The self-concept model, developed by Steve Andreas, provides a powerful NLP-based technique to transform limiting beliefs about identity into empowering beliefs. The process involves: (1) identifying your values and beliefs about yourself, (2) recognizing limiting beliefs as those that get in your way or create ambiguity, (3) understanding that beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies through selective attention to confirming evidence, (4) using the TOTE pattern (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) to create clarity through action and feedback, (5) restructuring counter examples by finding their positive intention and accessing internal resources, (6) creating new mental movies that guide future behavior, and (7) archiving old experiences while integrating transformed beliefs into your self-concept database. This transformation works because identity beliefs have the highest leverage point for change, as they travel with you throughout life.
How To Flip A Limiting Belief in Minutes
Added:Whoa, the comments already lit up.
You guys have already been on top of it uh for some time now. Welcome back. We have another action-packed live stream and we're on the countdown now. So, this is Wednesday. No, this is Yeah, this is Wednesday. Wow. Time flies when you're having a good time. We'll do another on Thursday and we'll do the final one on Friday.
So let me see what you all of you have been saying.
Uh so interesting you guys are talking amongst yourselves. Awesome.
Good day Damon. Good day everyone.
Another awesome day to be alive and having an opportunity to learn this transformational information. Indeed. If it's helping you at all, leave a like and subscribe to the channel. This has truly been beneficial. Thanks again, Damon. You're very welcome. And thank you for being so consistent, showing up every single day, and telling people to like and subscribe. Yeah, your support helps me continue doing this because if it weren't for people like you who show up and uh eventually, you know, not everybody has to do this, but eventually when some when people uh enroll in my programs or want to do one-on-one coaching with me, that's what enables me to do this full-time. So, >> I appreciate that. What was that?
>> Another comment above, please.
>> Yeah, but it's not a question for me.
>> It's a question.
>> All right. My wife is saying to answer this question.
I noticed that people get stressed when they are in a state of uncertainty and don't have clarity. How does one break that pattern and move to a state of certainty and clarity? Oh, you're right.
I thought it was the question for the people. Um, so a state of uncertainty does not need to be a state of stress.
There's so many things that we're not certain about. If you focus on all of the things that you're uncertain about, then you get a feeling of uncertainty.
Um, so what are you certain about?
It's okay to let into your perspective and give some of your attention to things that you're uncertain about.
That's how we solve problems. That's how we grow. But there are things that you feel certain about. So, make sure you're balancing it. Um, let's see.
So, I wouldn't even think about it as breaking a pattern. Um, it's more about getting very clear about what do you know and what don't you know and being able to balance the two. And clarity comes from doing work like this. Clarity can come from sitting down and working things out on paper.
But what really gives you a lot of clarity is doing things that create feedback.
And what I'm talking about here is action. You do something and get the feedback. And we in NLP we there's a pattern that we call tote tote or tote.
And it wasn't created by the founders of NLP, but they used it. And what that stands for is test operate test exit. So if you were hammering a nail into a piece of wood, you the uh the operate from the O and tote and tote is operate. So the operation would be to hammer the nail into the wood. You test you feel if you were to feel the nail and see okay or feel that it's not flush with the wood then that's the test and now you know that you need to keep operating, keep hammering and then you test again. You feel the nail is flush with the wood.
Now you exit. So test, operate, test, exit. So it takes action. Um, anything that gives you feedback is something not all feedback is useful, but what you need to do to gain clarity is do things that create feedback.
Uh, good morning. And we're starting with one more like than people currently than people currently here. Um, okay.
>> People can like and then leave and then come back. That's why.
>> Okay. All right. My wife is having to interpret these messages for me.
Hey everyone. Hope everyone is doing great. Hope you're doing great too. Good morning everyone. Let's go. Wow. I like all this. Everybody's ready to go. How do you distinguish between a limiting belief to get rid of rid of versus a belief that needs to be integrated like you do in parts integration? Um, parts integration is not necessarily belief integration. Parts integration is when you're dealing with a resistant part and in order to do the thing that you want to do, you have to integrate it. So it's not you're not integrating beliefs, you are you we transform beliefs.
So let me see how do you distinguish between limited belief to get rid of. So any anything that's getting in your way would be a limiting belief, right? You want to go do something, you want to create something and maybe you believe you can't do it or you believe you're going to fail, so why try?
Um those types of things are limiting beliefs that are getting in your in your way. Once you've identified your values like we did on the first call, if you don't believe your your values, that's a limitation. So you want to transform it.
Hello Damon and everyone. My live attendance streak continues. Good.
Awesome. Victor values insight has really been amazing paradigm shift.
Thanks. You're very welcome. Yes, values work.
Wow. I mean, I just can't say enough good things about it. It has absolutely changed my life. Uh, it just gives you so much direction and clarity. It just makes life a lot easier and enables you to be fulfilled even when you're failing, like when you fail at something. Okay.
Well, let's get right into this.
We are talking about how to flip a limiting belief in minutes. Is it really can it really be that fast? And yes, and if um you want to see a demonstration of this, I've talked about this before with a client of mine by the name of George, and he came to me. Uh we did eight sessions. Two sessions were mainly elicitation, and then we spent the next six sessions. Each session transforming a quality, which means transforming a limiting belief about himself. And you see it right there on video before your very eyes, you watch him transform. So, that would be probably the clearest, cleanest uh demonstration you could see of what I'm going to show you here and of flipping flipping a limiting belief and how quick it can happen.
What if you could flip any limiting belief into a positive, empowering belief in just minutes? What would that do for your life? Think about that for a moment. Imagine being able to transform any limiting belief you encounter.
Life would be a little bit different. I would I would imagine for you um when I think about my life before I was able to do this, before I knew this, and again, I'm going to give credit to my mentor Steve Andreas. He's he's the one who created what I'm going to show you. He's the one who created the self-concept model. The model that I will say and probably say for the rest of my life is the most powerful model I've ever used and not just NLP model. I wouldn't even limit it to NLP. It's the most powerful model period for transformation. And I like to focus on beliefs about identity, beliefs about yourself. Now, you can have beliefs, external beliefs about the world around you and those can be very limiting.
However, if you transform a limiting belief about something external, well, that only you only get the change in that particular area around that particular context or thing. But if you transform a belief about yourself, you take that with you wherever you go.
So I what I like to say is transforming beliefs about yourself that's the highest leverage point for change because one thing we know for sure throughout time and throughout all space you are you wherever you go you transform a belief about yourself and you take that with you wherever you go throughout time. So it's quite powerful.
All right. So first what you need to know uh to do this kind of work the way we do it with identity is to know your values right we did that on the very first stream we did then you want to go down that list and ask yourself am I and find out what do you believe about yourself as it relates to this value do you believe you are that value do you feel certain and solid about that so for example on my list there's the value of success that Just because you value it doesn't mean that you believe you are a success. So if I ask myself that question, I might go yeah right away.
Very congruent. I know it. I I I see and feel it right away. I can say yes as sure as I know my name. I'm a success.
That's one response. Another response would be well sometimes I am sometimes I'm I'm not. I have had successes but I've also had failures. This is what we call an ambiguous quality. And it's interesting when you even ask people a question like that. Are you this particular quality? And it's ambiguous.
You see it in their body before they even say anything. You see them do this and this. You often see their hands go back and forth like whenever Jenz says 67, they do this thing. Uh they might tilt their head back and forth or they look in two different directions. And then there's the other one where you say, "Are you this quality?" or "Am I this quality?" And there's a no. It's just a flatout no. And that means that the person typically believes the opposite, but they don't like to say it.
