The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.

I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you. We are in charge of our attitudes.

Charles R Swindol

I saw this quote on a website and took a liking to it. I think it’s a good quote, but the important sentence is almost at the end.

I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it

That’s the best bit, but even that needs a tweak in my opinion.

Here’s my version:

I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I respond to it

What! It’s just one word. What’s the difference?

In my opinion it’s a world of difference: a reaction is something that you do automatically, a response is something you have a choice in.

If I put my hand on a hot stove I will unconsciously pull my hand away, I don’t think about it, I don’t have to think about it.

If my partner, neighbour or colleague complains to me about something I can react without thinking. These reactions may not help the situation.

Or, I can respond to what they are saying, choosing how to be in the world. This may or may not help the situation but at least I won’t be a repeat of my last reaction (or the one before that).

If you want to change a knee jerk reaction (notice it’s not called a knee jerk response) then, at the very least, you need to notice that it’s happening and take responsibility for it. How you change the response depends on the situation you are dealing with and the tools you have at your disposal.

The part that everyone can do, and needs to do, it to own the reaction and look for a more useful response.

For more on this you might like to read Stop Trying To Change The World

Image courtesy of TheFutureIsUnwritten

There are many ways to neutralise limiting beliefs quickly and easily with EFT or other techniques.

Unfortunately our limiting beliefs are often unconscious and unquestioned, a part of the fabric of our perceptions, which makes them hard to find.

Other people’s limiting beliefs can be easy to spot because we are on the outside looking in, but our own remain hidden. That’s why there will always be work for good therapists and coaches.

But what are we going to do if there isn’t a therapist or coach available?

Are we doomed to wander ignorant of our own limiting beliefs because we can’t see them?

Fortunately, there is a simple way to bring lots of limiting beliefs into consciousness using just one word.

It’s a simple word, readily available and deeply familiar …

Because

Because is a special word because when it appears in a sentence it is usually followed by a reason.

• I can’t go out tonight because I am washing my hair
• I can’t start a new business now because the economy is on its knees.
• I can’t change jobs because I am too old.

Each time you hear “because” you are going to hear a reason for the statement that comes just before it.

We can use the power of because to bring our “reasons” out into the open.

Before describing how to use because for this, it is worth acknowledging that there are two kinds of reasons that could be uncovered:

Facts are descriptions of reality

I am cold because it is snowing

It is snowing is a description of the environment, people are often cold if it snowing. That’s not a limiting belief that’s a result of our external reality.

Beliefs are descriptions of our ideas about external reality (often confused with facts)

I am alone because nobody wants me

“Nobody wants me” is not a description of reality (even though it may be confused with one). It is a belief, an idea about reality.

The word nobody is a give away. There are more than 6,000,000,000 people on the planet (that’s a lot). It is impossible to know whether one of those six billion people would be interested in them. In a whole lifetime it would not be possible to meet even a tiny fraction of those people to find out. Nevertheless, for this person it may be a convincing idea about reality.

Is a reason a fact or a belief?

Sometimes, it can be difficult to decide if a reason is a fact or a belief. Fortunately there is a simple test: treat it as a belief and work with it. If it is a fact it probably won’t change, if it is a belief it probably will.

So how can we use because to expose our limiting beliefs?

1. Choose a problem

If you are going to uncover limiting beliefs you need a predicament to work with. If limiting beliefs cause difficulties for us which difficulty are we going to investigate.

• I can’t start a new business
• I am alone
• I can’t make enough money
• Our relationship is struggling
• …

So what is going on in your world that you suspect may be a result of limiting beliefs?

2. Harvest all the possible reasons

Write down a sentence that briefly describes the problem followed by the word because

• I can’t start a new business because …
• I am alone because …
• I can’t make enough money because …
• My relationship is struggling because …
• [problem ] because …

Now say your “because” sentence out loud, then write down whatever comes into your head that completes the sentence. Write as fast as you can and without judgement.

Say the “because” sentence again and write down whatever comes into your head this time as fast as you can and without judgements.

Repeat this process as many times as you can, until you run out of sentences, either because you have the feeling that the well has run dry, or you find you are repeating yourself.

Important: It is essential that you put your judging mind to one side for this process. The aim here is to get as many reasons as possible, so don’t evaluate your reasons at this point. Go as quickly as you can – this allows the information to float up from your unconscious without being blocked by the analytical mind.

