Beliefs

A belief is a linguistic expression of something a person holds to be true. In NLP, beliefs are expressions of inner models that each person continually creates and must create to orient themselves in the world. Other terms for this include: convictions, attitudes, beliefs, opinions.

Table of Contents

1. What are Beliefs?
2. Examples of Limiting Beliefs
3. Examples of Positive and Negative Beliefs
4. How Beliefs Influence Our Life
5. Consequences of Beliefs
6. How a Belief Is Formed
7. Finding Beliefs
8. How Can Beliefs Be Changed?
9. Techniques for Changing Beliefs

What Are Beliefs? Definition

Beliefs are generalizations (generalizations) about the “relationships between experiences.”

Beliefs guide the focus of our attention and determine which information we absorb and how we interpret it.

Beliefs form the overarching framework of all change work you do. When people truly believe they cannot do something, they will unconsciously find a way to prevent change from happening. They will interpret results in a way that fits their existing beliefs.

We all have convictions, attitudes, expectations, and beliefs — some inherited from culture and society, others derived from personal experience, adopted from others, generated by past trauma, or generalized through repetition.

The American sociologist W.I. Thomas was among the first to express the now widely accepted view that reality, in its consequences, is as people perceive and define it. This means: the way I construct my world and imagine it directly influences my actions and behavior.

Everyone has systems of beliefs or convictions closely linked with personal values and criteria that can strongly influence motivation, decision-making, and performance. They shape life drive, stress management abilities, and enable the creation of positive life plans, goals, and needs.

Belief systems consist of multiple beliefs that support and reinforce one another.

Beliefs – What Are They? Explained by Stephan Landsiedel

Examples of Limiting Beliefs

Below you will find some of the most common limiting beliefs along with facts and examples that may make you think differently.

• Boris Becker won Wimbledon for the first time at age 17.
• At just 12, David Stuart gave a scientific lecture to 150 archaeologists and Mayan researchers about a hieroglyph he had deciphered.
• At 15, Judit Polgar became the youngest chess grandmaster of all time.

• Hulda Crooks had no idea at 60 that she would discover mountain climbing as a new hobby at 70. By 90, she became the oldest woman ever to climb Mount Fuji.
• Livy wrote the history of Rome at 75, and Goethe completed "Faust" at 80.
• George Bernard Shaw broke his leg at 96 while picking plums from a tree.

• About 80% of the most successful entrepreneurs neither graduated from high school nor completed university.
• Albert Einstein never earned a high school diploma. He failed his first entrance exam at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic, yet went on to formulate the theory of relativity and became the most famous physicist of the 20th century.
• No one is stopping you from starting a new education today.

• Robert Schuller, known as the master of possibility thinking, had no money. Without a dollar, he founded a congregation, held services at a drive-in theater, and eventually built the Crystal Cathedral, now worth over 100 million dollars.
• Andrew Carnegie started in a spool factory earning 15 DM per week. In the last 18 years of his life, he donated over 1 billion DM.

• Robert W. Woodruff suffered from dyslexia and could barely read. Even as a major businessman, he had to sound out each word individually. Despite that, he led the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta until his death in 1985, turning it into one of the world’s most successful corporations. If Robert Woodruff could do that, what’s stopping you from succeeding?

• Arnold Schwarzenegger came from modest origins, yet became the most successful bodybuilder of all time, a Hollywood star, and even married into the Kennedy family.

• Demosthenes stuttered and yet became the greatest orator of ancient Greece.
• The blind musician José Feliciano earned 38 gold records.
• The blind Stevie Wonder became world-famous.
• Despite his drooping eyelid and slow speech, Sylvester Stallone became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Examples of Positive and Negative Beliefs

Money

Positive	Negative
I attract money effortlessly like a magnet.	I need a lot of money to be happy.
I feel rich and successful. I am rich and successful.	Rich people gained their wealth through lies and deceit.
I love money and feel good about having plenty of it.	Without money, I’m worthless.
I deserve wealth and prosperity.	People envy me for my success.

Self-Worth

Positive	Negative
I accept myself as I am.	I’m a failure and good for nothing.
I am grateful for what I have.	Everyone else is better than me and reaches their goals — unlike me.
I’m a wonderful person.	I’m insignificant.
As I am, I am valuable, complete, and happy.	I can’t handle it all.
My opinion matters.	If I make a mistake or fail, I’ll be rejected.

