Why do we usually make up a meaning for events that have no inherent meaning? And how does that automatic, unconscious meaning-making process create problems for us?

Why we need to create meaning

As a human being, your survival is conditional—it is not guaranteed. In other words, there are some things that help insure your survival and some things that threaten your survival. As a very young child, having loving, caring parents makes us feel our survival is insured; having parents who do not love or care about us (or who we feel do not love or care about us) makes us feel our survival is threatened. As an adult having someone on a dark street stick a gun in your face and demand your money makes you feel as if your survival is threatened.

Human beings seem to have a hard-wired “meaning making” mechanism that judges almost everything: conducive to my survival or inimical to my survival—for me or against me. One of the first words that children learn, and then repeat incessantly, is “why.” We need to understand what is happening and why so we can better judge the effect it might have on our lives.

The need to discover an event’s probable impact on us leads us to look for the meaning in events that have no inherent meaning. As I’ve explained in earlier posts and as is clear to anyone who has eliminated at least one belief using the Lefkoe Belief Process, no event has an inherent meaning because any event could have a multitude of meanings and you can’t ever draw any conclusions, for sure, from any event. Meaning exists only in the mind, not in the world.

For example, if parents get angry when their children didn’t meet their expectations, most children will assign such behavior the meaning that they aren’t good enough. In fact, however, the fact that parents are angry at their child tells you nothing for certain about their child. As a result, you can’t know anything for certain about a child from the fact that his parents frequently got angry at him. In other words, the events involving the parents and children have no inherent meaning.

We create two different types of meaning

There are two fundamental types of meaning we give to events:

The first type is the meaning we give to a pattern of events, such as mom and dad being busy a lot of the time (leading to: I’m not important) or mom and dad arguing a lot and getting divorced (leading to: Relationships don’t work). These meanings become beliefs, which are generalized statements about ourselves, people and life that stay with us forever unless we find some way to eliminate the belief. Such beliefs are often variations of “I am …, or “People are …, or “Life is ….” Beliefs are statements about reality that we feel are “the truth,” thereby determining our behavior.

The second type is the meaning we give to specific events, both external (events in the world) or internal (such as thoughts, feelings, memories, physical sensations, etc.). These meanings last only as long as our focus on an event lasts. Like beliefs, such meanings are created unconsciously and automatically. The meaning we give this type of event determines how it “occurs” for us. Most of us most of the time never distinguish between actual events and how the events occur to us. We think the latter is real and therefore we deal with the “occurring” as if it is the actual reality.

In other words, if a friend walks into a room and doesn’t speak to us, and this event occurs to us as: my friend doesn’t like me, it seems to us as if the reality is my friend doesn’t like me. At which point we deal with this person as if he really doesn’t like me, when all we know for sure is that when he walked into the room he did not talk to us. In other words, because we usually don’t distinguish between an event and the meaning we give the event, we deal with the meaning as if it is what actually happened.

Ultimately, both types of meanings (beliefs and our occurrings) get substituted for reality in our mind and we don’t deal with what really is. In other words, we think our beliefs and occurrings are “the truth.”

Getting rid of these meanings

When you eliminate beliefs, you create new possibilities in your life because “your reality” has changed. The filters through which you view reality are gone. Barriers to action, such as procrastination and anxiety, have been permanently eliminated.

When you dissolve the meaning/occurring you give events moment by moment, you are better able to deal with the situation (if it needs dealing with) because you are clear on the difference between the event to be dealt with and the meaning that exists only in your mind. So you are able to see more possibilities for solving a problem. Moreover, because meaningless events cannot cause feelings, most of our negative emotions, such as anxiety and anger, come from the meaning you give events. By dissolving the meaning, you simultaneously dissolve the negative feelings.

Dissolve beliefs and occurrings by making a distinction

As I pointed out in an earlier blog post, we think our beliefs and the meaning we give events moment by moment are true because of a distinction we failed to make earlier, namely between the event(s) and the meaning we assign the event(s). Therefore, the way to eliminate or dissolve beliefs and current meanings is to make the distinction we did not make earlier. When we are able to make that distinction, the belief and the current meaning/occurring disappear.

When people are told they can eliminate beliefs, some respond: But won’t that force me to do things that might be dangerous, for example, if I eliminate the belief life is dangerous, won’t that make me oblivious to some real dangers. The answer is no. Eliminating beliefs does not make you do anything. It only offers new possibilities, from which you can freely choose.

A similar thing happens when I tell people that they can learn to stop giving meaning to events. One person asked: Won’t that lead to people becoming sociopaths? What he meant was: if your have no feelings, won’t you stop caring about other people? Won’t you lose all sense of morality? Again, the answer is no.

Not giving an arbitrary meaning to moment-to-moment events does not affect your values at all. You can still value human life and have a desire to alleviate the suffering of others.

In addition, you do not need meaning to get you to take action. If you lose your job, you don’t need to assume it means that you will not be able to pay your bills, that you will lose your home, that you will never get another job, etc. in order to start looking for a new job. In fact, you will be better able to create strategies for finding a new job if you are not overwhelmed with the fear that would result from such occurrings.

How can I decide what to do without any meaning?

But if nature built a meaning-making mechanism into us because we need to know if what we encounter in reality is conducive to or threatens our survival, how will we be able to survive if we stop making meaning?

There is a significant difference between making reasonable assumptions that we know are assumptions and that we continually check for accuracy, and unknowingly giving meaning to an event and then thinking that the way the event occurred to us is what actually happened. We can never be better off by being blind to what actually is.

Automatic meaning-making might be useful in a world where real danger lurks beneath every bush, where a saber-tooth tiger might jump out at you at any moment. In such a world, we need to automatically give meaning to events and respond without conscious thought. We are better being safe than sorry and assuming the worst will probably save our lives at some point.

But we no longer live in a world where we need automatic, unconscious meaning. In virtually every situation we have the time to carefully think about events and consciously determine their most likely meaning—all the while realizing that our consciously-created meanings are provisional and need to be checked for usefulness from time to time. We know they are our best guesses at that time and do not mistake them for the truth.

In today’s modern world, thinking your beliefs and occurrings are “the truth” can never be useful. So eliminate your limiting beliefs and learn how to stop automatically giving meaning to current events. You’ll be surprised at how much happier and more successful you will become.

What do you think about our biological need to create meaning and how not giving meaning to events enables us to have a better life? I’d love to read your comments and questions.

If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using the Lefkoe Belief Process, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate one negative belief free.

For information about eliminating 23 of the most common limiting beliefs and conditionings, which cause eight of the most common problems in our lives, and get a separate video of the WAIR? Process, please check out: http://recreateyourlife.com/naturalconfidence.

These weekly blog posts also exist as podcasts. Sign up for the RSS feed or at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly.

copyright ©2011 Morty Lefkoe

Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

For many years I had asked myself the questions: What is the real source of our negative emotions? Why do so many things cause fear in our lives that aren’t inherently scary? And why do some people experience negative emotions while other people don’t in similar situations?

About eight years ago I wrote a paper for myself on the source of negative emotions. Today’s post is a summary of that paper. I think you’ll find some fascinating material here and I’m excited to get your responses and start a conversation.

* * *

What is an emotion?

An emotion is the experiential, chemical, and neuro‑physiological response a conscious being has to a stimulus. (I am concerned here only with negative emotions in human beings.)

If specific emotions were created by specific stimuli, then a particular stimulus would produce the same emotion in every person. In fact, different people have varied emotional responses to the same stimulus.

Then what does cause emotions? Except for stimuli that are explicit threats to our physical survival, stimuli themselves do not have inherent meaning for adults. The meaning adults give to events is what triggers emotions. On the other hand, certain events can have inherent meaning for children.

A specific stimulus is a necessary condition for an emotion, but not a sufficient condition. An additional condition that has to be present is a meaning given to the meaningless stimulus—that entails either a threat to survival, or a sense of powerlessness or helplessness that is indirectly, but ultimately related to a threat to survival.

Thus for adults to experience a negative emotion, they require either (1) beliefs that cause a stimulus to be experienced as a threat to their survival or beliefs that produce a sense of powerlessness or helplessness; and/or, (2) conditioning, that occurred in childhood, that links a stimulus and an emotion together. (Phobias also are the result of conditioning, but that conditioning can occur later in life when there is a perceived threat to one’s survival.)

