Changing Beliefs – Part 2

A Transcript of a therapeutic intervention utilizing an NLP belief change process.

This transcript is drawn from the DVD "Changing Beliefs" by Steve and Connirae Andreas which is available through the links on this page.

(Note: advanced; presumes NLP training experience) If you'd like to learn to use this process yourself, order your copy of the DVD from our store.

(Note: This transcript is pretty long. We have divided it into two parts. This is Part 2. Click here for Part 1.)

Part 2

STEVE: You’d have to pay more attention to nonverbals, you might have to list some examples, you know. For instance, your belief could be this, and this could be this, and dissociation and association—

CONNIRAE: For example, maybe for doubt, you see a movie of yourself doing blah, blah, blah, or some people see this.

GARY: Certainly more preparatory work.

CONNIRAE: Yeah.

STEVE: Probably.

CONNIRAE: Liv.

LIV: What did you do to sort through all the richness because there was so much there I didn’t really know which part to attend to? How did you know which parts to attend to with all of his—

STEVE: Well, some of his content—some of it really isn’t submodalities. I wrote it all down here to keep it all sorted a little bit.

CONNIRAE: Yeah, what we’re going for are the major submodalities rather than the content. Like this bubble surrounding, that’s not really a submodality. The fact that he’s associated or dissociated, that is.

STEVE: It has something to do with association.

CONNIRAE: Some very quickly, like location very quickly carried some of the other things like turning it into two pictures. So sort of why bother checking out two pictures in and of itself. You already know location will carry that. 1:04:02.2

STEVE: Now, is this a question of can you get something else that can carry all of these? So any—it’s sort of like you first you have all this data and then you can start building trees, you know. You can just go—in fact, he said—where’s the—oh, here. In the gathering information, he talked about if you have movement—I’m building a little hierarchy here—if you have movement that will make it—that makes color. So that means that if you change this one, you can get this one.

And then we go—what was the first one? Oh, location. So location goes into split frames and a few other things. And gradually you can assemble these into a sort of a cascade where if you get this one it’ll get this, and that’ll get that and that’ll get this, and something else will.

CONNIRAE: Now, we also began to make some generalizations. We had begun to make some generalizations about typical ways of coding beliefs. There’s certain submodalities that seem more related to beliefs than others. So we have some—that gives us some place to start, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about that now. After you’ve done one, then we can talk about generalizations.

STEVE: It’s like anything else, you know. After you do it a while, you have some guesses as to what will be really powerful. Association and dissociation is often very powerful. Color is often powerful.

CONNIRAE: Shh—(laughs.) Let’s let them find it out, and then—

STEVE: All right. And they may find some surprises in there, too.

CONNIRAE: Yeah, there are always people sorted uniquely. Laura.

LAURA: You also seemed to go early on for some of the ones that got physiology shifts in him as you went through the first time.

CONNIRAE: Yes.

LAURA: And that seemed like a real good place to start. And then he really did—it changed a lot when you went through the ones that seemed important just from the change in his physiology.

STEVE: Okay, so in terms of when he reported them the first time, when we saw a large physiological shift, go for those. Excellent strategy, good idea. 1:05:57.3

CONNIRAE: Yeah, same as we talked about with the switch when you’re going for submodalities, when you see as they’re talking you see big shifts, those clue you in.

STEVE: If they make big gestures or something like that.

FEMALE PARTICIPANT: Forward and backwards seemed to be a big one for him.

STEVE: Yeah, right. Right. Excellent.

CONNIRAE: Now someone else had something I believe.

STEVE: Maybe it’s time to go through the steps.

MALE PARTICIPANT: Just want to make a brief comment. When I’ve done this stuff before, when things have gotten really complex like started to be, that by itself caused me to say I don’t know what I’m doing here because it looks—there’s so much information. And what was nice about this is that still very simple things control that—

CONNIRAE: Yeah.

STEVE: That’s right.

MALE PARTICIPANT: And there are these really keys, how complex they are.

STEVE: Right. And usually, you know, you just go one at a time. And it may take you a long time, and you go through the first ten and—

CONNIRAE: And I recommend making a list on paper because most of you if not all of you will find – will got lost if you don’t. You’ll waste time.

STEVE: Now you might not get a single one that does everything. You might want to get—you might two. This one gets this batch, and this one gets this batch. And between the two of them, it carries it all over. And even though we had one that pretty much carried everything, as he was doing that, you notice, I started adding in some of these other ones that we found that were useful as it moves over there, the color will—

CONNIRAE: And that can be useful to make sure you get all the changes.

STEVE: —wash out of the picture, and so on and so on. So even if you get five or 10 different ones that are all powerful, you can always pack them all together in hypnotic language and get the whole thing. 1:07:26.5

Chris.

