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Why you should be concerned about your beliefs

Morty Lefkoe — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:21:41 +0000

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If you have read any of the writings of the top self-help experts during the past 10 years—such as Deepak Chopra, Jack Canfield, or Joe Vitale—you’ve learned that permanent change is impossible without eliminating the beliefs that are keeping you stuck.

I agree; beliefs do have that power. But why? What gives our beliefs the power they have to determine our behavior and feelings?

There are two reasons why beliefs have the power they have—one is obvious, the other more subtle.

Our beliefs about reality ARE our reality

First, a belief is a statement about people, reality, or ourselves that feels like the truth to us. Although you might think that you would consciously agree with what you believe, in fact, it is possible to consciously disagree with something you believe.

For example, you can know intellectually that mistakes are good learning experiences and still believe that mistakes are bad. If you have that belief, you would be afraid of trying new things or allowing others to know about your mistakes, even if you consciously think that mistakes are not bad at all.

Because most of us usually act consistently with reality, we act consistently with what we think reality is, not with what reality actually is. In other words, if we believe I’m not good enough, People can’t be trusted, or Life is difficult (none of which are true)—then we will deal with reality as if these statements are the truth. As a result, they will determine what we do and how we feel.

To use one simple example, if you believe I’m not loveable, Relationships don’t work, and Men/women can’t be trusted—if that is your reality—you have virtually no chance of having a nurturing, loving long-term relationship. Get rid of those and other related beliefs and you’ve changed your reality. At which point the possibility of a nurturing, loving long-term relationships becomes possible.

Because we view reality through the filter of our beliefs, which color our perceptions, long-term fundamental change requires eliminating the beliefs that limit us. Yes, it sometimes is possible to use will power to act against our beliefs in the short run, but ultimately we will act consistently with the way we view reality.

Beliefs are the primary source of our “occurrings”

There is a second way in which beliefs determine our lives: by influencing our moment-to-moment reactions.

For about 25 years I thought that beliefs affected our behavior and feelings directly, as explained above. To some extent I still think that is true. But a couple of years ago I realized that our moment-to-moment actions and feelings are determined primarily by the meaning we unconsciously and automatically give reality, in other words, how reality occurs to us—not by what actually happens in reality.

For example, imagine a friend of yours walks in a room that you are in, notices you, and doesn’t talk to you. Most people would think: My friend is angry with me. This would be so real that most people would say to someone with them: Don’t you see that my friend is angry with me?

But all that actually happened is the friend noticed you and didn’t talk to you. That event could occur to you as: He is angry with me. And because you deal with reality based on how it occurs to you—which you are convinced is what actually happened—you would respond to your friend as if he really is angry with you. Even though his anger exists only in your mind, not in reality.

We are constantly giving meaning to events. We do it 20-40 times a day. And we are hardly ever aware of it. So our “occurrings” run our lives. And what is the relationship between our occurrings and our beliefs? Our beliefs are the primary determinant of how reality occurs to us.

The meaning we give events, which have no inherent meaning, is determined largely by our beliefs, although our moods and physical condition also play a role.

Thus our beliefs determine our lives in two ways: directly, because they are what we think reality actually is and, indirectly, by significantly influencing our occurrings, which have the biggest impact on our moment-to-moment reactions.

The bad news and the good news

As a result, the bad news is: long-term fundamental behavioral and emotional change is virtually impossible without eliminating the limiting beliefs that are running your life. The good news is: You can make massive positive changes in your life—such as taking actions you were afraid to take and ridding yourself of such negative feelings as anxiety and anger—by eliminating your limiting beliefs.

It might well be that getting rid of a bunch of limiting beliefs is the best way to reduce the negative and increase the positive in your life in 2012.

Please leave your comments and questions here about today’s post. I read all posts and answer as many as I can.

If you found this post useful, please tell your friends and followers by using the buttons at the top of this post.

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 including a lack of confidence—and get a separate video of the WAIR? Process, please check out: http://recreateyourlife.com/naturalconfidence.

To get my blog posts as podcasts, sign up for the RSS feed above or look up “Morty Lefkoe” at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly

Can you permanently eliminate a belief in minutes?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:29:03 +0000

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About 30% of the people who used the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) to eliminate a belief told us in a survey that they thought the belief had not been eliminated. We were surprised at that statistic because well over 90% of the people we work with directly eliminate a belief. Why were so many not successful when they used the online process?

After spending a lot of time researching the issue we finally discovered that over 90% of the people who used the on-line process actually did eliminate a belief. The problem was that a large number of people who did eliminate a belief still thought that the LBP hadn’t worked. They had a hard time believing they had done what they just did.

This skepticism has produced a big marketing problem for the Lefkoe Institute since its inception 27 years ago. An awful lot of people just don’t believe it is possible to do what we promise to do.

What makes The Lefkoe Method unique

Our unique distinction is that we can help people quickly and permanently eliminate all the relevant beliefs and conditionings that cause virtually any behavioral or emotional problem in their lives. But most people have the belief: Change is difficult, takes a long time, and requires a lot of reinforcement. So telling people what we offer usually results in people expressing skepticism about our claim. Even when people actually eliminate a belief, they sometimes have a hard time acknowledging that it really has been eliminated.

Four ways to know that a belief really is gone

I’d like to suggest four questions you can ask to determine if any belief-elimination process you are using really works.

Another way to check is to say the words of the belief several days later. Do they feel true, uncomfortable? Do they resonate with you? Or do the words still feel meaningless? With no energy or discomfort? If you still feel as if the belief is gone several days later, it probably is.

2. Did you get rid of some undesirable behavior or feeling after eliminating all the relevant beliefs? Ultimately you don’t care about eliminating beliefs. Eliminating beliefs is a means to an end. The true test to know that beliefs are gone is if the problem that the beliefs caused is gone. Because most problems usually are caused by a number of beliefs, you have to eliminate at least 8-10 beliefs to know that any given problem is gone, which then is proof that the beliefs must also be gone. For example, procrastination is caused by 16 beliefs. A good test that the 16 beliefs have been eliminated is to see if your procrastination disappears and doesn’t come back. (Actually it is caused by 13 beliefs and three conditionings, but conditioning is not really relevant in this discussion.)

On the other hand, you cannot determine if any given belief is gone by checking to see if your problem is gone. Hardly ever will getting rid of just one or two beliefs eliminate a problem. Because there isn’t always any noticeable change in your behavior or emotions as a result of eliminating one or two beliefs, the absence of change is not proof that you still have the belief.

3. Did you get a guarantee that the beliefs will not come back AND the problem that the beliefs cause will not come back either.

We have helped over 13,000 clients in private sessions and about 100,000 in on-line and DVD programs eliminate beliefs and problems. We offer a year-long guarantee that the problem will not return and have a refund rate of less than 10%. To see just a few of the reviews of our on-line products, go to http://blog.recreateyourlife.com. To see some video reviews, go to http://bit.ly/3Z10LN.

4. Is there independent research that proves that the beliefs and the problems are truly eliminated and don’t return?

The most objective way to prove that beliefs and the problems they cause are really gone is an independent study with a control group. This is the “gold standard” for proof of the effectiveness of a belief-elimination process.

The University of Arizona conducted a study using The Lefkoe Method that was published in a peer-reviewed journal, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy.

Preliminary Report on Results from
“Speaking Without Fear” Study

Prepared by Victoria Cunningham, Ph.D. & Lee Sechrest, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology, University of Arizona

May 20, 2004

“A recent study was conducted to examine the ability of Morty Lefkoe’s ‘The Lefkoe Method’ to reduce or even eliminate fear of speaking in public in a group of forty volunteers recruited from Toastmasters Clubs and other random sources and who reported fairly severe symptoms related to public speaking. Subjects were randomly assigned to an experimental or a control group… All treatment sessions were conducted by telephone, and, on average, only three one-hour sessions were required to achieve treatment goals.

“The results support our hypothesis that self-reported fear of speaking in public would be virtually eliminated. Before the experiment, both groups rated their last public speaking experience as an average of about 7 on a 10-point scale on which 1 meant ‘not at all fearful,’ and 10 indicated ‘extremely fearful’. Subjects in the experimental group experienced a reduction of about 5 points to an average score of 1.5, whereas the control group remained unchanged. In addition, after receiving the same treatment, scores for the control group were also reduced by about 5 points to yield an average of 1.5. It is important to note that all subjects rated their post-treatment scores in relation to an actual public speaking experience.

“We also asked subjects about other common physical sensations and cognitive difficulties often associated with speaking in public, e.g., increased heart rate, sweating, dry mouth, quivering voice, stuttering and difficulty staying focused. The results were quite consistent with those from the rating scale: prominent symptoms were reduced for everyone who received the treatment, and the difference between the experimental and control groups was large and statistically significant. Responses to additional questions to gauge individuals’ self-confidence as a speaker also provide evidence that ‘The Lefkoe Method’ was effective in virtually eliminating the fear of public speaking.” (Emphasis added.)

For a copy of the entire study from Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, go to http://www.undoityourself.com/research.html.

A follow up was conducted with the subjects six months later. The average level of fear was still below 2.

The LBP has been proven effective in permanently eliminating beliefs with tens of thousands of people. It probably will work with you. If you had any doubts whether or not your belief really was gone when you tried it the first time, please try it again at http://recreateyourlife.com and keep in mind the four tests to determine if a belief really has been eliminated.

Please leave your comments and questions here about today’s post. I read all posts and answer as many as I can.

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Stop being run by your feelings

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:36:34 +0000

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At one point or another, everyone has uttered the words: “I am happy.” And: “I am upset.”

Notice what happens when you say: “I am [something].” You are describing yourself. Any words that follow the statement “I am” is your description of yourself.

Moreover, when we say, “I am [something],” it feels as if we really are that “something.” It feels as if our entire being is happy, or upset, or anxious, or any other emotion we say we are.

But is that really who we are?

Most readers of my weekly blog have eliminated at least one belief using the Lefkoe Belief Process (see http://recreateyourlife.com) where they discovered that they are not merely a “creation,” who has beliefs and feelings and who takes action, they also are the creator of that creation.

Although the creation you think you are is comprised of your beliefs and feelings and what you do, the consciousness you really are is whole and complete, for whom anything is possible and nothing is missing.

Thus, it actually is more accurate to say: My creation has feelings, but I am not my feelings. My creation has beliefs, but I am not my beliefs. My creation takes action, but I am not what I do.

This is not merely semantics

When you experience that you are your feelings, you are totally at the effect of them. They seem to pervade your entire being and there seems to be no escape from them.

When you experience that you have feelings, but they are not who you are, you make a clear distinction between “you” and “your feelings.” That enables you to get some perspective on the feelings and to place your SELF outside the feelings, so that you are no longer at their effect.

How do you do that? There is a simple way to experience that you have feelings, but are not your feelings. I’m not talking about an affirmation, where you try to convince yourself of something you don’t really believe. I’m talking about experiencing the truth of the statement.

First, use the Who Am I Really? Process, which comes at the end of the LBP, several times. You can get a link to the WAIR? Process at http://d3n3f57qjh51zc.cloudfront.net/who-am-i-really-new.mp3.

Then, when you start having some negative feelings and you notice that you are at the effect of them, remind yourself what you experienced in the WAIR? Process: “I am the creator of my life, not merely a creation.” And then remind yourself of the experience you will already have had: “I have feelings; I am not my feelings.”

When you do that, notice how the intensity of the feeling diminishes and how the feeling starts to lose its grip on you.

Try it and let me know your experience. I promise it will transform the way you experience your feelings.

Please leave your comments and questions here about today’s post. I read all posts and answer as many as I can.

If you found this post useful, please tell your friends and followers by using the buttons at the top of this post.

To get my blog posts as podcasts, sign up for the RSS feed above or look up “Morty Lefkoe” at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly.

How we intend to increase our impact in the world

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:47:54 +0000

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For almost 27 years we have been helping people eliminate the beliefs and conditionings that limit them and keep them from living the lives they desire. We are excited that we have facilitated over 13,000 in one-on-one sessions and almost 100,000 via our on-line programs. That’s a lot of people!

From time to time our clients turned out to be CEOs of business firms. When they discovered how effective The Lefkoe Method was in quickly and permanently eliminating problems, several of them asked if we could help their managers and executives become more productive and more effective. In every case where we worked with such people, we helped them to become more successful employees and happier in their personal lives.

Until today, however, we had never contacted organizations directly to tell them how we could help them have happier and more effective managers and executives (thereby becoming more profitable) by sending their managers and executives to work with us.

We know that when we help an individual, he or she benefits along with all the people that those individuals interact with. But when we help a manager or executive in an organization have better interpersonal skills, delegate more effectively, be more creative, communicate better, reduce stress, etc.—our work with such people is impacting hundreds or even tens of thousands of people.

Lefkoe Institute has created a new service

With this in mind we have created a service specifically designed to help managers and executives overcome both undesirable business behavior and personal issues that affect them at work. A detailed description of what we are offering can be found at http://lefkoe.com.

Why am I sending this information to you?

Because you—like the tens of thousands of others who receive this blog—probably have eliminated at least one belief and know how powerfully people are impacted when they eliminate beliefs. And if you know that, I want to ask a favor of you.

I have a favor to ask of you

I would appreciate it if you would share your personal experience (not necessarily specific details, but the general result) of using The Lefkoe Method with the appropriate people at your own organization, including your HR department. Then suggest that they visit our new site that describes exactly how we can help managers and executives become more effective. http://lefkoe.com.

If you know managers and executives or people in the HR department at other organizations, please send them the link also.

I promise to keep you informed about the impact the Lefkoe Institute is having on businesses, non-profit organizations, and government agencies. I expect that helping individuals from these places will enable them to make a profound difference with everyone they interact with, including co-workers and customers.

In any case, please take a look our new website that describes how we intend to increase our impact on the world, even if you have no one to send it to. I think you’ll find it interesting. http://lefkoe.com.

Please leave your comments and questions here about today’s post. We appreciate any suggestions on how we can make an even bigger difference in the world. I read all posts and answer as many as I can.

If you found this post useful, please tell your friends and followers by using the buttons at the top of this post.

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

To get my blog posts as podcasts, sign up for the RSS feed above or look up “Morty Lefkoe” at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly.

The Best of MortyLefkoe.com

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:01:45 +0000

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Every month hundreds of new people sign up to receive this weekly blog. Most of them do not realize that there are now 132 posts describing the different processes that comprise The Lefkoe Method and explaining how to free yourself from your self-imposed limitations and create the life you want to live.

Even people who have been on this mailing list for over a year might not be aware of the useful material that was written before they found my blog.

So today I am going to provide you with a short description and a link to some of my favorite posts over the past few years. In addition to the ones listed below, please check out the Table of Contents on http://mortylefkoe.com for additional posts that you might find useful.

“Would You Like To Stop Worrying About What Others Think?” One of the most common problems people have is an almost-obsessive concern with the opinion of others, which often includes doing things you would not normally do just to get others to like or approve of you. In this post I explain what beliefs cause this problem. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/stop-worrying/#
“How Do Beliefs Produce ‘Driven,’ Compulsive Behavior?” Why are so many of us “driven” compulsively to do things that frequently aren’t in our own best self-interest? You probably aren’t surprised that my answer is: beliefs. But there is a specific type of belief that results in “driven” behavior. And it is formed in a very specific way. I explain in this post. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/how-do-beliefs-produce-driven-compulsive-behavior/#
“Can Beliefs Keep You From Becoming Wealthy?” Getting rid of beliefs will not guarantee that you become wealthy, but having certain beliefs about money can create a significant roadblock to financial abundance. Discover some of the most common limiting abundance beliefs. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/can-beliefs-keep-you-from-becoming-wealthy/#
“Get Into An Altered State Of Consciousness In Minutes” To experience a shift in one’s identity from “self” (one’s body, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior) to “SELF” (as consciousness, as a spiritual being) typically requires years of meditation. Some workshops claim to be able to provide that experience in several concentrated days. My “Who Am I Really?” Process assists people to make that shift in less than 30 minutes the first time and in less than 10 minutes thereafter. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/get-into-an-altered-state-of-consciousness-in-minutes/#
“Why Self-Help Often Doesn’t Work … And What Does” Knowing what to do, how to do it and why you should do it should be enough to change behavior. But it often isn’t. Why? See this post. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/111009/#
“How Relationships Are Affected By Beliefs” Because there are so many different types of relationship problems, there are many different beliefs that are the source of each of them. Here is a list. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/120109/#
“Getting Rid Of Beliefs Is Not Enough” Many problems—especially those involving emotions, such as anxiety and anger—are caused both by beliefs and conditioning. Here’s a description of how stimuli get conditioned to produce negative feelings. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/032310/#
“How To Build Confidence” What causes a lack of confidence and what can you do to increase your level of confidence? I answer these questions in detail in this post. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/040610/#
“What Do You Want A Lot Of That Will Hurt You When You Get It?” The answer might surprise you. Take a look. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/what-do-you-want-a-lot-of-that-will-hurt-you-when-you-get-it/#
“How To Control Anger” In this post I explain the source of both our anger and the fear of other’s anger. In most cases there are only a few beliefs and conditionings. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/041310/#
“Are You A Victim?” Most people have some attributes of a victim. What are they and where do they come from? Why is victimization so common? http://www.mortylefkoe.com/victim/#
“How To Create New Possibilities In Your Life” This is not about manifesting our thoughts and feelings with the Law of Attraction. This post describes how you always literally create possibilities for your life that didn’t exist before when you eliminate limiting beliefs. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/how-to-create-new-possibilities-in-your-life/#

Please leave your comments and questions here about any of my earlier posts. I read them all and answer as many as I can.

If you found this post useful, please tell your friends and followers by using the buttons at the top of this post.

To get my blog posts as podcasts, sign up for the RSS feed above or look up “Morty Lefkoe” at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly.

What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 19:43:23 +0000

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There are things you don’t know that you don’t know. And that fact, perhaps more than any other single thing, is keeping you from having the best life you could possibly have. If that sounds a bit confusing, please let me explain.

When people know they don’t know something and they want to know about that something, they learn about it. So if you know that your relationships could be better, that it is possible stop worrying about the opinions of others, and that it is possible to eliminate the beliefs that keep you from being more successful in life … and you want to make improvements in these areas, you try to learn what to do. You can search on Google to find out where to get help. You can ask friends what they did. You can read books and take courses. Etc.

But what if you think that relationships can’t get any better than what you already have … even if yours is not very good? What if you think that everyone is worried about what others think of them and that it’s human nature to need to be liked and accepted by others? And what if you think that beliefs can’t be eliminated permanently or that you will never be successful, not matter how hard you try? Such people are not looking for a solution because they don’t think one exists. Actually it’s worse than that: far too many people don’t even realize that there is anything wrong.

In other words, if you don’t know that there is something better in life and that you can achieve it, then you will not even search for it.

That so many people don’t know that their lives can be significantly better has created a “problem” for the Lefkoe Institute. We offer people something profoundly valuable that most of them aren’t even looking for: the ability to permanently eliminate the beliefs and conditionings that cause most of the difficulties in their lives, thereby permanently improving their lives.

Hardly anyone searches for someone to help them permanently eliminate beliefs because most people think that is impossible. No one searches for someone to help them de-condition stimuli that cause negative feelings (such as anxiety and anger) because hardly anyone knows that such feelings are largely the result of conditioning and that de-conditioning will get rid of the emotions.

