Morty Lefkoe » The Lefkoe Method

You are not your feelings

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:22:53 +0000

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How many times have you heard yourself say: I’m upset, or I’m angry, or I’m happy? If you are typical, many times a day. But stop for a moment and consider what you are actually saying. You are saying “I am …. (some specific emotion).” Whether you mean to or not, you are defining yourself as being your emotions.

Actually, when you are in the grip of a strong emotion, it really feels all encompassing, as if there is no part of “you” that isn’t that emotion. In fact, sometimes a negative emotion so feels like who we are that we resist letting go of it even when we dislike having the feeling. In other words, often we seem to want to hold on to feelings because it seems as if giving up the feeling is like giving up part of ourselves.

Take a moment and remember a time when you felt angry at someone and you knew on some level that the person really hadn’t done anything so terrible and that you ought to let go of the anger. Take a moment and really make the incident real. … Do you remember that some part of you didn’t want to let go of the anger, as if you’d be losing some part of yourself if the emotion were to stop?

It also can be difficult to let go of an emotion when it feels as if the emotion is validating the meaning we’ve given an event. It can feel to us as if letting go of the emotion will invalidate that meaning and letting go of the meaning will invalidate the feeling (which is who we feel we are). An example of this would be someone who doesn’t do something for us that he promised to do. We might give that event the meaning that I can’t count on people and I have to do everything myself, which likely would lead us to feel angry. It feels to us as if it really is true that we can’t count on people. So the anger justifies the meaning we gave the event (which has no inherent meaning). At the same time the meaning justifies the feeling, so we might resist letting go of the meaning we made up.

But is that actually true? Are we our emotions?

If we really are our emotions, then when an emotion disappeared, we should disappear … but we don’t. Let me explain this outrageous statement: If we say we are anything specific, and that thing disappears, then logically we would have to disappear. But we don’t disappear when our emotions disappear.

Not only do emotions fade away automatically after a period of time, it also is possible to stop emotions on the spot by getting rid of the two things that cause them: stimuli that have been conditioned and our occurrings, in other words, the meaning we give events moment-to-moment.

As I’ve explained in several posts, we unconsciously and automatically give meaning to meaningless events all day long. Because events that have no inherent meaning can’t cause us to have feelings, the feelings we have must come from the meaning we give the events. And by dissolving the meaning—in other words, how events occur for us—we can dissolve all the negative feelings that arise from the meaning.

So if the emotions we have usually dissipate on their own after a while and if our emotions are primarily the result of meaning we give events and we can dissolve most emotions merely by dissolving the meaning that gave rise to them, can you get that it is more accurate to say we “have” emotions, but are not our emotions?

The two best ways to get rid of negative emotions are to dissolve the conditionings and the occurrings that cause the feelings. But if you don’t know how to do that, however, it still is possible to lessen the impact emotions have on you. How? By noticing when you feel swept up by a strong negative emotion that “you” are observing your feeling. And the “you” that is doing the observing is not the same “you” that is having the emotion. That realization will enable you to make a clear distinction between “being” your emotion and “having” an emotion. And that will enable you to get some perspective on the emotion and extricate yourself from it to a large extent.

Try my suggestion and let me know what happens in a comment.

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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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.

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Does “reality” really exist?

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:33:52 +0000

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If you asked someone, “Do things exist?” the response would probably be, “Of course things exist! The world is full of things. Everyone knows that there is physical stuff out there—that reality is tangible and real!”

But what allows any thing—a hand, a chair, or any other object—to exist? One way to discover the answer is to imagine a specific thing—say, your hand—expanding and expanding until there is nothing in the universe except the hand. What would happen to it? … Really, just take a moment and try this. You’ll be amazed at your experience … You wouldn’t see the hand anymore, would you? Why? … It would disappear because there would be nothing in the universe that was not the hand. This is a very basic concept about reality: In order for any thing to exist, there must also be not that thing.

Consider this for a moment. Can you see that any physical object is bounded by “not that object”? If an object did not have any borders—that is, if it wasn’t surrounded by “not that object”—it couldn’t be distinguished from everything else. In other words, it wouldn’t exist.

The same principle applies to nonmaterial concepts. Love and hate, peace and war, strong and weak, beautiful and ugly—these only exist and have unique attributes because they have been distinguished from each other. For example, the state of war is distinguished from peace by the presence of armed conflict. When there is no armed conflict there is peace. But if peace existed throughout the world all the time, and if the alternative (war) was unimaginable, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish peace. Peace, as a condition distinct from war, couldn’t exist.

A Universe Without Distinctions

Now imagine everything in the universe without any distinctions. It’s all just an undifferentiated whole. Can you see that there is nothing? That’s because in order for anything to exist, it must be distinguished from everything else. If no distinction is made between a specific thing and everything else, there is only an undifferentiated everything—which is another way of saying nothing.

Everything, without any distinctions, is the same as nothing. Take a moment and think about that. Until consciousness has made a distinction, nothing can possibly exist.

Therefore, the world really isn’t the way you perceive it. In fact, it isn’t any way until you perceive it that way—that is, until you distinguish it that way. You don’t even sense what’s “out there” because there’s nothing out there to be sensed. (Nothing, as we’ve seen, however, is the potential for everything before anyTHING is distinguished.) In making distinctions, we use our sensory apparatus (the five senses) as well as our perceptual framework (language, culture, and individual beliefs).

An excellent example of this point comes from a Time magazine cover story on human consciousness.

“A baby born with cataracts—an unusual but not unheard-of condition—and left untreated for as little as six months becomes permanently and irrevocably blind. If a sixty-year-old develops cataracts, an operation can restore full sight. The distinctions most of us make unconsciously and at a glance—foreground vs. background, moving vs. stationary, vertical vs. horizontal, and dozens more—are concepts that the brain has learned. It literally has to wire itself, with neurons growing out to touch and communicate with one another in an ever more sophisticated network of connections. And if those connections are not repeatedly stimulated in the first few months of life, when the brain is still in its formative period, they atrophy and die.” (Emphasis added.)

In other words, moving and stationary or vertical and horizontal are not things “out there.” Rather they are “concepts that the brain has learned” (or distinguished) as a result of having a specific sensory apparatus (and brain), without which they couldn’t be distinguished. That means they literally wouldn’t exist.

In other words, if everyone was born with cataracts (which would be normal if everyone had that condition), our reality would not possess moving and stationary, vertical and horizontal, etc.—despite the fact that we are convinced that these are inherent attributes of reality.

Is There AnyTHING Out There?

Here’s another thought exercise that will help make it clear that what we think is “out there” is largely a function of our perceptual apparatus. Imagine that beings from another galaxy arrived on earth. Imagine further that instead of human eyes they had a different “viewing sense, namely, the equivalent of an electron microscope.” When they viewed our world they might not see the solid objects we see; instead they might see atoms: electrons spinning around protons and neutrons. They might notice that almost all of what they were viewing (the atom) was empty space. So if these creatures were the inhabitants of earth, they might not even have a concept of solid matter.

Imagine further that instead of human ears, these visitors from space had a sense that picked up radio waves but did not hear “sounds” made in their presence.

And finally imagine that they had a sensory mechanism like dolphins, who “see” the echo of sound vibrations they send out.

These aliens would experience and describe a totally different universe than the physical universe we would swear exists all around us.

Our role in creating our reality can be seen in another area. Apart from our perceptual apparatus, our most important tool in making distinctions and creating our reality is language.
As Edward Sapir, a noted anthropologist, has said: “We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

Language Determines How We Perceive Reality

Language is far more than a tool for communication. With language we categorize, distinguish, and create the universe. Ultimately, we perceive the world consistently with our language. For example, when we think in English, we perceive a world made up primarily of objects: people, trees, and houses. These objects do things or have things done to them using verbs. We literally see everything in the world in this fashion. We don’t perceive “things out there” because there really are things out there. That just happens to be our worldview, because in our language there is a subject, which acts upon an object, which exists independently of the subject. In the English language, independent entities (subjects and objects) are primary, rather than processes or relationships. That’s not true in every language.

As Ralph Strauch points out in his book The Reality Illusion: “Some languages are structured around quite different basic word- categories and relationships. They project very different pictures of the basic nature of reality as a result. The language of the Nootka Indians in the Pacific Northwest, for example, has only one principle word-category; it denotes happenings or events. A verbal form like ‘eventing’ might better describe this word-category, except that such a form doesn’t sound right in English, with its emphasis on noun forms. We might think of Nootka as composed entirely of verbs, except that they take no subjects or objects as English verbs do. The Nootka, then, perceive the world as a stream of transient events, rather than as the collection of more or less permanent objects which we see. Even something which we see clearly as a physical object, like a house, the Nootka perceive of as a long-lived temporal event. The literal English translation of the Nootka concept might be something like ‘housing occurs;’ or ‘it houses.’”

We swear things exist because we distinguish them though our particular perceptual apparatus and through our language. Change those and you dramatically change the world that you think is “out there.” There might not even be any more “things.”

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You are both consciousness AND a “creation”

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:50:01 +0000

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Based on surveys of my blog readers, most of you are primarily interested in changing your “creation”—in other words, you want to improve your daily life by eliminating behavioral and emotional barriers. For example, you want to stop your anxiety and be able to take actions that you are unable to take now.

Some of you, however, seem to be more interested in growing spiritually—in other words, creating an altered state of consciousness in which you experience yourself as the creator of your life.

In fact, both are crucial to a life of happiness and fulfillment. And, I’m proud to say,The Lefkoe Method enables you to work on both at the same time.

You can’t ignore either state

Unfortunately, some people focus solely on spiritual growth, to the exclusion of improving their flesh and blood “creation.” Such people can be said to be “hiding out in spirituality, in their spiritual practice.

Here’s an example of what I mean. I was talking to a new client the other day who told me that she had been meditating and working hard on her “spiritual practice” for over 10 years, and couldn’t understand why she had seen virtually no change in her concern about what others thought about her, her fear of making mistakes, her procrastination, and the negative self-talk that filled her mind almost all the time. What was she doing wrong, she asked me.

I replied that she had neglected a crucial aspect of who she is. You see, many people have experienced a non-dual state of consciousness through meditation and think that all that is “real” is a formless, eternal, consciousness. For them, physical reality and the people named Morty, Joe, etc. are not “real.” As a result, they try to ignore, to the extent possible, “reality.”

Physical reality is “real”

There are several problems with this point of view.

First, how can you expect an improvement in your “creation,” the person who acts and feels, if you ignore it and pretend it doesn’t “really” exist?

Second, it may well be true that consciousness is the source of physical reality, in other words, that physical reality is a manifestation of consciousness. But that fact does not mean that physical reality is not real.

There is an old metaphor that explains this point clearly for me. It is as if consciousness is an ocean. The ocean creates (manifests) individual, specific waves. So there really are specific waves in different locations that are different from other waves, even though each of them comes from and will shortly return to the entire ocean.

Who you ultimately are

So who you ultimately are is formless, non-dual consciousness and, at the present moment, you also have manifested as a specific creation. Moreover, and this is crucial to remember, that creation has specific beliefs and conditionings. They, in turn, determine your behavior and feelings and—by being the primary source of your occurrings—your beliefs also determine your moment-to-moment responses to events.

I remember reading a book by Jack Kornfield, a Buddhist teacher at Spirit Rock near my home in California, who spent many years meditating and following a spiritual path in Thailand and other Far East countries. He wrote how in meditative states he totally transcended his body and dissolved in white light. He spent hundreds of hours in a state in which there was no distinction between the observer and what was observed. And yet, he reported, when he came back to America to teach he had all the same relationships problems he had had before his years of meditation.

This is not to minimize the importance of a spiritual practice. Recognizing that you are the creator of your life—as people experience in the Who Am I Really? (WAIR?) Process that is part of the Lefkoe Belief Process—provides an invaluable context to living as a creation.

Recognize you are both consciousness and a creation

So what should you do to live your best life possible? Recognize you are both the creator of your life (consciousness) and a creation (the person reading this post). And because you are both, work on both. Continue to eliminate the beliefs and conditionings that determine your behavior and feelings, and also learn to stop giving meaning to daily events, which will give you the ability to create your experience of life, moment by moment.

And find some spiritual practice, be it meditation, putting yourself in the “creator state” (an altered state of consciousness you can enter by using the WAIR? Process), or whatever else you choose. In that altered state you are able to get a valuable perspective on your life as a creation that cannot be obtained merely by working on the creation.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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How beliefs have caused a crisis in education

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 22:47:28 +0000

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Few institutions in our society are subject to as much passion, dissent, and, ultimately, paralysis as education. What is the source of the crisis in education and why does it seem to be so difficult to resolve?

As readers of this blog you won’t be surprised that my answer to both these questions is beliefs. Whenever you discover dysfunctional behavior—in individuals, organizations, or institutions—you will find beliefs at the source.

To understand the role of beliefs in creating the current crisis in education, let’s look at one widely accepted belief about what education should do: The primary purpose of education is to impart a prescribed amount of information about specific subjects.

As a result of that belief, we have federal, state and local programs designed to insure that students achieve a minimum level of proficiency (in other words, a minimum amount of information acquired) according to standardized tests. We rank our country compared to other countries based on scores on standardized tests that measure this.

What happened that initially led most people to accept the belief that a good education can be measured by the amount of information acquired? To answer, we must go back in time.

Compulsory education

When compulsory education was initiated in America over a century ago, its purpose was to prepare people to work in factories. Workers needed to read and write and be able to follow instructions. What a person knew about the world remained true during a lifetime of forty-some years. The amount of new knowledge produced during adult life was minimal. It wasn’t particularly important that one learn how to think independently or creatively.

Given such an environment, it made sense to conclude that there was a certain amount of information needed to succeed in life and that the function of school was to provide that information. The belief about the importance of learning a certain amount of information while in school was not wrong when it was formed. It made perfect sense and was totally appropriate, given the circumstances. It was the logical outcome of looking at the world as it existed when the belief was formed.

In today’s world, however, “facts” are in a constant state of change.

The amount of new knowledge produced every few years is greater than all the accumulated knowledge to date. The ability to succeed in the business world today (forget succeed—the ability even to get hired!) depends not so much on the quantity of information you know and how well you can follow orders but on your ability to think and act on your own. As Alvin Toffler put it, “The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write, but those that cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Today, people are not only changing jobs several times during their work lives; many of them are changing careers several times. Moreover, it has become increasingly clear that a satisfying life consists of more than business success. It requires a good sense of yourself, the ability to relate well to others, a positive sense of oneself, and lots more.

We need a new set of beliefs about education

The proposal for national standards to measure how much information has been learned in school is consistent with the existing beliefs about what education should be, but those beliefs are no longer appropriate. We need schools that operate consistently with a new sets of beliefs that are appropriate for today, one that opens the possibility for new educational strategies. There are some schools providing what is needed, but by definition they are “alternative” schools, operating outside the prevailing set of beliefs.

Let’s consider the difference between the “current” set of beliefs and a possible new one that is more appropriate for our time.

Compare the strategies resulting from different beliefs

Notice that the beliefs constituting the existing paradigm generate questions and strategies about how to achieve norms, obedience, and correct answers. The new beliefs lead to questions and strategies about how to motivate for lifelong learning, how to strengthen self-discipline, how to awaken curiosity, and how to encourage creative risk-taking in people of all ages.

Ron Miller, author of What Are Schools For?, describes the essence of this new paradigm:

Holistic educators recognize that all aspects of life are interconnected. They contend that education must be concerned with the physical, emotional, social, aesthetic/creative, and spiritual qualities of every person, as well as traditionally emphasized intellectual and vocational skills…. In our culture, education is implicitly equated with the transmission of information, particularly through written sources. But holistic educators have, for two centuries, asserted that education is an active engagement between a person and a vastly complex world. Holistic education emphasizes experience, not “Great Books” or a few “basic skills.” … Why limit students to a curriculum of academic subjects when the entire cosmos is at hand? Education, as John Dewey so eloquently argued, must not be seen as “preparation” for life—it is life! Education is growth, discovery, and a widening of horizons. This is just the opposite of traditional educational goals—discipline, order, high test scores—that aim to prepare children for the limited world which the adult generation has created.

If this description of an alternative model for education makes sense given today’s world, what educational strategies might we use to improve the educational system? We might focus on learning how to ask the right questions and how to think, rather than on dry facts that are not seen as relevant to one’s life. We might give students more responsibility for their own learning. We might use more learning experiences outside the classroom. We might relate the information that is taught to each student’s daily life. We might blend information from different areas together into core curricula so that students learn math when they study art and grammar when they study drama.

Strategies already exist that could solve most of today’s educational problems. What’s missing are the beliefs that would allow us to accept those strategies.

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

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The Best of MortyLefkoe.com

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

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

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.

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It took me 26 years

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 22:33:15 +0000

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Today (Monday) is a holiday and I’m sitting in my office writing this on my MAC.

No one else is around and the phones are pretty quiet. I came in on what should have been a day off because this week we are going to make available our new Lefkoe Belief Process Training and I have to work with Rodney (who works virtually from Southern California) to make sure the web site and all the emails get completed today.

This week my dream of 26 years will finally come true. Ever since I figured out how to help people get rid of long-held, limiting beliefs I have imagined that some day everyone would be able to eliminate their own beliefs and the beliefs of friends and family.

Imagine a world like this

An incident my wife Shelly told me about a few years ago vividly captures my vision: Shelly had just gotten on a Stairmaster at the gym one morning when a friend she had not seen for a few months got on a machine next to her. Shelly asked her friend how she was doing. Her friend replied that she was having some relationship problems.

What do most people do when a friend tells them about their relationship difficulties? You listen, empathize, and perhaps give some advice. Does your response really help your friend? Maybe it makes your friend feel better for the moment, but, in the long run, unfortunately, rarely does your response make any real difference.

But here is how Shelly responded: She asked, “What do you believe about relationships that could be producing the problems you just told me about?” Her friend thought a minute and then named three. Forty-five minutes later both of them got off their Stairmasters, the three beliefs had been eliminated, and her friend left the gym with new possibilities for a great relationship that she hadn’t had before talking to Shelly.

When Shelly told me this story I thought: What if everyone knew how to eliminate their own beliefs and help others when they got stuck? What if parents and teachers could help children? What if spouses could help each other (as Shelly and I do with each other when we get stuck)? What if all of us could easily get ourselves into an altered state of consciousness in which we experience that anything is possible and we have no limitations?

Every time I think about a world like that I get goose pimples. There are a lot of things that could make a profound impact on the world, but I can’t think of anything that would have as great an impact on each person’s quality of life than this.

How do we get there?

For over 26 years the only way to be able to learn how to eliminate beliefs was a three-day in-person training. Because it took a lot of time and cost a lot of money for people to travel here from all over the world, we didn’t offer the training very often. As a result there are probably less than 200 people in the entire world who have been trained to use the Lefkoe Belief Process.

In order to make a training easily available to anyone who might be interested, we had to find a way to create an on-line training that could be accessed from your computer located anywhere in the world, that didn’t require extensive travel, and that could be offered for far less money than an in-person training.

We spent the last year figuring out a way to do this and finally solved the problem a few weeks ago. The training is now complete and will be made available this week.

Shelly has been back East visiting her friends and family. After she gets home I plan to break open a bottle of champagne and celebrate a dream come true. I hope you are as excited by my vision as I am.

Please leave your comments and questions about how millions of people knowing how to eliminate their own beliefs and the beliefs of others can transform the quality of life on this planet.

If you are interested in learning how to help people eliminate their beliefs, enter your name and email in the box below and we’ll send you information.

A tribute to Steve Jobs

Steve, thank you for the words that inspire me to get out of bed every day, committed to improving the quality of life on the planet, one person at a time.

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” Steve Jobs

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Are they really stupid?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 21:33:00 +0000

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Rare is the day when we don’t think that someone’s behavior or emotional reaction makes absolutely no sense at all. One day it might be a government official, another day it could be a loved one.

In these situations there is always the unstated assumption that they are seeing the same reality I am seeing. And their response to the reality I am seeing is either crazy or stupid.

In fact, I contend that almost always there are at least two very different “realities” involved here: one for you and a totally different one for the other person. There also can be a third: what’s really happening “out there.”

The source of our “reality”

If you’ve been following this blog you’ve read on more than one occasion that our beliefs constitute our reality. If you believe relationships are difficult, that is an absolute fact for you. If you believe life is difficult, that too is a fact and you will have loads of evidence to prove you are right.

Beliefs are generalization we make about ourselves, people, and life that, for us, are “the truth.” So our beliefs about reality determine what we think our reality is.

In addition, we constantly give unconscious meaning to events and then we usually do not recognize the crucial distinction between reality and how that reality has occurred to us.

As a result of our beliefs and our occurrings, what we think is reality more often than not is really something that exists only in our mind, a subjective, unconsciously-created, personal view of reality, not what a video camera would record.

It follows, therefore, that although people’s behavior and emotional reactions might not make sense to us given our view of reality, they make perfect sense given their view of reality. Moreover, most of the time neither our view nor their view corresponds to what actually exists “out there in the world.”

