Looking past limits

Here's an incredibly inspiring and life enhancing video that is well worth the few minutes of your time to watch it now.

It's about believing in yourself and looking past limits to create an enhanced and enhancing life for yourself and others.

[here's the link to the talk if the embedded vid doesn't work for you: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/eng//id/1116 ]

I hope you enjoyed the video and found it useful and life enhancing.

smiles, Grant

Creating Empowering Beliefs

"Belief is Power. The power to create. We create our reality simply by what we agree to believe.”

Ray Dodd, The Power of Belief

As you know, Beliefs are powerful and life enhancingly important. This week's blog entry continues with our short excursion into the process and skills of believing and how to change limiting 'beliefs' into empowering ones. Remember from last week's blog that you don't 'have beliefs', instead you do the process of believing and the keys to the structure of this are submodalities.

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs

Limiting and negative beliefs and attitudes are life denying. Many of these are unconsciously installed by our culture and the micro-culture of our family. They are often so ingrained and unquestioned that at first you may not be aware of them.

Have you ever travelled overseas to another culture and noticed how many strange and unusual customs there are? The inhabitants of that country think their customs and beliefs, their societal and cultural norms and practices, are totally sensible and normal. Yet, to your eyes they can appear crazy and non-sensical. Well, guess what, a traveller visiting your world would find your customs and beliefs equally weird and wonderful.

This is not an issue when your beliefs, values and generalisations are life enhancing and support meaning and happiness in your life. However, your beliefs and attitudes often don’t fully serve you. They are habitual patterns, mostly performed outside your conscious awareness, and can undermine your happiness and peace of mind. It’s vital that you become aware of these life denying, unnecessary self-imposed limitations and learn how to replace them with empowering alternatives.

The fields of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT) have generated a lot of research on limiting and negative irrational beliefs and how they become automatic and streamlined into unconscious strategies that limit your ability to cope with life. Such negative and pessimistic thoughts and self-talk can occur when you are under stress and can cause emotional and physical reactions.

The following is a list of typical negative irrational beliefs. Take a look through and mark off those that you indulge in:

• In order to be happy, I have to be successful in whatever I undertake
• My happiness depends on my performance
• I must be accepted (liked, approved, admired) by all people at all times
• I just can’t be happy without love
• I should always be able, successful, and on top of things; if I'm not, I'm an inadequate, incompetent, hopeless failure
• Happiness is having everything I want without giving up anything!
• When things do not go the way I want and plan, it is terrible and I can't stand it!
• I am hopeless and worthless

Think about and list any negative believing you have been doing in your life or that you have used unconsciously to limit yourself. Now let's turn those around and replace them with empowering believing that's more life enhancing.

Creating Empowering Beliefs

To replace limiting and unsupportive 'beliefs' -- unsupportive believing -- you can’t simply get rid of it; your unconscious mind resists change that takes something away. Instead, you have to replace old beliefs with new ones. This is quite easily done using submodality shifts so that you zoom away the old beliefs, and zoom in the new ones.

First, generate new positive beliefs that you like the idea of having. Create a list of powerful supportive ideas and beliefs. Attitudes of success. Then use the following 'New Belief Generator' process described below to install the new beliefs in place of old negative beliefs.

Here is a list of empowering beliefs garnered from the field of Cognitive Psychology to get you started:

• I am a worthwhile person and I deserve and can easily achieve happiness
• I give myself Unconditional Self Acceptance
• Happiness is a skill that I can learn and continue improving in fun and powerful ways – I am a happiness master!
• I can wonderfully embody attitudes of happiness and success
• I am an Optimist and can easily cope with setbacks
• I see setbacks as challenges that bring new opportunities and learnings and that I can overcome
• I am a fallible human being and I forgive myself and empower myself to realise that even when I don’t get what I want I can still live a worthwhile and happy life
• There is no failure, only feedback; I learn from my mistakes and get satisfaction in overcoming obstacles
• I have High Frustration Tolerance, and know I can experience happiness as a choice, even when my preferences aren’t being met
• I am a worthwhile and happy person and I know it!