The best example of people not searching for what they don’t know is possible is the experience people have when they do the Who Am I Really? (WAIR?) Process. That Process enables people to make a distinction between themselves as the “creator” and as a “creation.” They get that they are not their beliefs, nor are they the behavior and feelings that come from those beliefs. People who use WAIR? experience that who they really are is the creator of those beliefs, or, putting it more accurately, who they (actually, who all of us) really are is non-dual consciousness. As a result they have the profound sense that they are not their lives, they are the creator of their lives, and, as such, there is nothing missing, anything is possible, and they have no limitations. Very few people ever search Google for how to get that experience.

Unfortunately, people don’t search for the most profound experiences in life because they don’t know they exist. Moreover, for many of those who do realize that such experiences can possibly exist, there is a sense that they will never find a way to have them.

So here is my message to you this week: Profound, fundamental change is possible. It is possible to live a joyous, exciting, fulfilling life. It is possible to dissolve negative feelings in an instant by dissolving the meaning you have given the events in your life. It is possible to permanently eliminate the beliefs and conditionings that cause most of the problems in your life. It is possible to experience yourself as the creator of your life, with nothing missing and anything being possible.

There may be beliefs and conditionings in the way, you may feel unhappy due to the meaning you give to daily events (your occurrings), eating may be your conditioned response to a number of triggers, you may not have what you want in certain aspects of your life, you may experience anxiety much of the time, and you may have any one of a number of common, everyday problems (such as procrastination, lack of confidence, and constant stress) … and it is possible to overcome all of these and live a really great life.

I know, because my life was a total mess for over 50 years and now it is bliss almost all of the time. And I am not the only one who has achieved this state. Please don’t ever give up the possibility that your life can be all you’ve ever dreamed it could be—and, even more importantly, much more than those dreams. It can be.

What do you think of the idea that there are things we don’t know that we don’t know? That we don’t try to improve things we think are normal. And that we don’t look for solutions when we think none exist? Please share your thoughts with other readers below.

If you know anyone who isn’t searching for what we offer but who would benefit from it nonetheless, tell them about us and send them to http://recreteyourlife.com/free where they can let go of a negative belief they have thought was true about them since childhood and distinguish themselves as the creator of their lives.

For information about eliminating 23 of the most common limiting beliefs and conditionings, please checkout: 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.

Get Rid of Negative Senses and Expectations: TLM Part 2

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:40:37 +0000

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Last week I pointed out that The Lefkoe Method (TLM) includes nine different processes, all of them unique methods for transforming the quality of your life. I described two of them—the Lefkoe Belief Process and the Lefkoe Stimulus Process—in detail. (See http://www.mortylefkoe.com/lefkoe-method-part-1/)

This week I’ll tell you how the Lefkoe Sense and Expectation Processes are revolutionary methods for removing barriers to you experiencing a level of joy and fulfillment most people have given up ever achieving.

As you read the following discussion of these two additional processes that are part of TLM, I want you to remember what I claimed last week:

To the best of my knowledge there isn’t another belief-elimination process out there that is guaranteed to eliminate fundamental beliefs permanently. Moreover, I am quite confident that no one offers as complete an arsenal of processes to help you make any change you want in your life … and have it stick. In fact, I’m not aware of any other process that produces the results that each of these processes achieve.

Have you ever heard of anything remotely like the two processes I describe below?

The Lefkoe Sense Process

The Lefkoe Sense Process (LSP) is useful after one eliminates all the relevant beliefs one can find and still has a negative sense of something. This “sense” usually doesn’t exist in complete sentences, like beliefs. A “sense” typically is described in bodily feelings, colors, images, short phrases, etc. You actually can have a negative sense of anything, such as people, life, and work, but the most common negative sense that adversely affects our lives is a negative sense of self.

Try it right now. Close your eyes and spend a moment looking inside for your sense of yourself. … If you find words, such as “not good enough” or “not important,” that is probably the result of beliefs like I’m not good enough and I’m not important. But keep looking: Is there a sense that exists primarily in feelings and images? If there is and it is negative, the LSP can help you get rid of it.

It appears that a negative sense of yourself is the result of conditioning and that the LSP de-conditions that negative conditioning. The initial conditioning usually takes place in childhood. Events around us—usually mom’s and dad’s behavior—lead us to have a negative feeling about ourselves. Sometimes the feeling is a direct result of their behavior—as an example, we might have a sense of ourselves as isolated or alone in the world as a result of mom and dad not paying attention to us much of the time.

Sometimes the feeling is the result of the meaning we give their behavior—as an example, feeling not acceptable as a result of giving that meaning to mom and dad not being available much of the time.

Let me explain further. Any child in any culture recognizes certain tones of voice and facial expressions as expressing “anger,” which most children would interpret as meaning there is something wrong with me. Why that interpretation and not: What’s wrong with my parents? Two reasons.

First, a child knows on some level he is dependent on his parents for his very survival. If there is something wrong with his parents, then his survival is threatened. Better that there is something wrong with him.

Second, children think that adults—especially their parents—have all the answers to dealing with the world; children also know they know very little about how to deal with the world. Children are always saying, “When I grow up, then I’ll be able to … (or, then I’ll know what to do).” So if mom and dad are angry, it must be my fault; there is something wrong with me. Before a child has words this anger can be experienced wordlessly as: pushed away, overwhelmed, not acceptable, not okay, uncomfortable, etc.

To summarize, events in your childhood and the meanings you give those events are the source of the “sense” you formed of yourself at the time and that still exists today.

As a child we looked inside and always saw this same sense of ourselves; at some point we got conditioned to experience the sense as “who we are.” The LSP works by getting us to realize that the sense is the result of events outside ourselves or the meaning we gave to outside events, and it never was inherent in us. We realize our sense of ourselves is not who we are.

Although getting rid of the beliefs that constitute our sense of ourselves usually will get rid of any negative sense, sometimes there will be a conditioned negative sense that requires the LSP. In such cases a negative feeling you’ve had about yourself for a lifetime can be extinguished in a matter of minutes.

The Lefkoe Expectation Process

The other process that might be necessary to get rid of negative feelings that often overwhelm us is the Lefkoe Expectation Process (LEP). Sometimes, after all the relevant beliefs have been eliminated, one can still expect life to be difficult, to not get what one wants, to have anxiety in certain situations, etc. The LEP can totally eliminate those negative expectations. Like with the LSP, you should eliminate all the relevant beliefs first, because often that will eliminate the negative expectation. But if the expectation is still there, use this process.

Again, to fully make real how useful this process can be, close your eyes and ask yourself what you expect regarding some area of your life, such as your relationships, career, wealth, or life in general. … Try it right now. …

You should come up with a description of your expectation that is not necessarily in the form of specific beliefs—for example, you might expect your relationships to never work out, to never be able to make lasting change in your life, or to never accumulate wealth. All of these expectations could be caused by beliefs, but if you still had any of them after eliminating the appropriate beliefs, the LEP could de-condition them.

Expectations are formed by assuming that the future necessarily will be like the past. In other words, if something has happened to you repeatedly (or even once if the event is really traumatic), then you will get conditioned to assume that it will continue to happen in the future.

The LEP works by having you realize that the circumstances that had something happen in the past are never exactly the same as your future circumstances, so it never makes sense to assume that your future will be exactly the same as your past, because all the relevant circumstances are never the same.

Why These Processes Are So Valuable

If, after eliminating the appropriate beliefs, you still have negative senses or expectations as a result of conditioning, the only way I know to get rid of them is to use the Lefkoe Stimulus Process and the Lefkoe Expectation Process. And if you don’t get rid of the conditionings, you will be stuck with negative feelings that will constantly sabotage you. You might not need to use these two processes often, but when you do, they offer relief that nothing else can provide.

(To see the actual steps of the Lefkoe Sense and Expectation Processes, please see my blog, http://www.mortylefkoe.com/get-rid-of-negative-%E2%80%9Csenses%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Cexpectations%E2%80%9D/)

Next week’s post will describe additional processes of The Lefkoe Method that you might need to eliminate all your barriers to having the life you’ve always wanted.

Please share below any comments you have on the Lefkoe Sense Process and the Lefkoe Expectation Process.

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.

To purchase a DVD program that I guarantee to help you significantly improve your confidence and also eliminate the major day-to-day problems that most people face, check out http://recreateyourlife.com/naturalconfidence.

What is the relationship between personal and organizational transformation?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:03:13 +0000

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I wrote about three types of organizational change in my book, Re-create Your Life, many years ago. Let me draw from several passages in that book because the business applications of this distinction should make the personal applications I wrote about last week even clearer.

Organizations, as well as individuals, require all three types of change to be successful.

First order change in an organization consists of improving on what already is. It usually consists of finding ways to do things a little better, faster or easier. It results in incremental improvements consistent with the existing culture of the organization (which is a function of the organization’s beliefs). You can make a lot of money doing this well.

Second order change consists of creating something totally new. It is characterized by behavior change that requires a new culture. In other words, the desired behavior is inconsistent with the existing set of beliefs and requires a new set in order to open up the possibility for the desired new behaviors.

An example of this would be a company where certain employees see themselves as “Service Technicians,” for whom fixing and installing equipment is their “real” job and for whom taking care of customers is an imposition. Giving such employees information about the importance of taking care of customers would be useless. Such information is inconsistent with their existing beliefs about themselves. They would need to change those beliefs so that they saw themselves as “Customer Satisfiers,” at which point taking care of customers would be natural and normal behavior.

Whereas first order change is incremental and consists of improving what already is, second order change is more fundamental and consists of creating a new set of beliefs that make possible behavior that had been impossible before.

One way to distinguish between a second and third order change organization is that the former creates a new and better culture in which to operate; the latter creates a culture that recognizes that there is no ”right” culture for all times.

A third order organization is always operating from questions rather than answers, such as, What makes sense today? It is an organization that is willing to question and change its beliefs and culture at all times.

As Eric Hoffer, the San Francisco longshoremen philosopher, once stated: “In a time of drastic change [such as the world is currently experiencing], it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer remains.” (Emphasis added.)

Continuous improvement is, by definition, a process, not merely a state change. Second order change substitutes one state for a better one. An organization committed to continuous improvement requires third order change, which is a process, not merely a state change.

A third order organization would welcome change because change would be its biggest competitive advantage. First and second order change organizations initially wouldn’t even see changes in the environment as they occurred. Eventually they would acknowledge the environmental changes and try to deal with them. They’d start with some first order change. Eventually some of them might make second order changes. By then what would have happened to the environment? It would have changed even more. Such organizations would never be dealing with the world as it is, moment by moment. A third order organization would.

No limitations

When I lead workshops to help an organization create itself as a “third order” organization—in other words, an organization that creates third order change on a regular basis—I frequently ask participants: What limitations would a third order organization have? The answer is always the same: “There wouldn’t be any limitations.”

This is exactly the same experience that individuals have when they distinguish themselves as the “creator” and not merely a “creation.”

Examples of second and third order organizations

It is relatively easy to identify a second order change organization. It usually is doing something totally different from what everyone else in its industry is doing. Often it is something that everyone else says is impossible.

A good example of such a company is Southwest Airlines, founded by Herb Kelleher. At a time when everyone in the airline business knew that you couldn’t possibly fly from point to point profitably and that the only way to run an airline was to fly in and out of major “hubs,” Kelleher decided that the conventional wisdom was wrong and created what has become the most profitable and successful airline in the U.S.

He challenged the existing industry beliefs and created a new set of beliefs about running an airline.

It is much harder to identify a third order change organization because it must be watched over time to see if one major challenge to conventional wisdom is followed by another. In other words, because third order change consists of repeating second order change over and over as the environment demands, you need to observe a company over time to see if it makes fundamental change repeatedly.

One such company appears to be Amazon. Jeff Bezos started by challenging the notion of retail as requiring physical locations and decided to sell retail over the Internet. He started with offering a larger selection of books than even the super-sized bookstores with physical locations, such as Barnes and Noble and Border’s, at a substantial discount.

But his next second order change was even bigger than adding a lot more products, it was deciding that if a lot of people were interested in buying digital books, he would manufacture the Kindle, a digital book reader. Whether he succeeds in the long run or whether the iPad or similar products defeat him is beside the point. He and Amazon have observed the environment and continued to change as new opportunities arose. They have created second order change at least twice, which probably makes it a third order change organization.

The relevance of change in business to personal life

How is the distinction between three types of business organizations relevant to personal growth and transformation? I think the distinction between a second and third order organization is directly applicable to individuals: It is important to not only get rid of existing fears and barriers to action—so as to become a happier, more successful individual—but also to be constantly willing to grow, to learn, to change, to expand as your environment and experience require.

An individual who knows deep within that he is not his creation at any given moment, but the creator of any creation—in other words, someone who does not identify with his creation—would be willing to give up the creation he thinks he is at any given moment when he realizes it doesn’t serve him and create another one.

Second order change is reaching a better destination. There is nothing at all wrong with that. Run, don’t walk, to any opportunity to experience second order change.

A third order organization has a culture that holds there is no right way of operating at all times and under all circumstances, and is always open to change.

A third order individual distinguishes himself as the creator who creates his experience of life, minute by minute, always knowing that he is the creator of his creation, not any specific creation.

Please share below any comments you have on first, second, and third order change and my ideas on transformation in business.

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What’s the difference between change and transformation?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 21:23:00 +0000

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If you’re reading this blog post you probably are interested in transformation. But I suspect that what you mean by transformation is very different from what others mean by the same word.

I’m a member of the Transformational Leadership Council, a group of “transformational” leaders, and I’ll bet if I asked each member what he/she meant by the term transformation we would get almost as many definitions as there are members.

So I would like to suggest a definition of transformation, not as the last word on the subject, but as a starting place for a discussion that I hope you will join after reading this post.

A butterfly emerging from its cocoon. (Photo by Randy Read)

Three types of change

I’d like to start by distinguishing between three very different types of change. Let’s call them first, second, and third order change. (I got my idea about three types of change from Gregory Bateson’s distinction between three types of learning in his book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind.)

First order change is a change in behavior that is consistent with your existing worldview, your existing beliefs, your existing “creation” (who you think you are). Let me give you an example. If you believe exercise is good and you like to exercise and you have beliefs that lead you to exercise regularly—and then you learn about a different exercise routine that would be better for your health—you probably would start using the new routine.

First order change is a change in behavior that does not require a change in one’s beliefs, in one’s view of oneself, in one’s “creation.” It only requires information you didn’t know before.

Second order change is a change in who we think we are in order to implement a change that is inconsistent with who we think we are.

In an earlier post I made the point that information and motivation usually do not result in change because often information is inconsistent with your belief system. And in the long run, it is difficult to act inconsistently with your beliefs.

So if we believe exercise is not necessary, that we don’t have time for it (because it is way down on our list of values), and that it is not fun, then learning about a new exercise or even learning that exercise is good for our health probably will not result in us using the new information we have gotten about exercising.

In order for that to happen, we need to change something about ourselves, probably our beliefs about exercise.

Second order change is a shift in your worldview, your beliefs, your “creation”—that opens up new possibilities for new actions that weren’t possible before.

If second order change is changing from one creation (our overall view of who we think we are) to a different creation, then third order change is being able to distinguish yourself as the creator of your creation. As such you have the ability to create a new creation at any time, which would create new possibilities and make any new information useable.

Categorizing offerings from the Lefkoe Institute

When I take a look at what we at the Lefkoe Institute offer people, I would say that my blog and most of my videos are representative of first order change. In other words, they provide information that will be useful and used by people who already have certain beliefs and will not be used (or even understood) by people with different beliefs.

If second order change consists of changing your beliefs and your “creation,” then the processes that eliminate beliefs and conditionings on all of our streaming video and DVD packages and in our one-on-one sessions provide second order change.

For example, in the Natural Confidence program you change from someone with a low level of self-confidence to someone with a high level of self-confidence. You also change from someone who is concerned about what others think of you to someone who is no longer concerned with what others think of you.

In fact, whenever you eliminate even one belief, you are changing your creation. You can see possibilities for your life that you couldn’t see before and you can do and feel things you couldn’t do and feel before.

To make this real, ask yourself what are the possibilities for a nurturing, long-term relationship for someone with the beliefs: I’m not lovable, relationships don’t work, men/women can’t be trusted. And what are the possibilities for someone with the opposite beliefs: I am lovable, relationships can work, and men/women can be trusted? Can you get how changing a few beliefs can drastically shift your sense of yourself and change the possibilities in your life?

Helping people stop their emotional eating using the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process is another example of a second order change program. Who you think you are changes from someone with an eating problem to someone who no longer has that eating problem. For someone who struggles daily with the problem of overeating, being able to totally eliminate that problem is not a negligible thing. This second order change program is life-changing. So I am not minimizing second order change programs.

So what is an example of a third order change program? The Who Am I Really? (WAIR?) Process, which is offered on all our streaming video and DVDs packages, and is a part of most of our one-on-one sessions, enables you to experience yourself as the creator of your creation. In that state you profoundly experience that you are not merely any given creation, you are the creator of all of them.

Our new Occurring Course is a good example of a third order change program because you learn how to change your experience of life at will by dissolving what you had thought was reality (in other words, how reality was occurring for you) and be left facing naked reality, without any meaning attached to it. Learning how to use the Lefkoe Occurring Process (LOP) in this course enables you to shift how you experience life, to eliminate negative feelings in moments, and to create a host of new possibilities for your life.

Interestingly enough, using the LOP to dissolve your “occurrings” usually puts you into the same “creator state” as the WAIR? Process, where you experience no limitations and unlimited possibilities. In this altered state of consciousness you experience yourself as the creator of your life, not as a specific creation.

All three types of change can be extremely valuable

Getting information you did not have before that you are able to use to improve your life can make a profound impact on your life (first order change).

Shifting your experience of yourself from one creation to another and creating new possibilities for your life that did not exist before can make a profound impact on your life (second order change).

And distinguishing yourself as the creator of your life—as opposed to a specific creation—and being able to change your experience of yourself and life at will can make a profound impact on your life (third order change).

So classifying change and programs that produce change into three categories is not at all meant to diminish one type or exalt another. All are different and each can be useful in different situations.

However, I suggest that the term “transformation” be reserved for the third type of change. This is change that results in you distinguishing yourself as the changer and not that which is being changed, that empowers you to initiate continued change on your own, and that enables you to create your experience of life moment by moment.

Please share below any comments you have on first, second, and third order change and my ideas on transformation.

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.

To purchase a DVD program that I guarantee to help you significantly improve your confidence and also eliminate the major day-to-day problems that most people face, please check out http://recreateyourlife.com/naturalconfidence.

Proof: Three Scientific Studies Prove The Lefkoe Method Works

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 21:35:28 +0000

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We are almost ready to submit an article to a major peer-reviewed journal based on a just-completed independent university study of The Lefkoe Method and it made me realize that I’ve never blogged about our two prior studies.

All three studies are exciting because very few people in the personal growth area have ever submitted their work to independent researchers at a major institution and encouraged them to study their products and services.

We have now done this three times and each time the results proved that The Lefkoe Method (TLM) does make significant changes in people’s lives.

The first study with incarcerated offenders

The first study was conducted in 1995 with incarcerated offenders, both adults and teens, just before they were released. The purpose of the study was: “We propose to examine the efficacy of the Decision Maker^® Process [since renamed the Lefkoe Belief Process] as an intervention to improve self-esteem, enhance an internal locus of control, and to reduce hostility, social alienation and anti-social behavior in eight incarcerated criminals.”

