Sport.co.uk meets...Paul McKenna
Posted by Sport.co.uk on: 05 May 2010 - 16:19
Author: Jonny Abrams
It’s been a while since Paul McKenna was on our screens making people act like chickens and so on for the amusement of the nation. Now based in America, the renowned hypnotist and self help guru returns to our shores for a live I Can Make You Thin event to be held at the IBIS Hotel in Earls Court, London, on Saturday May 29th. Sport.co.uk caught up with him to discuss his self help methods, why he became a hypnotist, what he makes of Derren Brown and how he could help England’s World Cup squad…
So, what can we expect from one of your live events?
They tend to be quite motivating, like a cross between a seminar and an evangelist rally. It’ll be around 800 people in a ballroom-type setting and I’ll do everything with this group of people that I would do if I was sitting doing a personal session with somebody to help them lose weight - I’ll just do it en masse. It’s certainly more viable for me to do it that way. I also think that you can get a great atmosphere going with a group of people. I did one of these events in January, thinking that I’d only do one this year, but the demand was overwhelming and it sold out quite quickly so I thought maybe I should do some more.
The I Can Make You Thin book has been out for a few years now…
The book has been out for six years, although it’s been revised a couple of times. I believe it’s the best selling self help book in British history now!
Congratulations!
Thank you. I believe it’s sold about 1.2 million in total.
What’s the most spectacular feedback you’ve had from it?
There are people who have lost mad amounts of weight, like 150 pounds. But it’s not just about the amount of weight that people lose – it’s more the quality of people’s life change. People say things like “thank you for helping me escape from food prison”! People who say that they were always going to be overweight and out of control but now they don’t freak out around food any more. They don’t worry about going to a social function and finding the buffet table a source of tension and angst. They say they’re relaxed around food and are in control of their life again. So clearly it is about losing weight but it’s also about feeling good about yourself, because there’s no freedom in losing weight but still being fixated about food. It’s not just about weight loss, it’s about freedom.
Do you ever get approached by athletes?
Yeah I do. In fact, I’ve worked with quite a few champion athletes – gold medallists, world champion boxers, footballers – everything. Exercise is really important because the only way to lose weight is to eat less and move your body more. The great thing about exercise is that is speeds up your metabolism. People who have been dieting for years have actually learnt to slow down their metabolism so they put on weight very efficiently and quickly. They always look at people who are naturally thin and say, well, it’s okay for them because they have a fast metabolism, so they can have burger and fries and chocolate and not put on any weight. But the reason they have a fast metabolism is because they haven’t f***ed it up through dieting and these dreadful diet clubs and regimes that are prevalent in our society now.
So exercise is important but it doesn’t mean you have to pump iron at a gym or run on a track. The small but significant difference between somebody who is naturally thin compared to somebody who is overweight is two thousand steps every day – somebody who is naturally thin will walk two thousand more steps so what I say to people is to walk a minute here, two minutes there, and so on until you get your step count up. That’s really the route to beginning exercise. There’s a lady who was overweight who began using my system and she’s lost around six stone and run four marathons now. Running marathons isn’t part of my system, of course, but it just shows that you can start small and then build and build and build.
We don’t want to get you to reveal too many of your secrets too early!
Actually, I’m quite happy to tell people what the components of the system are. It’s not a big secret but what makes it work, I think, is the hypnosis element. When people get my book, they get a hypnosis CD with it and when you come to the event, you’re in a room with a hypnotist for eight hours. So it’s very likely you’re going to change.
How close to a guarantee can you offer smokers that you can help them quit?
With smoking, you’ve got to want to quit. It’s a different mindset to weight loss. With weight loss, you’re genetically programmed to eat – it’s part of your survival. But you’re not genetically programmed to smoke – it’s something that people learn to do, usually behind the bike sheds, and they then become reliant on it because it is an efficient stress control mechanism. It’s just that it has this massive negative long term health consequence on some people. I’ve got no moral stance on it – I think people should be allowed to do what they want as long as they’re not hurting other people. Quitting smoking is one of those things you’ve got to want to do and what a hypnotist can do is make it easier for you to quit. In many studies, hypnosis is shown to be the most effective method in the world for quitting smoking. Weight loss is not a willpower-based approach – it’s simply remembering to follow simple instructions and using the hypnosis CD regularly.
How did you first discover that you could hypnotise people?
It isn’t like discovering a magic power – it’s a learned process, like playing the guitar or juggling. You have to practise it a lot to get good at it. David Beckham got good at kicking footballs with precision and speed into a certain window of space by, as a kid, putting a tyre on a bit of rope, tying it to a tree and practise hitting the target day in, day out by putting spin and bend on it. Mohammed Ali had his brother throw rocks at him so he could learn to sharpen his reflexes, which served him well for dodging punches later in life. Any skill that anyone has got good at takes thousands and thousands of hours to develop – it’s not a gift, like being a psychic or something like that. It’s just a skill that I learnt, practised and still do.
In that case, permit Sport.co.uk to rephrase the question – what inspired you to learn how to hypnotise people?