3. Pick the wheat from the chaff

Now we have a list of reasons we can sort through at our leisure and identify which of the reasons are limiting beliefs and which are just the random chatter of the mind.

Work through your list of because sentences, saying each out loud.

Give the reason a truth score from 0-10 where 0 is false and 10 is true (this is how true it feels, not how true it is logically).

Repeat this process for each of the reasons until you have a list of reasons that have some emotional charge.

Now you have a list of reasons (limiting beliefs) that can be worked on with EFT or whatever belief change method you would like to choose.

How many beliefs can I expect to find?
You could find just one or two beliefs, or you could find 10 or more.

If you do find a lot of limiting beliefs don’t despair, things might not be as bad as they seem.

• At least you know what to work on: This is big a step forward from having a problem and not knowing what to do with it.
• The beliefs you uncover are probably related: This is good news, if you make a dent in a big limiting belief there is a strong chance that the other beliefs will be softened automatically. You might only have to work through a few of them systematically to get big reductions in the others.

However many beliefs you find, all you need to do now is change them!

P.S. Two quick and easy EFT based belief change mechanisms are The Belief Flip and Exception Tapping

This is the time of year in the UK when many self-employed people start to experience that heady mixture of anxiety and procrastination that develops when the January 31st deadline for our tax return looms.

In the past I have procrastinated, sweated and rushed to get everything together and submitted by the deadline date. One year I managed to submit the tax return on the evening of the last day. Ouch!

Happily, I’ve been getting better at it over the years. This year I decided to use the Getting Out Of Your Own Way process to take care of my limiting beliefs and responses to this necessary task. It says a lot about my level of resistance that I resisted taking care of this resistance for so long.

Finally, over the Christmas holiday (I know how to have a good time) I ran through the process and nailed quite a few limiting beliefs and responses about getting my accounts done in good time. I even felt like I wanted to get started right away.

When I got home after the holiday, the feeling of getting started right away seemed to have disappeared. I looked at the bulging file of receipts and bank statements still to be processed sitting in their folder and thought that I really should get down to the business of working my way through them, but did nothing.

Eventually, I became curious about what was happening with my resistance to doing this chore. I decided to do a little experiment.

I put the folder brimming with papers on the table and printed out a copy of the tapping worksheet. The tapping worksheet is a method I use for breaking down a problem into its component triggers to make tapping easier.

Briefly, you name the problematic situation giving it a 0-10 score, then complete sections on what you think about the situation, what you see, hear and feel, what you tell yourself about it and what the situation reminds you of. This breaks down the situation into tap-able aspects. You can read about the tapping worksheet in A Patterdale Terrier’s Guide To Stress Relief and download a copy from the resources section of my website.

I worked through each section of the tapping worksheet and found a couple of negative responses that I had to this task.

The main one was: “I hate this!” (scoring 8 out of 10).

I tapped out the “I hate this” with just a few rounds of EFT. Then I went back to check on all the other parts of the worksheet, every other unhelpful response had disappeared!

I immediately started working on the file and spent the next two hours sorting and checking receipts and bank statements without difficulty.

Did the task that I hated suddenly become fun and enjoyable? Sadly not, it’s still a chore (I’d never be a good accountant) but it’s stopped being a problem or something to avoid.

Is this the magical end of procrastination? I doubt it. I think procrastination and self-sabotage are usually quite a complicated mix of beliefs and responses, but I do think I have uncovered an important part of my task aversion towards this particular chore.

Now I’m going to investigate how many other tasks I’m slow to complete because “I hate them”.

You might like to see if the “I hate X” is stopping you from doing what you need to do.

P.S. I’m still working my way through the various remaining accounting tasks without problem or resistance.

ChangeCamp+Plus gives you an opportunity to have a deeper experience of the kind of work ChangeCamp presenters do at an affordable price.

There are six presentations, three in the morning and three in the afternoon running concurrently on a variety of topics by ChangeCamp presenters.

Each ChangeCamp+Plus workshop is three hours long. That’s a lot of time to learn and explore a particular process or technique in depth.

The workshopsare a mix appropriate for personal development or professional development with CPD certificates provided.

