Are Your Beliefs Holding You Back?

HS - Jason Hartman Income Property Investing (2)Jason Hartman talks with president and founder of The Lefkoe Institute, Morty Lefkoe about how limiting beliefs determine our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Visit: www.HolisticSurvival.com. Morty shares how these beliefs can be eliminated, explaining where most beliefs come from and how they affect our successes in life. A limiting belief can be “I’m not important,” or “I’m not good enough,” or “Mistakes and failure are bad.” There are hundreds of limiting beliefs that can block our natural confidence and lower our self-esteem. Morty takes a unique approach to eliminating these beliefs, explaining how we attribute meanings to events early in life and that these meanings are created by us. Morty discusses eliminate limiting beliefs by realizing that events actually have no meaning until we attribute one to them, and that there could actually be many meanings attributed to the feelings we experience in any event. He emphasizes that we are the creators of our life.

Morty Lefkoe, who received his B.A. from the University of Chicago, where he also attended the Graduate School of Business, became president and founder of The Lefkoe Institute, and is the creator of The Lefkoe Method, a series of psychological processes that result in profound personal and organizational change, quickly and permanently. He is also the author of Re-create Your Life: Transforming Yourself and Your World.

Morty has written over 100 articles and columns for such publications as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He has also appeared on over 100 radio and TV shows, including Today, Leeza, ABC World News Today, and Fox Cable News. He is a member of the American Counseling Association and has written articles describing the Lefkoe Method in The California Therapist, The Group Therapist Perspective, and the California Psychologist.

In addition, Morty has spoken before groups such as the American Management Association, Vistage, American Psychotherapy Association, American College of Counselors, American Association of Integrative Medicine, National Wellness Coalition, Managed Health Care Congress, Association for Fitness in Business, and the American Psychological Association-National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. He has conducted over 200 seminars for groups of CEOs on “A Proven Method for Successfully Instituting Change” and “Limiting Beliefs, Business and Personal: How to Identify and Eliminate Them.”

Narrator: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival Show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats, and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you’ll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places, and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to today’s show. This is Jason Hartman, your host, and as you may or may not know, every 10th show we kind of do a special tradition here that originated with my Creating Wealth Show where we do a topic that is actually off topic on purpose, something just to do with general life and more successful living and that’s exactly what we’re going to do today with our special guest. Again, 10th show is off topic and it is very much intentional just for personal enrichment and I hope you enjoy today’s show. And we will be back with our guest in just a moment.

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Start of Interview with Morty Lefkoe

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Morty Lefkoe to the show. He is an expert on change and specifically changing beliefs. He runs the Lefkoe Institute and is committed to helping individuals dramatically improve their effectiveness and sense of well-being in all areas of their life whether it be sports, parenting, general self-improvement, whatever, they’ve helped over 12,000 people do this in countries as diverse as Nigeria, India, The UK, France, The Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea, Korea, China, and Japan, and I hope, Morty, The United States as well because you did not mention The United States. Morty, welcome, how are you?

Morty Lefkoe: Great, Jason. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Jason Hartman: My pleasure. So you’re coming to us from Northern California, beautiful Northern California today. And tell us about your work at the Lefkoe institute.

Morty Lefkoe: Well, like many other people who try to help others, my life was pretty screwed up at one point and I had been married twice before and screwed up both relationships and a lot of financial difficulties. I was depressed a lot and I kept trying to figure out what was going on, why my life seemed to be such a mess and I tried therapy and group therapy and somewhere along the line I did some reading and came up with the idea that our beliefs really have a profound impact on our lives, what we think, what we do, what we feel. And although a lot of people in the personal growth field realized that today and most authors say that. 25 years ago that wasn’t as common. But, at any rate, it seemed to me as if the way I saw life, if I believed I wasn’t good enough, then I would live as if I wasn’t good enough. If I believed relationships didn’t work, then I would live as if relationships didn’t work and so my beliefs pretty much determine how I saw life and how I live life.

So at some point I started realizing I had a lot of negative limiting beliefs but I was still stuck because I didn’t know how to get rid of them and I couldn’t find any discipline or any therapy that did it. And about 26 years ago, I sort of lucked into it. I was trying to do some work and think about myself on a plane trip from New York to LA and I started staying here’s a problem in my life and where’s that come from and what do I believe and where does that come from and how common? When I landed, something had changed and buried in 5 and a half hours’ worth of notes was the beginning of a process that actually enables people to eliminate those beliefs, usually formed in childhood, that pretty much determine the rest of our lives.