(If all negative emotions ultimately can be traced to a threat to one’s survival, then the ultimate source of negative emotions is the belief/perception that we are a separate creation, a thing, whose survival really is at stake. If that is the case, perhaps all positive emotions can be traced to a feeling of inclusiveness, wholeness, a lack of separation—to the recognition that who we really are is a non-dual consciousness whose survival can never be at stake.)

It is a child’s inherent dependency on others that makes it possible for him to directly experience a threat to his survival in the face of certain stimuli. Children also experience powerlessness and helplessness and these experiences are directly related to a sense that their survival is at stake.

The Cause of Specific Negative Emotions

Fear is our emotional response to something that we interpret to be a direct threat to our physical well‑being. All other negative emotions are the result of interpreting events as a threat to our mental/emotional well‑being. They are our response to something that is an indirect threat to our physical well‑being, namely, something that makes us feel powerless. Specifically, negative emotions other than fear are our response to something that is a threat to our efficacy, our “okayness,” our ability to act on our own behalf to do what is necessary to survive.

To summarize what we’ve seen thus far: the perception that something is a threat to our survival causes fear. The experience of powerlessness, the inability to take the actions necessary to survive, is the source of all the other “negative” emotions. (Guilt is the only exception, which is more directly related to fear, as explained below.)

Physical pain is a symptom of an underlying malfunction of the body. It is a sign of a dysfunctional physical/body state. It is a signal that there’s something wrong with the body, a potential threat to the survival of the body. Mental pain, which is experienced as negative emotion, is a signal there’s something wrong psychologically. It is a signal that we either are being threatened directly or that our efficacy (our ability to deal with threats) is being impaired, which results in a feeling of powerlessness.

Anger is the emotion we feel toward that which does something (or refrains from doing something) that results in our feeling powerless, helpless, and inefficacious.

Sadness, unhappiness, grief, and sorrow are emotions that result from feeling powerless in the face of not having (or not being able to have) what we want, or losing something we had.

Jealousy is the emotion we feel toward someone whom we experience as taking away from us something we want and we feel powerless to do anything about it.

Envy is the emotion we feel toward someone who has something we want—when we see ourselves as powerless to do anything to get it.

Shame is the emotion caused by a strong sense of embarrassment, unworthiness, or disgrace, which makes us feel we aren’t okay. If we aren’t okay, there is an implied impairment of our power to deal with possible threats to our survival.

Guilt is the emotion we feel as a result of a judgment we place on ourselves. When we feel guilty, we experience ourselves as “bad” because we don’t think, feel or do what we should have or could have thought, felt or done. This judgment makes us feel we aren’t okay. Guilt is a function of thinking we have done something bad.

If guilt requires the concept of bad, what is bad? For adults, beliefs determine which behaviors are good or bad. For a child, good consists of doing what parents want and approve of. Bad consists of not doing what parents want and approve of. Therefore, for a child, bad is usually associated with withdrawal of love, which, for a child, necessarily produces fear. Thus fear always underlies and is the foundation for guilt.

There is a difference between shame and guilt. Shame results from concluding: I am inherently flawed. Guilt results from concluding: I did something bad.

How fear occurs as a result of conditioned stimuli

The real cause of fear is always the perception that our physical survival is being threatened. The real cause of all other negative emotions, except guilt, is always the experience of powerlessness or inefficacy that is inherent in being a child. The real cause of guilt is the perception that our physical survival will be threatened because we are bad.

Let’s use this understanding of how emotions are caused to explain how certain stimuli directly cause emotions in children and how other, neutral stimuli become conditioned to cause emotions in adults.

When emotions are caused by conditioning, we have an emotion today whenever we are confronted with any stimuli that in the past we associated with the realcause of the emotion. Let me explain.

Pavlov’s experiments with dogs are the classic example of this conditioning process. When presented with food, the dogs salivated. Then a bell was rung just prior to presenting the dogs with food. After numerous presentations of the food with the bell, the bell was rung and no food was delivered. The dogs salivated anyway, because they had associated the bell with the food. In other words, a stimulus that normally would not produce a response does so because it becomes associated with a stimulus that inherently produces such a response.

In almost every instance of a stimulus that has been conditioned to produce fear, the stimulus itself did not cause fear in a child. The fear almost always was caused by the meaning the child gave to her parents’ behavior at the time the stimulus was present, namely, the parent’s behavior means the child will be rejected, which means it will be abandoned, which means it will die. Because children experience themselves as dependent on their parents for their literal survival, children inherently feel fear whenever their parents do anything that a child experiences as rejection or potential abandonment.

To show how childhood conditioning results in adult fear, let’s use as an example an adult who feels fear whenever he makes a mistake or even thinks about making a mistake. When did he first experience fear associated with making a mistake? Assume that as a child his parents usually got angry when he made a mistake (in other words, when he didn’t do what his parents wanted him to do). The anger (the parents’ response to his mistake) made him feel rejected, which to him meant he’d be abandoned, which to him meant he’d die. That perceived threat to his survival is the real source of the fear, not making a mistake. But because he almost always experienced fear whenever he made a mistake, making a mistake (a neutral stimulus) became conditioned to cause the fear.

Making a mistake didn’t initially cause the fear. The meaning the child read into the parents’ response is what really caused the fear. The child didn’t distinguish between what really caused the fear and an event that just happened to accompany what really caused the fear. Therefore the latter event became conditioned to cause the fear. Later in life, the conditioned event continues to cause fear even when the true cause of the fear is absent.

Phobias are the result of conditioning that can occur at any age. You can be conditioned to fear dogs, or heights, or even specific people. You had an experience (or observed someone having an experience with which you identified) with the stimulus that you interpreted to mean a physical threat to you. Now, even if the physical threat is absent, the stimulus produces the fear. Again, the neutral stimulus has been conditioned to produce the fear. It merely accompanied the fear earlier, just as Pavlov’s bell merely accompanied the food.

How the Stimuli for Anger Get Conditioned

Now let’s look at how childhood conditioning produces other emotions, where there is not a perceived threat to survival.

Let’s assume you experience anger whenever you are told what to do. Merely being told to do something does not inherently cause anger. Being told what to do has become conditioned to produce anger.

Imagine that as a child you experienced anger when you were told what to do. The real cause of the anger was not merely being told what to do. It was the powerlessness you felt because you had no ability to refuse. If you had been told what to do, but always had the option to negotiate and frequently ended up not having to do what you had been told to do, you would not have experienced anger when you were told what to do.

Being told what to do became conditioned to cause anger because you never distinguished between the real source of the anger—the powerlessness you felt when you couldn’t refuse your parent’s demands—and the demands themselves.

The same conditioning process occurs with all the other emotions, except guilt, which is more directly tied to a threat to one’s survival than to powerlessness.

Although this is far from the last word on a complicated issue, this theory does explain why fear and guilt are ultimately a function of a perceived threat to one’s survival, and why all other negative emotions are a function of powerlessness. Maybe our negative feelings won’t be quite as mysterious to us as they are now.

Please share any comments you have on these thoughts about our negative emotions.

These weekly blog posts also exist as podcasts. Sign up for the RSS feed or at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly.

If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using the Lefkoe Belief Process, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate one limiting belief free.

To purchase DVD programs that we guarantee to eliminate eight of the most common daily problems people face, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/store.

copyright ©2010 Morty Lefkoe

Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

There are two fundamentally different ways in which we can experience ourselves.

First, the way most of us usually experience ourselves: as a creation—a separate entity distinct from other entities, whose survival is always at stake. Some people call this the ego.

Second, as the creator of that creation—as consciousness, as Self, as non-dual awareness, as that which has always existed and always will exist.

The creation is experienced as an entity that is either “good enough” or “not good enough.” The creator, consciousness, Self is not experienced as someThing; rather it is a state of consciousness in which one experiences oneself as whole and complete, with nothing missing. On the other hand, because the creation is something specific, there is always something it is not, in other words, there is always something missing.

What is enlightenment?

Enlightenment consists of distinguishing yourself and then experiencing (as distinct from understanding) that you already are the creator, Self, consciousness—not merely the creation—it’s just that most people haven’t experienced it yet.

Therefore, transformation or enlightenment is not a place to get to; you are already there. And transformation or enlightenment is nothing more than (continually) creating that experience for yourself.

Why we need self-esteem

If we are going to experience ourselves as a creation, we need a high level of self-esteem. Why? Because when we experience ourselves as someThing whose survival is always at stake, we need to believe I’m able to survive (good enough, important, capable), and worthy of surviving. (Nathaniel Branden was the first person I know to point this out.) And a high level of self-esteem is more conducive to our survival than a low level of self-esteem.

