You have beliefs about yourself (your skills, your values, your dignity). You have beliefs about other people (what makes them tick, what they want, how to relate to them, etc). You have beliefs about work, play, recreation, hobbies and volunteer activities. You have beliefs about the world (politics, education, crime, police, the justice system, other countries, wars, journalism, and environment). You have beliefs about a thousand different concepts (time, history, the past, the future, causation, personality, emotions and destiny).

Further, because you have these beliefs, you operate from them as one uses a map to navigate territory. Beliefs as mental maps govern our life, emotions, health, skills, and everyday experiences. So where did these belief maps come from? How did we develop, create, or absorb them? How much validity do they have? What compromises these beliefs? How would we change them if we wanted to?

Beliefs develop over time out of our experiences. We construct our beliefs via the ideas, thoughts, feelings, meanings that we bring to bear upon various concepts.

At birth, we have no beliefs. Rather, beliefs arise as our perceptions, understandings and learning grow and solidify as a form of focused awareness. In this way, they develop into some durable internal maps about the territory out there.

Structurally, a belief involves thoughts about some thing or another plus validating, affirming, and accepting thoughts about these primary thoughts. This explains why merely repeating an empowering belief statement will not have the same effect as believing an empowering belief statement.

Now, it is useful also to have some understanding of disbelief. To disbelieve a statement, we essentially bring thoughts of doubt, uncertainty, and questions to bear on the primary thought. In other words, we think: “I have questions about that idea”. Hence, we are in a state of doubt about a particular thought. Thus, if you question anything enough eventually you will disbelieve it, including yourself. Part of the process of being coached is to encourage the client to question some of their own assumptions and ideas.

The natural growth of beliefs starts with vague representations of what we experience. We ‘think’ about but don’t ‘know’. We have questions and doubts about how to organise our thinking into constructed and logical concepts and assumed ‘knowledge’ about a particular thing. Yet as these representations gain more and more clarity, we develop various forms of knowledge about things. As that knowledge solidifies, it takes the form of knowing ‘what we have learnt’, what we understand about life, then progressively the idea takes greater hold in our mind.

At this point, when an idea is more solidly engrained in our minds, we have fewer doubts, less questions, and more of a sense that the idea itself is reality. Now we believe in the idea considered. we feel convinced about it. Eventually we feel so convinced that it becomes a conviction in our life.

Unfortunately, negative beliefs can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Negative expectations create negative outcomes, and naturally, positive expectations create positive outcomes. The good news is that we are all capable of creating new empowering beliefs. Several of my coaching sessions are based on the idea that we can eradicate limiting beliefs and create new empowering beliefs. Anything can become a belief. All you need to do is establish what you want to believe, or what belief would support you in achieving your goals and look for instances in your life that support this belief.

“There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.” – Dr. Denis Waitley

Here is a useful exercise you might like to try

First of all, think of a goal you have in your life. You might like to write it down to help make more sense of it. Then you need to write down three beliefs that don’t support you in achieving your goal, such as “I am lazy” or “I am frightened about facing my fears”.Then, for each negative belief, write down the answers for these two questions:

1. What has this negative belief cost me so far?
2. What will this negative belief cost me in 5 years time?

Next, I’d like you to think about the hidden benefits of not getting you goal. These are often the excuses you make to not take action. Can you think of three hidden benefits? Then ask yourself what is the true cost of keeping this ‘benefit’ in your life. Write it down.

The next step is to write down three empowering beliefs that are going to help you get your goal. Now it is worth bearing in mind that there are five different ways new beliefs can be installed, from:

1. Past outcomes (remember a time)
2. Events (is there an area of your life you already do/are this)
3. Creative Thinking (could you dream/imagine it)
4. Education (what could you learn)
5. Environment (who could you model)

The final exercise is for each of your new empowering beliefs, write down two different ways you could do something to strengthen them. You may need to think of other areas of your life where you have already demonstrated having one of these beliefs. If you have the belief in another life area, then you most certainly can transfer it to another.

Good luck with the exercise, and hopefully it will leave you feeling good and motivated.

To find out more about my coaching work on beliefs, why not get in touch or leave a comment here and I will get back to you.

