The Thought Diet - Part 2

In this article, I will provide three more questions that will allow you to help your clients close the mental and emotional gap between where they are and where they want to be, to further their chances of success. I will share with you ways to ask your clients what they want so they are clear on what they do want rather than what they don’t want, ways to help them get clear on the real reason they want change so they are inspired and ways to help them uncover and shift the limiting beliefs holding them back from allowing change to happen.

In the last article, I talked about how important it is for your clients to be at peace with their bodies so as to reduce the stress they put themselves under every time they think about their bodies and to gain a clearer perspective about what it is they truly want for themselves. Generally, when you feel bad about where you are, you are more focused on what you don’t want rather than what you do want. What you want will always be created in the moment of experiencing what you don’t want. You won’t be clear on what you do want until you make peace with where you are.

Second Question: What do they want, and when do they want it?

Now that you have your clients at peace about their health and bodies, it’s time to get a grip on what it is they truly want. Ask what they want (their goals) and when they want it. Because most people are so used to focusing on the negatives, your clients will most likely tell you what they don’t want. They will tell you that they don’t want to be fat anymore or that they want to lose weight or get rid of something. You may have a client who is at peace with where she is at the moment. However, her language and focus could steer her right back to working against herself. You can’t talk about what you want to get rid of and know where you would end up. The weight you want to lose is not a destination; it’s where you don’t want to be. It would be like going to a travel agent and saying you want to go “not here.” It’s hard to direct yourself anywhere if you don’t have a specific end result in mind. That said, if you have a client who mentions anything that reflects what she doesn’t want, you can easily dig a bit deeper by asking where she would be if she got rid of that.

For example, let’s say your client’s goal is to lose 20 pounds. You could easily turn that around and ask her where she will be when she loses 20 pounds. She might say 20 pounds lighter. That’s a great start. You can take that further and ask what 20 pounds lighter would be like, feel like or look like. Now you have started to create a visual map of where your client actually wants to end up. It’s much easier to go someplace if she can see where it is she wants to go.

It is also helpful to ask her when she would like to accomplish this change. Knowing when will help with the fourth question. But for now, declaring a time can be very powerful. It makes it more real.

Visualization and Closing the Gap

One exercise you can use with your client is helping her to create a strong vision of what she wants to look like through visualization. Most people get the concept of visualization, but what they lack is a better vision about where they are in regard to their current reality, meaning how they see their body outside of the visualization process.

Visualizing is useful because your brain doesn’t know the difference between “out there” imagery and “in here” imagery. This means whether you are observing something in reality or simply imagining it, your brain will respond to it the same way. But if your client still has some negative thoughts about her body when she returns to her daily activities, she will offset that visualization with her current limited view of reality and get nowhere. This is why people often don’t get what they visualize. You can’t visualize for a few minutes a day and then go back to looking at your body in a negative way and expect change to happen. It’s not to say that change can’t come about with very powerful visualization techniques alone, but it certainly helps to continue closing the gap between what you want and where you are in regard to your current reality.

To do a visualization exercise, have your client sit comfortably with her eyes closed and focus on her neutral body. Have her do this for a minute or so, and then have her turn her attention to what she wants as her ideal body or health situation (i.e., the end goal you helped her to define). Have her envision all of the details that will go along with this new body such as what she will be wearing, what she will be doing, what she will look like, feel like, etc. Once she gets into the details of what she wants, have her focus on how her body feels. She should notice a sensation that reflects her positive attention and excitement.

Once she has anchored in that feeling, have her turn her thoughts to her current body situation. Even if she is at peace with where she is, she will notice a change in how she feels. That feeling will be in response to an interpretation about where she is. She will be making where she is mean something that is not congruent with the vision she had when she focused on her goal. These thoughts create a negative feeling that will demonstrate the gap between her thinking about where she is now and where she wants to be.

The goal now is to start to close the gap between those two points of visualization. The next step is to take those thoughts and try to find better feeling thoughts about where your client is in regard to her body. Once she has made a little headway, have her do the exercise again and see if that emotional gap has closed at all. If she did make a shift toward a better perspective, she should notice that the difference in feeling about what she wants and where she is should be smaller. Continue having your client close this gap by shifting, step by step, her perspective about her current reality. The goal is to get her to the point where she doesn’t notice much difference between the two feelings. The closer you get the two feelings, the higher state of frequency your client will be in when she is going about her day-to-day activities, and the more efficient her exercise and diet plan will be. (See Part 1 for more information on frequencies.)

One more thing you can have your client do if she has a hard time closing that gap all the way is to have her practice, as often as possible, that same feeling she had when she focused on her goal. She doesn’t have to be thinking about her body, as long as she is practicing that feeling. Being in that frequency as often as possible will help the body make changes naturally. It will be like reprogramming the cells to behave at the most efficient frequency possible.

Third Question: Why do they want what they want?

Asking your client this question will help her to get a real understanding as to the deeper emotional reasons why she wants what she wants. When you first ask this question, you will more than likely get an uninspiring, superficial answer. If this is the case, ask her what that (her last answer) would provide for her in her life that she doesn’t have already. Keep taking her last answer and re-asking the question about what that would provide for her that she doesn’t have already or what would be different if she had that in her life. It may take some time to get to an inspired answer, but once she gets to what is truly in it for her, inspiration is present. And when someone is inspired, she is so invested that it is very hard to stop her moving towards what she wants. This exercise will also help her to realize that everything she wants, she wants for a more profound reason than just having some physical-plane experience.

