I’ve been doing a ton of research on the concept of beliefs, preparing for a class I am co-facilitating designed specifically around this notion of how beliefs (among other things) can either help or hinder our success. It is fascinating to know that the limits we perceive in our daily lives have root in the beliefs we hold to be true for ourselves. Not only that, most often the core beliefs (which tend to give us the biggest problems) were ones we created when we were little kids and had very little information to discern what was happening in the world around us. What does that mean exactly? Well let me give you an example:
When I was young, 8 or so, as my family watched a slasher movie, I overheard the following comment “Pretty, skinny girls always get it!” Well at 8, I wasn’t sure what “get it” meant, but from the sounds of it I didn’t want to find out! Shortly after that, I found all sorts of evidence that “Pretty, skinny girls get it”, mostly it seemed that they would come to some sort of violent death or at least be left for dead after some brutal attack. It wasn’t hard to find this evidence, TV, songs, movies, etc all confirmed that “getting it” was no good. Pretty soon I started putting on weight, and struggled with it for YEARS. It wasn’t until recently when I was trying to find out what sorts of beliefs was I holding on to that were preventing me from being at the weight I wanted, when I stumbled onto this notion that I’d been carrying around for so long! My life all of a sudden made sense! I now knew why it creeped me out when I got too much attention from “strange” men and why my weight had been yo-yo’ing all these years! Now it was time to take my life back! I did some NLP Belief Change work that helped a great deal. I am now on my way (in an extremely effortless way) to getting down to my goal weight. It absolutely feels like magic.
Although I wont share the details of the process I used, I will leave you with some questions you can ask yourself, to help loosen some of these limiting beliefs.
- How have you known this belief is true, until now?
- Is this belief always true? For everybody?
- What is the positive purpose for holding this belief?
- How would you know this belief wasn’t true? And what evidence (see, hear, feel) do you have for that?
These questions will start shaking the belief up a bit creating space for you to consider more possibilities. The one thing I find that works tremendously well, with limiting beliefs, inner critics, negative emotions, etc. is determining what the positive purpose/intent in holding these things to be true. By acknowledging and somehow incorporating that intent into your solution, allows you greater flexibility than remaining in inner conflict.
If you want more information on the specifics, please feel free to send me an email @ silvia@insightscc.comor post a comment.