• How To Develop Compassionate Self Acceptance with Andy Hunt
• Mindfulness with Iain MacKenzie
• Brief Grief Therapy with Harry Knox
• Gestalt Theory And Practice: Experiential Workshop with Iain MacKenzie
• From Problem To Solution Using EFT with Andy Hunt
• Personal And Therapeutic Toolbox with Rob McGinley

“First we make our habits, then our habits make us.”
- Charles C. Noble

It’s that time of year when New Year Resolution articles abound on websites, telling you how to choose and achieve your resolutions.

I spent some time racking my brains to find a way of talking about them that is different and useful, without success.

So I gave up and started to think about what I do to make changes in my life.

Rather than making and keeping New Years Resolutions I have what I think of as “Habits Of Change”, a collection of attitudes and actions that I apply to my daily life.

1. Use problems to grow: I assume that a problem is a disguised growth opportunity. I realise that some problems have lots more “growth opportunity” than others and can be real challenges, but I have found this a useful starting position.

For many people a problem is something that blocks them and holds them fast, I try to get myself to think of a challenging situation as an invitation to grow.

2. Try to be clear about what is going on: If you are going to respond to a situation you need to know what is happening now. I try to investigate the current situation and my part in it. Here are five questions I find helpful:

1. What is going on in my outer world?
2. What is going on in my inner world?
3. What can I change in my outside world?
4. What can I change in my inner world?
5. How do I want to be in this situation?

Notice that while what I can change in my outer world might be quite limited I have room to manoeuvre in my responses and how I want to be in that situation.

3. Change my responses: Most of my problems are in my responses to what happens, not to what is happening. While the world may be difficult to change I can change the way I respond to the world (see Stop Trying To Change The World). Daily life gives me a ready supply of experiences and challenges that I can respond to.

If I choose to respond in the same way that I have always done then I can expect similar results. If I change my response then I change what happens, for this event and for all future events. Each small change propagates out into the future in ways I cannot foretell, but they do add up. (See The Compound Interest Of Suffering And Freedom).

4. Use what I know: I’m lucky enough to know lots of NLP, EFT and other techniques that can change my experience. But knowing them is not enough, I have to use them to get the benefit.

I suspect many people learn techniques like these and are full of good intentions to use them, but don’t. If you are one of those people who think it is better to suffer than use what you know to change for the better, I have a question: What on earth are you waiting for?

5. Making a change however small: Some problems are big and difficult and like a rabbit caught in the headlights we can be paralysed, unable to do anything. Even in situations like that I try to change something, even a tiny change can make some difference, give a bit more leeway to work on the next part. By going step by step I can usually make progress.

6. Work out where my limitations are and dissolve them if I can: I am a human being, I have inherited tendencies, an upbringing and lots of experiences. All these combine to create a unique collection of beliefs, values and responses that determine the way I am in the world.

Lots of these beliefs and responses that I live from may now be out of date and worth updating. The challenge is finding out what those beliefs and limitations are, then resolving them. The second part, thanks to NLP and EFT is quite straightforward. The first part – finding them is much more difficult because they are rarely visible to us.

I developed the Getting Out Of Your Own Way process as a way of being able to reliably find my own limits so I could dissolve them.

7. Let go of understanding: I think it is much more important to change something for the better than understand why things are broken. I am amazed by the number of people who will spend hours working out what is wrong with them, whose fault it is, what theory explains their difficulties and so on, rather than spend a few minutes starting to resolve the problem. In my opinion it is much more useful to do something about a problem than to just think about it.

These are some of the “Habits Of Change” I have adopted over the years. I really don’t know how I developed them, I don’t think any of them were conscious choices, I’ve just picked them up along the way.

If you could adopt a “Habit Of Change” which would you choose?

If you have a “Habit of Change” of your own which I have not mentioned let me know in the comments.

In theory it’s a great idea, but in practice more than three quarters of New Year Resolutions are never achieved.