But when you distinguish yourself as the creator of the creation (which you can easily experience with the “Who Am I Really?” Process), then a paradox occurs: you no longer need a high level of self-esteem (because your survival is no longer in question) and you experience yourself as whole and complete, as okay just the way you are, with nothing missing, anything is possible, and no limitations—which “feels like” a high level of self-esteem.

Although it is possible to change the creation (by eliminating our beliefs about ourselves, which changes how we act and feel)—the very fact of experiencing ourselves as a creation will necessarily result in experiencing something missing, some limitations, and, as the Buddha said: some degree of suffering.

Some suffering seems to be inherent in the experience of ourselves as a creation, an entity whose survival is always at stake. Let me explain why.

If some things are good for us (conducive to our survival), then other things are bad for us (a threat to our survival). And when we encounter anything that we consider to be a threat to our survival, we feel anxiety and suffer. Depending on our beliefs and who we think are, we can be threatened by people who are angry at us, not being liked by people, making mistakes, not reaching our goals—in other words, by anything that we consider “bad.”

In other words, when anything we consider ourselves to be (a good parent, a hard worker, a sexy person) is threatened, we feel anxiety because we think who we are is in danger of extinction.

When we experience ourselves as a creation with a low level of self-esteem, our lives become about acquiring self-esteem. We create survival strategies—which are substitutes for self-esteem—that run our lives, such as having people think well of us, taking care of others, or doing things perfectly. We think these survival strategies will make us good enough or important. Unfortunately, it’s an endless quest because they never really work, although they can ameliorate anxiety for the moment.

The Lefkoe Method has two purposes

This is why The Lefkoe Method has a two-fold purpose: to help you change your creation (for example, from not good enough to good enough) … and also to facilitate you to distinguish and then experience yourself as the creator of the creation.

As long as you have human form you probably will experience that that form’s survival is always at stake. But it is possible to transcend that experience and distinguish yourself as the creator at any time. In that transcendent state, you experience that you are the space in which reality and time show up, that you always were and always will be, and that survival is never an issue.

So although it is possible to minimize suffering by changing the creation (eliminating beliefs that lead to dysfunctional behavior and feelings), as long as you experience yourself as a creation, suffering is always lurking just around the corner. The best way to relieve suffering is to create yourself as the creator, as Self, as non-dual awareness.

An alternative method

There seems to be a second method that I’ve been exploring recently: to detach oneself from the dualistic world in which we live—to dissolve the meaning we impose on meaningless reality—and face reality stripped bare of all meaning. When the meaning is gone, anxiety and suffering will be gone too.

Suffering and any other unpleasant emotion are the result of adding the meaning: “bad for me” (as distinct from good for me)—to a meaningless event. That meaning causes the suffering. Human beings are always creating meaning because we need to know: good or bad for my survival.

So there appears to be two ways to relieve suffering: to experience yourself as the creator—as distinct from the creation, or to act very un-creation-like and dissolve all the meaning from events, to live totally in the moment. The Lefkoe Occurring Process was designed to do just that.

Please share any comments you have on these thoughts on enlightenment and how to relieve suffering.

These weekly blog posts also exist as podcasts. Sign up for the RSS feed or at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly.

If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using the Lefkoe Belief Process, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate one limiting belief free.

To purchase DVD programs that we guarantee to eliminate eight of the most common daily problems people face, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/store.

copyright ©2010 Morty Lefkoe

I want to deeply thank the hundreds of you who shared intimate details about how your lives have been run by your fears and anger. Your stories were unbelievably honest and incredibly moving. They reminded me of how I described my own life in my journal years ago, just before I created the Lefkoe Belief Process (originally called the Decision Maker Process) and in the early months after I created it, before I had eliminated many beliefs.

Here are some excepts from my journal in the mid-1980s:

During the past few weeks I have been more and more upset, afraid, on edge. Nothing seems to be happening. I put articles, magazines, etc. out into the world, and nothing comes back. I am worried about money. I am troubled about the situation in which I have put my family.

It seems to be that there is something wrong with me, that no matter what I do, it will never be enough. I feel I am insufficient for the task I’ve set for myself.

Last night I was exhausted, crying when I got home, crying when I got up this morning.

I’m scared. And when I try to look and see what’s going on, my mind wanders and there’s a fog.

I just saw the thoughts: When all is said and done, I’m never going to make it. My life is not going to turn out.

If you didn’t know these comments were written by me many years ago, I’m sure you would assume they were among the many posts written last week describing the one area of your emotional life you would like to change.

Techniques That Didn’t Work For You

In your response to my question—What didn’t work to help you with your fear?—you said that most rational approaches, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, positive self-talk, and rational thinking, failed. ”Just don’t let the fear stop you” also didn’t work for most of you.

Your responses were mixed on EFT, hypnosis, and NLP. Some of you said these techniques were useful, others said they dealt only with the symptoms and never got rid of the underlying causes, which made the fear and other negative feelings come back.

Why Most Approaches To Eliminating Fear Don’t Work

I promised I would explain why the approaches that didn’t work for you couldn’t work. Here’s my answer.

Imagine a person with the beliefs: I’m not good enough, mistakes and failure are bad, I’m inadequate, I’ll never get what I want, nothing I do is good enough, life is difficult, people can’t be trusted, etc. If this is his reality, can you see that he would be afraid much of the time? …

Our beliefs have the power they do because, for us, they are our reality. And that’s why most change techniques that deal only with symptoms produce only temporary relief. If the source of your fear (and other negative emotions such as anger and general upset) is your beliefs, then the only thing that will permanently get rid of the fear is to eliminate those beliefs.

Let me give you a few more examples: Our behavior and feelings are responses to our reality. So if my reality is that relationships don’t work, that I’m not lovable, and that women can’t be trusted, then being in a relationship or even having the thought of a close romantic relationship probably would produce some level of anxiety. Why? Because in my reality relationships are unpleasant and unlikely to last.

If we perceive something as threatening us, we are hard-wired to feel some level of fear. If in our reality rejection is a threat to us, rejection will cause fear. If in our reality we will never get what we want and life is dangerous, then we are likely to live with some level of anxiety almost all the time.

In other words those things that we experience as threatening will necessarily result in fear. But what determines which events are perceived as threatening to us? Interestingly enough, it’s not what is actually out there in the world. Instead, it is our beliefs about ourselves, people and life.

Tera posted a comment on my blog that clearly explains why most approaches don’t work:

“I just wanted to point out that the Lefkoe Method is the only way I know that actually gets rid of the cause of the problems ONCE AND FOR ALL rather then all those techniques that only treat the symptoms. EFT, meditation, NLP, false forgiveness and letter writing, could drastically improve the quality of our lives, but they can’t fix the beliefs that cause the problems.”

A Modification Of This Theory

Based on what I learned in the Lefkoe Freedom Experiment earlier this year, I’d like to slightly modify what I’ve just written.

There seems to be an additional step between beliefs (and conditionings) and our behavior and feelings. Let me explain. Remember I said that beliefs get their power because they are our reality and our behavior and feelings are determined by our reality.

In essence, our beliefs and conditionings are the primary determinant for how reality “occurs” for us, or “shows up” for us. And because we usually don’t distinguish between reality and the way reality occurs for us, the “occurring” is our reality and directly determines our behavior and feelings.

Here’s how it works. Say you believe I’m not good enough, I’ll never get what I want, life will never turn out for me, and other similar beliefs. Then you lose your job or your investments severely decline in value. Given those beliefs, the events probably would occur for you as a disaster, as a hole you will never get out of, as another in the many set-backs life keeps throwing at you. (I know because this is a description of my beliefs and the way life occurred for me before I used the Lefkoe Belief Process on myself.)

But can you see that all that happened in the world is that you lost your job or your investments declined in value? With different beliefs the same events would occur for you differently, such as, here is an opportunity to get an even better job, one that will be more fulfilling, or what can this experience teach me about investing that will make me a more successful investor in the future. (How do you think “set-backs” occur for Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates?)

The problem for most of us is that we rarely, if ever, distinguish between actual events in the world and how those events occur for us. For us, the way things occur for us is our reality. And even if we did notice the difference, most of us don’t know how to realize that the occurring is only in own minds and not in the world, which would make it disappear.