CHRIS: How many people has Richard tested with this, or around the country, and what are the results? Do you know?

CONNIRAE: You know Richard better than that.

STEVE: You know Richard, come on.

CONNIRAE: (Laughs.) You’re really asking? He would never do—

STEVE: It’s all ready to be written up in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

CHRIS: I don’t mean that way, I just mean the way in which he does it—the context in which he does it, which is he goes in a room, works with people, in this city and that city.

CONNIRAE: He goes in bars and does it to, you know. (Laughs.).

STEVE: I’m sure he’s done hundreds because he’s very thorough. At least.

CHRIS: Hundreds, and he’s thorough. Has he watched the results for people? I mean, when he does this?

STEVE: He watches for five-minute follow-ups. (Laughter.)

CHRIS: Has anybody—

CONNIRAE: Done long-term?

STEVE: No.

CONNIRAE: Not in a systematic way. I mean, there are people that we change beliefs on that we still know them, you know, and so we know that it’s lasted and so on for a period of time. But—

STEVE: We just take 10 percent of the gross. (Laughter.)

CONNIRAE: Right, they can set up—

STEVE: If not, we’ll take it back!

CONNIRAE: You can set up a business doing this, changing people’s beliefs about money, and then you take 5 percent.

STEVE: Really. Take 1 percent, you’d still do pretty well.

CONNIRAE: (Laughs.)

STEVE: Okay, let’s go through systematically. And if there are other questions, we’ll—

So, first—and let’s refer back over here so you have a content example. First, you get the belief.

CONNIRAE: And have them—think about it and state it in such a way that it is an absolute conviction. I believe this is true. 1:09:09.6

STEVE: And the specific words are only an indicator for an internal experience, right? So don’t be too fussy about the precise words, but get something that they can congruently agree to. This is something that they have now, they believe now, and they’d rather it were different because in some way it limits them or gets in their way or has fallout that they don’t like. Yeah.

MALE PARTICIPANT: Did you say conviction?

CONNIRAE: Yes.

STEVE: Well.

MALE PARTICIPANT: What if they said well, I’m not sure their behavior is fairly consistent in terms of—

STEVE: They don’t believe anything?

CONNIRAE: There’s always something that they are sure of, and sometimes we just have to phrase things differently. Sometimes you have to add a qualifier in a statement, then they can absolutely agree to it.

STEVE: See if someone has a counterexample strategy like the grid person we had up here the other day—

MALE PARTICIPANT: That’s what I was thinking of.

STEVE: —then you have to go usually, almost always, you have to qualify it because they won’t ever agree to a totally unqualified statement, but they’ll still have beliefs that are strong motivators and determiners of behavior.

MALE PARTICIPANT: I think that I have a similar question, and that is that he said he knew that wasn’t really true on some level, but—

STEVE: It wouldn’t change his behavior.

MALE PARTICIPANT: Well, I know, but where’s the distinction between belief and doubt. Because of the behavior change if it doesn’t change your behavior?

STEVE: Yeah, sure.

CONNIRAE: Yeah, with doubt, you’re not going to have behavior in only one way. With strong belief, you will.

STEVE: I mean, think about all the things that people know intellectually are true, but it doesn’t—

CONNIRAE: They don’t act on them.

STEVE: —to their behavior, you know? I mean, you know, you can have the worst sexist in the world who says, I know men and women are really equal, but, you know. And then everything they do is obviously that they’re—the belief that they operate on is something very different. 1:10:55.9

MALE PARTICIPANT: Doctors who smoke.

STEVE: Doctors who smoke. (Laughter.) Okay, yeah, there’s a lot of things like that. Okay.

CONNIRAE: Okay, and if you are wondering about yours as you pick it, call one of us over, and we’ll come and assist you in refining your belief.

STEVE: Now, when they say that sentence, you want to direct them to their internal experience. They have some internal experience that represents that sense or that yields that sense.

CONNIRAE: How do you know that’s true?

STEVE: What is that belief made out of?

CONNIRAE: What do you see that lets you know? And we’re going to ask you to start visual on this. It’s just the easiest way to do it, and we’ll get into variations more later.

STEVE: Then, you go to doubt. What’s something you doubt of more or less equal impact, in other words, in terms of its impact on your life.

CONNIRAE: Something important, but you just aren’t sure.

STEVE: That’s probably not that crucial, but you might as well make it as similar as possible because if you get things that are real, real different, there may be some other contaminating differences that do not have to do with—

CONNIRAE: With doubt.

STEVE: —what you’re going after. 1:12:02.8

FEMALE PARTICIPANT: Could you give an example how it could contaminate?

CONNIRAE: Well, let’s say if you take something that’s really not important to you at all that you couldn’t care less about—

FEMALE PARTICIPANT: Oh, okay.

