Create Change in your life

When you are going through or attempting to go through change in your life, there are different levels (logical levels) from which your brain operates. It is useful to understand what these levels are when initiating any kind of change because whatever you want to manifest will be affected at each layer at some point. There are 5 main levels

1. Identity
2. Beliefs
3. Capabilities
4. Behavior
5. Environment

To understand these levels a little better let’s take as an example somebody who wants to become a singer.

Identity

Your identity would be to say something like ‘I am a singer’, here you are identifying yourself as being a singer. Now if you have just started out on your path to become a singer you may not say this yet. To some people they wouldn’t class themselves as a singer until they were doing it professionally or had an album out, others may consider themselves a singer because they sing in the shower.

This is the top level. Once you are here at this point when you can say ‘I am a …’ your identity has changed and it is now a part of you, ‘you are this person’. What you consider your identity will affect all the other levels below, your beliefs, behavior etc.

Beliefs

Now you may believe you can sing, but not believe you are a singer, there is a difference. Likewise you may call yourself a singer but still have doubts about your abilities (negative beliefs). In this example a belief may be ‘I know I can sing’ or ‘I have a good voice’ or ‘I know people will like the sound of my voice’.

Capability

At this level you are looking at your skills, for example, can you actually sing? Do you have a good voice? Can you write music? There are many people who call themselves singers (Identity) but don’t actually possess this skills (Capabilities) required to sing, and vice versa there are people who are very competent singers who don’t and would never call themselves a singer (identity).

If you couldn’t sing then it would be at this level you would seek out help either via courses or personal instruction by way of singing lessons etc.

Questions to ask yourself at this level include ‘What skills do you put into practice?’ and ‘What capabilities do you tap into in this area of your life?’

Behavior

At this level we are focused on the ‘doing’ part. What would somebody see if they looked at this area of your life? If somebody was watching a video of you what would they see you do? What would they hear you say? In the case of our singer, perhaps they would sing regularly, be sending demo tapes to music companies. This level is basically your day to day activities. What do you do exactly? If you had the identity of being a singer, then you would probably be singing regularly in a band or something similar.

If you are seeking change in certain areas of your life and your behavior indicates that you were not taking the necessary action, then you would need to look at other levels to see if there was any in-congruency with your goals. For example, beliefs can be a real block for a lot of people.

Environment

The bottom level is your environment. ‘Where are you when you engage in this area of your life?’ Who else is there with you? This level involves any external constraints.

Is your environment conducive to who you think you are? (Identity) or who you would like to become? If you are a singer, where are you when you sing?

This is your immediate surroundings. Is your immediate environment conducive for creating the life you want for yourself?

I think these are very important levels to be aware of, when inciting change into your life. You can have all the capabilities, right behaviors and be in the perfect environment, but if you don’t believe (beliefs) you can become who you want to become then the actions you take at the lower levels will reflect this.

It would also be true to say that you can have all the self belief in the world (beliefs) but if you are not carrying out the actions (behaviors) you need to, then your self-belief will not take you very far.

Where are you at with your 5 levels at this moment in time? And more importantly if you are experiencing any difficulties take a look at each level and work out what is not happening for you. Is it because of your environment? Is it because you haven’t found the appropriate strategy to generate the right behaviors you are after? Is it your capabilities? Do you have conflicting beliefs or are there some issues at the level of your identity?

admin Mind change your life, The mind

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.

admin Mind Beliefs, The mind

It is an unfortunate fact, but a lot of people out there don’t always use their mind in a way that enhances their lives. Instead they use it in a way that reduces the quality of their lives. If we don’t use our minds in a positive way than our mind will more often than not use us, it will dwell on negative issues and how things will not work rather than how they will work. In any event in your life, you will have a pre-conceived idea of how that event will go. Some of the time you will not see things going your way or you will see yourself performing in a less than optimal way in a certain situation.

You will either see pictures of yourself failing or you will hear voices telling you that it won’t go well, or maybe you will get a bad feeling about it. Whatever it is, this is your brain working against you.

It is good to notice when this does happen. Start paying attention to what is happening on the inside when you start to feel angry, nervous, worried, fearful, negative or self-conscious. When you start to understand what exactly is happening on the inside you can start to do something about it.

The first step is noticing what is going on inside your head to give you feelings that you don’t want. I have started to do this, and for me I find that I make pictures of the event and also sometimes hear myself speak about it negatively. Once you are aware of this you can then change the sub-modalities (NLP term) of your representation. For example if you hear a voice you can change the voice, maybe change it to a voice of Mickey Mouse or some other cartoon character. If you see a picture, and it is big, bright and colorful you could change it so that it is small, black and white and in the distance. This is known as changing the sub-modalities.