This is why I think New Year Resolutions don’t work:

1. They start on a short burst of willpower that doesn’t last. A gym full of people sweating away at their exercise programs in January will dwindle to a few people in February. The remaining people with the exercise habit have a very different motivation that keeps them going.
2. They challenge the status quo. Most people underestimate the power of the status quo. Day after day living in one particular way generates a huge array of beliefs, habits and responses that make your tomorrow as familiar as your today and your yesterday. That’s a lot of inertia to overcome all at once by willpower alone.
3. New Year Resolvers confuse long term changes with short term events. You diet like crazy until you are slim … then what? You jog everyday until you can finish a half marathon race … then what? Life continues after you fit in that dress or finish the race. To stay slim, fit, etc, requires continuous effort over time, often a lifetime, for that you need an All Year Habit not a New Years Resolution.
4. We expect to fail. New Year Resolution has become synonymous with failure. We joke about our resolutions being unlikely to be achieved, calling it a New Year Resolution is a declaration that we are going to make an heroic effort but that we expect to fail. We’ll be praised for our efforts and forgiven for our failure because that’s what everyone else is doing.
5. They happen at the wrong time of year. In the Western world, spartan New Year Resolutions about low weight and high fitness are embarked on just after two or more weeks of ridiculous excess. If our New Year Resolution was to eat and drink like crazy and slump in an armchair watching TV then we would be well prepared, but most resolutions are just the opposite – eat and drink as little as possible and exercise. No wonder we run out of steam (or breath).

If New Year Resolutions isn’t going to work you could develop some “Habits Of Change“.

ChangeCamp is a twice yearly self & professional development workshop running in Newcastle upon Tyne, it is designed to give taster sessions in a variety of subjects. Each session lasts for one and a half hours, it is a finger buffet of different approaches to psychological change work. While hugely enjoying the presentations, many of the participants comment that they would have liked more time to go into the subjects in more depth, that’s what ChangeCamp+Plus is for.

ChangeCamp+Plus gives you an opportunity to have a deeper experience of the kind of work ChangeCamp presenters do at an affordable price.  There are six presentations, three in the morning and three in the afternoon running concurrently on a variety of topics by ChangeCamp presenters. Each ChangeCamp+Plus workshop is three hours long. That’s a lot of time to learn and explore a particular process or technique in-depth.

The workshops are a mix of topics for personal or professional development with CPD certificates provided.

The workshops will include:

• How To Develop Compassionate Self Acceptance with Andy Hunt
• Mindfulness with Iain MacKenzie
• Brief Grief Therapy with Harry Knox
• Gestalt Theory And Practice: Experiential Workshop with Iain MacKenzie
• From Problem To Solution Using EFT with Andy Hunt
• Personal And Therapeutic Toolbox with Rob McGinley

What you need to attend these workshops:

• A desire to learn.
• To enjoy being with like-minded people.
• To enjoy working with some excellent trainers.
• You need to want to become more professionally skilled or more satisfied on a personal level.
• To have fun.

Note: You may need previous experience of the presentation subject before attending – see the information about each workshop.

What you don’t need to attend these workshops:

• You don’t need to have attended ChangeCamp to attend these sessions.
• A huge bank account, these workshops are designed to be as affordable as possible.

Where, when and how much?

The first ChangeCamp+Plus will be on Saturday February 4th, 2012 from 10am to 5pm at Jesmond Dene Conference Centre, Jesmond Dene, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Early Bird Discount

If you book before January 6th, the workshops will cost just £60 for the whole day, or £35 for a morning or afternoon workshop. Thereafter the full fee will apply, so don’t miss out on the discount

Full Fee

The cost of the workshops are £75 for the whole day or £45 for a morning or afternoon session.

Each workshop has a maximum of 16 places so you need to book early to avoid disappointment.

Visit www.changecampplus.co.uk to find out more and book your place

“The greatest sickness known to man or woman is called self-esteem. If you have self-esteem, then you’re sick, sick, sick, because you say: I’m okay because I do well and because people love me, so when I do poorly, which I’m a fallible human and will, and people hate me because they may jealously hate me or they just don’t like me, then back to shithood I go.

I worry, worry, worry about doing well and winning other people’s approval, and I worry, worry, worry about the future even if I do well in the present. So that’s the worst sickness – self-esteem – ever known to man or woman because it’s always conditional.”
- Albert Ellis, creator of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy

Self-Esteem – The ‘Nice’ Ugly Sister

Self esteem has been proclaimed as the solution to all our personal problems. If we have high self esteem then we will be happy and fulfilled. Organisations, schools and business have taken this advice to heart and tried hard to boost the self-esteem of their pupils and workforce.