What were the results? Here is the conclusion drawn by Dr. Lee Sechrest, Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona and the chief researcher:

“The simplest, and we think fairly compelling conclusion, is that the intervention resulted in generally favorable changes in self-concept in the Experimental group [the group that eliminated beliefs using the Lefkoe Belief process] and that without intervention, self-concepts would likely have deteriorated during confinement….

“All in all, this little experiment has to be regarded as a fairly remarkable success. Certainly it justifies efforts to carry out further testing to determine whether the changes observed can be dependably produced. If they can, the DM Process [the Lefkoe Belief Process] could have definite promise in helping young male offenders mend their ways.”

His comments, which were cloaked in academic jargon, don’t come close to revealing the effects of our first research attempt. Here are a few statements from subjects at the end of the study:

“Last weekend I went home and was with my buddies. They all carry guns and I felt like going home to get mine. Normally I would have gone and gotten it. Instead I just left. I had gone with them deliberately just to see what I would do. In the future I don’t plan to hang out with these guys anymore.”

“I no longer ‘rank’ on my little brother when I go home. Now I feel like I’m getting healthy. I’m going back to school and getting a high school diploma. I can get somewhere. You gave me a boost to get somewhere. I don’t even think about selling drugs anymore.”

“I’m not straining like I used to. I’m not self-destructive anymore. It doesn’t feel like I have to bite the bullet. My life used to be very strange, scary. I was afraid life would be a bore. I needed drugs to keep life from being boring. Always lived for the moment. None of this is true anymore.”

“I had thought about a career in drug and alcohol abuse counseling, but I liked easy money so I stayed selling drugs and never pursued it. I never thought about the possible consequences of selling drugs: getting killed, prison, etc. Before there was no worry, no fear. Now I am aware of what I have to lose if I go back to negative ways of thinking and acting. I used to solve all my problems with ‘F— it!’ Now money is not the greatest issue, happiness is.”

The second study with people who feared public speaking

Our first study was conducted with a few subjects and really was only a pilot. But the results were impressive enough to get Dr. Sechrest to agree to conduct another study in 2006. The purpose of this second study was to determine if The Lefkoe Method could totally eliminate the fear of public speaking.

The results of this study were published in a peer-reviewed journal, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy and stated:

“The large, positive changes on all outcome measures subsequent to treatment give strong support to the claim of efficacy of the TLM for reducing fear associated with speaking in public. … The TLM resulted in substantial decreases or complete eliminations of fear, accompanied by positive changes in confidence and reduced negative sensations felt during speaking in public in the experimental group. Overall, the TLM appears to have potential as an effective, quick, and convenient procedure to eliminate the fear of speaking in public.” (Emphasis added.)

Specifically, the mean level of fear for subjects before they used TLM at the start of the study was 7, with 1 being no anxiety at all and 10 being extreme fear. After eliminating the relevant beliefs and conditionings, the mean level for fear was 1.5.

In a follow up six months later, the fear level was still only 1.9.

The third study is finally complete

The latest study, also conducted at the University of Arizona but by different researchers, is finally complete after over a year’s worth of testing.

We compared a group of people who purchased our Natural Confidence program (which eliminates 19 of the most common beliefs and 4 of the most common conditionings) with a group of students who used the same program, a group of people who used a Tony Robbins CD program, and with a control group. We then compared the effects we found with those found in several different studies that used the same measures we did to evaluate the impact of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

The results, which I will not reveal until they have been peer-reviewed by experts in the field (this is standard practice in science), support most of the claims we have been making for TLM and Natural Confidence. We observed significant improvements in virtually everything we measured, including improvements of almost 50% in one area.

I look forward to sharing specific results as soon as our work has been peer-reviewed and the journal article is published.

We want to conduct more studies

At this point we would like to initiate a number of other studies.

I would like to validate our experience that emotional eating can be totally stopped in a matter of hours, despite the fact that nothing else has ever been able to do that.
I want to prove that TLM can totally “cure” a number of specific psychological problems, such as social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression.
I want to investigate and learn more about the profound results that have been produced during the Occurring Courses.
And finally I would like independent evidence to prove that each of our programs does what we claim it to do, such as get rid of the fear of rejection, stop worrying about what people think of you, stop the little voice in your head that is often so critical of you, and end procrastination.

I have several reasons for wanting to get as many studies as we can get.

First, hardly anyone else in the personal growth field is willing to submit their work to independent researchers to see if their claims can be validated. (The Hoffman Process is a notable exception.) We not only welcome it, we are actively seeking researchers to work with TLM.

Second, the only way to get the licensed psychotherapists to take The Lefkoe Method seriously and start to use it with their clients is to prove its effectiveness in controlled research studies. We could help additional millions of people if TLM became an acceptable technique for psychotherapists.

And finally, the biggest problem the Lefkoe Institute has in getting people to try its products and services is skepticism: Many people have a hard time believing that beliefs can be permanently eliminated in a matter of minutes and problems that have existed for years can be permanently eliminated in a matter of a few hours. Studies from independent researchers that prove our claims to be true might help to overcome this skepticism.

Please share below any comments you have on our research studies.

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What do you want a lot of that will hurt you when you get it?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:51:09 +0000

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What do you desperately desire, that the more you get, the harder it will be to achieve your goals in life?

Answers.

Let me explain.

It seems that nothing would make most of us happier than getting the answer to our questions, such as how to improve our relationships, how to make more money, and how to get anything else we want in life.

But answers are a type of belief. They are a solution to a problem, the way to do or get something.

And like all beliefs, answers are “a truth,” not “the truth.” Like all beliefs, answers are limiting, whereas questions are constantly pointing us in the right direction. In fact, answers actually prevent learning and change. Questions make them possible. Why? …

Learning and changing are relatively easy—when we don’t think we already have the answers. Most children naturally and effortlessly acquire such complicated skills as learning how to speak and read. For children, learning is a not a difficult task.

As we grow older something happens in most of us that severely hinders our learning: we think we already know the truth—we already have the answer.

To make this assertion real, consider this:

What do you ask a lot of when you don’t know how to do something? … You ask questions, right?

What happens to the questions when you discover how to do it? … They stop, don’t they?

If you think you already know the right way to do something, how open are you to learning a better way? … You aren’t, are you?

The history of corporate icons, such as GM and Lehman Brothers, is filled with stories of companies that thought they knew how to succeed, that were convinced they had the answer for how to succeed—and that failed while still proclaiming they were doing the right thing.

You see there is no “right” way to do anything at all times under all conditions. There is only the best strategy for the moment. And as circumstances change, the best way to deal with them changes also.

That gives us a clue to an alternative for “answers.” Instead of trying to find the “right” way to do or achieve anything, look for the best way at the moment. And then keep asking the same question regularly. If your reality doesn’t change much, the best way of dealing with it probably won’t change much either. But when reality changes enough, the best way of dealing with it will change, and the old answer will no longer be a good one.

This is why in a world that is changing rapidly strategies developed early in the year at a corporate retreat usually become inappropriate long before the end of the year. The same principle is true for individuals who are constantly looking for answers for how to achieve their goals. What worked yesterday or what worked for someone else, won’t necessarily work today or for you.

Don’t ever settle for the “answer.” Always hold your answers as working hypotheses, subject to constant checking and actual revisions when necessary. Live out of questions and observe what emerges. I promise you will be more successful than if you operate out of answers derived from what worked for you yesterday or what worked for someone else.

Please share any comments you have on these thoughts on why answers prevent new learning and actually can inhibit our ability to get what we want in life.

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You Create Your Experience of Reality

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:28:19 +0000

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When you realize that you never saw your beliefs in the world, that you only saw events that had no inherent meaning, it becomes clear that you create your beliefs—and, ultimately, reality as you experience it. Thus, everything we say is “out there”—other than what we sense (in other words, what we touch, see, hear, smell, or taste)—is a distinction we create that exists only in our mind.

Creation is the act of making distinctions

For example, you walk down the street and think you actually see “men” and “women,” when you actually only perceive what we have defined as individual human beings. You describe these human beings as “men” or “women,” but you have never actually seen “men” or “women”; they are only abstractions you have distinguished and imposed on reality. If you were to arbitrarily distinguish people into those taller and those shorter than six feet, you would eventually walk down the street and think you are seeing “shorties” and “tallies” as clearly as you now see men and women.

In Alternate Realities, Lawrence LeShan gives a simple example:

Consider how we make classes of things. “Surely,” we say, “we do not create classes. We take them as we find them ‘out there,’ male and female, animal, vegetable, and mineral. . . . We are not creating anything. We are observing things and learning their relationships.” Why then, asked one philosopher, has no one made a class of red, juicy, edible things and included meat and cherries in it? Or a class of tall, dark-haired men and women with no earlobes?

It becomes clear, as we look at LeShan’s example, that we help create and maintain the reality we perceive and react to. So nothing is until you make it so. But once you do, it must be. You can no longer not see men and women. (I once had the following printed on a t-shirt: “It isn’t until it is, and then it must be.” Can you imagine me trying to explain what I meant by that phrase to everyone who read it and asked me?)

Here is a vivid example. In The Experts Speak by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky, hundreds of experts are cited who were limited in their ability to see anything outside their existing beliefs. The following is just one of the beliefs that was generally accepted as “the truth” and that determined the believer’s behavior at the time.

Cerf and Navasky tell of how

in the 1850s, a Hungarian doctor and professor of obstetrics, Ignaz Semmelweis, ordered his interns at the Viennese Lying-In Hospital to wash their hands after performing autopsies and before examining new mothers. The death rate plummeted from 22 out of 200 to two out of 200, prompting the following reaction from one of Europe’s most respected medical practitioners:

It may be that it [Semmelweis’s procedure] does contain a few good principles, but its scrupulous application has presented such difficulties that it would be necessary, in Paris for instance, to place in quarantine the personnel of a hospital the great part of a year, and that, moreover, to obtain results that remain entirely problematical.” (Dr. Charles Dubois, Parisian obstetrician, in a memo to the French Academy, on September 23, 1858.)

Semmeiweis’ superiors shared Dubois’ opinion; when the Hungarian physician insisted on defending his theories, they forced him to resign his post on the faculty.

Today this example seems ridiculous. Doesn’t everyone know that proper hygiene is a lifesaving factor in hospitals? We tend to view this as an objective reality—as a fact. But Dubois and his colleagues were operating out of a different worldview, from a different set of beliefs. Semmelweis’s theory did not fit with their beliefs about hospital care, and therefore it was not and could not be the truth for them.

The only thing that is “true” is that which you make true by definition. You create reality (truth) by making arbitrary distinctions out of nothing. Whatever you distinguish becomes real (true) by the very fact of your having made the distinction. The distinction brings something into existence. It also serves as the definition of what has been brought into existence. Our world is—but only because we said so. We are, by our very nature, conscious beings who distinguish, which means beings who create our perception of “reality.”

I want to emphasize that I am not saying we create our physical reality. Maybe we do and maybe we don’t; I’m not sure. I am saying we create our perception of physical reality, and most people don’t ever make that distinction. Getting fired or having a spouse leave us are facts in reality; the events actually do exist. That they are a disaster or an opportunity for something better is a function of our beliefs and our occurrings. So when I say we create our reality, I am saying we create our experience of reality and we can change it.

Once you have created a belief, you have created a reality (for you) in which your belief is “the truth.” (I am…. People are…. Life is….) And your life becomes consistent with that belief. You have constant evidence that the belief is true. You have a hard time even imagining possible behavior that is not consistent with your belief. It is difficult to eliminate or change the belief because you feel that you actually perceived it existing in the world. So your behavior continues to be consistent with your belief, even if it is dysfunctional and you try to change it.

When You Eliminate a Belief You Change Your Reality and Create New Possibilities

Because “things” only exist as a result of distinctions you make, when you dissolve or eliminate the distinction, that reality disappears. The following exercise demonstrates my point.

Let’s distinguish a two-dimensional figure with three straight sides from every other possible figure and call it a triangle. (A definition is nothing more than how you describe a specific distinction. It’s the “nature” of the distinction.) Now let’s change the figure by adding one more side and making it a four-sided figure with equal angles. Notice you no longer have a triangle. You now have a figure we have defined as a rectangle. The new figure no longer fits the definition of a triangle. You might say that the triangle has disappeared. It doesn’t exist.

From this illustration we learn that when the unique attributes of a “thing” are changed—when the distinction that makes it unique from other “things” is changed—that specific “thing” disappears.

This principle explains what makes a belief disappear during the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP). In the LBP you identify a specific belief, which is a conviction you have that your way of viewing the world is “the truth,” as distinguished from all other views, which are not “the truth”—they’re false. You then transform a statement that you consider to be “the truth” into a statement that you consider to be “a truth?’ Once you do that, the statement is no longer a belief. It has become merely one possible interpretation—one of many possible ways of defining reality. Thus, the belief no longer exists. It has disappeared! And when the belief is gone, your reality has changed. New possibilities appear that weren’t there before.

Conventional Psychotherapy

Most therapies assume that there is an objective world “out there” that the client is having trouble dealing with. Therefore, the conventional role of therapy is to help people cope better with that objective world. The LBP, on the other hand, assumes that there is no “reality” (for you) independent from your beliefs. Thus, altering your beliefs not only changes your behavior, your feelings, and how you perceive the world, it literally changes the world in which you function.

Because we create the world as we experience it, we can change it at will.

Do you have any suggestions or comments on these thoughts on how your beliefs create your experience of reality?

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It worked. Brilliantly.

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:06:14 +0000

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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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How to build confidence

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:05:49 +0000

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Most of us would like to improve our level of confidence.

But why? How does a low level of confidence affect us and what changes in our lives when we gain confidence? What is confidence anyway? Where does it come from? Why do some people have more of it than others?

As someone who has helped literally thousands of people build more confidence, I think I am qualified to answer these questions. (By the way, I had very little self-confidence for most of my life but now I consistently experience a high level of confidence.)

What is confidence?

Confidence actually exists on a continuum, ranging from a very low to a very high belief in our own abilities, a sense we can handle whatever life throws at us. Very few people are totally lacking in confidence and very few feel confident that they can handle almost anything. So the issue for most people is where they currently are on the continuum and how they can improve their confidence.

It is important to distinguish between confidence about being able to perform a specific task (such as fly a plane or speak a foreign language) and confidence in yourself. One might not be confident about being able to perform a specific task even though they have high level of self-confidence. Such a person knows that her inability to perform a specific task means nothing about her as a person.

How to improve your level of confidence

The way to gain confidence about specific abilities is to learn those skills and practice a lot. The way to improve our internal level of confidence that we apply to life in general is to eliminate our limiting beliefs. Every negative belief we have lowers our internal level of self-confidence, beliefs such as I’m not good enough, I’m inadequate, I’m powerless, I’m not capable, Nothing I do is good enough, and I’m not worthy.

Once you understand that a lot of negative self-esteem beliefs lowers your level of self-confidence and getting rid of them raises it, you will understand the myth that self-confidence comes from succeeding or failing at specific projects in life.

If you succeed at tasks as a kid and your parents constantly tell you that you should have done better, you are likely to conclude, Nothing I do is good enough and other similar beliefs that will lower your self-confidence. On the other hand, if you don’t succeed at tasks a lot of the time as a kid and your parents say things like: “That’s okay, no one gets it right the first time. If you keep practicing you will get better and better”—you are likely to conclude: If I keep trying I can do anything. That belief would raise your level of self-confidence. In other words, your level of self-confidence is a function of your beliefs, not your practical results.

And if you already have a bunch of positive self-esteem beliefs, failures later in life probably will be experienced as temporary set backs that have nothing to do with who you are as a person.

Some of the consequences of low self-confidence

A low level of self-confidence can result in a host of other emotional problems, such as procrastination (we are afraid we won’t do a good job so we keep putting things off), worrying about the opinions of others (we don’t have confidence in our own opinion), a critical “little voice” in our head that constantly criticizes almost anything we do (because nothing we do is really good enough), and stress (because we are constantly worried that what we are doing is just not good enough).

Low self-confidence also can result in self-defeating behavior. It can keep you from ever getting started. Or it can have you quit at the first sign of a problem. Or it can lead you to sabotage yourself when you get close to success because you feel you don’t really deserve to get what you want. Or if somehow you manage to get some of what you want, a low level of self-confidence will keep you from truly enjoying your success. The best illustration of this latter point is a study of large company CEOs done many years ago in which most of them admitted they were terrified that they would be “found out” and that it would all be taken away from them.

How building confidence improves your life

Some of the benefits of increased self-confidence include: You’ll take more chances. You’ll stop procrastinating. You’ll do whatever you need to do to move your vision forward. You’ll finally start things you’ve always wanted to do and never got around to doing. It will make social activity easier. Talking to people and meeting new people will become easier and effortless. Failure and mistakes will no longer be dreaded. And you’ll do what you want without worrying about what others will think.

Nothing I can say will provide as good a sense of what happens when you eliminate the beliefs that thwart a high level of self-confidence than a note someone posted on my blog.

First and foremost THANK YOU!

I thought I was confident before so I grab the [Natural Confidence] course just to see how it worked. I starting doing them, I did the first one and when I said the belief, I could feel the charge inherent in it. I thought wow really. At the finish of the first belief, when we repeat the belief it was dead, no charge whatsoever. It was more observing the belief as if someone else said it not me believing it. That moment I was hooked.

I could not stop. I did the first 5 beliefs in a day. Each day I did 4-5 beliefs.

I love it. I don’t really know what I had before the course, it was not the confidence I thought. But now I feel deep inside a calm assurance, a swagger if you will. I am walking taller, chin up giving eye contact without instructing myself to. Before I would say to myself “you gotta make eye contact,” etc. There is no little voice telling me to act confident; it is just what I do now. I just am Now.

They say when the student is ready the teacher will appear, I guess I was ready!

Thank you once again,

Giorgio

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I finally stopped bragging

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:13:57 +0000

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It took me a long time to stop bragging. About 50 years in fact.

As a child I always bragged about things that I thought would impress others. How good my grades were. Things I had done. Popular kids I hung out with. Having people think well of me was so important that I even lied just to impress others.

When I was 17 I was living in Miami Beach in an apartment with my mom. From time to time I dated girls who visited Miami Beach on vacation. One time I remember driving past my aunt’s beautiful house and saying to the girl: “That’s where I live.” I would have been embarrassed to show her an apartment building and say I lived in there. Living in the luxurious water-front house meant I was “someone special” and that’s how I wanted others to view me.

For most of my life I didn’t see my bragging as a problem. I did it and most of the people I knew did it also. It was just something that people did.

It wasn’t until I developed The Lefkoe Method about 25 years ago and started to figure out what beliefs caused which problems that I realized that bragging is actually a way to compensate for a low level of self-esteem.

Let me explain.

As I’ve written in the past, very few people escape childhood without forming a bunch of negative self-esteem beliefs. With few exceptions, parents aren’t aware how their behavior is instrumental in the beliefs their children are forming. And as I said a few weeks ago in a post about parenting, parents, being adults, generally like quiet; children are not quiet and cannot even understand why anyone would value quiet. Parents for the most part want their house to be neat; young children don’t even understand the concept of “neat.” Parents want to sit down for dinner when it is ready and before it gets cold; children are almost always doing something that is far more important to them and don’t want to stop doing it when their parents call them.

In other words, parents usually want their children to do things that they are developmentally incapable of doing. They want their young children to act like little adults, which they cannot possibly do.

