Beliefs

Pathways to health and well-being

Robert Dilts, Tim Hallbom, Suzi Smith

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781845908157
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

BELIEFS are the foundation of everyone's personal outcomes.This second edition of Beliefs: Pathways to Health & Well-Being includes new and updated material and offers leading edge technologies that rapidly and effectively identify and remodel limiting beliefs.It teaches you powerful processes for change and demonstrates how to identify and change beliefs using scripts from personal change work undertaken with individuals in workshops. These processes include reimprinting, conflict integration, belief/reality strategies, visualization and criteria identification.You will learn the latest methods to change beliefs which support unhealthy habits such as smoking, overeating and drug use; change the thinking processes that create phobias and unreasonable fears; retrain your immune system to eliminate allergies and deal optimally with cancer, AIDS and other diseases; and learn strategies to transform "unhealthy" beliefs into lifelong constructs of wellness.

Chapter 1

Beliefs:
Identification and Change

In 1982 my mother had reached a transition point in her life. Many things were changing for her. Her youngest son was leaving home and she was having to deal with what his leaving meant to her. The law firm my father had been working with was splitting up and he was going into business for himself. Her kitchen, the heart of her home, had burned down and she was feeling frustrated and upset about that because the kitchen was “her place” and partly represented who she was in our family system. On top of it all, she was working long hours as a nurse for several doctors, and had commented that she was “dying to take a vacation.”

In the midst of all these stresses of change in her life, she had a recurrence of breast cancer that metastasized to her skull, spine, ribs, and pelvis. The doctors gave her a poor prognosis and basically said they would do what they could to “make her comfortable.”

My mother and I spent four long days working with her beliefs about herself and her illness. I used every NLP technique that seemed appropriate. It was exhausting work for her. When we weren’t working she ate or slept. I assisted my mother in changing a number of limiting beliefs and helped her integrate major conflicts that had developed in her life because of all the life changes that had occurred. As a result of the work we did with her beliefs, she was able to make dramatic improvements in her health and elected not to receive chemotherapy, radiation treatment, or any other traditional therapy. She lived another thirteen-and-a-half years in excellent health, and there were no further cancer symptoms. She swam one half-mile several times per week and lived a happy full life that included trips to Europe and roles in TV commercials. She was an inspiration for all of us about what is possible for people with life-threatening illnesses.

The work I did with my mother was pivotal in my development of NLP models to work with health, beliefs, and belief systems. The models that I use now have evolved considerably in the past seven years, and will be the focus of this book.

Even before I worked with my mother I had become intrigued with belief systems when I recognized that, even after doing an NLP intervention “successfully,” some people with whom I was working still didn’t change. In exploring why, I often discovered that these individuals held beliefs that somehow negated the change they wanted. One typical example of this occurred when I was presenting to a group of special education teachers. A teacher raised her hand and said, “You know, I think the NLP strategy for spelling is great and I use it on all my students. It just doesn’t work for me.” I tested her and discovered that in fact the NLP strategy did work for her. I could teach her to spell a word until she could spell it frontwards and backwards correctly. However, because she didn’t believe that she could spell, she would discount her new ability. This belief allowed her to override all the evidence that she could in fact spell.

Belief systems are the large frame around any change work that you do. You can teach individuals to spell as long as they’re alive and can feed back information. However, if people really believe they can’t do something, they’re going to find an unconscious way to keep the change from occurring. They’ll find a way to interpret the results to conform to their existing belief. In order to get the teacher, mentioned earlier, to use the spelling strategy, we’d have to work with her limiting belief first.

A Model for Change Using NLP

When working with any limiting belief, your goal is to get from your present state to your desired state. The first and most important step is to identify your desired state. You need to have a clear representation of your outcome. For instance, if you are working with a smoker, you’ll need to get him to consider who he’ll be and what he’ll do in his relationships, work life, recreation, and so on when he no longer smokes. Once you’ve helped someone to set an outcome, you’ve already started the change process because his brain is a cybernetic mechanism. This means that once he is clear about his goal his brain will organize his unconscious behavior to achieve it. He’ll begin to automatically get self-corrective feedback to keep him on track toward his goal.

I heard about an example of this recently. Someone wrote a master’s thesis at an Eastern university in 1953 on goal setting. The person writing the thesis found that only 3 percent of the students had written lifetime goals. Twenty years later, in 1973, someone checked with the surviving members of the class of ’53 and found that the 3 percent of students with written goals made more income than all the rest of the class put together. This is an example of how your brain will organize your behavior to achieve a goal.

After you’ve identified what you want, you can then gather information about your current situation—your present state. By contrasting and comparing your present state with your desired state, you can determine what abilities and resources you need to achieve your desired state.

