Archive for Beliefs
Can YOU understand someone else’s worldview?
Posted by: | CommentsThink of someone you know who is good at understanding another person’s worldview. That means they can let go of their understanding of how the world works and really delve deeply into someone else’s deep understanding of how something works. To really do this well requires a willingness to suspend one’s own beliefs. How? By understanding how beliefs work and how we process information at different levels of understanding.
Once we are down at the belief level, a specific set of rules is activated. Beliefs are not necessarily logical, but we will act as though they are. This means that using facts or logic will not shift a person’s beliefs. Why not? Well it’s because of two other processes that keep beliefs in place, distortion and deletion.
- The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes distortion as the act of twisting or altering something out of its true, natural, or original state: the act of distorting.
- Deletion is the process of leaving out information or facts that do not fit our beliefs. It can be more conscious, by actively avoiding sources of information that do not support our beliefs, or unconscious, by ignoring what does not fit. These are not necessarily conscious processes.
Does that mean that beliefs do not change? No, they can erode over time, slowly chipped away, or they can be changed by an event so powerful that it shakes one’s very core.
Another way that beliefs can change is when someone has a change of identity. Why? Well identity, who we are or think we are, is a higher-level process than beliefs—it occurs at a higher logical level. So, let’s say someone who had been an avowed atheist has an experience that causes them to become a Christian; their beliefs will undergo a cataclysmic shift. The opposite would also be true.
Beliefs also can change when you want to achieve something important. Such a major shift will often require a new set of beliefs to make it possible. Think of Roger Banister breaking the four-minute mile. He believed it was possible and trained to do what others considered impossible. Once he did it, others followed suit.
Here in America we can see how this phenomenon of beliefs is playing out in our politics. Think then about how important the ability to understand someone else’s worldview is. I chuckle because the process of creating this deep level of understanding does not make for exciting news coverage and might require that some of our interviewers develop the ability to let go of or suspend their own cherished beliefs.
Want to try this for yourself? You can shift perceptual positions using one of my favorite tools, a process called the Perceptual Positions Exercise. It describes how to create different perceptual positions. In addition to three primary perceptual positions, self, observer and w
2013 Download of the Month Club
Posted by: | CommentsLet Terry Show You The Power of Your Beliefs
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About Terry: Terry Hickey, M.S., is a Certified NLP Professional Coach, Business Trainer and Consultant, a Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the co-owner of NLP Advantage Group. Originator of the Belief Breakthrough Method™, Terry specializes in teaching coaches and entrepreneurs how to rapidly resolve limiting beliefs about wealth and success. His tips and strategies can help you launch yourself into the future you want… NOW. http://terryhickey.com/
How Beliefs Play in Politics
Posted by: | CommentsRest assured this post will not be about espousing the beliefs of one particular party over the other. What I do want to explain is how well-intentioned people can come up with widely different meanings from the exact same event.
Beliefs themselves are generalizations from experience or experiences. Once a belief is in place, it is sustained by two processes: distortion and deletion. Distortion means that when an event or occurrence is different from the pre-held belief, we go through a process of making a different meaning or coming up with an explanation that fits our pre-existing belief. Deletion happens when something contrary to our beliefs is ignored—it’s as though it never happened. Beliefs rarely are changed by direct confrontation; the opposite is true, for they tend to become more entrenched.
One concrete way we allow deletion to continue is by pre-selecting the kind of information we expose ourselves to. I don’t think it would come as a surprise to anyone that news channels often have a recognized bias. That is equally true with radio outlets, publications, websites, etc. It is unlikely that you will change beliefs if your reading or listening preferences are not challenged.
This plays out in another way also. Political speak on both sides uses words and terms in imprecise ways. For example, you will often hear a politician say, “the American people want ______ (fill in the blank)” as though there is an entity called “American people” that thinks in a unique way. This is particularly interesting when polls often suggest a near-even split about issues.
