Interview with Rik Schnabel on the Topic of NLP Time Line (Transcript)
Hey, everybody, my name is Nathan Segal from Coffee with Nathan, and I'm joined by my colleague Rik Schnabel. Rik was born to postwar immigrants who taught him the poverty cycle. It would create a life of hardship, insecurity, violence and drama, caused by perpetual money issues until at 40, Rik untrained his brain and broke the cycle. Rick has turned untraining his clients patterns and programs into a string of success stories. Since 2002, and with over 25,000, brain training hours, Rik has been helping average people to get beyond average by untraining their brain. If you want more from life, you need to undo your neurological programs from driving you and your behaviors. Rik is also the best selling author of five books, including the power of beliefs, the secrets to creating a life beyond limits ROAR courage, the life coach millionaires, a richer way to think and teenage coming out in 2021. So Rik,I'm really curious, how did you get the moniker of the brain untrainer?
Rik: I was working with a client who had multiple sclerosis. And he said to me, I really get a sense that you'll be able to help me to get rid of the symptoms of M.S. And he then agreed to go through a series of processes, so we scheduled them in; I designed a program. And what happened, to cut a very, very long story short, we had six sessions. And each session, I would calibrate him. And what I mean by that is, I would say on a scale of 0 to 10, 10, is you totally have the symptoms of MS; Zero, you don't.
Where are you? And he just kept going from what was originally at 10. He just kept coming down and down each particular session.
And then we got to the final session, and he finally got to fractions. He got down to 1.5. And I said, Wow, 1.5 That's incredible. What are you holding on to just keep that little bit there? And I discovered a course the concept of self sabotage and a positive gain from having the experience because he will get toxic his terms, and he would quit his job. And he would just stay at home, watch movies, go to
courses, do things like that. And so there was a benefit in having the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. So we did a lot of belief work, we did a lot of timeline, we did a huge amount of work.
At the end of it, when he finally got to that point that he had no more symptoms of multiple sclerosis.
He said to me, he said, You know what? You're not a coach, and you're not even a trainer. And I
thought, I'm about to get an insult. And he said, you're actually a brain untrainer. He said, You untrained my brain of all of those patterns, those identities, those beliefs, or systems, those things that kept the Multiple Sclerosis continuing through my life. And so that's how I got the title of brain untrainer.
Nathan: Very cool. I like it. It's very unusual. It's not the common thing that you would hear from people when they describe who they are what they do.
Rik: Yeah, I think a lot of the a lot of the culture these days is that we're all trying to put things into our brain. But what we're not doing is we're not recognizing that there's really a number of filters that we think through. So what we need to do if we want to create different thought patterns, we need to change those filters. And that's essentially what I did with him.
Nathan: Yeah. And one of the things that you mentioned in in terms of these sessions is timeline. And you've also said that it's your favorite NLP technique. And what I'm wondering is, what is the number one thing that you like about it?
Rik: Well, the thing that I like about timeline if we get a sense of the process, and just to kind of short circuit this, you focus a person on either a limiting decision that they might have made or a negative
emotion that seems to be side sideswiping them on a regular basis. So let's say for example, the emotion might be incredible anger.
So what the timeline process really does is, the first thing that you do is you go back to the very event that you first experienced anger, and you find the root cause of that anger. Then what you do is you have a person rise above, metaphorically, visually, above themselves at that moment, and begin to start getting what we call a learning or a lesson from the experience, because in truth, every negative
experience has a lesson in it. And so what that typically does, the more times you tend to hover above your problems, I believe that what it does is it really creates incredible wisdom within a person. After exploring many of your problems, and many of your negative emotions, what you typically start finding is you start finding all these wisdom points. And if you keep exposing yourself to all those wisdom points, it naturally builds your own wisdom.
Nathan: There was something else you mentioned to do a timeline, you said, you can use it to calm emotional triggers. How would that work?
Rik: Well, psychologically, what basically happens, in a very simple sense, a person has a an event, in that event, let's say somebody attacks that person in a physical way. And then what happens is, our brain is actually functioning very healthily. When what it does is it avoids circumstances that look, sound, feel anything like that attack And it's just protecting us. That's all it's really doing. So trauma, if you really think about it is a protection mechanism within our neurology.
