Warren Jamison

No Pills, No Patches, Nothing but a Method that Really Works

Let’s make one thing clear right up front: whether or not you smoke is your business. I’m not telling you to quit. However, you and I know that smoking kills about ten times as many people every year as automobile accidents do. Thus, failing to quit smoking often turns into the worst failure of all: the failure to live a long and healthy life.

Kick-Starting Your Quit

First of all, you have to want to quit. Not your wife or husband, not your girlfriend or boyfriend, not one of your parents—you have to be the one who wants to quit. Not half-heartedly, not on the basis that “I’ll try quitting and if I don’t like it, I’ll keep on smoking,” but a real desire to quit.

Secondly, you have to decide that you actually are willing to quit. You see, there’s a vast difference between wanting to quit and being willing to quit. The first is wishful thinking; the second is the necessary foundation for action.

Once you have made those two life-extending decisions, the rest is easy. We want to emphasize that deciding to quit is a tough decision because to do it you have to be willing to change your view of yourself in a most basic way. Most smokers know that smoking is extremely bad for their health, and yet they smoke anyway. Why?

If you could get a hundred smokers to tell you exactly why they continue smoking even though they know it will shorten their lives, you’d wind up with a lot of different answers. Some think it’s sophisticated to smoke, others feel it’s sexy, macho, devil-may-care—ideas reinforced by costly advertising showing alluring men and women smoking.

The willingness to continue smoking comes from seeing the habit as an essential element of one’s persona. Most people react emotionally against anything threatening to alter their basic personality, that is, the way they see themselves. Some fear the ridicule of smoking friends who may sneer at them for quitting. This is likely, because if you succeed in quitting, your success proves it can be done. This increases the pressure on them to quit too—and they hate that.

But none of this gets at the core reason, which is that all smokers light up because they continually tell themselves they are smokers. There’s a name for this: affirmations. How often have you heard a smoker say, “Yeah, I wish I could quit, but….”

That’s an affirmation, a powerful one. People who say things like that—or think them— reinforce their inner conviction that they are, and will continue to be, smokers.

The easy way to quit is to reverse your affirmations. But take note: if you just affirm that you are “going to quit” or affirm that “I’m going to cut down on my smoking,” you’re likely to smoke more rather than less. Why? Because you’ll be thinking about it more.

You may be saying, “I want to quit. I really do. I’m ready. Stop beating around the blackberries and tell me how I can quit.”

OK, but be forewarned—it can be a jarring experience.

The first step is to copy the following statement. Write it out on a piece of paper. It’s okay to add or change anything to personalize it but you must keep it in the past tense—stating that you have already quit. Otherwise the method won’t work. (The reason why will be explained a bit later. Answers to other questions will also be given.) Here’s the “I’ve Quit Smoking Affirmation (IQSA, pronounced ik-say):.

The IQSA

“Every time I see someone light up a killer weed, I know I’m looking at a dumb jerk (use your own expletive). Cigarettes stink. Tobacco made my mouth taste like a public toilet. But the worst part was all the tar and carcinogenic chemicals that tobacco was shoving into my body.

“Can you believe it? I was actually spending a lot of my hard-earned money for stuff that was poisoning me. I was giving my money to fat cats who are only too happy to pocket profits from selling an addictive drug that kills three thousand Americans every day. Yes, I was paying for gunk that was restricting my capillaries and wearing my heart out by making it work harder 24/365 (that’s all the time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year). Not only that, I was running a terrible risk of getting throat or lung cancer, and having to drag an oxygen bottle around with me the last few months of my life.

I wheezed and coughed all the time. Now I know that cigarettes were pouring more than 800 different chemicals into my lungs, but who knows all the ways tobacco was killing me? Only a lamebrain would smoke, and I’m no lamebrain. Hurray for me—I’ve quit smoking. Now my money goes for things that are good for me, not that killer weed.

“It was easy. I just threw the damn things away and stopped. No stupid habit like that is ever going to control me again. When I decide to quit something, that’s it. I quit. End of habit.

I’m done with paying good money for something that was digging my grave. I’m proud of myself for quitting, and I sure feel great since I did. Got more energy, got more wind, feel more alive. It’s great to know that I’m not offending people by blowing smoke and cigarette breath at them. There’s no way I’d ever touch one of the rotten things again.”