The question is not, Do children frequently “disobey” their parents? Children are developmentally incapable to living up to most parents’ expectations. The only question is how parents react when their children are not doing what the parents want them to do.

And because few parents go to parenting school and most bring their own beliefs from their childhoods with them, their reactions range from annoyance and frustration to anger and abuse, with every possibility in between. So we form negative beliefs about ourselves. (See http://mortylefkoe.com/031610)

Once we have a negative sense of ourselves, we need to find something that makes us feel good about ourselves, something that makes us feel able to survive and worthy of surviving. I call these survival strategy behaviors, because they feel to us as if we need them to survive. They are formed early in life when we accidently do something and get a positive response from parents or some other person who is important to us. That positive response makes us feel good about ourselves. After a few repetitions, we conclude: What makes me good enough and important is … being successful, or doing things for people, or my accomplishments, or having people think well of me. (See my post on survival strategies, http://www.mortylefkoe.com/how-do-beliefs-produce-%E2%80%9Cdriven%E2%80%9D-compulsive-behavior/)

What makes me good enough and important is having people think well of me is the most common survival strategy belief we’ve seen after working with over 13,000 clients in the past 25 years. And that’s why bragging is so common.

As I started to help clients eliminate this belief I discovered that I held it also. Eventually I eliminated a lot of negative self-esteem beliefs and several survival strategy beliefs, including What makes me good enough and important is having people think well of me.

After these beliefs were finally gone, I noticed one day that my bragging had stopped. I knew I was okay the way I was and I no longer need the approval of others to make me feel okay. I preferred that you like me, but your not liking me no longer meant anything about me. So I didn’t have to do or say things to get your approval anymore. A lifetime of bragging had stopped without me even noticing at first.

You might want to ask: Is every comment about one’s accomplishments “bragging”? Not necessarily. Here’s how to tell the difference between someone bragging and merely stating facts: Are the “facts” repeated frequently; does there seem to be a need on the person’s part that you really get the importance of what they are telling you; does the speaker have a lot of energy on “the facts”? If so, you probably are hearing bragging coming from people who need you to think well of them to feel good about themselves.

If the accomplishments are presented as information, something the speaker is proud of but not “invested in,” without looking for or needing a positive reaction from you, it probably isn’t bragging.

Bragging isn’t bad and it isn’t wrong. It’s merely the inevitable result of certain beliefs. It’s not the bragging you want to get rid of, it’s the beliefs that have you brag to get the approval of others to feel okay about yourself. And you can stop the bragging anytime you want by eliminating the negative self-esteem beliefs and the survival strategy beliefs that cause it.

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

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Getting Rid of Beliefs is Not Enough

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:53:17 +0000

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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.

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What is My Job As A Parent?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:59:09 +0000

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“How many times do I have to tell you?”

“What am I ever going to do with you?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Don’t you ever listen?”

Imagine yourself to be a young child listening to your parents repeatedly ask you questions like these. … If you stop for a few moments, listen to these words inside your head, and experience what it feels like, you will have a clear picture of what far too many children feel every day.

But what’s even worse than the momentary hurt you probably felt as a child are the beliefs that you probably formed if your parents used words like this day after day, year after year. You’d probably conclude: There’s something wrong with me. I’m not good enough. I’m not capable. Mistakes and failure are bad.

As parents we would be horrified to discover that many of our conversations with our children result in these beliefs. Nonetheless, speaking to them this way has a significant negative impact on them, not the least of which is a negative sense of themselves due to low self-esteem.

For over 25 years we have been working with people who’ve had a wide variety of dysfunctional behavioral or emotional patterns. Some were relatively minor, such as the inability to express feelings, procrastination, and obsessing about what others thought about them. Some were serious, such as eating disorders, chronic depression or anxiety, and phobias. We’ve helped these people with the Lefkoe Belief Process^®(LBP), a technique I developed that allows people to quickly and permanently eliminate the specific beliefs that are responsible for any undesirable behavior or feeling. When the beliefs disappear, the patterns do also. (To use the LBP to eliminate one negative self-esteem belief without charge, go to: http://www.recreateyourlife.com.)

In session after session, hour after hour, we have heard thousands of clients describe the experiences they had with their parents, most of whom loved their children and meant well, that led the clients to form the beliefs they were trying to eliminate: “My mom and dad always did …, they never did …, they always said …, they never said ….”

In the parenting e-Book my wife Shelly and I co-wrote, Guide to Effective Parenting, we 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. Those beliefs, in turn, then determine their behavior and emotions and, ultimately, their lives—for better or for worse. (For information about this e-Book, go to http://www.lefkoeinstitute.com/parenting-ebook.html.)

Shelly and I have read numerous books on parenting and have taught countless parenting workshops. Nonetheless, we still found ourselves doing some things that were interpreted negatively by our two girls when they were younger. But we finally got in the habit of asking ourselves the question after we interacted with our children: What has my child just concluded? When we think the answer is “probably something negative,” we go back to our children to apologize and reopen the discussion.

As an example, one day when our daughter Brittany was about five years old (she’s now 21!) Shelly went into the bathroom before bedtime to brush Brittany’s teeth. Our daughter flatly refused, being the independent young lady that she is. After all of Shelly’s parenting skills and tools failed, she found herself physically overpowering our daughter with one arm around her neck and one hand with the toothbrush in her mouth. After a few moments she regained her sanity and realized what she was doing. She stopped immediately and apologized to Brittany.

Shelly realized that, as important as brushing Brittany’s teeth was, far more important was what our daughter would conclude about herself and life out of that interaction if repeated consistently. A couple of possibilities include: I’m powerless or What I want doesn’t matter. (Rarely do just a few experiences lead to negative beliefs. A number of experiences usually are required before we reach specific negative conclusions about ourselves and life.)

How can we get our children to do what needs to be done (teeth that don’t get brushed do get cavities) without them forming negative beliefs about themselves? Knowing how to interact with our children in a way that facilitates a healthy self-esteem and a positive sense of life is not self-evident. There are many books and courses that provide excellent skills and tools. One of the best techniques is to ask your children what to do and give them a choice. When Brittany didn’t want to go to the bathroom to brush her teeth, we learned to ask her how she’d like to go—with Shelly leading a parade and her following (you should have seen Shelly as a drum major!), with her in my arms or on my back, or did she want to meet me there in five minutes?

Most of us think we are successful parents if we get our children to behave properly, to learn what we think they need to learn, and to be happy. The question we suggest you ask yourself is: At what cost? If you succeed in achieving what you want for your children, but they form negative self-esteem beliefs, such as, I’m not good enough or I’m not worthwhile, or negative beliefs about life, such as, Life’s difficult or I’ll never get what I want, was your behavior really “successful”? In other words, are the benefits you achieved short term with your children worth the long-term cost?

I am not saying that our children’s behavior on a daily basis, the information they acquire from us, and their happiness are not important. Of course they are. What I’m saying is that the single factor that has the greatest impact on whether or not your children achieve true happiness and satisfaction in life is a healthy self-esteem and a positive sense of life. Nothing we do, learn or feel when we’re young will have as much influence on our adult life as the fundamental beliefs we form and take into adulthood.

To make this real, let’s assume that your children have one of the two following sets of beliefs: I’m not good enough; There’s something wrong with me; I’m not deserving; I’m not loveable; I don’t matter—or: I am good enough; I’m worthwhile just because I am, not for any reason; I’m loveable; I matter.

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

Given the critical importance of beliefs, what should be the primary role of parents? Influencing behavior? Teaching information? Making their children happy?—or assisting their children to form positive beliefs about themselves and life?

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

P.S. Several of you wrote and said I never finished the story about my argument with Shelly in my post last week. So here the end of the story: As soon as I realized that my upset really had nothing to do with her, and was the result of conditioning, I told her that, apologized for getting upset at her and withdrawing, and that was the end of it. We actually have a game when we have an argument: Who can “get off it” the fastest. More and more often I don’t get hooked at all so I don’t even have to get off it, because I never get on it.

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Eliminating Beliefs in Organizations

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:21:50 +0000

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You probably already know that The Lefkoe Method can improve your personal life. Did you also know that it can be used to improve your work environment?

Although the Lefkoe Institute is not doing much corporate work right now, we have helped over 10,000 employees from over 50 companies—ranging from Fortune 500 to small family owned businesses—to change their organizational beliefs and their individual beliefs about their jobs. As a result, those organizations were able to produce significant change and improved results. Here is a fascinating case history of how the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) was used effectively in one of those companies.

One small manufacturing company we helped a few years ago had a typical top-down managerial hierarchy, with the bosses making all the decisions and the workers doing little more than following orders. Morale was low. Results were only fair.

Our goal was to totally transform the way the company operated, with a focus on giving the workers a tremendous amount of authority to make day-to-day decisions, with the managers acting as support instead of as “bosses.”

We conducted workshops with all of the company’s employees during which each eliminated one personal belief and all eliminated a bunch of limiting beliefs about their company. We taught them how to use a simplified version of the LBP.

Within days many of the employees started making suggestions for improvements in the company. (Change beliefs and behavior changes effortlessly.) Supervisors were allowing workers to make more and more decisions on their own. A lot of excitement was generated; many of the changes workers suggested were instituted.

At this point Bob, the manager of a department of about thirty-five workers, went on vacation for a week. Two days after he left, Jean, one of the supervisors who reported to him, handled something in her own that everyone had agreed would be done by the workers. When Rick, one of the workers, complained to her, Jean said, in effect, “So what? I’m still the supervisor.” When Rick continued to protest, Jean took him to the Operations Manager’s office.

The other workers observed the heated argument and most of them concluded, “We’re back where we started. Nothing has really changed. If you speak up you get into trouble.”

The next week Bob returned from vacation to discover that morale and productivity had sunk to a new low, with virtually no suggestions or worker participation. What would most managers do in a situation like this? Talk to the supervisor involved in the altercation? Yes, but that in itself would have little effect on the other thirty-some workers. Talk to the workers individually and as a group, telling them that one incident isn’t really important and that the new era of openness and involvement will continue? Yes, but through what filter will anything the manager says be heard by the workers? “I hear what you’re saying, but you weren’t here last week, and you didn’t see with your own eyes as I did that ‘We’re back where we started. Nothing has really changed. If you speak up you get into trouble.’”

Here’s what Bob actually did. He called a meeting of the department’s entire workforce and asked that someone explain exactly what happened while he was away. One of the workers described the incident between Jean and Rick. Bob thanked him and replied, “So most of you concluded, ‘We’re back where we started. Nothing has really changed. If you speak up you get into trouble.’ Right?”

A scattering of “Yeah” could be heard.

Bob continued, “That’s a reasonable conclusion, based on what happened between Jean and Rick. Right now, however, I’d like you to play a little game with me. It’s called Possibilities. I’d like you to tell me at least four or five other things that last week’s incident could possibly mean. I’m not trying to invalidate your conclusion, which is as good as any other we’ll find. I’d just like you to tell me what other interpretations might be possible?”

After a few minutes the answers started coming from the floor.
* It could mean that Jean hasn’t bought into our empowerment program, but all the other supervisors have.
* It could mean that Jean has it in for Rick, but she wouldn’t be a problem for any other worker.
* It could mean that Jean was having a bad day and she is as committed to the new empowerment program as anyone.
* It could mean that Jean is willing to delegate most of her work except for the job involved in last week’s problem.

After several more responses, Bob said, “Can you see that what most of you concluded—‘We’re back where we started. Nothing has really changed. If you speak up you get into trouble’—is only one valid interpretation of what happened, but that a number of other explanations are just as valid?”

Heads started nodding up and down.

He continued, “Didn’t it seem last week when Jean and Larry were arguing that you could see right here on the factory floor, ‘We’re back where we started. Nothing has really changed. If you speak up you get into trouble?’”

One worker yelled out, “If you had been here, Bob, you’d have seen it too!”

Bob smiled. “Did you really see that? If you did, I’d like to know, was it on the wall or the floor? Was it red or green, striped or polka-dotted? Big or small?” Bob waited a few seconds … “Or did you just see Rick and Jean arguing, and the only place—‘We’re back where we started. Nothing has really changed. If you speak up you get into trouble’—has ever been is in your mind, as an interpretation of what you really did see?” They got the point.

Bob turned to Rick. “By the way, what happened when you went to the Operations Manager’s office with Jean?”

“He told us to work it out ourselves,” Rick answered.

Bob turned back to the group. “Anything else?” He saw a lot of sheepish grins. “Let’s go to work.”

In most companies, hardly a day goes by that some employees don’t observe something and then reach a conclusion that negatively affects their behavior from then on. Usually their manager will try to change their behavior using Information + Motivation. (See my blog post, http://mortylefkoe.com/111009, on why that doesn’t work.) Sometimes if the belief surfaces—“So-and-so can’t be trusted” or “That new plan will never work”—the Lefkoe Belief Process (or a variation) can be used easily, with one employee at a time or with a large group, just as Bob did.

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 to this blog: http://mortylefkoe.com.

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People don’t resist change

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:57:38 +0000

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Do you think people resist change? … Most people answer with an emphatic: “Yes.”

I don’t think people resist change at all.

To which you might respond: “Well if people don’t resist change, why do most people not change when given reason to change?”

Good question. Here’s my answer: Imagine that you had been doing something a certain way for a long time and you believed that you were doing it the right way. Now imagine that I come along and tell you not to do that way any more. I give you a lot of reasons and I promise a lot of benefits if you stop doing it your way and start doing it my way.

No matter how persuasive I might be, you and most other people probably wouldn’t change their behavior. “Okay,” you reply, “that just proves that people resist change.” Not necessarily. Think about what I just said.

If you think what you are doing is right and I am telling you to do something else, what does it sound like I am asking you to do? … It would seem to you that I was telling you to do something wrong. Think about that.

We don’t resist doing something new or different—in other words, we don’t resist change. We resist doing what we think is wrong. When you really get this distinction, you will understand something about human behavior that most professionals in the training business still don’t understand.

This is a different way of looking at something I’ve written about before. Information and motivation do not change behavior because behavior is driven by beliefs. If you want to change behavior, change the beliefs that drive any given behavior—such as procrastination, yelling, etc.—and the behavior will change.

Here’s a real life example. Many managers are reluctant to give their hourly employees the freedom to make decisions on their own, despite overwhelming evidence that some of the best ideas in many companies come from the hourly employees.

If such managers believe they know what needs to be done and the people they manage do not, then how they manage is right. Asking their employees to think for themselves is wrong. Change the belief and you change how a manager manages.

If people were generally resistant to change, then there would be little if anything we could do about it. But if people don’t change because they believe what they are doing is right and what you (or others) want is wrong, then we are now in a position to produce change in individuals and in the world by helping people realize that their beliefs are not “the truth.” (Can you see that all political arguments are nothing more than conflicting beliefs? Consider: Global warming. How to deal with the economy. The failure in the educational system. Health care.)

How do you know someone’s belief isn’t “the truth”? Because all beliefs are only “a truths,” the meaning we give to meaningless events. (This becomes experientially real for people when they use the Lefkoe Belief Process to eliminate a belief.)

What appears to be widespread resistance to change is nothing more than people acting consistently with their beliefs. When people change their beliefs, change occurs naturally and effortlessly.

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.

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The Conversation Continues: How Things Occur For Us, Part 2

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:38:25 +0000

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Thanks for the fantastic response to my blog post that offered my initial thoughts on how reality “occurs” for us. I’ve never received so many responses so quickly on a post. Although I suspect I will be pondering this issue for a long time to come, because there has been so much interest in this topic I thought I’d bring you up to date on my current thinking.

I’m currently on vacation in Florida with my wife Shelly and two daughters, Blake and Brittany. Britt came from St. Louis where she is a junior at Washington University and Blake flew in from the Solomon Islands where she had been island-hopping in the South Pacific and surfing. Nothing makes me happier than being with my three girls. Even though I’m allowing myself to get some much-needed rest, my mind won’t stop thinking about the subject of last week’s blog post.

I still have as many questions as answers, but because so many of you said you were interested in my thought processes as I struggled with the distinction, “how things occur for us,” I thought I’d devote my Christmas post to a quick recap of my thoughts since last week.

We always create a meaning for the events we confront; that meaning then becomes how the events occur for us. We then think how events occur for us is an accurate description of reality. It is not. It is merely the meaning we have placed over reality. It is the filter through which we view reality and it determines how we actually experience reality.

For example, imagine you get fired from a job. That event either can occur for you as a terrible catastrophe or as an amazing opportunity. Your behavior and feelings from then on will be determined by how the event occurs for you—not by the event itself.

Another good example of how the same person or event can occur differently for different people is Shelly’s dad who just turned 90. Most of the family is upset around him when he’s telling people what to do and getting annoyed at almost anything they do. At those times he occurs to most of the family as a controlling, irritating, cranky person. He used to occur that way for me also. But after years of practice, his behavior finally has no meaning to me. He says what he says (such as telling me “how to drive” or giving me detailed directions on how to get to a place I’ve driven to at least 100 times) and I respond, “Thanks dad. Okay.”

The nature of a situation, apart from any prior beliefs, can have an important effect on how something occurs for us. For example, at his 90^th birthday party the other evening he was happy, loving, grateful for the people who attended, appreciative for the party, and nothing seemed to bother him throughout the evening. How people occurred for him that evening was different from how they usually occurred for him.

What determines the meanings we create? Every old meaning we have ever created (old beliefs) affects every new meaning we create, although certain beliefs can have a greater influence than others at any given moment. For example, the belief People can’t be trusted would affect how you feel about and how you deal with all people; the belief John is out to get me would have a significant impact on how John occurs for you and relatively little on how other people occur for you.

Cultural beliefs and organizational beliefs also are relevant, such as It’s important to respect our elders in Asian countries and The best way to make money is our industry is having better design/lower prices/more distribution outlets/etc. in various companies.

I think the meanings we create about people and events as an adult are formed instantaneously and automatically. The moment you sense something in reality (through one or more of your five senses), you silently ask yourself: What does this mean? And the answer you give yourself is the meaning you have created, which then becomes how that “something in reality” occurs for you.

Why do we do that? Here’s my hypothesis: Because we usually experience ourselves as a creation (and not as the creator/consciousness) whose survival is always at stake, we need to know if what we are encountering is “for us” or “against us,” conducive to our survival or inimical to our survival.

My thoughts above are one possible description of how and why things occur for us the way they do. I think it is possible, however, to interrupt this automatic meaning-creating process and give “no meaning” to what we are confronting in reality. Consciously making real that the person or event has no inherent meaning removes (or does it minimize?) the filter you’ve placed over the reality in front of you. I think this is what people mean when they advise “living in the moment” and not the past or the future (which is the realm of beliefs, conditionings, and expectations).

Because our need for meaning stems from experiencing ourselves as a creation whose survival is always at stake, one very good way to eliminate our need for meaning is to experience ourselves as the creator of that creation.

One way to make it easier to make real for yourself that the “reality” you are confronting has no inherent meaning is to use the Who Am I Really? (WAIR?) Process to distinguish yourself as the creator of the meaning and not the sum total of the meanings.

After using that Process you can notice the meaning you’ve just automatically created and then make a critical distinction between yourself as the creator of the meaning and the creation experiencing the meaning.

Your ability to distinguish yourself as the creator/consciousness also can be enhanced by using the WAIR? Process repeatedly, so that you get used to making and then experiencing that distinction. (That is why I strongly recommend you use that Process after eliminating each belief on our various belief-elimination programs.)

