Should I read Allen Carr’s Easyway book or attend a seminar?
This is a question I am often asked and it appears to confuse many a person. It is not surprising.
On one hand the books have sold more than 15 million copies purely on the basis of word of mouth recommendation (apparently each copy of the book is read by several people so it is easy to estimate that the book has easily reached more than 50 million people in more than 45 countries). On the other hand – the seminar is the method in its original form, with free of charge back up sessions, telephone support, and a money back guarantee.
It is a frequent misconception that the book led to the live seminars – yet the reverse is true. After he had successfully stopped smoking (following repeated failed attempts to quit over many years) Allen Carr helped many close friends to quit smoking using what he christened the “Easyway” method. More and more people sought out his help and eventually he was obliged to see people in groups rather than as individuals (such was the demand generated by the former smokers who had benefited from the method and recommended it to their friends).
Eventually, to cope with the demand for places on his sessions, he was obliged to see larger and larger groups of people. To accommodate more people he went from working in his own home to taking on commercial premises nearby – allowing him to see larger groups still.At this stage he was working six, or sometimes seven, days a week and was still finding it hard to cope with the number of smokers seeking his help. It was this (as well as a desire to provide help for the few smokers who failed to stop following consultations with him) that moved him to write the book.
Allen Carr’s family and friends told him he was crazy. They argued – why would someone pay the (relatively) high price for his stop smoking consultations if they could obtain the book for just a few pounds? Regardless of this – Allen put his method onto the printed page and self-published the book (a rare thing to do in the 1980s). An inauspicious start for what has become the best selling stop smoking book of all time!It was after treating several high profile celebrities that Allen was invited to appear on a popular national morning radio show. The book was mentioned and over the following weeks hundreds and hundreds of orders for the book were received (I can just imagine Allen and his lovely wife Joyce beavering away trying to pack and post thousands of copies of the book between his consultations). Of course the publisher Penguin soon took the book and less than 25 years later it had sold more than 13 million copies in 45 different countries.
So back to the question….a seminar or the book? I can only say that if it was my best friend who wanted help to quit – I’d book them into an Allen Carr’s Easyway Seminar. If they didn’t have access to one of our seminars (they are all accessible online now) I’d give them the book. That is not to sell the books short – they are an amazing phenomenon in themselves – it’s just clear that the live seminars are the absolute gold standard means of using Allen Carr’s Easyway successfully.Some people are concerned that if they read the book without success and failed to quit – the clinics won’t work for them either. This is another misconception. The clinics deliver the method in a clear, dynamic, spoken form via our amazing teams of therapists spread across the globe from Los Angeles to Moscow, from Tokyo to Kiev, from Paris to London, from Milan to Mauritius. Not bad progress for the method discovered by a man with no medical qualifications who stubbed out his last cigarette and realised he could cure the world of smoking.
We’re not there yet Allen – but everyone at Allen Carr’s Easyway is working tirelessly to ensure that your legacy achieves its full potential; whether via the lips of the therapists you trained or via the written word – we’ll get there.