So the next time you feel your mind working against you give it a go and see if you can change what’s going on in your head so you don’t feel as bad or negative.

admin Mind The mind

Have you ever ‘tried ‘to do something, how successful were you? Have you ever heard or been part of the following kind of conversation?

Person A: “We are meeting up for drinks tonight, you should come.”
Person B: “OK, I’ll try and be there at 7.00 o’clock.”
Person A: “see you there, bye”

If you were person A would you be confident that person B was going to meet you at 7.00 o’clock?

I am not sure that I would be.

There is a real difference between trying to do something and actually doing it. ‘Try’ is a word that really does not convey much conviction or instill in others confidence that a given task will be completed.

“I will try and get this report finished tonight.”
“I’ll try and arrange a meeting later on today so we can discuss the progress we have been making.”

Imagine if you are a manager (maybe you are one) who says to an employee, “I need to have the documentation for this project finalized by Wednesday at the latest”, and you employee turns to you and says:

“Sure, I’ll try and have it done.”

As a manager this isn’t really what you want to hear. I don’t think any manager would walk away without having some doubts about whether or not the documentation would be completed.

Saying that you will ‘try’ to do something doesn’t install faith, either in yourself or others.

When we say we will ‘try’ to do something it is like we immediately have doubts about our ability to complete the task we are about to try and do. When we say it to ourselves are we even sure that the task can be completed, not to mention whether it will be completed or not?

“I am going to try and get a job in the fashion industry”
“I will try to learn some French in the next 6 months”
“I will try and pass my accountancy exams”

If you ever heard anyone say the above, would you have faith in them, would you put money on them completing their goals?

Would you be surprised if they didn’t complete their objectives?

It is like saying:

“Ok I will start this activity, but it may not happen so let’s prepare ourselves for the eventuality of it happening, as well as the possible of it not happening.”

Your mind is already starting to think about what to do when the task doesn’t get completed.

“I’ll try and finish this by 6pm’ next thing you say to yourself is ‘What excuse can I come up with when it isn’t completed on time”.

Use words like ‘Will’ and ‘Do’, these words have more affirmative intentions behind them. Saying you will do something has weight behind it; it is believable and focuses your mind to come up with strategies on how to make it happen.

“I will pass my accountancy exams”.
“I will complete this report by 6pm”.

When you say you will try something, do you really deep down believe you will complete it? Be more positive with the words you use, Show some confidence in yourself and allow others to see it in you as well.

To quote a wise creature from a famous movie ‘Do or do not, there is no try’

admin Mind The mind

Why is it that we are so often down on ourselves and our abilities to make a go of something even before we have started it? I mean way before we have even attempted to start something, I am talking about when the idea originally springs to your mind. Do you recognize this? Maybe you want more money, to work for yourself, to change your career or to become somebody different (lose weight, more confidence). All great goals, but yet when you get pictures of the things you want the most in your mind, you hear a voice that immediately says ‘It won’t happen’ or ‘It’s too difficult’ or ‘If it were easy everybody would be doing it’ or ‘come on be realistic’. Sound familiar? Does it happen to you? If it does it can be a huge roadblock to making any progress in your life.

Do you recognize any of the following traits in yourself from time to time?

• Self sabotage
• Self loathing
• Self doubt
• Self confidence (lack of)

I think it’s probably fair to say, although correct me if I am wrong, but anyone with the above traits probably would have real difficulties making anything worthwhile happen in their lives even if they tried. Life is hard enough without all of this stuff floating about in your head. It doesn’t matter how old you are, where you live, or what you do, we are all the sum of our thoughts. Success or failure all originate in our minds.

“Defeat is not the worst of failures, not to have tried is the true failure.”
George E Woodbury.

How on earth does anyone know that they will fail at something or not be very successful before they have even given it their best shot? How can a person be that sure, that confident that they won’t succeed?

It is only after you have given something your best effort, given everything you can to achieve something that you can be in a position to make judgment about yourself or your abilities, and even then it benefits no one by being down or negative about it.

But to say to yourself that something is not going to work before you have even tried? Why would you do that?

It’s like

‘I really want to do X’

‘But I probably won’t be very good at X’

‘So it will probably be best if I don’t even attempt to start X because I already know it won’t work out.’

No attempts, no day by day goals to attain X, no plan in place, no persistence, no action, instead just a simple statement to yourself that it probably won’t work (even though you would like to make a go if it).

To not try something at all, is complete failure, but to give something a go takes courage and guts, it should be encouraged and commended in anybody who does however old they are.

Instead of people being so sure of that they won’t succeed why don’t people turn this around and believe that they will be successful. Why would someone adopt a burnt out defeatist attitude before the race has even started.

You can understand a writer who has been in the business for 20+ years, and is still waiting to be published to have a certain negative feeling towards the whole thing business (perhaps). But to someone who has never even given it a go?