Words like “always” or “never” go unchallenged, and then there’s the all-time favorite: “everyone knows.” What’s interesting about these patterns is that listeners tend to fill in their own meanings rather than asking for specificity. An example of asking for specificity would be to inquire, “Who specifically knows?”
Another example that can be heard from spokesman on both sides is a variation of “We’re going to take back the country from…” One response to that might be “Take it back from whom, specifically?” or “Take it back how, exactly?” In order for the initial statement to make sense, you have to understand what is presupposed. Somehow the country was “given away” or “taken,” so knowing how specifically one thinks of that helps to create more understanding.
Will reading this cause one to shift beliefs? Unlikely. What it may do is encourage critical thinking. One of the downsides of learning about beliefs is that listening to political speeches becomes a very different experience. I often assign my students the task of listening to debates or political channels so they can catalog and then write appropriate challenges to what they hear. It matters not what channel you choose because there will be plenty of examples to learn from.
So what do you think (specifically)? I welcome your comments below.
P.S. Do you want to share this post? Please do. Just be sure that it remains intact and includes the following bio.
About Terry: Terry Hickey, M.S., is a Certified NLP Professional Coach, Business Trainer and Consultant, a Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the co-owner of NLP Advantage Group. Originator of the Belief Breakthrough Method™, Terry specializes in teaching coaches and entrepreneurs how to rapidly resolve limiting beliefs about wealth and success. His tips and strategies can help you launch yourself into the future you want… NOW. http://terryhickey.com/
Making Changes at the Behavioral Level
Posted by: | CommentsAs you may recall, last month’s article was prompted by a question from a reader about how to best use behavioral change techniques. As promised, this month’s article continues that discussion, addressing the application of behavioral techniques in difference contexts.
Before you work on a behavioral change, it’s important to pay attention to the level at which the problem occurs. You need to be sure that you really are working at the behavioral level. (See my blog for information on this topic: Do You Know the Logical Levels for Successful Change?)
The next step is to establish a clear outcome and frame it in the positive. It should be a very clear goal expressed in terms of what is wanted—not what isn’t wanted. Rather than “I don’t want to be broke next year,” it should be reframed to say, “I want to make [specific income amount] in the coming year.”
Once you know what the client wants and what they have now, then the next question to ask is “What will bridge the gap?” Sometimes that can actually involve a behavioral technique. For example, someone might actually need a strategy for handling their appointment calendar. If that works, great. If not, you want to go back to the drawing board and ask, “What would have to happen so that you could manage your calendar the way you want to?” That question will likely tease out an underlying belief. If that’s the case, then you know the work is at the belief level.
Some of these questions might tease out a “part of me” answer: “Part of me wants to do this, and part wants to do that.” If that’s the case, you’ll need to do some integration work so that the parts can be in harmony.
As your coaching becomes more focused, you’ll discover that the work you are doing is more at the beliefs and values and the identity level than at the behavioral level.
Please feel free to share this tip with anyone you think might enjoy it. When doing so, please forward it in its entirety, including the copyright information and the bio below. Thanks, and enjoy!
About Terry
Terry Hickey, M.S., is a Certified NLP Professional Coach, Business Trainer and Consultant, a Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the co-owner of NLP Advantage Group. Originator of the Belief Breakthough Method™, Terry specializes in teaching coaches and entrepreneurs how to rapidly resolve limiting beliefs about wealth and success. His tips and strategies can help you launch yourself into the future you want… NOW.
Check out Terry’s website, http://terryhickey.com/, to find out more about his coaching, Belief Breakthrough Method opportunities and other services. Be sure to download his FREE audio interview: 3 Most Perilous Coaching Mistakes That Will Stop Your Clients in Their Tracks.
Do You Know the Logical Levels for Successful Change? (Part 2)
Posted by: | CommentsIn my last post I shared the lower levels of logical change: environment, behaviors and capabilities. Now I’m going to move on to the upper levels. Changes that occur at one or more of these levels—for you or your clients—are more likely to be successful and sustained.