Shelly and I disagree about our children’s education

To make this clear, here’s a personal example of what I mean.

Shortly after our first daughter was born over 29 years ago, Shelly and I started to have conversations about her education. I told her that I thought most public schools were toxic environments and produce more damage than value to the children who attend. (To fully explain my reasons would take an entire blog post. To briefly summarize my reasons, most public schools encourage conformity, discourage creativity and independence, and emphasize memorizing information at the expense of critical thinking.)

So I suggested that we find a really good alternative private school for Blake to attend. Shelly said that she understood my reasons for disliking most public schools and agreed with my reasoning, but still kept arguing that Blake should attend the best public school we could find.

If Shelly really understood my “reality” about public schools, it would make no sense at all for her to continue to argue that Blake should attend one. As a result, I would get frustrated and annoyed whenever we discussed Blake’s education. I remember a lot of heated discussions on this topic.

Shelly’s “reality” about public schools

Eventually I figured out Shelly’s “reality” about schools, at which point her preference for public school made perfect sense. Thirty years ago Shelly (like me and many other people in the world) had the belief: What makes me good enough and important is having people like me. Other related beliefs included: I can’t survive without close friends. Friends are the most important things in one’s life. As a result of these and other similar beliefs, Shelly’s friends were the most important thing in her life.

For Shelly, public school was the single most important place for our daughter to make friends and be accepted. And if making a lot of friends was one of the most important things one gets from school, then a small private alternative school with about 120 students spread over eight grades would be a horrible choice for her daughter. A public school with about a thousand kids would be far superior.

Shelly has since eliminated all these beliefs, but at the time her choice of schools for Blake—which seemed absolutely insane to me given what I thought about public schools—made perfect sense to Shelly given her view of public schools: the best place to make a lot of friends and learn about friendship.

Can you see that the difference between my behavior and feelings about public and private schools and Shelly’s was totally a function of how we viewed those schools. In fact, neither view of reality was “the truth.” Each was determined by our beliefs.

After I understood Shelly’s reality about public schools, I still disagreed with her choice, but I no longer thought her choice was stupid and felt annoyed at her. I realized that I would have made the same school choice as she did if I “saw” public schools the same way she did and she would have made the same choice I did if she had the same view I did.

In fact, over the next few years as Shelly eliminated her beliefs relating to friends and to her concern about what others thought of her, she ultimately saw public schools the way I did and ended up totally supporting our joint decision to send both our daughters to a great alternative private school.

The “reality” of government officials

My personal view about the role of the federal government is very different from conservative Republicans, especially the Tea Partyers. But unlike many of my friends who are angry at them and who think they are stupid, I have come to realize that their proposed policies are a function of their beliefs about the proper role of government. If I had those beliefs, I’d espouse the same policies.

Israel and Palestine: the problem is the result of different realities

For another good example where understanding this distinction can be very useful, look at the conflict between Israelis and the Palestinians. It should be clear that each side is viewing a totally different reality. And their different behaviors are a direct manifestation of each’s reality.

What are those behaviors? Israel puts up a fence and checkpoints to keep suicide bombers out of areas where Israelis congregate. Their invasions are designed to stop rocket fire, which comes from the invaded areas. Israelis settle anyplace they want, in other words, anyplace within the borders of the State of Israel, even in areas that are predominantly Palestinian.

Palestinians uses violence as the only avenue they claim remains open to them 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 they live today they want the right to return to their former homes on land that is now part of Israel.

This is a very condensed description what each side does and wants. Now consider the “reality” as seen by both sides and notice how each’s behavior makes sense given the respective realities.

Reality for Israelis looks like: 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.

Reality for Palestinians looks like: 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. Moreover, 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. They thought they were morally justified in their action, and it worked—they got the land they wanted. (See my earlier blog post for more details on this particular issue: http://www.mortylefkoe.com/a-tool-for-resolving-conflict/#).

When you get that people’s behavior and emotional reactions always make sense given the way reality occurs to them (which is a function of their beliefs and occurrings), you might notice that you are less confused by what people do, less angry at them for doing it, and better able to find common ground for a solution that works for all concerned.

Please leave your comments and questions about how people’s different beliefs and occurrings account for their different reactions to things, and how recognizing that can reduce your upset and increase your compassio

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How to build your self-confidence

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:51:28 +0000

NOTE: One of the most frequent questions I get is about what causes a low level of self-confidence and what can be done to improve it. To answer those questions I’ve posted an updated version of a post from early last year on this topic.

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

But why?

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

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 sense of victimization to a sense that we can handle whatever life throws at us. Some people are almost totally lacking in confidence and some feel confident that they can handle almost anything; most people are in-between. So the issue for most people is where they currently are on the continuum and how they can raise their level of 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 one has high level of self-confidence. Such a person knows that her inability to perform a specific task means nothing about her as a person.

Confidence is ultimately a function of the self-esteem beliefs we hold. For example, someone who believes I’m not good enough, I’m not capable, I’m powerless, I’m not worthy or deserving, etc. will likely have a low level of self-confidence. On the other hand, someone with the beliefs I am good enough, I am capable, I impact my reality, I’m worthy and deserving, etc. will likely have a high level of self-confidence.

In other words, your confidence in yourself as a person is the result of having positive beliefs about yourself.

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 self-esteem-type belief we have lowers our internal level of self-confidence; every one we eliminate raises our internal level of self-confidence.

Once you understand that negative self-esteem beliefs lower your level of self-confidence and getting rid of them raises it, you will realize that the commonly-held notion that self-confidence comes from succeeding or failing at specific projects in life is a serious misunderstanding.

Even if you usually succeed at tasks as a kid, but 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, which 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—the meaning you give your results—not your actual results.

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

Some of the consequences of low self-confidenc

A low level of self-confidence can result in a host of other emotional problems, such as 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 and we will fail.)

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 everything they had achieved would be taken away from them. This fear is so common that it has been given a name: “The Imposter Syndrome.

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

Do you still have any questions about confidence? Is the difference clear between a lack of self-confidence and the inability to perform a specific task? Please leave your comments and questions below

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What is the relationship between financial success and personal growth?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 22:58:02 +0000

The tens of millions of people who are interested in self-improvement have two different but related focuses: financial success and personal growth.

People who primarily are interested in financial success seek out products that promise to help them make more money and end up with more wealth. Such people are usually willing to pay more for their courses and webinars than for courses that only improve their emotional well-being.

People who primarily are interested in personal growth usually want to change their behavior, such as stop procrastinating, and their emotions, such as stop their anxiety and anger. People for whom this is the goal usually are willing to pay far less for such products. Some of these people, especially those who have a strong spiritual bent, even think that being spiritual precludes them from pursuing money.

So although sometimes there is an overlap between these two groups, people tend to have one focus or the other.

There is an inextricable connection

But even for the people who do pursue both goals, I’m not sure that many people interested in self-improvement are aware that there is an inextricable connection between the two areas of life.

Although financial success can be affected by many different factors—including what product or service you are offering, the quality of the offering, to what market, competition, at what price, etc.—one of the most critical factors that is often ignored but that significantly affects your financial success is your mental/emotional state.

Because my expertise is on how beliefs affect our lives, I’ll focus on the impact of beliefs, but whether the source of dysfunctional behavior and emotions are beliefs or anything else, the chance of achieving and enjoying financial success in today’s world is slim unless you are able to get rid of your dysfunctional behavior and emotions.

Let me explain why.

For many years, success in business depended on showing up every day and doing what you were told. If you did it well enough for long enough, you’d usually move up through the organization you worked for and end up with a nice pension.

Financial success requires personal growth

Today showing up and doing the “right” thing is no longer enough, whether you work for yourself or for others. More and more organizations are looking for creative, innovative, imaginative people who will figure out for themselves what needs to be done instead of waiting to be told. And if you work for yourself, then merely doing what others do, the way others do it, is unlikely to provide significant financial success.

Today the world is looking for the intellectually curious, the people who are willing to take risks, who, as Seth Godin puts it, are willing to “poke the box.”

If that is what financial success requires in today’s fast-changing world—where what worked yesterday is probably not what is going to work today and certainly won’t be what works tomorrow—than your behavior and emotional state are crucial.

Beliefs that hinder financial success

What is the chance of you being innovative, taking chances, doing what makes sense to you whether others approve or not, etc. if you have even just a few of the following beliefs?

I’m not good enough.
Mistakes and failure are bad.
If I make a mistake or fail I’ll be rejected.
I’m inadequate.
I’m not important.
What makes me good enough and important is having others think well of me.
I’m not capable.
I’m not competent.
I’m powerless.

And that list of self-esteem beliefs doesn’t even include specific beliefs about money, such as:

Money is hard to get.
Money is a struggle.
There’s never enough money.

In addition to the beliefs, what if also you have been conditioned to feel fear if you are rejected, if you are criticized or judged, or if you don’t live up to the expectations of others?

People with beliefs and conditionings like these will have a hard time doing what they need to do to achieve financial success. Yes, they can learn what to do from a lot of great books and courses, but it will still be difficult to implement that really useful advice.

A client buys the house of her dreams

My wife Shelly—who is a Certified Lefkoe Method Facilitator who helps over 25 clients a week get rid of limiting beliefs—told me the following story that illustrates this point. She had a client who eliminated a few negative self-esteem beliefs and other negative beliefs about achieving financial abundance. One day she got a call from this client who wanted to share some exciting news with her. The client and three of her friends had attended a T. Harv Eker workshop, after which she had bought the summer house of her dreams.

The client attributed her new possession to what she learned in the workshop. Shelly listened and then asked the client what her friends had purchased. The client responded that they hadn’t bought anything or done anything to improve their financial condition after the workshop.

At that point Shelly pulled out the client’s file and read her some of the beliefs she had eliminated before she attended the workshop: I’m not deserving, Money is scarce and hard to get, You should always save for a rainy day, I’ll never get what I want, and I’m not important.

Shelly then asked her, “Do you think you would have spent the money and bought the summer house of your dreams if you still had the beliefs you eliminated?” The stunned silence at the other end of the phone line was the answer.

Obviously merely getting rid of limiting beliefs and conditionings is not sufficient to insure financial abundance. You have to take action. But the ability to take the type of actions required for financial success in today’s world require the ability to not be stopped by your fear of making mistakes, by what you think others may think of your behavior, or by a lack of confidence.

So if financial success is your focus—and there is nothing wrong with that focus—make sure you handle your personal growth first. It probably will give you a better chance to achieve financial success and it certainly will enable you to enjoy it more.

What do you think about the relationship between personal growth and financial success? Please write your comments below.

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

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How to improve your relationships

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 23:21:02 +0000

I rarely give advice in my weekly blog post. I focus on the relationship between beliefs/conditioning and having the life you want to have. That is my area of real expertise.

But there is one aspect of life in which I think I am an expert, where I think I can give some very useful advice: how to improve your relationship with your significant other (spouse or steady partner). Shelly and I have created an incredible relationship and I think some of the things we do can significantly improve your relationship, although you might have to eliminate some beliefs in order to implement some of the suggestions.

The door closes

After Shelly and I had decided to get married but before the wedding, she complained about the fact that I was already leading a couple of evening seminars a week and was thinking about taking on an additional one. She said that it didn’t make sense for her to live with me if I was never going to be home to be with her. It wasn’t a threat, but the clear implication was that it made no sense to her for us to live together if I was going to be away “so often.”

I said, “I only have one demand if we are going to get married.” Now, Shelly is not someone who does well with demands, so she responded with surprise: “Excuse me!” I said, “I promise I will never cheat on you, I will never do anything I know will hurt you, and I am willing to work on myself to fix anything that is a problem in our relationship, but if we are going to be together, as of this moment you have to give up the right to leave, your commitment has to be absolute. If you are going to marry me I want your word that this is forever.”

I explained, “If we agree there we will never ‘entertain leaving,’ then we will have to find a way to make our relationship work. As long as leaving is a possibility, then there will never be a total commitment to making it work.”

Shelly was stunned. She told me later that she was terrified to make such a commitment. She had experienced the “freedom of a single life” for over 30 years. But she said that at that moment when she chose to give me the commitment it was as if a safe vault door was shut and she was on the inside. She later told me that the freedom she had experienced when she made the commitment was amazing.

In the early years of our marriage when we did argue a lot and had a lot of disagreements, this commitment that we had both made always kept us focused on finding a solution instead of thinking that we could leave if it didn’t work out.

Love for no reason

I’ve written about this next “tip” before, so let me review it briefly and give you a link to read about it in more detail. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/love-unconditionally/#

When Shelly and I were living together, shortly before we got married, she asked me why I loved her. I answered her, “Just because I say so.”

She didn’t like this answer. She wanted to know which qualities about her made me love her. I kept insisting that I only loved her because I said so, not for any particular reason.

At some point I explained what I meant. “If I love you for specific reasons, then my love is conditioned on you being a certain way. If you stopped being that way or if you weren’t that way at a given time, I wouldn’t love you. But if I love you just because I say so, then my love is unconditional and I can and will love you no matter what you do or don’t do.” I’ve repeated this to Shelly many times during the past 30 years and I think it’s finally okay with her.

As a result of this unconditional love, whenever I haven’t feel love toward Shelly at any given moment, I realized that I was not creating it and that it was up to me to figure out why and to start creating it again. I wasn’t blaming her for anything and I wasn’t waiting for her to change in some way. That gave me complete control over the way I felt about her, in other words, there was not only nothing she had to do to make me love her, there was nothing she could do that would lead to me not loving her.

I love a lot of things that Shelly does—such as the way she supports me, the way she loves me, and the way we read each other’s minds—but I don’t love her because of those things. So I am able to love her just as much when she doesn’t do those things as when she does.

This tip alone has me able to love Shelly 24/7, 365 days a year, regardless of what she does or doesn’t do. It makes for an incredible relationship.

Create love newly every day

Closely related to the prior suggestion is the importance of creating love for each other every day. I don’t try to remember how much I loved Shelly yesterday, I just wake up and create loving her, newly, every day. The first thing I say to her every morning is: I love you. Which is usually the last thing I say to her before we go to sleep at night.

I probably tell her how much I love her at least five times a day and frequently send her Google chats or emails that say: “Just in case you forgot: I love you massively.”

I find that the very act of saying “I love you” makes it easier to create that feeling in me.

(While I was editing this post Shelly suddenly appeared in my office, walked over to me, kissed me, and then walked out. Does life get any better than that?)

Stop giving meaning to things your partner says and does

As a result of implementing the relationship suggestions I’ve made above, Shelly and I have always had a very good relationship, even when we argued a lot in the early days. But even after eliminating all the beliefs we could find about ourselves and relationships, and after living the suggestions I’ve made in this post, there were still daily things that Shelly did that resulted in me feeling frustrated or annoyed with her.

For example, when I married Shelly over 30 years ago I was a mess. I had just been divorced for a second time and was getting depressed frequently. When we argued my way of coping with my upsets was to withdraw … and not just for a few hours. I’d withdraw for a couple of days! Shelly, on the other hand, would “get off it” (in other words, let go of the upset) in an hour or so and then wonder why I was reacting to something that had ended hours or even days before.

As I used The Lefkoe Method (TLM) to eliminate beliefs and conditionings, the time it took me to let go of my upset decreased, until, like Shelly, I could get off it in an hour or so after the argument was over.

At some point we created a friendly competition to see who could get off it first, in other words, who would be the first one to let go of the upset totally and be back in relationship with the other person. I ultimately acquired the ability to do that during an argument (as opposed to after it was over). I was able to stop right in the middle of it and just smile and say: “I’m sorry that whatever I am doing is upsetting you. Is there anything I can do to resolve this? I love you.”

Here’s what’s important about what I was doing. I didn’t say these words to placate Shelly or use extreme will power while still being upset. I was able to stop the upset and then say words that were true for me.

How did I learn to do that? I started asking myself what meaning I was giving Shelly’s behavior and comments. I realized that my upset was due to the meaning I was giving her behavior, not due to what she actually said or did. And then I followed two steps to get rid of that meaning.

First I realized that Shelly’s behavior had no inherent meaning, in fact, I realized that all events in the world have no meaning. Then I asked myself if I could literally “see” the meaning I had given her actions and statements. Obviously I never could “see” the meaning I had given, I could only “see” the events.

So it became clear to me that the meaning existed only in my mind. What she was doing and saying had no inherent meaning. The only meaning was the one I had given it.

As you know if you’ve eliminated at least one belief using the Lefkoe Belief Process, events that have no meaning can’t make us feel anything. So the upset that I thought Shelly had “caused” was, in fact, caused by the meaning I had given what Shelly did and said. When that became real, the upset literally disappeared.

For example, if your partner doesn’t do something you asked her to do and then you give the event the meaning that you can’t get what you want, you will get angry. If you give the event the meaning that your partner doesn’t care about what you want, you will be hurt or upset. If you say that your partner’s behavior has no inherent meaning, you will feel nothing. You’ll probably just calmly do what you needed yourself or ask your partner again if she will do it.

And that is something you can learn to do consistently, with practice.

Try implementing these four suggestions and then use the comment section below to let us know how they affect your relationship. Great relationships really are possible.

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Why Do We Need To Create Meaning?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:48:06 +0000

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

Why we need to create meaning

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

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

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

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

We create two different types of meaning

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

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

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

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

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

Getting rid of these meanings

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

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

Dissolve beliefs and occurrings by making a distinction

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

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

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

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

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

How can I decide what to do without any meaning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How Making Distinctions Can Change Your Life

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 23:37:35 +0000

My post today is about “distinctions.” And why should you care about distinctions? Because most of the problems in your life today exist because of distinctions you failed to make earlier in your life. Moreover, the way to permanently eliminate those problems from your life is to make those distinctions now.

I’ve known for a long time that the act of creating something is dependent on making distinctions. But I now also see in a way that I never did before that the effectiveness of The Lefkoe Method results from its ability to help you make distinctions you haven’t made.

Creation is an act of distinction

First let me explain what I mean by creation results from an act of distinction. I first realized this when I heard a presentation by Werner Erhard over 30 years ago. Let’s do a little thought experiment he used to make real that making a distinction is an act of creation. Really do the exercise.

Imagine your hand expanding and expanding until it fills the universe, so that there is nothing in the universe but your hand. What happens to your hand? … If you actually do this exercise you will experience your hand disappearing. Why? … Because any “thing,” in order to exist, must have a not “it.

A hand is a palm and fingers with space around it. If there were nothing but hand, it would crease to exist because it couldn’t be distinguished from everything else. In other words, any “thing” (or everything), without any distinctions, is nothing.

This is not only true for physical objects, it also is true for abstractions. In order for “up” to exist, there has to be a “down.” “Peace” requires “war.” If there were only peace all the time, the idea of peace, as distinct from war, could not exist.

So the existence of any specific thing requires the non-existence of that thing. This is what is meant by a “dualistic universe.”

Is it now clear that we create by distinguishing some “thing” from everything else?

Beliefs are caused by a failure to distinguish

Now let me explain my insight the other day when I realized that all the processes of The Lefkoe Method are based on making distinctions that had not been made earlier and most of our behavioral and emotional problems (which are caused primarily by negative beliefs and destructive conditioning) ultimately are the result of not making crucial distinctions earlier in life. Let me explain

Let’s start with the Lefkoe Belief Process. To begin with, most people have never distinguished their beliefs as the primary cause of their behavior and feelings. Moreover, when you form a belief you are not distinguishing between the events and the meaning you are giving the events; it seems to you as if you have discovered the meaning (the belief) in the world, which leads you to think the meaning is inherent in the events, which leads you to think you can “see” the meaning in the world.

A belief is eliminated for most people when they distinguish between the event and the meaning, which leads them to realize they cannot “see” the belief in the world, at which point they get that the meaning exists only in their mind and not in the world. Emotionally kinesthetic people eliminate the belief when they make a distinction between reality as the source of their feeling/belief and the meaning they gave reality as the source of their feeling/belief.

In other words, the belief got formed because we failed to make a distinction earlier in life and is eliminated today when we make that distinction. If we had made the appropriate distinction earlier between the event and the meaning we attributed to it, the belief never would have been formed.

Conditionings also are caused by a failure to distinguish

What is the role of distinctions in the Lefkoe Stimulus Process (LStimP)? Let’s use my ice cream story to explain how stimuli are conditioned to produce emotions and how the LStimP de-conditions those stimuli so that they no longer trigger those emotions.

Imagine you were being handed an ice cream cone with one hand while the other hand made a fist that looked as if it was going to hit you. What would you probably feel as you observed both the ice cream and the fist? … Probably some degree of anxiety. If this happened repeatedly, at some point the ice cream would get conditioned to produce anxiety even when there was no fist accompanying it.

A common example of this in real life is being criticized as a child by your parents, who usually got angry and yelled at you when they criticized you. The criticism as such did not produce anxiety; the meaning a child gives the yelling produced anxiety because, for children, yelling means parents are angry, which means they don’t love me any more, which means I could be abandoned, which means I could die. That is what causes the anxiety.

The principle is: anything that repeatedly accompanies something else that produces anxiety can itself easily get conditioned to produce anxiety … when we don’t distinguish between the stimulus actually causing the anxiety and the other stimulus that itself does not produce anxiety but that repeatedly accompanies something that does.