Like most coaches, I spend a lot of time helping clients eradicate their negative beliefs and then form new empowering ones to enable them to achieve their goals. This is crucial as hanging on to destructive negative beliefs can result in a great deal of unhappiness, lack of confidence, and low self-esteem.

When I read The Key by Joe Vitale, I was struck by a section written by the author Mandy Evans. I would like to share some of this with you. I have tried her strategy myself several times and have personally found it a very powerful and effective tool. Some of you may be familiar with it, especially those of you who have incorporated elements of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy into your coaching methods.

As we all know, coaching can help improve anything in a person’s life, from relationships to finances, but this is only truly possible when the person discovers the hidden beliefs that hold him or her back. As soon as they have been identified, then they are more able to start questioning them to see if they are still true to them in the clear light of day. It is completely possible for anyone to free themselves from painful emotions like fear, anger or guilt by finding and breaking down the beliefs that cause them and keep them stuck inside.

The beliefs that block happiness and success are among the most limiting and self-defeating of all. If you can get rid of them and feel happy and clear, you are much more likely to make choices and take actions that lead down a very different path from one you take in anger or fear.

Mandy Evans suggests the method of a question-and-answer Option Dialogue. It’s a bit like an interview with yourself. I would strongly recommend to my clients that they use a journal to record their answers, as this is an excellent way to track progress made.

Before you start, it is important to accept yourself just as you are. If you start judging yourself too much as you delve into those feelings and beliefs, it will then be more difficult to see clearly or tell yourself the truth. Go through the process slowly and use this time to discover as much as you possibly can about your feelings and beliefs.

Mandy Evans says that “You have to be willing to go through some confusion. As your beliefs change, your version of reality breaks up and reforms – disorienting, to say the least! These questions and answers weave around sometimes. They make more sense when you ask them about your feelings and your beliefs.”

Here are the questions:

1.    What are you unhappy about? Or angry, guilty, worried, for example. This question helps you get specific about your feeling and what it is about.
2.    Why are you unhappy about that? Our reasons for feeling bad are different from what we feel bad about. Our reasons are beliefs.
3.    What are you concerned would happen if you were not unhappy about that? This odd-sounding question helps you find any fear or concern you have about the feeling going away. We are often reluctant to part with a feeling even if it is painful.
4.    Do you believe that?
5.    Why do you believe that?
6.    What are you concerned would happen if you did not believe that? Sometimes we hold on to a long-held belief even if proves limiting or causes unhappiness. What are your concerns? Do they still seem real to you?
I would now like to share with you the outcome of doing an Open Dialogue with myself.

What are you unhappy about?
Answer: Young people in our society and how they have a lack of respect for others and seem to have little focus, purpose or direction.

Why are you unhappy about that?
Answer: Nobody seems to be able to get to the root of the problem, and parents and schools appear to be helpless in giving these young people the right support.

What are you concerned would happen if you were not unhappy about that?
Answer: That perhaps I wouldn’t speak out and give my ideas and suggestions, and that things would get even worse in the future. I fear that we may end up with a generation who are unable to care for one another.

Do you believe that?
Answer: To a large extent yes.

Why do you believe that?
Answer: I read so much about it and listen to reports on the radio about disaffected young people, street crime and lack of discipline at home and at school.

What are you concerned about would happen if you were not unhappy about that?
Answer: That I wouldn’t bother to do anything about it. That I wouldn’t be motivated to work on developing effective coaching programmes for young people.

Doing this exercise was enough to make me start to be more proactive in my quest to help these youngsters. I have been saying for months that I must get the ball rolling to start developing appropriate coaching programmes. I wrote down a list of contacts I know who would be interested in this field of coaching; a teenager coach, a coach who already has a programme in place, learning mentors that work in schools, and the list went on. If you know of anyone to add to my list, please do get in touch.

Clearly, this process has spurred me on to take more action and look for ways to make a difference.

Mandy Evans says “If someone asked me to review everything I learned in my whole life and give just one piece of helpful advice, it would be this – always question unhappiness. Never take feeling bad for granted. Happiness is the grand prize in the game of life, and you can award it to yourself!”

I would encourage you to try out this type of Open Dialogue in a journal. Use this process on an emotion you may be feeling right now. Think of something you want to be, do, or have. If you haven’t attracted it yet, how do you feel about it? Take that emotion and work with it in your journal.

Good luck, and it would be great to hear your views on this technique.