C: Cloe Madanes M: Mark Peysha S: Student

M: Welcome to Robbins Madanes Training. Today is the teleclass on Module 3 and a mega-strategy that we call
Finding the Spark. This is one of the most important mega-strategies that we have. Like expanding the unit and
the elevation strategy, it has to do with bringing more resources into the conversation. In this case it has to do
with bringing the person’s human energies and emotions and identity that is needed in order for them to
accomplish what they need to accomplish. One of the arts of strategic intervention is that you use the resources
that are already available to you and to the person. Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you are
working with someone who needs something completely different than they have had before. For instance, you
might be helping a guy who is in a breakup with his girlfriend, and he is a very logical, organized person, and he
may need a different kind of energy in order to make things succeed with his girlfriend, so you need to find
something within him that will appeal and that will bring to the relationship what they need.

The Beverly film and intervention is a great example of Tony finding a part of Beverly and expanding it by
finding a little spark. It is often a little bit of defiance, a little bit of spirit, or a little bit of humor in the person
that you can then encourage and nurture during the conversation. This becomes a major resource where the
person can lock into it and use it. In Beverly it was finding a part of herself that had been repressed and that she
had always made wrong. It seemed during the intervention a lot of the time that her and Tony were just hanging
out, time was just being spent and there wasn’t a lot of progress, but in fact he was enticing and bringing out
this energy in her which they then named Joy and which became the engine of her weight loss.

C: Yes. There were two things that Beverly said that gave crucial information to Tony that he picked on and
based his strategy on. One was she said that as a child she was supposed to be seen but not heard. Beverly had
been very abused as a child. We don’t know the details, we just know that she was abused. When she says she
was supposed to be seen but not heard, she carried this to the extreme. Often people will take one injunction,
one order that they receive in childhood, and take it to a total extreme. So, definitely she could be seen. She was
huge physically and she could not be heard because she was very timid and shy. She really didn’t speak up. She
described her main emotion as being terrified, but being terrified was really just a rationalization for overeating.
She justified her overeating by saying that she was terrified, but the terrified had to do with the idea of not being
heard, also probably because when she talked to adults about the abuse they didn’t believe her. That is my
hypothesis. So, she wasn’t heard.

The second crucial statement Beverly gave Tony to identify what she had to do was that she felt that there was a
little woman inside of her, inside all that fat, so Tony wanted to uncover and discover that little woman inside of
her. Of course there are many different ways of doing this and I’m going to tell you some stories of different
ways to do this, but it reminded me so much of an Ericksonian intervention where Milton Erickson, the famous

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hypnotist we mentioned in the previous class, would say to a woman that was very overweight, “I want to see
the shapely legs that are hiding under all that blubber. I want you to come back in a couple of months or in a
few weeks and show me the legs that I can’t see now but that are there under the fat.” That’s a very interesting
way of conveying the idea in a hypnotic way of loosing the fat because the shapely body then will be
discovered. I just love that.

There are many different ways of finding the person inside. I think that some of you might have seen the short
film on Olivia Garzon who was a woman who had been very mistreated by the husband in a divorce. He took
everything from her and she felt she had lost herself completely. She was deeply depressed, she felt she had
nothing, and Tony just connected her to her ancestry and talked to her about how a Garzon would react in terms
of life’s adversities. As soon as she remembered her family of origin and her last name, her maiden name was
emphasized, she totally put herself together. She said a Garzon would be strong, a Garzon would take it on, and
so on, so that is a different way of doing it.

M: It seems that the predominant strategy for this is seeing if the person either seems stuck in an identity or in
an emotion that is constricting to them, then thinking what is the complementary emotion to this? What is the
emotion behind this? If you have for instance a woman who is very timid, shy, and terrified as in Beverly’s case,
then you are not seeing the whole person there. You need to know that the opposite of that person is inside of
her. So, in fact there was a humorous, ironic, comedian inside of her, and that is just a principle that you need to
go by when you are working with people, especially when they are under stress or in some form of a problem
situation. That is the energy that is going to enable them to break out and go into a completely different pattern.