What does that really say about you?

admin Mind The mind

Have you ever been in a situation where you think somebody doubts your ability to do a job, and then you start to doubt yourself as well? Or maybe you just doubt your ability without anyone else involved. When somebody says to you ‘You can’t do something’, or ‘You’ll never be able to do that’, then that is just their opinion and nothing else, it is only when you start to believe such statements that it can affect your confidence and your outlook on life.

I know I can’t speak Korean, but knowing this doesn’t affect my life in any negative way. I mean if I want to I could learn to speak it. Just because I can’t do something doesn’t mean I won’t be able to in the future and it certainly doesn’t mean I am an incompetent person who can’t learn things.

As an example; Let’s say you arrive at work and see that you have a load of problems to solve ASAP, do you all of a sudden start to feel slightly apprehensive, maybe even a little skeptical of your ability to solve the problems? Perhaps before you know it you are sitting there feeling very unconfident. People can hear in your voice that you are not confident, you are speaking very slowly so nobody can hear what you are saying, you start to muddle your words and sound incoherent. It’s not a pretty site yet it probably all started with your own self doubt about solving a particular problem which then snowballed into huge self doubt, which then made the rest of your day miserable.

Even if you find yourself in a position where you can’t do something, you can at least state that in a confident way and move on with your life. At least be sure that if you wanted to learn something that you could do and just because you can’t do something at a particular moment in time doesn’t mean you should feel bad about yourself. A lack of self confidence in one area shouldn’t spill over to other areas of your life.

I don’t believe anybody can really affect your lack of self confidence the way you can. For most things that we are now doing in our lives, (that we can do competently) there would have been a time when it was the first time we did them, nobody is born with the ability to be good at everything. When we are young we haven’t learnt to be negative and so we don’t doubt ourselves when we start something new. Doubting ourselves and our abilities are all learned behaviors. We learn to be self conscious and insecure.

Only you can really decide how you feel about anything that happens to you. What will it take to have that inner belief about yourself that whatever you do you will do well and with confidence?

If you are faced with problems at work or in your personal life, I recommend that you break it down into smaller chunks and deal with one chunk at a time rather than see the problem as one big whole that has to be solved. Don’t let one little problem affect your whole self-image in a negative way.

Don’t let others decide how you are going to feel; what other people think is of no consequence compared to what you think of yourself. Speak positively of yourself, don’t put yourself down.

The only person who can affect the way you feel about yourself and your abilities is YOU.

admin Positive Thinking change your life, motivate, The mind

Do you dream about what your future may hold for you? Or do you believe dreaming is just wishful thinking, and that your fate has already been decided for you? Have you already decided that what you do is what you do, you are who you are and that you must just accept your lot for what is and just get on with life? This is not the sort of attitude that I want. I never want to stop dreaming, I’ll always be thinking about what’s possible for me in my lifetime.

Some medical researcher will probably one day find some health benefits to dreaming (if they haven’t already). I think it’s healthy to get lost in day dreams from time to time.

The process of dreaming creates images in your mind, which should then

admin Mind The mind

So what is NLP? NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic programming, it is a model of human excellence, how the language of the mind is used to achieve results, it is the structure of how we do what we do.

Neuro - Nerves, pathways, neurology.
Linguistic - Language, the way we communicate, verbal / non verbal, conscious, unconscious.
programming - Strategies, repeated patterns of speech and behavior.

I have read books on NLP and listened to various NLP audio. I find the area of NLP fascinating. I think it is great tool for overcoming problems and creating a better life for yourself. In particular I would like to use it for overcoming negative beliefs, improving confidence and communication skills, setting goals and creating a better future for myself. I have just recently finished a NLP life skills course. The course was 10 weeks covering the following topics:

• Communication
• Rapport
• Representational systems
• Work / Life balance
• Outcomes / setting goals
• NLP presuppositions

Here are some useful communication beliefs used in NLP:

• Everyone lives in their own model of the world.
• Mind and body are part of the same system. What affects one affects the other.
• A person cannot not communicate.
• If what you’re doing isn’t working, do something else.
• There is no failure only feedback.
• The meaning of the communication is the response you get.
• If one person can do it, anybody can.
• Everyone has all the resources they need.
• Every behavior has a positive intention.
• People make the best choices available to them at the time.
• The map is not the territory.
• More choice is better than no choice.
• Respect for everyone’s model of the world.

Some of these can be very useful when applied to your own life, I particularly like; ‘There is no failure only feedback’, ‘If one person can do it, anybody can’ and ‘Everyone has all the resources they need.’

Imagine going through life, with the belief that failure didn’t exist, and instead of failing at things you just got feedback as to what worked and what didn’t. What about ‘everyone has all the resources they need’. What does this mean to you? To me this implies that we all have within us the ability to create any reality we want for ourselves. We shouldn’t have to rely on anyone else to change us, ultimately it is down to each of us individually.

admin Mind NLP, The mind