I was a radio broadcaster and I went to interview the local hypnotist. I was already interested in yoga, meditation and things that are not dissimilar to hypnosis. He hypnotised me as I was stressed, and I felt relaxed and really quite euphoric, actually. So I borrowed some books from this guy, began reading them and practised on my friends to help them quit smoking, lose weight and that sort of thing. I’d be at a party and hypnotise someone to think they were a ballerina or a kangaroo or something and we’d all fall about laughing. Later on, I became more interested in the wider health-related issues that we can use hypnosis for to benefit society to a greater degree. Not that entertainment isn’t a benefit to society – it certainly is – but I felt that my skills would be better used helping people to make life changes.
What I’ve done is I’ve combined the entertainment side of what I do with the educational side, so the live events aren’t like boring, intellectual seminars, like something you might get in a traditional education establishment. They’re much more commercial and accessible and I try to make them very light-hearted, exciting, dynamic and humorous. But it’s educational at the same time and it’s got a real sense of motivation, like you’d get at a political or religious rally.
It occurs to Sport.co.uk that your book entitled I Can Make You Rich is the medium of self help which could potentially yield the most spectacular results. Have you had any truly remarkable feedback from that?
Absolutely. There’s one guy who went from making eight thousand dollars a year to over a million dollars within a year from using my system. It’s not just about money – it’s about people finding richness in all aspects of their lives. It’s emotional richness as well. A lot of people say, yeah, I make more money but I feel my life is richer, more purposeful and abundant in other ways. It can’t be just about making money as we’ve got to be careful not to create more miserable millionaires! The evidence is that [my system] appears to be making people richer in every sense.
What do you make of entertainers such as Derren Brown?
Derren was a student of mine. He’s a very skilled entertainer but, although he talks about it in the same terminology, he’s doing something very different to what I do. It’s illusion, trickery, sleight of hand – that sort of stuff. There’s not really very much psychology in it – there’s a bit, but it’s mostly magic put in the vehicle of modern psychological jargon. What he’s done is he’s reinvented the magic act. It’s a brilliant thing, really.
You say he was a student of yours?
He came to some seminars and learnt the schtick that I use. We would talk about psychology and how the mind works and he would then take a traditional magic trick, like making someone think that you’ve read their mind, and he’d dress it up in the psychological jargon that we use. What he did was find a new way of making an ancient practice seem very contemporary. He’s changed the face of magic by making it look like a psychological kind of technology.
Despite your wealth of satisfied customers, glowing references and of course sales figures, there remain people who are very sceptical - suspicious, even - about your methods. What would you say to someone who thinks you to be a conman?
I’d say just try it. When you’re doing a job like mine, you’re always going to come up against people that are sceptical and I think people are right to be sceptical because unless we ask questions, judge, analyse and criticise, how can we know if something’s legit or not? Or whether something works or not? So I’ve got no problem with scepticism – I’m a bloody sceptical person about a lot of things. What you want to be is sceptical in a constructive or benevolent way, rather than just relentlessly criticising everything. You could never take any joy in anything that way. I think it’s important to be sceptical in order to test things out, to find out what works or doesn’t work for you, and I don’t mind that I have critics and sceptics. In fact, they help make me who I am. God forbid I lose my tag of being controversial some day!
Finally, as we’re primarily a sports-based website and there’s a World Cup on the way…do you think you could be of any help to the England squad?
I’ve helped plenty of world class athletes to become more focused – what athletes call being ‘in the zone’. I helped David Walliams, who swam the Channel, and he’s not a professional athlete but he certainly performed like one. I think he did it in near record time. Athletes call it being ‘in the zone’, musicians call it being ‘in the groove’, psychologists call it being ‘in the flow’ – it’s when you’re in a state of absolute focus and nothing else around you really matters. You’re just in that intensely focused place and you feel a little bit of invincibility, actually. It makes you physically and psychologically stronger.
I don’t deal with sports people so much anymore but I think that’s something I could help provide. Lots of athletes approached me after I worked with Nigel Benn – snooker players, football players, tennis players, other boxers – and for ten years I worked with sports people quite a lot. I never cease to be amazed by the results we get and I think it can help give people that edge, that extra edge that brings out the ability that they have. It’s not like I can give someone ability that they don’t already have - all I can do is help them bring out [what they’ve got].
Some athletes train for years – let’s say for the Olympics – and they walk out on the day with a billion people watching them on television and they’ve got to make that one opportunity count. I wouldn’t leave it to chance – I would make sure that my mind and body were programmed to be in a peak state of performance the moment that I stepped on the track, or onto the field or wherever it is. So that’s one of the things I can do. I won’t be working with any more athletes in the near future as I’m a bit busy here in the United States but I think our team’s in pretty good shape anyway.
Paul McKenna’s ‘I Can Make You Thin’ live event will take place on Saturday May 29th at the IBIS Hotel in Earls Court, London, from 9.30am to 6pm (doors open 8.30am). Click here for more details:
http://www.paulmckenna.com/courses-weight-loss.aspx