He is wearing a chalk-stripe Brioni suit. What’s that? I ask, a couple of grand? “Yes, er, maybe a bit more actually,” he says in his sonorous former disc jockey voice. On his wrist is a chunky gold Rolex Daytona. “A lot of people think gold is very bling but I like it,” he says.
He thinks the British are still encouraged to feel guilty about success. Probably thanks to a “manipulative”, “abusive” and “brutal” education at a Catholic secondary school, McKenna is messianic about expunging guilt from his adult life, and from others’ too. (Though he still believes in God, “in a pantheistic way, as an organising force for goodness within everything”.) Ostentation is not his only weakness. Very keen to stress his own fallibility, he says he can be selfish, gullible, thin-skinned and vengeful as well. And before being photographed, he goes off to put on some make-up. “I’m looking a bit pasty and I’m very vain.” I’d guessed as much from a brief visit to his office in the next-door house, which, once you’ve added up all the posters and book jackets and CDs, plus the lifesize cutout propped up at the far end, must contain 30, 40, maybe 50 images of the boss.
“I’m quite shallow really,” he says, “so if there’s some famous person who wants to come to see me, and I’ve got a slot, definitely I’ll say come on over.” He doesn’t charge for these sessions. “I ask people to make a donation to charity. Life’s good to me and that’s one of the ways to give something back.” One man recently offered him £100,000 if he could stop him smoking. “I told him I couldn’t be bought. I’d still do this if I had all the money in the world.”
He continues: “I used to try to compensate for a lack of self-worth with material things. Our whole culture is set up to constantly help us to change our feelings, and there isn’t anyone in the world who doesn’t seek to control their feelings through external means, be it food, sex, drugs, gambling, whatever. I’m a positive, optimistic person, but a few years ago I got very low. I could never have a big enough house, a beautiful enough girlfriend . . . ” He has a steady girlfriend at present, Niki Roe — “an angel”.
His mission is to help us to control our feelings ourselves, rather than reaching for something that may harm us. “It’s about making little incremental changes each day that add up to a massive change over time. I’m OK with people being sceptical. I’m sceptical myself until things are proved to me. I would say to people, if you are a model of perfection as a human being, using 100 per cent of your potential, then, no, I can’ t help you. But I doubt that is the case.”
Quit Smoking Today Without Gaining Weight, by Paul McKenna (Transworld, £10.99), is available at £9.89: 0870 1608080, timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
How does it work?
Neuro-linguistic programming, NLP
This theory began with the question, what makes excellent people excellent? In the 1970s, Richard Bandler, a psychology student at the University of California, began working with John Grinder, who was then the assistant professor of linguistics, to answer this. The theory they developed, NLP, presupposes that we all have the same neurology, so if someone is able to do something, then anyone can, so long as they manage their neurophysiology in the same way. Bandler and Grinder developed the idea of “modelling” your beliefs, thoughts, actions and words on successful people. They co-wrote the book Transformations, outlining techniques for doing this, such as visualisation. NLP has now become a multimillion-dollar global industry that encompasses therapy, self-help and management training. NLP books now rank in the top ten bestselling business titles, and one training school alone, The School of NLP, based in Manchester and Nottingham, had 1,000 students last year.
Thought field therapy, TFT
Accusations of wacky cultishness have been levelled at a comparatively new technique that McKenna employs: thought field therapy, or TFT. It is based on the idea that psychological problems such as anxiety are the product of disturbances in what practitioners call “thought fields” and that if a patient taps acupressure points in the body while thinking about the thing that troubles them, they will be freed from their emotional pain. TFT’s creator, the psychologist Roger Callahan, claims that depression can be cured with this method in 15 minutes. While that might appear to put it firmly in the weird field, TFT’s clinical use is growing worldwide, including in some NHS clinics. Proponents argue that the technique uses a mind-body connection to “unblock” troublesome thoughts. Several clinical studies have indicated that it does seem to calm patients effectively, though commentators in the Journal of Clinical Psychology continually criticise the validity, independence and rigour of such studies.
Hypnosis
This technique is probably as old as civilisation. Ancient Egyptian scripts explain how to hypnotise someone, but it began to be developed in the 1600s, primarily with animals: people calmed chickens hypnotically by various means, such as balancing wood shavings on their beaks. There is no definitive explanation for how it works, but it is a trance state characterised by suggestibility, relaxation and heightened imagination where the subject is conscious, but tunes out most of the surrounding stimuli and focuses their attention on the person who has hypnotised them. Hypnotherapy is one of the most comprehensively examined complementary therapies in Britain, and many studies attest to its effectiveness. Trials have found evidence that hypnotherapy can be effective for irritable bowel syndrome, relieving pain and stress in cancer patients, controlling pain in labour and may well have an effect on helping weight loss. It is often used to help smokers to quit.
JOHN NAISH
Are you in the right mind to change your life?
Answer these questions to find if you have a smart strategy for self-imporevment, says John Naish