Often it is actually like a crazy-eight that they internalize. Beverly had trained her ability to have humorous
observations of things and look at things ironically and be self-deprecating and make jokes, but only inside. She
was never able to express it. Maybe sometimes with friends, but not as a habitual thing and certainly not in a
group of people who might be judging her or evaluating her. By Tony just recognizing this little spark inside of
her at some point when he was provoking her or when he was teasing her, he could see that she was responding
to this. You do it again and you acknowledge it when it comes up. So when he says, “Hey, you’re kind of a little
smart-ass, aren’t you?” or, “You’re a little bit of a ham,” he encourages that. Sometimes it comes in the form of
rebellion, the person resisting you. You want to then draw that out and acknowledge it and nurture it.

C: Yes, totally. I want to tell a story about one of my cases that is one of my very favorite ones. It shows a
different way of changing someone’s identity by using the social system that they are embedded in and their
more important relations. The story is a little bit complicated but bare with me because it all will make sense.

One day when I had my institute in Washington D.C., it was a Friday evening and everybody had left. I was the
only one there when I got a call from Children’s Hospital asking me please to accept a referral that is an
emergency. They are sending a mother with two children immediately to my institute. They explain that the
mother came in with a little nine-year-old girl and an older brother who was twelve. The mother was saying that
the little girl was threatening to kill herself and the psychiatric resident that interviewed them felt that the
mother was completely disturbed and in very bad shape herself. He felt that he couldn’t handle this well and
wanted to refer them to us. I said, “OK, I’ll be waiting here,” so they came in.

This was an attractive woman, but she was disheveled. She wasn’t dressed according to what she could look
like. She looked very preoccupied and extremely anxious. The twelve-year-old boy was very quiet and polite

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and the little girl was adorable and seemed a little bit confused as to what was going on. I realized that
everybody was very anxious so I sat with the three of them first and talked about school and their friends and
what was going on. As I began to ask about the situation, the mother began to cry and she said she had to tell me
something but she preferred to tell me alone. I was satisfied that the children had seen that I was a good person,
that I was not going to harm their mother or anything, so at that point I took them to the waiting room to play
and I sat down with the mother. She told me that she was terrified because her ex-husband was a sex offender,
he had gone to jail for sexual crimes against her younger sister, he was coming out of jail and he had called her
and said that he wanted to see the children so she had locked herself in the house.

I talked to her more about her life and the situation with this man and it turned out that practically every man in
her life was violent. Her father had been violent with her mother and she had a brother who was in jail. I asked
her about her current situation and if she had a new relationship with a man. She said no, she lived like a hermit.
She went to work and she was very successful at work, actually, and she supported her children quite well in
quite a difficult job. She was head of customer service at a very huge company so like Beverly she was very
competent in that way, but she was terrified of this man and of men in general. She lived like a recluse and she
told me also that she had been an addict. For most of her life she had been addicted to cocaine. She said that if
she had the chance to use it now she still would use it and she wasn’t buying it now but she would use it and she
had gone to several doctors who had prescribed Valium for her without taking a drug history first. So here is this
very addicted woman taking Valium and driving the children around, a very dangerous situation.

To make a long story short, I said to her, “I’m going to talk first with your daughter Wendy and then I’m going
to give you my professional opinion of your son, also.” I sat down alone with Wendy and talked to her about her
friends, about school, whether she had a best friend, and so on, and then I said to her, “What could your mother
do to be happier? Do you think that your mother is happy enough?” and Wendy was so cute. She said, “No, she
can’t be happy because she never goes out to play. She doesn’t go out with friends. She has a bike and she never
uses it so she never gets any fresh air. She needs to go out and get fresh air,” [laughs] and I said, “Would you
give permission to your mother to go out? Would you stay with your brother as a babysitter from time to time so
your mother can go out?” and she said, “Yes.” I said, “Would you behave really well and not have a tantrum?”
because one of the things she did was she provoked her brother and fought with him and threw things at him,
and she said, “No, I want my mother to go out. I’ll be very, very good.” Then I talked with the brother alone and
he said the same thing. He felt that the mother needed to have a life and he would be happy to take care of his
little sister for the mother to see friends and so on.