Weight Loss

Positive	Negative
Living and eating healthily is fun for me.	Losing weight is too hard.
I’m allowed to be slim.	I’ll never stick to a diet.
I feel comfortable in my body.	Everyone in my family is overweight.
I allow myself to be slim and proud of it.	I just have bad genes.
I reduce and maintain my weight with ease.	No matter what I eat, I gain weight anyway.
My body naturally finds the weight that’s right for me.	If I want to lose weight, I have to deprive myself.

Love

Positive	Negative
I’m worthy of love.	No one loves me.
I’m surrounded by people who love me.	I’m alone.
Love and harmony fill my life.	No one wants me.
My family gives me love and affection.	I don’t deserve love and affection.
I live in love and harmony with my dream partner.	My relationships are doomed to fail.
There’s an infinite source of love flowing within me.	Other people don’t love or respect me.

Health

Positive	Negative
Being healthy is my body’s natural state.	My illness is incurable.
I feel healthy and fit.	I can never be completely healthy.
I have control over my own health.	My age is to blame for my condition.
Each breath fills me with new, healthy energy.	If I were fully healthy, no one would care about me anymore.
I choose a conscious, healthy lifestyle.	There’s no help for me anymore.

Disability

Positive	Negative
I’m unique and special.	I’m unattractive.
Despite my limitations, I can achieve anything I want.	I’m disadvantaged and have no chance compared to others.
I love and accept myself just the way I am.	My limitation keeps me from achieving my goals.

Relationships

Positive	Negative
My relationships are full of love and affection.	I’m incapable of having relationships.
I have a great partner by my side.	I feel restricted in relationships.
I enjoy my relationships to the fullest.	Relationships can never be easy or harmonious.
I’ll find the right partner for me.	It’s normal to fight a lot in a relationship.
My relationship gives me security and stability.	My partner doesn’t respect me.
I respect and love my partner as they are.	I can’t be happy in a relationship.

How Beliefs Influence Our Life

Belief influences our physical functions — the body reacts as if what the mind believes were true. Furthermore, your behavior is also strongly shaped by your convictions and beliefs. Once a belief has been firmly anchored, even massive opposing information won’t shake it. We either ignore it or consider it wrong. The mechanisms of generalization, deletion, and distortion serve this purpose well. Some people even feel compelled to change the entire world just to make their belief right.

Examples

• The Corpse

  A classic example is the story of a man who believes he’s dead. He just sits and insists he’s a corpse. A psychiatrist argues with him for a while about whether he’s actually dead. Then the psychiatrist gets an idea.
  
  He asks the man whether corpses can bleed. Since all bodily functions have stopped in a corpse, the man says no. The psychiatrist then pricks his finger with a needle. When blood appears, the man says: “Oh, I must have been mistaken. Corpses can bleed after all.”

• Cancer Study

  In an interesting study, a researcher interviewed 100 “cancer survivors” to discover what they all had in common. She defined a survivor as someone diagnosed with terminal cancer and given little chance of survival but who was still alive and healthy ten to twelve years later.
  
  Interestingly, she couldn’t find a common pattern in treatment. Some had chemotherapy, radiation, diet programs, surgery, or spiritual healing — yet all shared one crucial factor: they believed their treatment would work. It was belief, not the treatment itself, that made the difference.

• Hypnosis and Ice

  Belief also filters our perceptions. Through the network of beliefs in our mind, incoming messages are given different meanings — even at the nervous system level. We can reinterpret stimuli from the outside through belief.
  
  In one experiment, hypnotized subjects were touched with ice while being told it was a piece of hot metal. All subjects developed blisters at the point of contact.

• Intelligence Tests at School

  In 1968, psychologists Rosenthal and Jacobsen gave elementary school students an intelligence test. Teachers were told that this test could predict future intellectual development.
  
  They were randomly told that 20% of their students were expected to show exceptional improvement in the coming year. In reality, these students were no different from the others.
  
  A year later, follow-up testing showed that the “selected” students had significantly higher IQ gains than their peers. The teachers’ positive expectations had directly influenced the students’ performance.

