Hi everybody, and welcome to my Ezine "NLP: The Secret Science of Self- Empowerment." This Ezine is designed to bring to you techniques, theories and exercises from the fascinating field of Neurolinguistic Programming.
This week's article continues to look at the highly interesting subject of "Beliefs." From an NLP point of view, a deeper understanding of what kind of beliefs you hold and how they affect your life is a step towards empowerment. Knowing what your beliefs are is a powerful way to build self-awareness and live more consciously.
This issue's article deals with a special kind of limiting belief, the so-called Thought Virus. If you want to read last issues article "Overcoming Limiting Beliefs", click here.
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This Issue's Article: Thought Viruses
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Once a limiting belief has been formed, it can become autonomous,
i.e. become disconnected from the circumstances under which it was created
and become what NLP calls a 'Thought Virus'.
A thought virus is a 'free-floating' belief in our system that we cannot link to a specific reference experience. In other words, we believe something without knowing why we believe it. Such thought viruses often are outside our awareness, even though they might strongly influence our behavior and decisions. Having the qualities of a virus, the disconnected belief is free to infect any part of our life.
A limiting belief such as "If I show others who I truly am, they will reject me," might have been formed during an art project at school, where a narrow-minded teacher gave you a bad marks for a very creative piece of work. It could be the result of writing a very personal letter to a significant person in your life and receiving a negative response. Or any other situation in which you felt you were sharing your true self and received a negative response from others.
Whatever the situation was under which a limiting belief was formed, once it separates itself from the context under which it came to life, it becomes a thought virus and can travel freely through our system and affect our attitude and behavior. By generalizing a limiting belief in this manner and applying it to all parts of our life, we are setting ourselves up for failure.
Typical thought viruses sound like:
- I am not good at sports
- People think I am weird
- People from this group (ethnicity, gender, profession, age, etc.) are not trustworthy
As you can see, thought viruses tend to come in an over-generalized form. They have been removed from a specific context. The woman who believes "I am not good at sports" might have had some negative reference experiences when playing soccer at high school. As the years went by, the initial limiting belief "I am not good at soccer" assumed the generalized thought virus form of "I am not good at sports" and now causes her tension whenever she is faced with a situation that involves talking about, watching, or playing sports.
Thought viruses can travel from one person to the other, much like the flu. This happens, when a person that is of significance to us passes his or her beliefs onto us, by acting or speaking in a manner that implies the belief. If a parent made negative statements about certain kinds of people (or countries, religions, professions, activities, etc.) during our childhood, we may very well find ourselves being skeptical of "those people" later on in life, without even knowing why. This kind of belief transfer can happen one-on-one, within a family or group of people, or even on a national level.
In order to get rid of thought viruses ask yourself:
- If the belief was passed on by someone else: "Do I have enough evidence from personal experience to sustain this belief, or have I just taken it on from someone else without testing it for its relevance and truthfulness?"
- If the belief is your own but got disconnected from it's original context: "What is the origin of this belief? Is the belief appropriate for the particular context I am applying it to?"
The key to neutralizing a thought virus is awareness. Let's say the woman who had the thought virus "I am bad at sports" becomes aware of it and, after examining it for its relevance, realized that it was born from the negative soccer experiences at high school. The next time she gets tense because her friends ask her to play basketball with them she can simply say to herself "Hang on, this tension is caused by my thought virus. There actually is no proof in my personal history that I am bad at basketball."
Once you become aware of your over-generalized, free-floating, limiting belief, you have a choice to keep it, alter it, or do away with it. A thought virus exposed will gradually shrink away in the scorching light of your awareness.
References:
Changing Belief Systems with NLP, Dilts, R., 1990
Sleight of Mouth, Dilts, R., S.1999
All the best,
Christoph Schertler
NLP Trainer/Coach - Founder PEC, LLC
Christoph Schertler has published an ebook on how to use NLP to build confidence. The NLP Confidence Builder
contains over 100 pages of powerful NLP techniques and concepts that can help you overcome limiting beliefs and bring forth the life-transforming power of confidence from deep within you.
Christoph Schertler was recently published in "101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Vol. 2" alongside John Gray, Jack Canfield, Richard Carlson, Bob Proctor, Alan Cohen and many other leading Self Improvement experts.
Get your copy today:
About the Author
Christoph Schertler is a certified NLP Trainer and NLP Coach with a passion for helping others to empower themselves and bring forth their power and genius from within. He has trained with some of the biggest names in the field and is a firm believer in the transformational powers of NLP.
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