Like if I don't believe I'm a success, if I say no to that, then that means I believe I'm a failure. And I remember coming to terms with that whenever I had it on my value solicitation and I asked myself that question and it was a no.
And I was like, wow, okay, so this means that I believe I'm a failure.
That was a hard pill to swallow. But the good news was is I had the tools that I'm showing you here to transform that.
So I wasn't too afraid of it. It did sting, but I was like, "Okay, now I know how to change this." And it also made a lot of sense to me as to why I did not have the success that I had wanted to achieve up until that point. Why I kept failing. Well, if you believe you are a failure, you will find a way to fail with pretty much everything you try.
because this is a belief you have about your identity.
Now, a lot of people will say, well, why don't why don't you just act differently? And a lot of uh identity shifting videos out there also like psychocybernetics, you know, the book by Maxwell Maltz, they'll just say like, well, just do something different. Just act differently or or act as if or fake it till you make it. But that doesn't work because when you act out of alignment with a belief, even if it's a limiting belief, what happens is you feel something that doesn't feel good. And it's called cognitive dissonance. When you act out of alignment with what you believe, now you experience uncertainty. Now you experience chaos and confusion because this doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like me because I don't believe this.
you will align with your beliefs no matter how negative they are, no matter how painful they are, rather than risk the chaos and confusion about who you are. Because if you're confused about who you are, that's that sends all sort of danger signals to your nervous system.
If you think about it, if it was thousands of years ago, maybe even longer, millions of years ago, and a person got confused about who they were or or just sort of fell into uh a long bout of confusion and chaos within themselves, they were pretty much dead. I mean, survival during those times required that you stick to the certainty. You stick to what you know.
So, we're pretty much still hardwired that way. And that's why we have those those uncomfortable feelings of what we call cognitive dissonance when we act outside of our beliefs. And what ends up happening is we become very exhausted by this. So if we're trying to like I'm trying to do successful things, but even when I still feel like I'm a failure because I'm trying to break out of this belief, it's just like going uphill, dragging a rock or pushing a rock uphill. And what eventually happens is you wear out. You get tired of fighting this, fighting yourself, fighting this belief within yourself. And what typically happens is you give into the belief.
All this can be changed by simply restructuring that information. It's actually quite simple.
All right. So once you've identified a limiting belief, and that can be an ambiguous belief, or you believe you're the opposite of what you value. So an ambiguous belief is a limiting belief.
Think about it. So if I ask myself, am I successful? want to go sometimes yes and sometimes no. Well, I'm being limited by being uncertain and ambiguous about that compared to if I in fact did feel certain that I'm a success. And that certainty was based on actual lived experiences.
Now I have a lot of clarity about that.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm not afraid to try. I'm not afraid to fail because I believe I'm a a success.
That means I will fail until I succeed.
And in fact, that's a great way to look at success. That success is a succession of failures until you get what you want.
And if you believe you are a success, you're not afraid of that. You know that, okay, yeah, failure can be frustrating still, but you know you're going to succeed because you believe it and you have the resume to back it up.
And then when you do succeed, it's just further validation and confirmation that you are in fact this belief. So once again, you take more risk, you put yourself out there, you really go for it because you have that confidence and eventually you succeed again. And it just confirms that belief, makes it even stronger and again the cycle just keeps repeating itself. And this goes for any belief, happiness, joy, uh determination, persistence, fun even um all of the beliefs function that way.
They become self-confirming as you select and collect pieces of lived experience to confirm them. And people do this in the opposite way too when it comes to limiting beliefs. They will select and collect information to prove the limiting belief because again we are hardwired to follow certainty and avoid confusion and chaos.
Okay. So, like I said, you can do what I'm going to show you with any beliefs, but I think you should focus on doing this about identity beliefs because that's the highest leverage point.
Now, we also did a uh we modeled uh certain solid quality. I forget which live stream it was, but we already did that.
And we uh let's go ahead and switch over to my iPad.
And we elicited something called what I call the template or what Steve Andreas called the template. And this is a template basically the process elements.
In other words, the structure how you structure a belief that you feel certain about. And I've often talked about this where mine is right here. It's on my left. It's the images are about the size of my hand. They tend to be still images until I look at them. And when I look at them, I'm also disassociated.
And uh they turn into movies. And if I keep my attention on it long enough, I will actually associate into it. They're in color. Uh they're pretty vivid.
They're not like three-dimensional. They don't really they're not like high definition. Um I don't visualize that vividly, but I can see that quite well uh each one of them. And uh like they're about this big. And they have a very kind of thin frame around them. They don't just bleed off into nothing. Um and that's kind of what they look like.
They're rather rectangular as well. So these are all the what I'm describing are all the structural elements that create this template.
So if you followed along on that live stream, you would now know what your template is. Not everybody does it the way that I do it. Some people have different put their databases in different locations. Let me also make the distinction between what I mean by a template and a database. A template is just the structure. The structure that we can keep reusing for any belief that we want to transform. So that would be the template. It's it has no content in it. It's just there for us to use. A database is a full quality with all of it it its examples organized into that template. So if I just refer to the template, it's just the structure. I know I can pop anything into that structure and it will feel certain.
If I talk about a particular quality like persistence, now I'm talking about the database. The database that's full of examples that are structured within the template.
Okay? So, you would want to already know that if you've done that already, great.
If you haven't done that, keep watching.
Uh, it's good to be familiar with this and you will want to go back and watch that one where we elicit that template.
Now, once we know we're familiar with the the database and how we do restructure a certain quality, now we can turn our attention to qualities that don't feel certain like ambiguous qualities and uh limiting beliefs or um unwanted qualities. That's another way that we can refer to them. So the first thing would be to know uh what positive examples do you have? Because regardless of how much you believe the opposite, let's see, let's say like success versus failure. I like this one a lot because I think this plagues a lot of people.
You do have examples of succeeding.
you're just overlooking most of them.
We want to let all examples count, no matter how small. They all count. Why would they why would you not let them count? Because and and this is what a lot of people do. This is one of the reasons why they don't feel successful and the reason why they do feel like a failure is because they won't count their successes. And they think that if they can withhold that from themselves, it'll drive them to succeed even more.
No, it won't. If it if it always feels like it's never good enough, then you're just going to give up. And it makes me think of like, you know, parents do this to their kids sometimes and that then they grow up to then do it to themselves, which is no matter how many A's they make, no matter how good how how many touchdowns they make and and on the football team, the a parent will always say, "Okay, that's kind of good, but you could do better." And then it just puts the the kid in a perpetual state of, "It's never good enough." And then they grow up to feel the same way.
it's never good enough.
That will not serve you. Okay? So, letting any shred of evidence to count as a example of success is not saying that we're we're not lowering the bar for your success.
That's not what that what's happening there. You're building yourself up to understand, to recognize, to acknowledge what success looks like for you. So, learning your own native language when you were a kid, that's a success. You weren't even trying and you just picked it up, right? Learning to tie your shoe, learning to walk, uh getting A's in your in in school, uh graduating high school, getting your first job, getting your first girlfriend or your first boyfriend, getting married, having kids, having a successful family, carrying on a sex a job, uh getting a raise, getting a promotion. All of these things count as success. learning to ride a bike.
