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. …

If you want to change behavior, change the beliefs that drive any given behavior — such as procrastination, anger, worrying what people think of you, the inability to delegate, etc. — and the behavior will change.

To make this clear, 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 (or he) thinks they ought to be doing.

Perhaps you have told her that you don’t like her yelling at you and you think it is inappropriate for her to yell at others.

Despite the logic of your argument, her response might well be: “Yelling is the only way to get people to listen and do what you want.”

That’s the belief that engenders the yelling. …

Continued: Change Doesn’t Have to Be Difficult… If You Know How

~~~~~

All of you who read my blog posts and who signed up on my website to eliminate a limiting belief are “weird,” according to best-selling author and popular blogger Seth Godin.

Why would he apply that term to you?

Seth uses the term “weird” to describe anyone who is not “normal,” in other words, people who express their uniqueness and who don’t try to fit in with what “most people” are doing.

What makes YOU weird? 

Most “normal” people are not interested in personal growth.  You—who are on my mailing list and reading this blog post—are a distinct minority.  Because you want more out of life … because you are willing to spend your time, energy, and money to create a better life for yourself.

Most “normal” people do not have this awareness and commitment. …

Continued: You are weird.

~ ~

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?

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

“This simple but powerful word got me thinking of all the different places someone who wanted to change course could start. Here are 6 tips to get you started on getting started.”

Item 4: “Start listening more to yourself and less to others. Pablo Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

“Unfortunately, even in childhood, our dreams too often get dismissed by others.”

Continued in her article The Key to Changing Course is to Start: 6 Tips on How to Get Started
~ ~

His program, The Lefkoe Method, is based on overcoming beliefs that impact our self-esteem, anxiety, confidence, fear of public speaking and other challenges.

Based on working with many clients, he finds that “getting rid of a limiting belief is a lot easier to do than finding the relevant beliefs in the first place.”

In a recent post on his blog, he notes the number of beliefs affecting a problem or issue can vary.

“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.”

Many problem behaviors or patterns share a lot of the same beliefs, he says, so overcoming a set of beliefs can improve our mental health and life in a variety of ways.

“If you eliminate all the beliefs that usually cause a lack of confidence,” he writes, ‘you also will be eliminating all the beliefs that cause several other problems, such as procrastination, social anxiety, fear of rejection, seeking approval, perfectionism, high levels of stress, and the critical ‘little voice’ in our heads.”

Continued in his article How To Find The Beliefs Underlying Your Problems.

You can try The Lefkoe Method for free at ReCreate Your Life.

The ‘inner critic’ image is from a related article Practical Strategies for Shifting the “I’m Not Enough” Gremlin, by Laura West.

~ ~

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Morty Lefkoe addresses the nature of self-limiting beliefs and how to overcome them in programs of The Lefkoe Insitute.

In his article What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know, he explains, “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.

“When people know they don’t know something and they want to know about that something, they learn about it. 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 far too many people don’t even realize that there is anything wrong. 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.”

“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.”

Lefkoe comments: “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.”

Continued in article What Drives You: “Intention” or “Inspiration”? by Morty Lefkoe.

Joe Vitale is author of many titles including The Awakening Course.

Morty Lefkoe is creator of the Natural Confidence Program [See testimonial by Jack Canfield.]

Try his Lefkoe Process and eliminate a self-limiting belief free at ReCreate Your Life.

She says, “This college experience is really important to me, and I won’t give it up for anything.

“I’m not going to school just for the academics – I wanted to share ideas, to be around people who are passionate about learning.

“Being at Brown has totally taken me out of my comfort zone.”

Continued in The Inner Actor post: Emma Watson on how college is “empowering and liberating”

One of the top selling self-help titles has been Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! by Anthony Robbins.

In their Scientific American Mind article Do Self-Help Books Help?, Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld use this as an example of self-help authors who “often make grandiose promises which invite a skeptical look.”

They note the dust jacket describes Robbins as an “acknowledged expert in the psychology of change” but “lacks any formal mental health credentials.

“Elsewhere, Robbins has made eyebrow-raising claims, such as that he can cure any psychological problem in a session, make someone fall in love with you in five minutes and even revive brain-dead individuals. (If he can do this with enough people, he might sell even more books.)”

