Throughout my career, I’ve helped clients relieve everything from seasonal allergies to PTSD. I’ve helped a woman undo a habit of clearing her throat after every statement. And, I’ve helped men with crippling shyness develop the confidence to approach beautiful women.
Virtually every issue in your life can be traced back to some form of baggage or limiting belief. And, just like these things were installed, they can also be uninstalled.
When I’m presenting on stage, I often hear questions like: “What’s it like to have no baggage and no limiting beliefs?”
And I usually provide an answer like: “I have no fucking clue.”
Your Limiting Beliefs
Everyone has baggage and limiting beliefs – from Elon Musk to the Dalai Lama. It’s part of the human experience.
A man making $40k a year isn’t making $40k a year because he wants to make $40k a year. No, he’s making $40k a year because he doesn’t believe that he can make $40k a month.
A man who seems to have it all – looks, smarts, money – but can’t seem to attract anyone other than gold-digging psychopaths has baggage and limiting beliefs. Somewhere along the line, he adopted the belief that “all women are gold-diggers” or maybe that “love is pain.”
Or, what about the man who seems to know everything – who provides amazing insight in nearly every conversation – but is wasting away in a cubicle, doing meaningless, monotonous work? He has a deep desire to acquire wisdom and use it to help others. But, he likely holds the limiting belief that he can only make X amount of money and could never make a living doing what he loves.
What beliefs do you have that are holding you back?
What would you love to do?
Maybe you want to quit your soul-sucking day job.
Or, move to a new city.
Or approach that hot blonde at the gym and ask her out.
What reasons do you keep conjuring up to convince yourself you can’t do it?
Damn near every person on earth has something they want to go for and a belief that stops them from doing so.
Nobody believed man would be able to fly. There was plenty of science and common sense to back it up. And yet, today, it’s estimated that there are 500,000 people in the air at any given time, with 6 million people taking flights each day. (When I actually think about the fact that a hunk of metal weighing 90,000 pounds – without passengers or cargo – can fly miles above the earth, it still seems like a miracle).
The point is that for millions of years, the world believed that humans would never be able to fly. Then, two brothers who seemed a little insane decided to believe something different. Think of the balls it took to go against what so many others had believed for so long.
If the Wright brothers could turn a deaf ear to the masses, then you should be able to turn a deaf ear to the voice inside your head. You know, the one that keeps telling you that cute barista is too good for you.
Albert Einstein once said, “For an idea that first does not seem insane, there is no hope”.
What idea do you have that seems insane? What if you stopped believing it was insane and replaced that belief with something more empowering?
At some point in your life, you probably believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. Maybe you believed in goblins or ogres. And, now, you don’t.
When you were a kid, those beliefs served a purpose. And, now, they don’t. Just about all beliefs are like that. They serve a purpose (usually to protect us) until they don’t.
What beliefs are you clinging to? Are they protecting you? Or, are they just holding you back? My guess is they’re holding you back. That’s why they’re called limiting beliefs.
Get Rid of Limiting Beliefs
Melissa, a former client of mine, was brutally raped at age 13 by someone she considered her best friend and one of her favorite people on the planet.
Just before the rape, they made homemade pizza with Melissa’s family. After they ate, he lured her to a bedroom. He then raped her while her family was just in the other room, oblivious to the trauma that she was experiencing.
The prime directive of the unconscious mind (UM) is protection. Your unconscious mind is usually hyper aware of danger, potential danger, and a variety of pain – emotional, physical, mental.
While being raped – and experiencing an unimaginable amount of physical, mental, and emotional pain – Melissa’s UM detected garlic, a key ingredient in the pizza she’d just made. She smelled garlic. Tasted garlic. Garlic was on his breath. Subsequently, Melissa’s UM began to associate garlic with pain. And, just like that, she developed a debilitating allergy to garlic, all because of a newly installed unconscious belief.
Melissa’s UM essentially decided that “Garlic is bad, and you must never go near it. Ever again.”
In the years following, Melissa went into anaphylactic shock nearly every time she detected garlic. In 2017, she was legally dead for over five minutes after meeting with a college professor who had hummus for lunch.
I first met Melissa in 2019 during my presentation at a seminar in Los Angeles. Melissa asked to be in a demo, and I went to work on her.
Directly after the demo, she gave me her EpiPen as a gift and said, “I no longer need this.”
Two days later, she sent me a message, letting me know that she was eating Lebanese food with her parents and ordered extra garlic.
In just 20 minutes, I helped Melissa release a belief that had run her life for 20 years – a belief that led to PTSD, phobia, and major social anxiety (most social gatherings have food and a hell of a lot of food has garlic), as well as depression and self-worth issues. Avoiding people and never being invited to anything caused Melissa to believe that she wasn’t good enough.
Now, Melissa is more empowered than she ever thought possible.
If Melissa can reprogram a 20-year belief that was born from trauma and damn near killed her, do you think you can reprogram some of your limiting beliefs? Like the one that says you can’t quit your 9-to-5 job. Or the one that keeps you from asking out the woman you like. Or the one that prevents you from submitting your writing for publication.
Yes, you can reprogram your unconscious mind.
Drop the bullshit that’s been holding back and pick up something more empowering. Don’t bow out before you step in. There’s a good chance something amazing will happen.
