Empowering Beliefs (part 1)
Empowerment: How to reveal the unconscious thought processes that can either really help or really hinder you
If you want to adopt ways of thinking and behaving that get great results and satisfaction (to empower yourself), or to help other people do the same, one very useful approach is to reveal some of the unconscious processes that can either really help or really hinder you.
In my kind of coaching, we call these unconscious processes ‘beliefs’ and I’m going to show you how to work with them to make sure that they are as empowering as you can get them.
This article takes a brief look at what are called ‘Cause-Effects’. These are the connections we unconsciously establish when we perceive that something consistently and predictably leads to something else. A shorthand I often use is “this causes that”.
Let’s explore some examples.
1. To start with, think of something that’s important to you in your work: _________________ ?
Suppose you say that: “Success” is important to you in your work.
Now that we know what’s important to you, we next want to know what your life experiences have taught you about how to satisfy that. First, we’ll ask:
2. What enables someone to have [success] _________________ ?
To which you might answer: “Hard work”.
Next, we want to know what would make someone take action, to actually take steps to satisfy their important thing. Using the example above, why would someone put in “hard work” in order to have “success”? We’ll ask this question:
3. What does [success] lead to or make possible _________________ ?
To which you might answer: “Security”.
Now we’ve got a really significant part of the pattern that your unconscious mind uses in regard to “success” at work:
Using this example, we can see that this person is unconsciously saying to themselves, something like this:
“If I work hard, I’ll be successful; and I want to be successful, because that makes me secure”.
4. From here, we can start to explore deeper.
First the “Enabling” part.
Here’s a few simple examples of questions that can really get breakthroughs in people’s thinking and behaviour:
- Does hard work always enable success for you?
- What else does hard work create?
- What do you do when hard work isn’t enough?
- Could success for you also come from some other factor than hard work?
- What else do you need, to be able to have success?
- What other reasons might you have for working hard?
- Which other people are important for success?
And then the “Motivating” part:
- Does success always lead to security for you?
- Is there anything that’s more important to you than security?
- How much security do you want?
- What other routes to security might there be?
- Does success ever actually get in the way of security?
- What did you learn about yourself when you didn’t have security?
- Who else is part of this?
The answers to questions like these will reinforce how working towards “success” is something that helps empower you and others. They’ll also help you to spot when that isn’t enough and to be on guard for how the unconscious assumptions that (in this example, hard work -> success -> security), can actually be disempowering or produce unwanted results and behaviours.
You can also use this approach for negative behaviours that you’d like to change. Put that behaviour in the “Important Thing” box and work through the process above.