But the question still remains: Is it possible to transcend all your beliefs and really live as if you are the creator and the reality you are interacting with has no inherent meaning under all circumstances, or can we do that only under some circumstances? And if only under some circumstances, what are they? At the moment, I’m not sure.

Perhaps the best way to summarize how I see this issue at the moment is by updating something I wrote last week:

Our behavior and feelings are determined primarily by how things occur for us, which ultimately seems to be nothing more than the meaning we are giving any particular person or situation at the moment. Moreover, we seem to be predisposed to automatically create a given meaning by all of our prior beliefs and conditionings. However, by making a distinction between ourselves as the creator and ourselves as the creation for whom something is occurring, and by recognizing that the “reality” we are confronting has no inherent meaning, I think we can change how that reality occurs for us under certain circumstances. And I think we can train ourselves to do it more effectively, more often.

Stay tuned. More to come.

I really appreciate all your contributions this past week. I got some real valuable insights from your blog comments. I’m looking forward to hearing from you during the next couple of weeks as I pursue this investigation. I’m really interested in what you think about the phenomenon of “occurring” and the blog posts describing my journey.

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish Happy Holidays to all of you from all of us at the Lefkoe Institute: Shelly, Karen, Rodney, Liz, and myself. It’s been a very exciting year for us. It took us 24 years for 13,000 people to experience our work and in this past year alone we had over 100,0000 people visit our web site and 39,000 eliminate at least one belief. Our goal is to have at least 200,000 people experience the Lefkoe Belief Process and the WAIR? Process by this time next year.

All of us wish you a wonderful year filled with new and exciting possibilities.

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.

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.

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How Things Occur For Us

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:54:01 +0000

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I generally know when I’m about to have a breakthrough, when there is a new process or way of understanding something that is on the verge of taking shape. I have glimpses of ideas and I have a sense of connections that I can’t quite put my finger on. But I know if I stay with it, something new and useful ultimately will take shape.

That’s where I am now. I think I’m about to come up with something very useful, and I’m not sure what it is yet. So I thought I would share with you some ideas I currently have swirling around in my mind and keep updating you as the ideas develop. I think I will end up with something that explains why our lives turn out as they do (apart from the influence of beliefs and conditionings)…. and how we can better influence how our lives turn out.

This “stirring” in my mind started a few weeks ago when I came across a book my wife Shelly was reading for a course she was taking: The Three Laws of Performance, by Steven Zaffron and Dave Logan (Jossey-Bass, 2009). Here are a few of the passages that particularly intrigued me.

“Each person assumes the way things occur for him or her is how they are occurring for another. But situations occur differently for each person.”

“So what exactly does occur mean? We mean something beyond perception and subjective experience. We mean the reality that arises within and from your perspective on the situation. In fact, your perspective is itself part of the way in which the world occurs for you. ‘How a situation occurs’ includes your view of the past (why things are the way they are) and the future (where all this is going).”

“When people relate to each other as if each is dealing with the same set of facts, they have fallen into the reality illusion. To see the reality illusion at work, think of a person you aren’t happy with at the moment—perhaps someone you’ve been resenting for years. In your own mind, think of words that describe that person.

“You might say, ‘self-centered,’ ‘doesn’t listen,’ ‘opinionated,’ and ‘irrational.’ You might be willing to swear on a stack of bibles that those words are accurate. But notice that you’ve described how the person occurs to you.”

“See the reality illusion at work, in you and people around you. Almost without exception, people don’t notice that all they are aware of is how situations occur to them. They talk, and act, as if they see things as they really are.”

“None of us see things as they are. We see things as they occur to us.” (Emphasis added.)

My first reaction after reading this material was that “how things occur” is nothing more than a function of our existing beliefs. We see/create our reality through the filter of our own beliefs. But the more I thought about it and the more I observed how things occur for me, the more I realized that this phenomenon is the result of more than beliefs. But what else causes it? I’m not sure yet. That’s what I’ve been pondering the past few days. I think, however, that the answer could explain a question I’ve had for years.

I’ve known for 25 years that you can change any behavior or emotion by eliminating the beliefs and conditionings (including senses and expectations) that cause the old behavior and emotion.

But this is not sufficient to change your reality, such as making more money or finding the romantic relationship of your dreams. Merely eliminating the barriers (beliefs) to those things showing up isn’t sufficient to actually have something show up in reality. Maybe how things occur for us would enable us to do that.

In the past I’ve investigated the Law of Attraction (as espoused by Seth, Abraham, The Secret, and others), Ernest Holmes’ Science of Mind, and quantum physics, but I don’t think any of these is sufficient to explain what it takes to have events in reality consistently show up in a particular way for you.

It is important to remember that beliefs are the meaning we give meaningless events in the world. Sometimes these meanings are generalizations and we conclude that I am …, people are …, and life is …. Other times we don’t generalize, we just say that I just did something wrong, or what he did was rude, or today has been a difficult day. All three of these are meanings/beliefs, but they are “narrow” meanings that are unlikely to affect us in most situations later in life.

How things occur for us at any given moment is a function of both types of beliefs. But what else is involved?

How things occur for us ultimately seems to be a function of the meaning we are giving any particular person or situation at the moment. Moreover, we seem to be predisposed to create a given meaning by all of our prior beliefs and conditionings. However, those prior meanings don’t cause the new meaning, they only predispose us. And by being conscious of the meaning we are assigning at any given moment, we might be able to change it despite old beliefs.

I noticed last week that recently I experienced being overwhelmed with things to do. No matter how much I did there was always more to do. There never seemed to be time to rest. That situation occurred for me as a problem. Because I had started thinking about the phenomenon of occurring, I tried to shift how these circumstances occurred to me, from negative to positive: all the things I have to do are opportunities. Aren’t I lucky to have so many great possibilities open to me? I don’t have to take advantage of all of them if I don’t have time. But I’m fortunate to have all of them and to be able to create new opportunities daily. It worked: My circumstances started occurring to ne differently.

How this situation originally occurred for me seems to be largely the result of my beliefs, but the shift did not require me to eliminate beliefs, only to be conscious of the old way and consciously choose a new way.

It might be, however, that I would not be able to sustain the new occurring if I had beliefs that precluded it, such as Life in difficult or Nothing ever turns out for me.

Try to create a new occurring for yourself. Look at how a specific person or situation “occurs for you.” Describe it in as much detail as you can. Notice that you interact with the person or situation as if how it occurs for you is the truth? Can you also see that how the person or situation occurs is a function of your beliefs and conditionings? Now try to create an alternative way for it to occur for you. Can you do it?

I intend to keep noticing how things occur for me and see if I can trace the source of that experience. I also will see if I can shift my “occurring” and if I can’t, why I can’t. I also will see if the new occurring lasts, in other words, does it exist only at the moment I create it, with the old one “re-occurring” the next time that person or situation shows up, or does the new one I created continue to occur for me?

I’m looking forward to the next couple of weeks as I pursue this investigation. Please write your comments and questions in the blog below. I’m really interested in what you think about this phenomenon and this blog post describing my journey. I’m sure your comments on how things occur for you will help me in my quest.

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.

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.

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Why Should I Eliminate A Belief?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:58:08 +0000

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Every once in a while after someone asks me what I do and I reply, “I help people eliminate beliefs,” I am asked: “Why would I want to eliminate a belief?”

There are at least good four answers to that question, which I will describe in this blog post. If you would like to improve the quality of your life and increase your range of possibilities, I think you will find this discussion very useful.

1. Virtually all the problems you have in life, behavioral or emotional, stem mainly from your beliefs (and sometimes some conditioning). So if you want to get rid of problems, you need to eliminate the relevant beliefs. Beliefs cause serious problems such as depression, eating disorders, and chronic anxiety, and common problems such as procrastination, relationship issues, and doing things just to get people’s approval.

Getting rid of the relevant beliefs may not be the only way to get rid of such problems, but it certainly is one of simplest and fastest ways. In this situation, getting rid of beliefs is not an end in itself, but a means to a very desirable end.

2. A second reason to eliminate a belief is to be able to use the Who Am I Really? (WAIR?) Process to create and experience a shift in one’s identity from “self” (one’s body, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior) to “SELF” (as consciousness, as a spiritual being) in a matter of minutes. Such a shift typically requires years of meditation. Some workshops claim to be able to provide that experience in several concentrated days. The Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) assists people to make that shift in less than 30 minutes the first time and in less than 10 minutes thereafter.

After using the WAIR? Process, people generally say that they experience nothing is missing, anything is possible, and they have no limitations. When asked to describe this experience in their own words, people say: powerful, serene, calm, peaceful, whole, complete, satisfied, empowered, nothing missing, no limitations and unlimited possibilities.

Because the WAIR? Process requires that you have eliminated at least one belief with the LBP in order for it to work, the incredible value of the state change it produces is a second good reason for eliminating a belief.

3. The first two reasons for eliminating beliefs are a means to another end. The third reason for eliminating a belief is an end in itself: We literally create new possibilities in our lives—a brand new reality—by eliminating limiting beliefs.

Let me give you an example. Assume you had the beliefs: I’m not loveable. Relationships don’t work. Men/women can’t be trusted.

With these beliefs, what are the possibilities that you could have a really good, nurturing, long-term romantic relationship? … Slim to nil, right?

Now let’s assume you use the LBP to completely eliminate those beliefs. Can you see you have just created the possibility of a good, nurturing, long-term relationship that literally didn’t exist before? There is no guarantee you will ever find such a relationship, but the possibility exists now that didn’t exist before.

This is one of the most powerful consequences of eliminating beliefs: You not only change your behavior and feelings, you actually change the reality you live in.

Let me remind you of something I wrote in an earlier blog post to make this idea completely clear. Let’s assume you held the following beliefs: You have to work hard to make money. I’m not deserving. I’ll never have enough money. /There is never enough money. Money is a struggle. Life is difficult. Your reality with these beliefs does not include the possibility of acquiring wealth easily, if at all. Without those beliefs the possibility comes into existence.

The possibilities that exist in your reality are defined by your beliefs. When you say something is impossible it actually becomes impossible for you. If you believe Life is difficult, you will experience things not going the way you wanted them to go as upsetting obstacles rather than exciting opportunities. If you believe I’m not capable or I’m not competent, would you likely try to do something you weren’t sure you could do? And if you tried, do you think you would succeed with these beliefs?

Imagine that each belief you hold is like a circle and you are limited to the behavior and feelings that are present in that circle. Anything outside the circle is not possible for you. In the illustration below, your range of possibilities is represented by the black space inside the circle.

When you have more than one belief, the other beliefs overlap each other, making the space available to you smaller and smaller as the number of beliefs increase.

In this illustration your range of possibilities is represented by the small black area in the middle. Imagine further that each of these three overlapping boxes represents one of the three relationship beliefs I listed above. Can you see that these three beliefs leave you very few possibilities for a nurturing, long-term relationship?

Now imagine eliminating these beliefs one at a time. Can you see that the space of possibilities increases as each belief is eliminated?

When all the beliefs are gone, you are no longer limited to the space inside the circles because there are no more circles. Every possibility outside the circles that had been unavailable to you before is now available and the space of possibilities becomes infinite. In other words, there are no self-imposed limitations remaining.

Shelly likes to use the metaphor of a room full of furniture. Each piece of furniture represents a belief, so if the room is full of chairs, tables, and sofas, there is virtually no room to move around. And you can’t get to the door to leave the room. Each piece of furniture (each belief) that you remove gives you more possibilities for movement. And when the last piece of furniture is removed, you gain access to the door and can leave the room. At which point there are no restrictions on your movement at all.

I have used the term “limiting beliefs” in the past. In fact all beliefs are limitations in that you are limited to that which is consistent with that belief and anything inconsistent is impossible. To use a silly example, if you believe Everything always works out for me, you do not have the possibility of things not working out for you, which could rob you of the ability to make mistakes and learn from them or learn how to transcend difficult situations. This may not be a belief you want to eliminate, but it still is a “limitation.”

I could devote an entire blog post to a discussion of this point. Suffice to say, as you eliminate beliefs, you increase possibilities in your life.

Notice that you don’t have to do anything (other than eliminate the belief) in order to create a new possibility and literally change your reality. Your reality changes automatically after the belief(s) has been eliminated.

4. In addition to changes in an individual’s life that result from eliminating beliefs, organizational change and social change also can be effected by eliminated the beliefs that govern those areas.

When I do workshops for CEOs I tell them that the biggest barrier their organization faces is not in the world (competition, government, costs, etc.), but in the minds of their employees.

For example, if most of the people in a company believe that something is impossible—such as outsourcing, raising capital, finding qualified new employees, or reaching a certain sales or earnings target—that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, because the employees will operate according to a reality consistent with their beliefs. If something is impossible, there is no sense in trying to do it.

In my blog post on November 17, 2009, I showed how the health care system that exists today is a function of a series of beliefs and how changing the system totally will be virtually impossible without eliminating those beliefs. I also showed how if those beliefs are eliminated and new beliefs created in their place, the health care system will change naturally to be consistent with those new beliefs.

I look forward to the day when people become so clear of the importance of beliefs that everyone learns about them in school, parents realize that their job is to help their children form positive beliefs, and social and organizational change is effected by changing the existing beliefs.

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.

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.

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An Effective Health Care System Requires New Beliefs

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:05:00 +0000

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Once you understand the power that beliefs have to shape behavior and limit possibilities, you can begin to see why so many of society’s problems seem insoluble. Societal beliefs prevent change in society just like individual beliefs prevent change in individuals.

For example, if you have the belief Relationships don‘t work, your options are limited. You can avoid relationships altogether, not work very hard to make them work because you already know they won’t, not leave a bad relationship because you’ll never find a better one, and so on. But a long-term loving and nurturing relationship is not a viable option with that belief.

Just like your range of possibilities is a function of your beliefs, so the range of possibilities for any social institution is a function of its beliefs.

Let’s take a look. Virtually everyone agrees that the existing health care system doesn’t work, even though there are a number of conflicting theories about why and what should be done. What’s wrong? Insurance premiums are rising faster than the ability of millions of people to pay. Tens of millions of people aren’t covered by any insurance at all. An increasing percentage of our national income is being spent on medical care. People with preexisting conditions can’t get insurance. People who can’t pay aren’t getting the medical treatment they need. Corporations can’t afford the rising premium costs. In other words, the health care system is broken!

Many solutions have been proposed but none seem to resolve all the problems, and some proposed solutions create new problems. Why can’t we seem to find a way to create a health care system that works for all concerned?

If you imagine beliefs as a box that limits us—where we can only act consistently with what’s inside the box and what’s outside the box is virtually impossible because it is inconsistent with the beliefs—then there is no real solution to the health care crisis given the widely accepted beliefs about health care.

What are some of those beliefs? For over a hundred years the health care system has been built on these and similar beliefs:

* Health care should focus on eliminating symptoms and disease.
* Body and mind are considered separate; psychosomatic illness is mental and may be referred to a psychiatrist. Mental phenomena are irrelevant in treating most physical illnesses.
* The body is a machine in good or bad repair. The primary intervention should be with drugs and surgery.
* The focus should be on treatment of symptoms.
* The patient is dependent. The professional is the authority.

In recent years some major medical institutions (such as the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic) and millions of individuals have rejected at least some of these beliefs. But these are exceptions, not the rule. It is news that one-third of the U.S. population has tried some form of “alternative” treatment in the past year.

For the medical profession as a whole, for insurance companies, and for most people, these beliefs underlie their interactions with the health care system and their attempts to improve it.

Because the beliefs I listed above still rule the health care system, preventative medicine, the mind-body connection, and treating people instead of symptoms are “outside the box.” Notice how these practices are described: they are “alternative medicine.” In other words, they are an alternative to accepted practice.

When the beliefs that govern the health care system change, new possibilities will open up and a new health care system will evolve, eliminating the problems that cannot be solved in the current “box.”

How can we do that? With a modified version of the Lefkoe Belief Process that can be used to create new possibilities for any social institution:

1. Identify the beliefs that are responsible for the current behavior.

2. Discover the source of those beliefs and realize that the beliefs made sense given the circumstances at the time.

3. Recognize that the beliefs—the meaning given to the circumstances—are a valid way to understand and deal with those specific circumstances. In other words, if the circumstances had been different, we would have formed different beliefs. Our conclusions are “a truth” for a specific time, not “the truth” for all times.

4. Take a look at today’s circumstances. Notice that it’s very different. Create new beliefs as the best way to understand and deal with today’s circumstances. Our answers are still not “the truth,” but “a truth”—only the best answers for today.

5. Because we now have a new set of beliefs, we also have many new possibilities that didn’t even exist before. Given our new beliefs about the social institution, what should everyone connected with it do?

Let’s apply these five steps to the health care system.

Step 1: Identify the beliefs that underlie today’s health care system. (See chart below.)

Step 2: What is the source of those beliefs?

There is not enough space in this blog post to describe the source of all these beliefs, but here is a very brief summary.

Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, taught that everything in the material universe was a machine, including human beings. He claimed that the human body reflected the machinelike characteristics of the universe itself—machinelike bodies inhabiting a machinelike world. He argued, therefore, that disease was a disorder of the mechanism; the machine was broken. Descartes devised what became known as the scientific or reductionist method: To learn about the complex, study the simple. Learn about a germ and eventually you learn about the disease associated with it.

A medical theory that supported Descartes’ general scientific approach was the theory of specific etiology: an identifiable microorganism causes every disease or infection.

In their book The Healer Within, Steven Locke and Norman Colligan describe the medical advances that flowed from these two theories:

“In 1906 researchers used Koch’s discovery of the tuberculin bacillus to develop a vaccine for the disease. In 1911 researchers developed a special arsenic compound, Salvarsan, which effectively treated many forms of syphilis. In the 1920s insulin was isolated, and insulin injections were extending the lifetimes of diabetic patients. In the 1930s, sulfa drugs appeared, and with them cures for bacterial pneumonia, meningitis, gonorrhea, and urinary tract infections. By the 1940s, the sulfa drugs were largely replaced by even more potent drugs, the antibiotics, made possible by the discovery of penicillin. It seemed that there was no disease that medical science could not handle.”

The biomedical approach resulted in physicians focusing more on diseases than on the patients who had the diseases. This trend was exacerbated by advances in medical technology, an early example of which was the stethoscope in 1819. Locke and Colligan write that diagnostic technologies “further reinforced the image of the patient as an object of study. By the turn of the century, doctors had tests for tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, cholera, and syphilis. Soon after came the X-ray, the electrocardiogram, the electroencephalogram, and blood tests. The patient became less and less a fellow human being with an illness and more and more an amalgam of medical data.”

Step 3: The beliefs made sense given the circumstances at the time.

So where did physicians (and their patients) get the belief that the source of most illness and disease was an invading microorganism or a malfunction of the body/machine and that the influence of the mind was irrelevant? From their experience over several decades. As Locke and Colligan put it, “For most of the history of modern medicine this biomedical approach has dominated the philosophy of science for the best of all reasons: it worked.”
So where did physicians (and their patients) get the idea that a doctor’s job was to diagnose an illness and treat it, as opposed to dealing with a whole person who had a body and a mind? Again, from their experience in dealing with the world. Their conclusion was not illogical or invalid. It made sense. Their interpretation fit most of the available evidence.