To Sum Up

Ultimately, getting rid of fear and other negative emotions (and undesirable behavior such as procrastination) requires eliminating the beliefs that cause the problem. Remember, however, because events as such have no meaning, they are unable to make you feel anything. So in the short-term you can get rid of negative feelings in moments by dissolving how the world is occurring for you. When you use the Lefkoe Occurring Process to dissolve the meaning you have given events (which determines how they occur for you), all your negative feelings disappear and you are left with nothing but the meaningless events.

If you eliminate the beliefs that are the source of your fear and other negative emotions and if you learn how to dissolve your “occurring world,” I promise you will be able to create your experience of life regardless of the circumstances. An experience that is free of anxiety and anger, that is instead filled with excitement, joy, and unlimited possibilities.

Now I Have Another Question For You

It’s become clear from your posts during the past week or so that a lot of you are dissatisfied with some aspect of your life and yet you have a sense that something better is possible.

So in order to serve you best, please take a minute to post a comment below telling me how my team and I can best help you increase your love, happiness, success, and fulfillment in your life.

copyright ©2010 Morty Lefkoe

Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

Remember last December I wrote that I was about to have a breakthrough? Well, I did.

On February 16, 2010 nineteen people and I began the Lefkoe Freedom Experiment (LFE). Before we started I promised the participants:

“You will learn how to transform the way you experience your life. No matter what the circumstances. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.”

Actually, I had never taught anyone to do that before, but I like to promise things I’ve never done before. That’s the exciting part: Figuring out how to do things after I’ve promised to do them.

The LFE was created after I noticed (and blogged about in three posts last December) that most people usually are not aware of the distinction between reality and how reality occurs for them. And because we are not aware of this distinction, we act as if the way reality occurs for us is the way reality “really is,” which is rarely true.

So the LFE was designed to determine if we could notice that distinction all the time and, even more importantly, dissolve the way reality occurs for us and be left with nothing but reality. Or as some gurus describe it, live totally in the present, without the past and future intruding.

We succeeded brilliantly! We met in a webinar for an hour once a week for ten weeks. Virtually everyone in the class who did their weekly assignment ended the experiment able to easily notice the distinction between “reality” and the way reality occurred for them at any given moment, and then quickly and easily dissolve the “occurring,” so that they were left either with only reality (without any meaning) or with a positive “occurring” that they choose.

Let me give you an example. Your investments lose a lot of their value. That is reality. That might occur for you as “a disaster, years of savings and struggle down the drain, how will we ever recoup our losses, etc.” That “occurring” would seem like “a fact,” “the way it really is,” and would result in you feeling upset, despondent, anxious, sad, etc. If you dissolve the “occurring” and observe only the reality—namely, the decline in value of your investment—the negative feelings would disappear. At which point you would have a choice to deal with “reality” and determine what you can learn from the experience and what you are going to do to replace the money. Or you even could create a positive meaning, such as “This is an opportunity to realize that my happiness is not dependent on material things and to grow as a spiritual being.” Giving that meaning to the events would result in positive feelings, such as pleasure and satisfaction.

Here are some more details of what we learned.

At any given moment we might have positive or negative emotions—joy and excitement, or anger, sadness, anxiety, and upset. Because events in reality have no inherent meaning (we have this profound realization when we eliminate a belief using the Lefkoe Belief Process), the events themselves can’t cause the emotion. What does?

The meaning we have given the events. And that meaning results in reality occurring for us in a specific way. So dissolving the meaning/the occurring immediately eliminates the feelings it caused.

Imagine that! Being able to eliminate any negative feeling you have in just moments by being able to eliminate the meaning you gave the events. This means that if you are in the middle of an argument with your relationship partner and you are getting angry, all you have to do is identify what meaning you are giving the situation and eliminate it, and the anger will stop.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I hear many of you thinking. “Do you really expect me to believe this?” Yes, I do. I know many of you are skeptical. “I’ve heard outrageous claims before but this is just too much.” Nonetheless, I personally have now done this many times and several people in the experiment did it also.

As Michael Scheibe, one of the participants put it: “The tools I learned in this experiment have transformed how I experience my life on a daily basis.

“Previous things that used to frequently upset me no longer do because through this course I truly got that my experience of life comes from the meaning I’m giving everything in the moment, and that meaning is not the same as what’s actually happening in the real world, and now I can also change that meaning whenever I want to something else I’d enjoy more.”

If my audacious claim really is true (and it is), you can understand why I think what we learned can totally transform how people experience their lives.

There is one caveat. Because how something occurs for us is primarily the result of prior beliefs and conditionings, as long as they continue to exist similar situations will continue to occur for us the same way. Ultimately, in order to be able to prevent negative occurrings, we have to eliminate the beliefs and conditionings that cause them.

We probably will offer another webinar like the last one shortly. Most of the participants in the experiment thought that the group participation was very helpful in being able to produce the result, but not absolutely necessary. So I need to find a way to teach the Lefkoe Occurring Process to everyone who wants the benefits it has to offer at a price everyone can afford, which means I’ll have to find a way to offer a training on CDs or DVDs, without group participation and without me having to be personally involved in every training. And because the weekly practice is so crucial, I need to find a way to get people to practice if they are not going to be showing up for a webinar with me weekly, where I am going to be asking about their weekly practice.

But we will find a way and it won’t be long before tens of thousands of people are able to dissolve negative feelings like anger, anxiety and unhappiness as they occur. Finding a way to help people do that is a goal worth getting out of bed for every morning.

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If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using the Lefkoe Belief Process, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate one limiting belief free.

Please share my blog posts by providing a link from your own website or blog to http://mortylefkoe.com.

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Because many emotions are caused by beliefs, getting rid of the relevant beliefs can frequently eradicate negative emotions. For example, the belief that “Dogs are dangerous” will result in an emotion of fear when confronting a dog. The belief “People can’t be trusted” will result in a feeling of suspicion around people. When the beliefs are eliminated, the emotions usually will be also. There are, however, emotions in adults that appear to be caused by something in addition to beliefs.  Getting rid of beliefs is not enough.

Let me explain the source of these negative emotions, such as fear and anger, and what you need to do to stop them from occurring.

During the first few years after I developed the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) to eliminate limiting beliefs, clients were able to make radical changes in their behavior by eliminating the beliefs that caused the behavior. Frequently, there also were meaningful emotional changes. We started noticing, however, that sometimes a client would continue to have a trace of a specific emotion such as anger or fear, even after eliminating all the beliefs we could find that seemed to be relevant. We usually assumed that there was another belief we hadn’t yet discovered, but eventually would.

Eventually we realized that, although some emotions are the direct result of beliefs, many are the result of conditioning in addition to beliefs. When that is the case, the LBP will not eliminate the conditioning. (You do, however, have to use the LBP to eliminate any relevant beliefs before de-conditioning can be effective in stopping the negative emotion. If you haven’t yet experienced eliminating a belief with the LBP, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com to try it free.)

A few years ago I developed a process I call the Lefkoe Stimulus Process (LStP). It is specifically designed to eliminate the emotions that are caused by conditioned stimuli. It is simpler to use than the basic LBP and usually takes only five minutes to completely eliminate the stimuli for such emotions as fear, anxiety, anger and guilt.

How Associations Early In Life Cause Negative Emotions Later In Life

Very often we are plagued by repeated negative feelings in our life, such as fear, anger, guilt, anxiety, and sadness. We experience these feelings every time specific events or circumstances occur, such as anxiety whenever we make a mistake or someone gets angry at us, or anger whenever we are asked to do something. In many cases the events that stimulate the feeling in us do not produce the same feeling in others, and vice versa. Why does an event that is not inherently fearful produce fear (or some other emotion) in some people and not in others?

Let me explain: The classic example of this situation was an experiment a physiologist named Pavlov conducted with dogs. When presented with food, the dogs salivated. Then a bell was rung just prior to presenting the dogs with food. After numerous presentations of the food with the bell, the bell was rung and no food was delivered. The dogs salivated anyway, because they had associated the bell with the food. In other words, a neutral stimulus that normally would not produce a response does so because it gets associated with a stimulus that does produce a response. In other words, the neutral stimulus gets conditioned.

Here’s an example I use with my clients that will make the process of conditioning very clear.  Imagine that I handed you an ice cream cone with one hand and made a fist with my other hand and drew it back as if to hit you.  What would you probably feel? … Some level of anxiety if you thought you might get hit.  Now imagine that the next few times someone handed you an ice cream cone, the same thing happened and you felt anxious each time.

