Delusions

I’ve had a lot on my mind lately – everything from what qualities and criteria create healthy relationships to gasoline prices. Picture this – Snoopy, laying on top on this dog house, head lifted to signify discomfort. He says: “I’ve been tense lately.” He sits: “I find myself worrying about everything…Take the earth, for instance.” He flops over on his belly and looks over the top of the doghouse as he clings to the roof with his paws. “Here we all are clinging helplessly to this globe that is hurling through space… He lays back down on the top of the roof, ears flopping over the sides. “ What if the wings fall off?”
There are many things we can focus our attention on. Choosing what we focus on will determine the type of experience we have as we move through difficult times. It is my fervent belief that if we all just focused on getting on our own life in order that the world would heal itself. That does not exclude helping others, of course. (Although helping others as a form of avoidance of dealing with our own problems ends up not serving anyone. We will tend to serve others through our own “need” filters rather than giving them what they truly need in reality.)

So here are three examples:

Delusion no. 1 –“ My financial problems will be solved if I just have MORE money”. Marilou Seavey and I (and Chris and Tim Hallbom, the originators of the Money Clinic) have been involved in this class since 1999. I’ve have sponsored that class no less than 8 times here in Dallas. Participants in the class with few exceptions have SIGNIFICANT INCREASES IN MONEY. I have experienced this also. Since my first Money Clinic, my income has increased consistently well into the 6-figure mark. We have found the money increases to be remarkable yet many have not experienced the benefits that come from having more money. A person can have all the money they want and still not experience abundance if they cannot manage what they have. Money management is a skill. It is not something you can do a belief change and “wha la” instant understanding and greater wealth. Money management means you know where your money goes, you save, you budget, you track your expenses for personal and business (if you work for yourself) and you don’t spend what you don’t have. It’s work! This also means you don’t lie to yourself that this one $15.00 shirt won’t count or you really need that vacation. One exception I make with this is your own personal growth. Ben Franklin said, “If you take the coins from your pocket and fill your mind, your mind will fill your pocket with coins”. In my experience, the money that I have spent on personal growth (skill based) has been to my benefit and it has always provided an increase in income. It is interesting to me that people will not have the money or time to improve their skills so that they can deal more effectively with themselves and the world but will have the money and time for a vacation. When they get back from the vacation, their problems are still there. Now they have more debt on top of it. Learn to manage what you have. More will not solve the problem without effective management skills. One other thought on classes…when I take a class I put everything into it. I want and will get my money’s worth and develop a well-formed outcome so that I’m clear about what I want.
Delusion no. 2 – My relationship problems are because I keep choosing the wrong person (if you are single) or my relationship problems are caused by my spouse (if you are married). The book I recommend to everyone who wants a healthy relationship or is currently in a relationship period is CONSCIOUS LOVING by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks. A great NLP book is SOLUTIONS by Leslie Cameron Bandler. The only way to change your experience in your relationships is to be a different person. From childhood we model relationships and how to do them from our parents, teachers, older siblings. Our past comes back over and over, like Ground Hog Day (the movie). Unless you change what you are doing and, more important WHO YOU ARE in the relationship, you’ll keep having the same experience. NLP offers significant change skills to effect the deep structure changes necessary to truly be a different person. First is the recognition that you are THE CREATOR. Next is healing the past traumas that support the unhealthy experiences. Then do the “changework” at all of the logical levels – your identity, beliefs, skills (yes, relationships need skills: communication, language, rapport, negotiation, self awareness, consciousness, understanding, clear outcomes), behaviors, and environment.
Finally, develop your relationship skills (there’s that word again). Clue, your parents provide good feedback as to what you might be doing unconsciously to sabotage your relationships. If one of your highest values is freedom and you keep trying to create relationships that take it away, your unconscious beliefs will over ride and your behavior will sabotage the relationship. Knowing and honoring your own values will support your outcomes and you’ll find the other person will honor them as well. But don’t be surprised it you attract someone who want a lot of freedom also. You have to do it first; it won’t come from the other person. In SOLUTIONS, Leslie talks about the stages of a relationship. It’s call the Threshold Pattern: Attraction to Appreciation to Habituation to Expectation to Disappointment/Disillusionment to Threshold Reached/Perceptual reorientation to Verification to Relationship Terminated. When a relationship starts to fall apart it’s not because the person we’re with changes, it’s because OUR perceptual filters change. The person is still the same; we just filter them differently. And we project negative characteristics into them that may not even be there.
Part of the Relationship lie is that the divorce rate is 75%. That is the overall statistical average including all of marriages that end after 3-4 months. If you break it down by group, the statistic is much better. If you are in the group that is over 35, college educated, and make over $50,000 combined income, the chances are very good that you will stay married and work things out. I got a laugh out of Mike Stammer’s, a sales consultant for CEO’s, philosophy on maintaining a long marriage. He says, “Live a long time, commit to staying married, marry a saint.” That probably works, too.
Delusion no. 3 –“I can have cheesecake this one time and still lose weight.” This is a part of a larger lie: “I can have the healthy body I want by doing what I’ve done in the past to create the unhealthy overweight body.” I’ve worked with many people on “weight issues.” Here is the secret: you must exercise every day and eat less calories than you burn. Maintaining a healthy weight is a daily outcome. There are hundreds of books on the market about weight control. Pick one. They all work. You just have to follow it. Health achievement and maintenance is highly procedural. Those of you who have studied “Meta Programs” or the LAB Profile know the difference between Options and Procedures. The procedure you must follow is: You become conscious about what you eat; you avoid foods that make you fat (fried foods, sugar); you exercise to get your heart rate up AND YOU DO IT EVERY DAY.
Most people have the goal of losing weight; not to maintain the loss. When being healthy is a life style, an identity, the behaviors will follow. I am a thin person, I eat like a thin person, I exercise like a thin person, I think like a thin person. Eating well and exercise is a priority with me. It has been all of my life. The scenario might go like this: So you gained 5 pounds over the summer. How did that happen? Well, chances are you didn’t exercise as consistently as you usually do – you missed some work outs every week on a consistent basis and you ate things you don’t normally eat – high fat restaurant food, prepared meals instead of cooking at home, starches such as French fries and white bread and butter. You didn’t eat these things every day but they were ingested often enough to combine with the missed workouts to add five pounds. You told yourself it didn’t matter AND IT DOES. ANY BEHAVIOR THAT YOU DO CONSISTENTLY WILL RESULT IN AN OUTCOME. …just one more donut, piece of pizza, fast food hamburger. Over time it adds up and so do the pounds. It is like putting a frog in cold water and turning up the heat. The frog doesn’t realize it’s being cooked until it is too late. --- a grizzly metaphor that is true for many experiences that catch up with us. We fall asleep, we tell ourselves a bunch of lies and then we wake up to results that are miserable and create a crisis – another case for clear outcome thinking.
Well, that’s three of them. My mission is to help you make a difference in your own life!