For example, ask your client why she wants to be 20 pounds leaner (or whatever she came up with as her end result). She might say it would give her confidence. You could ask what confidence would provide for her in her life that she doesn’t have already. She might say it would allow her to have a better/new romantic relationship. You would then ask what a better/new relationship would provide for her that she doesn’t have already, and she might say a sense of belonging. If she is not inspired by that, you might ask what a sense of belonging would provide for her in her life that she doesn’t have already. She might answer, “Having real love.” At this point, she might be moved by her answer. When she does get to a place of being moved, it will likely be because she has acknowledged what she wants is the feeling of love, appreciation, power, freedom, power or joy, which exists at the highest emotional frequency on which we operate and are the underlying reasons we want anything.

Fourth Question: How much do they believe they can have what they want when they want it?

Often, even when someone is at peace with where she is and knows what she wants and why she wants it, she still may have some limiting beliefs about her ability to have something she desires. Throughout life, we learn things that keep our desires at bay. We learn that we are not good enough, that people like “us” can’t make changes or that, since we’ve never been successful before, we won’t be successful now. There could many things standing in the way of someone allowing change to happen. Asking your client how much she believes what she wants can happen when she desires it to happen can uncover some well hidden limiting beliefs. Using the scale below, have your client rate her belief about reaching her goal. 

Disbelief -> Discouraged -> Pessimistic -> Content -> Hopeful -> Optimistic -> Enthusiastic -> Total Knowing 

If her belief is anywhere to the left of content, then you would want to help her make a shift by addressing the thoughts that she has that are causing that lack of belief. Knowing that feelings are always in response to thoughts, you want to get down to the thoughts that are the cause of what she is feeling. If she is discouraged, then you want to find out what is causing the discouragement. Using the “tell the next best story” technique (see Part 1), you can help her find a better way to look at her situation. Continue making shifts until she is at content or higher, preferably hopefulness or higher. The higher you get someone on this scale, the more likely she will be to allow change to happen.

Seeing Evidence First

Sometimes people need to see some evidence of change to really know things can happen, which is not a bad thing. With the amount of shifting that has been done to get to this point, your client should be in a state that would allow change to happen with less effort than ever before. With that, doing some bit of action to see results should reward her with some change. From there, seeing some change should spawn hope or optimism. From hope or optimism, more change will occur. It’s in that higher frequency state that the body will allow for more change. And as more change occurs, your client’s belief about getting to her goal will increase. With the increase of belief comes an increase in results, and so on, in a positive spiral.

The one thing I always recommend is reminding the client that change accompanies the frequency as much as it does the physical action. If she were led to believe that it was physical action alone that allowed the change, she would have to do that physical action potentially for as long as she wanted to keep the results. Knowing that the deciding factor in creating change is her state of mind and her overall frequency will help her maintain her new goal. Also, it may be easier to maintain and tend to her emotional state and frequency than to do only the physical actions she took to reach her goal. Or at least it could be a gentle balance between the two.

Engaging the Emotion

Sometimes finding the next best story is hard. If so, you can try another method of shifting with your client that I call engaging the emotion. Engaging the emotion is simply understanding where your client is emotionally and encouraging her to express the emotion she is currently experiencing. The idea is that at some point, she went to this emotion for an improvement over another feeling and got stuck. That is, she felt worse than this emotion at one point in regard to the subject and went into this emotion to feel better, but she never moved on. Doing this with the intent that she wants an improved feeling will help to move her forward.

You want to have the client express everything she can about where she is with the intent of creating relief from her current emotions. When she does this, she should naturally be led to a higher emotion with a slightly better perspective. If the client is not feeling better, it is because she is attracting more thoughts at her current level of emotion and keeping herself there. It may just be that she is not ready to shift beyond this vantage point using this technique. That can certainly happen, as many people are used to complaining about something and not really searching for a solution.

Again, the important thing here is the intent of finding relief. I suggest doing this with your client so you can listen for shifting. Knowing where she is emotionally and using the emotional scale from Part 1 of this series, you can keep an eye on the scale and an ear on her language and listen for her to use language that is somewhere above her starting point. When she does move to a higher place, encourage her to tell you about the new perspective accompanying the new emotion. Continue doing this until she is at a place of content or higher.

In the next article, I will cover the last question about the actions your clients believe they need to do in order to achieve success and how to make sure they are fully inspired by their action plan. I will also discuss Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), a time-tested shifting technique.

References:

1. Hicks, Esther and Jerry. “Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires.”  Hay House, October 1, 2004
2. Kandel, E. Schwartz, J. Jessell, T. The Principles of Neural Science, Fourth Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2000: 974-99
3. Lipton, B. Ph.D, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing The Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles, Mountain of Love, 2005
4. McCraty, R. et al. The Impact of a New Emotional Self-Management Program on Stress, Emotions, Heart Rate Variability, DHEA and Cortisol, Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 1998;33(2):151-170.
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6. McCraty, R. Children, D. The Grateful Heart: The Psychophysiology of Appreciation, Chapter published in: The Psychology of Gratitude, edited by R. A. Emmons and M. E. McCullough. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004: 230-255.
7. Pert, C. Ph.D., Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine, Simon & Schuster, 1999
8. Rein, G. McCraty, R. & Atkinson, M. The Physiological and Psychological Effects of Compassion and Anger, Journal of Advancement in Medicine 1995;8(2):87-105.
9. Sternberg, E. M.D., The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions, W. H. Freeman, 2001