You’ve got to believe in yourself, or do you?

So many people place huge importance on holding onto positive beliefs about ourselves and the world in general. For me however, I can’t help feeling this not only misses the point of self-awareness, but also severely limits it.

Whilst on the surface it may appear obvious that believing ‘I can’ puts me in a better state than believing ‘I can’t’, it still fixes and limits my awareness. In some cases this can blind me to important feedback that lets me know I might need to reconsider my position. Isn’t this a part of the problems we all face today? Holding onto distorted, generalised and incomplete versions of the world?

Even if you find you’re holding onto limiting beliefs, changing them from a negative to a positive continues to limit the level of awareness you operate from. In some cases can leave us dependent on having to believe something to feel ‘enabled’, ‘ok’ or ‘good’ rather than simply just ‘being’ or ‘doing’ the thing we’re busy thinking (or procrastinating) about. This utilises precious energy and cognitive resources I could be employing in just getting stuff done. For me, the fact that I might need to ‘believe’ something in order for me to ‘feel good, complete, take part or have a go’ at something is an insight into a deeper strategy I am employing, which may not be the most useful thing i could be doing.

Where do beliefs come from?

Beliefs are not ‘things’ in themselves but internal processes.
In order to believe something, I employ a strategy of conviction about the possibility of something happening and even generate a degree of dependence and rules around it. Whilst in some cases this can be useful, this can also become a dogma of habitual self delusion. Even stopping us accessing parts of our awareness that could help create real and lasting change. Namely, our strategies for ‘doing’ and ‘being’, rather than just thinking about doing or being!

If I find i have to continually believe positively in a ‘self’ or an ‘ability’ to take part in things or feel good, I might begin to question where my attention is and if the strategy I’m employing in that moment is in fact the most useful and appropriate. “Am I in the moment? Am I engaging with what I’m actually or about to do? Or am I lost in my thoughts rather than here right now?” or “do I really want to do it?”Sometimes a reluctance to do or be something is an important message in itself, not just a limiting belief.

The point is, beliefs are a part of the doors of perception, our deletions, generalisations and distortions about our experiences, not the reality we share with each other. Maybe if we were all a bit more present with each other and the world in general, beliefs wouldn’t cause as much hassle as they do!Awareness on a level above beliefs requires an open mind, an openness to possibility and an active and associative attention, within the thing I am ‘doing’ or ‘being’.For me, if I’m busy believing, I’m not fully present to what I need to do or open to the infinite possibilities right in front of me.

Do I believe I can do something? I don’t know, let’s have a go and start learning…

To explore it takes a sense of courage and curiosity rather than certainty, and to ignore it takes a sense of continued self delusion, ignorance and apathy.

The challenge is that to become aware of what we aren’t aware of, we have to be aware that we aren’t aware of it. 

This is the paradox. 

We only know what we know, because to know what we don’t, we have to know about it first. 

This can be both an empowering and uncomfortable place to inhabit in a world that values answers more than it values questions. This is the human predicament. We’re too caught up in what we think we know, we don’t notice that which we don’t know.

Some may experience this ‘non-awareness’ as a vacuum. A void containing nothingness, not visible or audible, hardly worth paying any attention to in the day to day in the land of mundane awareness. 

“If I can’t see it, or hear it, or touch it, or smell it, or taste it, it’s doesn’t exist”. 

But you will experience it.

Some may experience it as an emptiness or hunger. An intuition that there’s more to living than what we’re currently experiencing and a thirst that can’t quite be quenched by the material experiences in life.

When things do appear in this space of ‘nothingness’ they can at first seem ridiculous, frightening or even mundane and uninteresting. 

We quickly scrabble around our current paradigm to see what this ‘new thing’ relates to and what we can use to identify and label it within what we know already.

We’re taught very early in our lives to focus our attention outside of ourselves on systems, processes, facts and figures. Yet inside all of us are whole worlds of experience we haven’t really explored.

Worlds we know profoundly affect us all on a daily basis, yet somehow we don’t recognise their potency or give credit to their reality and impact on our everyday lives.