I brought the mother, Mary, back in and here is the finding the spark part. I knew that this woman was so down
on herself, her self-esteem was so low because of course she blamed herself for her choice of husband. How
could she not have seen that he was a sexual pervert? How could she not have noticed much sooner that he was
molesting her sister? How could she have been blind to all this? And she felt that always her choice of partner
would be wrong and that she just made the wrong choices. She was totally down on herself so I knew that it
would be very difficult to motivate her to be happier for her own sake, but I could see how she loved her
children and that she would do anything for them, so I said to her, “You know, Wendy can’t be happy because
you’re not happy. She is just like you. She looks like you, she talks like you, and you are showing her how to be
an unhappy, miserable person. Now if you could show her that you are happy, she would be happy too and she
would stop talking about killing herself.” Actually Wendy said that she didn’t remember saying that she was
going to kill herself, but the mother remembered it clearly and made a huge thing about it. I convinced her that
she was going to try to do something different to show Wendy that she could be happy so that Wendy could

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envision a happier life for herself.

I gave her a piece of paper and a pencil and I told her to write down what she was going to do. I told her that on
any given week she had to have three dates with three different men. She said, “What?” and she looked at me as
if I was completely crazy. I said, “Exactly what I said, three different men. It doesn’t matter whether they are
attractive or not, intelligent or not. They could be too fat, too thin, too young, too old, just three men. So tell me,
what men do you know that you could start inviting immediately on dates?” At first she couldn’t remember
anyone, then she remembered two friends, one she had dated and the other was just a friend, then she
remembered a gay friend, and I said, “OK, one can be gay. He’s probably the one that is most fun so that is
fine.” She said, “Yea, he is the one that I have most fun with.” I told her, “This doesn’t mean you have to have
sex with three men, it just means that you have to be involved in arranging three dates. That way you will stop
obsessing so much about your ex-husband and the best protection against a bad man is another man. So, you
will not get too intensely involved with any of these men because whenever you are out with one you are going
to have to be thinking that tomorrow you have to go out with the other one and that will protect you from
getting too intense. You wont tell each one about the presence of the others but inevitably they are going to
suspect or find out and that is a great protection against anyone who is bad, to know that you have a network of
other men that are good.” She looked at me completely incredulously but said, “You know, Cloe, I will try this
because what I’ve been doing now for years is not working and the children are not happy, so I will try what
you say.”

She came back a few days later and it was interesting because she had redone her hair. She had a totally
different hairdo and that is a good sign of change when a person totally changes their style. She was dressed
very nicely and she had met some new men. She had gone to her gym because one of the things that her little
girl Wendy had said was she had to exercise more to be happier and I emphasize that hugely also. So at the gym
she had started a conversation with a man that was a weightlifter, a very muscular man that was lifting weights,
and he invited her on a date so she was happy that she had that one date. Then she went to the hairdresser to
have a haircut and as he was cutting her hair, she noticed he’s a man and she invited him on a date and he
accepted. So she had those two dates and then she went to see another friend.

To make a long story short, she started going on these days and of course she found her spark and these men
were very interested in her but she ended up marrying the hairdresser that was a really good guy and in the
meantime there was no longer a problem with her little girl and no longer a problem with Valium or cocaine or
any addiction of any kind. These men were all very clean cut. Her hairdresser was a big muscular man also and
as soon as the ex-husband saw that she was involved with these men, the ex-husband stayed away. I remember
that I followed this for quite a long time. I was really fond of them. I have the footage and we should make a
film of this because from time to time she would call and say, “I remember that you filmed the sessions. Where
is the film you were going to make? I want to be on a film to train other people. I want to see my film.” [laughs]
She then also blossomed at work and became not only very successful at work but she became a union leader in
her branch of business.

The idea is that both Beverly and this woman had abuse in their background, bad abuse. Mary had not been
abused directly but the abuse of her sister to her was just as bad or worse as if it had been her. Tony with
Beverly found the spark in the sense of humor. I with Mary found the spark in what she was willing to do for
her children, particularly for her little girl.

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M: There is a huge problem that often happens for people when they feel ashamed or guilty for something that
happened in the past. If it was their own abuse or someone else’s abuse, or maybe they were carefree and they
messed up, they stop trusting themselves and start thinking, “No, no, no, I can’t let that happen again. How
could I have let that happen?” and they beat themselves up. Later, several years after this intervention, Tony
started to do some interventions also where he would find when one made a key decision.