What do you think you would feel the next time you were handed an ice cream cone, even if there was no menacing fist? … Probably anxious.  And yet it’s clear that ice cream cones are not inherently scary.  If this next time there was no fist, only ice cream, why would you feel anxious?  Because the ice cream cone got conditioned to produce fear.  The ice cream just happened to be there every time you got scared by the fist.

The principle is that anything that occurs repeatedly (or even once if the incident is traumatic enough) at the same time that something else is causing an emotion will itself get conditioned to produce the same emotion.

That’s how making mistakes, being criticized, not meeting expectations, being rejected, and a host of other situations that are not inherently scary get conditioned to produce anxiety (or some other emotion, such as anger).  This process is also the primary cause of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Here is a real life example: Consider one of my clients who experienced fear whenever he was asked to do something.  I asked him when did he first experience fear associated with being asked to do something? He told me that when he was a child his father frequently got angry and yelled at him whenever he didn’t do what his father demanded of him. When my client reviewed the original cause of his feeling of fear, he discovered that the fear was not inherent in being asked to do something.

What caused the fear was the meaning he unconsciously attributed to his father’s threatening behavior that usually occurred when he was asked to do something: The person he depended on for his very survival seemed to be withdrawing his love. No love, no care; no care, no survival. That perception—that his survival was at stake—is what caused the fear. Being told to do things just happened to occur at the same time as something else that constantly caused fear.

Whatever is going on when you experience fear due to your parents’ anger (because their anger is an implied threat to your survival) gets conditioned to produce the same fear. The stimulus today—making mistakes, being criticized, not living up to expectations, etc.—is not, itself, scary.

How The Lefkoe Stimulus Process Works

The Lefkoe Stimulus Process works by assisting you to make a distinction between the original real cause of the emotion and the events that just happened to be occurring at the time.  Once that distinction is made, the conditioning is extinguished.  It’s as if you could say to Pavlov’s dogs: “Hey dogs, you can’t eat the bell.  It just happened to be ringing whenever you got food.”  If the dogs could understand that distinction they would no longer salivate at the sound of the bell.  But while dogs can’t make that distinction, humans can. And when they do, de-conditioning occurs.  Using the Lefkoe Stimulus Process and the LBP you can easily get rid of the anxiety, anger, and other negative emotions that plague you.

If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using the LBP, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate one limiting belief free.

Please share my blog posts with anyone you think might be interested (as long as you tell people where they came from) and provide a link from your own website or blog.   http://mortylefkoe.com.

To purchase DVD programs that we guarantee to eliminate eight of the most common daily problems people face, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/store.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/mortylefkoe and join our fan page on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/recreateyourlife) where I answer your questions about the role of beliefs in our lives.

Finally, to receive notice of new blog posts, please fill out the following form.

copyright ©2010 Morty Lefkoe

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In order to make this blog post personally valuable to you, I’d like to start by asking you a couple of questions.  First, whatever sport you play, how often do you play up to your potential, in other words, if you rate your best performance a 10, how often do you play at a 10? …

The next question I’d like you to answer is: If you can play at a 10 sometimes, why can’t you do it more frequently?  You obviously have the physical skills and ability or you wouldn’t have been able to do it that one time. …

I’d like to suggest that the reason your game isn’t consistent and you don’t play up to your potential most of the time is strictly mental—specifically, your beliefs, attitudes, and feelings—all of which are within your power to change.

Obviously you need the appropriate skills for your sport but, as Jim Loehr (a sports psychologist who has worked with a number of successful professional athletes) points out, “the distinguishing trademark of great players in any sport is not so much their exceptional talent, but rather their exceptional ability to consistently play at the peak of their talent.”

Many others agree.  For example, a story in USA Today pointed out: “For years, golf’s top players have agreed: little separates the physical capabilities of the world’s 100 or so best players.  The difference between success and failure, they agree, largely depends on their approach, their handling of crisis situations on the course, their response to pressure, the ability to handle their emotions and fears and doubts.  In short, it’s the mental side of the game.” (Italics added.)

If you’re like most serious amateur competitors, you don’t complain very much about your physical limitations.  Here is a list of some of the most common complaints.  Which sound familiar to you?

• “It’s not that I don’t know what to do, it’s that I don’t do what I know.”

• “The harder I try, the worse I seem to perform.”

• “I know exactly what I’m doing wrong on my forehand (or my putting, or my footwork, or my swimming stroke, etc.), but I just can’t seem to break the habit.”

• “When I concentrate on one thing I’m supposed to be doing, I flub something else.”

• “I’m my own worst enemy.”

Notice that every one of these complaints is a mental one.  Moreover, all of them are the result of pressure you put on yourself.

In fact, Loehr contends, “If you can take the pressure off yourself, then winning will take care of itself.”

Why?  What’s the connection between pressure and your ability to perform?

Tony Schwartz points out in a New York Magazine article that “Thoughts about losing or playing poorly may lead to fear and anxiety, which prompt an array of physiological reactions such as increased heart rate, muscle tightness, shortness of breath, reduced blood flow to the hands and feet, and even narrowing of vision.  All of these reactions make it impossible to play up to one’s potential. ”

Mistakes

“The emotional downfall for most players is mistakes,” according to Loehr.  “Mistakes can trigger strong emotional responses (disappointment, embarrassment, anger, temper, low intensity) that can cause inconsistent or poor play.  For some players, nearly every mistake represents an emotional crisis.  But it’s interesting to note that everyone manages mistakes the same way when they’re playing well.  They simply turn and walk away confidently, as if nothing happened.  Ideally, the best emotional response to mistakes is to get challenged.  A mistake is simply feedback to the mental computer that the shot wasn’t perfect, that some adjustment is necessary. And the simple fact is that without mistakes, the learning process would be permanently blocked.  No mistakes, no progress.  But negative emotion also blocks the progress and is a natural response to mistakes.  So what’s the answer?  The answer is that players must train emotionally so that mistakes produce the right emotional response.”  (Italics added.)

It might be possible to “train emotionally,” but ultimately emotions are the result of beliefs and conditionings.  Eliminate the beliefs and conditionings and the emotions change automatically. Imagine the following: You have the belief that a ball being hit into the net (or into the water, etc., depending on your sport) is a mistake, and mistakes mean there is something wrong with you.  Now imagine that the ball hits the net or goes into the water.  What would you have to feel? … Angry at yourself, annoyed, frustrated, hopeless, etc.

Now imagine this scenario: You have the belief that there is no such thing as a mistake, that every result that isn’t what you intended is an opportunity to learn how to improve your game.  Moreover, you believe that not achieving your intended result means nothing about you. Now imagine that the ball hits the net or goes into the water.  What would you feel in this situation? …  You might find it difficult to imagine right now that there are only outcomes and no mistakes, but just do your best to imagine the scenario I’ve just described.  Okay? … What would you feel?  …  Challenged, calm, curious, or possibly nothing at all.

What happens physiologically when you think you’ve made a mistake?  Too much negative energy, which gets translated into being too excited, too angry, too anxious.  Some typical signs of over‑arousal include:

• Legs feel weak and rubbery.

• Difficulty in concentrating and focusing.

• Everything seems to be going faster than it really is.

• Inability to think clearly and accurately.

• Attention gets focused on one thing and refocusing is difficult.

• Become fatigued very quickly.

Changing your belief about mistakes would minimize these conditions.

Stress Is an Interpretation

“The greatness of a Gretsky, a Connors, a Palmer, or an Evert is not that they perform well under pressure,” Loehr contends.  “No one performs well under pressure.  Their greatness is in their learned ability to take the pressure off. …  In the face of great external pressure, these [top] performers felt almost no anxiety.  To the contrary, they felt calm and peaceful inside but also highly energized, positive, and enthusiastic…

“It is this skill that separates the superstars from the troops—they have the ability to take pressure off, transforming crisis into opportunity and threat into challenge.  All that stands between you and that ability is your own head!  …  Pressure is something you put on yourself.”  (Italics added.)

Nothing is inherently stressful.  In other words, stress doesn’t exist “out there” and nothing “out there” causes stress.  Stress originates in the mind and exists only in the mind; it’s the result of an interpretation.  Change the interpretation by changing beliefs and the stress will disappear.

For example, assume you had a project to complete and had a number of limiting beliefs, including I’m not capable and Nothing I do is good enough. What would you feel as you began the project? … Some level of stress. And it would feel as if the project was causing the stress, wouldn’t it?

