If you could join me inside my head right now you would hear a sound-track that goes something like this: WOAH! I feel good, dodo dodo dodo do. You might notice that the sides of my mouth are twitching upwards. This is not like me. I don’t usually run the James Brown classic on a loop in my brain. I don’t do high-fives when I walk into the office. I did this morning.

This probably explains why colleagues are avoiding me. I have been on a neuro-linguistic programming course, and I suspect I have overcooked. What happened, you ask. Well, I spent seven long days in a big beige windowless room in a hotel in Earl’s Court with 362 paying punters and three men who told us, over and over again, that life can be amazing, and that the only question we need ask ourselves in future is this: how much pleasure can I stand?

Does that sound freaky? Not to us. And what is really weird is that when we bounced out on the final day we were so happy, so invigorated, so well disposed to the world that we could have sat next to any number of smelly nutters on a broken-down, vomit-encrusted Tube train and responded in the only way we know: by smiling. WOAH!

Were we brainwashed? There’s no doubt. Is this a good thing? My colleagues seem to think not – and that’s before they’ve heard my werewolf yelp. Oh oh oh ohwoooooooo! In truth, I feel out of kilter with the rest of the world, as though in deference to the people around me I should turn down the volume and the brightness on my new mood. Otherwise I might do something inappropriate, like press my newly installed endorphin-release button and laugh uproariously. My partner is, frankly, unimpressed. “I’ve got to spend six hours in a car with you at the weekend,” he said as I chirruped circus music. “I’m not sure I can take it.”

The process that got me into this state began on a Monday morning when I was, naturally, grumpy. I was also certain that NLP had nothing to offer me. I had no hang-ups, and I wasn’t seeking to change my life, which was perfectly satisfactory, thank you. Trudging into the Ibis Hotel I was aware of people trying to avoid making eye contact. A few men looked cocky and possibly in need of a good slap, it struck me, many more people looked frightened. I felt scared, especially when I was anywhere near a person whose name-tag said Assistant. There were 50 of them and they were all smiling in a way that looked possessed. Fast rock music was booming out and they were swinging their hips, which was a bit much at nine o’clock in the morning.

The music got louder and suddenly two men in suits were on the stage. One was Paul McKenna, the hypnotist who was once a radio DJ from Enfield but who has reinvented himself as The Man Who Can Change Your Life. The other was Michael Neill, a coach from California whose teaching involves arching his eyebrows so often with glee that he looks like Ronald McDonald. “Say good morning to three people in an unusual way,” instructed McKenna. This wasn’t fun.

I looked around the room. Half men, half women, all ages, largely white. Why were they there? Over the week I spoke to about 50 of them. Some admitted they had personal difficulties: a sales manager knew he was aggressive, a banker hated his job, a successful manager was secretly shy. A few people had been knocked sideways by cancer and wanted to move forward. Many had reached a career crisis and didn’t know where to turn, many were counsellors who wanted to build up their skills. A lot of people wanted to make money, including Darren, a tanned young man from Essex who sold home gym equipment through the internet. “My bruvver did this course last year and now ‘e’s curin’ people of their phobias for £250 a go,” he said. “So I put a couple of ads in the local papers and I’ve got my first bookin’ next Tuesday.” His mouth smiled, his eyes didn’t.

Some people worked for big companies and were being sponsored, but most of those I spoke to had paid the week’s fee of £2,338.25 (including VAT) themselves and this would be a recurring theme over the first couple of days. What was the deliverable? one man asked. Certainly we were being entertained. As the ideas about replacing our negative thoughts with positive ones were pumped remorselessly into us, our trainers – McKenna, Neill and Richard Bandler, the man who invented NLP some 30 years ago – said funny things, told funny stories, did silly things and programmed us so effectively that when they cued us to laugh we practically fell off our chairs.

So what were we taught and how were we taught it? Richard Bandler’s central premise is that it is possible for everyone to be happy. Phobias, fears and compulsions are learned responses, he reasons, often programmed through imagination, and if you can learn them then you can also learn to respond differently in the situations in which you feel fear. Thus, if your brain can programme itself to be frightened of public speaking – the biggest phobia in the Western world, he maintains – you can reprogramme yourself to be at ease when you address a room full of people. No matter what happened in your past, it is healthier to focus on what is happening now and what you want to happen. Bandler believes that if you persist in reliving past events linked to bad feelings, as many people in therapy do every week, those events will continue to make you feel bad and can stop you doing things you want to do. For this reason he is scathing about psychotherapy. “Have you ever noticed what psychotherapist says?” he asks with a manic gleam in his eye. “Psychotherapist.”

Bandler is a maverick, a former Hells Angel and cocaine-abuser who defiantly wears a long ponytail at the age of 57. He grew up in a dodgy part of New Jersey and had a difficult childhood in which his father was violent, his stepfather more so. Bandler learned by example and became, by his own admission, a sociopath, but by 1975 he was a computer programmer. After studying the work of Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, and working with Virginia Satir, a family therapist, he and a linguistics professor called John Grinder examined the language patterns used by Perls, Satir and the hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson. All three were skilled in bringing about dramatic, fast and lasting change, and by dissecting how they worked Bandler and Grinder were able to identify their core strategies, and model their techniques. Their books formed the foundation of NLP, through which you unpick and rebuild processes by overlaying positive strategies and feelings on to bad ones.

