OVERCOMING LIMITING BELIEFS

Studies have shown that we engage in self-talk roughly 50,000 times a day.  Unfortunately, 80% of that chatter is devastatingly negative.  It consists of self-deprecating statements that we don’t really question.  They just play in the background all day long; a nearly endless tape of negative self-judgment. 

How do you STOP the disempowering thoughts that play in the background all day long?  The truth is that you have a built-in navigation system that helps you avoid errors of thought:  your emotions. 

How does that thought make you FEEL?  If it makes you feel helpless, hopeless, frustrated, angry, sad, or any other unpleasant emotion, you’ve got a disempowering thought playing.  If you notice that you’re feeling anxious, fatigued, overwhelmed, or just overly sensitive, the odds are good that your thoughts are waging war on you. 

Your emotions are a RESPONSE to a thought.  They’re your internal guidance system.  They let you know that you’re having a response to a negative thought by producing an emotion that MATCHES that thought. 

Fortunately, there are some simple fixes for this phenomenon. 

First, we need to understand that there are TWO principle areas where people lose self-esteem:  Competence and Worthiness. 

The first occurs when people acquire a belief that they are incompetent (and therefore helpless to alter their circumstances or improve their future prospects for success and happiness).  This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, every time.  If you believe that you are incompetent, your aversion to risking exposure means that you will go to great lengths to avoid feeling incompetent.  You won’t look for a new job, learn a new skill, or engage in team-building or negotiations where you risk “losing face”.  You simply won’t recognize opportunities, but will tend to see them as challenges to your ego instead. 

Taking a cognitive-behavioral approach to this belief is useful in the beginning.  You can easily prove to yourself that you have overcome MANY obstacles and difficult situations.  Perhaps you’ve lost jobs before, and maybe even a home or good credit score as a result.  Maybe you’ve suffered the loss of a loved one through death or divorce.  Maybe you managed to make it through school, or maybe you survived despite NOT making it through school.  We survive car accidents, natural disasters, severe illnesses, employment layoffs, financial disasters, and all sorts of setbacks and unwelcome conditions.  And often we can readily see that our foresight, creative problem solving skills, and determination put us firmly in the winner’s camp.  So recognizing that you ARE competent and resourceful is the first and most obvious route to overcoming the “I am incompetent/helpless/hopeless” mindsets.  But when those beliefs are well-ingrained, it’s often MORE useful to simply UNDO that belief by relocating it to another area of the brain.  Neurolinguistic Programming techniques can literally re-wire the physical brain in the areas where those thoughts are processed.  Just as we can take the imagined experience of enjoying a piece of chocolate cake and move it over to the area of the brain that recalls the experience of tasting some truly objectionable food, thus creating an inability to enjoy chocolate cake – permanently – we can also remove a negative cognition into an area of the brain where a positive belief is stored.  Or one where hope and resourcefulness are stored.  Whatever the desired outcome is, we can craft a technique that allows you to simply experience the thought very differently than you presently do, thus creating a confident, hopeful, and resourceful emotional state. 

Which, by the way, is ALSO a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I’m not saying that everything will suddenly become easy.  Just that you’ll KNOW you have the resources, skills, creativity, and candlepower to survive even the most difficult condition or circumstance.  And that makes it possible to be happy in the face of even the most arduous tests of faith. 

The second underlying belief revolves around being unworthy of love.  Frankly, this is much more pervasive AND disempowering.  And I’m going to point out right now that this is an essentially egoistic perspective.  It sets you apart from EVERYONE else on the planet as “special” in a way that is completely negative.  But the truth is that you cannot be that special. 

Thankfully, hypnosis and NLP are extremely well-suited to overcome this belief as well.  These self-statements are generally not as amenable to logic and reason as “competence” statements are.  They need a more direct approach to the experience of love.  But the truth is that love is an emotion that feels exactly the same whether we are giving or receiving it.  Hypnosis bypasses ALL of the critical thought processes and goes directly to the unconscious awareness of love’s presence in our lives, whether internal or external.  From there, NLP employs a direct, hands-on approach to altering conscious thought processes and allowing new information to attach to the old ones.  In other words, we don’t “argue” with the belief.  We accept that it might be true, and move it into an area where uncertainty exists.  And then we ask what we’d rather believe, and move that “untrue” belief into an area where absolute certainty is experienced.  Once we’ve removed the emotional payload of the belief that “I don’t deserve to be loved” and opened up the possibility that we can experience that as even *possibly* untrue, it’s a self-reinforcing system.  Because no one WANTS to believe that they are so flawed and defective and monstrous that they don’t deserve to be loved.  No baby was ever born that did not accept and appreciate feeling safe and loved, and defend against feeling unsafe and unloved. 

If you’d like to know more about how to identify and CHANGE the underlying beliefs that drive an unwanted experience, Hypnosis Frederick is here for YOU. 

Call today for your FREE consultation and let’s get to work changing YOUR life!