Now let’s assume you had the same project but had the opposite beliefs, including I am capable and Whatever I do is good enough.  If your beliefs made you feel confident that you would do a good job, do you still think the project would make you feel stress? … Unlikely.  Same project, but different beliefs would result in different levels of stress.

By changing your beliefs, something that had been experienced as stressful can be experienced as fun or challenging.

Control your mind, improve your game.  It really is possible.

Thanks for reading my blog. Do you agree or disagree with the points I made in this post?  Why?  Do you have something to add?  Your comments will add value for thousands of readers.

Please feel free to share my blog posts with anyone you think might be interested (as long as you tell people where they came from) and to provide a link from your own website or blog.

If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using the Lefkoe Belief Process, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate one limiting belief free.

To purchase DVD programs that we guarantee to eliminate eight of the most common daily problems people face, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/store.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/mortylefkoe and join our fan page on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/LefkoeInstitute) to get my latest insights on the role of beliefs in our lives.

Finally, to receive notice of new blog posts, please fill out the following form.

Copyright © 2009 Morty Lefkoe

Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

Getting rid of a limiting belief with the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) is not particularly difficult.  We can train people to do that in a weekend.  And we can create an on-line process or a DVD that will eliminate a specific belief.

The trickiest aspect of the LBP is identifying all the relevant beliefs that cause a given problem.  Getting rid of the beliefs is actually easier than finding them.

That’s why we can put together programs that eliminate specific problems when we already know what beliefs (and conditionings) cause those problems for most people.  So far we have created packages that get rid of such issues as procrastination, lack of confidence, social anxiety, fear of rejection, the need for approval, perfectionism, high levels of stress, and the critical “little voice” in our heads.

Some patterns like phobias can be eliminated by getting rid of one belief and one conditioning.  One client had a fear of small bugs, insects, or rats.  It was totally caused by one conditioning: Fear associated with being touched by small insects or animals.  When that was de-conditioned, the fear was gone.  Another client had a fear of dogs.  She had the belief: Dogs are dangerous and the conditioning: fear associated with dogs.  When they were gone, the client said she felt comfortable with dogs, unless they were barking.  We then discovered and eliminated the belief: barking dogs are dangerous.  Then her fear of dogs was totally gone.

Other patterns like depression and eating disorders can have upwards of 30-40 beliefs (in addition to conditionings, senses, and expectations). These patterns can have as many as 15 negative self-esteem-type beliefs, along with negative beliefs about life, such as life is difficult.  It is easier to get rid of bulimia than overeating, because you can stop bingeing and purging, but you can’t stop eating.  And overeating is really a combination of several different issues, for example, people can eat to keep feelings down, to reward themselves, to take care of themselves when they think others won’t, to keep from thinking about unpleasant things, and woman sometimes gain weight to remove themselves from the dating game.

Many patterns share a lot of the same beliefs. So, for example, if you eliminate all the beliefs for a lack of confidence (19 beliefs and 4 conditionings), you also will be eliminating all the beliefs that cause several other problems, such as procrastination, lack of confidence, social anxiety, fear of rejection, seeking approval, perfectionism, high levels of stress, and the critical “little voice” in our heads.  These other problems have fewer beliefs and conditionings (as few as 6 beliefs and 3 conditionings for fear of rejection) and different combinations of them.

I am frequently asked how one can figure out what beliefs and conditionings cause specific problems.  We spend an entire three-day weekend teaching people how to do this, so I can’t teach you in a short blog post.  But the first step is just to figure out logically what beliefs could cause the problem.

For example, if you aren’t able to create a lasting, nurturing romantic relationship, you probably have beliefs about yourself, the opposite sex, and relationships.  What do you think they are? … Logical possibilities include: I’m not loveable, women/men can’t be trusted, and relationships don’t work.

If you are afraid to take chances, what are some of the beliefs you might have? … Mistakes and failure are bad.  I’m not good enough.  Nothing I do is good enough.

And if you’re an approval junkie, what are some of the beliefs you might have? … I’m not good enough.  I’m not important.  What makes me good enough or important is having people think well of me.

The Best Technique For Finding Beliefs

The best single technique for finding the relevant beliefs is to notice what you are thinking and feeling as the problem occurs. They will be a clue to the underlying beliefs.  For example, if the overall problem is social anxiety—not feeling comfortable with people in social situations—then when meeting someone at a party you might notice yourself thinking: I don’t feel comfortable when people are putting their attention on me.  And you might be aware of an anxious feeling as if something bad is going to happen.  Two beliefs that “go with” those thoughts are: Something bad will happen if people put their attention on me and I’m not good enough.  A conditioning that could account for the feeling is: fear associated with people focusing on me.

Ultimately, experience is the best way to find all the beliefs and conditionings that cause any given problem.  (As I mentioned in a recent post, a negative sense of self and life, along with negative expectations, sometimes have to be eliminated before an undesirable behavior or feeling is totally gone.)

Luckily, not knowing what beliefs cause which problems is not really a problem because we at the Lefkoe Institute already know what beliefs (and conditionings) cause common problems.  In other words, probably 90% of people will be able to get rid of a given problem if they eliminate the beliefs and conditionings we’ve already identified for those problems.  And we offer packages that eliminate the beliefs and conditionings for those problems.

And if you have a problem for which we don’t yet have a package, Certified Lefkoe Method Facilitators are able to help you find the beliefs and conditionings that cause any problem you want to get rid of, and then help you eliminate them.

My Vision

My vision is to have The Lefkoe Method so thoroughly incorporated into the culture that everyone learns the relationship between beliefs and behavior at an early age and also learns how to help others eliminate beliefs and change behavior.  And to have parents know the child-rearing techniques that minimize the number of crippling beliefs their children form.

An experience my wife Shelly had a few years ago symbolizes the way I envision how the world will utilize TLM in the future.  She went to the gym and got on the Stairmaster.  A couple of minutes later a friend of hers who she hadn’t seen for a few months got on the machine next to her.  Shelly asked her friend how she was doing. The friend told Shelly about some relationship difficulties she was having.

What would most women do in a situation like this? … Empathize with their friend’s predicament and give some advice.  Shelly empathized but didn’t give any advice.  Instead she helped her friend identify three of the most relevant beliefs that were responsible for the relationship difficulty and then helped her friend eliminate them all … in 45 minutes. As a result, the friend had the possibility for a good long-term, nurturing relationship that she didn’t have before talking to Shelly.

Let’s Create This World

Can you imagine a world in which it was commonplace for everyone to be able to do that for everyone else?  That’s my vision and what my life is dedicated to creating.

NOTE: We’re offering another tele-seminar answering your questions about beliefs on August 13, from 6:00-7:00 Pacific Time.  For information and to submit a question, please click on https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/357775698

Thanks for reading my blog. I really would appreciate your comments and questions. Please feel free to share my blog posts with anyone you think might be interested as long as you tell people where they came from.

If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using The Lefkoe Method, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate one limiting belief free.

To purchase an on-line interactive program where you can eliminate 19 beliefs and four conditionings, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/sales.html.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/mortylefkoe and join our fan page on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/LefkoeInstitute) to get my latest insights on the role of beliefs in our lives.

Finally, to receive notice of new blog posts, please fill out the following form.

Copyright © 2009 Morty Lefkoe

Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

Remember the last time you heard a parent say: “My kids are wonderful. They always obey me.” Or, “They never talk back.” Or, “They are never a problem.” Did you sigh with envy and say, “Oh, I wish my kids were like that”? Think again. What would children have to believe about themselves to always obey, never talk back, or never be a problem?

I started out as a typical parent who sometimes envied those parents with “perfect” children.  Then when my first daughter was about three, I developed the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP), a technique that assists people to identify the specific beliefs that are responsible for any dysfunctional behavioral or emotional problem.

Examples of such problems include anxiety, concern with what others think of us, procrastination, lack of confidence, stress, self-criticism, and relationships that don’t work.  After the beliefs are identified, the LBP enables people to quickly and permanently eliminate them.  When the beliefs disappear, the problems do also.

What We’ve Learned From Our Clients

In working directly with over 13,000 clients we have seen how the beliefs we form in childhood determine how our lives turn out in almost every respect.  And, most importantly, how the beliefs that lead to “good behavior” as a child are not necessarily the best beliefs to have later in life.