It seems our fickle obsession with the physical experiences in life have trained us well to search outside ourselves for answers to many of the challenges we face. 

Much like swallowing a spider to catch a fly we can impose solution after solution until we’ve become so detached from our individual and unique experiences we are no longer aware of our connection to them and often too short sighted to see the effects.

Some may think of it as a place for mystics, mental patients and drug users to inhabit, whilst the rest of the ‘normal’ people carry on with the ‘sensible’ stuff in life like paying bills and going to work.

The fact is everyone of us experience the world around us from our own understanding of what we know and what we don’t.

I think if the world needs anything right now, it’s an openness to knowing we don’t know everything and a willingness to collaborate with others to explore the pieces of the bigger picture.

After all wisdom comes from multiple perspectives.

Mindset for Strength and Performance

Last weekend saw Eddie at Strength and Performance Oldham, delivering a 3 hour ‘taster’ session to their members on understanding our Mindset.

I’d like to say a special thanks to Lynsey & Mark for making this happen and for taking the initiative to offer their members an opportunity to discover the power of learning more about what makes us human beings tick. #NLP

Chatting to the members of the Gym it’s clear that Lynsey and Mark are creating something special here. The commitment to supporting  their members with the whole journey of becoming healthier, fitter, stronger and happier is clear and the environment they’ve created at Adelaide Mill in Oldham is a warm, welcoming and supportive one.

It’s definitely #notjustagym

If your looking for a place to start to challenge yourself physically, learn more about diet and nutrition and meet up with supportive, friendly like minded people you won’t find much better than Strength & Performance Oldham. Connect with them on Facebook here or get in touch on 07477 677529. They’re based at Adelaide Mill in Oldham.

The Session – What is a ‘Mindset’ and Why is it important?

The session started with the usual introductions and to begin to explore what were the challenges people faced in terms of reaching their goals, both inside and outside the Gym and what they wanted from the session.

After a brief introduction to what Neuro Linguistic Programming is we then explored just how we make sense of the world around us. In terms of Perception, Thinking and Behaviour. This practical understanding of “How” we do what we do begins to lay the foundations of understanding what makes us tick, what makes us all unique and how our experience has a structure.

All Performance is State dependent

We explored our ‘State’. And began to understand how our state of mind effects everything we do in life. Developing our awareness of ‘how’ we do it means we can begin to have more choice and control in the kind of ‘states’ we want to be in. This included practical tips of how we can change influence and change our state at will.

After some reflections and exercises, we then went on to explore the power of mental rehearsal. Most people are really good at mental rehearsal, the only difference is we tend to use it for things like worry.

The sounds of ‘wow’ in the room never get old, as people realised and understood the power of mental rehearsal in the practical demonstration, and then went on to witness someone achieve a personal best after a short demonstration and then have a go themselves.

and then time beat us… for now

I’d like to say a big thanks to everyone who came and made the session really easy to deliver. I hope you all found the session as enjoyable as I did and more importantly, useful and relevant to what you hoped to get from it.

Please do feel free to connect with us on facebook here. We’re always happy to hear from people and about how they’ve used what they’ve learned. That’s when the magic starts to happen.

So what now?

You never know how far a change will go.

Lynsey and Mark are keen to introduce part 2 of this to the members at some point in the near future. Lynsey herself has recently completed the INLPTA NLP Foundation Diploma with us.  I know Lynsey has more plans to integrate what she’s learned into the Gym to benefit the members. It’s great to see the ripple effect of this kind of learning, and imagine the possibilities it can create.

If you’re interested in learning more about NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) or would like to book a course or taster session please do get in touch with us. We can offer a range of bespoke Applied and Accredited training and development experiences.

Check our our Events page for upcoming courses or get in touch to have a chat about what you may need.

We also offer 1-1 sessions designed to help you develop more choice and control in your life through Psycho-education, Hypnosis and NLP. It’s not all about problems and it can help Stress & Anxiety, Depression and low mood and Personal Change & Development – for more information click here

Thanks again and we hope to see you again soon