There’s just one problem, it isn’t true and it doesn’t work.

Self esteem is conditional and comes when you think you have done well or that you have desirable personal characteristics.

Self esteem is a flawed system for feeling good because it relies on social comparison. Trying to find the answer to “how am I doing compared to everyone else”?  There are inevitably going to be people who are better or worse at things than we are. You probably don’t have to look too far to find someone who is better at something than you. So, comparing ourselves to others as a way to feel good is doomed to failure.

We can feel good when things are going well but “going well” is a state that’s difficult to maintain. Self-esteem is high maintenance, to keep feeling it you have to keep doing well, it has to be re-earned, it is never permanent.

When things go badly (as they will do) it will be hard to compare yourself to other people and find yourself coming out on top. Because you are evaluating your status with respect to other people all the time this sense of security is very vulnerable to the uncertainties of life.

The more investment you put into having self esteem the more distressed you are going to feel when things don’t go according to plan. If our self worth is linked to what we do or what we have, when circumstances change or we fail then our self esteem will be in jeopardy and we may become victims of self hatred.

Self Criticism – The ‘Nasty’ Ugly Sister.

Self-esteem is also fragile because when we fall short of our standards we typically use self critics to motivate ourselves to do better, leading to more comparison and more falling short. As our self esteem rises so does our level of self criticism. It’s a vicious circle.

Superficially, self criticism seems like a good method for motivating ourselves to do better, to get back to being ‘good enough’. But it often moves from being a pep talk into a viscous beating when we feel we have fallen short of our ideals.

If you are caught between self-esteem and self-criticism you are caught in a never ending cycle of temporary highs and vicious lows.

Self Compassion – Cinderella

Self compassion or treating yourself with kind acceptance. It puts aside social comparison and self criticism and tries to treat all our experiences with kindness, understanding and acceptance.

It’s a way of being kind to ourselves without judging or comparison against others. Rather than emphasising our separateness and unique suffering it puts our experience in the broader context of all humanity.

By treating ourselves this way with all our experiences it is not contingent on evaluation against others and tends to be a very stable way of relating to ourselves.

Self compassion has been shown to lower depression and anxiety, raise levels of happiness, optimism and motivations.

Self-compassion is unusual in this culture for several reasons.

Many of us in this culture are conditioned to be self-sacrificing, looking after other people’s needs before our own. So it’s an unfamiliar or even seems like a selfish thing to want to do.

We often find it so much easier to be kinder to other people than ourselves, we don’t have much experience in applying that level of compassion to ourselves.

Self compassion is often confused with self-pity, but self-pity is all about “poor-me” it is all about separate individuals suffering alone. Self compassion is framed in the context of responding  with kindness to suffering that is shared by many human beings. It implies “I am not the only one”, with self pity “It’s all about me”.

So if might be wondering what self-compassion is like you might want to try this little experiment.

“… a very easy and quick way to soothe yourself, to calm yourself, to allow yourself to feel safe and get out of that mode of self-criticism, is compassionate touch. Stroke your arm, put your hand over your heart and give yourself a little hug if no-one’s looking

It’s amazing how powerful that very simple act can be because your body responds even if your mind can’t go there right away.”

- Kirsten Neff (interviewed by Dr David Van Nuys on the mentalhelp.net podcast)

I have decided to make my e-book “7 steps to more wellbeing” completely free.

You can now download the book without having to give me any email details or sign up to my newsletter to get it.

If you want to sign up to my occasional (monthly-ish) newsletter, and I’d really like to be able to send it to you,  there is a separate sign-up form just below the box.

I hope you enjoy the book and find it useful.

I’m working on a couple of others now which should be appearing before the end of this year.

On the face of it shoulds sound like an innocent statement of intent – I should mow the lawn, I should complete this project – but it turns out to create a subtle, or not so subtle, resistance to getting it done.

During the workshop one of the participants used the process to work on one of her “shoulds”. When I got up the following morning I found this email in my inbox

On November 19th, 2011 I am running a Getting Out Of Your Own Way workshop in Newcastle that will include undoing shoulds and many other limitations to stopping you doing what you want to do.

To find out more visit Getting Out Of Your Own Way

This months EFT Cafe is on Wednesday 9th November and is all about using questions and EFT as a more powerful alternative to affirmations.