Most of us would be thrilled if we called our child and told her dinner was ready and we found her sitting at the table seconds later.  But what would she have to believe if she was totally immersed in playing when we called and she immediately dropped what she was doing to come to dinner?  She would have to consider what we want to be more important than what she wants, which might result from such beliefs as What I want doesn’t matter and I’m not important.

The biggest problem many of us have with our younger children is getting them into the car when we have to leave the house.  A child who was always ready to leave would bring joy to any parent’s heart.  But, again, what beliefs would a child have to have to always act that way?  In addition to the two just named, another belief might be The way to be accepted is to make people happy, to never upset them.

Some Specific Consequences As an Adult

What are the long-term consequences of such beliefs?  One of our clients, Joan, always did what her parents wanted when she was a kid. Her parents described her as “the perfect child.” Two of the beliefs that made her compliant as a child were What I want doesn’t matter and I’m not important. As an adult these same beliefs led to passive behavior and a sense of victimization. Larry, another client, had concluded early in life: The way to be accepted is to make people happy, to never upset them. His problem as an adult was an obsession with what others thought of him and a fear of expressing his own opinions.

In session after session we have heard thousands of clients describe the experiences they had with their parents that resulted in the beliefs they were trying to eliminate as an adult: “My mom and dad always did …, they never did …, they always said …, they never said ….”

In my book, Re-create Your Life: Transforming Yourself and Your World, I explain in detail how what parents do and don’t do, say and don’t say, provide their children with the experiences that the children interpret into beliefs.  As I began to see how our behavior as parents led to our children forming beliefs that then determined the rest of their lives, I began to question the long-range implications of having children “obey.”

Short Term Benefits versus Long Term Costs

Maybe getting children to behave is good for us as parents, but not necessarily good for our children.  It might make our lives easier but what does it do to them?  My wife Shelly and I asked ourselves the question:  If we succeed in getting our children to do what we want, and, as a result of our interactions with our children, they form negative self-esteem beliefs, such as, I’m not good enough or I’m not worthwhile, or other negative beliefs, such as, What I want doesn’t matter or I’ll never get what I want, is what we achieved short term with our children worth the long-term cost?

I’m not saying that our children’s behavior on a daily basis is not important.  Of course it is. There are some things that children need to do for their health and well-being and there are some things children need to do for our well-being.  We clearly would be remiss as parents if we took a totally hands-off attitude and allowed our children to do whatever they wanted.  So we need to learn parenting skills that enable us to influence our children’s behavior when necessary, without leading to negative conclusions.

A Parenting Tip

For example, instead of calling our children just when we are about to sit down to dinner or two minutes before we are about to leave the house, expecting them to drop whatever they are doing because our schedule requires their presence, we can give our children ample warning.  Fifteen minutes before we will need them we can ask them what they are doing, acknowledge that it probably is very important to them, and then ask them if they can complete whatever they’re doing in fifteen minutes because dinner will be ready, we will be leaving the house, etc.  If we treat them with dignity and respect what is important to them, the odds are good they will respect our needs, without forming any negative beliefs about themselves.

And that is the crucial point.  The single factor that has the greatest impact on whether or not our children achieve happiness and true satisfaction in life is a healthy self-esteem, a positive sense of life, and other positive beliefs.

To make this real, let’s assume that your child has one of the two following sets of beliefs: I’m not good enough; There’s something wrong with me; I’m not deserving; I don’t matter; I’m powerless—or : I am good enough; I’m worthwhile just because I am, not for any reason; I am worthy and deserving; I matter; Life is whatever I make it.

Which Set of Beliefs Would Lead to a Good Life?

Which set of beliefs would most likely lead to anxiety and depression? To substance abuse? To satisfying relationships? To a productive career?  To a truly satisfying life?

Given that fact, what do you think that the major role of parents should be? Getting children to behave, or assisting them to create positive decisions about themselves and life?

If you chose the latter, the best way I know to insure that you are getting your job as a parent done is constantly to ask yourself the question:  What is my child likely to conclude about himself and life as a result of this interaction we just had?  If it is a positive belief, congratulations!  You got your job done.  If it is a negative one, go back, apologize and clean it up.

After we’ve changed our focus as parents, from getting our children to obey, to assisting them to create a positive attitude about themselves and life, we may no longer consider the ultimate parenting accolade to be: “Your child is so well-behaved.” We may come to prefer: “Your child has such a positive attitude about herself and life.”

If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your crippling self-esteem beliefs using The Lefkoe Method, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate one limiting belief free.

To purchase an on-line interactive program where you can eliminate 19 limiting beliefs, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/sales.html.

Thanks for reading my blog. Comments and questions are welcomed.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/mortylefkoe and join our fan page on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/The-Lefkoe-Institute/54781675766?ref=ts) to get my latest insights on the role of beliefs in our lives.

Would you like to get rid of the anxiety or anger you feel much of the time?

Because many emotions are caused by beliefs, getting rid of the beliefs can frequently eradicate negative emotions. For example, the belief that “Dogs are dangerous” will result in an emotion of fear when confronting a dog. The belief “People can’t be trusted” will result in the feeling of suspicion around people. When the beliefs are eliminated, the emotions usually will be also. There are, however, emotions in adults that appear to be caused by something in addition to beliefs.  Getting rid of beliefs is not enough.

Let me explain the source of these negative emotions, such as fear and anger, and what you need to do to stop them from occurring.

During the first few years after I developed the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) to eliminate limiting beliefs, clients were able to make radical changes in their behavior by eradicating the beliefs that caused the behavior. Frequently, there also were meaningful emotional changes. We started noticing, however, that sometimes a client would continue to have a trace of a specific emotion such as anger or fear, even after eliminating all the beliefs we could find that seemed to be relevant. We usually assumed that there was another belief we hadn’t yet discovered, but eventually would.

Eventually we realized that, although some emotions are the direct result of beliefs, many are responses that appear to be the result of conditioning and unrelated to beliefs. When that is the case, the Lefkoe Belief Process is not sufficient to eliminate the conditioning. (You do, however, have to use the LBP to eliminate any relevant beliefs before de-conditioning can be effective in stopping the negative emotion. If you haven’t yet experienced eliminating a belief with the LBP, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com to try it free.)

A few years ago we developed a process we call the Lefkoe Stimulus Process (LStP). It is specifically designed to eliminate the emotions that are caused by conditioned stimuli. It is simpler to use than the LBP and usually takes only five minutes to completely eliminate the stimuli for such emotions as fear, anxiety, anger and guilt.

How Associations Early In Life Cause Negative Emotions Later In Life

Very often we are plagued by repeated negative feelings in our life, such as fear, anger, guilt,anxiety, and sadness. We experience these feelings every time specific events or circumstances occur, such as anxiety whenever we make a mistake or someone gets angry at us, or guilt whenever we are asked to do something. In many cases the events that stimulate the feeling in us do not produce the same feeling in others, and vice versa. Why does an event that is not inherently fearful produce fear (or some other emotion) in some people and not in others?

Let me explain: The classic example of this situation was an experiment a physiologist named Pavlov conducted with dogs. When presented with food, the dogs salivated. Then a bell was rung just prior to presenting the dogs with food. After numerous presentations of the food with the bell, the bell was rung and no food was delivered. The dogs salivated anyway, because they had associated the bell with the food. In other words, a stimulus that normally would not produce a response does so because it gets associated with a stimulus that does produce a response. In other words, the stimulus gets conditioned.

Here’s an example I use with my clients that will make this very clear.  Imagine that I handed you an ice cream cone with one hand and made a fist with my other hand and drew it back as if to hit you.  What would you probably feel? … Some level of anxiety if you thought you might get hit.  Now imagine that the next few times someone handed you an ice cream cone, the same thing happened and you felt anxious each time.

What do you think you would feel the next time you were handed an ice cream cone, even if there was no menacing fist? … Probably anxious.  And yet it’s clear that ice cream cones are not inherently scary.  If this next time there was no fist, only ice cream, why would you feel anxious?  Because the ice cream cone got conditioned to produce fear when it became associated with the fist.  Something was scaring you (the fist) and ice cream just happened to be there every time you got scared by the fist.

The principle is that anything that occurs repeatedly (or even once if the incident is traumatic enough) at the same time that something else is causing an emotion will itself get conditioned to produce the same emotion.

That’s how making mistakes, being criticized, not meeting expectations, being rejected, and a host of other non-scary situations get conditioned to produce anxiety (or some other emotion, such as anger).

