3. Imagine yourself sitting in the cinema, watching yourself on a small, black-and-white screen.
4. Now imagine floating out of the ‘you’ that’s sitting in the cinema seat and into the projection booth.
5. You can now see yourself in the projection booth, watching yourself in the seat, watching the film of you on the screen.
6. Run the film in black and white, on the very tiny screen, starting before you experienced the memory you want to overcome and run- ning it through until after the experience when you were safe.
7. Now freeze the film or turn the screen completely white.
8. Float out of the projection booth, out of the seat, and into the end of the film.
9. Run the film backwards very quickly, in a matter of a second or two, in full colour, as if you’re experiencing the film, right back to the beginning, when you were safe.
10. You can repeat steps 8 and 9 until you’re comfortable with the experience.
11. Now go into the future and test an imaginary time when you may have experienced the phobic response.
In Chapter 9 you discover all about setting anchors. You can use anchoring to put yourself or a client into a resourceful emotional state before doing the Fast Phobia Cure.
Accepting That Beliefs and Values Make a Difference
You may have heard someone say, ‘teenagers today, they have no values’.
Well, everyone has values; they’re just different for different people and dif- ferent groups of people. Your values and beliefs are unconscious filters that you use to decide what bits of data coming in through your senses you pay attention to and what bits of data you ignore. You know what that means, don’t you? The unconscious nine-tenths of your brain has been sitting there on the quiet, building up all sorts of beliefs and making all sorts of decisions about you and your environment, and you’re not even aware of them.
Getting to grips with the power of beliefs
Your beliefs can, when allowed to go to the extreme, have the power of life and death over you. Your beliefs can help you to health, wealth, and happi- ness or keep you unwell, poor, and miserable.
The beliefs we’re talking about here are distinct from religious beliefs – these beliefs are the generalisations you make about your life experiences. These generalisations go on to form the basis of your reality that then directs your behaviour. You can use one empowering belief, for example, to help you to develop another belief to the next level of achievement. So ‘I’m a really good speller’ helps you develop the belief that you enjoy words and are quite articu- late. This belief may lead you to believe that you can tell stories and suddenly you find that you have the courage to submit a short story to a magazine; and suddenly you’re a published author.
Just as you have positive, empowering beliefs, you can also have negative, disempowering beliefs. If you had the misfortune of being bullied at school, you may have developed a belief that people, in general, aren’t pleasant.
This belief may make you behave quite aggressively towards people when you first meet them. If some people then respond in a similarly aggressive way, their behaviour may well reinforce your belief that ‘people aren’t pleas- ant’. You may not even notice when someone responds in a friendly manner because your belief filters aren’t geared to noticing pleasant people.
Be aware that a limiting belief may be lurking if you find yourself using words or hearing words such can’t, should, shouldn’t, could, couldn’t, would, ought, and ought not, as in ‘I couldn’t possibly do your job’. As Henry Ford said: ‘He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.’
Being impacted by the beliefs of others
The really scary thought is that other people’s preconceptions can place false limitations on you, especially if the other people are teachers, bosses, family, or friends.
A very interesting study conducted with a group of children who had been tested and found to be of average intelligence illustrates how a teacher’s belief can enhance or hinder a child’s learning ability.
The students were split into two groups at random. The teacher for one group was told that the students in the group were gifted, whereas the teacher for the other group was told that these students were slow learners.
Both groups of children were retested for intelligence a year later. The intel- ligence score for the group in which the teacher thought the students were gifted was higher than when previously tested; whereas the group in which the teacher had been told the students were slow learners scored lower on the intelligence test than they had done before.
Sadly these limitations aren’t just the domain of overcrowded schools but exist in homes where parents shoehorn their children into an ‘acceptable’
position. Other examples include when your friends remind you to be careful of changing a secure job to pursue a dream, or when a boss whose commu- nication style is different from yours has a detrimental effect on your career progression. We hear of many cases in which doctors declare to patients that they are never going to recover, and how this statement negatively impacts the life span of the patients. Not only are some of these professionals per- ceived always to know more than you, but also you may even place them on a pedestal.
A child can have difficulties overcoming the shortcomings of a teacher with- out parental assistance and even more so the restrictions of a parent or family environment. As an adult, however, you can weigh up the pros and cons of the advice you’re being given by seeing it from the other person’s point of view. (We cover this situation in Chapter 7, where we write about exploring perceptual positions.) When you understand the reasons for the other person’s opinion, you can choose to follow the given advice or not.
Also, with this knowledge behind you, you can always start to use your boss’s communication style in order to get your message across and so prog- ress in your chosen career.
Changing beliefs
Some of your beliefs can empower you, while others can limit the way you think and hold you back. The good news is that beliefs can and do change.