It all counts. There is no reason to withhold this from yourself. Okay? And as you're thinking about these, you want to be popping them into that template.
So, you're starting to build up that template. You're starting to populate it because chances are if you believed you were a failure, you you're positive examples of succeeding are probably scattered everywhere and you're you're not even recognizing them. A lot of times they're just in the in the dark. But as you start to think about them and you start popping them into your template, you're going to notice something. First of all, it's going to it get becomes a lot easier to find more and more examples.
And then as you're finding them and you're popping them into that template, it starts to feel real. You start to go, "Yeah, wait a minute. I have succeeded in a lot of ways in so many ways that I was not allowing myself to count." So that is good. You're starting to feel it. You're starting to feel more capable in in this area. you're starting to feel more like a success. And the more you feel that, the easier it is to find more and more examples. So, and it's also not just counting all the small examples.
You want to count all of them, the medium examples, the big examples. But most of the time, what people will do is they'll they say, well, I'm not a success and I can't find any examples.
And it's like, okay, well, what uh you have succeeded in life, tell me about that. And they'll say, well, I have had no big successes. And it's like, well, I didn't ask that. That's not what I asked. any success counts.
Put it in there. So, you want to build up that template somewhat. And then we want to turn our attention to what we call counter examples.
And we were working on counter transforming counter examples yesterday.
So, these are the examples that go counter to being the quality that you want to be. In this case, we're using success. Okay? So you have examples and you have counter examples. Examples, those are what support you in being the quality you want to be, the quality that you value. Counter examples, those are the things that tell you no, you're not because you did this or you did you did that or you failed or what have you.
Okay.
Now, your counter examples it is possible are set up in your template already.
whatever feels certain and solid. And that would be one of the reasons, a major reason why this negative belief feels so certain and solid because it's organized in such a way that makes it feel certain and solid. It doesn't always work that way, but I'm don't be surprised if it if it is that way. And I've had that happen where I believed I was something negative and it felt very certain. And then when I went to look for the counter examples, here they were hanging out right here on my left. And that's why it felt so certain. So we want to find them. Okay? And there's a few variations that your counter examples are going to follow.
I don't know why I keep doing it that way. Why don't I just start Nope, that's not Well, that's fine. Why don't I just start over here?
Okay, so what we're looking for is our counter examples, and they're going to appear in one of three ways. They either are going to be in the same location as your database. So, same location that would be here for me or they're going to be in a different location but same modality and modalities are visual, auditory and kesthetic. So what that means is if I go looking for my counter examples. So I built up my database already with some positive examples. So I got something to hang on to that's starting to feel like I am this quality. And then I go looking for my counter examples. And if they're here that same location, if they're already in the same place, then that would be same location.
If they're not there and I go looking around over here and I find them over here and they're also visual. So the V here, they're also visual. So my positive examples are visual and so are my counter examples. They're just in a different location. So that would be different location, same modality. Okay.
Now, there's one other variation.
Actually, there's a theoretical one, too, but we don't have to worry about that one. There is also different location different modality.
Now most of you are probably visual not all of you but most of you probably are.
So if you have a visual database for your certain and solid qualities and you notice your counter examples are not in the same location, they're somewhere over here. And not only are they not in the same location, they're not even visual. Maybe they're voices that hang out right here next to your ear, which is very common. You know those critical voices.
So that would be different location, different modality. So, which one of these do you think is the most unstable or the the hardest one to deal with?
It's this one right here.
And the reason why is because you cannot integrate counter examples if they're in a different modality. Now, please hear me say that because I know somebody's going to comment probably tomorrow. I can't seem to get these counter examples to integrate. My question is going to be, what modality are they in? Oh, they're auditory. What modality is your positive uh template or your positive qualities? Visual. That's why they will not integrate when they're in a different modality. It's like oil and water. They just will not mix.
So, what we need to do is we need to change the modality so that it's compatible with your database if they're in a different modality. Now, some people might go, "Oh, no. That's definitely not me."
Well, don't be so sure. And the reason for that is I'm primarily visual. And that does not mean that I visualize in 3D and and high definition. That I just don't. Um, but I rely on the visual more than anything else. So, I have my visual examples and this this was this was happening to me for a time and uh I would go looking for some counter examples and I would find counter examples also visual. I would transform them and integrate them into my database and I thought everything was fine. The next day suddenly I'd have this crashing feeling and suddenly the quality that I had worked on the day before was gone and now it was back the way that it it was before. And this happened a few times and I was like what is going on?
And so I tried to slow it down. The next time it happened I slowed it down and I realized what was happening. There was critical voices that were coming over my shoulder and slamming into the new quality that I had just built and destroying the database. So, what did that let me know? I had counter examples in a different location behind me.
That's probably why they weren't so obvious. And they were in the auditory.
Another reason why they weren't so obvious. Okay, now it started to make sense. So, when I started work on these qualities, I would always go back and listen. Was there something going on back here? And often times they did have critical voices which were serving as counterexamples. And there's there's lots of reasons why that that's probably so. For one, counter examples are unpleasant. So we might want to not try to hide them from ourselves. What better way to hide them than to move them behind us and put them in a different modality that we don't normally pay attention to. Sounds sounds logical. Uh that doesn't mean it's good for us. it.
But that's sounds like something your unconscious mind would probably do when you were a kid. Especially also when you're a kid and you're being reprimanded and a lot of times your head is down like this while your parents are telling you what you did wrong.
So the voice is coming over your head or you're at school and you're at a desk and the teacher's reprimanding you and you got your head down like that over the desk. Or I remember getting caught a lot of times drawing when I wasn't supposed to be drawing and the teacher would sneak up on me and what are you doing? And so that voice is coming over here. So what do we do with this? Well, I would take those voices and swing them around and say, "Okay, who's saying this to me?" And so now I give visual images to the voices. And sometimes it was my first grade teacher. And I remember thinking to myself, "What the hell is going on? I've been carrying around this critical voice and it's my first grade teacher who means absolutely nothing to me right now and has no consequence whatsoever in my life. But I've been carrying this around and it's been affecting me because I didn't know what was going on and it was very unconscious. And this is goes back to what I was saying yesterday. When things are unconscious, they have a stronger effect on you. So I would swing my counter examples around, give them visual visuals to them, then transform them, and then move them into my database. Now, this also happened to me one of the first times I was teaching this, and this video actually still exists on my YouTube channel. You have to go way back to the beginning. Um I was teaching a weekend training of self-concept and I was doing this um demo with a young man. He was only 18 but very sharp, very bright and just asking him walking him through the instructions of transformation. His mind was razor sharp and super fast and flexible. And so it was really cool to use uh him as a demonstration subject.
But every time we would get to the end and I would say one of the one of the ways we test and know if we are this quality, I would say, "Are you Q?"
meaning quality. And he would pause, he would hesitate, and he would go, "Yeah."
And I was like, "No, I'm not convinced.
There's there's something missing here."
And so we'd go back, we'd do the process, we'd find more counter examples, I would transform them, and then boom, we'd pop them in, integrate them, and then I would get to the end of it and say, "Okay, are you Q?" And then he would go, "Yeah." I was like, "No, you're not. this is not how I can tell this is not working. And so I I said, "Okay, when I ask that question right before you answer, what happens?" And he goes, "I don't know. I just kind of get this nagging." And soon as he did that, he kind of his head to the side and says, "Nagging." And that's when I knew what was wrong. So when people to their head to the side, it's usually they're accessing something auditory.
