If I said what you believe is the most fundamental and important thing in your life, would you believe me? Beliefs are things which are true to us, they tend to empower or disempower us. If you believe you can do something and if you act in accordance with that, then you tend to get results which support your belief. Your positive result supports your belief in a virtuous circle. But if you believe that you cannot do something it will either prevent you from acting or it will hinder any action you do take. Meaning that you get poor results, which then supports and reinforces your belief in your inability to succeed. Thus, your beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies. If you have empowering beliefs about yourself, you can get great results, and if you have disempowering ones you won’t achieve your potential.
In Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) we talk about beliefs and values as different things. And it is perfectly fine to do so, I wrote about values in a blog in July 2023. Values are things which are important to us, they provide motivation in our lives, we use them to judge right and wrong, we feel negative emotion when our values have been violated. In relationships, we seek a degree of alignment between our values. It is the same at work, if our values aren’t aligned with the ones being expressed in the business then we could feel like we don’t fit in. What we also say about values in NLP is that they are a generalised representation of a collection of beliefs about a subject. What that means is that it is your beliefs that are more fundamental. Another aspect of beliefs, that may not be immediately apparent, is your beliefs cause you to feel emotions too. If you didn’t have any beliefs, you wouldn’t feel any emotions. What all of this means is that your beliefs are the most fundamental piece of psychological programming you have.
As I said you can have empowering beliefs or disempowering beliefs. In NLP we have a set of fourteen empowering beliefs to have about yourself and about other people. We call them the Presuppositions of NLP. We aren’t saying that these are objectively true, I cannot prove that they are. All we do say is that if you adopt these beliefs then you get better results as you interact with other people. They were modelled from successful therapists during the creation of NLP. Here are four of the fourteen –
- The meaning of the communication is the response you get. It doesn’t matter what you think you communicated to someone else, the response that you get from them is what you communicated. This makes you 100% responsible for your communication.
- There is no failure only feedback. For yourself and for others, treat any apparent failure as an opportunity to learn something.
- The map is not the territory. The words that people use do not, necessarily represent the experience that they are having. Another way of saying this is, the food isn’t the menu. You eat the food, the menu is the linguistic description of the food, but it isn’t the food. Many a time you will have been either pleased or disappointed based on what you ordered from a menu and what you ate.
- Respect the other person’s model of the world. We all have a construct of how the world works and how we fit into this. This is our model of the world, it can include things like our religious, spiritual, scientific, or philosophical outlook, as well as what we think about our own capabilities.
As well as having empowering beliefs we also have disempowering beliefs. In NLP we call these limiting beliefs. These are things that we assume are true about ourselves that hold us back, which are not objectively true. Such as “I am not good enough”, “I’m not attractive”, “I can’t earn enough money”, “I’m not good at relationships”. Most often what causes these in the first place is that at some point in our life we were in a negative emotional state, for all manner of different reasons, and in that moment, we make a choice, a decision about ourselves that then forms the belief. Our unconscious mind faithfully continues to replicate this for us until we bring it into our awareness, and let it go. The NLP toolkit contains numerous techniques to help us to let go of limiting beliefs. Nevertheless, remember that you are empowered to change any belief you have about yourself. The first step is to bring it into your awareness, then ask yourself, do I really want this to be true about me. But if you don’t believe it can be that easy to change, then do 20 push-ups, and then let it go.
“The truth is that there is no actual stress or anxiety in the world; it’s your thoughts that create these false beliefs.” Wayne Dyer
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