The problem was that the medical establishment as a whole (with some exceptions) and most patients considered this conclusion an absolute fact—“the truth” rather than “a truth”—the only accurate description of illness and how the body worked, then and forever. Once the belief was formed, they became blinded to new evidence that was incompatible with their beliefs.

Step 4: Take a look at today’s circumstances.

It is clear that we now live in a world that is very different from the one we inhabited a century ago, a world in which there is irrefutable scientific evidence of a mind-body connection, evidence that existed only anecdotally during the years that the paradigm for modern medicine was being created.

The current paradigm is at variance with the new medical reality, as Dr. Larry Dossey (Beyond Illness) points out:

“What is the success of modern medicine? What can it do? These are the questions in need of answers in the debate . . . . The fact is that for the majority of patients who see physicians, the likeliest diagnosis is some type of psychosomatic or stress disorder. And regrettably, it is in this area—the area from which most patients suffer—that modern medicine is not at its best . . . . Actual studies show that three-fourths of all illnesses brought to physicians are self-limiting (that is, will go away without medical treatment). And of the remaining one-fourth, in only about half of the cases is medicine dramatically helpful.”

None of this is meant to denigrate physicians or modern medicine. The only point I’m making here is that what we observe when we look at what is known about health and illness today is vastly different from what we observed a century or so ago when the current medical model was being formed.

Today’s strategies are a function of an institution’s group of beliefs, which in turn were designed to be an appropriate response to a specific environment that existed when it was created. If today’s environment is significantly different, can you see that neither the current strategies nor the current beliefs can work for today? That neither are “the truth”?

Step 5: It’s fitting to ask: If we originally formed a set of beliefs and a course of action that was based on a careful analysis of the environment as it existed then, why don’t we do the same today?

Notice in the above chart that for the most part the existing beliefs generate questions and strategies about illness, especially how professionals can make people better after they get sick, usually using such “mechanical” aids as drugs or surgery. Can you see that the beliefs constituting one possible new set of beliefs lead to questions and strategies about a state of wellness, emphasizing prevention, involving the patient as well as the professional, and using the patient’s internal resources as a significant aid?

Each new belief opens up new possibilities for strategies and solutions. Experts in each field can provide better solutions than I can, and many already have. What’s been missing is the acceptance of a paradigm that allows solutions outside the existing one. Once people realize that the existing beliefs are “a truth,” not “the truth,” and view the alternative beliefs presented here as another “a truth,” one that is more appropriate for today, new health care and wellness strategies will be devised and implemented widely, not just in isolated situations.

Perpetuating outdated beliefs makes it impossible to resolve the problems of society. As Seaborn Blair once said, “Everybody wants to change the world, but nobody wants to change his mind.” Why don’t we want to change our minds? Because we are convinced that our beliefs are “the truth.”

Our only hope for resolving the myriad problems that confront us today and really improving the state of the world is to change our minds. If we are to create a society that really works for everyone, we must get unstuck from our existing beliefs and open our minds to alternative ones.

The Lefkoe Belief Process is one effective way to do that.

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 it 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, 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.

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Why Self-Help Often Doesn’t Work … And What Does

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:52:52 +0000

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How many times have you attended a personal growth workshop, or listened to a self-help audio course, or viewed a set of DVDs designed to change your life? Given the type of people who usually read my blog, probably most of you.

And how many times did you get a high when you completed the program … that dissipated shortly, leaving you almost where you were before you started? Based on what many of you have told me, an awful lot of you.

Why don’t these courses that usually offer such valuable information produce lasting change? Based on everything we know about change, they should.

But what if our assumption about what produces change is wrong?

The presumption implicit in most attempts to change behavior is: Information (I) + Motivation (M) = Change. This makes perfect sense to most people who are trying to producer change, whether they are psychotherapists, training professionals, parents, or committed individuals. If you know what to do and how to do it, and if you are motivated (positively or negatively), isn’t that all you need to take the appropriate action?

Obviously not, since the formula of I + M = C doesn’t seem work a lot of the time. If it did, everyone would wear seat belts, which they don’t. Everyone would keep New Year’s resolutions, instead of letting them go after a couple of weeks. People suffering from cardiovascular disease would adopt low-fat, low-cholesterol diets. Corporate training programs would be far more effective in changing worker behavior.

Let’s take a simple example. Say you’re a procrastinator. You always leave work projects until the last minute. As a result, you’re anxious much of the time and sometimes you turn projects in late, which subjects you to the disapproval of your boss. In fact, he tells you, “I’d like to consider you for a promotion and a raise, but I can’t as long as you continue to deliver projects late.”

Making Plans To Change

You decide you must change and you really want to change. So what do you do?

*You prioritize your activities, assuming that it will help you focus on the most important projects.
* You make a schedule that helps you allot time during the month for work on the most important projects.
* You put up reminders in prominent places.
* You create rewards to give yourself when you finish a project—a special dinner or a new item of clothing.
* You ask your friends to support you.

So now you’ve gathered all the information and resources you need to get your projects done on time. And you have several strong reasons for doing it: a possible promotion, a raise, your boss’s approval, and an alleviation of your constant anxiety.

Does It Work?

But be honest! After you’ve done all this, plus all the other variations you’ve discovered, does the behavior pattern really change? Does the I + M = C formula enable you to do what you say you are going to do? And if it does today, does it continue to be easy month after month? For most of us, the answer is no. (If you think this isn’t a valid assumption, consider all the times you’ve committed to some change in your life, buttressed by Information + Motivation, but for some inexplicable reason you failed to follow through.)

Let’s look at another example of how I + M = C is ineffective in helping people change their behavior and emotions.

Imagine you attended a workshop, or read a book, or purchased some CDs and DVDs telling you what you have to do to have a great relationship. Now you know exactly what you need to do.

*You must honestly communicate your thoughts and feelings.

*You must listen from your partner’s point of view.

*You must “get” your partner’s communication, in other words, get that what your partner is saying is true for him/her whether or not you happen to agree.

*Focus on what you can do to improve the relationship instead of assuming all the problems are the result of your partner.

You now know what to do and you are motivated.

But months go by and nothing improves despite your best efforts. You are still withholding some of your thoughts and feelings. You still feel your partner is at fault for most of your difficulties. Etc.

Why isn’t I + M = C working?

Maybe because you still have the beliefs: It’s dangerous to express my feelings. My feelings aren’t important. No one is interested in what I have to say. Men/women can’t be trusted. Relationships are difficult. And so on.

Maybe because the formula of I + M = C never deals with beliefs, so lasting change isn’t possible. I + M = C isn’t enough to change emotional and behavioral patterns because the beliefs that cause them haven’t been eliminated.

Beliefs are nothing more than thoughts we have about reality that we are convinced are “the truth.” They are, for us, accurate statements about reality. Therefore your beliefs mold your behavior, your emotions, and your attitudes.

So if the personal growth material you’ve tried hasn’t produced lasting change, you now know why. You were informed and motivated, but you never eliminated the beliefs that necessitate the existing behavior you want to change.

Now that you know that your beliefs determine your life, you are where I was in January 1985: excited to have found the explanation for my inability to change my behavior and feelings—yet not knowing how to get rid of my limiting beliefs.

And then I found a way to eliminate those beliefs—quickly, easily, and permanently. And my life was changed forever. And now you can eliminate your limiting beliefs and change your life forever too.

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.

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.

Did I Really Eliminate a Belief?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:41:20 +0000

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

During the past few weeks we have been conducting a little study to determine how effective our free on-line belief-elimination program is.

We know from our one-on-one sessions that The Lefkoe Method is effective with about 90% of the people who use it. We’ve been offering a money-back guarantee to people who come to us to get rid of their fear of public speaking and only about 10% of the almost 2,000 clients who had that problem have requested a refund. And in informal follow-ups with clients who come to us with other problems at least nine out of ten clients continue to describe significant changes in their lives months later.

But from blog comments and emails from people who eliminated one or more beliefs on our free belief-elimination site, it seemed that the effectiveness rate was much lower.

So we conducted a study and asked people to click one of three links at the end of the process that eliminated a free belief. Here’s what we found. Belief was eliminated: 44%. Not sure if belief was eliminated: 44%. Belief was not eliminated: 14%.

This result was totally inconsistent with our experience with clients in one-on-one sessions. The 14% who said the belief was still there was close to our experience. But the number who were convinced the belief was gone was only about half of our experience. So we asked people who participated in the study if they were willing to be interviewed so we could solve this mystery.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the phone for the past few days talking to people who had clicked the “not sure” button, and here’s what I discovered.

What I Just Did Is Impossible

Almost all of the people I spoke to said that the words of the belief felt different at the end of the Lefkoe Belief process, but they just couldn’t tell if the belief was “really eliminated.” Almost all of them said something like: I didn’t expect it to work so quickly after having the belief so long.

I then asked, “Do you have the belief: Change is difficult and takes a long time?” They all answered, yes. The mystery was getting solved. They had the belief that what they had just done (totally getting rid of a belief they had lived with since childhood) was impossible.

That reminded me of what I had discovered during the University of Arizona research study with subjects who had a fear of public speaking. After they eliminated all the beliefs and conditionings that usually cause a fear of public speaking, I would ask them to imagine a talk in the future and to rate their level of fear on a scale of 1-10, 1 being no fear at all and 10 being terror. (The average for all the subjects at the start of the study was 7.) Most of the subjects said 2-4. Given the beliefs (and conditionings) they had eliminated, they should have said 1-2.

As I talked to the study subjects and asked a lot of questions, I started hearing comments like: Well, I can’t expect to get rid of a fear I’ve lived with for a lifetime in just a few hours.

So I added one more belief to the list of beliefs we used with the subjects: Change is difficult and takes a long time. After the subjects eliminated that belief (along with the others) the level of imagined fear dropped to 1-2. (That, by the way, was also the level they reported after they actually delivered a speech in public.)

Do I Feel The Belief in Real Life Situations?

The next thing I discovered from my phone interviews was that people were testing whether or not the belief was true by looking into their lives to check, which is one useful way to check.

Unfortunately, instead of imagining events in the future to see if the belief still seemed to be there, people were recalling events in the past when they felt the belief.

Because the belief actually did exist in the past, it felt to many people as if the belief was not gone. In order to see if the belief is gone, you need to imagine a future incident, the type that usually brought up feelings caused by the belief, to see if you still feel the belief.

When I did this exercise with the people who weren’t sure if the belief was gone, almost all agreed that it was.

But I Still Have The Problem

Some people had a sense that the belief was gone, but thought it couldn’t really be because they still didn’t feel good about themselves. These people thought that the belief—I’m not good enough or I’m not important—couldn’t have really disappeared if they still had any negative feelings about themselves.

I explained to them that one can have many other negative beliefs about oneself—such as I’m not capable, I’m not worthy, Nothing I do is good enough, and I’m powerless—and getting rid of one negative self-esteem belief doesn’t automatically get rid of all the others. You have to get rid of each of the negative self-esteem beliefs you have before a negative sense of yourself will be totally eliminated, even though you will feel better about yourself in some way after eliminating each belief.

I Just Can’t Be Sure

In conversation after conversation, the people I talked to said: “I just couldn’t be sure. The words felt different, but I couldn’t say for sure if the belief was really gone.”

There is an exercise my wife Shelly created to help clients determine if a belief really is gone. She asks them to say the words “I’m a woman,” if they are a woman, or “I’m a man,” if they are a man. Then she tells them to say the words: “I’m a monkey.”

The client is then able to notice how it feels to say a statement that feels true versus a statement that feels false.

After Shelly asks them to say the words of the belief they just worked on, she asks them: Does your belief feel like saying “I’m a man/woman” or like saying “I’m a monkey.”

Because the first statement about being a man or woman is obviously true and the second about being a monkey is obviously false, this gives people a reference point to compare the belief to. That is usually enough for most people to conclude that, in fact, the belief really is gone.

I Thought I Had Eliminated a Belief Before, But It Came Back

Finally, several people I spoke to said the belief did feel gone after the process, but they had done other exercises in the past where it seemed that beliefs had been eliminated, and then after they went back into life, the belief came back (or perhaps it never really had been eliminated). Because of that experience, they were hesitant to say the belief was gone even though they felt as if it was.

So based on what people who weren’t sure if their belief was really gone told us, we will revise our video belief-elimination process to include what I learned from those of you I spoke to. I want to thank al of you who participated in our study for your support. Your feedback will help people realize that, in fact, many more of them really did eliminate a belief in just a few minutes that they had lived with since childhood.

Our commitment is to have at least 90% of all people who use our on-line and DVD processes experience the belief disappearing.

We really are committed to our mission: “To significantly improve the quality of life on the planet by having people recreate their lives [eliminate their limiting beliefs] and live as the unlimited possibilities they are [realize they are the creator of their lives, not merely the creation].”

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 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.

Are Your Beliefs Permanently Gone? Four Tests To Know For Sure

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:24:21 +0000

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

The Lefkoe Institute has had a big marketing problem since its inception 24 years ago. People don’t believe we can do what we promise to do.

Our unique distinction is that we can help people quickly and permanently eliminate all the relevant beliefs that cause virtually any behavioral or emotional problem in their lives. But most people have the belief: Change is difficult, takes a long time, and requires a lot of reinforcement. So telling people what we offer usually results in people expressing skepticism about our claim.

Interestingly enough, when we started helping people eliminate beliefs 24 years ago, most people didn’t see a connection between beliefs and behavior. “What do my beliefs have to do with what I do and feel?” most people would ask.

But as a result of many best-selling books by such popular authors as Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and Joe Vitale now almost everyone in the personal growth field acknowledges that in order to make fundamental permanent change, you have to remove limiting beliefs first.

As a result, almost all the major teachers in this field claim to be able to eliminate beliefs, because it’s what most of their customers are asking for. In some cases they deliver on their promise. Unfortunately, although many of the popular belief-elimination techniques result in feeling as if the belief is gone at the moment, in many cases the beliefs are not eliminated permanently.

Consequently, many people have become skeptical when someone claims they can help them quickly, easily, and permanently eliminate long-held beliefs. (As one well-known psychologist told me many years ago when I made that claim: “Anyone who says he can permanently eliminate beliefs is a fraud.”)

This is not to say that programs that don’t eliminate beliefs aren’t valuable. Many of them make a profound difference in people’s lives without eliminating beliefs.

I’d like to suggest four questions you can ask to assure yourself that the belief-elimination process you are using really works.

1. Does the belief you want to get rid of go away and stay away? You can know a belief is eliminated right after an exercise because the words of the belief no longer feel true; the words feel as if they have no meaning. That’s not the same as having an insight that has you conclude the belief must be gone because it no longer makes sense to hold the belief or because the belief doesn’t feel as true as it did before. In this type of situation it can seem as if the belief is really gone, but it really isn’t. One way to check is to say the words of the belief several days later. Do they feel true, uncomfortable? Do they resonate with you? Or do the words still feel meaningless? With no energy or discomfort? If you still feel as if the belief is gone several days later, it probably is.

3. Did you get a guarantee that the beliefs will not come back AND the problem that the beliefs cause will not come back either.

We have helped over 13,000 clients in private sessions and well over 30,000 in on-line and DVD programs eliminate beliefs and problems. We offer a lifetime guarantee that the problem will not return and have a refund rate of about 10%. To see just a few of the reviews of our on-line products, go to http://blog.recreateyourlife.com. To see some video reviews, go to http://bit.ly/3Z10LN.

4. Is there independent research that proves that the beliefs and the problems are truly eliminated and don’t return?

The University of Arizona conducted a study that was published in a peer-reviewed journal, Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy.

Preliminary Report on Results from”Speaking Without Fear” Study

Prepared by Victoria Cunningham, Ph.D. & Lee Sechrest, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology, University of Arizona

May 20, 2004

For a copy of the entire study from Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, go to http://www.undoityourself.com/research.html.

A follow up was conducted with the subjects six months later. The average level of fear was still below 2.

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.

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.

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Answers to questions about beliefs, Part 2

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:40:47 +0000

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Here are my answers to a bunch of new questions I’ve been asked repeatedly about beliefs.

1. Once you understand that you can’t see beliefs in the world and that events have no inherent meaning, why do you have to go though the process time after time to eliminate additional beliefs?

Remember, a belief is a statement about reality you think is true. And most people, because they are visual, think it is true because they think they saw it in the world. Even though you know in principle that all meaning is in your mind and you can’t really see any of your beliefs in the world, all your reminding beliefs still exist because you still think you saw them earlier in life.

For example, even though it might now be real that you never saw I’m not good enough in the world, that all you saw were parents who were angry when you didn’t met their expectations, you can still think you saw I’m not important when your parents weren’t around.

Each belief exists independently for you as something you think you saw in the world (or, if you are emotionally kinesthetic, you think something in the world caused you to feel the belief). You have to eliminate each belief separately.

2. Why do you hold the belief that beliefs are difficult for a person to find?

They aren’t necessarily hard to find. And for someone who has had a lot of training and experience looking for the beliefs that cause any given problem, they can be relatively easy to find. It’s just that most people are not used to looking for the relevant beliefs for different problems, so most people do not know how to do it.

3. Why do I have a difficult time eliminating beliefs even after I’ve identified them?

Eliminating beliefs is not difficult when you are trained in a process that is effective at eliminating beliefs. Many of the techniques that claim to eliminate beliefs don’t really get rid of them, so the beliefs show up again later. Although it isn’t difficult to use the Lefkoe Belief Process to eliminate beliefs, you do have to learn how to use it. And if you don’t go through each step properly, the belief won’t go away.

4. Why do we seem to have more negative beliefs about ourselves than positive ones?

I’m not sure that we do. We generally are only aware of the negative ones that produce problems in our lives. But we have thousands of others that are either neutral or that lead to positive results.

5. How do you know the difference between a “belief” versus your intuition telling you something?

It can be difficult to know the difference. Here’s one tip that might be useful: If the feeling (of danger or whatever) occurs continuously, then it is probably the result of a belief or conditioning. Beliefs and conditionings affect us all the time and we would probably have the same reaction in similar situations.

If the feeling rarely occurs in similar situations, then it likely is intuition. Just remember, however, intuition isn’t accurate all the time.

6. Even when there is physical evidence that a belief you picked up as an adult is valid, how can you let go of the powerful emotion?

The emotion probably is the result of the belief, so when the belief has been eliminated, the feeling will be gone. Moreover, there is never physical evidence that a belief is true. There are events and then there is the meaning we give the events. The events are “valid”—in other words, they are out there in the world; the meaning (the belief) is always in our mind.

7. I’ve done your program (the beliefs seem to be gone), but the beliefs come back and are still there. How can I get rid of them?

For visual people, who know reality because they see it, beliefs rarely if ever come back. For emotionally kinesthetic people, who operate more out of feelings, beliefs do come back from time to time, but with much less intensity. Just use the Lefkoe Belief Process again and, for most people, that should be enough to get rid of them forever. For some people some beliefs might some back again, but the third time is usually sufficient to eliminate them permanently.

I’m working on developing a new process that will be more effective with emotionally kinesthetic people so the beliefs will stay gone the first time.

8. How do you identify the belief that is running our lives? Are certain survival strategies generated by certain beliefs?

First, there is no single “the belief” that is running our life. There are many. So we don’t look for the beliefs that “run our lives”; we look for the beliefs that cause specific problems in our lives, such as procrastination, anxiety, relationship difficulties, and worrying about what others think of us.

See my earlier blog post (August 8, 2009) that offers a few tips on how to find the beliefs that cause specific problems.