- Beliefs and Values: this level addresses how you organize your experience in the world; remember, a belief is a generalization from experience. Beliefs are adopted early on and become our guiding force, not learning from life. For example, if I believe the world is safe, my experiences will be very different from those of someone who thinks the world is dangerous. Given that beliefs rarely exist independent of one another, we each have systems of beliefs that can create problems when they don’t work together.
Underlying beliefs affect the lower levels of change. Oftentimes changes at the lower levels—environment, behaviors and capabilities—won’t last if the beliefs that hold them in place are not addressed.
- Identity: this level is crucial because it determines who you are in the world and how you think of yourself in relation to others. For example, saying “I am a golfer” represents an identity—who you are—and is different from saying “I play golf,” which only refers to something you do.
Your identity influences how you move through the world and what you do or don’t do. Saying “I’m not the kind of person who takes risks” means that your new learning experiences will be limited. Describing yourself as a “risk taker” has different implications and may result in dangerous behaviors that do not serve you well.
What I understand when I’m working with people is that the identity you hold may need to be adapted or shifted in order for a significant change to happen in your life. Identity has an impact on all the levels beneath it.
- Mission or Purpose: this speaks to, “What’s more important than me?” or “What’s larger than me?” Teachers often answer this by saying that they get to have an impact on children—that it’s the most important thing they can do. Mission is crucial. That’s why people struggle at a job that to them has no purpose. When people recover from illnesses that were supposedly terminal, it is often because of mission, or remission—acquiring a new sense of purpose. For many, having a connection with God or a higher power makes a difference, feeling a bond with something larger than themselves.
Change can happen at any one of these levels, but you need to recognize at what level the work is being done. For example, sometimes a reframe doesn’t quite sell because it’s at the wrong level.
It’s also essential to know at what level a problem exists. Coaches are often trained to work at the behavioral level, yet problems usually are not behavioral—or not just behavioral. There’s often an underlying belief at another, higher level that may prevent a change at this lower level from making a difference.
Understanding the relationships between and among all these levels can profoundly influence the way you work with people. Ultimately, you want to create alignment at all six levels. When everything is aligned for a client, their actions will be more effective and precise, they won’t waste energy, and they’ll have more success.
Are your values, identity and mission congruent with your goals? Do you have a client who needs to make a change at one of these levels to support his or her goals?
P.S. Do you want to reprint this article? Please do. Just be sure that it remains intact and includes the following bio.
About Terry: Terry Hickey, M.S., is a Certified NLP Professional Coach, Business Trainer and Consultant, a Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the co-owner of NLP Advantage Group. Originator of the Belief Breakthrough Method™, Terry specializes in teaching coaches and entrepreneurs how to rapidly resolve limiting beliefs about wealth and success. His tips and strategies can help you launch yourself into the future you want… NOW. http://terryhickey.com/
Do You Know the Logical Levels for Successful Change? (Part 1)
Posted by: | CommentsWhen people say, “Well, at one level I believe this, but at another level, it’s this,” it shows that they are thinking about issues at different levels. Whether they know it or not, they are referring to logical levels of thinking or change.
There are six levels that I hold as important in whatever change work I do. They can be useful for understanding change from an individual or an organizational point of view. Let me explain…
- Environment: change at this level implies making a change in one’s environment; it could involve bringing in an organizational specialist to rearrange an office environment in support of a mission or job, or it could be as simple as reorganizing furniture, adjusting the temperature or making ergonomic changes.
- Behaviors: this addresses what you do; to create behavioral changes you might bring in the same organizational person to teach a set of behaviors to maximize the environmental changes, which could range from new methods of doing simple tasks to things such as assertiveness training or behavioral intervention.
- Capabilities: this refers to how you organize your behaviors—the strategies people come up with to carry out behaviors, whether for work or play; it involves thinking at a higher level about how behaviors are organized. (For some the problem is that they don’t have a strategy on this level. For example, many people claim they don’t know how to make decisions, but the actual problem is that they don’t know how to put one set of criteria ahead of another; they don’t have a strategy for making their decisions.)