Here is a real life example: Consider one of my clients who experienced fear whenever he was asked to do something. When did he first experience fear associated with being asked to do something? His father usually got angry and yelled at him whenever he didn’t do what his father demanded of him as a child. When my client reviewed the original cause of the feeling of fear, he discovered that the fear was not inherent in merely being asked to do something.

What caused the fear was the meaning he unconsciously attributed to his father’s threatening behavior that usually occurred when he was asked to do something: The person he depended on for his very survival seemed to be withdrawing his love. No love, no care; no care, no survival. That perception—that his survival was at stake—is what caused the fear. Being told to do things just happened to occur at the same time as something else that constantly caused fear.

Whatever is going on when you experience fear due to your parents’ anger (because their anger is an implied threat to your survival) gets conditioned to produce the same fear. The stimulus today—making mistakes, being criticized, not living up to expectations, etc.—is  not, itself, scary.

How The Lefkoe Stimulus Process Works

The Lefkoe Stimulus Process works by assisting the client to make a distinction between the original real cause of the emotion and the events that just happened to be occurring at the time.  Once that distinction is made, the conditioning is extinguished.  It’s as if you could say to Pavlov’s dogs: “Hey dogs, you can’t eat the bell.  It just happened to be ringing whenever you got food.”  If the dogs could understand that distinction they would no longer salivate at the sound of the bell.  But while dogs can’t make that distinction, humans can. And when they do, de-conditioning occurs.  You really can get rid of the anxiety, anger, and other negative emotions that plague us.

If you haven’t yet enjoyed the experience of eliminating at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using The Lefkoe Method, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate one crippling belief free.

Thanks for reading my blog. Comments and questions are welcomed.

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mortylefkoe and join our fan page on Facebook (The Lefkoe Institute) to get our latest insights on the role of beliefs in our lives.

It is possible to get rid of your stress.

“Yeah, sure,” you might say. “And how exactly am I supposed to get rid of all the stressful things in my life?”

Here’s how I answered that question for myself.

I was filled with anxiety for most of my life. I worried about what people thought of me, I was worried about not having enough money, and I worried about my mother who was having a difficult time after divorcing my father when I was three. If worry causes stress, I was overwhelmed with stress from the time I was a child.

My way of dealing with the “things that were causing stress in my life” could be summed up in the phrase I uttered at least several times a day for the first 20 years of my life: “I can’t wait until I grow up and then I’ll be able to ….” My life was always focused on changing my circumstances some day so that the anxiety would go away and I would be happy.

After many years of therapy, workshops, and self-help books the stress had lessened somewhat, and I was coping with my difficult circumstances better, but I was still trying to change what was happening in my life to gain happiness. I noticed that I was now in my 40s and I still hadn’t managed to change things enough to make me happy and relieve my constant stress.

It was only after I started using a belief-eliminating process I had created that I realized that the stress was not coming from what was happening, but from the meaning I was placing on what was happening. Once I was able to change the meaning, the stress literally disappeared.

For example, before I married my current wife Shelly (to whom I have now been married for 26 glorious years), I had been married twice before. Neither relationship worked very well or lasted very long. Most of my married life with these two women was very stressful. At the time, I blamed my wives and said all I needed to do was to find the right woman, in other words, change my circumstances.

So I tried it for the third time, hopefully with the “right” woman. Unfortunately, right after we got married I noticed the stress was still there.

About that time I started looking for and eliminating the beliefs that were causing the problems in my life. One problem was that I was incredibly needy. I actually believed that I couldn’t survive without a woman in my life who loved me. That belief led me to place so much pressure on my wives that our relationships were constantly stressful. Once I eliminated that belief and a bunch of others (most importantly, what makes me good enough and important is having people like me and think well of me), the neediness stopped. And when the neediness stopped, and when a bunch of negative beliefs about myself were gone and I realized I was loveable and worthy of being loved, my relationship with my current wife transformed.

The same person and the same circumstances, but instead of trying to get my sense of okeyness from my marriage, I brought my sense of okeyness to my marriage. It made all the difference in the world. And the stress was gone.

I’m reminded of a news story I read in the mid-1990s when a lot of middle-level managers were losing their jobs. The article interviewed a number of these out-of-work people. Some of them were very stressed, worrying about making ends meet. Some of them, however, were very happy and seemed to exhibit no stress at all.

People in this latter group experienced being fired as an opportunity to do something they had always wanted to do and had never done because they were “stuck” in their jobs. They either created one-person consulting firms, opened some type of retail store, or went back to school and changed professions entirely.

If losing your job means you will never find another way to make money, you will be stressed. If losing your job means you can now do something even more nurturing and satisfying, you will be excited about the same event.

You see, events don’t have any inherent meaning. Circumstances don’t mean anything until you give them a meaning … and one meaning can be stressful while another might be enlivening. Stress is caused by the meaning we give to events-which in turn is caused by our negative beliefs and feelings about ourselves, people, and the world we live in. The beliefs can easily be eliminated with the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) and the feelings with the Lefkoe Stimulus Process (LStimP).

Imagine that you are about to undertake an important project and have the beliefs: “I don’t think I can do it. I think I will fail and failure is bad” How do you feel? … You’d feel stress-and would blame the project for causing the stress. Now imagine the same project, but this time you have the beliefs: “I’m competent. I know I’ll do a great job. And if I don’t my results don’t mean anything about who I am.” How do you feel now? … Notice that the project is no longer causing stress.

The following is a list of some beliefs that clients complaining of stress have identified and eliminated. Can you see that anyone with beliefs such as these probably would experience stress?

Say each of the following beliefs out loud. If any of them resonate with you, it’s probably a belief you hold. Even though you may have held it since you were a child, and even if you’ve tried a number of ways to get rid of it, you can get rid of it using the right approach. I had many of these myself and eradicated them all.

“If I fail it means I’m stupid.”
“I’m not competent.”
“I’m not good enough.”
“Nothing I do is good enough.”
“I’ll never get what I want.”
“Mistakes are bad.”
“If I make a mistake it means I’m bad and stupid.”
“Life is difficult.”
“People can’t be trusted.”
“I’m powerless.”
“I have no control over my life.”
“I don’t measure up.”
“The unknown is scary.”
“If I do something wrong, something terrible will happen.”

Assume that you didn’t have these or any other related beliefs. Imagine, instead, that you believed, “There is no such thing as failure; everything is merely a learning experience.” And, “I’m fine just the way I am; I don’t have to do anything to be okay and accepted by others.” Would you still be likely to experience as much stress as you do now?

Most of the techniques commonly used to deal with stress focus on how to better cope with stress after we experience it. For example, meditation, deep breathing, and visualizations can sometimes alleviate it for the moment. Our work, on the other hand, assists people to totally eliminate their stress (or not even get it in the first place) by getting rid of the beliefs that cause it.

One client, a psychotherapist who lived with constant stress, described how the Lefkoe Belief Process helped her overcome it.

“At my first session with Shelly Lefkoe I told her: ‘I’m overwhelmed. I’m confused. Scattered. I’m not focused. All over the place. I can’t organize. Frightened by competition. It keeps me from being successful. There is an emptiness I have to fill. I feel anxious and stressed all the time.’

“Shelly helped me eliminate a number of beliefs, after which my life changed dramatically. Today I have a grounded sense of confidence. I enjoy life more. I feel better about who I am. I now believe I am worthy of being taken seriously. Unlike what my mother used to say, ‘No one could take you seriously,’ I know I have much to offer people.

“The emptiness is gone. I have an inner joy. I accept what I can do and have confidence that I can do it. It doesn’t matter what others are doing. The other guy is not such a threat anymore. Finally, I have a sense of poise in the world that I lacked before. I used to be seen as this naive, wimpy type. I don’t think that’s what I project any more. I project a stronger image. I’m someone I’m happy to be. The anxiety and stress are gone.”

As I said when I started this post, it is possible to get rid of your stress. I’ve done it and I know a lot of others who have too. Change the meaning you are giving to the events in your life by changing your beliefs, and you, too, will see your stress melt away like ice cream on a hot summer day.

If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using The Lefkoe Method, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate one belief free.

Tags: beliefs, BlogDesk, changing beliefs, eliminate beliefs, eliminating beliefs, fear of public speaking, motivation, personal change, personal growth, power of beliefs, produce change, psychotherapy, solving problems

Tags: stress, worry, worrying