How to Re-Program Your Unconscious Mind
Whenever I do a demonstration like I did with Melissa, everyone wants to know how I did. “How the hell did you do that?” audience members ask. “How did you cure her allergy with just her mind?”
Well, I’m a trained professional, with years of experience under my best. But, the short answer: We scrambled the image in her mind – specifically the one that was telling her to avoid garlic at all costs.
That said, I’ll dive in as much as I can.
We tend to believe that allergies can’t be cured, right? Doctors say it. Advertisers scream it. There’s a multi-billion dollar industry built around the idea. So, obviously, allergies can’t be cured. Right?
Wrong.
I’ve helped clients release all kinds of allergies, not to mention addictions, epilepsy, vertigo, diabetes, phobias, PTSD, flu, chronic coughs, chronic pains, anxiety, depression, and many other afflictions.
But how?
Let me give some background.
You already know we have a conscious mind (CM) and an unconscious mind (UM). Some researchers say the CM runs 5% of our life and others say it’s as little as 0.5%. That leaves the UM running 95-99.5% of our life.
To explain this further, you’re using your CM to read this right now. If you get a text from your crush then your CM will be reading that. Your breath is controlled by your UM. But, if I tell you to focus in on your breath or breathe as deeply as you can, then your CM will take the wheel.
Additionally, your UM controls your pulse and digestion. It also runs the program for your life. Your UM holds all of your beliefs and values.
When it comes to your life, your CM is the goal-setter and your UM is the goal-getter.
You want with your CM but what you’ve taught your UM is what determines if you actually get it or not.
On January 1 of every year, many people make a conscious New Year’s resolution. By January 14, almost 90% of those people have given up. That’s because those people have a UM with a program that wasn’t congruent with the goals they set.
Your UM works in symbolism. It creates an internal representation (IR) for all of your thoughts, experiences, emotions, beliefs, etc. Essentially, everything is assigned a logo. Your UM does this to remain efficient, as it’s processing over 4 million bits of information every second. By comparison, your UM can only handle 126 bits.
Your UM uses symbolism and imagery to save you time when making life-or-death decisions. Imagine being charged by a tiger and having to take the time to logically analyze the situation, data point by data point, before deciding whether to fight, flee, or freeze.
Back to Melissa.
Melissa’s UM had created an allergy to garlic as a way to protect her from rape. Her mind stored an IR that said: “If I smell garlic then close your throat. You can’t be raped again if you’re struggling for air.”
Every time I help a client like Melissa, I have to begin by releasing the trauma associated with their trigger. I work around the trigger that tells the body to have an episode.
Again, the techniques I use can be dangerous if used by anyone who isn’t a trained professional. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can go from being sad about a breakup to having a full-blow traumatic episode, resulting in cPTSD or worse. With Melissa, I had to talk her mind out of asphyxiating her.
This stuff is powerful.
I’m going to share two simple techniques you can use to help will help relieve things like pain (physical, emotional, and mental), anxiety, and negative emotions.
Research shows that there are upwards of 100 trillion cells in the human body. Every single one of those cells has an experience every time you have a thought or an emotion. You may think everything is stored in the brain, but that’s not the case. Emotions and thoughts are stored in the cells in your body.
In fact, when I work with clients who hold limiting beliefs, I typically ask: “Where do you feel that in your body?”
(This is why you might have an injury from high school that is fully healed but still aches every time it rains. There is stored emotional baggage just waiting to be released.)
Technique One
Do you have some pain that seems to linger? Have you been through a traumatizing event? Think of it. Close your eyes and locate the pain or sensation in your body.
Where do you feel it?
On a scale of 1-10, how much does it hurt?
What color is it?
Which way is it spinning?
Now take it out (actually use your hands and take it out).
Hold it out in front of you.
Change it’s color and use your hands to spin it the other way.
Once it’s spinning on it’s own, put it back in.
On a scale of 1-10, how much better is it?
If it didn’t drop to zero then do it again. For most of my clients, the pain drops to zero after running through the exercise two times.
Technique Number Teo
Think of an event that triggers you. Maybe it’s when you walked in on your partner cheating on you. Or maybe it’s when you got shit-canned by your dickhead boss. Or, maybe it’s that day in junior high, when your crush totally shot you down in front of the whole school.
Go back to that moment.
Instead of remembering it the way it happened, change some detail. Blow people up like balloons, add silly voices, change the coloring, play cartoon music in the background.
When you do this, you’ll scramble the IR and loosen the emotion attached to it. Change the image, change the experience.
Your Life in Pictures
Indeed, your life is run by your mind which operates in pictures. Yes, even if you are saying “I can’t visualize.”
The pictures in your mind have meaning. And, the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” doesn’t even begin to cover it. When you adjust your IR – the pictures in your mind – you’ll begin to notice a completely different experience when recalling them.
Having a hard time believing this works? Understandable. But, try the exercises above and see what happens. They won’t kill you.
Kip Brooks is a certified Trainer and Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and holds certificates in Mental and Emotional Release® and Hypnosis from the Association for Integrative Psychology. He is a John Maxwell certified speaker, sales trainer and coach and holds certificates in youth empowerment by YouthMax and YouthMax Plus. He is also certified by the Life Coach Training Institute and is certified in Neuroscience, and Healing Touch.