What we call a key decision is that some times in your life (and everyone has gone through this in their history)
you are in a dilemma or you are in a position of great stress where you choose one option and not the other. For
instance in Beverly’s case it would be that she was being abused and in order to survive she had to make certain
parts of herself wrong or repress certain behaviors and go with other behaviors, and this was just the survival
instinct of a child. What Tony found and you have found as well in these interventions is that often if you find a
key decision in someone’s life, a turning point, often it is a traumatic moment or a difficult moment and the
person revisits that moment, they will actually find, as in Beverly’s case at the point of being abused, if they
remember the moment exactly before that and they have the emotion that they had before something happened,
like for instance before a car accident you are very happy and carefree and then you have a trauma like that and
you make a new decision, then what you are repressing is the exact emotion that you had before it happened.

Tony did an intervention with a guy who was in the Army where the presenting problem was that everyone felt
distanced from him. His wife felt like she didn’t know him and his children could not understand where he was
coming from. He was one of these very isolated, stony, silent men. People were feeling like it was such a weight
just to be around him and they had so many question marks about what was going on in his head that it was
becoming a huge problem. What Tony did was ask him about some parts of his past, something that was very
scary or something that happened to him, and what in fact had happened was there had been a time that he
almost died. He was in the army on a train going through the center of Africa, an incredibly inhospitable
territory, and he fell off the end of the train and was holding on by like three fingers. He knew in his mind that if
he were to fall off the train, they were not going to stop the train, he was lost, they were just going to go off
without him. It was him, nature, and those three fingers pulling him up. He held on long enough to pull on and
get himself up until he got some help. Tony asked him what was the emotion that he had right before that
moment when he fell off and the man said, “I couldn’t contain my excitement at returning to my family after
being in the Army.”

The emotion he had right before the trauma happened was feeling a connection with his family and feeling
inseparable from his family and his brethren and he realized that when he had fallen and was holding himself,
part of his brain was saying, “Whatever was just happening that made me vulnerable to this terrible thing
happening to me is wrong.” It is a neurological response. Your system basically says, “Whoops, can’t make that
mistake ever, ever again.” The nervous system does this sometimes as a response to shock or trauma. It is
unconscious and it is almost like an automatic thing. This is a good example to keep in mind when you are
trying to find the spark in someone. There are parts of themselves that they have suppressed, that aren’t right
because bad things could happen, so what Tony will often do in many of these if you watch carefully is that he
will provoke the person and look for a little bit of rebellion or resistance in the person and then he will name
that rebellion and resistance the complimentary emotion that he is looking for. In Beverly’s intervention, when
Tony is going a little bit off the chart in terms of his provoking her to be humorous, sly, or naughty, then his
response becomes, “Oh yea, you are a little bit of a rebel. You are a little bit of a wise ass,” and he magnifies
from there.

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C: Remember that Beverly had had a near death experience also in a horrible car accident.

M: That’s right.

C: And it was after the car accident that she put on this tremendous amount of weight. She wasn’t like that
before the car accident. So there was a physical reason in the sense that she couldn’t work out and so on, but her
weight gain was totally disproportionate to her injury, so something was triggered in that car accident.

One other parallel that I want to make between Beverly’s case and the story that I just told is that one interesting
thing about Beverly was that even though she had children and grandchildren, she never once mentioned that
she was killing herself with food and that the grandchildren were going to lose their grandmother. It wasn’t a
consideration. You would think that a woman would think, “I have to take care of myself better so I can stick
around with my grandchildren.” It is interesting that Beverly was photophobic, she hates to have pictures of her
taken, but she sent us a picture where she is holding two of her little grandchildren on her lap, so it is like the
weight loss helped her to reconnect to her family in a different way.

M: I know Beverly quite well and in her case she had actually raised her children on an extremely strict diet
where they had no chance of becoming overweight. She did everything for the children kind of over the top in
terms of the discipline while she herself had a major eating problem.

C: Right, and she was not motivated to stay alive for the children and grandchildren, whereas Mary (the woman
in my case) could easily be motivated for the sake of the children. She would do anything for the children so not
only she left her life as a recluse but she quit all interest in drugs also, which was her addiction. I remember I
called her Easy Rider because when I started to talk to her about dating men she remembered one that she
wanted to go out with because she wanted to ride his motorcycle. [laughs] She really enjoyed riding the
motorcycle.