Consequences of Beliefs

Beliefs are always linked to emotional reactions. The most common consequences of beliefs can be categorized into the following emotional states:

• Hopelessness:
  A belief that the desired outcome is unattainable, regardless of one’s abilities and resources, e.g., “Cancer is incurable.”
  
  ➨ Hopeful:
  A belief that one has the personal abilities and resources to reach the desired outcome.



• Helplessness:
  A belief that the goal is attainable in general but not for oneself, e.g., “Others can do it, but it won’t work for me.”
  
  ➨ Empowered:
  A belief that achieving the desired outcome is possible and that one is capable of learning how.



• Worthlessness:
  A belief that one doesn’t deserve to achieve the desired goal, perhaps due to something done or not done, or simply “being the way one is,” e.g., “I don’t deserve an easy life.”
  
  ➨ Worthy:
  A belief that one deserves success and positive outcomes because they’ve earned them through appropriate effort.



• Meaninglessness:
  A belief that the desired outcomes have no significance for oneself or others.
  
  ➨ Meaningful:
  A belief that the desired outcome also benefits others and enriches relationships.



• Pointlessness:
  A belief that life itself is meaningless and that striving for goals is pointless.
  
  ➨ Purposeful:
  A belief that the desired outcomes fit meaningfully into the overall process of life and that life itself is purposeful.

How a Belief Is Formed

In our development, we go through three distinct phases:

• Imprinting Period

From birth to around age seven, we experience the imprinting period, during which we absorb all events, images, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells around us.

• Modeling Period

From around ages eight to thirteen, we enter the modeling period, where we imitate our parents and other admired individuals.

• Socialization Period

During adolescence, we move beyond the family circle and encounter new people. This is when our social values and belief systems develop.

A major source of belief formation is our direct personal experience — the conclusions and interpretations we draw about our environment, the people in it, and our past experiences. Many of our beliefs also arise from language (media, books, etc.) and communication with others.

Information from experience or verbal communication forms the foundation for conclusions and generalizations that shape our belief systems. The way we distort or delete elements of current experience often serves to maintain old generalizations from the past.

During childhood, parents play a crucial role in this generalization process. A child’s “model of the world” is shaped by both verbal and nonverbal messages and meta-messages received from parents. For example, if parents repeatedly say to their daughter, “You’re so clumsy,” it can become the belief, “I’m clumsy — I can’t do things right.”

Finding Beliefs

The key factors in forming and maintaining our beliefs are reference experiences, environment, role models, and self-programming through autosuggestions. Analyze yourself in these areas and ask the following questions:

How Can Beliefs Be Changed?

• What beliefs does the person you want to become hold?
• What experiences or reference points are needed to realize your dream and become that person?
• Use the experiences of others (mentors) and study biographies of successful people. Who could be your mentors? Which biography will you start with?
• What kind of environment would best support you in achieving your goals?
• Which autosuggestions fit your new identity?

Changing Beliefs with NLP

Techniques for Changing Beliefs

• Generate a new belief (New Belief Generator or Mentor Technique)
• Install a Belief on the Timeline
• Change historical imprints (Re-Imprinting)
• Install belief systems through Submodalities
• Dickens Pattern

Mentor Technique: Generating a New Belief

This model suits anyone who wants to change a behavior in a specific situation but doesn’t yet know how. The Mentor Technique is ideal for “stuck states” that need fresh ideas.

A mentor is an advisor, counselor, or wise friend. Real or fictional mentors are used as resources — they can be people you know, have heard or read about, characters from books or films, fairy-tale figures, animals, plants, mystical beings, guardian angels, or even natural elements such as the ocean or mountains (anything meaningful within the client’s belief system).

When a client cannot identify resources within themselves, the mentor position helps to reveal or provide those resources.

The use of mentors to access resources is called the Mentor Technique.

Mentor Technique – See Yourself – Explained by Stephan Landsiedel

Installing a Belief

To install a belief, follow these steps:

Re-Imprinting by R. Dilts

An imprint is a formative past experience from which someone has created one or several beliefs. It often involves unconsciously adopting the roles or behaviors of significant people in that experience.

Re-Imprinting aims to find the missing resources, change the belief, and adapt the old role model to the client’s current reality. The process unfolds as follows:

Re-Imprinting Process Overview

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