So anytime we hear someone with that volume, or we hear a specific type of voice, or we see someone looking that same way that person looked just prior to attacking us. What it will do is it almost sends off alarm bells in our heads. And it will either do one of two things, we will either freeze, on the spot.
Or we will fight. Of course, we can also flee. So from that perspective, what is going on in the trauma is our job to remove the trauma, once the trauma is removed, the person doesn't have those same strategies that they run whenever they feel like they're under threat.
In fact, they start feeling more empowered, in fact, and they're not fearful anymore. And if you think about it, at the end of the day, fear is probably the number one thing that holds people back.
Nathan: I would agree. as a side note, I've watched a video a while ago, it was between Tony Robbins, john Reese and Frank Kern. They were talking about why people don't complete their courses, the typical number of actual people who tend to use a product is about 5%. And Tony's theory was that a lot of these people are lacking certainty. And if they had the certainty that they would get the result from the product, then your numbers would go up.
Rik: Yeah.
Nathan: In a conversation we had a few days ago, you spoke about the learning position with timeline.
Could you elaborate more on what that is?
Rik: Yeah, the learning position. Actually, I'll give you a personal account. When I was studying timeline myself, the best part of the study is to actually experience it, to put yourself into an experience.
I grew up a very angry person. And it was actually my biggest fear was that my anger was going to completely release and I would have no control over it. And I would end up killing somebody, I had so much rage in me.
The rage came from my early experience in primary school where I was picked on and bullied. So it happened with regularity. And if something just keeps rubbing us up the wrong way, or keeps antagonizing us, or keeps just pushing that finger into our chest, what it does is it builds frustration.
Now Freud used to call anger, a hydraulic model. In other words, you keep putting frustration into a small vessel, until eventually someone squeezes the toothpaste to the wrong end, and all of a sudden, someone erupts unnaturally.
So what I experienced was I experienced anger, of course, as I was going through this process, and the learning position, is when you rise above the event, and you metaphorically assume that you are now in a spot to be able to learn from the event. Now typically, when when we're triggered emotionally, or we have the emotion is, we won't think logically, to really get a learning. So the process actually forces you to really look at the event.
So in this event, I'm now seeing a particular point, it was just one event of many where I was behind a hill at the school. Now, this was the point that the teachers could no longer see what was going on. So that was the point when the bullies engaged. So I saw this event. And I saw this event from up high.
And of course, the process asks you, what is the lesson? What didn't you learn back then that, should you look at it now what would you learn? So what was the learning? What was the lesson? And what I got is that as a trainer, and as a coach, one of my key skills is really thinking very, very fast on my feet.
And I got that skill, because of the bullying incidents. Because what I found is, when I was able to think very quickly on my feet, metaphorically, what would happen is, I could sometimes talk my way out of being hit. Or I could sometimes be a little bit funny without being abrasive, or really taking the Mickey out of them, so to speak. What I would do is, it's, it's actually harder to hit a person that makes you laugh. And, so I discovered a lot of this in that learning position. And the fascinating thing is that your brain sees polarities. So it's either yes or no, it's like a computer. It's bad or it's good. No, it's terrible or it's wonderful.
And so what I saw was, I saw the learning from this event, and I began to realize how valuable that is, to me today, as an asset, that I could no longer look at those events and feel bad. All I could do is look at those events and start to feel like I actually got something of value from those events. And I found myself very, very quickly, shooting in my mind to another time where I saw one of the bullies. And I saw him being chased by his father with a big stick. And all of a sudden, all the dots came together, it made me realize that, bullies are often bullied. And they're trained that way. And so all I could feel emotionally instead of anger, was I felt really sorry for him. Yeah. And today, I actually feel sorry for a lot of the bullies, they're actually very fearful people.
Nathan: That makes a lot of sense. There were a couple of things that we'd spoken about in this previous conversation, one of them about timeline improving past decisions, and you just covered that.
And then you also mentioned that timeline de-identifies then re-identifies the person and I think you just covered that again.
Rik: And that's what it does. We make decisions regularly, we do poorly at a mathematics test at school. And immediately we might say, I am stupid, or I am not good at mathematics or mathematics is not my thing. Yes, the truth is, anything can be learned. Anything can be mastered, but not without attitude.