And since then, I’ve understood it better, I’ve expanded on it, I’ve created other variations of the process. Essentially, what I came up with, was a way to help people find the specific beliefs that caused the problems in our life, anything from serious problems like depression or eating disorders or OCD to the everyday things of the procrastination or fear of public speaking or worrying what people think of this. In every case you can find the beliefs that cause the problem, and with the Lefkoe belief process, you can eliminate the beliefs. So you can really change almost anything in your life relatively quickly by eliminating the beliefs that cause it.

Jason Hartman: Now, that’s interesting that you talk about eliminating beliefs. Do you help people implant new more empowering beliefs as well or is it really just a process of getting rid of the bad ones?

Morty Lefkoe: It’s more a process of getting rid of the bad ones because when you get done there is a profound spiritual component to the process because when a belief goes away and you say, wait a minute, I’ve been living as if I am not good enough – I am not important. Those beliefs are gone but I’m still here. So I can’t be my beliefs. And just by realizing that you sort of go into an altered state of consciousness in which you really get that you’re the creator of your life, not nearly the creation. So there is a creation called Morty and Jason who has certain beliefs and acts in certain ways and has certain feelings that since those behaviors and feelings come from beliefs that were created, who you are as a creator did that. So you actually sort of experience yourself as consciousness as the creator of your life, and you actually have the profound experience that anything’s possible – there’s nothing missing – there’s no limitations in your life. And basically you end up not with the sense that “I am good enough” instead of “I’m not good enough” or “I am important” instead of “I’m not important”. You end up having the experience that I created the whole thing. So we really don’t need a positive belief. You just operate out of I create my life and I can create it anyway and there are no limitations and you just sort of create what you create.

Jason Hartman: Very interesting. How does it work? Give us some examples. And I assume, by the way, this works for phobias and things like that as well, because those are just beliefs, right?

Morty Lefkoe: Yes and no. Yes, it does work for phobias. We’re now getting into something slightly different. In the beginning, it looked like beliefs handled all of the problems. And after several years I realized they handle most of but not all. In some cases, there’s actually something called conditioning, so like Pavlov’s dogs, you ring a bell and give the dog food, it salivates and at some point you can take the food away and just the bell gets conditioned. Well, in the same way, human beings can get conditioned early in life so that an awful lot of people are conditioned to feel fear if they make the mistake, if they’re judged or criticized, if they don’t live up to expectations, if they’re rejected. You can be conditioned to feel angry if somebody tells you what to do. And you can be conditioned to feel fear in certain situations, going over a bridge, in an airplane, etcetera, as a result of a profoundly unpleasant situation. So I would say that phobias specifically are a combination of beliefs and conditioning, but when you eliminate both the beliefs and the conditioning the phobias disappear.

Jason Hartman: So how does one do it, Morty? I mean, one of the things – and maybe you want to give out a website link for this – you talk about how someone can eliminate a belief in 20 minutes or less.

Morty Lefkoe: I’ll do my best. First, let me tell you where you can actually go to eliminate a belief. I actually walk you through the process and it’s just RecreateYourLife.com and there are three of the most common beliefs there. There’s no charge. You just sign up and you get to do it and you can eliminate “I’m not good enough”, “I’m not important” and “Mistakes and failure are bad”. So I can explain the essence of how the process works, but it’s like almost any experience. I can explain what swimming is like, and if you’ve never been in the water you can say “Yeah, Morty, I got it.” You jump into that wet stuff. But if you’ve never been in water, you don’t really know what I’m talking about.

Jason Hartman: Exactly. It has to be experiential, right?

Morty Lefkoe: Yeah. So I can tell you the essence of what it is, how beliefs are formed and why they’re usually hard to get rid of and why this process makes it easy, but I just want to emphasize that an intellectual understanding, you might say “I understand totally, Morty, what you’re saying, but I still don’t get how the belief goes away.” So you’re going to have to do it to get that, but let me answer your question anyway. To the extent that you and your listeners want to try this, if you actually try to make this interactive and sort of do what I’m suggesting, you might even get more of a sense of it, but, in any case, let’s just go.

So let’s imagine when you’re a little kid you got parents who do love you and try to do their best, but they take a look at the world and they say it’s a very competitive world and you can’t be good and make it – you gotta be great. So your parents sort of take the attitude and have the belief themselves that I want you, my child, to be successful in the world, so I gotta make sure that you accept. So here you are at the age of 3-4 years old and for some reason you notice your room is total chaos one day and for no reason you say “I’m gonna clean up my room.” So you close the door and you take all the stuff and you throw it under the bed or you throw it in the closet and you sort of make the floor clean and you go to the door and you say “Mommy, Daddy, come look at my room! Look at my room!” Now, imagine mom and dad walk into your room and you’ve just done all this work and you’re so excited and you’re so proud, and they come to the door and say “Not bad, not bad, but if you’re gonna do it, do it right. There’s all this stuff under the bed, there’s all this stuff in the closet that’s not neatly put away. If you’re gonna clean your room, do it right.” And mom and dad walk out and you say “Eh, okay” disappointed.