And then he used an auditory predicate, nagging. Nagging is auditory, right? So, he goes nagging like that and that's when I knew he had counter examples behind him and it was in a different modality. So, again, we pulled them around uh because his uh positive quality had visual examples, I knew I needed to get those into the visual, then transform them and then integrate them. And I was sweating that demonstration because I was in front of a group of people. And finally, it worked. And I said, "Are you Q?" And he was like, "Yes." and it worked. I was like, "Ah, thank you." It's kind of a stressful situation.
All right. So, you want to know how you do your counter examples. And once you know, once you have them figured out, um, if they are in a different modality, first thing you need to do is get them changed into the same modality as your positive examples. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to in this case like remove the auditory. But you do need to add the visual. If your positive examples are visual, you got to get those counter examples visuals. And an easy way to do that, uh, if they're auditory, and a lot of times when it's, uh, counter examples that are auditory, they're usually voices. So, you just say, okay, well, who was saying this?
And then their face usually appears, and then you get more information about what was going on when that happened. Okay.
Now, if you already have positive I mean counter examples already in the same location, it will probably help you to pull them out and bring them to what we call the workstation, which is something we did yesterday and look at the group the entire all of the counter examples and group them.
It just makes them easier to group. So let's say you have this kind of cloud and you got all these counter examples in here.
And remember these are the this is basically what creates the generalization the negative generalization. And remember I use generalization and belief interchangeably. They're both the same thing.
So let's say you got this collage of uh counter examples and this is what makes you feel the negative belief that you feel in this case like I'm a failure. So these would be like all my failures or what everything that I'm calling a failure.
Now we want to look for similarities to make this easier more bite-siz chunks, right? It's hard to go at a big blob of counter examples like this all at once.
So, I'm going to look for similarities and group them by what's similar to some of them. And what do I mean by that?
Well, it could be a lot of things. The best way to group them if you can is find a theme.
So certain groups could a group could be all times that I failed when it came to um that was more of a context. So context is one way we can group them. All times that I failed in relationships or dating. All times that I failed in my career. all times that I failed. Um, oh, anything in my health. I don't know what that would quite look like. I don't have a sense of that. But, so there could be context would be one way you group them by similarity. You could also group them by time. All times, you know, that I failed when I was a teenager. All times that I failed whenever I was in my 20s, in my 30s. So, that would be another way you could group them. But if you can find a way to group them all by like the kind of failure in the sense of what meaning you made of that failure. Uh all times that I failed and I I felt not good enough. Um all times that I failed and trying to think of other trying to get back into my memories of what I had experienced back then.
Nothing comes to mind at the moment. But if you can group them by their meanings, like so all of them are counter examples to this quality that you're working on, this belief that you want to work on.
When you group them into smaller groups, if you can group them by their what what they have in common, by meaning, that's going to be your best bet. But if you don't see that, it's fine. Find whatever similarities that you can. Okay. Now, what I like to do among these groups is I like to take the biggest, baddest, nastiest one first and transform it. And the reason why I want the biggest, baddest, nastiest one first is because as I transform the the worst ones, the worst groups, a lot of times the other groups start to fall apart. So, it becomes easier and I'm always looking to uh be efficient.
So, let's say I see this really nasty one right here. This is the worst one.
This is like the heart of the belief that makes me feel really bad. So, I'm going to pop that one out. Let's see.
There's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Let's just say there's 10. So, I'm going to pop that group out so I can work with it.
And it has about 1, two, three, four, five, six, 7, 8, 9, 10. Let's see. 11 12. Let's kind of fill this up. So, here's all the counter examples in this group. And let's say this group uh made me feel not good enough.
That's the theme behind all of these.
The next step is I'm going to look for the first or the worst. And this is basically how we create generalizations, positive or negative. Okay. The first time something happens, especially if it's negative, it's very jarring and we go, "That was awful." And what that does is it opens up a new category that we've never had before of this thing that happened and we realize this can happen again, you know?
So, like maybe the very first time I remember failing at something and it was so jarring and it felt so bad and I was like, I didn't know this was even such a thing. This is the first time I'm experiencing this. And so that category opens up in my mind. Category also means generalization.
If this happened this time, this means this can happen again. So now I have a new category of experience. And every time something similar like this kind of feeling, this kind of failure happens, I select and collect that and drop it into this group. So this first one starts to attract more and more of these experiences into a group. We call this a category or a generalization.
Or what can happen is you have a first, it's not too bad. You know, you have like a minor failure and you go, "Ah, that doesn't feel so good." And then you're going about your life and you might have a few more. Ah, that didn't feel so good. Ah, that didn't feel so good. And then you have one bad one, just really bad. And it really makes you feel this and then you go, "Oh my god, that was horrible." And then what that does is before you had this kind of loose floating counter examples, in this case failure, but once you have this really bad one, suddenly the category solidifies and all the past ones then come into the group. And then of course if you have any ones as you go into the future you're selecting and collecting based on this worst.
Now another thing you will find in either the first or the worst is these tend to hold the criteria for what it means to be a counter example within this group. Now remember we talked about summary representation.
Summary representation for your quality is a quick go-to how you know you are that quality. When I ask you if you're that quality, you don't have to go through an entire database of experiences. That summary representation is a representation that indicates you do in fact have a rich database of experiences of this quality. So you don't have to go through them. You just go yes, I am I am that quality. This is very similar. The first or the worst serves that purpose. It's like a summary representation for the group.
So the theory here is if you can transform that one whichever one is doing it you can transform them all transform them all at once. Okay.
Sometimes it will be the first first time you remember this this negative experience and sometimes it will be a different one that we you will call the worst. Oftentimes the first is the worst, but not always. Okay, so let's say I find it. It's this one right here.
It's a it's it's awful. I don't even want to look at it. It's so awful, right? And it really holds the criteria of what it means to be a part of this group. So I want to move this one out so I can work with it. So I leave the group there. In fact, you want to kind of push the group away and you want to work on the one.
So, let's say we have it here.
It's a a badass counter example. We put this in our workstation. I talked about this yesterday. And a workstation is a kind of safe place where we can bring this thing close enough to us that we can work on it, but not so close that it causes us to crash out. And you do not need to experience any pain for this.
You should not experience pain for this.
It will only distract you. So do not get into this mode of like punishing yourself. That's not nec that's not not only is it not necessary, it's counterproductive. So, some people like to see it in a box or like a plexiglass box or put a plexiglass in front of them to kind of give them a sense of safety.
Now, you want to make sure you're disassociated, which means you can see yourself. You don't want to relive this experience. It was a nasty, painful experience. You don't want to relive it.
You want to sit back and see it. Right now, this should start to sound familiar because this is exactly what we did yesterday. So, I'm not going to go in depth through this whole process. I'm going to kind of fast track it. So, what we do here is we watch the movie of what happened and while you watch that movie of what happened, you ask yourself, what was my positive intention here? Because I didn't purposefully create a counter example. I didn't purposefully act against what I value. Okay? And that that alone for a lot of people is a huge relief. They never even think about it that way. They was like, "Oh yeah, of course I wasn't trying to do something bad." So you get in touch with what was that positive intention?
And then when you get clear about that, you might have to chunk it up to a higher value because it might have been something like, well, I wanted attention. Attention is not a strong enough value. Okay. What was important to you about getting attention in that in this experience? Well, what was important to me is I really wanted love.