I want to tell another strategy that applies to men since we seem to be talking about women mostly. The
equivalent to this strategy for men is what I call practicing rejection. This works very well with the male
equivalent of someone like Beverly or like Easy Rider where it is a man who feels that women don’t like him,
that he is nerdy, that he is shy, or he doesn’t look good and he wouldn’t know how to have a successful date and
he just feels terrible about himself in that sense.

I say to the man that the problem is not that he is shy or nerdy or doesn’t look good or any of those things, the
problem is that he has very low tolerance for rejection because if he could tolerate rejection better he would just
ask out so many women that eventually just by the statistical chance some women would accept his invitation
but he is so afraid of rejection, he has such low tolerance of rejection that he doesn’t do that. So, what he has to
do is make sure that he gets rejected enough so frequently that he doesn’t mind it at all. So I say, “You have to
be rejected by a woman at least three times a day.” I will send him for example to a fashionable department
store. I used to live near Bloomingdales, a fashionable department store in Washington D.C., and I would tell
him that he has to stand at the bottom of the escalator in the store and as women are coming down he has to pick
any woman, it doesn’t matter whether she is pretty or not, old, young, whatever, and say, “Would you like to
have a cup of coffee with me?” or, “Would you have a drink with me?” or something like that and of course the
woman will say, “I don’t even know you, get out of my way,” indignant, and that would count as one rejection
and when he got three of those he could go home. The bottom of the escalator is a good idea because the woman

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that is coming down the escalator cannot suddenly turn around to avoid him and go up the escalator. You can’t
do that or you fall so she has to face him for a few seconds and respond or just walk away but it gives him a few
seconds to say something to her before she turns away. Of course I’m counting on the fact that some women are
going to say, “Yea, OK. Let’s go have a cup of coffee,” and then he will have a chance.

This is totally based on an Ericksonian intervention. He would send men like this to the public library and he
would say, “I just want you to sit down at the library and read a book or a magazine, anything, it doesn’t matter
what you read,” because Erickson knew that some woman would find him. There is always a woman for every
man. So I love to use that intervention also.

This reminds me of another Ericksonian technique of finding the spark that is a famous case of his. It is not
exactly finding the spark but it is overcoming a childhood problem in a very original, totally different way and
recovering a sense of self that was lost. This case is called the February man. It was a young woman who had
recently gotten married and the husband wanted to have children and she didn’t want to have children because
she had been raised in a wealthy family and she felt that she had never had love from her mother and father. She
had been raised mainly by nannies and servants and none of them stuck around long enough for her to feel
loved and she felt that because she had not had a happy childhood and she had not been mothered properly that
she would be a bad mother. So in a way she wanted to have children but in another way she was very afraid of
having children because she was afraid of being a bad mother because she didn’t have the right memories.

Erickson hypnotized her and slowly regressed her to younger and younger ages. He took her back let’s say to
when she was fifteen years old and she was sitting in the living room of her house and a guest appeared and it
was Erickson and this was the month of February. Erickson would talk to her when she was fifteen years old as
a kind friend of the family that was interested in her, that wanted to help her, that was affectionate with her and
so on, then he would regress her back to the age of fourteen and do the same. Meeting after meeting he talked to
her as a younger and younger child until one day she came in and said to him, “You know, I think I’m
completely over this. I think I’m going to be an excellent mother. I decided that I do want to have children and
I’m going to have children.” I think she was never aware of the hypnotic process that was happening there but it
is an interesting idea that you can introduce a memory. You know, false memories are known to be disturbing
and bad, but this is a way of introducing a false memory that actually creates a happy, loving image.

M: That’s great.

C: Yes. One other thing that I want to point out about Beverly that I wanted to mention before and I didn’t
mention is that when Tony says, “You’re not a human being, you’re a human doing,” in relation to Beverly
saying that when there was nothing to do she felt that she had to eat, without really overtly criticizing her he
refers to this behavior as being less than a human being. Very interesting. And it is. The way that she ate was not
human.

Why don’t you talk about the seven master steps before we open for questions.

M: Sure. The film featured seven master steps. We get a lot of questions about those and we will be getting into
them in greater depth but I thought I would go over the seven master steps and some of the ways that we think
about them.

