I know that some people have gotten some very useful belief changes from doing the firewalk. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The problem with firewalking is that you have little control over the new belief that takes the place of the old one. There are enough bizarre and dangerous beliefs in the world without adding to them with a random process.

Another problem with something like firewalking is that it tends to install the belief that it takes a really dramatic external event to get you to change. I'd rather install the belief that change happens constantly, and easily, and making it work for you is a matter of understanding how to run your own brain. It doesn't take walking on hot coals to do that.

There is a completely separate issue of whether firewalking is actually something that's difficult to do or not, and whether the six hours of evangelistic preparation makes any difference in being able to walk on the coals. A reporter from the Rolling Stone timed people as they walked across and found a range of 1.5 seconds to 1.9 seconds, with an average of about 1.7 seconds. The length of the walk was about 10 feet, so if you have a 30" stride you can easily make it across in 4 steps — two on each foot. That gives a maximum of less than half a second of actual contact per footstep. Firewalkers make a big deal about the temperature of the coals—1,400 to 2,000 degrees — but they don't mention that each foot has only two contacts with the coals lasting less than half a second each. When you pick up a hot coal that's landed on your carpet to throw it back into the fireplace, your fingers probably contact the coal for about that long— and your fingertips are much more sensitive than your feet.

Burning requires heat transfer, not just temperature, and the contact time is only one factor in heat transfer. Another factor is conductivity. Let's say you're in a cabin in the mountains and you get out of bed in the morning when it's 20 degrees below zero, and one bare foot lands on a steel plate, while the other lands on a sheepskin rug. Even though the rug and the steel are both at 20 degrees below, the steel will feel a lot colder than the rug, because of it's greater heat conductivity. The conductivity of charcoal is greater than sheepskin, but a lot less than steel. Ask the next firewalker you meet if he's willing to walk the same length on a steel plate that's at the same temperature as those coals!

There is an additional factor that physicists call the "Leiden–frost effect." When there is a significant temperature difference between two substances, and the cooler one is a liquid or contains liquid, a thin vapor layer forms to create an insulating barrier that reduces heat transfer significantly.

All the evidence I have indicates that a ten foot, 1.5 second firewalk is something' anyone can do, with or without evangelistic preparation, but very few people think they can do.

Woman: Some people have beliefs that don't seem to influence their behavior much. For instance, I have a boss who always talks about how people should be nice to each other, but he's usually mean to people himself. How do you explain that?

I try to understand how things work, not "explain" them. There are several possibilities. One is that this belief is not really something he believes, even though he talks about it. A lot of "intellectuals" have beliefs like that which have no effect on their behavior. In that case you could use the belief change pattern to make his belief into one that is subjectively real enough to affect his behavior.

Another possibility is that his belief is real enough, but it's selective: other people should be nice to him, but he doesn't need to be nice to them, because he's special. Kings, dictators, and some movie stars are like that. Beliefs aren't always reciprocal.

A third possibility is that your boss' belief is real, and reciprocal, but what he thinks of as "being nice" seems "mean" to you. In the 60's a lot of humanistic psychologists would hug everyone too hard because they believed it was a nice thing to do, without noticing whether the "huggee" liked it or not. They'd also go around insulting people, because they thought it was always good to be honest and tell the truth. The crusaders believed that saving souls was an important thing to do, and they didn't care if it was sometimes necessary to kill the body in order to do it.

The process of changing a belief is relatively easy, as long as you have the person's consent. It's a little tougher if the person doesn't want to change a belief. I've also presupposed that you can identify a belief that's worth changing. Sometimes that's not obvious, and it may take some work to determine what someone's limiting belief is. Often the belief that the person wants to change isn't the one that actually limits his behavior.

My principal goal here is to teach you a. process that you can use to change a belief. However, the content that you put into a belief is also important. That's why I asked you to be sure to do an ecology check, as well as to state the new belief in terms of a process, rather than a goal, and to state it in positive terms. I asked you to do this belief change process without knowing the content of the new belief, because I know that some of you would get lost in the content and have trouble learning the process. After you have learned the process thoroughly, you won't be as likely to get lost in the content. When you're working with your clients, it's a good idea to know something about the content, so that you can verify that the new belief is stated in positive terms, is a process rather than a goal, and that it's likely to be ecological. Beliefs are very powerful things; when you change one it can do a lot of good, but if you install the wrong one, it can do a lot of harm, too. I want you to be very careful about the kinds of new beliefs you go around installing in people.

I have always thought it was interesting that when people are arguing about a point that doesn't matter, they say "It's academic." John Grinder and I were forced to leave teaching at the University of California because we were teaching undergraduates to do things in their lives. That was the complaint against us. They said school was only for teaching people about things.

When I was an undergraduate, the only courses I did badly in were psychology and public speaking. I flunked psychology 1A, and I got a "D" in public speaking! How's that for a joke? NLP is my revenge.

In my contacts with educators, I've noticed that the people who teach a subject may be very good at it, and know a tot about that particular area. However, they usually know very little about how they learned it, and even less about how to teach it to someone else. I went to a lecture in a beginning chemistry class once. The professor walked up in front of 350 people and said, "Now I want you to imagine a mirror here, and in front of the mirror is a DNA helix molecule, rotating backwards." Some people in the room were going "Ahhh!" They became chemists. Some people in the room were going "Huh?" They did not become chemists. Some people in the room were going "Urghh!" They became therapists!

That professor had no idea that most people can't visualize in the detailed way that he did. That kind of visualization is a prerequisite for a successful career in chemistry, and it is a skill that can be taught to people who don't yet know how to visualize well. But since that professor presupposed that everyone else could already do what he did, he was wasting his time with most of the people in his classes.