The Tools: Transform Your Problems into Courage, Confidence, and Creativity

5 unique Tools ... 3 seconds each to use ... A lifetime of fulfilment

Can you imagine what your life would be like if you could tap into a new source of power – one that has been inside you all along – to solve your own problems and become the master of your life?

The Tools is an extraordinary psychological model based on the proven methods of Hollywood's greatest psychotherapists. Phil Stutz and Barry Michels have over 60 years of psychotherapeutic experience between them. Together they have helped their A-list clients work through whatever has held them back ­– be it insecurity, trauma, anger, lack of willpower, negativity or avoidance – to achieve their greatest work and find a deep level of fulfilment.

Now, at last, the acclaimed clinicians are sharing their methods in this eye-opening and empowering book. Introducing their five simple techniques, namely The Reversal of Desire, Active Love, Inner Authority, The Grateful Flow and Jeopardy, the authors clearly explain what they are plus how and when to use them. Astonishingly effective and beautifully simple – once you've learned a tool it takes only three to five seconds to use it – this book will give you everything you need to propel yourself forward to achieve your ambitions and be who you were born to be.

A Letter from the Authors: What Is a Tool?
In conventional psychotherapy, we talk about “insights” or “causation” and we tend to believe that if we can uncover the deep-seated reasons behind someone’s problems, then the person will change automatically. This implies that awareness alone creates the forces that cause change. But real change, the kind of change patients in therapy cry out for, means changing your behavior, not just your attitude.

That requires much stronger forces. A tool is a technique or procedure that can generate a force that allows you to do the work of change. It is work that must be done in real time. When do we use a tool? In the present.

Conventional therapy tends to be passive and focuses on the past. It excavates a patient’s history, usually from childhood, brings it into the light of day and interprets it so as to strip it of its unconscious power. I have the greatest respect for the past. Memories, emotions, insights can all be very valuable. But my patients needed help and relief in the present and all the insights in the world weren’t going to be powerful enough to deliver that.

To control your actions you need something else: a specific procedure you can use systematically to combat a specific problem -- you need a tool.

There’s an obvious objection that arises here: Isn’t what you’re doing superficial? Sure, these tools of yours may help a patient change his or her behavior but you haven’t addressed the underlying reasons. Unless you do that they’re bound to go back to their (self-) destructive ways sooner or later.

There are two answers to this objection. The first involves a misunderstanding of how people change. Insight into the “reasons” for a problem isn’t the cause of change – it’s the result. Groups like Alcoholics Anonymous have always known this. You don’t join AA and then sit around discussing why you drink too much over a few beers or vodka martinis. You join to stop drinking one day at a time. Only after that can you look into the roots of your addiction by “taking inventory.”

The second answer goes back to our original question about what a tool is. There has been a bias in psychotherapy implying that anything that is active and involves your will is superficial; as if the deepest part of human experience can only occur inside your head. The truth is the opposite; the deepest part of human experience happens when you interact with the world outside yourself. That means you need to go beyond thinking and into “doing”—and this is exactly what a tool makes possible.