Nathan: It is funny what you said about triggers. When I was young when I was humiliated in front of a class. I developed the belief I was stupid and failed my way through a lot of classes after that. 13
years later standing in the locker room at a tech school and thinking about the subjects we were taking, and realizing I was doing well. I remember thinking, where did I ever get the idea that I was stupid?
And then the whole memory of what happened came back, played in my mind for a few seconds it dissolved, and then my marks took off. So the trauma was a decision that I didn't know that I made and, and but when that happened, the whole thing just just vanished. And it didn't come back.
Rik: And it makes a lot of sense. One of the things that I often find when I'm coaching people, they'll often get to that one point, that decision point. And then all of a sudden, it's like all the dots are all joined. It's it's the epiphany that now happens, where they where they begin to realize and they start, yeah, and you see their faces change where they go, Oh, my God, I so get it. I now know why I do what I do. Because back then I made a decision that I was that kind of person.
Nathan: It's one of the things that you've said about timeline is that in addition to what you've just explained it also helps a person to think richer. And I'm just wondering, how?
Rik: I'll probably be bringing my own personal story to this. I had for many, many years. And, this all makes very much logical sense sense to me, and it will to you to be here. And that is that I came from immigrants, though, they immigrated from Germany to Australia, and post Second World War, and we all know what happened in Germany.
And so, even though I was born in Australia, just because I had a German surname. Well, that's where a lot of the bullying came from, too. But what essentially happened was there was a lot of judgment, a lot of criticism and so forth, leveled at me through my, through my childhood. So, what happens is we create an identity of who we actually are. And then we play out that identity of who we are. So really, in timeline, what can happen, it's also what we're doing is we're just running upwards and backwards and forwards along our timeline, making new decisions, re-identifying ourselves as to who we are changing some of the belief patterns, we had, in fact, changing some of our neurological patterns.
So I was poor because I had immigrant parents, I had an identity which matched my parents. I could not see myself as rich. I couldn't even see myself as thinking richly, because I came from poor parents.
And so what happened was my behavior tended to be poor. My activities were poor, my career choices were poor.
And so much of my behavior was very much that and then I got to a particular point in my life, I was 40. I was having my first child. I was married, and I was down to my last $27. And it was that moment that I was so annoyed, and so frustrated with what had transpired over all those years that I drew a line in the sand. I said, that's it. That's enough. I'm doing whatever I can to be able to get beyond this. Now fortunately, at that particular point, I was learning Neuro Linguistic Programming, And so much of the timeline work, and much of the belief change work was all about changing my identity or who I thought I was.
Now, I was working in sales at the time, but I had a belief. And the belief was that I was terrible at sales. But it was in coaching, and I was getting coached as well as learning NLP at the time. And my coach said to me, tell me, what do you think about salespeople? And back then I said, that I think salespeople are sleazy. They would sell their own grandmother, etc, etc, etc. Now, of course, I don't believe any of that anymore. But back then I did. So he said, let's put a couple of dots together. He said, because all neurology is a mathematical formula. So let's put the formula together. The formula is you don't believe sales people are good people. Let's summarize it is that you are equally salesperson. But you're a bad one. So therefore, you're a good person.
And so he said, therefore, if you were successful, like a super salesperson, what would you be? You'd be super bad. Super bad. So he said, that is the core of much of your problems in sales. And we did some work on that.
And the fascinating thing is, I went from the worst salesperson in this company. It was the American Australian company. I was the worst salesperson in America, and Australia as far as they're concerned.
And I went, within three months, I went from the worst to the best. I skyrocketed to success in my sales to such a degree that they investigated me, they just couldn't believe that a person that was about to lose his job, which I was, could all of a sudden become their best asset. But it really shows you what your belief system can actually do.
Nathan: And our languaging the way that we speak to ourselves and that leads into the next question, which is you've said that you can completely turn a person's emotional state around in 15 or 20
minutes. You just described that for yourself, but how would you do that with a client?
Rik:
Well, the thing that you've got to do is, first of all, there's a bit of setup, a bit of pre-framing, a bit of getting a client ready to actually create the shift. So you've got to make sure that the client does definitely want the shift, you've got to do what's called a future pace and getting the client to think about the future with the shift intact that is they've shifted. And you've got to find out, is there any negative results of shifting? And if the answer is yes, there are, then that client is unconsciously going to work against the work.