Now, love is a great value, right? Great positive intention. Um, so there there you go. That's what it would be. Now, a lot of times, just like in parts integration, this is going to come out stated in the negative. What was my positive intention? What was I trying to do? I didn't want to be ignored. Okay, so that's a negative. We can't go toward a negative. So, if you didn't want to be ignored, what did you want instead? I wanted attention. Okay, we're still not at the level of a value. If you had gotten attention in this situation, what would that have done for you? I would have felt loved. So love would be the positive intention.
And then the next thing is what resource or resources were you not accessing at this time within yourself that if you had you would have been able to fulfill love regardless of what happened because we don't control other people.
And you might say, well, love itself was the resource I wasn't accessing. This is very true. When we go seeking uh attention, when we go seeking love, it's often because we're not accessing our own love. And so, we feel like we're empty and we we're trying to get it from someone else. This is not the way. You have love inside of yourself. Access it. And when you do, you will feel that want and need to share it. And that's the time when you want to find a partner, when you feel an abundance of love that you want to share. Now, there might need to be more resources here. Another one might have been, well, I wanted to feel like I belonged. You know, whatever this situation was going on here, I wanted to feel like I belonged. Okay. Well, we don't control whether or not people accept us. So, what does this tell us?
If we're looking for acceptance, once again, we're probably not accessing our own acceptance. So, we can do that at any time, though. This is a resource within you. It's always there. It never goes away. You can The only thing that you can do is overlook it, pretend it's not there, and pretend that other people's acceptance of you is more important. Then you might be able to blind yourself to your own acceptance, but it does not serve you. When you access your own acceptance, you already feel like you belong. You don't feel like you don't belong. You feel like you belong anywhere you go. And the interesting thing is is that when you feel like you're accepted and you stop seeking acceptance, you stop being desperate for other people's acceptance, often times that's very attractive. So you end up attracting people who accept you. It's kind of how this works. So what we do is we recreate this movie guided by your positive intention to fulfill love while plugging in these resources of love and acceptance and you just let your mind show it to you. What does this look like? And you get this new movie.
And so you have a new movie of you fulfilling your positive intention, fulfilling love, full of love, full of acceptance. And you go, "Wow, that looks great. I wish that's what I I would have done." Then that's the question you want to ask yourself. Is this new movie the way you wish you had done this? If there's a yes, then we ask one more question. Is this the way you would like to handle this situation should a similar situation like this arise?
If you say yes, then we know you're congruent with it. We know there's no resistance to this. Now, sometimes there will be. Sometimes they'll say, "Yeah, the movie's better, but there's still something missing." Okay? It could be another resource. Uh, it could be you need to make some other adjustments here. Um, and sometimes you just need to work with the movie a little bit more until it's optimized. Yes, this is how I wish I had handled it and this is how I would like to handle this going forward should a similar situation arise.
Really tune this movie up. Make it like a clear like yes, this is who I want to be. Because what it does is it serves as a vision going forward. It tells you how to do something rather than how not to do something. When we make a mistake, we tend to, like we talked about yesterday, we tend to just tell ourselves, don't ever do that again. That was terrible.
You know, that's that was bad. Without ever understanding it, like what was it that you were trying to fulfill? What was your positive intention? And what was missing that you weren't accessing within yourself? Most of the time, people never take the time to understand this. And so, what happens? They try to bury the mistake into their unconscious where it becomes more powerful there where it influences you even more because you're not consciously aware of it. And then the tendency is you keep making the same mistake over and over again because you haven't truly learned from it. Now you've truly learned from it. So much so that you've been able to to create an alternate version of how to do it if you're ever in that situation again. Remember Hiro and Natada told not to surrender under any circumstances.
Well, they didn't ever say you can surrender if if Japan loses the war.
They never told him that. So, what did he do? For 30 something years, he kept fighting the war even though it was over.
So, now you have an alternative. Okay.
Now, some people might say, well, am I just trying to delude myself into believing something else happened? No, no, no, no. We don't want to do that. So what we do want to do is we want to take the old ver well. So you want to tune this new movie up by the way make it super compelling if it making it bigger, brighter, uh enriching the colors, whatever makes it feel like it's wants to suck you into it. But you don't want to go into it. You want to keep it out here because you want to see you doing you the way that you want to do you.
That will motivate you to move in this direction. But really tune it up. And then for the old movie of what actually happened, you want to do the opposite.
you want to de-emphasize it, right? We don't want to delete it because we don't want to pretend like something uh didn't happen when it did and you may for whatever reason need to recover this information. So, you're going to uh what's the word I um not artifact archive. You want to archive that information. An archive is something you know we put in the basement or whatever.
It doesn't doesn't need to be front and center in our face. And how we do that is we attach it to the new to the new movie and we make it like I don't know faded black and white still image. It's everything opposite of compelling and it's attached to this new movie.
So if your mind ever falls on this ever again, it's immediately compelled by the new movie that it's attached to. So you don't feel bad. You don't go get down on yourself. This new movie pops up and you go, "Oh yeah, okay. Here's how I I need to deal with this." And this happens in real life. When you are in situations that feel new to you, your mind will automatically go searching for similar situations so that you have a sense of certainty and familiarity with that situation. Now, if your mind goes searching for past experience of a similar situation and all it has is all these counter examples and these mistakes that often becomes you just follow along and you commit the same mistake again because that's what's familiar to you and you've had this happen before.
You've caught yourself making the same mistake and you go, "Oh my god, why do I keep making the same mistake?" Well, that's because that's your reference experience and you haven't done this.
You haven't given yourself sensory experience or sensory information of what you would rather do instead. So you keep falling back on the old mistakes.
Time to change that. So when this happens, your mind might go here and then it's going to go here to this new movie and you go, "Oh yeah, course correction. I'm going this way, not the old way." Now you have a new pathway.
So, I should probably put resources.
So, this is a resourced new movie. Now, what you're going to do, you're going to take this one with the old movie still attached to it. Let's see if I can do this well enough. And you're going to pop this back into the group from which it came.
Okay?
And what you're going to do with that.
So I'm going to put N M for new movie.
Here's the group.
You're going to attach all of those other counter examples to this new movie at the edges.
Okay. Now the next part is like magic.
If you got the Did I not put it here? Yeah. The first or the worst. If you nailed this, if you got the right one, and not all the time does that work the first time, but if you nailed this and you found the one that is really driving the group and you transformed it with resources and you pop this back in the group and then you have all of those other counter examples attached to the edges, you let these resources from this new movie transfer to all of these counter examples all at once.
And when that happens, the entire group flips. The entire generalization of this group flips because now you just infused all of these counter examples was with what was missing, those resources.
Now, one or two things will happen when these transform. Either these counter examples become extremely deemphasized, very small, very dark, kind of like what you did to the other uh old movie here.
If that happens, great. This worked.
That means these counter examples have pretty much lost their sting. They've lost their their still have a slight meaning to them, but very little, not much.
Or these actually blow up into resourceful examples and they'll often have kind of a hyperreal or or kind of technicolor look to them.
And what that does is it kind of lets you know you didn't actually live these experiences. These are all alternatives to their original experience. So if either one of these things happens, you transformed an entire group. If this doesn't happen, you start back over here and go back in and look for the first or the worst. You didn't get it the first time. And that's okay because you have infinite number of shots at this.
Now you keep doing this with each one of these groups.
And every time you transform a group like this, so let's say I'll show you what my positive template looks like. So here's here's Damon and over here to my left is my positive template.