How to Make the IQSA Method Work

Copying the I’ve Quit Smoking Affirmation is the first step. Keep the state­ment with you. Read it first thing in the morning, and the last thing before going to sleep at night. The important thing is to really feel the emotions, and especially to thank your­self and really brag on yourself for already quitting.

“Hey, wait a minute,” you may think. “I haven’t actually quit yet. How can I thank myself for something I haven’t done? I mean, how can you lie to yourself? It just doesn’t make sense that you could do that.”

You’re right; you can’t lie to yourself for very long—your subconscious mind won’t stand for it. And that’s why the system works—if you concentrate on feeling the emotions of having beat the habit. You have to put your feelings into reading the IQSA twice daily: first thing every morning and last thing every night. It’s easier to do than you may expect. Don’t think about the difficulties; think about how important it is to you; it is first, last and always a matter of life or death—yours. This is not an exaggeration, as 300,000 Americans every year could testify if tobacco hadn’t killed them.

Here’s my promise. If you follow this plan with sincere intent, within 30 days you will either quit smoking or quit reading your personalized IQSA. You just can’t keep on doing both, not unless you refuse to read the IQSA with complete emotional commit­ment. If you keep on smoking, it simply means you don’t really want to quit. You’d rather show that you’re really addicted, that nothing will let you beat the guys stealing your money and your health.

How does the method play out? Just let it happen. After driving the IQSA into your mind twice a day, you’ll find yourself reluctant to light up. You’ll be talking to yourself about dumping your supply of tobacco product, and getting rid of your ashtrays. The time will come when you don’t want those things around, don’t fight it, just let your feelings rule.

If you don’t feel the right emotions strongly at first, don’t let it discourage you. Keep at it. The right emotions—repulsion at the idea of smoking, and delight that you have quit—will take hold when you master the skill of momentarily putting yourself where you want to be. As you do this, make sure to look at the world through your own eyes. It’s important not to fly overhead observing yourself. This method works best when you feel the reality you want to create, rather than when you merely daydream about it.

It’s not necessary to fight yourself about changing. As long as you continue to read your IQSA twice a day, taking a few moments to let the emotions grab hold, you are reprogramming your mind. Continue doing so and your activity will move in the desired direction.

Remember, your IQSA has to be cast in the, I’ve already quit mode. It’s no good at all repeating, “I’m going to quit….” Being no more than wishful thinking, it has no power to bring about change. Even worse, it simply confirms that you are a hard-core smoker.

And be aware that you also may feel reluctant to continue reading the IQSA emotionally. That happens because your old smoker personality is fighting to stay front and center. This is the decisive point—this is where you either quit smoking or quit the IQSA. It’s when your true determination to put health ahead of habit either wins or loses.

What about using this in conjunction with one or more of the pills, inhalers, and patches that are commercially available to help you quit smoking? Many people get the job done using the IQSA method without chemical support, but the vital thing is to quit. Do what works for you.

How to Use the IQSA Method to Break Any Bad Old Habit, or Establish Any Good New One

The key is to write an emotional affirmation like the IQSA, and review it twice a day as suggested above. The more nitty-gritty you make your affirmation, the better. Repetition at least twice a day as stated above is essential.

How many affirmations can you have going at any a time? It depends. If you tend to get stressed out by change in your personal habits, take it one at a time. If you thrive on change, you can probably handle several at once. Just hold it down to the number you have time to get emotional about—with practice, you can do this in a few seconds for each affirmation.

But be very careful, how you use this knowledge. Be aware that wrongly used affirmations can kill. This is especially true about losing weight. Affirmations are what allows anorexics starve themselves to death in homes where food is abundant.

What’s the cost of this program? Nothing. It’s free. However, it will enable you to add many years of health and happiness to your life. If you feel grateful, send a contribution to my PayPal account—about half of what you save the first month that you stop buying poisonous tobacco products. Your contribution will enable me to spread the word faster, and save more people from dying years ahead of their time because they can’t break their nicotine habit. In any case, breathe deeply and live long. <>

You are probably a member of one of my projected book’s three target audiences:

(a) As yet unpublished writers in search of a more certain way to get published who are willing to explore the possibilities of collaborating with an expert—but don’t know how to go about doing this successfully.

(b) Published writers seeking greater professional success.

(c) Experts in some topic (often a new niche within a larger subject) who want to publish a book without having to grind out the whole thing by themselves.

We’ll talk about writers first.