hey continue, “Even trained psychologist authors are not immune to hyperbole. Wayne Dyer, a counseling psychologist, wrote You’ll See It When You Believe It: The Way to Your Personal Transformation. The dust jacket promises that ‘through belief you can make your most impossible dreams come true, turn obstacles into opportunities, rid yourself of guilt and inner turmoil, and spend every day doing the things you love to do.’

“That’s nice work if you can get it.”

Bibliotherapy research

“Typically investigators recruit participants with a specific problem (such as depression, panic attacks or obesity). They take objective measures of the problem before and after the bibliotherapy and compare such statistics with a group that gets no book or any other treatment… Some studies also compare bibliotherapy with face-to-face psychotherapy.

“Results generally demonstrate that bibliotherapy leads to greater mental health improvements than no treatment, and it often equals the benefits obtained by psychotherapy.”

That may sound very encouraging, but the article adds some warnings about the limitations of such research.

More from the article:

Using Self-Help Books Wisely

• Choose books based on research or on valid psychological principles of change. See if the author makes any references to published research that support his or her claims.

Some books that have been used with good effects in bibliotherapy studies are:

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, by David D. Burns.

Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think, by Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky.

Coping With Panic: A Drug-Free Approach to Dealing With Anxiety Attacks, by George Clum.

• Examine the credentials of the author. Proclaiming oneself an expert (or appearing on Oprah) does not an expert make.

• Be wary of books that make promises that they obviously cannot keep, such as curing a phobia in five minutes or fixing a failing marriage in a week. Typically these books are based on the personal biases and preferences of the author rather than on valid psychological principles.

• Beware of authors that offer “one size fits all” solutions. For example, a book that tells you to always express your anger to your spouse fails to take into account the complexity of the people involved and the specifics of the marriage.

• If the problem is a serious one, such as clinical depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder or schizophrenia, you are better off seeking professional treatment than reading a self-help book.

From Do Self-Help Books Help?, Scientific American Mind, October/November 2006 [PDF]

Also see guest article: Dr. David Burns’ “Feeling Good”: A Classic in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Literature by Kitty Holman.

The image is also in the related post Why Is Change So Difficult?, By guest author Morty Lefkoe.

personal growth development, personal development, self growth, personal growth resources, life change, positive change, self-help, self-help books

Dick (Jim Carrey) from a scene in Fun with Dick and Jane. Feeling exuberantly self-assured after getting a promotion, he sings the R. Kelly song in an elevator.

But aside from those kinds of energizing positive sentiments, we are often dealing with self-limiting beliefs.

In a recent post,  Steve Pavlina notes, “Limiting beliefs can seriously hold us back in life. But most of the time such beliefs are invisible to us. They control some of our thoughts and behaviors behind the scenes, enough to curtail our results in some area of life.

“For example, if you have the false belief that mistakes and failure are bad, then you’ll avoid many growth and learning experiences because you have to be willing to fail in order to build new skills.

“As another example, if you have the belief that rejection is a bad thing, you’ll avoid approaching new people, and you’ll miss out on many wonderful social connections.”

He asks, “Where do these beliefs come from?”

“Many limiting beliefs get installed during childhood, but that isn’t always the case. The pattern is that your mind drew false generalization based on one or more specific events. It assigned questionable meanings to those events, and those interpretations are disempowering you.

“As a result your mind blocks you from taking certain actions, even though the actions may be reasonable and intelligent choices.

Overcoming self limiting beliefs

Pavlina continues, “In order to remove a limiting belief, It isn’t enough to identify and acknowledge it. You may be aware of some of your limiting beliefs, but awareness of them isn’t necessarily enough to keep them from operating in your life. You may be aware that rejection isn’t such a terrible thing, but your subconscious is still conditioned to avoid it. Awareness is an important part of the solution, but it isn’t the whole solution.”

He writes about being in Bermuda for the Transformational Leadership Council retreat, and meeting Morty Lefkoe, who helped him deal with limiting beliefs he had.

“Morty took me through a fairly straightforward cognitive process that allowed my mind to eliminate false beliefs that I’d been carrying around for years. After the retreat we did a couple more sessions by phone in order to eliminate some additional beliefs that were holding me back…”

From Remove a Limiting Belief in About 20 Minutes, by Steve Pavlina – who is author of the book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth.

Try out The Lefkoe Method free at ReCreate Your Life.

For reversing public speaking fear using The Lefkoe Method go to Undoityourself.

Also see an article by Morty Lefkoe: Everyone Knows You Can’t Eliminate Beliefs Permanently… Are You Sure?

[You can view a video of Dick (Jim Carrey) in Fun with Dick and Jane (2005) in the article Facing the Enemies Within – Courage and Fear, by Jim Rohn.
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