Before I describe the rest, keep in mind that there is a hierarchy to these levels. These first three—environment, behaviors and capabilities—are the lower levels of thinking. It’s tougher to successfully make a change if you intervene at a lower level, at least in terms of making systemic changes. I’ll share information about the upper levels in my next post.
In the meanwhile, can you think of a change you’d like to make at one of these levels? Is there something in YOUR environment that needs to be adjusted to support your goals?
P.S. Do you want to reprint this article? Please do. Just be sure that it remains intact and includes the following bio.
About Terry: Terry Hickey, M.S., is a Certified NLP Professional Coach, Business Trainer and Consultant, a Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the co-owner of NLP Advantage Group. Originator of the Belief Breakthrough Method™, Terry specializes in teaching coaches and entrepreneurs how to rapidly resolve limiting beliefs about wealth and success. His tips and strategies can help you launch yourself into the future you want… NOW. http://terryhickey.com/
How Can You Help People Move Forward?
Posted by: | CommentsMany subscribers have told me that they really enjoy my newsletter, especially the hints provided in Tips and “How Tos.” This post represents the first of a monthly offering of tips based upon reader questions. If you are not already signed up for my newsletter, you can subscribe here (FREE):
Several subscribers took up the recent challenge to ask me a question. One reader sent this question: “How can you help people move forward rather than creating resistance?”
The quickest way to create cooperation rather than resistance is to make sure that you have a clear agreement about what you’re working on. This is also known as “the goal.” It is important that the goal states what they want, not what they don’t want.
For example, if someone starts with the goal of “I don’t want to be in debt,” that needs to be framed differently. One alternative would be to say that they “want enough income to be able to pay down my debt.” This is much more than a subtle distinction.
Another important part of this process is to ask, “What will happen for you when you achieve this goal?” This question will link you up to what’s really important for a person, which will increase their motivation.
Make sure that you’re using their words and descriptions, not changing the language to fit your ideas of what they want.
Just doing these two things will vastly cut down on a client’s resistance or “stuck-ness.”
As always, let me know how I can help. Just share a limiting-beliefs question that has been challenging you or a client, and I’d be happy to address it here or in a future issue of the newsletter. Call me at 520.237.4435 or e-mail me at Terry@terryhickey.com with your question.
Please feel free to share this tip with anyone you think might enjoy it. When doing so, please forward it in its entirety, including the copyright information and the bio below. Thanks, and enjoy!
About Terry
Terry Hickey, M.S., is a Certified NLP Professional Coach, Business Trainer and Consultant, a Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the co-owner of NLP Advantage Group. Originator of the Belief Breakthough Method™, Terry specializes in teaching coaches and entrepreneurs how to rapidly resolve limiting beliefs about wealth and success. His tips and strategies can help you launch yourself into the future you want… NOW.
Check out Terry’s website, http://terryhickey.com/, to find out more about his coaching, Belief Breakthrough Method opportunities and other services. Be sure to download his FREE audio interview: 3 Most Perilous Coaching Mistakes That Will Stop Your Clients in Their Tracks.
The One Question That Immediately Puts You On Track For Results
Posted by: | CommentsIn last month’s article How To Stop Convincing Your Clients To Change—Gather 5 Essential Components of Information That Turbo Charges Change, I described the basic components involved in effective problem-solving.
These five basic components, known by the acronym S.C.O.R.E. (Symptoms, Causes, Outcomes, Resources and Effects) represent the minimum amount of information coaches need to help their clients change and heal:
- Symptoms are typically the most noticeable and conscious aspects of a client’s problem.
- Causes are the underlying elements responsible for creating and maintaining the symptoms.
- Outcomes are the particular goals or desired states that would take the place of the symptoms.
- Resources are the underlying elements responsible for removing the causes of the symptoms and for manifesting and maintaining the desired outcomes.
- Effects are the longer-term results of achieving a particular outcome.
