When I first began my coaching career, one of the first courses I enrolled in was NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming
NLP is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy, created in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California.
NEURO:
The physical components as well as the mental and emotional components relating to the nervous system.
LINGUISTIC:
Pertaining to the language; how you communicate with others and more importantly, how you communicate with yourself
PROGRAMMING:
Perceiving your mind as your internal operating system; the way our past experiences, thoughts and emotions affect all areas of our lives.
Learning NLP is learning the language of your own mind!
At the time I began the course, I did not know how fascinated and curious I would become in learning about the power of our mind and how our brain works; I did not know as well that this would lead me to become a mindset coach.
One of the first things I learned in this course was the NLP presuppositions, those presuppositions are no more than beliefs that I needed to implement in my practice if I wanted to be a great support, guide, and coach for my clients.
For the reminder, beliefs are thoughts patterns, they are assumptions about ourselves, about life, about others that we assume to be true.
We all have a set of beliefs that empower or limit us in our lives.
One of my main objectives as a coach is to find the limiting beliefs that my clients have and to help them to transform them into positive ones so they can create a life they really want.
Because yes, your beliefs create your reality!
Everything that was created by humans was a thought first, and to create anything we first need to believe that is possible.
"Whether you believe that you can or believe that you can't, you are right!"
During our childhood we did not have a choice in our beliefs, we took those of our parents, our community, our country... but as an adult now, we have the power to eliminate those that do not help us and to choose new ones that are more in alignment with who we really want to be.
We better have a nice set box of beliefs, beliefs that makes us feel good, trust in life, humanity, and ourselves.
I realize now after almost 4 years how those NLP beliefs have affected my life in a much more personal way than I thoughts!
They helped me to have more compassion, understanding, acceptance, perseverance, creativity, gratitude, a greater capacity to forgive... myself but also, others.
I shared those beliefs with my clients, which helped them as well, and today I wanted to share 6 very powerful ones with you.
I realized soon after that those beliefs were also shared by spiritual teachers, psychotherapists, therapists, coaches, and healers, so you might know them but are they part of your beliefs set box?
You will see that they work perfectly together.
And remember, if you want to believe them or not, is your choice :)
6 Empowering beliefs to implement right away:
1. “Any behavior was the best choice anyone had at the time."
Anyone who makes a choice no matter how stupid, wrong, inadequate or inappropriate it can be, does it with the information, the awareness, the state of mind that they had at the time they made it. Or like Deepak Chopra phrases it:
“People are doing the best that they can from their own level of consciousness.”
That means how awake, alert and aware they can be in the moment they had to make a choice. And nobody is perfect!
This belief helps me to be more compassionate, forgiving and indulgent with myself and others.
2. "Behind every behavior, there is a positive intention"
Everyone has a positive intention behind their actions and if we had exactly the same programming (childhood, experiences, education, traumas, set box of beliefs, senses..) we would have probably done the same thing.
This means that at a given moment a person reacts the way he or she knows best.
No-one Intentionally ‘Screws Up’!
This belief helps to have more acceptance with myself and others.
3. "Failure doesn’t exist – Only feedback exists"
That means that when you "fail" it helps you to have feedback that you are not doing things properly. It does not make you a "Failure". Do you know how many times a baby falls down when they learn how to walk? About 2000 times!
Luckily we did not take our falls as a failure and decided that walking will not be for us!
We succeed by repetition, set back, and tests. Our ability to learn and take the lessons from those feedbacks are a very important skill to have, but first, we need to have this belief to be able to actually see our lessons and grow.
This belief helps me to have more perseverance to achieve my goals and to be more resilient.
4. "If what you’re doing doesn’t work, test something else"
Or like Tony Robbins says:
"If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get the results you’ve always had."
This belief seems so logical, but you can't imagine how many times we do the same things again and again consciously or not and then give up and assume that this thing was not for us.
This belief helps me to become more creative and to observe my patterns with more attention. The idea is to become aware of and change our patterns that are not creating success and to use consciously those that are actually creating success! And this works as well with our beliefs.
5. "The map is not the territory & Perception is a projection"
What we think about the world is not the world. We all have filters (programming, senses, state of mind) that makes us see the world in a certain way.
We all have individuals truth.
When we understand that we can have more acceptance and respect for others.
Trying to understand why people think this way is much more interesting than just judging them because they are not thinking like us.
I believe that we also need a mix of mindset and people's opinions to have a more interesting world.
What boring would be a world if everybody was thinking like me!
6. "It's easier to change myself than to change others"
This is more about realizing that we can't control others, we can't change them.
Everybody is free and if they want to change it will be their choice.
So if we want to keep harmonious relationships it's better to change ourselves, and our perceptions about others than to try to "fix" others.
Also by starting with us, we can inspire and influence others in a much healthier way!
Do your homework first!
If you want to implement those beliefs I would recommend you to write them in a place where you can see them everyday and to find examples in your past and in your everyday life of how they can be true.
This is a little exercise you can do at home if you want to transform a limiting belief:
-Ask yourself, what do you believe about yourself, others or the world that is not helping you to create a successful life?
Examples: "I am not a morning person", "Life is hard", "I am not good enough"
-What are the impact of those beliefs on your life?
-What do you think about that?
-What could be a more empowering belief for you to have?
-Imagine yourself in the future with this new belief, what will you see, feel, be with this new belief?
-Write this new belief where you can see it every day
-Then take one little action step every day that confirm this new belief
I really hope those new beliefs will empower you as they empower me!
In the comment, let me know what is your favorite belief or what would be one you would add to the list.
And if you like this article, please share it!
With Love,
Laeti