If you’re an aspiring but as yet unpublished writer, get ready to give your drive toward publication a tremendous boost. Do that by pounding the four commitments that appear below into your skull. Write them down. Paste them in your hat, on the mirror in your bathroom and on the 3 x 5 cards you’ve snapped a rubber band around so they’re handy to review in spare moments:

(a) I write at least an hour every day.

If it’s impossible for me to sit at a computer, I still write at for least an hour. If I can’t do it in one shot, I write for at least 20-minutes three times a day—longhand or shorthand. (There’s a third way to seize precious writing periods from your busy day: get organized so you can dictate to a recorder during the otherwise dead time when you’re driving somewhere. See more about writing via dictation in Chapter ###.

(b) I avoid writer’s block and write fast when I’m ready to capture words because during every unstressed moment of the day, I think about what I’m going to write tonight after work or tomorrow before work.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? Don’t quit your day job until you have enough cash coming in to carry yourself and your responsibilities. Tom Clancy kept his insurance agency going after THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER became a great success. Not until his second book also hit the bestseller lists did Clancy cut loose from his day job.

(c) I want writing success, which I’ve never had. Therefore, I must do things I’ve never done.*

* With thanks to my friend in Florida, James Amps III, a dynamic keynoter and public speaker, who says, “If you want something you’ve never had, do something you’ve never done.”

((d) Every day I not only write, I also read something that will improve my writing skills or knowledge of the writing industry.

For nearly thirty years, I’ve been getting queries about writing a book for or with someone. Quite often the person making the query is not well informed about what’s involved in getting a book written to professional standards, finding a legitimate agent to represent it who will sell it to a trade publisher, and then promoting it heavily enough to make it a financial success.

This as a more informative response to all such queries than I could provide individually. After reading these words—and after examining your willingness to invest time, energy and your hard-earned cash to get your book written, published and selling in bookstores across the nation—you may or may not want to go ahead.

However, if you are willing and able to go ahead, please let me hear from you again. Helping people get published is my profession.

Some of the people who will read this message know little about how the publishing business operates today, so I’ll define terms as we go along.

Trade

Trade refers to the legitimate, royalty paying publishers such as Simon & Schuster, Random House, Pearson, Thomson, Penguin Putnam and Berkley—to name some of the largest ones. Beyond the giants are a large number of smaller publishers. On the average, the trade book industry issues 75 different new titles every working day, 150,,000 each year.

A key fact to keep in mind is that trade publishers generally take nine months to a year to publish a book AFTER they have a fully approved final manuscript. What does this mean to you?

If your manuscript isn’t complete and in publishable shape today, your book won’t arrive in bookstores for two years or more. Contrast that with self-publishing, where you can have books a month after your manuscript is complete and all other prepress requirements are in your printer’s hands.

Vanity

Legitimate, royalty-paying trade publishers never advertise seeking authors. (Anytime they do advertise, its purpose is to sell the books they have already published.) Firms who advertise seeking authors are called “vanity presses” because they will print anything anybody will pay them to print. I hear at second or third hand about a lot of major dissatisfaction with vanity houses. They tend to make lavish promises they don’t keep. Going to a vanity press is a sure way to fill your garage with books that will never sell.

Self-publishing

Self-publishing is totally different from vanity publishing, although in both, the author pays for the book’s production and printing. However, self-publishers know how to market their books—often doing so at their public speaking events. Thousands of self-published books written by or for public speakers (some written by me) have been very profitable for the speakers who commissioned them. An outstanding example is HOW TO MASTER THE ART OF SELLING, which I wrote for Tom Hopkins. After being self-published by Tom, it was picked up by a major trade publisher, went back to press 42 times, was translated into several languages and sold nearly two million copies worldwide.

POD Publishing

POD means Print on Demand. With this system, you only print books as you sell them. However, your costs per copy are so high it’s difficult to sell them at a profit. But at least your garage doesn’t get packed with books.

E-books

This is the least expensive way to get your message out because no paper and ink is involved. At least in theory, several hundred million people around the globe can access your book if it’s on a website—and even pay you for it. However, it takes a lot of skillful work to sell enough of them to make it worthwhile. Buy HOW TO GET YOUR E-BOOK PUBLISHED from Writer’s Digest Books if you’re interested in putting out an E-book.

I hope this information will be helpful to you. If you have more questions, I’m available for phone consultation at $40.00 for a half hour, $70 for a full hour, payable in advance. Schedule a mutually convenient time by email to w@jamison.org/

I am on Pacific Standard Time.

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