Nothing shapes your beliefs about yourself faster than direct experience.
And, sometimes, people form limiting beliefs about themselves in early childhood that haunt them throughout the rest of their lives.
All it takes is one powerfully negative experience to tarnish your self-image, cripple your confidence, and limit your self-expression and your ability to connect with others.
Once I had a client come to me because he couldn’t speak to women.
Any women.
He’d just shut down in their presence…
…Averting eye contact, stuttering, and freezing up like a deer in the headlights.
He was a young man, 23, handsome and intelligent.
Nobody would have guessed he had such trouble talking to women.
But, he’d never even had a girlfriend because of his condition.
After some digging we traced the cause of his problem back to an experience he had in the 5th grade when he tried to talk to a girl he liked.
He approached her in the cafeteria during lunch and she stood up, pointed right at his face…
…and screamed…
“Eww! You have a booger hanging out of your nose!”
He was humiliated.
Then everybody else then joined in.
Dozens of other 5th graders laughing and pointing, as he stood there in shock.
Now he wasn’t just humiliated, he was completely destroyed.
At that age, in that vulnerable state, the first time he had ever worked up the nerve to show interest in a girl…
…Everything blew up in his face.
And that painful experience became so deeply, subconsciously connected with the thought of expressing interest in women that he simply couldn’t do it for the next 13 years.
The belief he developed as a result was that he was simply incapable of speaking to women – that he was doomed to die alone.
Now, obviously, the belief he should have formed was that you should always check for boogers hanging out of your nose before approaching someone you find attractive…
But deeply rooted pain like this is immune to logic and reason.
By the time the traumatic experience settles in, no amount of intellectual understanding of the situation will overcome the immense fear you feel after the fact.
Luckily for him, NLP provides several quick fixes for cases like this.
Since experiences like these hold you back in life by automatically replaying, like a video on repeat in your head, bringing back all of the pain of the original situation every time you find yourself in a similar situation…
All you need to do is edit the video.
In this case, I had him pull up the experience in his mind’s eye, as if he were viewing it on a television. Then I had him imagine that, in his hand, he was holding a remote control which he could use to turn down the volume on the experience until he was watching a silent movie of the memory.
Then, I instructed him to turn the color saturation down until it was a black and white silent movie.
Finally, he pressed the zoom button until the picture was shrunk down to nothing.
And that simple visualization exercise allowed him to wipe the booger of humiliation from his memory.
After that, he was able to easily talk to women without that painful experience flooding back into his mind like a wartime PTSD flashback.
Is it really that easy?
Often times, yes.
If you have a single, overpowered negative memory from a vulnerable time in your formative years, it can often be removed as quickly as it was put there.
Visualization is a powerfully effective tool for freeing yourself from those types of traumatic experiences…
And my Freedom from Your Past subliminal hypnosis session uses a very similar technique to subliminally turn down the volume on the excessive emotional impact of any traumatic memories you may have.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about creating brand new experiences from scratch, and if it’s really possible to create a whole new reality just by visualizing it until you believe it.