The LStimP works by making a distinction that you didn’t make earlier in life when the conditioning took place. You realize that the ice cream was never scary; the fear was caused by the fist and you now make a distinction between the two. Being criticized was never scary; the fear was caused by the meaning you gave your yelling parents and you now make a distinction between the two.

Other Lefkoe Method processes help you made distinctions

There are other Lefkoe Method processes, such as the Lefkoe Occurring Process, which dissolves the meaning we give current events, the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process, which de-conditions emotional eating, the Lefkoe Sense Process, which de-conditions a negative sense of life or sense of self, and the Lefkoe Expectation Process, which de-conditions negative expectations.

These processes work in much the same way as the Lefkoe Belief Process: they enable you to make distinctions today that hadn’t been made earlier in life. When the distinction is made, the belief, the sense, the occurring, the expectation, or the conditioning is eliminated, as are the problems they cause.

Yet more to come

A lot of research has been done in recent years that proves conclusively that the brain is plastic, meaning it can change up until death. And making new distinctions is what enables the brain to create new pathways and learn. I have a strong sense that a better understanding of “distinctions” will enable me to create additional processes to facilitate easy and permanent change.

What do you think about distinctions? Do you have any questions about why they are so important in understanding both why people get stuck and how to get them unstuck? I’d love to read your comments and questions.

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What Should I Do With The Rest Of My Life?

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:26:38 +0000

I’ve always been the youngest person doing whatever I was doing. I was just 16 when I graduated high school. I was working on Wall Street as a securities analyst at 22. I was an Assistant Vice President of a financial firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange at the age of 24. And I already had articles published in Fortune and was an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal by 26.

Then one day I woke up and discovered I was 73. Instead of being the youngest person doing what I was doing, I was suddenly one of the oldest. There is only one person older than me in the Transformational Leadership Council, a group of transformational leaders who meet twice a year. And I am the oldest among all my friends.

Where did the time go?

What I’ve accomplished

I am proud and grateful for all that I have accomplished in my lifetime, especially my incredible 30-year marriage to my wife Shelly and the two girls we raised together to be independent spirits, each of whom is proud of who she is. And I am really proud of creating The Lefkoe Method (TLM), which has helped almost 100,000 people eliminate at least one limiting belief, enabling them to enjoy life more and experience themselves as the creator of their lives.

I cherish the relationship I have with those of you who have written me and I am inspired by all the changes you have created in your lives. On days when I don’t feel like going to work, all I need to do is read a note from one of you telling me how TLM helped you shed some “baggage” and enjoy your life more and I can’t wait to get back to work.

But now at 73 a question is popping up almost daily: Now what? What should I do with the rest of my life? I have been thinking about that question for the past six months or so and I still don’t have a good answer.

For over 26 years my vision was very clear: To significantly improve the quality of life in the world by having people recreate their lives and live as the unlimited possibilities they are.

My vision made me important

For a while I “needed” to do that. Right after I developed the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) having that as my vision is what made me an important person, a person better than other people. “Look what I’m doing with my life!” But as I eliminated a bunch of negative self-esteem beliefs and realized I was okay the way I was and that I didn’t need to do anything to be okay; my vision became a choice—a game I decided to play —rather than a survival strategy, something I needed to do to prove I was worthwhile.

But in the past year or so I have started to realize I no longer have “forever” to do what I want to do and I’ve started asking myself: What is the best way to spend the rest of my life? What is the greatest contribution I can make in the time I have left?

Let me tell you some of my thoughts and then I would like to hear from you. What do you think? What could I do that would make the biggest difference in your life?

Projects worth undertaking

Here are a few projects that seem to be worth completing:

1. For people who are visual, who know reality because they can “see” it, the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) works about 98% of the time. For people who are emotionally kinesthetic, who never “saw” their belief in the world but who ”felt” it, beliefs sometimes come back once or even twice. The effectiveness rate with such people is over 90%. I want to figure out how to make the LBP more effective for emotionally kinesthetic people.

2. The Lefkoe Occurring Process (LOP) seems to make more of a difference in people’s lives than anything I’ve done in 26 years. It gives people the ability to create their experience of life moment by moment. The many testimonials we’ve received from people who have taken the Lefkoe Occurring Courses go beyond anything we have received in 26 years—and we’ve had thousands of people tell us the TLM has provided relief that nothing else they had ever done had provided. The problem is it takes me ten weeks of my time working personally with only 20 people to produce the incredible value the LOP provides. For people who can afford it, it is the single best thing they can do to make a profound difference in their lives. For people who can’t afford it, it’s useless. Right now the only way I am able to produce the results this course provides is to personally coach each of the 20 people each week. My goal is to find a way to put this course into a DVD product that I can sell for a price anyone can afford.

3. We just completed a two-year research study conducted by a major university that proved that our Natural Confidence DVD product significantly reduces stress, which means it can help anyone with an illness that is at least partially caused by stress—which is most of them. The study will be published soon in a peer-reviewed psychological journal. In order for psychologists and governmental officials to take TLM seriously, we need a lot more research that validates our experience with almost 100,00 people over the past 26 years. I am convinced we could help returning soldiers with PTSD, relieve depression, stop most anxiety, and free people from almost all the day-to-day problems that affect most people on earth. We need to prove that with independent scientific studies.

4. Most of all, I want to reach far more than the 100,000 or so people we’ve helped so far. I am truly grateful that my associates and I have been able to help each and every one of these people. But there are hundreds of millions of people throughout the world who lack confidence, who constantly worry about what others think of them, who procrastinate, whose relationships are characterized by constant bickering and dissatisfaction, who fear rejection, and whose beliefs and conditionings sabotage their ability to have sufficient income and wealth so that money is no longer an issue in their lives. I’m not satisfied with reaching only about a hundred additional people every day. I no longer have 30 or 40 years to play this game. I need to find a way to break out of the box and reach hundreds of thousands in the next year or so and then grow geometrically from there.

If you are on my mailing list, you’ve probably eliminated at least one belief and have personally experienced the power of my work. If you’ve purchased one of our products like Natural Confidence or worked with one of our Certified Lefkoe Method Facilitators in phone or Skype sessions, you’ve seen a lifelong problem disappear in a matter of hours and never return. So you have a good sense of the impact my work can have in the world.

I guess the bottom-line question I’m trying to answer is: What legacy do I want to leave the world?

What do you think I should be focusing on? Where should I be devoting the bulk of my time for the next few years? What could I do that would make the biggest difference to YOU? And do you have any suggestions on how I can make TLM available to millions of people?

Please post your answer below. I might not be able to respond to every post, but I do promise to read and seriously consider each one of them.

For information about eliminating 23 of the most common limiting beliefs and conditionings, which cause eight of the most common problems in our lives, 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.

Do You Need Training To Use The Lefkoe Method?

Morty Lefkoe — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:13:48 +0000

Are you one of the people who figured out how to use the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) after eliminating a few beliefs on http://recreateyourlife.com/free where we offer three beliefs for free? Many people are able to eliminate beliefs by themselves after going through the LBP a few times, whereas others are unable to do it themselves if they’ve never received training even after eliminating 20-30 beliefs.

Once you’ve figured out what belief you want to eliminate, going through the steps of the LBP can be relatively easy for some people. The steps are the same in most cases, although the source and alternative interpretations are different for survival strategy beliefs. So if you are able to find the source of your beliefs and come up with valid alternative interpretations (which can be different for different beliefs), you might be able to get rid of many beliefs on your own.

The biggest problem in using the LBP is figuring out which beliefs are the source of different problems. (And, of course, many problems also are caused by conditioning, which can require you to use several other processes that are part of The Lefkoe Method [TLM] in order to eliminate those problems totally.)

This ability to quickly learn how to get rid of the beliefs that cause many of your day-to-day problems is a significant distinction between the LBP and almost every form of psychotherapy.

You Can’t Conduct Psychotherapy On Yourself

It is virtually impossible to conduct a psychotherapy session on yourself, regardless of which type of psychotherapy you choose to use. And instead of a weekend training to learn how to use the LBP with others, you need several years of school and many hours of practice and observation before you can be effective as a psychotherapist.

It is because the steps of the LBP are relatively simple once you know the belief you want to eliminate that we have been able to put that Process on DVDs and streaming video. And because certain problems usually have the same beliefs and conditionings, we have been able to create DVDs and streaming video programs to get rid of entire problems in addition to eliminating an assortment of random beliefs.

Using TLM successfully probably requires less communication skills than most forms of psychotherapy. A Lefkoe Method facilitator must be able to administer TLM effectively and that usually does take some training, skill, and practice, but if the processes are presented correctly, they will work regardless of the rapport the facilitator has established with the client. That is one reason why the various processes in TLM can be effective in a DVD or interactive web program.

On the other hand, most forms of psychotherapy require a high degree of trust, relationship, rapport, etc. between the therapist and the client, and often the better the rapport, the more effective the session. In TLM the process is more important than the facilitator, whereas in most other therapies the opposite is true.

This is not to say that no rapport or trust is required for Lefkoe Method faciliators, because if they are totally absent, people may not feel comfortable working with the facilitator. Also, a LM facilitator with a high degree of training and insight is likely to figure out the source of a given problem that another facilitator might not even recognize. Finally, a client is more likely to be totally open with a facilitator she trusts, which can make a difference in the outcome of a session.

Everyone Helps Everyone Else

My vision is for millions of people to learn how to use the LBP and the other processes that comprise The Lefkoe Method early in life so they can use them on themselves and to help others. My vision was illustrated a few years ago when my wife Shelly was on a Stairmaster at the gym. A friend of hers who she hadn’t seen in a while climbed on an adjoining Stairmaster. When Shelly’s friend started talking about some relationship difficulties she had been having, instead of commiserating or giving advice, Shelly helped her friend find a few beliefs that might be causing the difficulties and then helped her eliminate those beliefs … while exercising. That is my vision for the world: to have everyone able to help everyone eliminate the beliefs and conditionings that are the source of most of the problems we face in life.

In recent months we have had many inquiries about future courses that train people to use the Lefkoe Belief Process and other Lefkoe Method Processes, either on oneself or to help others. In the past all our trainings were held in the San Francisco Bay Area. We’ve taught people how to eliminate beliefs in one three-day weekend. Another three-day weekend was required to learn how to find the right beliefs that were responsible for any problem. And a third three-day weekend taught people how to use the various conditioning processes. Interspersed between the three training sessions were eight hours of coaching students by listening to recordings of their sessions and giving them feedback.

We are investigating the possibility of creating an on-line training to substitute for the first weekend where students learn how to use the LBP effectively after a belief has been identified.

If we don’t find a way to offer it on-line and we have to offer a live training in the San Francisco Bay Area, please let us know if you would be interested in attending. Alternatively, if we do offer an on-line training would you be interested in participating?

Depending on the level of interest in each type of training we will make a decision shortly about further training sessions.

Please tell us about your interest in being trained and how you think you will use your training (on yourself or to help others). Let us know if you are willing to travel here for training or if you are only interested in on-line training.

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.

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.

Would You Like To Be Able To Love Unconditionally?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:21:13 +0000

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

Early last year a good friend and colleague, Marci Shimoff, contacted me and told me she was writing a new book to be titled, Love For No Reason. She said she had read a post I had written about my unconditional love for my wife, Shelly. Marci asked if she could interview me for the book and use what I had written. Of course I agreed.

Her book has just been published and I want to strongly recommend that you read it, because she explains, in a way that I had never thought of, how to create a life of unconditional love. Because I’ve been able to love unconditionally, I know how incredible that experience is, so anything you can do to have that experience yourself is worth doing. http://www.thelovebook.com

The book opens with an inspiring story about love for no reason that sets the tone for the entire book. I was hooked from the start.

Early on Marci uses part of her interview with me, where I described my experience of unconditional love.

When I married my wife, Shelly, almost twenty-nine years ago, she asked me why I loved her. I answered, “Just because I do.”

She didn’t like this answer. She wanted to know which qualities about her made me love her. But I kept insisting that I simply loved her, not for any particularly reason.

I explained: “If I love you for specific reasons, then my love is conditioned on you being a certain way. If you stop being that way or you aren’t that way at a given time, I may not love you. But if I love you ‘just because,’ then my love is unconditional and I can and will love you no matter what you do or don’t do.”

If I don’t feel love toward Shelly at any given moment, I realize that I’m not experiencing love inside myself and that it’s up to me to figure out why and to start experiencing it again. I’m not blaming her for anything and I’m not waiting for her to change in some way. This gives me complete control over the way I feel about her. In other words, there’s nothing she has to do to make me love her, and there’s nothing she can do that will lead me to not love her.

Marci’s book is filled with many inspiring stories about love and she also offers some useful tips regarding what it takes to learn to love unconditionally.

For example, she points out that you need to be able to experience self-love before you can truly love another.

Almost all of us carry around this same underlying belief of “I’m not good enough”—or some variation of how we are flawed or inadequate. Yours might be “I’m not smart enough,” “I’m not worthy,” or “I’m not loveable.” It really doesn’t matter which edition of the “I’m not Okay” manual you have, when you don’t love yourself, you hold yourself back from receiving life’s richest experience: Love for No Reason. It’s like having a winning lottery ticket and not showing up to claim the millions.”

Marci describes a meeting she attended with the Dalai Lama, who radiates love for no reason:

Just sitting within ten feet of this great spiritual master was transformational. His presence was incredibly calming, bathing the entire room in an aura of quiet, unconditional love.

The Dalai Lama graciously welcomed us to the meeting, and before taking our questions, he shared a few words that put us instantly at ease. He said that whether he is addressing the president of a nation or a homeless person on the street makes no difference to him, because he treats everyone the same.

“Differences in religious beliefs, politics, social status, and position are all secondary,” the Dalai Lama explained. “When we look at someone with compassion, we are able to see beyond those secondary differences and connect to the primary essence that binds all humans together as one.” (Emphasis added.)

He added that when we are in this state of being, we feel love for ourselves and others, not because of what we do, but simply because we are.

Marci identifies one of the biggest barriers to unconditional love:

One of the biggest blocks to experiencing Love for No Reason is being judgmental, which is different from exercising good judgment or voicing an opinion. Being judgmental is condemning another person or situation, which creates tension and separation in our relationships, effectively cutting off the flow of love.

I was excited that she also discussed love for no reason at work. She quoted from an interview she had with another one of my friends and colleagues, Stewart Emery.

When you’re living in a state of love, it automatically brings the ability to “be a good one” to whatever you are doing. It’s love that causes that to happen. Without love for your work, you can’t get good at it.

What’s interesting is that if you ask people who love their work why they love it, they’ll invent reasons, because we’re socialized to have reasons for everything, but the truth is that the love we’re talking about “passeth all understanding”: it’s beyond reasons. And it’s this love that produces the greatest artistic, scientific, and business achievements.”

Near the end of the book Marci has a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that is especially relevant in today’s world, where there is conflict wherever we look.

Though it’s tempting to reject or even try to destroy the people we feel are hateful, Dr. King said that returning hate with hate “only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe … It just never ends … The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil … and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love.”

Although these words were spoken more than fifty years ago, we still face the same challenge today: to love people we don’t agree with and who don’t see the world the same way we do.

There is nothing like the experience of loving for no reason. I’ve had that experience many times and it usually is accompanied by a feeling of bliss. If you want to know more about it and learn how to create it yourself, read Marci’s book. To order the book on-line, please click on the following link (I don’t earn an affiliate commission, I just think you should read the book) or go to your nearest book store. http://www.thelovebook.com

Please share below your thoughts and questions on unconditional love.

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 Drives You: “Intention” or “Inspiration”?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 20:07:42 +0000

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Everyone knows that success in life is a function of your “intention.” Right?

I just read an excellent blog post by Joe Vitale (http://blog.mrfire.com/why-i-gave-up-intentions) that challenges this point of view. Joe’s perspective makes a lot of sense to me and, because New Year’s Resolutions are usually all about our intentions, I thought I would use my first blog post of the new year to take a fresh look at this topic.

Joe questions the value of intention

Joe makes this point: “Today I realize that most intentions are limitations. Intentions come from your ego and can actually limit what is possible for you to receive.”

He goes on to explain:

STAGE ONE:

In the first stage you are a victim. We’re all born into it and most of us stay there. With coaching or the right books or the right movies, you one day break free.

STAGE TWO:

In the next stage you realize you have more power than you ever thought before. In this stage intentions are fun and exciting and useful. You aim your life where you want it to go. It’s exhilarating to manifest things like new cars or a new house or anything else you can imagine.

But there’s a stage after that.

STAGE THREE:

In the third stage you realize you have choice but you don’t have control. You realize you don’t have all power. This is where you surrender. This is where you can receive inspiration from something greater than your ego awareness.

I was filmed for two more movies last week. One of them is all about letting go to inspiration.

For me, I want inspiration.

When it comes, that becomes my new intention.

But the intention comes from inspiration, not from limitation.

The intention comes from the Divine, not my pipsqueak ego.

In short, when I receive an inspiration to do something, it becomes my intention.

So I still believe in intentions, but not those of the ego, but those of the Divine.

A distinction between intention and inspiration

Joe made an important distinction between inspiration, which comes from who we really are (the “creator”) and intention, which comes from who we think we are (the ego, the “creation”).

Because our creation is pretty much run by our already-existing beliefs and conditionings, our intentions are not really freely chosen. Our intentions are determined by our past, or, to be more precise, the meaning we gave past experiences. In other words, our intentions are limited by our beliefs. We can’t intend to achieve more than our beliefs will allow.

Inspirations, on the other hand, are created out of nothing. Inspirations don’t depend on anything and they are not limited by our beliefs.

If you were asked: What is the source of any goal you might have—and you explain why you have the goal, you probably have an intention that is a function of your beliefs. If your answer is, “just because” or “why not” or “just because I said so,” you probably have an inspiration that was created independent of your beliefs.

As soon as I realized the power of The Lefkoe Method (TLM) about 25 years ago to make a profound difference in the world, I said to myself: I intend to spend the rest of my life using TLM to make a difference in as many lives as possible. A worthwhile intention, isn’t it?

But when I first created this intention about 25 years ago it mattered to me. I used it to define who I was. It became my identity. I had to do it. It was a better way to spend my time than how most other people spent their time. The world needed what I had to offer.

My intention became an inspiration

And then about 10 years ago there was a shift from: I need to do it, to: I choose to do it. And I would be okay if I didn’t do it. The world didn’t need me; it would be okay without me.

My intention had shifted to inspiration and it no longer defined who I was. My ego was no longer involved.

I’ve actually been thinking about what to do with the rest of my life (I’m now 73 years old) during the past two weeks while I was on vacation in Hawaii with Shelly and my two daughters.

On the one hand I felt I could stay on vacation for the rest of my life. Either my associates or I have worked one-on-one with well over 13,000 clients and over 70,000 people have used an online and/or a DVD program to eliminate at least one belief. Most of these people experienced a freedom that they had never experienced before. One of my daughters pointed out that very few people in history had helped so many people. I felt that was okay to stop.

On the other hand I felt excited about getting back to work. I was looking forward to implementing the many ideas I have for 2011, including a way to reach a few hundred thousand more people in 2011, leading a new occurring course, and creating several new products.

After weighing each possibility, I choose to go back to work. I don’t need to help people for ego reasons. I am okay whether I continue to make The Lefkoe Method available in the world or not. However, for me this is still the best game in town and I am interested in playing for at least one more year.

Look at your own intentions

Take a look at your intentions for 2011 and see if they are freely chosen or not. Are they something you are choosing to do or something you need to do to be okay?

If you discover that the source of your intentions is your beliefs, get rid of any negative self-esteem beliefs so that you realize you are okay just the way you are and that you don’t need to do anything to be okay. Make sure you get rid of any survival strategy beliefs, so that your sense of okayness is not dependent on anything outside yourself. Do the Who Am I Really? Process and experience that you are the creator of your life, not a creation.

Allow yourself to ruminate about the question: What do I want to do with my life, just because I want to do it—not because of what it means about me or because of what others will think?

When you discover what you choose to do, not what you need to do, what you would do even if no one else ever knew that you did it, you are probably in touch with divine inspiration, rather than ego-driven intention. At that point the universe likely will support you in manifesting your inspiration in the world.

Please share below your thoughts and questions on living out of inspiration versus intention.

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.

How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions. Guaranteed!

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:39:14 +0000

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

Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions last year? … What about the year before? …

If you are like most people, you worked on them through the middle of January and by early February you had forgotten you ever made them. Or, perhaps after several years of failure, you stopped making New Year’s resolutions at all.

Why don’t we do the things that we say we are going to do? Things we really want to do? Things that truly would benefit our lives?

The answer is simple. Our behavior is not the result of our desires or even our commitments. It is the result of our beliefs and conditioning. And if there is a conflict between our beliefs/conditioning and our commitments/desires, the beliefs/conditioning usually will win.

Let me give you a few examples.