See my earlier blog post (May 26, 2009) that deals with survival strategy beliefs.

9. How do you know if you have a belief that may be holding you back from something that you want?

If you are unable to change your behavior or your feelings despite repeated attempts, the odds are what you want to change is being caused by beliefs and conditionings. If you are able to do what you want and change when you want to, you are unlikely to have limiting beliefs in that area of your life keeping you stuck.

10. Can you change your existing beliefs by reading articles about beliefs?

I’d hesitate to say that anything is impossible, but it is highly unlikely that reading articles about beliefs will eliminate them. In fact, it is highly unlikely that thinking about the steps of the Lefkoe Belief Process will eliminate a belief. You need to do the Process and make each step real for yourself. You need to get you never saw a specific belief in the world and that the events you did see have no inherent meaning.

As I said in answer to an earlier question, merely understanding that all meaning is in our minds will not make all beliefs go away. Understanding is nice, but it won’t eliminate beliefs.

11. Why do feelings of self-loathing reappear after I feel like I’ve dealt with and made peace with myself when I’m overwhelmed and frustrated?

Because “dealing with” and “making peace with myself” does not make beliefs go away. So whenever you get in a stressful situation, the beliefs that are still there get reactivated and you feel self-loathing. If you get rid of the beliefs that cause the self-loathing, the feeling will not come back again.

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.

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.

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How To Find The Source Of Beliefs

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:30:20 +0000

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Since we first offered belief-elimination programs on the Internet last November many people have said to me: The source of the beliefs you give in the belief-elimination videos might be the source for most people, but not all are true for me. Please help me find the source of my beliefs.

So I decided to devote this week’s blog post to providing you with the principles we teach Certified Lefkoe Method facilitators, so that you will be more effective in finding the source of your beliefs when the sources we suggest on the videos aren’t true for you.

1. Beliefs are almost always a logical interpretation you make of earlier events. A belief is the meaning you give to events that have no inherent meaning. So the most obvious way to find the beliefs of the earlier events is to ask yourself: What possibly could have happened that would have led to this belief being formed? What might mom and dad have done or said repeatedly that would have had me conclude (the words of the belief)?

2. If the belief is a self-esteem belief—in other words, a belief about oneself such as I’m not important, I’m not good enough, or I’m powerless—then the source of the belief is almost always in interactions with parents (or very rarely other full time caretakers), before age six.

3. The source of a belief is rarely one or two incidents; it is usually a pattern of events, for example, the way you are treated by your parents daily, not the couple of times something “big” happened. Look for the nature of your relationship with your parents, rather than for specific incidents, although the incidents might be most real to you and can be used to eventually get to the pattern of behavior and the on-going relationship. Obviously, traumatic events like rape or seeing someone killed can, in themselves, lead to a belief.

4. For most people, the source of I’m not good enough, I’m inadequate, I’m not capable, I’m not competent, Nothing I do is good enough, Mistakes and failure are bad, and several other similar beliefs was your parents’ frequent dissatisfaction or anger when you weren’t doing what they wanted, when they wanted, or the way they wanted. You heard things like: Don’t you ever learn? How many times do I have to tell you? What’s wrong with you?

5. The question to ask is: What are the earliest events that could be the source of the belief? Self‑esteem beliefs almost always can be traced to the first six years of life with your primary caretakers. On the other hand, other types of beliefs are frequently formed later in life (for example, when you get your first job you form beliefs about work and when you get involved in your first relationships you form beliefs about relationships). So don’t assume that all beliefs can be traced to early childhood.

6. Try to get concrete events as the source of a belief, rather than interpretations, for example, my parents yelled at me and hit me, rather than my parents were upset with me or didn’t like me. If you can’t remember any concrete events after looking, but you do have a clear sense of the source of a belief, such as, my parents didn’t care about me, come up with specific behaviors your parents exhibited that meant to you that they didn’t care. This way you will have something to work with in the “seeing” and “kinesthetic” steps of the Lefkoe Belief Process.

7. Sometimes people will have no memory whatsoever of their childhood before the age of six or seven. Because most self‑esteem, sense of self, and sense of life beliefs seem to have been formed before that age, this situation can present a potential difficulty. In such a case it frequently is possible to get a good sense of what must have happened in your childhood by using the following technique:

Recall whatever you can of your relationship with your parents. What were the personality and behavior patterns of your parents at whatever age you can remember? If there were any later siblings, how did your parents deal with the younger brother or sister? When you have a good sense of your parents, ask: How would they have acted with you when you were two?—and then describe the behavior typical to a two-year-old. What about when you were three? Etc.

Typical childhood situations include: not putting things away; making noise; not doing what parents wanted, when parents wanted, the way parents wanted; not doing chores; parents not being around at all or being around physically but not emotionally; not having any say about what you did; not being held and kissed; not being acknowledged for what you did; being compared unfavorable with siblings or others.

Almost every client with whom I’ve tried this has been able to make real how her parents treated her before the age of six by imagining how her parents must have acted in specific typical childhood situations, based on a knowledge of her parents at a later age that is real for her.

Because I remember virtually nothing before the age of six, this is the technique I‘ve used to eliminate all my beliefs that were formed in childhood.

8. You might have a hard time finding the source of a belief because you are uncomfortable about criticizing your parents. Some of my clients constantly talk about how wonderful their parents were and say they can’t imagine anything their parents did or said that could have led them to conclude anything negative about themselves or life.

In such cases I emphasize that their parents did the best they could, that the point of the Lefkoe Belief Process is not to make their parents wrong, that something in their life must have happened that led to the belief in question, and that the dysfunctional pattern they now have is not the result of anything their parents did, but, instead, is the result of their interpretation of what their parents did. To avoid this problem I usually explain this before asking the clients about the events that lead to the belief.

9. It also is important to realize that even if 90% of a child’s interactions with his parents were “positive,” and only 10% “negative,” the child will still try to make sense out of the 10% and can reach negative conclusions about himself.

10. It is important to understand that the belief made sense at the time it was formed. It was a logical interpretation, one that most people (most children, in the case of beliefs formed in childhood) who had the same experiences would have made. You didn’t make a mistake in forming the belief. It was actually a brilliant abstraction that integrated a great many disparate events that hadn’t made sense before.

11. Sometimes you might feel strongly that there are two different sources of a belief, one from parents at home and one from early school. You are not sure if you had formed the belief before starting school. In such a case, use the earlier source. If the belief is not eliminated, then go through the program again using the later events as the source.

12. Although survival strategy beliefs are interpretations of events, like any other beliefs, there is something unique about the way they are formed. See my blog post on May 26, 2009 that describes survival strategy beliefs in detail.

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.

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.

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Everyone Knows Change is Difficult … Are You Sure?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:22:42 +0000

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Because I’m in the change business I am frequently telling people that change is really easy if you first eliminate the relevant beliefs. Almost without exception, the response is: “But everyone knows that people resist change!”

Don’t you think that people resist change? Don’t you notice that your friends, family and co-workers frequently know what to do and just don’t do it. Of course people resist change. It’s human nature.

Maybe.

Obviously I don’t agree with this common point of view. People do resist something, but it’s not change. Let’s take a look and see what it is.

Let me describe two situations where people usually don’t change when they’ve been told why it is necessary and see if you can figure out what they really are resisting.

Resistance in Business

A common business situation illustrates workers who are seemingly resisting change. Many companies employ people called service technicians. These people see their job as installing, fixing, and maintaining whatever product their company sells.

In recent years management has tried very hard to get these people to provide a higher level of customer service. They are sent to workshops where they are told the importance of taking better care of customers: how customers will buy elsewhere unless they get a high level of service, how their jobs will be threatened if customers stop doing business with their company due to poor service, etc.

But in case after case, the level of customer service doesn’t improve much. According to management, many of the service technicians are “resistant” to change.

Well, if I’m right and they aren’t resistant to change, what are they resistant to? Here’s a clue: These employees believe they are technicians, whose job it is to install, fix, and maintain the company’s products. Now they are being told to take more time talking to customers, telling customers what they are doing and why, answering all the questions customers might have, etc.

Given their belief about their job, they think that what they are being asked to do will make it more difficult to do what they think their job is. They are thinking: How in hell will I ever get my job done if I have to spend all my time talking to customers?

Well, if someone is telling you to do something that will make it difficult for you to do what you think is right, what does their request sound like to you? … Like they’re telling you to do what you think is wrong.

In other words, the technicians are not resisting change (doing something different), they are resisting doing what they think is wrong given their existing beliefs.

What appears to be widespread resistance to change is nothing more than people acting consistently with their beliefs.

When I realized this many years ago (when I was a management consultant), I created workshops that would change workers’ beliefs about their jobs. The new job belief included the desired behavior. After eliminating the old belief and creating the new one, the workers naturally and effortlessly changed their behavior.

In the case of service technicians, we had them create a new job belief—I am a customer satisfier—in which taking better care of customers became possible. The shift in belief allowed employees to see taking care of customers as an integral part of their job, instead of getting in the way of their job. (And the level of customer satisfaction went from the mid 70s to the mid 90s.)

Resistance in Relationships

Now let’s look at a situation that comes up frequently in relationships. Imagine that you have a relationship with someone who yells at people whenever they don’t do what she thinks they ought to be doing. Perhaps you have told this person that you don’t like her yelling at you and you think it is inappropriate for her to yell at others. The response might be, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” But her behavior continues despite this admission.

The response, however, might be: “Yelling is the only way to get people to listen and do what you want.” That’s the belief that engenders the yelling. Given this belief, if you want to get someone to do something and they aren’t doing it, you have to yell to get results.

So if yelling is the right thing to do to achieve her goal, then not yelling is the wrong thing to do. The “yeller” doesn’t resist change; she resists doing what, for her, is wrong. Change the belief and the behavior will change naturally and effortlessly.

The logic of your argument for change is useless if you are trying to get people to do something inconsistent with their beliefs. They will continue to resist doing something they think is wrong. The next time you think someone is resisting change, ask yourself: What must they believe that has them think their current behavior is right and what you are suggesting is wrong?

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.

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.

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What Happens When a Belief is Eliminated?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:49:19 +0000

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Because people are not used to permanently eliminating beliefs (processes that are guaranteed to totally and permanently eliminate long-standing beliefs are rare), people aren’t sure what to expect when a belief really is eradicated.

Actually, there can be a wide variety of responses. We have had people tell us that they felt their life was transformed, like an oppressive weight had been lifted from their shoulders. They were clear their life would never be the same.

Other people aren’t even sure the belief is gone. “I’m not sure” is their reaction. This reaction is usually the result of holding the belief: Change is difficult and takes a lot of time. Such people usually have eliminated the belief and have a hard time accepting that they can get rid of a belief in just a few minutes. They believe that what they just did is impossible!

Others experience that the belief is gone at the moment, but fear that it will return at some point in the future. Such people have done processes that purported to permanently eliminate beliefs in the past but the belief always “came back.”

Still other people realize the belief really is gone; it no longer resonates, the words sound meaningless, it is easier to say the belief. But the overall feeling is sort of: “So what? It’s gone. Now what?”

That’s a reasonable response, because most people don’t care about getting rid of beliefs; they want to get rid of the everyday problems that affect them daily. Some of the most common (and the approximate number of beliefs and conditionings that cause each) are:

Procrastination (16), need for the approval of others (10), fear of rejection (9), social anxiety (16), high levels of stress (23), a critical “little voice” in your head (18), perfectionism (14), a lack of confidence (23), and relationship difficulties (10-20).

Each of these everyday problems has a different number of beliefs (and conditionings) and the problem won’t be totally gone until all of the beliefs have been eliminated.

For example, here is a list of the beliefs and conditionings that cause procrastination:

Beliefs

Mistakes and failure are bad.
I’m not good enough.
Change is difficult.

What makes me good enough or important is having people think well of me.
Nothing I do is good enough.
I’m not capable.
I’m not competent.
If I make a mistake I’ll be rejected.
I’m a failure.
I’m stupid.
I’m not worthy.
I’m powerless.
What makes me good enough or important is doing things perfectly.

Conditionings

Fear associated with criticism and judgment.
Fear associated with not meeting expectations.
Fear associated with rejection

Thus, the ultimate test of whether or not a belief has been eradicated is when the problem disappears after you eliminate a bunch of beliefs and conditionings.

One of easiest problems to eliminate (if you know the source) is a phobia, which is caused only one or two beliefs and one or two conditionings. The most complicated problems to eliminate are chronic depression and eating disorders, which can have over 30 beliefs and conditionings, many of which are unique to each person.

By the way, if you discovered this blog recently, please take a look at earlier posts below. You might find a few that you are really interested in. Some recent titles include:

• Get Rid Of Negative “Senses” And “Expectations”
• Get Rid Of The Belief “I Can’t ….”
• Our Perceptions Shape Our Reality
• How To Find The Beliefs That Cause Specific Problems
• Why Does The World Suffer From An Epidemic Of Low Self-Esteem?
• How To Create New Possibilities In Your Life
• Get Into An Altered State Of Consciousness In Minutes
• Can Beliefs Keep You From Becoming Wealthy?
• How Do Beliefs Produce “Driven,” Compulsive Behavior?
• Leave The Past In The Past
• Would You Like To Stop Worrying About What Others Think?
• How To Eliminate Some Of Your Negative Emotions … For Good
• How To Eliminate Upsets And Suffering From Your Life, Parts 1 And 2

Thanks for reading my blog. I really 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.

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.

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A Tool For Resolving Conflict

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:27:50 +0000

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“Amazing!! You must do it in Hebrew and Arabic!!! It will change the condition in all the Middle East.”

This is one of my favorite comments written on my blog. It’s from Yair, someone in Israel who wrote it after using our free belief-elimination process. Yair obviously saw how the principles of the Lefkoe Belief Process could be useful in resolving the Middle East (or any other) conflict.

For years I’ve wanted the opportunity to help in that situation by using a variation of the Lefkoe Belief Process.

Here’s what I’d do.

First, I would get representatives from all the different factions on each side to a big table, with each group facing the other across the table.

Second, I’d ask , what do you do to protect yourselves? How do you deal with the other side? (If you identify closely with either side in the conflict, imagine yourself sitting at the table and answer these questions for yourself.)

Israel might talk about the checkpoints and roadblocks, the invasions of Palestinian areas, and the fence. Palestinians might describe their acts of violence and their attempts to gain international support for their position. We’d soon discover that what each side does is precisely what the other side uses to justify its behavior.

Third, I’d ask, what do you believe that has you act the way you do?

Representatives from Israel might reply that the fence and checkpoints are the only way to keep suicide bombers out of areas where Israelis congregate. The invasions are the only way to stop the rocket fire, which comes from the invaded areas. We have the right to settle anyplace in Israel, even in areas that are predominantly Palestinian.

Palestinians might explain that violence is the only avenue open to try to get Israel to recognize their basic human rights and give them back their homeland, which was taken from them by force and by illegal and immoral international agreements. No matter where we live today we have the right to return to our former homes in Israel.

Fourth, I’d ask, what happened to you that led you to hold the beliefs you hold?

Israelis might reply with a history lesson: Centuries of anti-semitism, the Holocaust, the struggle to create a homeland of their own, trying to survive as a small nation when others have sworn to push them back into the sea, constant shelling from Palestinian areas (and other countries), and the ever-present threat of suicide bombers. Jewish people have always lived on this land and King David made the city of Jerusalem the capital of Israel 3,000 years ago. Even 150 years ago there were more Jews living in Jerusalem than Muslims.

Palestinians might reply with their own history lesson: We were living here peaceably when Israel and international agreements (we were not a party to) forcibly drove us from our homeland, Israel has kept us from returning and denies those of us living in Israel basic rights as human beings. Jerusalem contains some of Islam’s holiest cities. They probably would add: The Jews used violence against the British when they thought it was the only way to get them to give up control over what is now the State of Israel, and it worked.

Fifth, I’d point out to both sides, that given their respective histories—what has happened to them as a people—their beliefs make perfect sense. Most people with similar histories would have similar beliefs. And given their beliefs most other people would act the way that they act.

In other words, I would totally validate each side, making it clear that their experience as a people led to their beliefs, which now determine their behavior. In other words, given their experience, their behavior actually makes sense.

And then I would ask the sixth and final question, What if you were born to the parents of the people sitting on the other side of the table and were brought up as they had been brought up? Take a few minutes and make that fully real. Imagine that that really happened. … Which side of the table would you be sitting on now? Which side would be “right”?

Obviously, the current behavior, beliefs, and histories (source of the beliefs) are much more complicated than I’ve presented here. But I have presented the essence of what each side would answer and showed how the Process would work no matter how complicated the answers may be.

This Is Not Merely Taking The Other Point Of View

This approach is very different than merely suggesting to someone, “Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.” Given our beliefs that make us think and feel we are “right,” it is almost impossible to emotionally experience what the “other person” is feeling. But if you actually make each of the above steps real to yourself, you will have the profound experience that your beliefs and behavior are no longer “right,” but only a function of your earlier experience.

I’m actually not sure what would happen after Israelis and Palestinians completed all six steps, but it would be impossible for them to continue to be righteous about their respective positions when they’ve just had to acknowledge that they would be arguing the opposite point of view if they had been born to different parents. Because if an accident of birth would have resulted in them having opposite positions, then they can’t argue that their current positions are “right.”

Solutions Do Exist

I have no idea how to work out the many real disagreements between them, but many experts have developed possible solutions. As Professor Robert Mnookin, chair of Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation said in a Harvard Law Bulletin article: “Unlike other ethnic conflicts where solutions are difficult to imagine, as in the Balkans, an arrangement that might greatly reduce the tensions and violence between Israelis and Palestinians isn’t hard to identify. The mystery is why that can’t be achieved.” (Emphasis added.)

A partial explanation for the “mystery” is that each side thinks it is “right” and the other side is “wrong,” so the other side should make most of the compromises. (“Why should I give away something to which I am entitled to people who are not entitled to it and who are killing my people?”) When it becomes clear that neither side is right or wrong—that everyone is only acting in accordance with beliefs derived from an accident of birth—compromise might be a lot easier to achieve.

A further explanation for the “mystery” is the profound disagreements between the various factions on each side. Therefore I suggest that the six-step process be used first with a three-or four-sided table and representatives from the Israeli factions and then again with the Palestinian factions, before the meeting between the two major parties to the conflict. Because each faction has somewhat different histories, each has different beliefs, leading to different behavior. Each needs to discover that its point of view is not “the truth” before there can ever be a unified Israeli and Palestinian position.

The Process Will Work With All Conflicts

By the way, you might have realized as I described the steps I would take with the two sides of the Middle East conflict that this approach would be just as useful in labor-management disputes. In fact, couldn’t you use it with minor modifications with your spouse or significant other to resolve interpersonal conflicts?

The Process I’ve described is not merely a theoretical model; it is a modified version of the Lefkoe Belief Process that we’ve used with over 31,000 people to help them totally and permanently eliminate the beliefs that determine what they do and feel. It is so consistently effective that we actually guarantee that people will get rid of their anxiety, their fears, their approval seeking, their procrastination, etc. when they eliminate the beliefs that cause those problems, such as I’m not good enough, I’m not important, and I’m powerless. So we have considerable evidence that the basic process is extremely powerful and has produced spectacular results for 24 years, which have been verified in a study published on a peer-reviewed psychological journal.

Please pass this on to anyone you think might be interested in this six-step process for resolving disputes, especially anyone who is actively working on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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 crippling 19 beliefs, 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.

