‘Chapter 06: How to Change Your Beliefs’

A great way to change a belief is to associate pain to the old belief and then to associate pleasure to a new, empowering one. A good way to do that is to think about how your belief has caused pain in the past and would continue to do so in the future.

When you do this exercise, be careful to keep in mind that the past does not equal the future. If you think back to your past and it is painful, use that discomfort to strengthen your resolve to make the necessary changes. If you prefer, you can do this exercise in a journal or with a friend.

1. Select one or two beliefs that you would like to change and sit somewhere where you can be comfortable. Do not rush through this exercise – try to really feel the emotions that are evoked.
2. Think about all the ways in which the beliefs have created pain in the past. Try to visualise past events and bring back the emotions you felt at those times. The events may have occurred a long time ago, or they may have happened in the last week.
3. Think about all the ways in which your beliefs are creating pain right now. Perhaps you have not achieved goals that are really important, or you are not as happy as you would
   like to be. Allow yourself to become dissatisfied with the way your beliefs have held you back.
4. Consider that if you do not change your beliefs, they will continue to bring pain in the future. Visualise yourself ten years older, still holding on to the same beliefs. Imagine how you will feel with such a heavy burden. How about twenty years from now? Lastly, imagine yourself in old age, having held your disempowering beliefs for your whole life. Would you regret that you had not changed them now?
5. Think of empowering alternatives to your beliefs, and this time imagine the improved future you would have if you adopted these instead. Feel excited about all the opportunities that are available to you if you adopt these new beliefs! If you have allowed yourself to really feel the emotions throughout the visualisation you should feel strongly motivated to make some changes.

Our brains are experts at answering questions, and their most specialised knowledge is about ourselves. Every time we ask a question we receive an answer. The quality of the answer matches the quality of the question. For this reason, it is important that we do not ask ourselves limiting questions as these will only strengthen the beliefs that hold us back. For example, if you ask questions like ‘Why do I always screw up?’ your brain might immediately respond with ‘Because you’re a failure!’ If you ask ‘What can I learn from what happened?, however you are likely to get a relevant and informative answer.

Asking questions is one of the best ways to change beliefs, because people attempt to act rationally. If after asking questions you realise that a certain belief is illogical, you will feel more internal pressure to change that belief. A belief that appears to make perfect sense is difficult to change.

Before you ask questions about your beliefs, you need to know what they are. If you do not have one in particular that is becoming a nuisance, or a great one in mind that you are trying to strengthen, turn to the beginning of the chapter and review the section on discovering your beliefs. You might want to question just one belief so that you can spend some time on it and allow yourself to answer the questions in more detail. You can question your beliefs whenever you realise that they are interfering with your actions, or as a preventative exercise.

Ask any questions you like about your belief, but be careful to select ones that will help you reduce the strength of a disempowering belief, not increase it. Obviously, you would ask different questions to strengthen an empowering belief. Some good questions to reduce the strength of a belief may include:

• In what ways is this belief absurd?
• How could this belief be proved incorrect?
• Who taught me this belief and is that person worth modelling in that area?
• What will it cost me in the long-term to keep this belief?
• What will it cost my loved ones in the long-term if I keep this belief?
• Is there anyone, anywhere, with my problem or limitation who has succeeded in spite of it?

Some good questions for increasing the strength of a belief may include:

• In what ways would this belief help me in my life?
• What are the benefits to me and my loved ones if I feel strongly about this?
• What experiences have I already had that prove this belief correct?

It may take several sessions of questioning to change a belief, especially one that has been a part of your thinking for many years. Once a negative belief has been challenged and proven wrong, you can replace it with an empowering one.

For really stubborn beliefs try making up a card with empowering alternatives. Write the beliefs in the same style as you would write an affirmation: present tense and focusing on the positive things that you are moving towards. Put the card in your wallet and read it whenever you can, especially when the belief is holding you back. You may want to take this idea further and put a card on the fridge, the computer monitor, in your car, next to your bed… anywhere you have a blank space.

I once had a friend who always kept his affirmations on a card in his shirt pocket. After repeatedly getting them mangled and put through the wash, he decided to get them laminated!

‘Should’ beliefs affect your self-esteem because they make you feel like you are not living up to your own expectations. We often adopt them from well-meaning peers, but they are often not empowering. You can banish the shoulds whenever you notice them creep into your thinking.

How to dispel the shoulds:

1. Ask yourself: What are some things that I feel I should be doing?
2. List them on a piece of paper in any order. Next, on a separate piece of paper, or in a journal, write a sentence about each item that you ‘should’ be doing. Every sentence will start with the words ‘I prefer to… because…’ or ‘I prefer not to… because…’ Make sure you describe exactly why you prefer to, or prefer not to do the things on your list. Each time you complete a sentence, let the should go and let yourself feel less burdened.
3. Now that you have a number of preferences, you can choose which are most important to do now. Feel confident in your decision and focus on how you can take action to the best of your ability.

The sense of release that you feel when doing this exercise is wonderful. Feeling like you ‘should’ do so many things builds up quite a lot of pressure, creating a mental traffic jam that restricts further progress and creative problem solving. If you let go of your expectations and think instead about what you prefer to do, the tasks that seemed like chores actually become interesting again.

Submodalities describe the way we internally represent our thoughts and experiences. They describe our inner world in the same way that our senses describe our external world. The most common submodalities are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.

The submodalities that accompany a belief are different to those associated with a non-belief. You can use this to change the way you perceive your beliefs when you think about them mentally. For example, if you have trouble imagining yourself enjoying healthy food, it is likely that you don’t believe it tastes good, and that belief might lead to health problems. Changing the way you create your mental pictures, sounds and feelings etc. can immediately change your beliefs.

When you create mental pictures the images have visual submodalities. Some examples include:

• colour – the hue and saturation
• location – the centre of your field, or to a side, top or bottom
• depth – two or three dimensional
• movement – motion or a stationary image
• clarity – clear or blurred
• size – large or small
• brightness – dark or light
• viewpoint – your own or an external perspective.

When you create or reconstruct sounds in your mind they have auditory submodalities. Some examples include:

• volume – loud or quiet
• tone – harsh or soft
• distance – near or far
• pitch – high or low
• clarity – clear or muffled
• speed – fast or slow
• location – the centre of your field, or to a side, top or bottom.

Kinesthetic submodalities include those associated with the senses of touch, balance and body awareness, as well as emotions. Some examples include:

• location – a feeling in a part of the body
• pressure – hard or soft
• temperature – hot or cold
• weight – heavy or light
• frequency – constant or intermittent.

In order to use your submodalities to help you change a belief, you need to discover the ones you use already and what they mean. Consider an extremely strong belief. It does not have to be too difficult – you may believe that you own a pair of sneakers or that gravity will act if you step off a cliff. When you think about the belief, note whether you see something, hear something or feel something that makes you feel so secure about it. Try to list as many submodalities as you can when you think about the belief. Do the same for an idea that you have no belief in – it may be as absurd as you like. Are any of the submodalities that you use different between the two mental representations?

Once you know how you represent a definite belief as opposed to a non-belief you can use that information to change the way you think about things, and hence change your behaviours. If you think about an idea that you’re not too sure about now, but know it would benefit you if you strongly believed it, you can adjust the submodalities to match those experienced when you do believe strongly. Changing the submodalities is a powerful way to change a belief, but requires practice and vigilance before the new representations become a habit.