I’m going to stop procrastinating

A few years ago I had a friend named Johnny whose problem was that he procrastinated a lot of the time. He almost always left work projects go until the last minute. As a result, he was anxious much of the time and sometimes he would turn projects in late, which resulted in an upset boss.

At some point he decided he must change, so he made a New Year’s resolution to stop procrastinating the next year. Because he was really committed, he did everything he could to insure his success.

He prioritized his activities, assuming that it would help him focus on the most important projects.
He made a schedule that helped him allot time during the month for work on the projects.
He put up reminders in prominent places.
He created rewards to give himself when he finished a project—a special dinner or a new item of clothing.
He asked his friends to support him.

And yet—despite this detailed strategy for keeping his resolution—by early February he called to tell me the problem was as bad as ever.

I put on my “Lefkoe Method Facilitator” hat and asked Johnny what thoughts he had when he was about to do what he knew he should do at work, just before he put it off and did something else instead. He gave me the following list.

What I do might not be good enough.
People might judge my work badly.
I feel uncomfortable when I think about doing the project.

Can you see that these thoughts and feelings were keeping him from acting? That most people with those thoughts and feelings probably would procrastinate, especially with important projects?

After a short discussion we found a number of beliefs that were causing the thoughts and feelings, including these three:

I’m not good enough.
What makes me good enough is having others think well of me.
Mistakes and failure are bad.

These beliefs (and several others) led to the thoughts and feelings that caused Johnny’s procrastination. After I helped him get rid of the beliefs, the procrastination stopped … totally.

If you resolve to stop procrastination, eliminate all of the relevant beliefs and your New Year’s resolution will finally manifest.

I’m going to find a great relationship this year

Here’s another story that will explain why it can be so difficult to stick with our New Year’s resolutions.

Years ago I had a friend, Jennifer, who really wanted a great romantic relationship. In fact, it was all she could talk about. But she either went months at a time without any relationship at all, or she would get into disastrous relationships that didn’t last more than a couple of months and then ended with a lot of upset.

One year she made a New Year’s resolution to create a great guy in the coming year. She made a list of all the qualities she wanted, visualized what he looked like, and imagined spending time with him as he did all the things she imagined this great guy would do.

But after February came and went, she, too, asked if I would put on my professional hat and help her. We quickly identified the following beliefs, among others: I’m not good enough. I’m not loveable. I’m not deserving. Men can’t be trusted. Men are jerks. Relationships don’t work. I’ll never get what I want.

What were the chances of a nurturing long-term romantic relationship with beliefs like these? … Slim to nil. So I helped her eliminate these and a few other beliefs and conditionings.

By June she was in the relationship of her dreams and by the end of the year she was married.

I’m going to lose weight

With about 70% of American adults obese or overweight, the resolution to lose weight is probably a common one.

Unfortunately, the reason people have a difficult time losing weight is the same reason they overeat and gained the weight in the first place.

As I explain in detail in my eBook, The Secret to Ending Overeating For Good, (http://emotionaleatingreport.com) overeating—in other words, eating when you aren’t hungry—is caused both by conditioning and beliefs. And most people’s weight problem is the result of overeating. In other words, if you only ate when you were truly hungry—and not for emotional reasons—and you ate healthy food with a modicum of exercise, you would not gain weight.

Overeaters have conditioned eating as the “drug of choice” whenever certain “triggers” occur, such as being lonely, bored, anxious, feeling unlovable, depressed, stressed, or rejected.

Many also have beliefs like: If I don’t eat the food in front of me now, there won’t be any later. If I can’t eat “bad” foods, I’m missing out. The way to keep food from running my life (like it did my mom’s) is to eat whatever I want to eat.

What are the possibilities of keeping your resolution to lose weight if you have conditionings and beliefs like these? Again, not too good. On the other hand, if you get rid of all the relevant beliefs and conditionings, your overeating will stop naturally and automatically, and losing weight will be relatively easy.

2011 is the year you can achieve all your resolutions

As you make your list of what you resolve to do in 2011, take a look and see if you have any beliefs or conditionings that might be barriers to achieving any of your goals. If so, get rid of them and then notice that, perhaps for the first time, you keep your New Year’s resolutions and you achieve all that you want.

Happy Holidays! May you continue to dissolve the barriers to your “creation’s” happiness and well-being and may you continue to experience yourself as the “creator” you actually are—with nothing missing and anything possible.

Let’s have 2011 the year you make all your dreams come true.

Please share below your thoughts and questions on keeping your New Year‘s resolutions.

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.

How To Be More Effective At Work: TLM Part 4

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 18:41:27 +0000

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

In addition to the seven processes that can help free individuals from their limitations (which I’ve described in the last three blog posts), The Lefkoe Method has two additional processes that were designed specifically for use in organizations.

If you use them in your own firm, you will be more successful. If you use them at a company where you work, you will become a more effective and valuable employee.

The Lefkoe Belief Process-Possibilities

The first process, the Lefkoe Belief Process-Possibilities, was created when I discovered during my years as a management consultant that employees on every level in every organization were sabotaging themselves and their organizations with many beliefs that started with the words: We (I) can’t ….

Almost everyone in every organization—whether it be non-profit, for profit, or governmental—has a number of beliefs about what can’t be done and what must be done. Based on my experience I contend that these beliefs are an organization’s biggest barrier to innovation. In fact, they are probably the single biggest problem organizations face.

“We can’t out-source that job.”
“We can’t find the type of employees we need.”
“I can’t get the support I need.”
“We can’t possibly finish the project as quickly as the customer wants.”
“We can’t afford to do that.”
“That suggestion is crazy. It can’t possibly work.”

Sound familiar? If you work in an organization it is unlikely you get through an entire day without hearing, We (I) can’t …, at least once. And if the right someone (or lots of someones) believes something “can’t be done,” then the chances are slim to nil that it will get done.

Either this type of belief will stop a new initiative cold, or, if the organization manages to get it off the ground, the people with the belief will have a hard time supporting it, which will lead to the belief becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.

When I first discovered the widespread prevalence of this type of belief, I realized that the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) could easily eliminate it. The problem was that it was impractical to train everyone in an organization to use the LBP. It would take much too much time. So I had to revise the Process so that anyone could learn to do it very quickly.

At some point I realized that if you were eliminating a belief whose source was not childhood and that was always the same—namely, something hadn’t worked before—I could create an easy-to-learn-and-use variation of the LBP that only eliminated We (I) can’t … beliefs.

I call this process the Lefkoe Belief Process-Possibilities because when you eliminate a We (I) can’t … belief you create possibilities that literally didn’t exist before. The LBP-P can eliminate a belief in less than five minute and can be taught to groups of people in only an hour or so.

For more details about the LBP-P, including the actual steps of the Process, please visit http://www.mortylefkoe.com/get-rid-of-the-belief-%E2%80%9Ci-can%E2%80%99t-%E2%80%A6%E2%80%9D/.

Changing the culture of an organization

Right after I created the LBP in 1985 my associates and I did a lot of management consulting work. One of the most exciting assignments we had was helping many of the newly-formed telephone companies that had just split off from AT&T to create a new customer-driven culture.

For about a hundred years AT&T had a culture that was focused on internal measurements for improvement. Because the company had a monopoly and customers had no place else to go, it didn’t focus much on what customers wanted. AT&T gave them what it thought they needed. After AT&T split up into a number of “Baby Bells,” each operating company had to change its culture to focus more on customer service.

The Lefkoe Institute was brought in by seven of those companies to work with thousands of their employees. I created a process that had employees in all the workshops realize that what they did on a daily basis made perfect sense given the beliefs they had created about what to do and how to do it. They also came to realize that these beliefs made perfect sense given the environment that existed when the beliefs were formed.

So instead of telling the employees that what they were doing was wrong or that they needed to change, we validated their behavior and their beliefs.

Once they realized the many ways in which the “old environment” had changed, they were able to consciously create new beliefs about their jobs, policies and procedures that were consistent with the new, current environment. And obviously their behavior changed to be consistent with their new beliefs.

We were very successful both in helping change the behavior of employees and the culture in which they operated.

Important organizational distinctions

In addition to the two processes that were developed specifically for organizations, I have made several important distinctions that are very valuable for organizations, such as the distinction between first, second, and third order change.

Here is a short summary of the difference between the three types of change:

First order change is incremental and consists of improving what already is. It is change consistent with existing beliefs.

Second order change is more fundamental and consists of creating a new set of beliefs that make behavior possible 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 change organization is able to easily create new cultures as new environments require.

For examples and more details see my blog post: http://www.mortylefkoe.com/relationship-personal/.

Summary of The Lefkoe Method

In this and the last three blog posts I have provided a summary of the nine processes that comprise The Lefkoe Method and provided links to get additional information about each process.

It should be clear that not only is each process unique in what it does and how it does it, but all of them together as The Lefkoe Method offer a revolutionary approach to freeing us from our limitations and providing us with the freedom to create our lives exactly the way we want them to be.

Please share below any comments you have on the two organizational processes or any other process in The Lefkoe Method.

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This Way To Well-being: TLM Part 3

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:53:29 +0000

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The Lefkoe Occurring Process (LOP) and the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process (LDP) are the two newest processes that constitute The Lefkoe Method (TLM). I’ve mentioned them before in other posts; today I will summarize each of them and describe how each offers a unique benefit not found in any other process in TLM or, to the best of my knowledge, in any psychotherapeutic or personal growth technique. I also will describe the Who Am I Really? (WAIR?) Process, which helps you enter an altered state of consciousness.

The Lefkoe Occurring Process

Our beliefs are the meaning we gave to a series of events in the past, which we now feel is “the truth.” For us, a belief is an accurate description of reality, which gives it the power to influence our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

We also give meaning to reality moment by moment and the meaning we give events determines how reality “occurs” for us. For example, someone you know walks into a crowded room and doesn’t say hello to you. That is a fact. It may occur to you, however, that she doesn’t like you, or that she is being rude, or that she didn’t see you. All of these “occurrings” are possible meanings for her behavior—that exist only in your mind.

But here’s the problem. For most of us the way the world occurs for us is our reality, because we never distinguish between the two. And because the way we think reality “is” determines our thinking, our feelings, the possibilities available for our actions, etc., for most of us most of the time our responses to “reality” are really responses to our occurrings.

Because our emotions are usually the result of our occurrings and not reality itself (because events have no inherent meaning, they usually cannot cause feelings), the ability to dissolve our occurrings enables us to eliminate most negative emotions at will.

Unlike beliefs, which once formed become our reality forever (unless they are eliminated), our occurrings are only the meaning we have given transient events and then disappear either immediately or shortly after the events are gone. As a result current occurrings rarely affect us in the future.

The single best, easiest, and fastest way to control your experience of life is to consistently make a distinction between reality and how reality occurs for you, and then to dissolve the occurring, so you are left with nothing but the facts of reality.

For more details on “occurring,” see a short video I made that visually explains how we create occurrings and how we can dissolve them: http://occurringcourse.com/how-occurring-works/. See also a blog post devoted entirely to this topic: http://www.mortylefkoe.com/create-experience-life/.

Although eliminating beliefs and conditionings can make a profound difference in how you experience your life, you will gain more minute-by-minute control over it using the Lefkoe Occurring Process. (For information about the next course where I teach participants how to use it, see http://www.occurringcourse.com/discover/.)

The Lefkoe De-conditioning Process

This process has the potential to be used in a wide variety of problems, but it was created for and currently is only used for eating problems.

I discovered after years of trying to help people stop their overeating by eliminating beliefs that that approach was insufficient.

I had known all about “classical” conditioning, in which a stimulus is conditioned to produce a behavioral or emotional response. So rejection or making a mistake can be conditioned to produce anxiety. Or being told what to do can be conditioned to produce anger. This type of conditioning was demonstrated by Pavlov’s dogs that were conditioned to salivate by the ringing of a bell. The Lefkoe Stimulus Process can easily de-condition this type of conditioning. But that type of conditioning didn’t seem relevant for overeating, which involves a behavior that seems compulsive.

There is another type of conditioning called “operant” conditioning. This type of conditioning is the result of rewarding or punishing a behavior. As a result you become conditioned to act in a certain way in order to achieve the “reward” or avoid the punishment. This also didn’t seem relevant to the way eating gets conditioned.

So at some point I realized that overeating was largely the result of a different type of conditioning. Here’s how eating gets conditioned: When we have some type of negative feeling—such as anxiety, depression, neediness, and loneliness—and then eat, two things happen: we are distracted for the moment from the negative feeling and we have substituted a positive feeling (eating) for the negative feeling. After experiencing a “pleasurable distraction” (or a comforting or a numbing feeling) many times when we eat, eating gets conditioned and becomes a compulsive reaction whenever the negative emotional “trigger” it was associated with shows up in your life.

Other behaviors could get conditioned the same way, but so far eating is the only compulsive behavior I have found to be conditioned this way.

The Lefkoe De-conditioning Process makes several distinctions that enable eating to be de-conditioned, so that it is no longer an automatic compulsive behavior whenever the trigger appears.

For more details, see an eBook I recently wrote about how overeating is caused by this type of conditioning and how it can be totally stopped using the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process and, in some cases, the Lefkoe Belief Process: http://eatingreport.com

These are my two newest processes and I’m very excited about them. One of them will help people stop overeating for good without using will power. The other will enable you to create your experience of life, minute by minute. Do you know anything else that can do this?

The Lefkoe Method is both practical and spiritual

It wasn’t until several years after I had been using the Lefkoe Belief Process that I realized that it opened the gate to a profoundly spiritual experience of oneself. After a while I created a process—that I now call Who Am I Really? (WAIR?)—that supports the spiritual part of the Lefkoe Belief Process.

WAIR? enables people to distinguish themselves as the creator of their lives. This awareness is not merely a thought process, where you understand that you create your life. It isn’t even merely the experience of creating your life. It is a creative process, where you distinguish yourself as the creator of your life, at which point you know it on a very profound level that goes way beyond understanding or even experience. In this altered state you experience that anything is possible and that nothing is missing.

All the other individual processes that comprise TLM help you change the “creation” you think you are in some way. The WAIR? Process helps you realize that you aren’t merely your creation, you ultimately are the creator of the creation.

All in all, TLM is a profoundly spiritual method to improve your life. It not only helps you in a very practical, day-to-day way, it also helps you distinguish yourself as the creator of your life.

You really have to do the WAIR? Process to get how powerful it is. It is included at the end of the free beliefs at http://recreateyourlife.com and it also is a stand-alone process in all of the streaming video and DVD products we offer at http://recreateyourlife.com/store.

For an entire blog post devoted to a detailed examination of the WAIR? Process, see http://www.mortylefkoe.com/get-into-an-altered-state-of-consciousness-in-minutes/.

Next week’s post will describe the final two processes of The Lefkoe Method.

Please share below any comments you have on the Lefkoe Occurring Process, the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process, and the Who Am I Really? 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.

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.

How Can I Use The Lefkoe Method? Part 1

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 22:10:51 +0000

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Many of you have used the Lefkoe Belief Process and found that permanently getting rid of beliefs has made a profound difference in your life. Did you know that The Lefkoe Method includes eight other processes you can use to make significant changes in your life?

Depending on the problem you are trying to get rid of and what you are trying to accomplish, some of these other processes might be required.

Because recently readers have asked me to describe the difference between each process and explain how each is used, I’ve decided to use my blog posts over the next few weeks to do just that. I’ll provide a short description of each process, explain how it works, and tell you how it can be used to help you get rid of problems you face in your life daily.

This week I’ll discuss the Lefkoe Belief Process and the Lefkoe Stimulus Process. In future weeks I’ll write about the others.

Here is a list of the processes that comprise The Lefkoe Method:

Lefkoe Belief Process
Lefkoe Stimulus Process
Lefkoe Sense Process
Lefkoe Expectation Process
Lefkoe De-conditioning Process
Lefkoe Occurring Process
Lefkoe Belief Process—Possibilities
Lefkoe Belief Process—Organizations
Who am I really?

The Lefkoe Belief Process

The Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP), which I developed in 1975, was the first of the processes and still is the most important. Most of our undesirable behavior and feelings ultimately can be traced to our beliefs, so being able to get rid of beliefs will make the biggest long-term difference in your life.

A belief, as I use the term, is a statement about reality that is the truth for us. It is experienced emotionally as the truth, because it is possible to intellectually disagree with something we believe.

For example, you may believe that I’m not good enough, even though you know intellectually that that is not true. So the way to know you have a belief is to say the words of the belief out loud and then ask yourself: Do the words feel true? Do they resonate even a little bit? Do they feel even a little uncomfortable?

Most of our core beliefs about ourselves, people, and life are formed in the first six years of life as a result of interactions with our parents. Beliefs about other areas of life—such as work, politics, relationships, and aspects of society—usually are formed when we encounter them.

The steps of LBP consist mainly of questions that enable you to discover that something you thought was “the truth,” something you thought you “saw” in the world, is really only “a truth,” that exists only in your mind. When you make that distinction, the belief is transformed into merely one interpretation you gave a meaningless series of events, and the belief disappears.

Typical common negative beliefs include I’m not good enough, I’m not important, I’m powerless, People can’t be trusted, and Life is difficult.

Many day-to-day problems that we face—such as procrastination, selling ourselves short, and trying to impress others—can usually be resolved by eliminating the beliefs that cause them.

The Lefkoe Stimulus Process

Many emotions are caused by beliefs, 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 many adults, however, who experience emotions that appear to not depend on beliefs.

Very often we experience negative feelings in our life on a recurring basis, such as fear, anger, guilt, anxiety, and sadness. We experience these feelings every time specific events or circumstances occur, such as fear 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, for example, does an event that is not inherently fearful produce fear in some people and not in others?

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

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

The classic example of this was an experiment a psychologist 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.

Here is a real life example: Consider someone who experiences fear whenever he is asked to do something. When did he first experience fear associated with being asked to do something? Assume the original source of the fear was a father who always yelled, threatened, and terrified the client as a child. No matter what the client did, the father was not satisfied.

When the client reviews the cause of his feeling of fear, he discovers 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 behavior: The person he depended on for his very survival was withdrawing his love. No love, no care; no care, no survival. That is what caused the fear. Can you see that fear is not inherent in not doing things perfectly or, in fact, any other specific thing you do or do not do?

In order to help people get rid of these emotional problems I developed a new process in 1997 that I call the Lefkoe Stimulus Process (LStimP). It is simpler to use than the LBP and usually takes only five to ten minutes to completely de-condition the stimuli that cause such emotions as fear, anxiety, anger and guilt.

The Lefkoe Stimulus Process works by helping you to realize that initially “being asked to do something” never produced fear. The original cause of the fear was the meaning you attributed to the way you were asked to do something (the anger that accompanied the request), by someone whose survival you depended on (your father). You associated “being asked to do something” with a loss of love, which ultimately you experienced as “a threat to your survival.”

When the association is broken, when you realize that you made this arbitrary association, the events that got associated (being asked to do something) will no longer cause fear. When you consciously make a distinction between what really caused the feeling initially and the events that happened to be associated with it, the associated events (current stimuli for the feeling) will no longer cause the feeling.

It is important to realize that most of our emotional problems—such as anxiety, depression, anger, and sadness—cannot be eliminated totally merely by eliminating beliefs. You also have to use the Lefkoe Stimulus Process.

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 Belief Process and the Lefkoe Stimulus 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.

Don’t ever give up hope

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:01:23 +0000

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For most of my life I didn’t want to be me. In fact, I was so unhappy being me that I wanted to be someone else. When I was in my twenties I wanted to be Fred Astaire, because I liked the light and joyful sense of life he projected when dancing on screen. Later in life I didn’t care who else I was as long as it wasn’t me.

During my twenties and thirties I contemplated suicide, evidence of how utterly miserable I was at that time.

Unless you have personally experienced depression it is hard to imagine how debilitating it is. It is all-encompassing and feels like being in a black hole from which there is no escape. Doing anything at all when you feel so hopeless and helpless is an effort. Sometimes washing the dishes was my major accomplishment of the day.

I was so afraid of being alone that I put pressure on my two former wives to not leave me, as a result of which I lost both of them. Like depression, being alone was more painful than I could bear.

Photo credit: worldislandinfo.com

Why am I telling you about how miserable I was for over half my life? Because so many people today feel the same way. And because none of those feelings are present in my life today.

I no longer want to be anyone else because I am thrilled with who I am and what I do. The depression and neediness disappeared many years ago and never resurfaced, even a little bit. I’ve had a blissful marriage to Shelly for almost 30 years. I live in the “creator” space most of the time, in other words, when I look inside I usually feel that there is nothing missing (although I still have goals, I am not attached to them), anything is possible, and I have no limitations. I rarely give meaning to events and when I do I am able to use the Lefkoe Occurring Process to dissolve the meaning in seconds. In other words, I am totally satisfied with my experience of life and don’t feel the need to change a thing.

Brittany was feeling hopeless

My daughter Brittany was upset the past weekend about an illness that no one has been able to diagnose—a condition that makes her tired, nauseous, and very emotional much of the time. She was starting to feel that it would never be diagnosed and cured, and that she would have to live with it forever.

So I described to her in detail how horrible my life had been for so many years and how it is today, as I’ve just told you.

