Paul McKenna’s Change Your Life In 7 Days
I’m all for self help, otherwise I wouldn’t have started this self help blog – but here is a book that claims it can change your life, and not only that, but in a mere 7 days! But then, it is Paul McKenna making these grandiose claims, and Paul is so successful, you have probably already heard of this book – some of you may well have read it already! So where should this book sit on the avid self helper’s bookshelf?!
In a world where therapy continues to be a boom industry, and anti-depressants and tranquilisers are still prescribed by the billion, it might at first seem awfully odd and absurd for Paul McKenna to claim either he or you or anything you can change your life in the short space of 7 days. Then again, I am sure people laughed at the Wright Brothers’ dreams of a flying machine, for years – until their first success changed everything! I have read a lot of self help books, from the popular to the more weird and wonderful – and there are still times when I need help (don’t we all!), even if it’s just a little boost, so when I saw Paul McKenna’s Change Your Life in Seven Days I thought I would pick it up and give it a go – if nothing else, I was curious about Dr McKenna as a friend told me she had been personally trained by him in hypnosis and NLP!
Firstly, if you’re looking for an easy read, and not mountains of text to wade through, and also look for good value in a purchase, then this book may be an ideal start for you, as you not only get the book, but also a FREE mind programming CD (although of course, you are really buying a book with a CD, there’s no such thing as a free CD or a free lunch!). So you get a book and a “mind programming” CD, and Paul Mckenna makes much of the idea that you can re-program your brain, using the image of “installing” new software. As somone into computers, this idea appeals to me, although it may sound a little scary, this idea of being re-programmed! Then again we are exposed every day to the result of advertisers who have spent huge sums of money to change and influence how people think and feel, so there can be no dount that it works and it works very well – or they wouldn’t continue to invest so much in advertising! How refreshing it could be, then, to spend a little time re-programming your own mind in order to some of the results YOU want instead of to fill other companies’ fat pockets!!
If you have not read any of Paul McKenna’s serious books before, you might still retain the popular image of him as a TV personality and prank stage hypnotist – while he was very successful at that, he is also a highly educated (with a doctorate) individual and has spent many years researching into what makes people successful, and how to make them even more successful – covering fields such as hypnosis and NLP (neuro linguistic programming). He draws much of the advice contained in Change Your Life in Seven Days from his knowledge of NLP – and in some respects the book is a simplified NLP manual. If you’re not familiar with NLP, it is basically a system of psychotherapy which, instead of looking into what’s wrong with people, actually looks at what works well and seeks to build on this. So for example, McKenna has studied the behaviour patterns of 100′s of successful and confident people in order to find out just what makes them successful and confident, and he brings this knowledge to this book and his other systems for helping people achieve more. There is plenty of information about NLP on the net, try this WIKI NLP entry for a little introduction! In any case, although Neuro Linguistic Programming is a relatively new system, it does seem to have a large number of benefits, one of which is it can work very quickly where other forms of psychological programming can take years!
So, Change Your Life In Seven Days uses Paul McKenna’s knowledge of NLP, the power of hypnotic suggestion, and other knowledge and research he has picked up during his very successful career. It is interesting to note that while in some other titles, he says something like “I can make you…”, instead the title is more of an instruction that “YOU are going to change your own life, and indeed this is the format the book takes.
It is structured to be easily readable, and can be read in 7 chunks over the week. Depending on your lifestyle, you may or may not be able to read it in the 7 days, but there is not anything mystical about the 7 days – you will not suddenly “fail” if you go over the time frame of a week! Being a bit cynical (afterall, I want to bring you an honest appraisal of the books and other items on this site!) the title is a bit misleading, but then book titles so often are. You MAY find your life instantly and irrevocably changed once day 7 ticks over (indeed I have read books in just one day which HAVE profoundly changed some aspect of me or my life) – but this is a very bold claim/aim, and I think the book is actually doing something quite different, in that the 7 days you spend reading the book will be the START of profound changes. Still, 7 days is a good benchmark to aim for though for actually reading the book – and I would say if you are fairly new to self help concepts, then if you spend 7 days reading, and really getting into the techniques described in the book, then it will be a 7 days that sees you at the start of a journey which, if you take on the challenges and persevere, really will be the start of a life changing experience that really will take you forward on a journey of self improvement, towards a more fulfilled life – but you do have to work at it! 
Self Help books ought always to come with caveats, however – and it would be irresponsible of me if I didn’t mention a few negatives. By and large the reviews on Amazon are very positive, with 5 stars from the majority of independent reviewers – but this doesn’t mean that the negative reviewers don’t have valid points. One important point is that many NLP enthusiasts claim that their techniques work for everyone, and this is a claim McKenna does make in the book. However, to claim that one particular system will work for everyone could actually be regarded as quite silly – even the mega drug and pharma companies recognise that pills they pump millions of research dollars into, often only end up working for 50% or less of patients. I don’t think the claim is dangerous in anyway – but there are people in our society who suffer significantly from mental illness, and help for them needs to come from a professional, rather then a self help source. And clearly, there was at least one reviewer at Amazon for whom the book didn’t work, as he didn’t sound very happy!! Another criticism that could be levelled, is that McKenna makes a lot of use of quotes and examples of famous people who have endured adversity only to go on to be big successes – the idea being that you have to fail 100 times in order to achieve the one big success that will take you all the way to the top. Of course you also have all the people who not only failed the first 100 times but also the 500th as well – and while it is true that you make your own luck, we are not all going to wind up millionaires by adopting an optimistic frame of mind and working hard – if only that were so, there would be very few poor nurses and teachers, for a start! And there are no doubt people who do everything right, and who still fail badly… But of course this would have no place in any self help book whose purpose was to make you live more positively! But it is worth mentioning, as this blog is about self help and self development – it is not about waving magic wands
All that said, having read through the book, I do believe it has some very valid and very significant information, laid out in a comprehensible and accessible format, which, if followed through and practised enthusiastically, coupled with the mind-programming CD, will lead to very significant, even profound changes in a large proportion of people who use the techniques. Change Your Life in Seven Days is a brilliant book if you are perhaps just stuck in a rut, and want to work with accessible NLP and self hypnosis to make improvements in your life. The real message of the book is actually the opposite to what is suggested in the title (and this is probably a clever bit of suggestion deliberately thrown in there by Dr McKenna!) – Changing your life in 7 days is a big, even silly claim – but it also holds true that changing you life has to begin one day at a time, and the first 7 days could well be the most important. All in all, I would say reading this book would be a pretty good start if you do want to make changes – and the CD really does help, if nothing else, you get to relax for half an hour and do absolutely nothing – while hypnotic suggestion weaves its magic into your unconscious mind!