CONNIRAE: And you get—

STEVE: I doubt if the doorknobs on the Motel 6 in Thornton are made out of brass.

CONNIRAE: I’m not sure about—(laughter)—then you might be getting submodalities for that’s not important to me instead of for doubt.

STEVE: This is more of a chance to go haywire, so you might as well—the more you can have something similar, the less you’re likely to seize on something that’s really a difference that isn’t related to what you want.

Now it may be that all your doubts are identical and the one about the motel and the brass doorknobs has the same structure as something else, but it might not or there might be some content contamination in there or something. Yeah.

MALE PARTICIPANT: You customarily will go after the content and the belief that they want to change.

STEVE: You don’t have to.

CONNIRAE: In really working with someone, I would just to make sure it was ecological. Now, you don’t have to for this.

STEVE: If you want to do it in here and you want to keep it—you want to do it content-free, if I’m the person who wants my belief changed and I don’t want you to know about it, fine.

CONNIRAE: That’s your prerogative.

STEVE: We’re going to trust you that far, but be careful.

CONNIRAE: Don’t tell them. (Laughs.)

STEVE: Okay? So, you’ve got doubts, now, what is it made of. How do you know you have doubt about that particular content? So this is just setting it up, right.

CONNIRAE: How do you know you’re not sure?

STEVE: There are two experiences.

CONNIRAE: As you look at that image, what lets you know that you’re not sure, that kind of thing.

STEVE: And as they already do that, you can start calibrating. How does the person represent those things? 1:13:43.9

CONNIRAE: Some differences will be obvious, like location differences, just from that step.

STEVE: Now, you do contrast of analysis, which you did already with confusion and understanding, right? Is there any question about that? How are they different? And if they don’t mention some differences that you think might be there, mention them and ask.

So here we’ve got the differences now. Now it’s time to test. Test arbitrarily. Take anything you want.

CONNIRAE: Test one at a time.

STEVE: Find out which ones drag the other ones along. Which are the key ones, the lynch pin, the—

CONNIRAE: The carrier.

STEVE: —the keystone, the carrier—the carrier frequency. What drags everything else along?

Any questions up to there? Tom?

TOM: So in that process, as you do that and elicit those, you should then put it back?

STEVE: Yes.

TOM: So you have two and you go from there.

TOM: Right, because now you’re just testing. You don’t want to change until you know how this thing works.

CONNIRAE: So when you shift location, you bring it back, and then do another one. 1:14:55.2

STEVE: Absolutely. Good, thanks.

CONNIRAE: Any questions on testing?

Yeah, Nelson.

NELSON: Well I guess—is there a step between four and five?

STEVE: I don’t think so.

CONNIRAE: Are you thinking of one? (Laughs.) I don’t see one.

STEVE: That’s an interesting question. Let me think, is there a step between—

CONNIRAE: What do the rest of you think?

STEVE: —four and five. No, there’s no step between four and five.

NELSON: What about four and a half? In other words, doesn’t belief have to be changed before we start the new belief?

STEVE: Yes.

NELSON: Where is that?

STEVE: That’s where we—let’s see. We’re not changing anything. We’re just gathering information.

CONNIRAE: You’re just finding out what belief they want to have. What belief would you like if you had it to—so that they have some kind of representation for us to stick in later on.

STEVE: See, one through five is setting it up.

NELSON: Okay.

STEVE: It’s like the switch. You set up the pictures. You get them all set.

CONNIRAE: And then—

STEVE: And then—

CONNIRAE: You install.

NELSON: The new belief before you switch into it.

STEVE: You want to know so that you can say put that new belief in.

CONNIRAE: And they’ll know what to see.

NELSON: Got you, okay.

STEVE: Okay? You don’t want to have to stop in the middle of this thing and go now what new belief would you like to have in here and da da da.

CONNIRAE: Because remember, the brain learns quickly, but not slowly. So if you take too long in there figuring out what new belief to put in, you’ve probably lost it.

MALE PARTICIPANT: —building a house of cards.

STEVE: No. We’re making a—

MALE PARTICIPANT:—and it would happen pretty fast.

CONNIRAE: Oh, okay.

STEVE: Have you ever made a sandwich?

MALE PARTICIPANT: No.

STEVE: Usually I lay the bread out, and I get the mayonnaise out of the refrigerator, and I get the bologna, and then I make the sandwich. Then it’s boom, boom, boom. One through five is getting all of the stuff out of the refrigerator.

MALE PARTICIPANT: And the idea of getting the new beliefs in, or they may not have one.

STEVE: Usually they do

CONNIRAE: Yeah, but you create one if they don’t. It’s setting up all your dominos and then knocking them over.

STEVE: Okay?

MALE PARTICIPANT: So take out the step between four and five.