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The seven master steps are not exactly a recipe in the sense that you have to go to step one and then step two
and then step three and then step four. If you study Cloe’s work especially, she tends to do five steps at a time
with one strategic move and that is why we call these things mega-strategies, because they often accomplish
many steps at a time, but it is good to get a feel for what these seven steps or seven moves purpose is in the
conversation.

Master step one is understand the person’s world. Basically, if the person doesn’t feel understood by you, they
wont open up. If they do feel understood, they will often let you further in and express and even deeper problem
on the level of their needs. Beverly for instance stood up because of her weight and Tony brought his
understanding of her emotions to the point where she was adding other things that were bothering her. She felt
terrified and that became the new problem.

One way of understanding a person’s world is to try and find the spark. If you tease the person or ask them a
funny question or even an inappropriate question or a naughty question and find the rebel within the person, that
is one way that you can understand them. The basic ways of understanding the person’s world is to get a sense
of what are their six human needs, what are their top two needs, and what do they typically do to meet those
needs.

For each of these steps, I think of it in terms of what you need to accomplish, what state you are expecting to
find in the person you are working with. If you accomplished understanding their world and the person is open
to you and accepts what you are going to say because they feel like you get them, they don’t feel like they are
holding information that you haven’t accessed. Another thing I would think about for each of these steps is what
is contraindicated, so when are you not done with the step of understanding their world? If you are working
with someone and they are defensive and guarded and they are interrupting you or they are acting like they are
holding out on you, then they don’t feel understood by you yet, so it is going to take more work to understand
the person.

Step two is to find the real challenge. The person may have been wrestling with the same problem in the same
way for some time and has developed a resistance. Resistance is often resistance to other solutions and
resistance to solving the problem. Why? Because if you have been struggling with a problem for years and then
someone comes in and gives you another solution or makes it seem like it is an easy problem to solve, then you
have this defensiveness like, “Well, I didn’t just waste seven years of my life with this problem,” right? And this
is just part of human nature. You need to work with that, so one of the most effective things you can do is
reframe the problem as something that is much easier to solve and that the person can solve in real time by
making a decision with you right there.

Beverly had two hundred plus pounds to loose and Tony addressed her weight in certain ways and then he found
another way to deal with her problem. He found a way to reframe the problem in a way that she could change in
that very moment. He didn’t say, “Look, you are not going to be done with this therapy or with this intervention
until you have lost two hundred pounds.” He is looking for a decision that she could make now. It was very
interesting when he defined her as a human being, not a human doing, and he made it kind of the ultimate easy
challenge. She just had to be with him without him doing anything and they spent a lot of time just being
together and that was really how he reframed the problem, so it is very effective. If a person has been dealing
with a problem the same way and wrestling with it and defining it the same way, if you can reframe the problem
as something that is new, that puts a spin on what they need to do and make it something they can take action

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on during the conversation. If a person feels like you are not bringing much to the conversation or if they don’t
accept the redefinition then you need to work harder, basically.

The third step is getting leverage. The real heart of leverage means that you need to have an understanding of
what the person most cares about. Leverage is often seen as somewhat of a heavy tool. It has business
applications and the word can be used in a somewhat aggressive tone, but it does not have to be a heavy-handed
step. If the person feels understood by you and accepts the real challenge, if they have taken step two and say,
“You know, you are right, I need to do this,” then you often already have leverage. If the person accepts the new
challenge, for example if Beverly accepts that she needs to become a human being and hang out and spend time
not doing anything with Tony, and then resists with moments of panic or something, then you need to reassure
her that this is what she needs to do.

C: Let me add something to that. In the case of Mary or “Easy Rider” as I was just describing, the leverage was
her love for her daughter. When I said, “How can she be happy if she sees her mother is so unhappy?” that
totally touched her deeply. That was my leverage with her. What she would not do for her own sake she would
do for the sake of her daughter. Very often when I follow these steps while doing an intervention, I find the
leverage in their love for someone else.

M: Exactly. If the person is resisting you as an interventionist, you can ask their daughter, “What does your
mom need?”

C: Right.

M: That becomes a source of leverage. With this step, the contraindication, you are not done getting leverage if
the person is not responding to you. Often people are so immersed in their problem or they have a habit of
certainty they are stuck in that they are not responding to fresh new information from you, they are not
responding to new ways of reframing it, or they are not willing to make a new decision, it means that either you
haven’t understood them fully and there is something more to learn or that you don’t understand what they
really care about. You haven’t identified what they care about more than their problem.