Formula for Change

I’d like to present my simple NLP formula for change:

Present (Problem) State + Resource = Desired State

This is essentially the process you use with all the specific techniques that NLP has developed over the last seventeen years. Sometimes you run into difficulty in adding resources to the present state—something in the person’s thinking interferes. You then have a model that looks like this:

Present State + Resources = Desired State

Interferences

(including Limiting Beliefs and/or Inner Conflicts)

Recognizing and Working with Interferences

I sometimes humorously label interferences “internal terrorists” who sabotage all your best efforts. Unfortunately, you can’t go in and arrest the “terrorist” because it’s a part of you that needs to be evolved and incorporated rather than destroyed. Consider an interference as a communication that another set of resources is needed before you move on toward your desired state.

The most typical kind of interference is the type that exists within the individual. Sometimes people are trying to gain some desired outcome, but do not consciously realize that they are getting certain positive benefits from the problem they’re trying to overcome. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

A woman might have difficulty losing weight because she’s afraid that if she does, then people might be sexually attracted to her. Losing weight would create anxiety because she doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to handle those situations gracefully.

When a man who is sick gets a certain type of attention from his family that he doesn’t normally receive, that can become a motivation for staying sick. When he is well he feels taken for granted and doesn’t get the attention that he wants.

I remember a fellow I worked with who had cancer of the liver. When I asked if there were any parts of him that objected to becoming healthy again, he felt a hesitancy. A part of him was concerned because he had gathered all his friends together for a grand farewell party, where everyone bared their souls and cried. This part felt that if he got well he couldn’t possibly live up to all that incredible emotion. It would all be downhill from there because he had that peak experience that was predicated on his dying. Not being able to live up to this peak experience represented an interference. I had to deal with that interference before adding any other resources.

Interferences can take one of three forms. The first is that some part of the person doesn’t want the change. Often the person is not consciously aware of this part. I was working with a man who wanted to quit smoking and every conscious part of him agreed. However, there was an unconscious “15-year-old” part of him that thought if he quit smoking he’d be too much of a conformist. If he quit smoking he’d no longer be himself. We needed to take care of this identity issue before giving him more appropriate ways of being an independent person. In order to create change, you have to congruently want the change.

A second kind of interference is when the person doesn’t know how to create a representation of change or how he’d behave if he did change. You have to know how to move from present state to desired state. I once worked with a boy who had an auditory spelling strategy and couldn’t spell. He tried to spell by sounding out the letters. Of course, he couldn’t spell very well because to spell effectively you need to see the word and get a feeling of familiarity or unfamiliarity. I taught him the NLP visual memory spelling strategy, which gave him the know how to spell.

This brings us to the third kind of interference. A person needs to give himself the chance to use his new learnings. There are some common ways that people don’t give themselves the chance to change.

A person often needs the time and space for the change to take place. If someone tries an effective strategy for losing weight and doesn’t see results within a few days, he hasn’t given himself a chance to change. So, just giving yourself time can give you the chance you need.

Another kind of chance to example was demonstrated when Tim Hallbom and Suzi Smith were once talking to an instructor from a graduate school about how to help people create change in their lives. The instructor said, “I’ve read about the NLP phobia technique in Using Your Brain – For a Change but I’d never use it because it’s just a ‘quick fix.’” She thought for change to be worthwhile it had to be a long, painful process. Tim and Suzi said, “We’ve used the process lots of times and seen it last for years.” She said, “I don’t care if it lasts; it’s still a quick fix.” This instructor was a person who wanted to be more effective as a people helper, but couldn’t learn how to because she wouldn’t give herself a chance to because of her fixed and limiting beliefs about how change should occur.

Summary

In summary, you can create change by:

1. Identifying the present state;

2. Identifying the desired state;

3. Identifying the appropriate resources (internal states, physiology, information, or skills) that you need to get from present state to desired state; and

4. Eliminating any interferences through using those resources.

You’ve got to want to change, know how to change, and give yourself the chance to change.1

Additional Elements that Influence Change

There are four additional elements that relate to influencing change and are a part of wanting to change, knowing how to change, and giving yourself a chance to change. These elements are: (1) physiology, (2) strategies, (3) congruency, and (4) belief systems. Any change that you make is in some way going to be influenced by each of these. Let me divide it this way:

• Physiology and strategies have to do with knowing how to. How do you do a particular behavior?
• Congruency and beliefs have to do with wanting to do something or giving yourself the chance to do it. You have ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 : Beliefs: Identification and Change
• Chapter 2 : Reality Strategies
• Chapter 3 : Belief Strategies
• Chapter 4 : Re-imprinting
• Chapter 5 : Incongruence and Conflicting Beliefs
• Chapter 6 : Criteria
• Chapter 7 : More on NLP and Health
• Chapter 8 : Allergies
• Epilogue
• My Pathway to Wholeness
• Appendix A : Well-formed Conditions for Outcomes
• Appendix B : NLP and Cancer Treatment
• Glossary
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors
• Copyright