Negative beliefs
If you are on a path to create change in your life, then one of the things you are going to come face to face with is your negative or limiting beliefs. Of course it you don’t have any, then great, but if you do there are many ways to overcome them. A useful technique you might want to employ is called reframing (a NLP term). With reframing rather than ignore the belief altogether (a tough thing to do), you simply look at it from a different perspective. You can either break it down into smaller chunks, look at the strategy and sequence of the belief (explained below), reframe the context, reframe the content or look at the different outcomes that the belief will bring you, there are many ways.
In this article I will look at how you can alter your thinking about the belief by looking at how you represent the belief internally (the strategy and sequence of the belief).
I think the best way to describe this is with a couple of examples.
Take the negative belief ‘I’m too fat’, now this is a very general belief, it doesn’t say much. For instance ‘too fat’ for what exactly, but let’s get to work on it anyway:
Questions you could ask yourself and anyone else who has this belief include; How do you know you are too fat and not slightly overweight? How do you know you are too fat and not just fat? What is the real difference between the two? How will you know when it does not hold true? What will you see, hear and feel? How do you represent ‘too fat’ in your mind? Do you see a picture of someone who is large or a picture of yourself? And what exactly does it mean to be too fat? What are the consequences of being ‘too fat’? What can you not do, how does it restrict your life? Are all fat people ‘too fat’, or just yourself? Is there any example of when someone is fat but not too fat?
What lets you know that it is fat and not large or big? When does ‘big’ become ‘fat’? What is that trigger? What was it that happened that suddenly made you become ‘too fat’? What does this mean for your life? Are there lots of things you can’t do now because you are ‘too fat’, are you now unhappy with yourself because you are ‘too fat’?
Now what exactly is happening here? Well we a not trying to remove the belief, instead provide a different way of looking at it. By asking yourself questions like these you are essentially playing around with reality as you see it, you are able to make suggestions and offer advice to help yourself come up with new ways of looking at the belief / problem.
What about the following belief; ‘I’ll never be able to learn Japanese’.
Wow, never is such a powerful word, so never ever in the future will you be able to learn Japanese, not one word of Japanese for the rest of your life, if I told you a word in Japanese and you repeated it, would the whole negative belief come crashing down around you. What about counting to 10, will you never be able to count to 10 in Japanese? What about if you study counting from 1-10 every day for the next month, can we expect you not to be able to speak the numbers by the end of the month.
Does this just apply to Japanese, what about Chinese or German, is there something special about Japanese, have you ever tried to learn it? Where does belief stem from? How is this represented in your mind? Do you see yourself struggling to converse with 40 Japanese business men in a boardroom, all laughing at your pathetic attempts to speak their language? Or do you see yourself scratching your head reading a language book as you try to make sense of all these complex words? What about a picture of you learning 2 or 3 words a day for the next few weeks, would that be learning Japanese? Would the belief still hold true? How did you arrive at this conclusion? Do you see yourself not ever trying because of it? Have you known other people who have tried and failed which is where this belief comes from? Has there never been one person not born in Japan who has learned the language?
Again do you see what is going on here, we are playing around with the reality of the belief, making suggestions and generally trying to change the way you currently see the belief in a way that will potentially shift your thinking about the belief entirely.
When you need to use the strategy for a negative belief use the following questions to help
shift your thinking:
How did you arrive at this understanding and conclusion?
How do you know that you feel this way?
What lets you know that it is ‘this feeling’ and not ‘this feeling’?
How do you represent this belief?
How will you know if and when it does not hold true?
What comes first? What comes next? How do you code each part of the belief internally?
Are you sure you don’t have this in any other format?
Play around with the reality – Ask questions, make suggestions, offer advice and attempt to link up with other understandings. Have fun with it.
For more information on negative beliefs, check out this site.
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