Step four is to interrupt or annihilate the limiting problem. Again, this is aggressive sounding language but it
can be done very smoothly. The reason that it comes after leverage is that often the person has accepted the real
challenge and you understand what they really need and they are stuck in an old habit or they have a reaction
that they go back to. In Beverly’s case, she could easily constrict again and go into a state of not wanting to
speak and being terrified. In this case Tony would provoke her or bring her back out so she would continue to
be opening up and being with him rather than hiding.

C: To add something to that, Tony also uses techniques such as talking in disgusting ways about her colon and
chocolate and all this to shock her out of the idea that her eating was actually harmless or that it was OK to eat
as a way of doing something. In my cases like in the case of Mary, for example, I completely confronted and
took her out of the view that locking herself in her house and not going anywhere and not meeting anyone was
the right thing to do because she would make the wrong choice. I showed her that she was setting an example of
unhappiness for her daughter. That was what she was really doing. In the case of the “nerdy” young men who
don’t know how to date, I eliminate the problem from being that they are shy or that they are nerdy and make
the problem that they don’t tolerate rejection. So, part of this is a huge reframing that has to be done.

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M: If the reframing has already happened and they are stuck in something, sometimes shocking the person or
even just saying, “Hey, this is bullshit,” or, “This is all wrong. We can’t go forward,” that kind of thing where
you make it so the person has to take some form of motion or small action to keep them in the conversation.
When Tony is on stage, he has some restraints as to what he can do, but simple ways of doing it if you come to
an impasse in a conversation with someone are to take them outside, go for a walk, change the context, change
the environment, bring someone else in. Often that kind of a thing is enough to interrupt the pattern. You have
changed the context and context is very powerful.

C: Yes.

M: The fifth step is to create empowering alternatives. If you think of what the person has gone through so far,
they have taken the time to be understood by you and they feel understood, you have redefined their challenge
as something that they are unfamiliar with but that is something that they could make a decision on during the
conversation, you have gotten leverage meaning that they feel you understand what they really care about and
you can say they are going to lose this thing they care about if they don’t make a decision, you have interrupted
the pattern - when the person makes person makes progress and they take that little step that you have asked for,
they may be making their first proactive decision but they are often still very weak and uncertain. They have
shown that they are moving forward but they are kind of scared, so what you have to do in that case is you give
them a demonstration of the abundance of choices and options that they have.

If you watch Tony’s interventions, in almost every one he has a point where the person has just made a new
decision and they are feeling kind of empty and weak and hopeful and uncertain and at this point he will hit a
monologue and often it is a comedy routine or it is an inspirational speech. The purpose is to basically infuse
them with some forward going emotion, either an inspiration or humor. In the Lindsey film, Tony went on for
twenty minutes talking about men and women and cracking her up and he made sure that she was in a state of
laughter for a long time so that when he came back and talked to her about things going forward she was in a
completely different state. In Beverly’s case it was recognizing that she had come out and that she could rename
this part of herself. She called it Joy. So, it was an uplifting identity that she already had. Cloe, you often will
ask someone else in the family what this person needs, so that was an example of an empowering alternative
when the daughter said she needed to go out on her bike, right?

C: Yes, absolutely.

M: With the contraindication, basically if the person is already moving forward and is right on with you and
making the decision and they are firm and they are committed, you can sometimes skip this step because you
don’t want to appear to be giving them more options when they already made a strong decision. It is for when
people don’t know how they can do something. You get practice at being able to name six different ways that
they could do it. They choose one of them and you have got progress.

The sixth step is to condition and test for ecology. This simply means that you give the person many small ways
to succeed at demonstrating their new decision, the new thing that they have learned how to do, so they are like
mini tests. With Tony and Beverly he started to tease her and cajole her in little ways by challenging her ring
and insulting her a little so she was practicing standing up for herself. You can also do that in terms of
hypothetical questions. You can say, “Well, what is going to happen when you go home? What will you say?”
or, “Pretend I am this person insulting you now. What are you going to say?” You basically take the person

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through something like this several times so they are rehearsing in their head how they will deal with a situation
like this in the future.