STEVE: Okay, good.

CONNIRAE: Okay. Now. 1:17:07.6

MALE PARTICIPANT: Ecological concerns about what new belief would you like.

STEVE: Yes.

MALE PARTICIPANT: What would you generally do there? Well, the belief I want to have is—I don’t know something that ends up harming them or other people.

STEVE: Okay.

CONNIRAE: All of the usual ecological ticks are important there. You think about all the ways that this could go wrong. Make sure that they’re taking into account in the person’s belief. Watch them nonverbally to notice as they talk about it. Are they giving you nonverbal clues that they’ve got some objection?

MALE PARTICIPANT: Do I directly ask them, is there any way this might get in your way?

STEVE:: Sure.

CONNIRAE:: That’s one way.

STEVE: There’s a million ways of checking for ecology that we should know. Let me give you a couple though right off the top. If someone says, the new belief I want is to be smart. In other words, it’s an endpoint—to be rich, to be successful.

CONNIRAE: I want to believe that I am smart.

STEVE: Don’t give it to them. Give them—convince them—

CONNIRAE: You’d rather give them something like I want to believe that I can use feedback in the world to continually improve my abilities and skills.

STEVE: I want to believe that I can search around and find a business that will make me rich. Or something that is directed toward means and the ends.

CONNIRAE: Not I want to believe that I have the right thing to do right now.

STEVE: Because again, there are too many people in the world who believe they have competence already, and so they only—all they want is confidence. And their confidence may be real accurate feedback that they don’t have it yet. So any time you build a belief that has a gap between where they are and where they think they are, that’s not the kind we want to go around installing.

MALE PARTICIPANT: It’s more the view.

STEVE: The means, remember—and the switch, again. It’s creating a direction not that you are already at that endpoint that you would like to be. You create that picture and you create it dissociated out there so that people will find ways to get there. Okay?

Okay, so we got it all set up now, right? One, two, three, four, five, got it? Now—

MALE PARTICIPANT: You mentioned before how it’s represented in terms of submodalities the new belief. Is that—

STEVE: The new belief? Oh, yeah. Just to find out—later on, it’s a way of testing. If the new belief is in some kind of something is a whole lot like doubt or it’s real different than belief, it’s a disbelief or something else. It’s just interesting information for you. It’s not required for this pattern. It can give you additional information that you can later use for checking.

MALE PARTICIPANT: You would check if it’s coded differently from the way it was before?

STEVE: Right, right.

Whoops, there’s another one. Lynn?

LYNN: Did you just say that new belief needs to be dissociated so they’re drawn toward it?

CONNIRAE: No.

STEVE: In the switch.

CONNIRAE: That’s the switch.

STEVE: I want the new belief to be directed toward means rather than ends. 1:20:09.9

CONNIRAE: That’s what we talked about in terms of ecology.

STEVE: Okay?

CONNIRAE: It’s not that I believe I am the most wonderful person on earth; it’s that I believe I can learn, I believe I can—

STEVE: We don’t want to create beliefs that are contrary to your best assessment of reality. How’s that for a way of putting it? Not that reality is real, but if you look at someone and, you know, they’re such that the belief they want is radically different from what you can assess they are, don’t give it to them.

CONNIRAE: So they come in yelling and screaming at their kids, and they go, I want to believe I’m a wonderful parent.

STEVE: Some people do it, and they go back, and they yell and scream at their kids, and they totally believe they’re a wonderful parent. And since their belief is so certain, they don’t listen to anybody.

CONNIRAE: So you might want to install, I want to believe—

STEVE: I mean there’s lots of that out there already, right?

CONNIRAE: —that I can notice ways of becoming better and better as a parent. I want to believe that it’s possible to always improve the way I am as a parent.

STEVE: I’m going to start a new religion, and the religion will be called feedback.

MALE PARTICIPANT: Amen. (Laughter.)

CONNIRAE: Amen, brother.

STEVE: Buttressed by five million years of evolution—(laughter.) Seriously, that’s what life is all about. It’s about feedback from the first little critters that twitch when light hits them and they don’t twitch when lights them—when light doesn’t hit them. And so they head for the dark places, and that’s where the food is. From that on up to human beings, it’s feedback and more and more of it, and more and more information. And the connection between action and the information that comes back.

That’s why we’re all here. What we’re doing here may not have much to do with it. And that’s what NLP is all about. One of the things that distinguishes NLP from other methods, both on a theoretical level and hopefully on the practical level, is feedback. Not just going—doing a switch on somebody or doing a belief change on them, but noticing all the channels of information that you have to confirm that what you’re doing is what you think you’re doing.

CONNIRAE: And what you want to be doing.

Okay, so now for the—

STEVE:: (Inaudible at 1:22:31.7) – relax.