And it kind of looks like this. I can see the edges of all the many examples one after another sequential that just trail off back here. So once I do something like this, whether they transform like this or they deemphasize, then I move them into my database, which just enriches my database of this quality.
And then I go back up here. I So I've obliterated this group and now I'm looking for which one is the next nasty big bad group of counter examples that I'm going to flip.
And you keep doing this until you obliterate the whole thing.
And all of those transformed counter examples end up in your positive template.
It's an extraordinary experience. And like I said, if you want to see it happening, you can watch that demo with George where you see me doing all that I I explained here.
All right, that was a lot.
So, this is not hard.
It does take practice.
There's a lot of details to it, but it's actually not hard. It's actually not hard.
All right, before I take questions, um I want to tell you what I've been telling you the whole time. You can learn how to do this. You can be coached through this um if you want to do one-on-one coaching either with myself or um I have coaches I've trained and certified. They're really, really good. Um, so you can do one-on-one coaching if like you don't really want to learn this stuff, but you want the transformations.
Um, in fact, George, that's what he came to me for. He wanted the transformations. He He's uh he he's into a lot of different things, and he wasn't really interested in learning it, but after the transformations, he said, I want to learn this. And so now he's in our program. So, uh, it's a wonderful program. We walk you through the step by step. We make it so that you can't fail. Uh we give you everything you need including a community uh of coaches and uh practitioners and there have been people there are people in that group that have are really seasoned practitioners who've been there for a long time and they're very wise people and I'm there as well.
I'm very active in there. I answer all questions especially if people tag me on the questions. So we walk you through this step by step. Now, uh you might not be in a position to afford one-on-one coaching or the self-concept training program. And if that's the case, at least get into our NLP training, our ultimate NLP practitioner training.
This that is actually where I started. I did I started learning NLP before I learned the self-concept model. You can do it that way. By the time you get to the self-concept model, the self-concept model will come much easier because you will already understand the basics. The self-concept model is an NLP based model. So once you understand NLP and you can make it work and you're effective at it, the next level with the self-concept model, you're going to be fine. Now, people go, some people go the other direction. They start with self-concept and then once they learn self-concept, they go, "Wow, this is amazing. I want to dig deeper. I want to understand where this all comes from."
and then they jump into the uh the practitioner training.
So the ultimate NLP practitioner training is super affordable and again uh the skills of NLP whether or not you want to be a coach. A lot of times people say well I don't want to be a practitioner. I'm like what do you mean? And they're like well I don't want to coach people. I was like you don't have to coach people. You can use this for yourself. Now, one thing I will say, in order to master NLP, you do want to practice with other people. And that will include like it's like coaching them because you're learning the technique. In order to do that, you're using the technique on the person. Even if all you want to do is use NLP on yourself, you still want to work with other people because you will become better at using NLP on yourself when you work with other people. And vice versa. I've met so many people in NLP trainings. when I was attending NLP trainings and they would be like, "Well, I don't have any interest in using this on myself cuz I'm a coach. I just want to use it on uh my clients." And I was like, "Are they out of their mind?"
Like, you will never become the coach you could be if you don't use this stuff on yourself and become effective at it using on using it on yourself. So, regardless of what your goal is here, what your objective is, if you just want to use NLP for yourself, you still want to get good with other people. You want to practice with other people. And we give you a community to do that. And if really as a coach you want to use it on your clients, you want to be able to use this effectively on yourself because then then you will really unlock your potential as a coach. So regardless of where you're coming from or your financial situation, um you can afford the ultimate NLP practitioner training.
So jump into that, get learning. If you use it, it will change your life. Or if you want to jump straight in the self-concept, let's do that as well.
Both options are available to you. Uh I think my wife put the link here in the description and she also just put the link of George the uh video >> description of the video >> and it's also in the description. So if you want to see that me demonstrating self-concept transformations, uh the link is in the chat and the link is in the description. All right, let me check out your questions here.
Let's see.
Can doing this work drive someone who already has mental problems into psychosis? I don't think so. I've never heard of such a thing. But if you have severe mental issues, I would say go take care of those things first. Um it's very hard to do this kind of work if you're uh if you have severe limitations that you haven't dealt with. It's better to go take care of those things.
Um I'm scared I will never find true love. Well, that really is about connecting with your own love. And um there's a lot of things you can do, but start there.
Is there any way you could dig deeper into accessing resources within how exactly do you do that? It's very simple. So, um when I'm coaching people um and we identify a resource and let's say the resource that I found there, uh love and then I would say, "Okay, what's it like when you feel love?" And they'll, you know, they'll say, "Well, it's like a warm feeling." And I'll say, "Where in your body do you feel it most?" And a lot of times they'll point to their heart. Well, you just accessed your resource and I didn't make you do that. I just asked you a question. You did it yourself. Okay? Or I can just say something like if if acceptance is the resource, I'd say, what's it like when you accept when you just really accept?
You accept yourself. You accept the world around you. You accept the things you can change. You accept the things that you can't change. What does that feel like? Just asking the question, it brings it up. Or I can ask them to think about a specific time that they were very accepting and then they feel it right away. So it's that simple. This was intense, but I can feel the power in the steps as you describe them. Yeah, it's kind of intense at the same time. It's step by step. We leave nothing out. It's it's uh elegant that way.
Um it's so precise, right? So you just you follow the steps. Can we get the link to YouTube with George? Okay, Julia, put that out there. I know people have referred to NLP as a pseudocience, even though the creators of it said it was a a technology and not a science.
What would you say is the biggest push backs you get? Um, I mean, people who come to me for uh NLP training and NLP coaching don't really bring that up. Uh, but I I've uh debated people on the comment section of my videos quite often uh over that. And I've often said, uh, why don't you come on to my live stream and we will debate this in front of an audience. Um, I'm clearly not going to convince them because they've already made up their mind. They're not going to convince me because I know how well uh NLP has worked in my life. So, let's leave it up to the audience. Let's debate it out. And nobody has ever taken me up on that offer. And that offer is still open. If you know someone who wants to debate me online here on a live stream uh regarding NLP's uh efficacy and how well it works or not or why, you know, whatever they think it doesn't work, I will debate that with anybody.
I've even challenged PhD psychologists and psychiatrists to come on my channel and I'll debate them. They'll always turn me down. So that and that's one of the reasons that I I'll tell them it is not a science. So if you're not trying to pass something off as a science, how can it be a pseudocience? It's not a it's not a science. So what I tell people, so like I'll give you some examples. Um is language a science? And I don't mean the study of language. I mean a language itself like is the English language a science?
No, it's not a science. Okay? But clearly it's effective. I'm using it and you're understanding what I'm saying, aren't you?
So, if it's not a science and it's never been proven because it hasn't been, how is it working? It's obviously working, right? So, if we want to get into this thing of like, well, it hasn't been proven by science. Language, we started using language before there was such a thing as science, right?
Uh math, math is not a science. It's also a language. It's adding symbols kind of like as placeholders for things to try to map the universe. So science is not a I mean a math is not a science itself. Actually science itself is not a science. It's a it's a methodology.
Um and so this is how NLP works the same way.
And I can take it even further. Um and I can say u do you have beliefs? I don't know anyone who would answer no to that question. Everyone would answer yes. I have beliefs.
But science has never proven the existence of a belief.
And beliefs control everything. Right?
Our beliefs uh they basically guide what we do. They are what we believe is our reality.
But science has never proven the existence of it.
But everyone believes they have beliefs.
So how does that work?
So I could I could go on and on. But anyway, uh I don't really get push back from clients or anything anyone like that.
And if anyone wants to give me push back, um I will gladly debate them here on my channel on a live stream.
And yeah, like so I would like any psychologist or psychiatrist to observe this video that I did with George and tell me that what I did was not effective and then they can go talk to George himself and and and find out, you know, what he what he thought about it.
Uh what's happening there? Is this all just made up? Was he an actor? You know, like come on.
All right, that's all the questions. You guys are making it easy. Great session.
Thank you again Damon. You're very welcome. When we are imagining new movie, is it useful to draw a picture or write something? I don't think so.
Generate this in your mind. And then, you know, if you want to take notes on it, go ahead. But like I've had clients want to do that and as soon as they start referring to their notes or things like that, it just they they they're basically disassociating from the process. So, I don't like that. generate this in your mind and it's much more powerful that way because all of your experiences are stored in your mind.
So that's where you want to, you know, you need this new information. You're generating this this new information. It needs to match up with the old information. How is the old information represented? It's there in your mind.
It's not in drawings. It's not on a list.
I can see why you are so confident about debating this because every point makes sense, especially the beliefs being intangible, but they exist. Yeah. It's like we can't pin everything down to was it proven by science. We'd never do anything. Cars were not proven by science before they were invented. They just started using them. They just started putting them together and making them and figuring it out, you know, a piece at a time. Now, with technology, whether it's a hard technology or a mental technology, we love science. Like science is great. We love to I love to look at u you know new things that are happening in neuroscience because um they often confirm what we know about in NLP and sometimes they give us u more like we where whereas in NLP we might not have had quite the right understanding. Neuroscience adds a lot to that. So I in no way am a science denier. I love science. I think science is amazing. It's just science has a different objective than what we do in NLP. Science is all about trying to observe what what is objectively true.
And what NLP does is we turn subjectivity on itself. We cannot truly observe anything objectively.
It's always going to be passed through our subjectivity.
So why not study our subjectivity? And that that's not to mean to study subjectivity uh rather than study objectivity or what is objectively true.
We can do both. There's no reason why we can't or shouldn't. So I'm glad we have science. I'm, you know, more than glad that we have science. And I'm really happy that we have scientists, people who do that work. We need them. It's awesome.
And I'm one of those guys who does this other work where we study our own subjectivity. How are we creating this?
How are we creating our sense of reality? How how are beliefs constructed?
I can't get past the first few pages of the manual. It seems very technical. Can it be skipped? What manual are you talking about? Thanks, Damon. You always answer my questions with clarity. My pleasure. It seems very similar to core transformation. Um, not really. I mean, it it's it's it's NLP. Core transformation is NLP. the part about values. Yes. And in fact, um when I first started learning self-concept, so uh Steve didn't teach the value solicitation part, the way that Steve taught it, he just assumed you knew what you valued. He assumed you knew what qualities you valued. And the reason for that is by the time he was teaching this, he was teaching this to advanced students who had done many of his trainings. and Steve and Connie Ray always put uh a lot of emphasis on values and you know I understand why because they're so important. So by the time you were learning self-concept from Steve he just assumed you knew your values. You knew the qualities that you value and you would just be able to kind of pick them off off however you want.
So when I got to it and I got to that point and I was like when I did my first transformation, I was like, "Okay, there's so many qualities that I want.
There's so many qualities I want to be.
Where do I even start?" And it was overwhelming. And so I just went to Steve and I said, "So Steve, I can just kind of like transform any quality that I want just kind of like picking it off the shelf at a store." And he was like, "Yeah." And so I was like, "Okay, I feel like a kid in a candy store, but I feel like a kid in a candy store who's overwhelmed with all the different candy. So where do I even start?" And it was right around that time that uh I was curious about Steve's son, Mark Andreas.
Um, and he taught uh core transformation, his mother's technology, and I wanted to learn core transformation. I also wanted to meet Mark. So I said, "Steve, will you introduce us?" He said, "Yes." He introduced us by email. And then I got Mark on a call and we hit it off right away and I said, "Uh, well, I'd like to take you I'd like to have you come to Santa Cruz and teach core transformation and, uh, I want to learn core transformation from you." He said, "Great, let's do it." So, I brought him to Santa Cruz. He taught core transformation. And I remember at the very beginning when they when he he was teaching the values elicitation. Now, core transformation is about states, not not beliefs. And you you access the core states through a value value solicitation. When I saw that, I was like, I can use that with self-concept.
I can pair value solicitation with self-concept. And instead of going into core states, we can go into core beliefs, beliefs about your identity. And so that's what I did. And so I did a value solicitation. I went down the list and I saw right away I did not feel certain and solid about any of my values being qualities of who I am. And that's when I went down the list and started transforming every single one of them.
And this is what gave me sort of a a clearer method, a more precise approach, finding my top values and then transforming them, especially values that overlap and I find in every area of my life. And when I did that, oh man, my life just 180 degrees. And I had never felt so much fulfillment and purpose and meaning in my life. And then I went back to Steve and I said, "Well, uh, I hope you like this. This is what I did and it helps me focus on where to go, which which qualities to transform. And I've been using this in my coaching practice and it's been very effective." And uh, he was like, I'm not surprised because yes, the more you value a quality, the more your self-esteem goes up when it feels certain and solid, when you transform it into a certain and solid quality.
So yeah, I took that piece from core transformation and added it to self-concept. Now, uh, Connie Ray Andreas did not create value solicitation. That was part of basic NLP since its beginning.
All right. Uh, thank you very much, Julia and Damon. Well, it's actually Ulia. It's spelled with an I. I know it looks like an L. Her name is Ulia. It's actually a very common name in Eastern Europe.
Let's see. I do my research in the science of teaching and learning. As I learn more about this, I want to use this in my class with my students. It's not a science. Should I not test for effectiveness? Oh, you should absolutely test for effectiveness. So, let let me give you another um I don't know how much you guys are familiar with Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It's one of the most effective martial arts, if not the most effective martial art. You're never going to have total consensus on that.
Is it a science?
No, it's not. Is it effective?
Yeah, it's very effective. If you watch mixed martial arts, if you watch the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the UFC, they're using Brazilian jiu-jitsu all the time. When people go to the ground, when the fight goes to the ground, if you don't have a ground game like Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you're going to lose. So, it's tested for effectiveness over and over and over again. And we do the same thing in NLP. So it's not about not testing for effectiveness. It's that you're just not going to get consistent results. So like let's say Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you can say, is the armbar proven well. It depends on who's the practitioner and it depends on who they're using it on it. You know, that's part of becoming a a martial artist.
Artist being the key word. being able to express yourself in the moment and find the best option to use in the moment that's very hard to break down into a science. Okay, this is why it's both an art and a science. And this is what NLP is. It mixes art and science. There is an art to this. It's a practice. And the same thing with yoga is like, is yoga effective? Well, depends. I mean, I've been you I've been doing yoga for probably two decades now. I find it very effective. Um, but you could have someone else practice it and go, "Uh, I don't like it." Okay. And it also depends on effective for what, uh, for physical health, for mental health. Um, some people would say it does wonders for their mental health. Some people would say it didn't help at all. So, is it effective? Well, yeah. In some circumstances, with some people, it is.
With others, maybe not.
What you are actually describing is philosophy. That is fantastic. Um, I'm not sure what you're referring to, but NLP is definitely not a philosophy.
There is no The closest thing in NLP to philosophy is the NLP presuppositions, but they're um, they're more like filters or frames. They're definitely not philosophy.
NLP practitioner training participant manual 1992 version, but I think I got the answer with your answer. Okay. NLP is not a science, rather, it's a method.
But we could use science to compare NLP to some other methods. I bet NLP would be the best and take all the prize.
Yeah. Well, so the you know, if you think about what NLP is, it's it's about bringing together everything that works.
It's through understanding how we create our subjectivity.
That's basically what it is. So, it's a model for modeling. And because it's a model for modeling and it's content free, yes, there's a lot of truth to what this this statement here. Um NLP would use whatever is effective. So, uh, you could say, well, NLP borrows from cognitive behavioral therapy or just therapy or hypnosis. Yeah, NLP was modeled from, uh, hypnosis and family systems and just all therapy. It took the the the it extracted the effectiveness of those models by model, leaving out the content. So, that's what we're always doing with NLP. And that's why the self-concept model works. It's not like, oh well, if you're a different type of personality, the self-concept model won't work. It's like, no, it's not based in content. It's based on a structure. How do you structure your identity? Once you know that based on your beliefs, all you have to do is map in the content for the beliefs that you want to believe.
Hi Damon, you might have explained this already, the stuff you've covered so far. How much of that is NLP versus the self-concept model? You have said in the past that the self-concept is a form of NLP. No. So there's no separating the two. Self-concept is NLP. Self-concept is a model that was created through NLP.
So again, NLP is a model for modeling, modeling how our subjective experience.
More importantly, we're looking for excellence, right? So if there's a person and this is what Steve did he modeled people who seem to exemplify uh fulfillment, success, excellence in a variety of ways. There wasn't like one way. So he went around modeling a variety of people to understand how they were creating their sense of self using he used NLP to create that model. So uh NLP is based on models like the meta model is the first NLP model and it's a it's a language model. The self-concept model is a belief or like generalizations based model. More specifically, it's a scope and category model and that's a long that's that's a big discussion. So there's no separating the self-concept model from NLP. It is NLP. It's an NLP model.
It's like saying what's the difference between language and the English language?
The English language is a language, right? So that's that's a better way to think about it. One of my values was presence and I found that encapsulates so many other values like freedom, nurturing. So I just use presence as the overarching value to represent them. Is that okay to do? Uh I would still use those other smaller values because we want to build those. Uh sometimes you can get away with that just using a bigger overarching uh value. Um but you want to be uh more specific enough because presence is a very general value. And so for example when sometimes people as a value it's a little too broad and general for them and they struggle whenever they try to create that belief. And so often we have to do is we have to break that down into smaller beliefs. So to be more thorough, I would use those smaller values or or beliefs. So yeah, I would if you're going to transform presence, uh you can try transforming presence and then it would probably have a very general feel to it. And then I would also go in and transform nurturing. Now freedom is a value, but it's not a quality, right? Uh if I said are you a present person, you could say yes or no or ambiguous. If I said, "Are you a nurturing person?" You say yes, no, or ambiguous. But if I said, "Are you a free person?" You're going to be kind of like, "What do you mean?" Right? Because freedom has to be contextualized.
Most often, not all the time, but most often, the corresponding quality to the value of freedom is authenticity.
Because to be free to be who you are, to be authentic, is usually the truest freedom you will ever know. So I would use authenticity for that. How can implant a empowering belief faster? How can you implant a empowering belief faster? Faster than what? I have not seen anything that works faster than the self-concept model. And again, if you want to see a demonstration of that, check out that video with George.
In less than an hour per quality, we were we were transforming his qualities, these beliefs about himself in less than an hour.
How would you use NLP to deal with being okay with people not liking you because you did something that comes across as selfish, inconsiderate, but you didn't mean to? Well, so this thing selfish, inconsiderate, these would be counterexamples, wouldn't they? So, what are these counter examples of?
Counter examples to what quality that you value. So, that would be a good place to start. Um, so I mean if you don't really care or you don't want to care what people that people are not liking you, then you might not care if you're selfish and inconsiderate. So you kind of need to sort out what you want out of this. When you are living your values, when you believe you are your highest values as qualities of who you are, you won't be concerned that much about what people think of you. Only the people who really matter to you. And when I say concerned, it's not like, oh, I want people to like me. It's no, you get way past that.
Okay? If people don't like me, and especially if I don't know them very well or they have they're completely inconsequential in my life, I do not care. I really don't. It's not that I want is I mean in general yes I want people to like me you know uh who doesn't right but if I find out that such and such person doesn't like me and you know it's not this person's not my wife uh not my kids not my best friend or best friends I don't really care and all of the people who I just named would tell me they would tell me if I did something that they didn't like and then I would listen to them it's feedback right is that feedback back useful to me. If it's useful, then I do something about it. If it's not useful, I drop it.
So, when you are living your highest values, you don't care so much what other people think. If you truly believe that you have done selfish things and inconsiderate things, then get clear about what is the quality or what is first of all, what is the value you violated by being those things? Because if it if you didn't like it and you feel like you violated one of your values, then you need to be clear about that.
And that's how we transform counter examples. But before going in and transforming these counter examples, you want to know what is the belief you want to be. What is the quality you want to be that you value? And which selfishness and being inconsiderate are counterexamples to. You always need you always want to do this in the context of what you want, who you want to be, where you want to go. Don't just focus on problems on their own without that.
That's when problems get very scary and that's also how you get stuck. So, you always want to know where you're going and what you want. Thank you for the explanation. You're very welcome. Is being giving and generous a value?
Absolutely. Absolutely. That was one of the things that I got stuck on whenever um I was transforming the quality of being successful.
I had some resistance. I had an objection to being successful. So, this is something you want to check in with yourself. When you go to transform something, you always want to ask, do I have any resistance or any objection to being this quality? In this case, it was successful.
And I did. So, we don't run from that resistance. We welcome that resistance.
It has a positive intention for you. So, I checked in with it and I said, "What is your positive intention for not wanting me to be successful?"
And I heard a voice. It said, "I don't want you to be greedy." I said, "Okay, what do you want me to be instead of greedy?" Because remember, we have to get it flipped to a positive. And it says, "I want you to be generous."
And then I thought, "Okay." So, I checked in with my success, this kind of success that I wanted.
Was generosity compatible with success, the success that I want. Absolutely.
Absolutely. So I go back to the resistant part and then I say is generosity and success compatible and the part was like yes if you know you're being a generous person when you're successful that is possible. So what does that mean? I need to include generosity in my success. So I said well if I am successful I can be more generous. The resistant part agreed and then I said to the resistant part, would you be willing to play that role in my success making sure that I am also generous as I become more successful?
The part said absolutely that's all it ever wanted. So now generosity became part of my success and there was no resistance to success anymore. No objection to it. So yes, you can value generosity and you can be a generous person as a quality of who you are.
Okay, so someone else someone is asking someone else a question here.
All right.
Well, I had a lot of fun. I hope you did, too. We have two more live streams to go. Who is going to be at tomorrow's live stream?
There we go. All right.
There's always this long delay.
All right. I believe you. Especially you, Avery. Avery 829.
Thank you, Damon. Going to be there.
Excellent. Okay. Thank you. And you're welcome. All right. I will see you tomorrow.
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