The real key to amplifying and owning a new belief is to make it bright and big and bold. Fill the belief with colour and movement, so that it engenders fantastic juicy feelings. Add music and surround-sound to the image. Really amplify and enhance it. By repeating this process a minimum of three times you’ll create a new pattern of believing in your life and your unconscious mind will continue to embody the attitude in powerful ways.

New Belief Generator

1. Picture and think about the belief you want to change. Elicit the submodalities of this image. Notice its size and position, distance and brightness. Is it coloured, is it focused, does it have a border or is it panoramic? Is it still or a movie? Write down the submodalities to use later in the strategy.
2. Think about and picture something you really don’t believe. Something you just cannot believe at all. Elicit the submodalities of this ‘Don’t believe it’ belief. Write them down.
3. Create a new, more empowering belief. You may not totally believe it yet, but decide on a belief you’d like to have. Write it up in bright bold colours. Refine it. Make it impactful in its wording and description.
4. Now, take the image of the belief you want to get rid of and zoom the image off into the distance, getting smaller and smaller, then bring it back but to the size, position and other submodalities of the ‘Don’t believe it’ image. Repeat this process 3 to 5 times. You may have to do this whole process with an ‘as if’ quality. Not everyone sees the images in their minds eye with total life-like quality, and it doesn’t seem to matter for the effectiveness of this technique. You’ll find it will work, even if you are just imagining all this happening.
5. Take the image of the new positive belief, and starting with it way in the distance, ZOOM it in to the submodalities of belief. Zoom it in powerfully, and as it comes in, closer and closer, make it bigger, brighter, bolder, more colourful and any other changes you’d like to see. Make a ZOOMING or SWOOSHING sound as you zoom it in. Repeat this process 3 to 5 times.
6. Put this whole process together. Take the old negative belief and zoom it away in the distance. Bring it zooming back in to the position and submodalities of ‘I don’t believe it’ and as quickly as possible then ZOOM in the new positive belief to the position and submodalities of total belief.
7. Lock the beliefs into position by hearing the sound of them ‘Clicking’ into place. Make a sound of a solid clicking sound in your mind or even with your voice out loud.
8. Break state by looking around the room. Repeat steps 6 and 7 from 3 to 5 times. As quickly as you can.

Up to you

Ok, it's up to you now. This blog has given you some key life enhancing ideas, beliefs and processes to use and explore. Empowering beliefs can really make an incredible life enhancing difference to your world.

Believe this! You create your reality through what you choose to believe. So choose life enhancing and empowering beliefs now.


Want to learn more, get a copy of my book: Avoiding the Enemies to HAPPINESS!

empowering wishes

Grant

Using Your Brain - For a Change: NLP - Richard Bandler

Change Your Mind-And Keep the Change : Advanced NLP Submodalities Interventions

Belief Busting with NLP Unpacked (Audio CD)

Believe This!

"Belief is Power. The power to create. We create our reality simply by what we agree to believe.”

Ray Dodd, The Power of Belief

Beliefs are powerful and life enhancingly important. Beliefs, attitudes and values organise your behaviour and direct most aspects of your life and psychology. As Henry Ford said “whether you believe you can, or believe you can’t, either way you’re right”.

Another way of putting it is that ‘Achieving starts with believing!”. So it’s important to understand how beliefs work and then choose empowering and well-formed beliefs that serve you to enhance your life delightfully and wondrously.

Beliefs also largely set or constrain your freedom -- freedom to think, feel and act. So as part of our ongoing exploration of freedom, we'll take a short detour into beliefs and the underlying process of believing. Today's blog will be the first of a two part journey into believing.

So what are 'beliefs'?

Beliefs are generalisations or rules that you’ve come to accept as true about yourself and the world. Beliefs show up as stereotypes, prejudices and mindsets. A large number of your beliefs and attitudes are outside your conscious awareness. It takes work and insight to bring them to conscious consideration. There’s much research to show that large differences can exist between your espoused or conscious beliefs and your operating beliefs, your ‘beliefs-in-action’. This is the crucial difference between what you say and what you actually do.

Why aren't we taught this?

Given the importance and power of beliefs, you’d think it would be something you’d be taught at school, something that society would encourage and educate deeply about. But I bet you've never had a class called ‘Empowering Beliefs 101’. Well, let’s remedy that here and now.

