Many of you will know Paul McKenna as a hypnotist on the television in the Nineties. That was indeed how he first came to prominence, persuading punters to dance with brooms they thought were Madonna and the like. “People were doing daft things but, by today’s reality show standards, I was pretty tame,” he says.
McKenna left stage hypnotism behind nearly ten years ago. Now 43, in recent years he has made his name, and his considerable fortune, as this country’s premier self-help exponent, his five books in as many years servicing a seemingly insatiable desire for more confidence, more success, more control, more happiness — and, most of all, less fat. (His boldly titled I Can Make You Thin is his biggest seller by far.) His publishing deal — close to £3 million for five books — was the largest non-fiction advance in British history. His show seminars (“stand-up therapy,” he calls them) sell out at £250 a time to audiences of more than 500. McKenna’s ambitions don’t end there. “Through regular media, and modern media, I’m going to make it possible for millions of people to improve their lives.”
He likes being famous. Not only does he not complain about fame, as many celebrities do, he revels in it. I ask about his celebrity clients and he reels off some names: “Robbie Williams, Naomi Campbell, Elle Macpherson, Sophie Dahl, David Bowie, the Duchess of York . . . ”
A week later, his publicist e-mails. “Paul has asked me to give you some more celeb names he has helped for your interview: Stephen Fry, David Walliams, Roger Moore, Courtney Love.” Most of these people wanted to lose weight or stop smoking. Roger Moore wanted to stop eating bread. Walliams wanted help with the psychological side of his Channel swim last summer. “I taught him a method of time distortion so it speeds up,” says McKenna. “I use it myself on plane journeys.”
McKenna’s methods are based on the principles of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). He’s a a fully trained practitioner and member of the Society of NLP, its official body. Formulated in California in the 1970s by John Grinder and Richard Bandler (the latter is now McKenna’s mentor and business partner), NLP, while not accepted by the scientific establishment, underpins a great deal of thinking in therapy, sports psychology, management and motivational training and self-improvement circles.
“Every major corporation in the world is using NLP,” says McKenna. The ideas of both positive thinking and visualisation, for instance, are essential NLP concepts. He explains: “People have always changed the way they feel and behave by making pictures and sounds in their imagination (visualisation), just as there were ways to communicate before the telephone, but they weren’t very efficient. NLP has provided a similar jump in the human potential for change.” The idea of mirroring an interlocutor’s body language and speech to increase rapport and “build agreement”, familiar to salesmen (and Tony Blair), is an NLP tenet. Or rather, the idea that such mirroring (which most people do naturally during an interaction) is refinable and teachable is where NLP would come in.
“NLP-ers believe the brain is a computer running software,” says McKenna, “some of it positive, some of it negative. The job of the practitioner is to rewrite the software where necessary.” This rewriting he claims to be able to do astonishingly quickly, within an hour in some cases. “Say you had a phobia about spiders,” he says. “Conventional therapy would get you to relive the original episode that gave you the fear and very , very slowly introduce you to a picture of a spider and then after six months they’d put you in a room with a spider next door.” (His scorn for orthodox analysis, particularly that based on Freud — “barking”, “off his head” etc — is considerable.) “Lots of people can talk psychobabble about why they are as they are,” he says. “Understanding a problem doesn’t necessarily help solve it.” What he would do, and does, he says, is to focus not on the why of the fear, but the how.
“I ask someone how they feel when they think about spiders. They feel stressed, so I get them to think about something relaxing and then to think about spiders when they are feeling calm. I reset the emotional equilibrium.” There are various techniques to do this, running a “film” of the phobia in the mind, for instance, then reducing its emotional impact by turning down the colour, focus and volume and so forth. A great deal of NLP comes down to the practitioner getting the patient to structure, control and develop the power of their imagination.
“Through imagination,” says McKenna, “we have a lot more control over autonomic processes. Think of something scary, your heartbeat quickens, your blood pressure rises, your body chemistry changes.” He cites a study in Cleveland, Ohio, conducted by Dr Karen Olness, in which children were shown a puppet show in which one puppet represented a virus and another a policeman seeking to combat it. “Some of the kids were asked to close their eyes and imagine they had more policemen puppets fighting the virus. Saliva samples then showed their immunoglobulin levels had rocketed, as if they were fighting an infection.” More anecdotally, McKenna has a friend, a Hollywood screenwriter and NLP-er, who throughout his work on a script will visualise the end product being premiered in front of Steven Spielberg, will imagine himself as Spielberg watching the movie. And then imagine himself as another director watching, and then Joe Public watching, and so forth. McKenna uses similar methods when he writes a book. He calls it “floating out of his body and down the time-line”. Others might call it strategic planning.
McKenna’s interest in NLP grew simultaneously with his development as a hypnotist. From his early twenties, while he was making his name as a hypnotist, he was also studying NLP. “Hypnotism is just part of the NLP toolbox really,” he says. “It means that you can work faster. It’s shrouded in mystery but it shouldn’t be. All communication is a form of hypnosis anyway. If I ask you to pass the salt, and you do, I’ve modified your response.” He means that if you ask someone to do something — and they do it — you have, to an extent, made them do it.
Growing up in Enfield, North London, his father a builder, his mother a home economics teacher who became a university lecturer, he wanted to become a radio broadcaster like his hero Kenny Everett. “When I was 12 I’d read from the newspaper into a tape recorder and try to make it sound like it did on the radio; I’m a compulsive person.” He achieved his goal, working for Radio 1 by his mid-twenties.
Then two things happened. An eye specialist, a medical doctor, convinced him it was his destiny to become a “healer”. And a friend, who was a fellow fan of self-help books, suggested he try a “projection” exercise. “I went ten years into the future and I saw that I was a DJ, older, more paranoid. I thought ‘crikey’. I did this exercise where you ask yourself what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail. It takes the limiters off. I thought ‘I’m a hypnotist, I’m on TV, I’ve a range of self-improvement products, glamorous clients, it’s a fantastic life’. I thought I don’t know if I can do that, I’ll have to educate myself, dress differently, take risks.” He performed a personal stocktake, an inventory of his skills and resources and “made very, very clear plans”. He still does this from time to time.
For those of you in need of some reassurance about all this New Age business, it’s worth saying that McKenna is an extremely old-fashioned showman. We meet in his mews house in Kensington, a home that surely justifies the description luxury bachelor pad; garaged near by are his Ferrari 575 and his Bentley Arnage; in the wine rack in the kitchen are eight bottles of Château Latour 1989, which according to my sources sell for £225 a pop. Elsewhere in the three-storey house, the name Bang & Olufsen figures discreetly, but frequently.