Seventh is creating an empowering environment. Much of strategic intervention the way we are teaching it
already takes that into account. It is basically how do you set up relationships in the person’s house or in their
life so that when they come back they have ways of being aligned with the people in their life rather than being
in opposition.

C: Very good. I think we should take some questions now.

M: OK. Press *2 to raise your hand if you have a question. The main thing with the seven master steps is to get
a feel for the person’s process, the person you are working with, so that you understand where they are at during
different stages of the conversation. You wouldn’t want to be interrupting a pattern if the person doesn’t feel
understood. The person first needs to feel understood, otherwise if you interrupt the pattern you might be
perceived as a jerk or someone who is not trustworthy, for instance.

I have a question here from Luxembourg from the webcast. “I still have difficulty understanding the meaning of
leverage. Is that the outcome, what the person really wants, instead of the problem?”

C: Leverage is what will motivate the person to change. Leverage is the tools that you know that you have to
use to motivate the person to change. For example, with the case of Mary “Easy Rider”, my leverage was that
the little girl was learning how to be unhappy from her mother and my leverage was her love for her little girl.
In the example of the strategy of practicing rejection, the leverage is the reframing of the problem. You just
don’t know how to take rejection; you get too hurt from it, so you have to practice it. So there are many
different types of leverage, but the best definition is what you as an interventionist can use to bring about
change.

M: Also, in the more strong form of leverage you think of a meaning or a situation where the person has no
stepping back, no shying away from forward change. In Tony’s case for instance with a group, he will ask the
person to make a small step and then he will magnify that step and have the entire crowd acknowledge it and
make it a big step if that is what they need to do. It is basically so the person doesn’t backslide they need to feel
like they have some skin hanging on it.

C: Yes.

M: I have a good question here from Rome. “Could you give prototypes of persons according to their two major
needs? For example, if the two first needs are growth and variety, how can we quickly identify it?” The second
question is, “Regarding an anorexic/bulimic person, how can I help her?” I think we have time for the first
question at this point. How do you identify a person’s two major needs?

C: I think that this is a work in progress. There is a lot of development to do of this idea. But for example if a
person has a life where they are always giving to others, if they have a career that means that they work hard
under stressful situations to help other people, usually their first need is contribution. It is interesting because I
have been talking to several doctors lately and often they don’t put their first need as contribution and I say,
“How can you not say it’s contribution when you work in stressful situations in a hospital with very sick people

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the whole time and really bend over backwards to help them? You are totally focused on contribution.” A person
is going to choose growth when they are looking to improve themselves and try to develop spiritually or
physically and you can see that in their lives. A person focused on certainty is usually afraid of many things and
limits their life because they have to feel so secure. A person focused on variety usually wants to travel a lot,
may want to do some risky things.

M: I agree. Basically you will develop this as a shorthand and you can do this as an exercise. The six human
needs are very effective because you can often spot very small hints of the person’s behavior that will give you
a sense of which needs are their top two, even with the kinds of problems that they stand up with. One way to
understand the top two needs, to be a little bit more specific, and this is where a lot of people have their biggest
challenges, is that one need is being valued higher than the other and the one need is a gateway to the other
need. For instance, you may value both love and significance but you don’t feel love until you feel significance,
so if you don’t feel significant in a relationship there is no feeling of love. You feel angry, pissed off, stressed,
upset, but you are not extending your heart.

C: That means that you are putting significance first.

M: That’s right. That means significance is your top need and love is your second. The other way around, if love
is your first need and significance is your second need, then you are feeling love and you are feeling distraught,
you are feeling unhappy and heartbroken, but you are feeling connected, you are feeling loved, and maybe it is a
love while you are feeling humiliated. It is very effective when you are working with someone to know that
people will often identify their top two needs and misidentify which one is first.

C: Right. Another way you can tell is the person for whom significance is most important is always talking
about how they need to be respected. “So and so didn’t treat me with respect,” or, “They didn’t listen to me.”
Those types of comments show how important significance is for the person. The person whose first need is
love and connection is always talking about the people they love.

M: Yes, and they might be feeling for instance more rejected rather than angry if they are someone for whom
love is first.

C: I think it is about time to end.

M: I think it is. Thank you everyone for coming. [goodbyes, class ends]

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