CONNIRAE: We’re about to hand out the offering plate now. (Laughter.)

STEVE: That’d be fun.

CONNIRAE: Belief change process.

STEVE: The indispensible church.

CONNIRAE: Now is where you use the information you gathered to knock the dominos over. Belief into doubt first, just use whatever key submodality or submodalities will take the belief content into doubt. Any questions on that one? That one’s fairly straightforward.

Now the second one, change content. That one we need to say a little more about because the way that Tom was able to do it will not work for most people because his was not a totally different content, it was just adding in elements into what he already had.

Now, a lot of people have totally different content. It needs to be a totally different picture. So what you can ask yourself is how can I easily and gracefully give this person a way of making that shift so that it seems easy and graceful and natural to them. So you—

STEVE: For instance, let’s say that someone believed they were ugly. It’s okay my girls aren’t pretty because they’re smart. I’m ugly. I’m not pretty, whatever. And they have a single picture for that one. That’s their initial belief. You take it into doubt, and let’s say something like Tom’s where there’s two pictures. This is a fairly common thing that there are two images in doubt. And often, one will be, as we asked him, one is the positive and one is the negative of whatever it is that you’re in doubt about. It might be true, might not be true. Well, could be ugly, could be pretty. 1:24:15.8

CONNIRAE: So you see both options. So once you’ve got your submodalities moved into doubt, in this case – let’s say distance does it. So you see – up close, you see this one picture of yourself ugly. But when you move it farther back, it turns into two pictures of ugly pretty because that’s doubt for you.

Now, in this case, you’ve got a very natural way of moving the new belief back up. You just simply move it closer, but you take the pretty one this time as you move it back in.

STEVE: Now sometimes—

CONNIRAE: Another person once had blinking on and off for doubt. The light would blink on and off, and one blink would be the pretty and the next blink would be the ugly, and then the pretty and then the ugly and so on.

STEVE: So alternating pictures, and sometimes they’re like this so that one flashes and this one’s all dim, and then this one flashes and this one’s all dim. So you wait until the right moment, and then you go—1:25:09.2

CONNIRAE: And when it flashes, you bring it back into belief.

STEVE: Now when you come back, you use same the submodalities that you used to change it down the other way. So whatever you used here. Like with Tom we used primarily dissociation.

CONNIRAE: Dissociation.

STEVE: And also location, color, and sound.

CONNIRAE: But the dissociation was the key. So the same thing that we used to take Tom’s belief into doubt we used in reverse—

STEVE: Do the same thing over here when you go back
.

CONNIRAE: —to get it back into strong belief after we’d switched the content.

Now, one more possible way of shifting contents here. Let’s say your doubt doesn’t have these two pictures in some way, it’s just a single representation of doubt. Maybe it’s fragments that aren’t organized. Mine sometimes is like that. It’s fragments of pictures that aren’t organized in any way that would lead me to a conclusion. So now what can I do to shift? Can you—what could I do? 1:26:08.2

STEVE: So there’s—is there content visible in these pieces of pictures?

CONNIRAE: Yeah, so I see different contents in kind of a—

STEVE: Like a collage.

CONNIRAE: —collage, fragments of unorganized information.

STEVE: That’s the belief.

CONNIRAE: Pardon?

MALE PARTICIPANT: Move the belief into fragments or disorganized.

STEVE: Well yes, you do that, and now you’ve got this one and the—

CONNIRAE: How do you change contents now from doubt—

STEVE: Now we’ve got lots of little uglies in here, but it’s in pieces. For instance, okay.

MALE PARTICIPANT: Take a piece at a time, and then – it’s easier to do it all at once.

CONNIRAE: You can turn the pieces over one at a time, and as they came over, they—

STEVE: Now, as you turn them over, you see what we’re going for is not just to change them, but how do you change them. What submodality would you use to change them? Now, you could use—let’s say they’re like puzzle pieces. You know, sometimes there’s a puzzle, and you turn it over and there’s another puzzle on the other side? So you could just go flip, flip, flip, flip.

CONNIRAE: Have your brain do it all on the inside.

STEVE: Or, what else could you do?

MALE PARTICIPANT: Erase it.

STEVE: You could erase it. Slide in a new one. You could peel off this one.

CONNIRAE: So have a line come over with a new one. 1:27:19.2

STEVE: On TV, they have a thing where they pull off a picture, and there’s another one underneath. You could have this picture—

CONNIRAE: A couple other really standard ways are to have the whole thing get so bright it whites out. Use one of your analogue submodalities. Get so bright it whites out and you can’t see what it is, and then when it comes back in, it’s the new content.

STEVE: Or so dim that you can’t see the content, then come back in as a new one.

CONNIRAE: Or so small you can’t see the content, then it comes back.