There are specific questions connected to each component that will allow you to understand your client’s perspective. In this article I offer one key question to elicit symptoms from your clients so you can get the “right” information, leading you to take the most effective action.
The one key question for symptoms is this:
In which context do you experience your symptoms?
This question is intended to reveal whether your client experiences the symptom within a specific event or context or whether the symptom is experienced in several contexts. For example, your client may feel nervous only when making presentations. Or your client may feel anxiety across many contexts in relating to people.
If the symptom occurs during a specific event, context-specific resources to build confidence—such as changing how your client pictures the event or adding resources of confidence and enjoyment—may be sufficient.
But if your client feels nervous across many contexts, then the intervention needs to address a “deeper” level within the client. It is likely the client identifies with being a nervous person, and the resources will need to be more robust. Coaches then need interventions to transform the client’s limiting identity and create an identity capable of creating the results the client wants. For example, asking, “Who will you be when this issue is far behind you?” will begin to open your client’s mind and call her/him forward to future possibilities. Sometimes interventions are also needed to relieve limiting childhood events and beliefs.
While training high-level coaches in belief-changing techniques, I have found that a common major error is not discovering the depth of clients’ issues right from the start. This leaves both coach and client disappointed when the suggested actions don’t create immediate results.
This question helps you immediately recognize the depth of the issues and sets you and your client on the most productive track.
So with your next three clients, ask,
In which context do you experience your symptoms?
I would love to hear how well this approach works for you. Share your feedback and comments below.
P.S. Do you want to reprint this article? Please do. Just be sure that it remains intact and includes the following bio.
About Terry: Terry Hickey, M.S., is a Certified NLP Professional Coach, Business Trainer and Consultant, a Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the co-owner of NLP Advantage Group. Originator of the Belief Breakthrough Method™, Terry specializes in teaching coaches and entrepreneurs how to rapidly resolve limiting beliefs about wealth and success. His tips and strategies can help you launch yourself into the future you want… NOW.http://terryhickey.com/
Using the Belief Change Template for Transformational Change
Posted by: | CommentsI just finished a recent training with David Gordon, one of the world’s best NLP trainers and thinkers. David gave a powerful interactive presentation on what he calls the Belief Change Template. He highlighted in his training that working with limiting beliefs is ALWAYS necessary to maintain important behavioral changes.
Given that beliefs are usually unconscious, how do you discover them? Well, David uses the Belief Change Template to uncover beliefs by exploring and discovering your criteria and how those criteria are expressed and operationalized. Dealing with beliefs at the conscious level (i.e., “just change what you believe” or “just adopt this belief”) is the least effective way to do change work.
He showed us how to do belief change work in a visual fashion so you can actually see the results, and it is in the seeing that the “ah-ha” moments come. David did a live demonstration with an attendee who discovered through the process how one of her criteria “to do it perfect” was so overwhelming that she became paralyzed by inaction—or by too much action. As she saw this in front of her, she realized as an observer what she had been doing to herself.
What David says—and what I believe—is that when someone goes through this process, they can then spontaneously shift a belief and then a behavior or implement a new behavior. Learning how to be good at using the template takes some time, but it is well worth it.
To take your coaching to a higher level, develop a way to help your clients discover limiting unconscious beliefs. If you want to learn more about David’s work in this area explore http://expandyourworld.net/dggd.php.
If you’d like to know more about the Belief Change Template or other approaches for facilitating transformational change, contact me at Terry@terryhickey.com.
Thanks,
Terry Hickey
The Belief Change Alchemist
P.S. Do you want to reprint this article? Please do. Just be sure that it remains intact and includes the following bio.
About Terry: Terry Hickey, M.S., is a Certified NLP Professional Coach, Business Trainer and Consultant, a Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the co-owner of NLP Advantage Group. Originator of the Belief Breakthrough Method™, Terry specializes in teaching coaches and entrepreneurs how to rapidly resolve limiting beliefs about wealth and success. His tips and strategies can help you launch yourself into the future you want… NOW. http://terryhickey.com/