I had this conversation with Brittany because I wanted her to realize that no matter how bad things might be right now, you can never make absolute predictions about the future. And I’m repeating the essence of my conversation with her to you, because no matter how difficult your life might have been so far, that doesn’t mean it can’t turn out to be exactly how you’ve hoped and dreamed it would be.

Even if no doctor has been able to diagnose Brittany so far, that doesn’t mean we won’t find one tomorrow. And even if all the personal growth courses and workshops haven’t given you the freedom and joy you’ve been seeking thus far, that doesn’t mean that there is nothing out there that ever will.

I’ve talked to a number of people recently who have given up on ever finding a way to get rid of the barriers to a happy and fulfilling life. After 20 or 30 years of sitting through one course after another, reading one book after another, and going to one therapist after another—none of which resulted in a real change—they feel as if nothing is ever going to work. And the despair that comes from concluding nothing will ever help them makes whatever problem they started with feel even worse.

My purpose for this blog post is for people whose perspective on life is: “I’d like to be truly happy but probably never will”—to shift to: “It is possible for my life to work—and if I never give up hope it will.”

Obviously I think The Lefkoe Method is one very effective solution. It worked for me and for tens of thousands of others. But regardless of what method eventually works for you, don’t ever give up hope that someday it will all turn out and you will achieve the happiness you’ve always imagined was possible. Don’t allow frustration to destroy your dreams.

I persevered, never gave up hope, and finally created the life I had hoped was possible … and you can too.

Please forward this to anyone you think it might help.

Please share below any comments you have on having the life you’ve always dreamed of.

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.

Are you a victim?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:12:54 +0000

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We all know people who are “victims”—people who view their lives through the filter: “It’s not my fault. They (or it) did it to me.” When you understand what the feeling of victimization really is, where it comes from, and how it affects people, you will discover it is even more widespread and debilitating than you might think.

The primary source of feeling like a victim is the feeling of powerlessness and, because we don’t like feeling that we are powerless, we tend to blame someone or something for causing that feeling. So we feel that we are a victim of circumstances or other people’s actions and we can’t do anything about it. Being a victim is experiencing yourself at the effect of something outside yourself.

Photo credit: jillallyn

Thus the single most important belief responsible for the feeling of victimization is I’m powerless. Other beliefs that could underlie this feeling include: I’ll never get what I want, People can’t be trusted, and Life is difficult.

Why feeling victimized is so debilitating

The reason feeling victimized is so debilitating is that it undermines your ability to do anything about your situation. If you are having difficulties in any area of your life, such as relationships or money, and you experience yourself as powerful and in control of your life, you can devise a strategy to improve your situation. And if one solution doesn’t work, you can learn from your experience and try again.

But if you have a victim mentality—in other words, if you feel powerless to affect your circumstances—you are likely to feel that the world is “doing it” to you and that there is nothing you can do about it.

That’s why this is one of the most devastating problems you can have: If you have any other problem, but see yourself as responsible for your situation, you have the ability to look for and implement a solution. If you have the problem of feeling victimized by life or other people, you are less likely to look for and implement a solution because you feel you can’t do anything about your situation.

Most victims can be identified by their conversation, which consists of a lot of “woe is me” and “it’s not my fault” language. However, there also is the “stoic” victim. Such people do not complain and keep a “stiff upper lip,” but underneath they experience a sense of victimization. Such people frequently don’t even let themselves know how they are feeling.

So victims are not just people who speak their victimization, but also those who have that experience underneath a veneer of confidence and “Everything’s okay; really it is.”

Typical characteristics of victims

Here are a few other important characteristics of victims:

People who are victims usually don’t see that the only thing in common between all the people and situations they think they have been victimized by is themselves.

Victims usually are people you can’t depend on, because they deny responsibility for their actions. They are quick to blame other people and situations for anything that doesn’t work in their lives.

Victims don’t have resilience, which is the ability to quickly bounce back after being knocked down.

Victims generally are passive.

Victims are usually angry at the people or events they think have “done them wrong,” and underneath the feeling of anger is almost always the feeling of powerlessness.

Successful people are rarely victims. One might be able to be a victim and still make money in rare cases, but usually it would be difficult for victims to be successful. To be successful you need to learn from your mistakes and try again. Victims are, by definition, people who do not acknowledge responsible for their actions and who blame outside forces.

So if you are a victim or know someone else who is, what can you do to help yourself or the other person? Fortunately, the source of this problem is similar to the source of almost every other problem: your beliefs. Reality and other people are not causing you to feel like a victim; your beliefs are. Get rid of the beliefs that cause the problem and the feeling of victimization will disappear for good.

Please share below any comments you have on my thoughts about victimization.

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Can children eliminate beliefs?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 23:08:03 +0000

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I am often asked: Can the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) be used to help children eliminate beliefs?

My answer is that it depends on the child: Is the child able to deal with the abstractions of the process? If the child can, then the LBP should work. One trick is to simplify some of the steps and use language that can be understood by a younger child. I did that when we did our study with incarcerated offenders and the LBP was effective with teens as young as 14 to 15 years old. Since then Shelly has used the LBP with several children 12 or 13 years old, who presented a wide variety of problems including ADD and ADHD.

The very youngest child who was ever successful with the LBP was my daughter Blake when she was only six years old. I am going to summarize my conversation with her at that time because you will see how easy it can be to use the LBP with young children. (By the way, you’ll see from this example how easy it can be to use the LBP with adults when you know the belief and the source of the belief.)

On many occasions, Shelly and I had taken Blake to fairs and shows where there were hundreds of people and she usually enjoyed herself at these events. One Saturday we took her to a school that was having games, face painting, and a lot of other activities for kids. We had been inside only a few minutes when Blake screamed and exclaimed, “I’m scared! I want to leave!”

“What’s wrong?” we asked her.

“I don’t know. I’m just scared. I want to leave,” she repeated.

We tried to find out what was scaring her, but she didn’t know. The closest she could come to an answer was that there were a lot of people there. I reminded her that she had never before been afraid of crowds. What was it about this crowd that was so scary? She didn’t know. When we realized that the fear wasn’t going away, we left.

When we got home I sat down with Blake and asked, “Do you remember that Mommy and Daddy talk about the work we do with people in our sessions? How we help them with things that bother them in their lives?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like me to try to help you figure out what is scaring you? You’ve never been scared of crowds before.”

“Okay,” she said solemnly.

I started to help her identify the belief. Blake named it almost immediately. “Crowds are dangerous.”

“Okay, what happened that gave you that idea?”

She didn’t pause even for a minute. “Remember when we went to the Italian street fair? Remember the lady who burned me with the cigarette?”

I certainly did remember. The fair had been mobbed; we could barely walk. We had been there for only a few minutes when Blake had screamed in pain. A woman had walked by her, swinging a lighted cigarette in her hand, and had hit Blake’s arm with it. The woman then turned around, yelled at Blake, “Watch where you’re going!” and walked away. Fortunately the burn wasn’t bad and we had stayed for another couple of hours.

“So did you decide crowds are dangerous based on your experience at that fair?”

“Yes.”

“I can see why you decided that. It made a lot of sense to conclude that. A lot of people would have said the same thing, honey. Now we’re going to play a little game. What else could explain what happened to you other than what you said? It really could be that crowds are dangerous. But what else would explain what happened?”

She wasn’t sure what I meant, so I said, “For example, that fair was dangerous, but maybe not all other fairs will be dangerous.”

She got into the spirit of the game. I gave one interpretation, then she gave one:

* That woman didn’t care if she hurt you, but other women would.

* People carrying lighted cigarettes can hurt me; people without cigarettes won’t.

* That person wasn’t careful with her cigarette, but most people would be.

* I’ll get hurt at some crowded places, not others.

* The crowd at that fair was dangerous; other crowds wouldn’t be.

* I’ll get hurt at fairs, but not other crowded places.

* People who are not careful with lighted cigarettes are dangerous, not crowds.

Blake was having fun with the alternative interpretations part of the LBP.

“Okay, honey,” I said, “can you see that it made sense for you to conclude when you got burned that crowds are dangerous, but that there are a lot of other explanations for what happened?”

She understood what I was saying. She nodded.

I looked directly into her eyes and asked, “Didn’t it seem, at the fair, right after you got burned, that you saw right in front of you that crowds are dangerous and that you’ll get hurt?”

“Yes, that’s what I saw.”

“Is it clear now, honey, that you didn’t see that, you only imagined that? You did see one woman burn you, but you never saw with your eyes that all crowds are dangerous. Did you?”

“I know what you mean, Daddy, I didn’t see it. I only thought it.”

I had hoped the LBP would work with Blake, but despite her ability to deal with abstractions that she had shown in many conversations we had had previously, I still wasn’t sure she’d be able to do the LBP. But she had. This was the first time I had worked with a really young child and she had used the LBP to eliminate a belief that could have negatively impacted the rest of her life. I was really excited about the possibilities, but first I had to finish with Blake.

“Do you still believe that crowds are dangerous?

“No,” she said, smiling.

“Could you imagine being in a crowd that wasn’t dangerous?”

“Yes, I could, daddy.”

P.S. The next time we went to a fair Blake experienced no fear and had a great time.

Using the LBP with children won’t always work, but you have nothing to lose if you try. And if you succeed, you’ll be saving the child from a lifetime of fear, anxiety, etc.

Please share below any comments you have on using the LBP with children.

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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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Why we have negative emotions … and what to do about them

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:19:27 +0000

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

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

* * *

What is an emotion?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cause of Specific Negative Emotions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How fear occurs as a result of conditioned stimuli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the Stimuli for Anger Get Conditioned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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How to eliminate suffering and get enlightened

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:01:45 +0000

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

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

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

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

What is enlightenment?

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

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

Why we need self-esteem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lefkoe Method has two purposes

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

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

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

An alternative method

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

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

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

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

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Some Thoughts on Manifesting

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:42:23 +0000

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Most of my blog posts present material I have a clear point of view on, such as how beliefs are formed, how they can be eliminated and how they determine our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. I don’t hold these as “the truth,” but as effective and useful “a truths.” A few posts—like the ones I wrote last December on occurring—present some half-formed ideas I am thinking about and trying to work through. This post on some thoughts on manifesting is like that.

Let me start with two ideas I’ve been fascinated about for a few years.

Here is the first idea:

If you asked someone, “Do things exist?” the response would probably be, “Of course things exist! The world is full of things. Doesn’t everyone know that there is physical stuff out there—that reality is tangible and real?”

But what allows any thing—a hand, a chair, or any other object—to exist? One way to answer is to imagine a specific thing—say, a hand. What if the hand expands and keeps expanding until there is nothing in the universe except the hand. What would happen to it? … Really try to imagine this. … You wouldn’t see the hand anymore. But why?

It would disappear because there would be nothing in the universe that was not the hand. This thought exercise illuminates a very basic concept about reality: We live in a dualistic universe. In order for any thing to exist, there must also be not that thing.

Consider this for a moment. Can you see that any physical object is bounded by “not that object”? If an object did not have any borders— that is, if it wasn’t surrounded by “not that object”—it couldn’t be distinguished from everything else. In other words, it wouldn’t exist.

The same principle also applies to nonmaterial concepts. Love and hate, peace and war, strong and weak, beautiful and ugly—these only exist and have unique attributes because they have been distinguished from each other. For example, the state of war is distinguished from peace by the presence of armed conflict. When there is no armed conflict there is peace. But if armed conflict existed throughout the world all the time, and if the alternative (peace) was unimaginable, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish war from any other state. War, as a condition distinct from peace, couldn’t exist.

Now imagine the universe without any distinctions. It’s just an undifferentiated whole. Can you see that there would be nothing? That’s because in order for anything to exist, it must be distinguished from everything else. If no distinction is made between a specific thing and everything else, there is only an undifferentiated everything—which is another way of saying nothing.

Everything, without any distinctions, is the same as nothing.

Physicist Fred Allen Wolf once said that “the world is only a potential and not present without you or me to observe it.” I would suggest that what physical reality really requires is consciousness to make distinctions.

In making distinctions, we use our sensory apparatus (the five senses) as well as our perceptual framework (language, culture, paradigms, and individual beliefs). But the world isn’t really the way you perceive it. It isn’t any way until you perceive it that way—that is, until you distinguish it that way. In fact, you don’t even sense what’s “out there:’ because there’s nothing out there to be sensed. (Nothing, as we’ve seen, however, is the potential for everything to be distinguished.)

An example comes from a Time magazine cover story on human consciousness.

“A baby born with cataracts—an unusual but not unheard-of condition—and left untreated for as little as six months becomes permanently and irrevocably blind. If a sixty-year-old develops cataracts, an operation can restore full sight. The distinctions most of us make unconsciously and at a glance—foreground vs. background, moving vs. stationary, vertical vs. horizontal, and dozens more—are concepts that the brain has learned. It literally has to wire itself, with neurons growing out to touch and communicate with one another in an ever more sophisticated network of connections. And if those connections are not repeatedly stimulated in the first few months of life, when the brain is still in its formative period, they atrophy and die.” (Emphasis added.)

In other words, moving and stationary or vertical and horizontal are not events “out there”: Rather they are “concepts that the brain has learned” (or distinguished) as a result of having a specific sensory apparatus, without which they couldn’t be distinguished. That means they literally wouldn’t exist. (This is only a brief summary of an idea that’s relevant to this post. It could be developed further into a longer post or even a chapter in a book.)

Here is the second idea (this is actually a part of the Who Am I Really? Process).

There are three ways to “know” something:

First, by understanding it. This is conceptual and involves language and explanation. You can understand that you create your life when someone explains it to you or when you read about it.

Second, by experiencing it. You know you are the creator of your life in a totally different way when you experience it.

Third, by bringing something into existence by creating/distinguishing it. When you distinguish yourself as the creator of your life as distinct from the creation, you know you are the creator of your life in this third way, which cannot even be described.

The following are some of my recent thoughts that appear to be related to the two ideas presented above, but I’m not sure yet how to tie all this together. Any suggestions?

Understanding something as true or even experiencing it as true doesn’t make it manifest. These two ways of knowing are ways of knowing what already exists. The third way to know reality—knowing by distinguishing/creating—brings what has been distinguished into existence.

Making a distinction is sufficient to bring something into existence as an idea. But it needs to be experienced and “brought into existence” for the distinction to actually exist in reality. The fact that a distinction does not show up in physical reality immediately does not mean we haven’t created it. What we’ve distinguished really does exist (as an idea); it just isn’t in physical form yet.

Wants and desires are a function of already-existing beliefs. They arise from already-existing beliefs. You look at what exists and want it to be the same or different based on your values, which are a type of belief. The beliefs are from the past and the wants/desires live in the future. You’re either satisfied with what already is or dissatisfied with what already is. Neither generates or creates. Creation takes place in the present. You make a distinction and bring something into existence as a thought/an idea.

The very act of making a distinction brings it into existence mentally, that thought will then manifest when we act in the present consistently with it.

Behavior can exist in three totally different realms: (1) figuring out how to solve existing problems to reach a goal (focusing on the past), (2) creating a strategy to reach a goal (focusing on the future), or (3) taking advantage of opportunities as they arise consistently with a future that’s already been created/distinguished in the mind (focusing on the present).

How am I using these ideas in my own life? I created/distinguished 5 million people using The Lefkoe Method to eliminate at least one limiting belief by December 31, 2012. At the moment, I have no idea how to manifest 5 million users in just two and a half years. I am doing whatever seems appropriate to manifest that “creation” as the opportunities arise: writing weekly blog posts, writing guest posts, creating a new course to teach people how to dissolve how the world occurs for us, supporting research on the effectiveness of The Lefkoe Method—especially on stress, joint venture mailings, using Twitter and Facebook, etc. I expect that additional opportunities to reach my goal will emerge over time and what currently exists only in my mind will manifest in the world when the time comes.

Do you have any suggestions or comments on these thoughts on manifesting?

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How to get rid of your fears

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:48:26 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Techniques That Didn’t Work For You

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

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

Why Most Approaches To Eliminating Fear Don’t Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Modification Of This Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Sum Up

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

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

Now I Have Another Question For You

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

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

What could they possibly have been thinking?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 04 May 2010 22:54:58 +0000

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There was a time in America when some people were treated as property, forced to do whatever other people wanted, abused without any ability to respond, and unable to obtain their freedom. Such behavior was legal and considered appropriate by the people practicing it.

When we look at the people who exhibited that behavior we think with repulsion, “What could they possibly have been thinking?”

I’m not referring to slavery 150 years ago. I’m referring to the abuse heaped upon millions of children daily by well-meaning parents who don’t realize the long-term damage being done by spanking and other forms of punishment.

Corporal Punishment Doesn’t Work

Research has shown that corporal (physical) punishment not only doesn’t stop the behavior it was intended to stop, it produces a host of negative consequences. These studies have linked corporal punishment to adverse physical, psychological and educational outcomes.

Researcher Elizabeth Gershoff, Ph.D., in a 2002 meta-analytic study that combined 60 years of research on corporal punishment, found that the only positive outcome of corporal punishment was immediate compliance; however, corporal punishment was associated with less long-term compliance. Corporal punishment was linked with nine other negative outcomes, including increased rates of aggression, delinquency, mental health problems, problems in relationships with their parents, and likelihood of being physically abused.

Time recently described a new study published in Pediatrics that confirms the results of many earlier studies, “As five-year-olds, the children who had been spanked were more likely than the non-spanked to be defiant, demand immediate satisfaction of their wants and needs, become frustrated easily, have temper tantrums and lash out physically against other people or animals.” (Emphasis added.)

We’ve discovered from our work with over 13,000 clients that most self-esteem beliefs are formed from interactions with parents during the first six years of life. Spanking produces the dysfunctional behavior described in the studies quoted above because it leads to such beliefs as: I’m powerless. I’m bad. I deserve to be punished. There’s something wrong with me. The way to be safe is to have power over others. Violence is an acceptable way to handle disagreements. The way to keep from being punished is to not get caught. I’m not good enough.

Despite all the evidence showing the negative consequences of spanking, many people still argue that it is a useful and appropriate tool for parents. One such person is Dr. James Dobson, a psychologist who Time called “the nation’s most influential evangelical leader.” He argues "[P]ain is a marvelous purifier. . . It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely." (Emphasis added.) (From his book, Dare to Discipline, pages 6 and 7.)

Answering the question: “I have spanked my children for their disobedience, and it didn’t seem to help. Does this approach fail with some children?”, Dobson replied:

“The spanking may be too gentle. If it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t motivate a child to avoid the consequence next time. A slap with the hand on the bottom of a multi-diapered thirty-month-old is not a deterrent to anything. Be sure the child gets the message — while being careful not to go too far.” (Emphasis added.) (Complete Marriage and Family Home Reference Guide)

Now you may be thinking, I don’t spank my child and I don’t know any parents who do; it isn’t really that common anymore. In fact, it is a lot more common than you might imagine. According to the Center for Effective Discipline, in the 2006-2007 school year, 223,190 school children in the U.S. were subjected to physical punishment. A recent survey in the UK showed that seven out of 10 parents used corporal punishment on their children.

Yelling Also Can Be Abusive

But that’s only half the story. A lot of people who would never physically abuse their children abuse them emotionally on a regular basis. Such people can grasp the brutality of hitting a defenseless child, but think nothing of screaming at their child, uttering such common phrases as: “What’s wrong with you?” “Are you stupid?” “How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t you understand English?” “If you were a good child you’d obey me.”

Our work with clients also has showed us that such emotional abuse often leads to as many negative beliefs about ourselves as physical abuse, including many of the same beliefs that spanking produces, plus I’m not capable, I’m not competent. Mistakes are bad. I’m not loveable. I’m not worthy. I’m inadequate.

There’s an important distinction to be made here: Physical and emotional abuse, as painful as it might be in the moment, has no long-term consequences. But the abuse inevitably leads children to form negative beliefs about themselves and life, that in turn lead to a wide variety of behavioral and emotional problems for the rest of their lives. (Thousands of clients have stopped their chronic anxiety, eating disorders, needing the approval of others, lack of confidence, etc. by eliminating the childhood beliefs that cause such debilitating problems.)

Why do we hit or yell at our children? The answer most parents probably would give is “Nothing else seems to get my children to listen.” Would you hit or yell at your friends who frustrated you because they wouldn’t listen to your advice? And if that’s not appropriate, what makes it okay to do it to defenseless children?

Shouldn’t Children Be Disciplined If They Don’t Obey?

Think of a time when you were disciplined by your parents. … Did you think: I’ll never do that again, or did you think: I’ll make sure I never get caught doing that again. … Did you learn anything from the punishment other than to make sure you don’t get caught? … Did it instill a moral sense of right and wrong and the desire to do what’s right, or were you just angry with your parents? …

Research has shown that spanking and browbeating sometimes can work to produce immediately compliance, but there is no learning involved. If they really worked to permanently change behavior you’d only have to use them once or perhaps a few times. It’s weird to me that parents justify hitting and yelling as a way to get their children to listen, and then keep doing it over and over because their children don’t listen! That reminds me of the old saying: Insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over expecting to get a different result.

