Cynicism is what is holding me back in life; a fear of looking naive is preventing me from reaching my goals

INNOVATE THIS:IF YOU HAD founded a religion this year, how would you go about getting the word out? Which marketing channels would you use to carry your message to the masses?

I have two suggestions: Premier League football and The X Factor. Between them, these get to more people, more often, when they are more emotionally open, than virtually anything else out there. They are marketing channels par excellence and both carry a message using the methods of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a modern take on positive thinking that some liken to religion.

In football, each post-match interview is a small taster course in NLP, or one of its many variants. Players think only of “the positives” and are trained to avoid any answer that hints at introspection.

Likewise, the wannabe pop idols standing in line to be humiliated by Simon, Cheryl Cole et al are keepers of the flame. The message is the same one parents drum into their kids as they pack them off to school and upon which most management training is now based: you can be anything you want to be.

It is the perfect message for our times: democratic, universal and able to spread like a virus. It works because we are open to its promise of making us the person we want to be, the one we sometimes glimpse but who never stays around long enough to be of any use.

Meanwhile we stumble around our lives, eating too much, worrying about paying the bills and jealous of that mate who sold his business just before the crash.

NLP was developed in California in the early 1970s by psychoanalysts Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who studied the thinking and behavioural skills used by people they deemed particularly effective and successful.

Successful people, they said, are different. They don’t have doubts and they focus their entire being on the matter in hand. They set goals and tick them off systematically. They take regular exercise, are good with their kids, have great sex and help their local community. Most of all – and this is very important in dealing with non-believers – they are not cynical. They are open-hearted and move towards goals, not away from them.

There are plenty of cynics, however, whose attitude to the faith was shaped by annoyance at early salesmen. And it is here the new generation of NLP converts has learnt a lesson, one it hopes will propel their belief system to a new, higher level of market penetration.

Tap the name Anthony Robbins into YouTube at this point. Robbins – or Tony, as he sometimes prefers – is selling books by the gazillion and packing out US theatres with his three-day seminars, which take his book Awaken the Giant Within and run with its ideas, often across hot coals.

Robbins has become the face of NLP, and this is a problem. His face, which is like that of an Action Man on steroids, feels out of time. He was the subject of a brilliant article by US journalist Dave Barry, who signed up for a Success seminar featuring a cast of “go get ‘em” characters. This culminated in Barry witnessing, first-hand, Robbins’s uncanny ability to whip a crowd into a frenzy of positive mental attitude. Watching Robbins, wrote Barry, was truly a transforming experience, “if you define ‘transforming’ as ‘lasting as long as the Korean War, but sometimes louder’”.

Memorably, Barry highlighted a small notice in the seminar handbook which made clear that the word CANI!™ is “a trademark of Robbins Research International and may not be used without permission”.

On this side of the Atlantic, the Robbins role is played by Paul McKenna, a former radio DJ and hypnotist working for one of London’s commercial stations. NLP has been good for him, too; McKenna lives in Michael Jackson’s old house in Los Angeles.

The last time I saw him was browsing the lower reaches of the Sky channels, looking for old episodes of Frasier (me, not him). McKenna was talking to a morbidly obese American woman who seemed on the verge of tears as our hero questioned the wisdom of finishing everything on her plate.

Despite their huge commercial success, my feeling is that for every person Robbins or McKenna converts, there are many more turned off by the cheese.

It won’t come as a huge shock to hear that I’m a cynic – but this is not a problem for the converts. In the hands of an NLP coach, my cynicism will be turned against me. It’s what’s holding me back in life; a fear of looking naive is preventing me from reaching my goals.

NLP’s marketing message is now embedded in the higher echelons of sport, entertainment and business. It is rapidly bleeding into other areas – most worryingly medicine – where proponents believe a strong mind can defeat such mighty foes as cancer or heart disease. Those who say religion is on the decline are wrong. It’s just changing shape.