STEVE: Have it go off to infinity. And it’s a dot, and then you bring it back.

CONNIRAE: Yeah.

STEVE: Or you can have this fuzz out. You can defocus. You can have it all become like you’re looking through water, and then as it comes back, it has the new content.

MALE PARTICIPANT: And when it has the new content, it has the same submodalities as it had—

STEVE: Yes, it’ll still be correct and—whatever this is, you do whatever you do to—

MALE PARTICIPANT: Reverse it?

STEVE: —away to a little point, and then back with new content.

CONNIRAE: So, you just make some kind of gradual change that is easy for that person. If you have one that you love and you try it out and they’re acting like it’s hard, try another one.

STEVE: See, they may give it away right in here. They may have something in here. Doubt may be fuzzy. If it’s already fuzzy, then just make it more fuzzy.

CONNIRAE: So just fuzz it out more and have it come in the new content.

STEVE: It’s something they already do. The more you can make it align with what they do, the easier it will be for them to do it. Okay?

MALE PARTICIPANT: How are you adding the new content into that?

STEVE: Into this?

CONNIRAE: You’re not adding it in; you’re changing it.

MALE PARTICIPANT: Okay.

STEVE: In this – the more usual case is that you’re reversing it. This is ugly, and the new content is pretty.

MALE PARTICIPANT: Oh, I see. That’s where I got confused with it.

STEVE: See, with Tom’s, it was adding it in. And that was appropriate because it wasn’t that the things he was already doing were destructive, as far as I know. He seemed to enjoy them congruently and so on.

CONNIRAE: So it might—

STEVE: It’s just that he wanted more—he didn’t want to be limited by money.

CONNIRAE: More choices, so it might be changing from I believe I can’t learn NLP to I believe I can learn NLP—opposite content. 1:29:13.8

MALE PARTICIPANT: Okay, so in the doubt—when you’ve got the belief I can’t learn NLP, whatever it is. Okay, you come to the doubt—into the doubt submodalities, basically, with that belief that now—

STEVE: That content.

MALE PARTICIPANT: —that content is now somehow going to be screwed up probably because you’ve moved it over into the—

STEVE: It’ll be different.

MALE PARTICIPANT: It’ll be different, sorry. Okay, it’ll be different, and then you work with—

STEVE: —some other submodality to change content.

MALE PARTICIPANT:To change it, to change the content—

STEVE: Right.

MALE PARTICIPANT:—to the belief that you want, take it back to the belief side.

CONNIRAE: Guess who’s the location? (Laughs.)

STEVE: Almost everything in this pattern is stuff you’ve already done except this step of changing content. And it’s really a fairly easy step, and there are lots of ways to do it. And we don’t care how you do it as long as it’s fairly easy for the person to do.

You’ve already done the contrastive analysis. You’ve gathered information. You’ve already had the thing of accessing cues and noticing submodality shifts externally, getting the differences. You’ve already done moving from one thing to another, from understanding to confusion and back again. So really this is the only additional piece is the switch of content here and back.

MALE PARTICIPANT: That’s just a switch back in a way. You’re just describing a switch back.

STEVE: You can think of it that way, but for right now, don’t say it.

CONNIRAE: It’s like one piece of it—

STEVE: I agree with you.

CONNIRAE: —and other people are going to make dissociated pictures if you say so right now.

STEVE: For right now, keep them separate. Later on, play the game of yeah it’s really all the same stuff. In some ways, everything that Richard, John and Leslie have taught for however many years, it’s all the same stuff.

CONNIRAE: Change, right?

STEVE: But there are different things you can do with it, and sometimes it’s useful to keep it sorted out for a while so it doesn’t just get all mush. Okay?

FEMALE PARTICIPANT: What do we do exactly—or what did you do exactly with Tom when he changed the content? I don’t get—

STEVE: Well in this case, we added it in. See he had content in here.

CONNIRAE: Have him add in more. 1:31:15.0

STEVE: And we just added some other pictures in there. He already had a whole bunch of pictures, and we just added a bunch more content.

FEMALE PARTICIPANT: —inflexibility at that point.

CONNIRAE: You could talk about it that way.

STEVE: Well, other things that he could do if he had money.

CONNIRAE: It was seeing things that he could do.

STEVE: See had this limited bunch of stuff.

FEMALE PARTICIPANT: Oh so there are pictures.

CONNIRAE: Yes, yes. This is concrete experiences.

STEVE: Sure. Now, you might find somebody who in there—when they get to doubt, the only way they know what’s there is there’s a little voice that says, “This is doubt about X.” Okay? Then you can have the voice fade off into the distance and come back. Okay?

If you get into any puzzlement about this at any point, ask one of the assistants or one of us, and we’ll come in and help out. This is the only new piece, really. All the rest of it you’ve had.