Do We Really “Own” Our Children?

Many parents feel they are legally and morally justified in forcing their children to do whatever they arbitrarily decide they want their children to do, just because they are the parents. They hate the question “why?” because they usually don’t have an answer. If their children disobey, it’s okay for them to punish their children until they “cry.” Their justification: “How can we possibly get our kids to do what we want if we can’t spank them or yell at them?”

If a master’s absolute dominion over his slaves was justified by the argument that the slaves were “owned” by their masters, isn’t that the implicit argument that justifies punishing children? (Obviously, parents don’t consciously think that about their children, but think about it for a moment, isn’t that the implicit assumption out of which most parents operate? Don’t they think: “Who are you to tell me how to parent? They are ‘my’ children.”)

If we ever are going to raise a generation of children who don’t have the negative beliefs and day-to-day problems so many of us have today, the first thing we are going to have to do is realize that physical and even emotional abuse results in lasting damage. Not the actual abuse itself, which is over in a few minutes. But the meaning children give that abuse results in crippling beliefs that stay with them and cause them suffering for the rest of their lives.

This post is not meant to make parents feel guilty who didn’t realize the consequences of their behavior or who just don’t have any effective parenting skills. It is meant to destroy, once and for all, the idea that parents “own” their children and have the right to spank or scream at them for disobeying.

Please help get this post into the hands of as many parents as possible. Let’s do whatever we can to hasten the day when everyone looks back at these early 21^st century parenting practices in America and says: “What could they possibly have been thinking?”

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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 can I help you?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:04:09 +0000

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People like you and I can make profound and lasting changes in our lives, if we have the right knowledge and support. To insure that you have ready access to that knowledge and support I’ve created a Facebook Page that is dedicated to providing them. It has been created for people committed to improving the quality of their lives …

who know that the “good life” requires constant growth …

who aren’t satisfied with a life of “here’s how it happened to turn out”…

who are always asking “what if …?” and “why not …?”…

who want to free themselves from their self-imposed limitations …

who believe that true satisfaction ultimately comes from contributing to others …

who are committed to, as one person said on my blog, “living the best life possible.”

Do you see yourself here?

If your answer is “yes,” if this message resonates inside you, I’m here to tell you that this site was created just for you. You can make lasting and dramatic changes in your life even if the methods you’ve tried before didn’t work for you. Together we can make it happen.

To join myself and hundreds of others on this journey “become a fan.”

Many of us know intellectually that we are spiritual beings living day to day as human beings. But most of us don’t experience and act on that knowledge a lot of the time. We forget who we really are. We act as if we are only a “creation,” when really we are the “creator” of that creation. It is possible to fully experience who we really are when we do the “Who Am I Really?” Process. In that state we experience anything is possible and that we have no limitations.

Use the WAIR? Process and have this experience for yourself if you haven’t already. You can find it at the end of the free belief-elimination process at http://recreateyourlife.com/free or as a separate downloadable program in any of our packages of beliefs and conditionings.

At our Facebook site (“become a fan”) we will remind you who you really are and give you the tools to be able to easily experience who you really are.

All of us need two things:

1. the ability to free ourselves from our self-imposed limitations so we can live a more stress-free and satisfying life and

2. the ability to regularly get in touch with the energy/consciousness/creator we really are.

We will provide you with tools to do both.

Use this site to ask your own questions and answer the questions of others. What has helped you and what has disappointed you? Books, workshops, CDs, DVDs, personal growth gurus. Let’s create a site that will support all of us who really want to improve the quality of our lives.

How can we collaborate, cooperate, create what we want and need, explore and even enjoy ourselves?

The Internet now makes conversations possible that weren’t possible before. Let’s learn from each other. We no longer have to associate primarily with people in our neighborhoods, schools, or place of business. Now we can find people with similar interests all over the world. We’ve had customers in over 45 countries, all with a similar goal: to eliminate the barriers that keep them from being able to do what they’ve always wanted to do and live the live they’ve always wanted to live.

We at Lefkoe Institute see our job as supporting such people. We’ve developed The Lefkoe Method that has proven itself repeatedly to make profound improvements in people’s lives. Our mission is sharing it with the world, in order to help people free themselves from their internal limitations, so they can recreate their lives.

Moreover, the principles underlying the The Lefkoe Method explain many things about human behavior that weren’t clearly understood before. That knowledge, which we are committed to sharing with you, enables you to better understand yourself and others.

Tell me what you want and need and we’ll do our best to provide it. Share about your own journey. Tell me what general topics you want covered and I’ll write about them in my weekly blog posts (which you can listen to as a podcast). I’ll answer your specific personal questions on the Facebook/Recreate Your Life fan page.

Click here to “become a fan.”

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How to control anger

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:21:35 +0000

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The first time I really allowed myself to experience my anger I fainted.

I was about 36 and had successfully suppressed my anger since childhood. And there I was in a group therapy session, hitting a mat with a stick with foam wrapped around it, screaming: “Mom, I’m really angry at you.” When I started the exercise I was only mouthing empty words, but then at some point the words became real and the anger surfaced. It terrified me so much that I literally passed out on the mat.

I fainted the next couple of times I tried that exercise, but eventually I was able to experience anger toward my mother that I had never allowed myself to experience. And I was able to remain in an upright position.

Although there probably aren’t many people who first experienced their anger in exactly the same way I did, there are millions who are terrified of experiencing their own anger or being in the presence of the anger of others. Many people get in touch with that anger in therapy or some personal growth course, and millions never do.

In addition to the fact that suppressing your anger is suppressing a part of yourself—in other words, having a part of you be unknown to you—suppressed anger has been implicated in serious illnesses, especially heart diseases.

So if you want to discover why our anger is so scary that we need to hide it, even from ourselves, and if we want to be able to experience anger without fear, read on and let me explain how we can do that.

The Primary Source of Our Fear

The primary source of our fear of anger is three specific beliefs and two conditionings. The beliefs are: Confrontation is dangerous, If I’m angry I’ll lose control, and Anger is dangerous. And the conditionings are: fear associated with anger and fear associated with confrontation. There can be a several others relevant beliefs and conditionings, but it is my experience that when these five have been eliminated, most of the fear we have of our own anger and the anger of others will be gone.

The source of these five beliefs and conditionings is almost always a childhood where one or both parents frequently displayed extreme anger. (I’ll explain why some people frequently express anger in a minute.) If we are terrified by the anger of our parents as a child, the typical reaction is the five beliefs and conditionings I listed.

The group therapy I described above helped me get in touch with my anger and allowed me to experience it instead of suppress it so totally that I didn’t even know I was feeling it. But my fear of anger did not disappear totally until I eliminated the five beliefs and conditionings several years later.

Now what about people who aren’t afraid of anger, but who themselves are angry a lot and express that anger as verbal or physical abuse? What is the source of that?

People Who Get Angry Easily

Kids want affection, attention, and acknowledgment. When they repeatedly can’t get what they want, they are likely to feel powerless. Also, frequently being told: “Just do it because I said so” can produce the same feeling. This leads to the belief I’m powerless.

This is a basic self-esteem belief that makes us feel out of control and insecure, because if we are powerless then we don’t have the ability to do what we think needs to be done. In other words, on a subconscious level we know our survival is always at stake.

When we form such a belief as a child we need to find some way to deal with the ever-present anxiety it produces. As I explained in a blog post last year (http://www.mortylefkoe.com/how-do-beliefs-produce-%E2%80%9Cdriven%E2%80%9D-compulsive-behavior/), when we form a negative self-esteem belief as a child we need to develop some strategy to deal with it. For example, if we conclude I’m not good enough or important, the most common survival strategy is the belief: What makes me good enough and important is having people think well of me.

And the most frequently-formed survival strategy when one concludes I’m powerless is, The way to be in control is to have everything be exactly the way I want it to be.

Think about this for a moment. Imagine you needed to have everything be exactly the way you wanted in order to feel in control. And if things weren’t exactly the way you wanted them to be—or if someone didn’t listen to you—you would feel powerless, which would lead to a profound anxiety. What would happen when someone or something kept you from having things the way you wanted them to be?

You’d feel lots of anger, probably rage. You would be angry at whomever or whatever you feel is making you feel powerless. And if it’s a child or spouse, the rage can easily turn into verbal and/or physical abuse. (This explains people like O.J. Simpson.)

(If you form the belief I’m powerless and don’t ever form the survival strategy belief, instead of exploding in anger you are likely to be a typical “victim.” You will always be talking about how people and events are “doing it to me” and you will allow people to take advantage of you.)

Based on over 25 years of experience I am now fairly certain that underneath all anger is a sense of powerlessness, because if you could do something about the situation you wouldn’t feel angry. And if the two beliefs I mentioned above were eliminated, a large part of one’s anger would be dissipated.

It’s amazing to think that merely getting rid of a few beliefs and conditionings could minimize one of the major sources of heart disease and getting rid of a few more could halt the epidemic of child and spouse abuse. Just one more example of the power of beliefs in our lives.

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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?

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).

How building confidence improves your life

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.

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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Make Your Arguments a Thing of the Past

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:20:15 +0000

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Did I ever tell you about the time I gave myself an award for “‘Getting Off It’ the Fastest”?

Well, I’m going to tell you right now because I think it will make a profound difference in your relationships with people, especially your loved ones.

When I married Shelly almost 29 years ago I was a mess. I had just been divorced for a second time and was getting depressed frequently. When we argued, which happened frequently, my way of coping with upset was to withdraw … for a couple of days! Shelly, on the other hand, would “get off it” (let go of the upset) in an hour or so and then wonder why I was reacting to something that had ended hours or even days before.

As I used The Lefkoe Method (TLM) to eliminate beliefs and conditionings, the time it took me to let go of my upset decreased until, like Shelly, I could get off it in an hour or so after the argument was over.

At some point we created a friendly competition to see who could get off it first, in other words, who could let go of the upset totally and be back in relationship with the other person first. I ultimately acquired the ability to do that during an argument (as opposed to after it was over) and being able to stop right in the middle of it and just smile and say: “I’m sorry that whatever I am doing is upsetting you. Is there anything I can do to resolve this? I love you.”

Here’s what’s important about what I was doing. I didn’t say these words to placate Shelly or use extreme will power while still being upset. I actually was able to stop the upset and then say words that were true for me.

How did I learn to do that? I started asking myself what meaning I was giving Shelly’s behavior and comments. And then I used two steps of the Lefkoe Belief Process to get rid of that meaning.

First I figured out two or three other meanings for whatever Shelly had done or said, other than the one I have given it. If it had other valid meanings, the one I had couldn’t be “the truth.” Then I asked myself if I could literally “see” the meaning I had given her actions and statements. Obviously I never could “see” the meaning I had given.

So I realized the meaning existed only in my mind. What she was doing and saying had no inherent meaning. The only meaning was the one I had given it.

As you know if you’ve eliminated at least one belief using the Lefkoe Belief Process, events that have no meaning can’t make us feel anything. So the upset that I thought Shelly had “caused” was, in fact, caused by the meaning I had given what Shelly did and said. When that become real, the upset literally disappeared.

So how did I get the award? I created the reward myself and printed it out after a very special day. She had gotten angry at something I had said and done, and before I ever reacted to her, I asked myself: What does Shelly’s reaction to me really mean? When I answered, nothing, I had no reaction to her anger at all. None. And then I said what I had been saying when I had gotten off it during an argument (but his time it was before the argument ever started), “I can see how you could get upset by what I did and said. And if you are angry, that’s okay. And I love you.” And I said it with a smile.

It’s very hard to argue with someone who is not arguing back. She calmed down in a matter of minutes. Later that day I asked Shelly to give me the award I had created for getting off it the fastest ever … a time that could never be beaten … because I never got on it to begin with.

Remember, events have no inherent meaning, so nothing your loved one (or anyone else) does can upset you or make you angry. (If this isn’t real for you, eliminate a couple of limiting beliefs without charge at http://recreateyourlife.com and it will become real). What produces the upset or anger is the meaning you make up to explain why the other person did what they did.

For example, if your partner doesn’t do something you asked her to do and then you give the event the meaning that you can’t get what you want, you will get angry. If you give the event the meaning that your partner doesn’t care about what you want, you will be hurt or upset. If you say that your partner’s behavior could have many different meanings and, in fact, has no inherent meaning, you will feel nothing. You probably will just calmly do it yourself or ask your partner again if she will do it.

And that is something you can learn to do with practice (and, obviously, the more beliefs and conditionings you eliminate, the easier it is to do).

I haven’t always been able to do that since that day, but I do most of the time with Shelly and I even learned how to do it with my daughter Brittany when she was 14 (she’s now 21 and in college).

I had always had a very close relationship with Brittany. She would tell me what she was thinking and feeling quite often. I usually visited Brittany after she came home from school and asked her how her day went and we had a nice chat. When she reached 13-14 years old, she changed. I joke that she was captured by aliens who left one of their own in her place, because my daughter couldn’t not possibly have acted the way my daughter acted between the ages of 13 and 18-19. (In fact this is a natural part of a child’s development.)

At any rate, by the time she was a freshman in high school she had started getting angry at me frequently, telling me I was annoying (and worse), saying she didn’t feel like talking, and asking me to leave her room.

Although I would comply, I would leave upset. Why upset? Because the meaning I was giving her behavior was she was ruining our relationship (which was very important to me), that she was angry with me, that I couldn’t talk to her any more, etc. If that’s what her behavior meant, that was upsetting to me.

I asked myself, what else could it mean? She was individuating, as she should be doing. She had a problem with one of her teachers. Her hormones were raging. She had some difficulties with friends during the day. Etc. Did I ever “see” that something fundamental had happened to “ruin” our relationship? That I wouldn’t ever be able to talk to her the way we had in the past? No, I didn’t see that. I only saw her behavior, which could have many different meanings other than the one I had given it.

So one day, as a result of doing the type of thinking I just described, I didn’t get upset. I merely got up and left the room without saying a word. And after I left the room and closed her door, I said: “Honey, I hear a daughter who loves her dad very much and who’s probably having a hard day. Sorry about that. I love you too sweetheart.”

As I walked away I heard a shoe bounce off the door. Ten minutes later she came out of her room, threw her arms around me, kissed me, and apologized for being shitty.

She acted that badly and worse hundreds of times over the next 4-5 years but for the most part I was able to react without reacting. And it led to an incredibly close bond being formed between us. She knew I loved her unconditionally and would always be there for her because I didn’t withdraw my love when she treated me badly.

It probably will take practice to give a different meaning to someone else’s behavior, but when you do, arguments will become a thing of the past. Relationships will improve dramatically. And the quality of your life will skyrocket. And you’ll be able to create your own “Get off it the fastest” award.

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. 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.

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

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

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

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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.

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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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.

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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Do we need to create new beliefs?

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:59:12 +0000

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“The Lefkoe Method is very effective at eliminating negative beliefs. But why don’t you replace them with positive beliefs?”

This is a very common question so I decided to devote this week’s post to answering it.

For many years we did attempt to “install” positive beliefs—the opposite of the “negative” belief that was eliminated—for example, I am good enough for I’m not good enough and relationships do work for relationships don’t work.

Although the new belief felt true at the moment for most clients, it usually didn’t feel true when we checked a week or two later. In other words, despite using several different methods to install the new beliefs, it usually didn’t work.

Is it Possible to Consciously Create New Beliefs?

Here’s why I think it is very difficult to have someone consciously create a new belief and then really believe it. A belief is the meaning we have given meaningless events in reality. When we do that it seems (for a visual person) that we can actually see that meaning in the world. It is the truth. You aren’t trying to convince yourself that the meaning is true; it is true for you. For a kinesthetic person, once you give a meaning to events, those events make you feel that meaning every time the events occur. Again, you aren’t trying to feel something; you can’t help but feel it.

This is the automatic process that occurs when you initially create a belief unconsciously. But it is very different when you consciously say the words: I am good enough or relationships do work—and hope that you will really believe the words you’ve uttered. You are saying it more like an affirmation, as something you want to be true, rather than as something you think you can see in the world (which would mean it must be true). Even looking at recent events that could validate the new belief wasn’t consistently effective.

We also tried having clients create the new positive belief after they had gotten into the “creator” space (after using the Who Am I Really? Process). I never kept records, but I’m not sure that this worked much better.

You Don’t Need “Positive” Beliefs

I never looked for additional techniques that might enable people to get the new beliefs to “stick” because I decided early on that it was more important for people to realize they were the creator of their lives, than they were a “healthier or better creation.”

Let me explain. I commonly use the words “negative” and “limiting” as descriptions of certain beliefs. In fact, however, beliefs aren’t negative or positive they are neutral. They result in certain feelings and behavior. If you like what they produce, you could say the beliefs are “positive,” but only because you arbitrarily like their manifestation.

Moreover, all beliefs are limiting by their very nature. You are what you believe you are (for you) and anything else is absolutely not true (not possible). Your beliefs about people and life also create boxes; what’s outside the boxes literally does not exist for you. (If you believe relationships always work or never work, you will interpret all relationships through that filter and no matter what you see couples do or don’t do, you will interpret it consistently with your belief. For you, relationships inconsistent with your beliefs cannot exist.)

Live As The Creator, Not a “Better” Creation

I concluded that it was more important to live as the creator of your life (as the sculptor) rather than as any specific creation (as a specific piece of sculpture). In the altered state of consciousness produced by the Who Am I Really? Process, you have no limitations and anything is possible.

So even if it were possible to install a new belief, I don’t think it would be particularly useful. If you have used the WAIR? Process (which is attached at the end of the free belief-elimination processes and is available in all of our belief-elimination programs), you know that it feels as if anything is possible and that you have no limitations. Next time you get in that space, ask yourself if the opposite of the beliefs you’ve eliminated feels true for you. In that space they will, whether you experience them as true in day-to-day life or not. In that altered state, you feel whole, complete, and okay just the way you are. You feel good enough, important, and loveable.

My advice to those of you who are interested in forming positive beliefs, use the WAIR? Process daily. Get into an altered state every day. And it won’t be long before it gets easy to have that experience of yourself even when you aren’t using the WAIR? Process. Wouldn’t you rather experience yourself as the creator of your life than as a “better” creation?

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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How Relationships Are Affected By Beliefs

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:37:19 +0000

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“Why don’t you have a belief-elimination package that will help me get or improve my relationship?” we are asked regularly. Most of the eight packages we offer will significantly improve your sense of yourself, which obviously will help you improve your relationships, but none of the existing packages deals specifically with relationships.

We aren’t holding out on you. If we could create such a package, we would. But let me explain why it is so difficult to create a relationship package (at least given our ability to create pre-recorded belief-elimination packages right now).

The programs we currently have—such as procrastination, worrying what people think of you, lack of self-confidence, and stress—are caused by roughly the same beliefs for everyone. Each problem is very specific and the beliefs that cause it are the same for about 90% of the people with the problem.

A relationship problem, however, can be different for different people. For example, you can be shy and afraid to approach someone for a date, or if approached feel uncomfortable about talking to the person approaching you.

Or you can have a problem initiating a conversation or keeping one going when on a date. Or once you are in a relationship you can sabotage it. Or stay in a bad one despite it not working. Or leave as soon as it gets difficult and never really trying to make it work. Unfortunately, there are numerous ways you can screw up a relationship.

As a result we would need at least 10 different relationship packages, each with different relationship beliefs (anywhere from 5-20). And some beliefs would show up in several different programs and some would be unique to each program.

Take a look at just some of the beliefs that could negatively affect relationships that you might have (in addition to the negative self-esteem beliefs that underlie almost any relationship problem) to get a sense of what I mean. I’ve listed over 30 and there are even more that show up from time to time.

Men/women can’t be trusted.

Men/women are unfeeling/controlling/unreliable/unpredictable/emotionally unavailable/always cheat on their partner/etc.)

Relationships are difficult/don’t last/don’t work/are suffocating/etc.

The type of man/woman I would want wouldn’t want me.

I’m unattractive.

I’m too heavy.

Men don’t want heavy women.

I’m not what men/women want.

I have to be thin to have a man want me.

I’ll never get what I want.

Men have all the power.

There are no good men out there; they’re all taken.

Women/men are evil.

Men/women are selfish.

If I don’t take care of myself no one else will.

The way to survive is to always be in control.

The way to have power is to control and dominate.

Nothing good lasts.

If I get into a relationship, I’ll be abandoned/smothered.

To be in a relationship I have to sacrifice myself/what I want.

What makes me good enough is working hard/achieving/being successful/having a lot of money. (These beliefs will keep you at the office and away from your partner.)

Anger is dangerous.

Confrontation is dangerous.

It’s dangerous to express my feelings.

Any man/woman who would want me, I wouldn’t want.

It is highly unlikely that anyone would hold all these beliefs, but depending on which ones you do hold, different relationship problems would show up.

As I mentioned earlier, our negative self-esteem beliefs also inhibit nurturing long-term relationships. If you think, I’m not lovable/good enough/worthy, you are unlikely to think that others could find you lovable/good enough/worthy. And what if you believe Life is difficult or I’ll never get what I want? Or, No one is interested in what I have to say, I don’t matter, or What I want/think/feel doesn’t matter?

