face and heard the sounds of her screams. He tried every available form of therapy, but nothing made any difference.

I gave him a Havening session in front of the doctors for 73 minutes, explaining the process as I went along. By the time we’d finished, he appeared to be totally cured.

One year on, he no longer wakes up distressed in the middle of the night. He can remember that a terrible event occurred, but the sadness, anger and panic attacks that once haunted him have gone for good.

Another volunteer was a woman who’d had chronic pain in her legs for years, for no discernable medical reason. Once we started the Havening process, the pain receded, but it wouldn’t entirely disappear. Then, suddenly, the woman began to cry. ‘Something really bad happened to me in my childhood,’ she told me.

I didn’t need to know the details to begin Havening her bad memory. After about 20 minutes, she said with surprise: ‘I feel fine — the pain’s gone!’

Mark my words: Havening is going to change the entire face of psychology.

In the meantime, you’ll soon be joining the thousands of people who are already benefiting from it.

• The Three Things That Will Change Your Destiny Today by Paul McKenna is out on New Year’s Day, priced £12.99. For more information visit: paulmckenna.com. The book comes with a DVD, CD and instructions for downloads in which Paul McKenna uses hypnosis to help you tap into your potential at an even deeper level.