MALE PARTICIPANT: I’m sorry, one more question. On the doubt side, what’s confusing to me I guess is that on the doubt side, you’re really changing it into the belief—into the new belief.

STEVE: No, you’re changing—

CONNIRAE: The content of the new belief.

STEVE: Think about it this way.

CONNIRAE: Not the submodalities.

STEVE: If you believe this, then that’s all there is. Then you disbelieve this. If you move it down here, doubt is some alternation between this thing and its opposite, usually. More often this will be some kind of representation of this thing and its opposite. So all you’re doing is you’re turning over the coin when it’s in doubt here, and then when the coin is turned over, then you bring it up like this, and now the other side becomes belief. Because if you doubt that you’re ugly, then it’s like you doubt that you’re pretty. You don’t know either one. They’re both in there implicitly. So it’s not really—it’s not dragging something that doesn’t really belong there. You’re just making explicit the other side of the coin.

CONNIRAE: The other side.

STEVE: Okay? 1:33:11.0

Okay, I think you’ve got enough.

CONNIRAE: Let’s—we need to go over testing real briefly.

STEVE: Oh testing, great.

CONNIRAE: Do you have a question?

STEVE: Let’s do—Tom.

TOM: Yeah, that image and doubt, that’s—(inaudible at 1:33:22.2) and then when you move it to belief—

STEVE: Whatever it is—

CONNIRAE: For you, it was.

STEVE: For you, it was.

CONNIRAE: But not for everyone.

STEVE: For you it was. It’s not necessarily. There are no rules here about association and dissociation. In the switch, there’s this heavy rule of start with association go to dissociation. No rules here go in and find what you find. Whatever their belief is made out of, start there. Whatever their doubt is made out of, go there, switch back and forth.

CONNIRAE: The major ways to test are to ask them afterwards not using any of your anchors or anything how do they think about their new belief now. And then you watch nonverbally to what submodalities they have at the same time.

Further test is to okay, well, now how does that old belief seem to you. And then you watch again for the submodality clues. And usually, they will—the old belief will either be in doubt. Often, it’s shifted over into I believe it is not true. It’s not in doubt anymore. Now, that’s the one that’s not true.

So it may not have the same submodalities as strong belief—or excuse me, as doubt. But still, it is not strong belief. Does that make sense?

STEVE: Tom, is your belief still there?

TOM: My belief is there.

STEVE: Yeah? Well, we’ve got an hour to 30 minute follow-up. 1:34:42.1

CONNIRAE: Although the belief change pattern is simple and easy to do when you understand it, its results can be powerful and far-reaching. For this reason, it’s important to really know what you’re doing when you use this kind of a pattern. Beliefs tend to be organizers of behavior that go across context, and this means that if you change someone’s belief, that change will also go across context.

We suggest that you be very cautious in trying out this pattern, particularly if you don’t already have a considerable amount of NLP training. One way that you can be careful in using this pattern is to completely respect any hesitations, any objections on the part of a person that you’re working with. Usually these hesitations are an indication that you have missed something that’s very important, or they’re an indication that the belief you’re trying to install would actually make the person less of a human being rather than more of a human being.

There are several characteristics of a good belief. One is that it is stated in positive terms rather than negative terms. Another is that it’s stated in terms of an ongoing process, not in terms of an endpoint. For example, the belief “I am not a warm person” violates both of those characteristics. It’s stated in terms of what you’re not rather than what you are, and is stated in terms of a state, an endpoint, not a process. 1:36:17.7

In contrast, the belief “I can learn to become a warm person by trying out different things and noticing what response I get,” does meet both of those characteristics. It’s a process. It’s stated in positive terms.

In addition, that particular belief has another important characteristic. It includes feedback about the response that I get with what I’m doing. That’s really important because often a belief can be limiting because it does not include feedback. It can be dangerous because it doesn’t include that kind of feedback.

There are many other fine points that are essential in getting positive results with this pattern. Certainly if the belief that you’re trying to install in someone is the wrong belief, you’re not going to have a positive impact on your clients. Also, there are other skills that can make the difference between succeeding or not succeeding with the pattern. They include having the verbal and the nonverbal patterns for gathering information about a person’s submodalities.

Next, we show you a follow-up interview with Tom that was taken three months after the session on belief change that you just watched. 1:37:35.1

TOM: Hi, Connierae.

CONNIRAE: And, thanks a lot for coming back to—

TOM: Absolutely.

CONNIRAE: —discuss the belief change that we made three months ago now. I think the thing everyone will want to know is has it made a difference?

TOM: It has made a difference, absolutely.

CONNIRAE: You’re sure of that?

TOM: Yeah, absolutely.

CONNIRAE: Great. And how are things different in a way that you attribute to the belief change?