The inability to form a nurturing and lasting relationship and the inability to make an existing relationship work are the result of beliefs, just like any other problem. But because there are so many difficult types of relationship problems, we can’t (at least at present) offer an on-line or DVD program. In our one-on-one phone or Skype sessions we are able to pinpoint the exact nature of your relationship issue and then help you identify and eliminate the specific beliefs causing that problem.

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 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 to this page.

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.

What Makes The Lefkoe Method Unique

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:01:42 +0000

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

Last week I sent an email to my entire mailing list asking you for feedback about what makes our work unique. Specifically I asked you: “How have we helped you in a way no one else has? What have we done for you that other programs may have overlooked?”

Because I think our work is unique I wanted to find out if you agreed. I also wanted to use your words to describe The Lefkoe Method in the future.

I promised to read every comment and respond to your answers in a future blog post. Thank you for the avalanche of responses. I never thought so many of you would respond. Here is a very small sample of what you said along with my response:

“I especially like how simple and powerfully you put the viewer in a ‘logic box’ that can only lead him/her to one conclusion: that he/she is ultimately responsible and powerful in their creation of beliefs. The most effective thing I’ve seen in studying positive motivation and success theories so far. Such a breakthrough that I shall continue to recommend to others…. You rock.”

“Found your program unique in the sense it simplifies the approach to eliminate limited or dis-empowering beliefs. We realize that beliefs are our choices and can be changed to make them more empowering. Thanks for your innovative communication style.”

“There is plenty of literature and videos on the Law of Attraction but only a few of them address the issue of your subconscious filtering/altering the thoughts you generate. They come to the point of saying – so beware of what your subconscious beliefs are. Period. I’ve come across only one system that addresses the resolution of those beliefs in a ‘no-gimmics’ kinda way. And that’s the Lefkoe method. Mankind thanks you.”

“Then you said, somewhere, that ‘Anything only has meaning when we give it meaning.’ A searchlight blasted on in my soul. I had been trying to say that my entire professional career. But it was your words that put it right, that is, accurately, for me. Again, I say you have helped me immensely. Thank you.”

“Morty, thanks to you I know the power of beliefs and how they impact every word we say and every action we take. When we have mostly positive beliefs about life, success & what not, then life becomes like a harmonious play where we can just step into our greatness with ease and joy. I’ll never underestimate the power of beliefs again.”

“Morty, I think the big difference is that your process goes one or two critically important steps further than any other form of therapy. The first is that you don’t stop at simply remembering where a belief or limitation came from (childhood) but you lead the client to take complete ownership of their belief so that they can stop reenacting that belief in their life and they can stop blaming the parent (or anyone else) and as a result, there is an experience of freedom and great relief. The other critically important step is recognizing that you are the creator of your life and therefore, are the creator. This leaves the client totally empowered to self-coach when other survival patterns show up later on.”

“1. You care. Even though it is an ‘artificial’ program and I am not directly meeting you in person I sense and feel your caring and personal touch. …

2. You believe. …

3. You are Honest and have a higher sense of integrity. …

4. You are open to both negative and positive feedback and give a lifetime money back guarantee.”

“First of all, thank you for creating this process! … What, for me, makes your approach unique and special from the methods all those other good folks use to transform limiting beliefs, is this:

(1) Your method is FUN and EASY to do! Almost like going along with an episode of one’s favorite cartoon, and participating in it!

(2) Your method is COMPLETE, what in science is called necessary and sufficient: it is what you must do, and all you have to do. …

(3) Your method contains THREE necessary elements: understanding, experience, and the all important FELT-SHIFT.

(4) Your method is DEEP: only when the approach is deep enough can you get at the root cause. Only then can change be permanent and can one achieve true knowing, Gnosis. …”

“The thing you have delivered that no one else before ever had to me was permanency of transformation. All the other systems, the ones that worked, involved something that you had to do over and over without slipping, maybe for the rest of one’s life. Now, the only reason I’m using The Lefkoe Method over and over again is that I keep discovering new beliefs to eliminate – and each time leaves me stronger and more free.”

“Most importantly I was given a practical tool on how to bust certain beliefs. No other personal development resource has given me such a tool. I use the Lefkoe Method daily.”

“No other system, method or approach has ever really worked despite many years of attending to this knotty issue of; ‘how to effectively and permanently resolve unwanted beliefs?’ Your process works by taking a hidden subconscious issue and bringing it present into the consciousness of the individual in such a smooth and delightful way it is undeniable and therefore quite real! … Clarity is regained, energy is released and stuck attention is freed up. Energy abounds and happiness is restored. Truly this is one of the most important breakthroughs in mental technology ever innovated – my fondest hope is that the whole world will avail itself of this magnificent discovery!”

“You put things very simply and in a visual way. The almost child-like simplicity of the videos is very appealing and memorable. … You have consistently asked for feedback. You have not pressurised me to buy your products, which is always off-putting.”

“You’ve given me another view of things Morty. I like the logic and re framing of your arguments. I’ve gone through the free belief busting you’ve published and I look forward to experiencing more when I buy the whole program.”

“I just had no real comprehension how powerful and limiting beliefs can be and more importantly, some effective processes to use to get past them. Now that I’m aware of them, I am constantly asking ‘What is the belief behind this behaviour?’ – with coachees, my kids, my partner, my parents and myself. Your process has assisted me greatly in finding more effective solutions. Your work is so enlightening.”

I am thrilled that so many of you recognize my deep commitment to make a real difference in your lives and that you have gotten so much value from my programs. My life was so difficult for so many years that when I created the Lefkoe Belief Process (the first of the many processes that now make up The Lefkoe Method) I couldn’t wait to make it available to others so that they would have the same tools I had to fix up their lives.

And I am doubly thrilled that The Lefkoe Method is making such a profound difference in so many lives. Over 100,000 people visited our free belief site in its first year of operation, with about 35,000 signing up to eliminate at least one belief free.

Our goal at the Lefkoe Institute is to have at least 500,000 visit our site by the end of 2010, with at least 200,000 eliminating at least one belief and experiencing themselves as the creator of their lives. That would be the best Christmas present I could possibly have a year from now.

Have a very happy Thanksgiving (if you are in a part of the world that celebrates it).

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.

An Effective Health Care System Requires New Beliefs

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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Your Behavior As Parents Determines Your Children’s Future Happiness

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:55:07 +0000

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

What parents do and don’t do, say and don’t say, provide their children with the experiences that their children interpret into beliefs. Those beliefs, in turn, then determine their behavior and emotions and, ultimately, their lives for better or for worse.

Most parents at this point respond: “I’ve never thought about my children’s beliefs before. Isn’t our job as parents to get our children to do the right thing, to teach them, and to make them happy?”

At What Cost?

The question we suggest you ask yourself is: At what cost? If you succeed in achieving what you wanted at the moment, and, as a result of your interaction with your child, he or she forms negative self-esteem beliefs, such as, I’m not good enough or I’m not worthwhile, or negative beliefs about life, such as, What I want doesn’t matter or I’ll never get what I want, was your behavior really “successful”? In other words, is what you achieved short term with your child worth the long-term cost?

I’m not saying that your children’s behavior on a daily basis, their learning, and their current happiness are not important. Of course they are. What I am saying is that the single factor that has the greatest impact on whether or not your child achieves happiness and true satisfaction in life is a healthy self-esteem, a positive sense of life, and other positive beliefs—such as Relationships work, It’s safe to express feelings, and People can be trusted. Nothing they do, learn or feel as a child will have as much influence on their adult life as the fundamental beliefs they form as a child and take into adulthood. (What are the possibilities of a truly satisfying life if you believe: I’m not good enough, I’m not worthwhile, What I want doesn’t matter, or I’ll never get what I want?)

Given that fact, what do you think that the major role of parents should be? Influencing behavior? Teaching information? Making their children happy?—or facilitating their children in creating 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 is my child likely to conclude about him or herself and life as a result of this interaction we just had? If it is a positive conclusion, congratulations! You got your job done. If it is a negative one, go back, apologize and clean it up.

The following two anecdotes involve interactions my wife Shelly and I had with each of our two children. They illustrate some of the consequences of choosing something other than facilitating the creation of positive beliefs as the goal of parenting.

I Am Responsible For My Child’s Behavior

I noticed one day after my then ten-year-old daughter Blake took a friend’s hat that I immediately told her to give it back. Why, I asked myself a few minutes after my interaction with her, did I tell her what to do? If the friend got angry and didn’t speak to Blake for a day or two, that would be a good lesson for her on respecting other people’s property. Having one friend not talk to her for a couple of days wouldn’t be a catastrophe. If, on the other hand, the friend didn’t get angry, then it was just a game and Blake would give it back on her own when the game was over. There were a half dozen other possible outcomes. Regardless of what happened, however, why had I felt that I had to make sure she gave it right back?

I discovered after a little exploration that I believed “I am responsible for my children’s behavior toward others.“ And, “if I am responsible, then I have to make sure she always does what I think is appropriate and never does what I think is not appropriate.” Can you see how these beliefs led to me telling her to give the hat back?

The question is not whether this is a “good” parenting belief. The important question to consider is: What conclusions would Blake eventually come to if I continued this type of behavior long enough? There’s something wrong with me (because dad is always telling me what to do and not to do). Or, I can’t count on myself to do the right thing. Or, I need someone else to make sure I do the right thing. With this belief, what would happen when someone tells her that “everyone” is trying drugs, or having sex, etc.? If she can’t count on her own judgment, she would have to listen to what everyone else is saying.

Learn Effective Parenting Skills

Obviously there are good ways of teaching children without controlling your child’s every behavior that I cannot cover in this short blog post. For more details, and to learn how parents can insure that their children form positive, and not negative, beliefs about themselves and life, attend Shelly’s live, interactive, webinar, where she will answer your specific parenting questions. Tuesday, Nov 3, 9-10 p.m. EST. http://bit.ly/4umdm5

Children Are Not Adults. Why Do We Assume They Are?

When Brittany, our other daughter, was four, she took about ten two-to-four inch pieces of Scotch tape from Shelly’s desk and was using it to play with. Shelly asked her to not take any more tape because she was wasting it. Brittany did it several more times and Shelly found herself getting increasingly annoyed with the amount of tape Brittany was “wasting.” Shelly told her that she wouldn’t be allowed to come into her home office anymore if she kept taking the tape.

After several more incidents like this, Shelly said to herself: What’s the big deal? Putting a couple of feet of tape on paper, the waste basket and the wall is wasting tape by adult standards, but it is a game by a child’s standards and a very inexpensive game at that. On the other hand, what is she concluding about herself and life as a result of these interactions with me?

One possibility might be: There’s something wrong with me. Or perhaps, I’m not good enough. Or, I can’t be trusted. Or: What I want doesn’t matter. Shelly clearly had to stop this type of behavior, but first she had to figure out what she believed that produced it. When Shelly finally discovered it she realized that it was a belief that a great many parents had: Children should have the same standards of behavior as adults. Why should they? Children are not adults!

Remember to keep asking yourself as you interact with your child: What conclusion is my child reaching? Asking that question and making sure that the conclusions are positive will make more of a difference in his or her life than you can possibly imagine.

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 find out more about Shelly Lefkoe’s live, interactive, webinar, Tuesday, Nov. 3, 9-10 p.m. EST, where she will answer your specific parenting questions, click on http://bit.ly/4umdm5)

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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Eating/Weight Problems: The Source and Solution

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:41:29 +0000

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

Most of the behavioral or emotional problems we want to get rid of are relatively simple to deal with. We procrastinate. We worry all the time about what people think of us. We lack confidence. Using The Lefkoe Method you can find and eliminate the beliefs and conditionings that cause these problems. As a result, the problems will disappear.

Unfortunately overeating and weighing too much are not as simple. This problem is much more difficult to get rid of than most because it consists of from six to eight (or even more) sub-problems, each of which has to be handled before the real problem is solved.

Let me explain.

Some people gain weight because they eat a lot of unhealthy fattening foods and do very little exercise. That’s relatively simple to handle. Eat more healthily and get more exercise. If there are beliefs and conditionings that inhibit those two activities, get rid of them and you’ll start eating more healthy foods and exercising.

But for many people, the real problem is eating when they aren’t really hungry. If they would stop eating when they feel full and only eat when they are really hungry, the eating/weight problem would disappear. This is my ultimate goal for my clients, not losing weight. Because if most people with a normal metabolism and with a healthy diet eat only when hungry, they will not gain weight.

So the question then becomes, why do people eat when they aren’t hungry?

There can be many reasons, including:

It is a way to take a break from work; it’s a diversion.
It is a way to reward yourself when you feel no one else or nothing else will.
It is a way to experience love and acceptance.
It is a way to keep unpleasant feelings down—such as anxiety, anger, upset, and sadness.
It is a way to feel good, comforted, happy, secure, centered, at home.
It is a way to feel comfortable in social situations where everyone else is eating.
It is a way to remove yourself from the dating game and from sex. In other words, if you feel uncomfortable in romantic relationships and/or in sexual relationships, one way to avoid them is to get very heavy to discourage the opposite sex. In fact, although being significantly overweight might discourage some people from a romantic or sexual relationship, it obviously does not discourage a great many.
It is a response to childhood deprivation. If there wasn’t enough food to eat—if you didn’t eat the food right away it would be gone and you wouldn’t be able to eat at all—you can get conditioned to eat whenever you see food whether you are hungry or not.
If I work hard and accomplish a lot I’m entitled to whatever I want, including anything I want to eat.
You’re going to go on a diet and will be depriving yourself of food for a while.
The food tastes really good, which makes you feel good.

If your eating/weight problem is the result of eating when you aren’t hungry, then you need to determine which “needs” your eating is fulfilling. Then you can treat each of these needs as a separate undesirable behavior pattern. From there you can find and eliminate the beliefs that cause it.

In addition to having to get rid of a lot of beliefs, self-esteem and otherwise, eating/weight problems also involve a lot of conditioning.

Classical Conditioning

I discussed one type of conditioning and a process we have for de-conditioning in my blog post on May 5, 2009. In this type of conditioning, which psychologists call “classical conditioning,” something that normally doesn’t cause an emotional response gets conditioned to do so.

Here’s an example I use with my clients that will make this type 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. 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 the fist scared you.

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). The Lefkoe Stimulus Process is a very effective method to use with classical conditioning.

Operant Conditioning

There is another type of conditioning that is especially relevant in eating/weight issues. It results from continually rewarding or punishing specific behavior, thereby conditioning that behavior. Psychologists call this “operant conditioning.”

For example, if every time you got upset as a child your mom gave you food to make you feel better, you could get conditioned to eat whenever you got upset.

Or, if your parents continually rewarded you for special things you did as a child by giving you a special meal with the food you really liked, you could get conditioned to eat whenever you wanted to feel acknowledged for something you did.

The Lefkoe De-conditioning Process is very effective with operant conditioning.

The Source Of One of the Sub-problems

Let’s examine one of the eating/weight sub-problems in a little more detail to see how it is the result of beliefs and operant conditioning.

Assume that whenever you feel alone, rejected, unloved, etc. you eat, whether you are hungry or not. You might believe I’m unlovable, I don’t fit in, Food is love, I’m alone in the world, Eating is the way to be loved, and If someone gives you food it means he loves you. There can be many others, but this gives you an idea of the type of beliefs that could cause a behavior pattern like this.

The operant conditioning involved here is eating in order to feel loved. This could have occurred early in life if your parents fed you as an expression of their love. This conditioning is more likely to be found in Jewish and Italian families.

Resolving eating/weight issues is especially tricky because you need to continue eating after the problem is gone. You can’t stop it completely like you can stop alcohol and drugs. Nevertheless, if you eliminate all the relevant beliefs and conditionings for all the sub-problems, an eating/weight problem can become nothing more than an unpleasant memory in your past.

To see a short video from someone who totally handled his emotional eating problems, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3tjZqDtBs8

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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Answers to questions about beliefs, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Everyone Knows Change is Difficult … Are You Sure?

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

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

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.

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The Lefkoe Method Is Not Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:21:42 +0000

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Often when I start to explain to someone how the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) works, they quickly respond, “Oh, you’re just doing Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)!”

Although the LBP is similar in some ways to CBT (of which there are several variations), there are more things that are different than the same. (Because I am not trained in CBT, I have no first hand knowledge of it. But several people who are certified in CBT and who also are familiar with the LBP have helped me make the following distinctions between the two.)

First, some versions of CBT attempt to change beliefs by challenging the validity of the evidence that the client uses to support them. However, the “evidence” that people offer for a belief usually is not the actual reason they believe it. The evidence people offer usually consists of recent observations that appear to substantiate the belief. The real source of one’s fundamental beliefs, the LBP contends, is interpretations of circumstances earlier in life. Core beliefs about one’s self and life are usually formed in childhood. After a belief has been formed, however, one acts consistently with it, thereby producing “current evidence” for the already-existing belief.

Because the evidence one presents to validate one’s beliefs usually is a consequence of the beliefs, not its source, challenging the validity of that evidence may not be the most effective way to eliminate beliefs.

Second, CBT tries to show clients that their thinking is illogical, broad generalizations, self-defeating, etc. The LBP makes no attempt to get clients to see that a current belief is wrong or not true, to see it as illogical, to accept that it does not make sense, or to reject it as self-defeating. The LBP actually validates people for forming the belief earlier in life by assisting them to realize that most people probably would have made a similar interpretation under similar circumstances. It insures that people realize that their belief actually is one valid interpretation of their earlier circumstances.

CBT attempts to get clients to realize their beliefs don’t make sense and are self-defeating; therefore they should give them up. The LBP assists people to eliminate beliefs by getting them to realize that they form beliefs by giving/attributing meaning to events that have no inherent meaning, after which they think they can “see” that meaning inherent in the events. When clients realize they really can’t see the belief (the meaning) in the world, that it exists and has only ever existed in their minds, and when they realize the feeling of the belief was not caused by something outside of them, but by the meaning they gave the events, the belief is eradicated.

A third element that distinguishes the LBP from some versions of CBT is that CBT tries to get the client to agree to act consistently with an alternative belief to test its possible validity. In other works, homework is an integral part of CBT; there is nothing a client has to do between sessions with LBP. Because the current belief is totally eliminated by using the LBP during the session, one has no need to try to change one’s behavior when one goes back “into life”; one’s behavior changes naturally and effortlessly once the belief is gone.

A fourth distinction between the LBP and many cognitive approaches is that the latter frequently give clients tools that they are expected to use to think more rationally in order to act more rationally in the face of strong emotions such as fear, anger, depression, hostility, etc. The LBP is used by a facilitator (either a live person, or an on-line or DVD program) to assist clients to eliminate the beliefs that cause such emotions. When these emotions stop after the beliefs (and conditionings) that give rise to them are eliminated, clients no longer need a tool to deal with them more effectively.

Fifth, The Lefkoe Method includes other processes other than the LBP when appropriate. For example, the Lefkoe Stimulus Process facilitates de-conditioning the stimuli for negative emotions, which has nothing to do with beliefs or illogical thoughts. In order to get rid of the fear of public speaking, for instance, one has to extinguish the conditioned stimuli that have become associated with fear, such as facing criticism, or feeling that one is not meeting expectations, that one is being judged, or that one is being rejected.

And in last week’s blog post I described the Lefkoe Sense Process and the Lefkoe Expectation Process, which de-condition negative senses and expectations. To the best of my knowledge CBT does not deal with conditioning directly.

Finally, there is no explicit spiritual element in CBT. As far as I am concerned, the “Who Am I Really?” Process, which helps you shift your identity from an ego—the sum total of your beliefs and their manifestation—to the source of the ego, is a crucial element of the LBP and is as important as getting rid of beliefs.

The Lefkoe Method, which includes the LBP and several other processes, accomplishes two distinct things with clients:

It helps people make fundamental changes in who they think they are, namely, their beliefs and the way those beliefs manifest in their behavior and feelings, by eliminating beliefs and de-conditioning stimuli, senses, and expectations.
It helps people make a distinction between themselves as the sum total of their beliefs and how they manifest, and themselves as the creator of those beliefs, and, therefore, of their lives.

Because CBT is the most researched psychotherapy (and is considered the “gold standard”), I am excited to announce a research study we are about to start. Conducted by a major university, the study will compare the results of using our Natural Confidence DVD program, which contains 23 self-esteem beliefs and conditionings, with 10 hours of private CBT sessions. The study will measure changes in self-esteem, self-confidence, and stress. Stay tuned for the results.

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.

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Get Rid Of Negative “Senses” And “Expectations”

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:11:27 +0000

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In my post on May 5, 2009, I described the Lefkoe Stimulus Process (LStP), the most important process other than the Lefkoe Belief Process that we use to help people get rid of unwanted behavior and emotional problems.

This process de-conditions common events that have been conditioned to cause fear and other negative emotions. To get rid of almost any emotional problem, you will have to get rid of beliefs and conditionings.

There are two additional processes I’ve created to help clients eliminate problems in their lives that can be very valuable: the Lefkoe Sense Process (LSP) and the Lefkoe Expectation Process (LEP). I’ve never heard of anything that can do what these two processes do as quickly and effectively.

The LSP is useful after one eliminates all the relevant beliefs one can find and still has a negative sense of something. It usually doesn’t exist in words. It is a “sense” that typically is described in bodily feelings, colors, images, etc. You actually can have a negative sense of anything, such as people, life, and work, but the most common negative sense that needs to be eliminated is one of self.

Try it right now. Close your eyes and look 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 doesn’t exit in words? If there is and it is negative, the LSP can help you get rid of it.

I’m going to provide the steps of the LSP below with a caveat: Using it will produce virtually no change unless you eliminate all the relevant beliefs first. If there is still a negative sense after getting rid of all the limiting beliefs, then this process will get rid of it.

Finally, before presenting the entire LSP, let me explain Step 3, which says: “Is it real to you that your current sense of yourself was caused by those [childhood] events and the meaning you gave those events?”

Let me explain why this is true. Any child in any culture recognizes certain facial expressions as “angry,” 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.

Second, children think adults, especially their parents, have all the answers to dealing with the world and children 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 can be experienced wordlessly as: pushed away, black, overwhelmed, not acceptable, etc.

If you don’t get what you want a lot of the time, you might feel powerless even before there are any words for that feeling. If mom and dad aren’t around a lot of the time when you want them, you might feel alone.

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.

Steps of the Lefkoe Sense Process (LSP)

1. Close your eyes, look inside, and find your sense of yourself. Don’t worry about putting words on the sense. Your experience might be in the form of pictures, images, feelings, or vague thoughts. Just try to experience it as fully as you can right now. [Give the client a moment to think.] … Now that it is real, please use a few words to describe that sense so that I can get an idea of your experience, even though the words are not your experience.

Client’s description of sense: _______________________________________.

2. What are the events when you were a young child that first caused ________________________________? [describe the sense using client’s exact words] [The events are almost always interactions with parents early in life.]

3. Is it real to you that your current sense of yourself was caused by those events and the meaning you gave those events? [The answer should be, yes.] NOTE: Even though usually events have no inherent meaning for adults, they do for children who are dependent on their parents (or other adults) for their very survival.

4. Is it real to you that the only reason that _____________________________ [describe the sense using client’s exact words] is your sense of yourself today is that as a child you never distinguished between you and the meaning you gave specific circumstances outside of you that really caused the______________________________? [describe the sense using client’s exact words] In other words, can you see that the _____________________________ was [describe the sense using client’s exact words] never inherent in you—it was never who you really are? [The answer should be, yes.]

5. To make this distinction real, if earlier in life the circumstances that originally caused the ___________________________ had been different, [describe the sense using client’s exact words] if_______________________________ [state the opposite of what actually happened] had happened instead, would you have had the _________________________________________________________then? [describe the sense using client’s exact words] If you didn’t have it then, would you have it now? [The answer should be, no.]

6. Close your eyes and look inside. Do you still experience yourself as ________________________? [The answer should be,no.] [describe the sense using client’s exact words]

Note: Sometimes the entire negative sense will be gone at the end of the process. If only some aspects of the sense have been eliminated, do the process again with whatever words describing the sense still feel true to the client. There may be a different source for what remains.

The other process that can be very useful is the Lefkoe Expectation Process (LEP). Sometimes after all the relevant beliefs have been eliminated one still expects life to be difficult, to not get what one wants, to have anxiety in certain situations, etc. This process can 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.

Here are the steps of the LEP.

Steps of the LefkoeExpectation Process (LEP)

To be used to eliminate negative expectations about some area or issue.

1. What is your expectation about _____________________________________?[Insert the area or issue, for example, self, life, relationships, or career

2. ___________________________________________________________ [Insert the expectation given by the client.]

3. What happened early in your life that might have led you to this expectation? [Note: The client usually will say: I expect … to happen in the future because it happened many times in the past.]

4. An expectation is nothing more than assuming the future will be like the past. Can you see that your expectation made sense given the many experiences you had that were similar to what you now expect? [The answer should be, yes.] Can you see that your expectation is a function of those specific circumstances? [The answer should be, yes.]

5. If the circumstances in the past had been different, would you still have had the same expectation? [The answer should be: Of course not.]

6. Describe the differences between your earlier circumstances and today’s circumstances. [If the client has difficulty in doing this, you can assist. One crucial difference is that the client has The Lefkoe Method available now and a lot of beliefs the client had then he does not hold today. Also, in most cases the “earlier circumstances” occurred when the client was a child; now she’s an adult.]

7. Can you see that today’s circumstances are very different from the earlier circumstances that led to your expectation? [Summarize the current circumstances that the client has just stated in #6 above.] [The answer should be, yes.]

8. Don’t tell me what you want, what you wish for, or how you’d like it to be. If expectations for the future are based on current circumstances, tell me what any reasonable person would expect in the future given your circumstances today, namely ________________________________________. [Restate what the client stated in #6 above.] [The answer will be a different expectation.]

9. Close your eyes and look inside. What do you expect about ___________________________ right now? [Insert the answer from #1 above] [The client will describe a new, positive expectation.]

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How To Find The Beliefs That Cause Various Problems

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:08:54 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Best Technique For Finding Beliefs

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

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

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

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

My Vision

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

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

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

Let’s Create This World

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

Answers To Common Questions About Beliefs

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:52:50 +0000

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Last fall I conducted a one-hour tele-seminar in which I answered questions I had been sent about beliefs. I thought I would devote this week’s blog post to answering a few of the most common questions I received.

Question: Once you have eliminated a belief, what does one need to do to move forward and leave their dysfunctional behavior patterns behind?

Answer: In a word, nothing. Once you have eliminated all the beliefs (there is rarely only one) that cause any given behavioral or emotional problem, the problem just dissolves and there is nothing more you have to do.

Question: How critical is it to identify the origin of a belief correctly, and how accurately does one need to identify it?

Answer: Our experience is that you do need to find the real source of a belief in order for the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) to be effective in eliminating the belief. For example, if you think the source of a belief is experiences you had in school, when the real source is interactions with your parents, the belief might not be eliminated. Why?

Remember that in the process you are asked: Imagine being a child and observing the events that led to the belief. Doesn’t it seem as if you can see (the belief)?

For the belief to go away for visual people, you need to get that what you’ve spent a lifetime thinking you saw in those events, you never really did see. If you truly can see something, then it really is there. The trick is to realize that you didn’t see what you thought you saw. The belief (in other words, the meaning you gave the events) exists only in your mind, not out there in the world to be seen.

If you mistakenly choose other events that aren’t really the source, you still will think you saw (the belief) in interactions with your parents and the belief will still be there.

For people who are predominantly emotionally kinesthetic and “felt” the belief instead of seeing it, they need to get that the events didn’t make them feel (the belief); it was the meaning they gave those events. Again, if you have the wrong source, this part of the LBP might not work.

More often than not, a belief is formed from the meaning we give to a pattern of events, such as the way mom and dad reacted when you didn’t live up to their expectations or the fact that mom and dad weren’t around very much. Not the one time you remember dad yelling or mom not being home one afternoon.

There is no way to know for sure if you have found the “real” source of a belief. One test is whether or not it feels true for you that a repeated pattern of events led you to form the belief. Another is that you need to be able to answer yes to the question: Wouldn’t most people have formed the belief you did in those same circumstances?

In other words, the events must be a logical source for a given belief.

Question: When going through the process of eliminating beliefs, I have a hard time with the concept of ‘seeing’ the belief. I usually don’t think I saw it; it’s more like I felt it. So sometimes beliefs don’t go away because I don’t get it. Is there a way around this?

Answer: I provided part of the answer to this question in my answer to the prior question.

Emotionally kinesthetic people generally do not “see” the belief in the situations that led to the belief being formed, they “felt” it.

The end of the Lefkoe Belief Process has a section specifically for people who are kinesthetic, so if you don’t think you saw the belief, just skip that question and go to the next step of the Process (the events that led you to form the belief have no meaning) and then finish the Process. If you complete the LBP, the belief will be eliminated.

Question: How do you apply the technique [Lefkoe Belief Process] on your own?

Answer: Most people cannot do it by themselves; a few can. Try it; it might work for you.

There are at least three reasons most people can’t do it.

First, without a lot of training it is hard for most people to identify all the beliefs and conditionings that cause any given problem. And if you don’t find and eliminate all of them, the problem might lessen, but not be eliminated totally.

Second, even when you know the belief you want to eliminate, it can be tricky to find alternate interpretations for certain beliefs and sources.

Third, most problems can be eliminated by eliminating the beliefs and conditionings that cause it. From time to time it is necessary to use additional processes that eliminate negative “senses” (of oneself, life, etc.) that were conditioned early in life or negative expectations, where one is conditioned to expect negative things to occur. You need to be trained to use those processes.

After helping thousands of people eliminate tens of thousands of beliefs, I find that I am able to walk myself through the LBP or the Lefkoe Stimulus Process (to eliminate conditionings) some of the time, but when I discover a new problem and I’m not sure what beliefs or conditionings cause it, I still need a trained Lefkoe Method facilitator to help me.

Question: Is it possible for limiting beliefs to have not originated with your parents? Is it possible for limiting beliefs to have formed in adulthood, say after romantic disappointment? If so, how does one locate the source of the limiting belief?

Answer: Almost all negative self-esteem beliefs are formed through interactions with parents during the first five or six years of life. We form many other beliefs later in life when we encounter new situations.

We form beliefs about school in school, politics as we start reading and hearing about it, and romantic relationships as we start having them.

How do you find the source of beliefs formed later in life? Training and a lot of experience.

Question: I think the biggest belief I have that keeps me from transformation is that I can’t do it – I don’t have what it takes to follow though.

Answer: That’s possible, but this is an example of how it can be tricky to identify all the relevant beliefs that cause a problem.

You might believe I don’t have what it takes to follow through, but what beliefs would you have to have to have formed that one? Probably many, including I’m not good enough, Nothing I do is good enough, I’m inadequate, I’m powerless, and I’m not capable.

In other words, there are probably a bunch of beliefs that led you to not follow through, and now you believe you can’t follow through. You have to find and get rid of all those earlier beliefs too.

Question: One of the biggest roadblocks is identifying the core belief that is holding me back. I come up with a lot of peripheral beliefs. What is the best way to determine what is the core belief that needs to be changed?

Answer: As far as we are concerned, there is no “the core belief.” There are almost always many core (self-esteem) beliefs and many other beliefs causing the problem you want to get rid of.

NOTE: We’re offering another tele-seminar answering your questions about beliefs on August 13, from 6:00-7:00 Pacific Time. For information and to submit a question, please click on https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/357775698
Thanks for reading my blog. I really would appreciate your comments and questions. Please feel free to share my blog posts with anyone you think might be interested as long as you tell people where 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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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.

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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

Revealing the Truth About Prejudice

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:58:30 +0000

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A few years ago Leeza Gibbons devoted the entire hour of her daytime talk show to an investigation of the causes and cures for prejudice. I had been on the show before talking about how beliefs cause most of our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, so she asked me to come back to discuss the relationship between beliefs and racial prejudice.

Before the show we went into the audience looking for a volunteer who would acknowledge having prejudice and who also would like to get rid of it if possible. We found Chad, a young man in his mid-20s, who said that he was “prejudice against any ethnic group, the way they act and the things that they do.” After getting rid the primary belief that caused that feeling before the show started, he announced during the show to a nationwide audience that the feeling he had when he started, he didn’t have any more.

Just as we in 21st Century America look back at cultural practices of years gone by with a combination of repulsion and amazement, future generations probably will look back at the prejudice that runs rampant in the world today with similar reactions.

Just as it is almost impossible for us to understand the Roman thinking that feeding people to lions is a spectator sport, in a few years people will try to understand why millions of otherwise sane individuals would consider some people “less than” others because of the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their sexual preference.

Rather than wait for future generations to try to figure out what made the widespread prejudice possible in the early days of the 21st century, let me offer one possible explanation while we are living in the middle of it.

Because our beliefs are the primary determinant of what we do and feel, and even what we perceive, all prejudice can be traced to beliefs.

People who are convinced that African-Americans, or Muslims, or gays are not as good as them (usually white heterosexual Americans) are expressing their beliefs about those people. (Actually, many people in those groups have similar feelings about white heterosexual Americans.)

A belief is a statement about reality that we experience as the truth. It is a fact about reality for the person who holds the belief. So when we hold a belief about something, we are convinced that we know the truth about that something.

But, in fact, no belief describes the truth about reality. Without exception, all beliefs are nothing more than arbitrary interpretations of actual events in reality. Physical objects and events certainly occur in the world, but the meaning we give the events exists only in our minds, not in the world.

How prejudicial beliefs are formed … and can be eliminated

Let me tell you about the conversation I had with Chad before the Leeza show went on the air.

When we started the conversation he had told me that he felt that members of ethnic minorities, especially African-Americans, couldn’t be trusted. So I asked him: “What do you believe about these people that would have you not trust them?”

He answered: “Blacks are dangerous.” (He used the word “Blacks”; I used the word “African-American.” Moreover, there probably were additional beliefs, but this was one the most relevant.)

I replied: “It’s clear that anyone with your belief would feel the way you do. But you didn’t have that belief when you were a year or so old. What happened that led you to that conclusion?”

“When I was 10 my dad took us to the gun cabinet and said we had his permission to kill a Black if he stepped on our property. Areas where Blacks lived were very dangerous—a lot of crime and killing. The news was full of it. Most of our friends had the same negative attitudes about Blacks. I heard this constantly at home and at school. I also remember driving my car once and saw a Black man get into an accident that was clearly his fault.”

I said to Chad: “Your belief about African-Americans—that they are dangerous—is one explanation for what you saw and heard as a child. What else could the same events mean?”

Here’s what he answered:

1.    What my father and others said might have been true of some Blacks, but not all of them.
2.    Some Blacks are … (almost anything) just like some whites are … (almost anything).
3.    The behavior I heard attributed to Blacks is true of some people from every race, not just Blacks.
4.    Because what people say is a function of their beliefs, and do not necessarily reflect the truth, the fact that some parents, families, or friends have negative thoughts about Blacks doesn’t mean that those thoughts are true, only that they believe it. Had they had different childhoods with people telling them different things, they wouldn’t have the beliefs they do and they would be saying just the opposite.

It was immediately clear to Chad that his beliefs about African-Americans were only one arbitrary interpretation of what he had heard about African-Americans as a child, and not the truth.

I then asked him: “Didn’t it seem as if you could see African-Americans are dangerous when your father and friends talked about the crime and the killings in African-American neighborhoods?”

“I did see it,” he replied. “Anyone would have seen it.”

“Okay, if you could see it, tell me what does ‘African-Americans are dangerous’ look like,” I asked.

“Well, it looks people getting robbed or killed in Black neighborhoods.”

“Yes,” I said, “you could see that, or hear people tell you about that. But that fact could have a lot of different meanings. You just gave me four of them. I want to know what ‘African-Americans are dangerous’ looks like.”

After a moment’s reflection he replied, “Now I understand what you mean. I can’t see “Blacks are dangerous’. I now realize I only saw certain people saying things to me. My beliefs about Blacks are interpretations that exist only in my mind. I made them up. They have nothing to do with reality.”

It was after this short interaction with me that Chad announced on national TV that his prejudice was gone.

The prejudice that exists today against Muslims, African-Americans, gays, or any other group is based on beliefs that are nothing more than arbitrary meanings we gave to a series of events (9/11, what we read in the newspaper, what we were told by parents, what lots of other people already believe, etc.). The beliefs are not facts. They are not the truth.

There is a well-known psychological term that describes people with prejudices, people who have mistakenly confused a thought that exists only in their mind with the truth about reality: they are delusional.

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.

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

How do beliefs produce “driven,” compulsive behavior

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:54:57 +0000

Why are so many of us “driven” compulsively to seek or 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. Let me explain.

Imagine you are a young child who has created a host of negative beliefs about yourself or about life. (Very few of us escape childhood without forming a bunch of negative self-esteem beliefs. I’ll explain why in a future blog.) At this point you are in school, interacting with lots of other kids and adults. It dawns on you that you are going to grow up and will have to make your own way in life. You are confronted with a real dilemma, albeit an unconscious one: “How will I make it in life if there’s something fundamentally wrong with me or the world?”

Imagine the fear and anxiety you must feel when you experience these two conflicting “facts”: On one hand, you sense that you must make it on your own in life. On the other hand, you have concluded that “There’s something fundamentally wrong with me or life that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to make it on my own.”

Fear and anxiety are unpleasant and painful feelings, so children who have them try to find ways of not feeling them. In tens of thousands of sessions with clients, I’ve discovered that people have two basic ways of dealing with the unpleasant feelings that are caused by negative self-esteem beliefs:

First, they use alcohol, drugs, sex, food, or other substances to cover up the feelings and numb themselves or to make themselves feel good.

Second, they develop strategies that help them deal with the anxiety that stems from their negative beliefs. I call them “survival strategies” because the fear one experiences when one has negative self-esteem beliefs often makes one feel as if his survival is being threatened.

When a survival strategy is formed, the child also forms a belief about that strategy:
“What makes me good enough (or important, or worthwhile, etc.) is ….” A variation of that is: “The way to survive is ….”

Survival strategies are based on a child’s observation of what it takes to feel good about herself, to be important, to be worthwhile, or to be able to deal with life in spite of negative self-esteem beliefs.

For example:

Susan’s parents placed a heavy emphasis on friendships, on what others thought of them, and on impressing people, so Susan concluded that the way to survive was to get everyone to like and approve of her.

Fred formed a similar belief in a different way: When he got praise and acknowledgement from his parents he really felt good about himself, in a way he normally didn’t. So he concluded what made him good enough and important was having people think well of him.

Here’s Lauren’s story: She noticed that people treated her dad with respect and admiration because he had been so successful in business and had so much money, so Lauren concluded that what made her important and good enough was being financially successful.

Art lived in a community where the people who were considered important and given respect were in gangs and carried guns, so he chose that as his survival strategy.

(By the way, one way to know if you have negative self-esteem beliefs is to ask yourself: What makes you good enough [or important, or worthwhile, etc.]? When you answer anything other than: “Nothing,” it becomes clear that you need whatever you answered in order to be okay.)

Once you decide that a positive sense of yourself is “because of” anything, you’ve created a lifelong problem. For example, if you believe the only way to be good enough is to be wealthy and have a big house, your sense of worth is linked to those conditions. If you aren’t wealthy and don’t have a big house, you are forced to face your belief that you’re not good enough, which produces anxiety. Moreover, even if your survival strategy is achieved, there’s the danger of losing it. Total disaster is always just around the corner for you. Life becomes a sea of anxiety, in which you are constantly struggling to meet the conditions you have made for being good enough. Your self-esteem is always in question.

Tom, an executive in a Wall Street firm, earns over $200,000 a year. His core belief is I don’t matter, and his survival strategy belief is: “What makes me worthwhile is being seen as important by others.” As a result, Tom becomes anxious whenever a new person gets hired, or a colleague wins praise, or he isn’t included in a meeting, or his boss doesn’t acknowledge him after he’s completed a project.

Miriam has the survival strategy belief: “What makes me acceptable is being beautiful.” For most of her life, she has lived comfortably with that belief. Her beauty earned her quite a bit of attention, admiration, and even love. But now Miriam is approaching fifty, and she’s frightened. The march of time is threatening to rob her of the one thing that she believes makes her acceptable. She has become increasingly depressed; every time a man fails to look at her admiringly, she has a deep feeling of not being okay.

One consequence of being run by survival strategy beliefs is that instead of living out of choices and pleasure—doing things because you want to do them—you do them primarily to survive (to feel okay about yourself). You experience your survival as dependent on the success of your survival strategy. The need to fulfill the terms of your survival strategy dominates your life.

Someone once said, “You can never get enough of what you never really wanted in the first place.” That’s an excellent description of trying to live using survival strategies to compensate for negative self-esteem beliefs. Once you say you’re not worthwhile just the way you are, no amount of accomplishment or praise will provide the unconditional sense of self-esteem you want and need.

People who have beliefs that are indicative of low self-esteem are not just criminals or drug addicts or unsuccessful people or those who suffer from deep depression. Many people with low self-esteem are visibly successful, living in nice homes with stable families. What distinguishes people is not their self-esteem beliefs, but their survival strategies—the ways they cope with a negative sense of themselves.

Although the dysfunctional behavior that people exhibit is usually a direct result of their survival strategy beliefs, the energy that drives the survival strategies is the underlying negative self-esteem. We don’t want to have to acknowledge the negative self-esteem belief (it’s too scary), so we do whatever it takes to manifest the survival strategy belief. That’s why the underlying self-esteem should be eliminated before the survival strategy belief.

The role of survival strategy beliefs explains why therapies designed only to improve self-esteem rarely produce fundamental and lasting changes in people’s behavior and feelings.

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, including two of the most common survival strategy beliefs (“What makes me good enough or important is having people think well of me” and “What makes me good enough or important is doing things perfectly”) go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/sales.html.

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

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

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 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 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