Neuro Linguistic Programming is all about beliefs. 

Hypnosis is all about beliefs. 

Self improvement and any kind of self help is (effectively) directed to help you change some or many of your beliefs. 

NLP is not everything in life… but your beliefs, whether you like it or not, are!

When we talk about beliefs, it is almost inevitable not to talk about the modern human curse. I call it a curse, because it seems that most people approach the outer world (not outside the globe, but outside the body) as if it is real. And on that base, they react. 

When I say “they” I still do not exclude myself from the curse. I suffer from it just as much as you do and they do. It is a curse mainly because in most times, the interpretation of “reality” is distorted.

We spoke about this one already, in another context. Life being a chaos, and the refusal to admit this chaos leads to active distortion of a consistent distorted perceived reality. 

Beliefs come in just in that phase of interpretation. The beliefs you hold, small ones and big ones, shallow ones and deep ones, they are all influencing every fiber in your stream of thought at this very moment. 

Because your beliefs influence every aspect of what you would call “independent thinking” or “conscious awareness”, we should make it very clear from the beginning – you have NO conscious control on your beliefs. 

That’s a bit confusing, I admit. Sincerely, it took me quite some time to grasp what beliefs are and how to handle them. The best way I came up with is to handle them indirectly, just like you would treat a small fire. You don’t put your hand over a small fire directly and cover it to prevent oxygen from getting in. You don’t do that because you know the result – pain and wounds to your hand. You might have reached your outcome, putting down the fire, but you’ve gained a very undesired side-outcome – damaged hand and moderate to severe pain. 

That’s how most people handle their beliefs. They force their hand over the fire, feeling the heat and still not taking the hand away. That is not stupid or idiotic, it’s habitual. You realize that you believe the world is against you and you’re pushing that belief further down your “dark side”, somewhere in your mind where you can suffocate this belief and let it die there. It may work, but you will certainly gain pain and damage on the way. 

Habitual suffocation of beliefs is accumulating to a worst case scenario. And if you would take a careful look around you, in real life, without judgment or patronizing, you’d see it everywhere. People who live as if they were zombies… not the fun to play with (NLP) zombies, but the worst case: people who live the years but not the substance. People who find themselves after a decade more or less in the same point in life they were 10 years before, but with grayer hair or less hair altogether. 

That is the result of the curse – meaningless life. Some of them confuse themselves (or delude themselves, depends on which side you are) and “discover” the self-help distorted set of realities. They buy books. They go to workshops. They work on connecting with their inner child. They forgive their parents by breaking a chair or punching a pillow. They walk on nails or burning coals or eggs or anything else that would overwhelm their senses. They practice meditation. They fly 3,000 miles to meet a guru. They donate to charities. They wear a lucky charm. They delude themselves by being active in a false self improvement journey. Heck, they may have even signed up for some NLP course!

Falling to the trap of the modern human curse is the road to mental blindness and a major waste of time. Some people never wake up from this curse. Sleeping disease without an infecting agent, that’s the best way to describe it. 

Some wake up, though, and all it takes to wake up is to realize that you don’t need to escape the life you have, but you do need to admit the truth to yourself. And I’m not talking about the “obvious” truth, the things you see when you open your physical eyes and look at your life. Because, if you’re an addicted optimist, you’d see the full half. If you’re a depressed pessimist, you’d see the empty half. If you’re a genuine journalist, you’d make an attractive story out of it. Well, it’s your life, you know, so do what you feel like.

But there are better ways to handle the dark side. There are better ways to face your non-appropriate embarrassing beliefs right in the face and handle them indirectly, so you won’t get burn or feel the pain severely. You will certainly feel pain, there’s no doubt. For every period of growth there is a pain linked. That’s the pain of letting go and surrender. It hurts. Sometimes it only hurts physically, and if that’s the case – you’re lucky. But in many many cases, if it’s an important belief change cycle – it hurts emotionally and affects every thought. 

But it never hurts as bad as putting your hand on a small fire to suffocate something about you which you don’t really like. It never hurts as the sudden awakening from the sleeping disease without an infecting agent, that is the result of the modern human curse… It does hurt, though, so don’t delude yourself with the false claims of self help gurus, as if growing and changing can be “fun” and “easy”. 

I like it this way. You know, if you would change easily and while having fun, you would also change back – without your conscious effort – while it’s easy and fun as well… if it’s painful, the change can stick forever. You’d have warnings all around, painfully, if you “slip” and start to change back to the old set of beliefs… 

It works for every imaginable kind of belief. If you were a smoker and now you’re not, there’s a great test that nobody thought of – smoke! Light up a cigarette. If you choke on it, it means you are a different person. If you handle it with delight – you’re a smoker even if you haven’t smoked for 20 years. 

I stopped smoking quite harshly. I went with a friend to a semi-marathon, and by the second kilometer I threw up black masses of unfamiliar substance (and some blood) which I immediately connected to smoking. That was the last time I ever thought about me being a smoker. It’s been over 10 years since, and ever since I can’t even think about myself holding a cigarette without the burning feeling I had while throwing up… I’ve changed.