Since knowledge is power, let’s learn about the process of generating and changing 'beliefs' and how the process of believing influences your unconscious mind and the minds of others. Let's examine your limiting and negative beliefs and mindsets and provide you with an NLP technique you can use to install success strategies for tracking and overcoming self-imposed limitations and replacing them with wondrous and supportive beliefs and attitudes. Sound useful and interesting?

Beliefs 101

One of the first things to understand about beliefs is they don’t actually exist! Yes, that’s right. You’ve never seen a belief. Ever. You’ve only ever seen the process or behaviour of believing. Think about it.

In NLP, the word ‘belief’ is what’s called a nominalisation. A nominalisation is a verb, or doing word, that has been turned into a noun, turned into an object or ‘thing’. Language is powerful. It’s how you do most of your thinking, your communicating. It’s how you organise, filter and make sense of your world. It’s a very powerful representational system. And like any powerful system, can be used appropriately or misused.

We typically use nominalisations to fix an ongoing process into a static object so we can get a handle on it, to talk about it. But in doing this, we distort our reality and if we’re not careful we end up mistaking our map for the territory. This distorting can lead to un-sane (not totally sane) thinking and behaviour, creating problems in our lives.

Belief as a disguised verb

Since beliefs are NOT objects, we don’t ‘have’ beliefs. Instead, we do a process of believing, and this process for most people is done outside of conscious awareness. It’s done with unconscious competence. You can’t hold a belief in your hand, or sit it on the table; you can’t go buy one from the shopping mall. So you don't have beliefs, instead you really do the process of believing (or disbelieving). And this process is a skill and has a structure.

How do we do the process of believing?

The process of believing involves forming generalisations from experience or learning them from other people, from society, family and friends. NLP has shown that when you ‘believe’ a generalisation, you unconsciously use a set of submodalities with it. Remember, submodalities are the sub-components of each of your sensory modalities. For example, visual submodalities are elements in your internal visual experience such as how close your pictures are, what size they are, where they are located in your visual field, whether they are focused, black and white, colored etc.

Let’s do a practical demonstration of this. Think of something you strongly believe in or that's an important 'belief' for you, and picture it or some representation of it in your mind’s eye. Notice the submodalities of the picture. How big is the picture, where is it in space, how far is it from you, is it coloured or black-and-white? How clear or focused is it?

Now, think of something you don’t believe and notice the submodalities of this. You’ll find some very big differences between the submodalities of what you believe and what you don’t believe.

Now just for the moment, perform this experiment. Take the image of what you believe strongly and shift the picture to have the same submodalities (size, position, distance, colours, focus etc.) of the thing you don’t believe. Now notice your subjective experience. If you’ve accurately changed the submodalities, you’ll typically find that it no longer seems quite so believable. Even though the content of the image is the same, when you picture it with different submodalities, it changes how you think and feel about the belief. It changes how you are ‘believing’ the generalisation that you are picturing. [Now make sure you put the belief back to where it belongs, back to it's original set of submodalities.]

How amazing is that! It’s so so simple to change a belief… to change ‘how’ you are believing.

What can you do with this?

Ok, so what can you do with this knowledge? Well, for a start you can begin to become aware of the submodalities of your various 'beliefs' -- how you are doing believing of the generalisations that organise your mind, perceptions and ultimately your life.

You can then consciously choose which beliefs support you and which you want to change or replace to enhance your freedom and your life.

Changing and revaluing beliefs is simple and powerful and one of the most fundamental processes you can do to enhance your life.

In next week's blog entry we'll explore typical negative and disempowering beliefs gleaned from the field of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and provide you with a powerful NLP technique for installing new more empowering beliefs.

So until then, start noticing 'how' you are believing. Increase your focus and awareness on the submodalities of your internal processing. Submodalities are how your unconscious mind encodes meaningfulness and are key components of the operating system of your mind. Explore them and play with them.

Believe this, you are truly free when you are able to control and master your submodalities and your processes of believing.


wishing you life enhancing believing,

smiles, Grant

Using Your Brain - For a Change: NLP - Richard Bandler

Change Your Mind-And Keep the Change : Advanced NLP Submodalities Interventions

Belief Busting with NLP Unpacked (Audio CD)