Thursday, July 20, 2006

If you're feeling stuck...

Over the years, I have really come to believe that (as Jane Roberts wrote in the 1970’s) “you create your reality through your beliefs”. So many times, I have seen that by changing a belief, my reality immediately showed up differently. And I have seen that for my friends and clients as well.

We are each in charge of our own beliefs. If something is going wrong in your life, there is probably a belief, in fact, probably an unconscious belief, that would benefit from a change. I have lots of tools to help you change your beliefs, and I learned some new linguistic ones last weekend, at an NLP workshop called Sleight of Mouth.

Although this is a major oversimplification, Sleight of Mouth is basically asking very good questions to loosen the belief, that is, to make you question whether or not it is really true. Here are a few of those questions, using as an example the belief that “If people knew who I really am, they wouldn’t like me”:

* What is the effect of that in your life? (You feel doomed to living a lie, and are shutting down parts of yourself.)

* Your belief implies a certain value. Aren’t there other values that are more important to you? Given the importance of these other values, how are you going to maintain this belief? (Isn’t it more important to be true to yourself than to be liked?)

* Can you think of a counterexample? A time, a place, or a person for whom this wasn’t true? (Can you think of a time you got what you wanted by telling the truth, by just being who you were?)

* How do you know this is true? What evidence do you have? (If you’ve never been genuine, how do you know that people won’t like the real you?)

Next time you feel stuck, try asking yourself what you would have to believe for that to be true, and then try asking these questions. It might just shift you off the path you’ve been on.

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