Take the example of the four-minute mile. For years athletes didn’t believe someone could run a mile in less than four minutes. Roger Bannister achieved this aim in May 1954. Soon after, even this record was broken sev- eral times over.
Are you thinking, ‘But why would I want to change something that glues my world together?’ Yes, beliefs do hold your world together, but ask yourself whether it’s for better or for worse. If a belief is holding you back, change it. If you find you need the security blanket of the old belief, you can always change it back.
When you think of a belief you have, you may make a picture, have a feeling, hear something, or experience some combination or all three of these sensa- tions. These qualities of your beliefs – visual (pictures), auditory (sound), and kinaesthetic (feelings) – are called modalities, which can be fine tuned using submodalities: qualities such as brightness, size, and distance for pic- tures; loudness and tone for sounds; and pressure, heat, and location for feel- ings. Check out Chapter 6 for much more on senses and modalities.
One way of changing a belief is to adjust its submodalities. This process is useful because it helps you to loosen the grip that a limiting belief has on you and reinforce the effects of a positive belief, in order to develop a more empowering belief. Suppose that you can’t help but be drawn to people and have long been told that being subjective is bad – changing your belief to
‘I’m good with people’ can make a huge difference to your confidence when dealing with others. Similarly, if you know that you’re good at art, this belief can help you branch into a more art-based career. You can find out how to go about changing a belief in Chapter 10.
As a member of the human race, what beliefs are holding your ‘isms’ (sexism, ageism, racism) in place and whose ‘isms’ are you allowing to box you in? A cluster of beliefs is called a belief system. A belief or belief system can support a particular value. Values are the why you do something. Beliefs direct your behaviour, which then helps you to fulfil a value – provided of course your unconscious mind creates no conflicts.
Working with your values
Values are the ‘hot buttons’ that drive all your behaviours and are your unconscious motivators and demotivators: you act because of your values.
After you’ve acted, you use these values to judge whether the deed was good or bad. For instance, if you value honesty you may decide to pick up a wallet you find in the street for safe-keeping and feel good about handing it over to the police.
When considering your values, ask yourself the question ‘what’s important to me?’ Your answers reflect your values.
Values affect the choice of your friends and partners, the types of goods you purchase, the interests you pursue, and how you spend your free time. Your life has many facets. You’re probably a member of a family, a team at work, and maybe you belong to a club in your pursuit of a hobby, just to name a few. Each of these areas of your life, family, work, leisure, and so on has its own values hierarchy, with the most important value at the top. The values at the top of the hierarchy are usually more abstract than those further down and exert the most influence in your life. For example, in Figure 3-2, family and friends is fairly concrete, whereas happiness is more intangible.
Figure 3-2:
A ladder of values.
Family and Friends Togetherness Companionship
Love Happiness
Distinguishing means-to-an-end values
Values can be ends values or means values, with means values occurring fur- ther down the hierarchy, acting as the rungs in a ladder that enable you to reach your ends values. Freedom is an ends value and all the other values in Figure 3-3 are means values. Means values are those that need to be fulfilled in order to get you to your final, ends value. Freedom is harder to quantify than, say, money. In the example, you can have money without having free- dom, but to have freedom you need money. So freedom – which is an ends value – is dependent on money – a means value.
Figure 3-3:
A ladder of happiness.
Employment Money
Personal Development Freedom
Your values can drive you towards pleasure or away from pain:
‘Towards’ values ‘Away-from’ values
Love Guilt
Freedom Sadness
Health Loneliness
Happiness Anger
Wealth Poverty
Values with away from tendencies are indicative of negative emotions, negative decisions, or emotional traumas that may be exerting an influence on your life.
These tendencies can be released using techniques such as time-line therapy (which we discuss in detail in Chapter 13. The main purpose of any such tech- nique is to learn the lessons that may be of value from negative events in order for the unconscious mind to release the trapped emotions. Essentially, time- line therapy works on the principle that your memories are arranged along a time line, and by changing a memory along this time line you can release the hold of some memories, which in turn helps you to gain more control over your reactions to events and create more options in your life.
Creating values
Your values are essentially formed over three periods in your life:
✓ The imprint period occurs from the time of your birth to when you’re approximately seven years old. During this time you learn largely uncon- sciously from your parents.
✓ The modelling period occurs between the ages of 8 and 13 when you learn by consciously and unconsciously copying friends. Some of your most important values – core values – are formed when you’re around 10 years old.
✓ The socialisation period occurs between the ages of 14 and 21 years.
During this time you acquire values that affect your relationships.
Eliciting your values
If you recognise areas in your life that you think can be improved, you can then examine your values to get a clue to help make positive change. By fol- lowing the suggestions in the following steps, you can discover what’s hold- ing you back from getting what you want: