A further quote from the article I received the other day, “What You SAY Is What You Get; How To Speak Your Way To Success” by Jack Canfield, America’s Success Coach:

Researchers have found that the average person thinks as many as 50,000 thoughts a day. Sadly, many of those thoughts are negative — I’m not management material… I’ll never lose weight… It doesn’t matter what I do, nothing ever works out for me. This is what psychologists call victim language. Victim language actually keeps you in a victim state of mind. It is a form of self-hypnosis that lulls you into a belief that you are unlovable and incompetent.

In order to get what you want from life, you need to give up this victim language and start talking to yourself like a winner — I can do it… I know there is a solution… I am smart enough and strong enough to figure this out… Everything I eat helps me maintain my perfect body weight.

This is all well and good — but if you believe that you’re a victim, trying to speak your way out of it rarely works. Your brain hears you saying it and responds, “yeah, right.”

You will give up your victim language only when you cease to think of yourself as a victim, when you adopt the internal belief that you control your own destiny. A victim believes that he or she is not in control of their own life, correct? That they are driven by the currents of circumstance. Only when you change that belief will your victim-driven mindset change.

Oh, you may, by sheer force of repetition, convince your mind that you’re not a victim. Your brain will hear the repeated affirmations and begin to question itself. It will begin to think, “Okay, I’m hearing all this stuff. Why am I not driven by circumstance?” If your mind comes up with enough good reasons on its own, your belief that you are a victim will change. Then again, it may not — it depends on if Mr. Brain can come up with enough reasons to believe differently.

Change your beliefs

Why leave to chance whether or not your mind identifies you as a victim? Make a decision that one of your core beliefs is that you are in control of your own destiny. That “you don’t believe in any of that fate crap.” How do you do that? Easily, it turns out, and a lot more effectively that repeated affirmations of denial…

The power of pain and pleasure

Your mind will give up its limiting and damaging beliefs when you decide you’ve had engough of them: when you associate enough pain in your mind to keeping it, and enough pleasure to changing it. You have to make it so painful to have that limiting belief that your mind will want to change it, just to keep from hurting! You then have to entice your brain into adopting a new belief by offering it a carrot, a reward, for changing it. It’s nothing more than the old carrot and stick thing your ancestors used with donkeys. You hold the carrot out in front of the donkey, you give it a goal to strive for, something yummy. If the donkey doesn’t want the carrot badly enough, you encourage it by a whack or two with the stick. As it moves away from the pain, it’s also moving toward the pleasure.

Stop the thought process

My dear wife, more years ago than I care to think about, imparted to me what I considered at the time to be an incredibly stupid tactic for getting rid of bad thoughts. If thoughts came into her head that she didn’t want, she’d say out loud and very forcefully, “CANCEL CANCEL CANCEL” while holding her fingers to her temples, bowing her head, and scrunching her eyes shut. What a comical picture! What I didn’t realize at the time was that she was employing what is known in NLP as a ‘pattern interrupt’. You recognize that Mr. Mind is engaging in a destructive thought process, and through gestures or words (ideally a combination of both) you stop the thought process from continuing.

So here, in a nutshell, is what you need to do to change a destructive belief:

• first, recognize that the belief isn’t in your best interests, and that you really need to change it
• second, whenever that belief rears its ugly head by putting bad thoughts in your brain, get your brain to stop by using a pattern interrupt
• third, ingrain your new, empowering belief by reminding your brain how much pleasure it’s going to get by adopting the new one and letting go of the old one

Simple, yes? Simple, yes, but it does take practice. But remember above all, as the old saying goes, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again.” Use the ultimate success formula to change your tactics a little and work on it some more. Maybe you aren’t convinced deep down that this belief is something you need to change. Maybe you aren’t interrupting your mind’s pattern of thought strongly enough so that it truly stops the thought process. Or it could be that you don’t have a compelling enough reward to offer Mr. Brain for changing. Whatever it might be, adjust a little and go for it again!

You can do it!