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How To Create New Possibilities In Your Life

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:37:20 +0000

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Some people are convinced we create our own reality by focusing on what we desire with strong emotion. Others are just as convinced that that idea is New Age nonsense. But regardless of which position is valid, it is unquestionably true that we literally create new possibilities in our lives—a brand new reality—by eliminating limiting beliefs.

Let me give you an example. Assume you had the beliefs: I’m not loveable. Relationships don’t work. Men/women can’t be trusted.

With these beliefs, what are the possibilities that you could have a really good, nurturing, long-term romantic relationship? … Slim to nil, right?

Now let’s assume you use the Lefkoe Belief Process to completely eliminate those beliefs. Can you see you have just created the possibility of a good, nurturing, long-term relationship that literally didn’t exist before? There is no guarantee you will ever find such a relationship, but the possibility exists now that didn’t exist before.

This is one of the most powerful consequences of eliminating beliefs: You not only change your behavior and feelings, you actually change the reality you live in.

Let me remind you of something I wrote in an earlier blog post to make this idea completely clear. Let’s assume you held the following beliefs: You have to work hard to make money. I’m not deserving. I’ll never have enough money. /There is never enough money. Money is a struggle. Life is difficult. Your reality with those beliefs does not include the possibility of acquiring wealth easily, if at all. Without those beliefs the possibility comes into existence.

The possibilities that exist in your reality are defined by your beliefs. When you say something is impossible it actually becomes impossible for you. If you believe Life is difficult, you will experience things not going the way you wanted them to go as upsetting obstacles rather than exciting challenges. If you believe I’m not capable or I’m not competent, would you likely try to do something you believe you can’t do? And if you tried, do you think you would succeed with these beliefs?

Beliefs Create An Organization’s Environment

Even the environment in which an organization operates is largely a function of its beliefs. When I do workshops for CEOs I tell them that the biggest barrier their organization faces is not in the world (competition, government, costs, etc.), but in the minds of their employees.

For example, if most of the people in a company believe that something is impossible—such as outsourcing, raising capital, finding qualified new employees, or reaching a certain sales or earnings target—that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, because the employees will operate according to a reality consistent with their beiefs. If something is impossible, there is no sense in trying to do it.

As amazing as that is, another remarkable thing occurs: When fundamental changes in our behavior and feelings occur after eliminating a few beliefs, we usually are not even aware of the change.

If there are no beliefs in the way, all we have to do to make a change in our way of living is to make a commitment to the change, and it usually occurs. Sometimes we don’t know how and have to get some needed information, and then the change happens. But it’s not so easy when there are beliefs in the way.

When we try to act inconsistently with our beliefs—such as trying to create wealth or relationships when we have beliefs that act as barriers, or trying to stop procrastination when we have beliefs that necessitate it—we are aware both of the struggle to change and our inability to produce lasting change.

Our Reality Changes Without Us Even Noticing It

But when the belief(s) is gone, we unconsciously do whatever we choose to do and there is no resistance. We just automatically do it. Because there is no resistance, because we are able to make the change so easily, we frequently are not even aware that the old barriers are gone.

One of the most dramatic examples of that fact was when I once asked a client whom I hadn’t talked to for a few months about her sex life. She replied, “It’s fine, why do you ask?” I read to her from her file the details of her lack of interest in sex that had plagued her for years, which she had related to me just a few months earlier. She was flabbergasted. “I totally forgot that that’s how it used to be. My new feelings and behavior now seem so natural and automatic I just take them for granted.”

When you drive down a highway and come across a barrier in the middle of the road, you are aware of trying to remove the roadblock so you can drive on. After you remove the roadblock and you then drive down that same highway a few times, at some point you drive down the highway and forget that the barrier had ever been there.

It’s so easy to create new possibilities for yourself. What are you waiting for?

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, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/sales.html.

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Get Into An Altered State of Consciousness in Minutes

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:36:03 +0000

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To experience a shift in one’s identity from “self” (one’s body, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and behavior) to “SELF” (as consciousness, as a spiritual being) typically requires years of meditation. Some workshops claim to be able to provide that experience in several concentrated days. The Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) assists people to make that shift in less than 30 minutes the first time and in less than 10 minutes thereafter.

For the first 10 years or so after I created the LBP in 1985, the only thing I was aware the Process did was eliminate beliefs. And that was more than enough for me! I eliminated scores of my own beliefs and made many fundamental changes in my life. I also helped friends and referrals from friends eliminate beliefs and entire problems, and found a way to apply a variation of the Process in organizations to change employees’ behavior by changing their beliefs about their jobs.

Then one weekend I took a course in meditation that was presented by an associate of psychologist Lawrence LeShan. By Sunday afternoon I realized that the LBP seemed to be getting people into a “spiritual” state similar to that of deep meditation.

Over the next few months I tried to determine if there really was a “state shift” after a belief was eliminated. At some point I started asking clients several questions to see if they noticed feeling different and, if so, what was the difference.

Three of the questions included:

•    Is there anything missing?
•    What’s possible?
•    What limitations do you have?

How is The Shift in Identity Experienced?

I discovered that most of my clients said they experienced that nothing was missing, anything was possible, and they had no limitations. When I asked them to describe this experience in their own words, I heard: powerful, serene, calm, peaceful, whole, complete, satisfied, empowered, nothing missing, no limitations and unlimited possibilities.

Asking them the same questions before doing the LBP got totally different responses. Clients described various things they thought were missing from their lives; many said that a lot was possible to them, but certainly not anything; all described various limitations they experienced at the moment.

At some point I figured out what part of the process seemed to be most responsible for the shift. After a belief had been eliminated, I asked the client: “Is it real you created your beliefs.” The answer was usually, yes. Then I asked: “Is it real now that your life has been consistent with your beliefs?” The answer again was usually, yes. Finally I asked: “If you create the beliefs that create your life, what does that make you?” The answer usually was: The creator of my life (or words to that effect).

I realized at one point that the clients who experienced anything was possible and no limitations had already made a shift in identity. Whenever people described limitations, I realized that the shift had not occurred.

To insure that every client experienced that shift in identity from merely a physical being to also a spiritual being, I added some material after the belief had been eliminated. This material got clients to explicitly distinguish/create themselves as the creator of their lives so that they knew it, not as something to be understood or even experienced, but as something they experienced almost as natural knowing. After I did that, almost everybody made the shift.

For many years I used the term “creator space” to describe the spiritual state the client got into and called this new material, the “creator space process.” Because I wanted the name of the process to more accurately describe what the process is all about, last year I renamed the process “Who am I Really?” (WAIR?). You experience the answer to that question when you complete this short process.

The Lefkoe Belief Process Combines the Best of
Psychotherapy and Spiritual Practices

At some point I realized that the LBP was unique in that it combined the best of psychotherapy and spiritual practices.

Most psychotherapists try to help clients deal with reality more effectively. In other words, most clients in therapy have a hard time dealing with some aspect of reality, and experience depression, anxiety, anger, procrastination, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, relationship problems, etc. So the various forms of psychotherapy use different techniques to eliminate these problems so that clients are able to deal with reality more effectively and have happier lives.

Most spiritual practices, on the other hand, attempt to help people experience themselves as a spiritual being and realize that they are not merely physical bodies living in a material world. The goal is to deeply experience that “We are spiritual beings having a physical human experience.”

So there are “two of us”: First, a “creation,” the human physical being, which is experienced as one’s body, thoughts, behavior, and feelings. This physical is born, lives a while, and dies. And second, a “creator”—the consciousness, energy, spiritual being—that “creates” the creation. This spiritual being is timeless, always was and always will be. While most disciplines deal with one or the other, the LBP deals with both.

First, the LBP enables people to eliminate the beliefs that cause their thoughts, behavior and feelings. As a result they are better able to deal with reality and they experience new possibilities as a result of not being limited in life by crippling beliefs. Their “creation” changes and people experience the difference in their internal thoughts and feelings and they observe a difference in their behavior.

Second, the LBP enables people to distinguish and then experience themselves (not merely know intellectually) on a deep, profound level that they are not merely a creation, that who they really are is the creator of the creation. It is a profoundly spiritual experience.

To have that experience yourself, eliminate one belief free at http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free. The process there includes the WAIR? material at the end.

To purchase an on-line interactive program where you can eliminate 19 beliefs and get a separate video of WAIR?, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/sales.html.

Thanks for reading my blog. I really would appreciate your comments and questions.

Everyone Knows Change is Difficult … Are You Sure?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:06:25 +0000

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“Change is difficult, everyone knows that!” This is the response I frequently get when people ask me what I do and I reply that I can help them make fundamental life changes, easily, quickly and permanently.

Why do so many people believe that they have to put in a lot of time and effort, and need a lot of reinforcement, in order to produce a lasting change in their life? This belief comes from the same place all beliefs come from: the meaning we give our experience.

People hold this belief because they have tried unsuccessfully to change a variety of things in their lives, such as eating junk food, not sticking to an exercise program, getting into relationships they know are bad for them, having negative feelings like anger and anxiety, and procrastination. When I ask clients what they have done to produce change in the past, I get a litany of answers: therapy, books, workshops, hypnosis, EFT, NLP, willpower, support systems, etc.

For people who have spent years trying a variety of techniques to produce a real change in their behavior or feelings, and they haven’t succeeded, it was reasonable for them to conclude: Change is difficult, if not impossible. That’s why so many people hold this belief.

That leads us to the obvious question: Why is change so difficult? Very often we know our current behavior doesn’t make logical sense and is self-defeating. We know what we should do instead. We know the value of change. So why doesn’t all that information and motivation result in change?

People Who Know Reality Through Their Eyes

The answer to this question lies in how we know what we know. The overwhelming majority of people are visual, which means they know the truth about reality because they can see it. “What do you mean you disagree with me, can’t you see that I’m right? Look at the evidence.”

So if you think you see something out there in the world, it must be true.

For those of you who have used the Lefkoe Belief Process to eliminate a belief, you’ll remember there is a place in the process where the facilitator says: “Imagine being a child and observing the events that led you to form the belief. Doesn’t it seem as if you can see your belief?”

The answer for visual people is always: “Yes, I can see it.” And that is why it is so difficult to get rid of old, limiting beliefs and the behavior they engender: Because we think we saw the belief out there in the world many times.

When mom and dad are critical, we think we can see I’m not good enough in their comments and behavior. When mom and dad aren’t available when we want them, we think we can see I’m not important in their comments and behavior. When mom and dad make all the decisions and what we want is ignored, we think we can see I’m powerless in their comments and behavior.

Later in life we use logic and a bunch of other techniques to try to erase the belief. But our subconscious seems to be arguing: Maybe the belief doesn’t make sense, maybe it is self-defeating, maybe the behavior and emotions coming from the belief are ruining my life… but I saw it in the world, so it must be true.

What makes the Lefkoe Belief Process so effective is that it helps people realize that they actually never did see their belief in the world, that what they think they saw was, in fact, only one arbitrary interpretation of a series of events that has only existed in their minds. For example, not being able to get mom and dad’s attention could mean I’m not important. It also could mean that mom and dad just had poor parenting skills or they felt uncomfortable around kids, and their behavior had nothing to do with my importance.

When we give meaning to events that have no inherent meaning, it seems as if we can see that meaning in the events. Therefore, that meaning (belief) must be true. But, in fact, we don’t discover (see) the meaning in the events, we attribute the meaning to the events.

People Who Know Reality Through Their Feelings

For those people who know the truth through their feelings, earlier in their lives they felt the belief to be true. In other words, whenever mom and dad were critical, they didn’t see I’m not good enough, they felt I’m not good enough.

Why do such people trust their feelings to tell them the truth about reality? Because they think that their feelings are caused by reality, that their feelings tell them something about reality.

For example, if I feel uncomfortable with you and decide not to deal with you any more, why would I act on those feelings? Because I think there is something about you that is causing the feeling, so the feeling must be an accurate reflection of the way you really are.

For such people, using logic or motivation or most other techniques to get rid of beliefs doesn’t work because their subconscious is saying: But I felt (my belief) hundreds of times in the past, so it must be true despite evidence to the contrary right now.

Here the Lefkoe Belief Process helps people to realize that reality didn’t cause them to feel their beliefs; they caused the feeling by giving a particular meaning to the events that appear to cause the feeling. In other words, the fact that mom and dad were disappointed or angry at you didn’t cause you to feel I’m not good enough. You had to first say that those events meant I’m not good enough before you could feel that. If you had said instead that mom and dad’s behavior meant: Mom and dad have unreasonable expectations of me and their frustration or anger has nothing to do with me, their same behavior would have made you feel that meaning, instead of I’m not good enough.

So the next time you are trying to change something in your life (or are trying to help a friend change), remember that change without getting rid of the beliefs that cause the current behavior or feelings is almost impossible. And that change probably is difficult when you are convinced you either saw or felt the belief causing your current behavior or feeling on numerous occasions earlier in life. When you realize you never saw your belief and you caused the feeling, not reality, your belief will just dissolve. And when all the beliefs that cause an undesirable behavior or feeling are eliminated, the behavior and feeling disappears also.

When you know how to produce lasting change, it actually is very quick and easy.

Thanks for reading my blog. I really would appreciate your comments and questions.

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, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/sales.html.

Can Beliefs Keep You From Becoming Wealthy?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:19:40 +0000

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A few months ago I asked people on our mailing list which beliefs they thought were keeping them from becoming wealthy. The top five were:

•    You have to work hard to make money.
•    I’m not deserving.
•    I’ll never have enough money. /There is never enough money.
•    Money is a struggle.
•    Life is difficult.

If you have any doubt about the impact of beliefs on your ability to earn and retain money, ask yourself this question: Imagine someone having these five beliefs. Then ask yourself: Do you think such a person is likely to be wealthy? … Do you think Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, or any other really wealthy person has these beliefs?

Here’s another way to demonstrate the power of beliefs to interfere with your ability to make money and accumulate wealth. Think back to the last book you read or the last workshop you took that told you exactly what you needed to do to make huge sums of money. You learned what actions you needed to take, didn’t you? Now answer this question: Did you do what you learned to do … on a consistent basis? For most people the answer is “no.”

Why People Don’t Use the Expensive Courses They Buy

In fact, as amazing as it might seem, people who sell courses that promise to help you make money report that many of the thousand dollar and up courses that are purchased at workshops are never even opened when the buyers get them home. Moreover, the free email support that accompanies many of these courses is rarely used.

The only way to make sense of these astonishing facts is to remember that knowing what to do is useless if you have beliefs in the way of acting on that knowledge.

•    If you believe you have to work hard to make money, it just might not be worth the effort.
•    If you believe you aren’t a deserving person, you would likely sabotage any effort you make to become financially successful.
•    If you believe I’ll never have enough money, then what’s the point of trying?
•    If you believe money is a struggle, your life becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
•    And if you believe life is difficult, then you will create a life that is difficult in most respects, including a lack of money.

Anne Lieberman, ranked among the country’s top 100 financial advisors just a few years ago, recently pointed out: “Many people do not have a workable relationship with money. When they don’t, it shows up in one or more of three realms: earning, spending and saving/investing.”

Wealth Can Elude You For Many Reasons

In other words, wealth can elude you because you don’t ask for the money you deserve or do what you know you should do to earn it, because you spend money you don’t have and get into debt unnecessarily, and/or because you don’t save or invest wisely. Limiting beliefs can cause all three of these inappropriate behaviors.

We can guarantee that eliminating the relevant beliefs will change your behavior and feelings. But having wealth involves much more than beliefs, although getting rid of crippling money beliefs is certainly a precondition.

In order to insure financial success, it would be useful to have, in additional to the absence of limiting money beliefs, a positive attitude about earning and having money, an effective strategy for getting it, and then the commitment to fully implement your strategy.

For more information about our program, “Bust Your Money Beliefs,” please go to http://recreateyourlife.com/moneybeliefs/

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

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, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/sales.html.

Do You Really Want Your Child to Always be Well-Behaved?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:48:51 +0000

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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.

How To Eliminate Some Of Your Negative Emotions… For Good

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:36:55 +0000

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.

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.

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.

How to eliminate upsets and suffering from your life. Part 1

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:55:38 +0000

This post assumes you already have eliminated at least one belief using the Lefkoe Belief Process and used the “Who am I Really?” Process to experience yourself as the creator of your life. If you haven’t please visit http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free first so you can eliminate a belief and have that experience.

Most people think upsets and suffering are inevitable. They aren’t.

In fact, there are two different techniques that will dissolve your upsets and suffering. I’ll describe one of them in today’s post and tell you about the other one in my next post.

Let me start with an assertion that I will explain: All upsets result from experiencing yourself as a victim.

Do you get upset about your difficult circumstances when you know you can fix or handle them? … Take a moment and really think about this. … No, you don’t.

You get upset or suffer when you think you can’t do anything about what is happening. If you feel you can’t do anything about a situation, you are experiencing it as outside your control. You experience the problem as “out there.” Someone or something is doing it to you. That’s the experience of being a victim.

What happens in the world might be outside your control, e.g., floods, the death of a loved one, and losing a job. But if you really look carefully, you will realize that events, as such, as not upsetting. What upsets you or causes you suffering is the meaning you are giving to events that have no inherent meaning. And in most cases one of the meanings you are giving is that you can’t deal with the events

Another interpretation is you don’t know how to deal with them right now, but you could learn how in the future. Can you really “see” that anything is outside your control? … What color and shape is it? …

So change the meaning you give your circumstances—from There’s nothing I can do about it, to I don’t know what to do about it now but I can figure out how to make things even better than before—and your experience of upset and victimization will disappear like ice on a hot summer day. At that point you can start focusing on how to deal with the undesired circumstances.

For example, imagine you are fired from your job. That is a real situation; it really does exist in the world. You might then conclude: There’s nothing I can do about it, I’ll never get another job, I won’t have money for food and to take care of my family, etc. These are all meanings you are giving to the event.

You can “see” that you are no longer working at the job. You cannot “see” the meanings you are giving the event. They exist only in your mind.

You might not be able to change the event; it actually happened. But there might be a lot you can do to get a new job, create your own business, get money for food and to take care of your family, etc. If you focus on finding a solution to the difficult circumstances instead of on the meanings you are giving the circumstances, you will feel empowered, not victimized.

In my life a lot of “bad” things have happened, such as two divorces, going bankrupt, and losing a job I really wanted. But when I look back on those events today I can see how each of them ultimately made a positive contribution to the happiness and success I have today. At the time I gave them a “negative” meaning: This is a disaster, why did this happen to me, I’ll never recover from this, etc.

There is another meaning to the same events that I didn’t see at the time and that is very clear today: This is preparing me for something even better in the future. In every case the “disaster” led to something wonderful that would have been impossible without the “disaster.” If I had been able to see that meaning at the time, my upset and suffering would have disappeared. And I contend it is possible to see that meaning even before the wonderful things happen in the future.

I don’t think it is possible to permanently change specific behavior patterns and emotions without eliminating the beliefs and conditionings that cause them. But it is possible to change your emotional state at any time regardless of the circumstances.

Circumstances can’t cause upsets and suffering; only you can. When you change the meaning you are giving your circumstances and become responsible for your experience of the circumstances, your sense of victimization will disappear and so will your upset and suffering.

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

To eliminate a limiting core belief free, please visit http://recreateyourlife.com/free.

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

How to live a life without stress

Morty Lefkoe — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 01:42:11 +0000

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