The Godiva Chocolate Pattern
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By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht
This is another exercise in submodality power. Many people use it to improve motivation or develop other valuable feelings. Try this one for some chore that you don’t enjoy doing, like cleaning or budgeting. The Godiva Chocolate pattern is a way to feed good feelings and motivation directly into a task that you cur-rently find disagreeable. The idea is to give you a compulsive desire to do this, and lose the bad feelings about it.
Start with an image of something that you ALREADY intensely desire and feel compelled to indulge in. Perhaps there is a chocolate treat that you favor. Amplify the submodalities that make it desirable. See how well you can stir up excitement, happiness, and desire with this image.
Next, imagine seeing yourself doing the task that you WANT to want to do. You know what I mean? The task that you SHOULD want to do.
Now, do what we call an ecology check: If any part of you objects to this task becoming a desire of yours, speak up now. If you have any objections, see if there is a better way to achieve your higher objective, or choose a different task for this process.
Now imagine the picture of what you are supposed to do right there before you. You are watching yourself do the task. The picture of your desire is right behind it, where you can’t see it.
Now imagine a hole opening quickly in the picture, so that you can get a good view of your desire when you look through the hole. Enjoy whatever happy feelings come from this view. Really emphasize the joy of this image.
Now allow the hole to close, but slow enough that you can maintain that nice feeling while you again gaze at the task picture. See what it’s like to harbor that happy, desiring feeling while you look at the task picture.
Do that opening and closing again a few more times. You are connecting good feelings and desire with the task.
Once you’re done, see how it feels to bring up the task in your mind. Now we’ll see if it really becomes eas-ier to do the task. As they say, the proof is in the pudding. Or the chocolate.
What’s not to say the reverse won’t happen? Whenever you look at chocolate now, you’ll be reminded of the unpleasant task.
I was thinkong the same. I will try it to help me stop eating bowls of chocolate ice cream at night!
If the ‘thing desired/desirable’ is substantially stronger/greater than the thing that you are associating it with, the result will always be as described above. For instance, don’t just think of a chocolate candy; think of an amazingly delicious meal with the person you MOST want to spend an evening with and then to top it off the dining establishment gives you the meal as a gift. Let that ‘resolve’ into an image, a representational scene, and let that be the positive picture.
So long as the undesirable ‘image’ produces a less emotional reaction than does the ‘positive’ image, the subC will give precedence to the positive image. However, if you are using an image of a candy bar for the positive and the task is that quarter report upon which your job hangs, it WILL go the wrong way.
Of course, there are much easier ways to accomplish the goal that this pattern is aimed at that I would tend to go for the other methods. This one is almost too much work for a rather small payoff.