“Wipe out the bad pictures. Take a bad feeling and ruin it for yourself. Make it familiar to feel good. If you begin to fill your life with pleasure you will spend less time criticising yourself, feeling bad and not getting shit done,” Bandler instructed.

What he was saying is that we have choices – to nurture a reaction to a bad thing, or to focus on the outcome we want. This made sense to me – indeed it struck me as common sense – yet while Bandler is a charismatic figure, when he describes himself as a bully and a cranky old f**k, you believe him. A round man in a black leather waistcoat, he appeared each day in a pulsating boom of Purple Haze rock music and spoke for two hours, sometimes longer. His imagery was violent, his sense of humour dark, his language strong and threatening: “If you don’t do every one of these things a demon will come to your house and rip out your soul. Ha ha ha!”

He worked through metaphors, telling stories of transformations he has brought about: to the Jewish schizophrenic who thought he was Jesus, he announced that it was Good Friday, built a cross and asked questions that enabled the man to distinguish between what was real and what was imaginary. Bandler does not believe in mental illness or that drug treatment can cure it. Neither does he believe that doctors are always right. When he had a stroke and was told he would never walk again, he ignored the medic’s advice. “It took months, but if I’d believed him I wouldn’t have tried. That’s where most of the limitations we feel come from – somebody once programmed us to believe that we couldn’t do something.”

He is an egotist, a show-off who constantly reminded us of his success and the fees he can command (thus confirming the idea that his techniques can make money, a point underlined by the presence of McKenna’s Bentley outside the hotel entrance). But he charges by the change, and his changes are fast. This notion was reinforced several times a day as Bandler, McKenna and Neill hypnotised people from the audience. Each was dispatched happy and relaxed: a woman with OCD, a serial blusher, a woman who had had cancer was suddenly able to visualise her future, a woman who, for medical reasons, hadn’t laughed for three years became a chronic giggler.

The inference was obvious: if sudden change can happen to them, it can happen to you. We were told that the seminar was a massive hypnotic installation, and on Day 2 we were taught to hypnotise each other. This was pleasantly relaxing, but even though each day closed with 20 minutes of McKenna’s powerfully melodic voice washing over watery new age music, I was never convinced that I had been in a trance. Neither was I certain that I was doing the exercises properly: visualising a good feeling and amplifying it, then a bad feeling, and pouring the good on to the bad; or shrinking the bad and moving it to the part of our consciousness where we experience the good feeling; breaking down an activity we can do, and one we think we can’t, and transferring the processes that made the first effective to the second; making a voice we perceive as threatening into Mickey Mouse, or perhaps just turning it off.

“Are you enjoying it?” I was repeatedly asked by shiny Assistants. Enjoyment wasn’t the word that came to mind, I replied tartly.

My breakthrough came on the sixth day when we were invited to tackle our phobias. For me this meant snakes – even a picture was terrifying – but I had always reasoned that as I have yet to encounter a python on the streets of Ealing, this was something I could live with.

McKenna worked on stage with a snake phobic and a spider phobic from the audience. The snake phobic duly held a python, the spider phobic a tarantula. Then we were told to work with a fellow course member. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to entrust my crippling fear to a trainee NLP practitioner, but what the course had made me realise was that because my terror was based on an imaginary snake (described to me by a headmaster who humiliated me when I was 7), I had nothing to be frightened of.

So we copied McKenna’s techniques and an hour later I was inches away from a python called Crikey. I felt wary, but intensely curious. That was the moment I started to feel high, and of course the feeling was amplified as I watched the public-speaking phobics do a turn on the stage. Suddenly a new thought occurred to me. If I could look a python in the eye and think it cute, I need not fear anything else, and especially not authority figures who enjoy frightening little girls. And if I wasn’t frightened, then anything I wanted to happen was possible. I realised too that this thought showed that I had indeed absorbed hypnotic suggestion, and I liked the pragmatism.

Four days later I met McKenna at his Kensington mews house. These days he is a multimillionaire, not least because of the success of his training company. In 1994 he was a successful stage and TV hypnotist when he encountered Bandler, pursued him and became his protégé. The training seminars began as a hobby, and now McKenna’s company has trained 50,000 people in the UK alone. Surely they can’t all feel ludicrously high? How long will this feeling last, I asked.

“You still have a full dynamic range of emotions, including fear and anger and guilt, but your default setting on overall contentment is higher,” McKenna said. “What we’ve done is rejigged your perceptual filters and there was perhaps a lot of good stuff going on that you took for granted. You’re at a point where you’re not paralysed by a snake, you’ve got more freedom. In situations where you felt fear, or restricted, you’ve got more choices.”

I had one more question: can NLP be used to manipulate people? Especially if, as we were taught, we identify the primary way in which another person sees the world – visually, auditorally or kinesthetically – and tune our language to theirs. McKenna wandered through guns and cars and Hitler before he concluded simply: “You’re never going to stop people with malevolent intentions, but the more you become aware of what people are up to, the harder it is for them to do it.”

Postscript

My euphoria has subsided and the cat is grateful that I don’t scoop him up and dance around the kitchen when I get home. But I still don’t feel grumpy, and I am keen to focus on positives. I haven’t bitten my nails for two weeks – not because I don’t have the urge but because I know I don’t have to – and I no longer scuttle along the street like a demented beetle. Overall, I still feel good, dodo dodo dodo do.

NLP Practitioner Course, Paul McKenna Training; 0845 2302022; www.paulmckenna.com