So that's the first thing, you've got to clear that path to make sure that it's ideal or ecological. That is it's good for them, good for the planet, good for everyone, should they move forward. So the next thing that you've got to do is you've got to get to the very core of the problem. So for example, this is I guess, why I'm not a massive fan of medication. because quite often, what we're doing is we're medicating the symptoms, not really getting to the core of the problem. We're just nullifying, the reactions and the responses that come from either biochemistry than your neurology.
What I prefer to do is get to the very core of the actual problem. So in my example, with anger, which, because I had so much anger in me, it's a little bit like the example that I gave earlier with squeezing the toothpaste from the wrong end and all of a sudden you have a person flaring up. A person who has a lot of anger doesn't need a lot of tinder or a lot of flame to light that fire. They just need one little spark.
Bang, they're off. So what you've got to do is you've got to go into the very cause of it, not the
symptoms, not the anger itself, but the very core or cause of the actual anger. And what that will often come down to are decisions. And there will be decisions, such as I'm a loser; or, I'm stupid. Decisions such as the life that I really want for myself, I'm never gonna have. So I'm just gonna I'm gonna become a real angry bastard, become a real abrasive bitch. Know these are harsh words, but I'm really making a point...
Nathan: ...but accurate. And you have to use words like that sometimes. When you're describing something for the impact, and for a way of just cutting through stuff and just getting through?
Rik: And quite often, when I'm telling some of these stories to my students, or my clients that I'm coaching, a lot of them just do not believe it, because they're looking at the evidence of now. And I'm pretty chill guy those days, I'm certainly not the angry guy that I used to be. I used to call myself a
Rebel Without a clue. And the thing was that, it's just that you can completely flip people's negative emotions.
But you do have to actually get to the very river of them, you got to get to the source. When you get to the source, clear out the water, clear out the debris, then you could argue that they're really flowing much better. There's no blockages in their body, there's no memories that they keep being triggered to and anchoring them back in the past. And that's essentially what you're doing.
Nathan: That makes sense. So in terms of what we've covered here, I'm just wondering if there's anything else that comes to mind that you'd like to cover that we haven't addressed?
Rik: Well, I guess a nice thing to perhaps give you a sense of is, various clients that I've worked with, and students that I've seen, go through incredible shifts. So for example, there's one particular
gentleman, and he was, first of all, he was a student of mine, then he said, can you actually personally coach me? And I said, Sure. And so we were coaching for probably two, three years. And I was wondering why we coaching for so long? What's going on here?
And then one day, I asked him for a testimonial. And he said, Sure, you know, happy to give you a testimonial. And the testimonial, I can't remember it verbatim, but it goes something like this. I was on
$100,000 for I think he said a decade. So for a whole decade. He was on $100,000. Now, for some people, that's an incredible wage, but he's been on it for a decade. And he's thinking, why am I stuck at 100 grand?I can't get beyond that. So I coached him and within a short space of time, he increased his income by 100 grand.
And that's why he kept coming back. Every time I coached him, his income just kept going up and up and up and up. And that's why he kept coming back. But he's a lovely man. He lives now in Austria.
He's a base jumper. He's an incredible, dynamic, man, lovely, lovely man. But, it's when you realize that everything that we do, comes from our neurology, now most people get that. Yeah, yeah, sure.
What's going on up here determines what happens out here.
But the thing that people I think, don't really get is that inside of us very deeply inside of us, is a particular person that we see in our mind's eye. And then not often the same person we see in the mirror. And so it's that person that we actually see that we are almost reflecting through that person. It's like a mask that we wear, that protects us in public. That behind that mask, is the person that feels that way, not the mask, but that way, the person behind the mask. And so most of the time, much of activity is typically is governed by our past.
it's basically, that name that we were called, that, as you described it earlier, that time that you were embarrassed or ridiculed, ashamed. And we carry that in our body and we store that as a memory. And so you can literally go back through a memory. And you can scratch the hell out of out of it like you would an old vinyl record, that the pattern just jumps, the needle just jumps, it doesn't get in the groove of that old way of thinking. And you can shift things very quickly when you know how.
Nathan: Yeah, that's great. I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with me on this. I love our conversations. And I know that from past experience, we could keep going on and on, but for right now, time to stop. I really appreciate your time. Thank you.