TOM: For me, it’s space. You know, it is space. It’s like the way that I most usually think about it myself is in terms of the future, possibilities, things that are open to me now to think about, to plan for, to work towards that weren’t available three months ago. A lot of possibilities have opened up.

CONNIRAE: That sounds really good. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that’s different from how things were before?

TOM: Well, sometimes it’s kind of hard even to remember exactly the way I used to think about, you know, money in the past.

CONNIRAE: I guess you don’t mind that.

TOM: No, really. What happens for me when I do do that, when I recall that, mostly I get a feeling, and it’s a feeling of constriction that I – and the way that I recall it is that there are only certain kinds of things that were okay for me to think about vis-á-vis money. And that as I look at those now, I can see that they were really constraining me a lot, and they had been doing that for a considerable period of time. And now, that’s changed.

CONNIRAE: Okay, that certainly fits with what you were talking about in your experience in the belief change itself, narrow—

TOM: Yeah, exactly. 1:39:14.0

CONNIRAE: —and broadening out. So it sounds like that stayed with you, that broadening sense of possibilities.

TOM: Yeah, well, and it’s funny too. I mean, now—I hadn’t really thought of this, but occasionally I will kind of flash back or remember those submodalities or whatever that constraining and then what was beyond that where I feel I am now, and the constraint, that old belief, I still have a feeling for what that is. So in a sense, it’s a guide now for me sometimes when that comes up. You know, I can notice that there is another way to think about this. And when I think about it in another way, things open up. So it’s—does that make any sense, that I can—

CONNIRAE: So are you saying that from time to time you have a bit of the old feeling and that that leads to the new feeling now?

TOM: Yeah, and I—yeah, or I’ll have—I’ll think about doing a certain thing or implementing a project or whatever, and there will be considerations or, you know, sometimes a voice, whatever it may be, that seems to be constraining. And it’s like I’ll go back into the submodality change—the experience of that—and it ties together, then it expands, and I find myself thinking about it in another way.

So it’s in a sense, if anything, those old—that old whatever it was has become a motivator. When I fall back into that, it motivates me. Because I’ve already been through it, I know I can do it. So there’s that sense, that feeling of sureness about what I’m up to, and that’s nice. 1:40:43.0

CONNIRAE: Great, great. Now, you’ve talked about having a sense of more—that more is possible. Do you have any indication that you are actually going to do some of these things, or does it seem like—

TOM: Yeah, yeah. No, that was a big one. Actually, throughout the whole submodalities workshop for me, one of the things that I noticed during that was that there was a—literally a gap between where I was and where I wanted to be, and it was like terra incognita, literally a blank. I didn’t have—I didn’t know what the steps were to fill in to where I thought I wanted to be in the future, and now that’s changed.

I can—I really do attribute a lot of it to the money, you know, that change work, that now I can either do backward planning, locate myself some place in the future and look at the steps I need to go through to get there clearly, and it feels comfortable to do that. And from the other end here, I’ve already begun to implement a lot of those steps. I’m actually putting together the first steps—

CONNIRAE: Great, so not only you see the steps, but you’re beginning to—

TOM: I’m doing—

CONNIRAE: Great.

TOM: Right, so it’s kind of coming together from both directions and moving me into the future, and it’s nice.

CONNIRAE: That sounds good. Is there anything else that you would like to say overall about your response to what’s happened? Is there anything that was surprising to you about how things are different? Anything that you’ve kind of gone, “Oh, that’s different now.”

TOM: I have a lot of those. I think the thing about it that strikes me the most is that it—I think I was expecting some, you know, bolt of lightning, periodic, you know, “aha.” And it hasn’t been like that. It’s been a real—a kind of a gentle ongoingness to it. I mean, it’s like I’ll think about things and begin to plan things in a new way, and it’s like well, of course. I mean, that’s—this is the way it works.

CONNIRAE: It seems second nature.

TOM: Yeah, second nature. Well, of course, this is the way it works.

CONNIRAE: No big deal, this is—

TOM: Yeah, right.

CONNIRAE: Okay, that sounds good, in some ways better than a bolt of lightning.

TOM: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, much more there’s a sense of concreteness. And the other thing about it, I mean I understand that these are not really specific kinds of things, but there’s a sense of continuum and ongoingness now. And it’s like the future is much more not only approachable, but—so it’s a lot more attractive to me now. Without that constraint that I used to have.

CONNIRAE: Okay, well thank you very much for letting us know what’s been going on in the last three months.

TOM: Absolutely.

CONNIRAE: And I imagine as more times goes on, more and more of those steps will have—
TOM: Yes, yes, yes!
CONNIRAE: —will become a part of your past, as well as the future.
TOM: Yes. Thank you.
CONNIRAE: You’re welcome.

END TRANSCRIPT

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