44 Part I: Introducing NLP
In Chapter 9 you discover all about setting anchors. You can use anchoring to
put yourself or a client into a resourceful emotional state before doing the Fast
Phobia Cure.
Accepting That Beliefs and Values Make a Difference
You may have heard someone say, ‘teenagers today, they have no values’.
Well, everyone has values; they’re just different for different people and dif-
ferent groups of people. Your values and beliefs are unconscious filters that
you use to decide what bits of data coming in through your senses you pay
attention to and what bits of data you ignore. You know what that means,
don’t you? The unconscious nine-tenths of your brain has been sitting there
on the quiet, building up all sorts of beliefs and making all sorts of decisions
about you and your environment, and you’re not even aware of them.
Getting to grips with the power of beliefs
Your beliefs can, when allowed to go to the extreme, have the power of life
and death over you. Your beliefs can help you to health, wealth, and happi-
ness or keep you unwell, poor, and miserable.
The beliefs we’re talking about here are distinct from religious beliefs – these
beliefs are the generalisations you make about your life experiences. These
generalisations go on to form the basis of your reality that then directs your
behaviour. You can use one empowering belief, for example, to help you to
develop another belief to the next level of achievement. So ‘I’m a really good
speller’ helps you develop the belief that you enjoy words and are quite articu-
late. This belief may lead you to believe that you can tell stories and suddenly
you find that you have the courage to submit a short story to a magazine; and
suddenly you’re a published author.
Just as you have positive, empowering beliefs, you can also have negative,
disempowering beliefs. If you had the misfortune of being bullied at school,
you may have developed a belief that people, in general, aren’t pleasant.
This belief may make you behave quite aggressively towards people when
you first meet them. If some people then respond in a similarly aggressive
way, their behaviour may well reinforce your belief that ‘people aren’t pleas-
ant’. You may not even notice when someone responds in a friendly manner
because your belief filters aren’t geared to noticing pleasant people.