Well, it’s a little bit later and you’re playing a game of soccer and you’re running back and forth and mom and dad are in the stands and you run and run and you kick a goal and you look up in the stands and you wave to mom and dad. And the game’s over and you run over, “Did you see me score a goal, Mom?” and “Did you see it Dad?” And mom and dad look and say “Yeah, you scored a goal – that was great. But I noticed it was a kind of intensity and focus you had when you scored that goal. Do you think if you did that all the time maybe you’d score 2 or even 3 goals?” And you say “Okay.”

And now it’s a little later – you’re 6 years old and you’re now in school. You’re in 1st grade or Kindergarten and you get your first report card and you get 4 As and 2 Bs. And you are so thrilled and excited and you run home and you run through the door and you stick the report card in Mom and Dad’s face, “Look, look, look. I got 4 As, Dad, look!” And they take a look and say “Yeah, you’re a smart kid. This is exciting, but what you did in the courses you got As, you didn’t do in those 2 you got Bs. Think if you tried a little harder you might 5 or 6 As?” And no matter what you do, Mom and Dad are always telling you how you could have done better. What belief do you think you would form by the time your 5 or 6 years old?

Jason Hartman: Well, maybe that I’m not trying hard enough, I’m lazy, I don’t know – something along those lines – almost good enough, not quite good enough.

Morty Lefkoe: There’s something wrong with me or I’m not good enough. That’s how beliefs are formed. We form beliefs trying to give meaning. We try to understand ourselves and life. Why do people do what they do? Why do things happen the way they do? And we then come up with possible explanations. So in a case like this it would be I guess I’m not good enough, there’s something wrong with me, nothing I do is good enough. If Mom and Dad are not around a lot of the time, well, I guess I’m just not important or they’d be around. So this is how we form the beliefs. Now, here’s what happens. It seems as if once you give meaning to Mom and Dad’s behavior that that meaning is inherent in the events, so you get a sense as if when I see mom and dad talk to me that way it’s as if I can see I’m not good enough or I’m not important or whatever the belief is that you form. And here’s the point. If you think you can see something in the world repeatedly, it’s gotta be true. I mean I can see it. I can see in front of me. If you were there when I was a kid or you saw the way Mom and Dad talked to me, you’d see I’m not good enough. So as long as you think you can see it, later on in life you might say “Well, I know better. I know I’m good enough. It’s sort of self-defeating, it’s illogical, look at my accomplishments, look at my family.” But deep down underneath is “But I think I saw it over and over.” So the reason it’s hard to get rid of beliefs using most attempts or most therapies is because we think we saw it. And logically talking yourself out of it today doesn’t make it really go away, ’cause deep down I saw it all through my childhood. So what we do in the process we use is we have people find the source of a belief and then go back and I would ask you “Didn’t it seem like when you cleaned your room and mom and dad were dissatisfied and you scored the goal and mom and dad were dissatisfied and you got 4 As and mom and dad were dissatisfied, didn’t it seem as if you could see nothing I do is good enough?” And if you were actually doing the process, you’d say “Well, of course I saw it.” And then I’d say “What does it look like?” And you say “Mom and Dad’s behavior.” I said “No, that’s Mom and Dad’s behavior. What does ‘I’m not good enough’ look like?” And what people realize is “I’m not good enough” isn’t in the world. It’s the meaning they made up in their mind to try to explain what’s in the world. And they make a distinction between the events and the meaning they put on the events.

One way of looking at it, it seems as if you discovered as a child “I’m not good enough”. It’s a fact and you figured it out. What really happens is you attribute that meaning to meaningless events, because in the process you realize that Mom and Dad’s behavior could mean you’re not good enough, it could mean that they just had poor parenting skills – they just thought this was a good way to get you to excel. It could mean you weren’t good at certain things. It doesn’t mean you’re not a good enough person. It could mean you weren’t good enough as a kid but that’s not true forever. It could mean 50 things. So what does Mom and Dad’s behavior really mean? It doesn’t really mean anything. And as soon as you get Mom and Dad’s behavior has no inherent meaning and that the only meaning it has is meaning you made up and gave it, the belief will disappear.

Jason Hartman: Okay. I’ve spent a little bit of time with Nathaniel Brandon and studied a lot of Denis Waitley’s work and had him on the show and so forth. And is this the same as self-esteem or is it a different area?

Morty Lefkoe: Well, I know Nathan for 40 years or something, and I’m sort of familiar with his work. Negative beliefs about yourself lead you to have a negative self-esteem, but the process for getting rid of it is totally different than anything Nathaniel has and you can have beliefs that have nothing to do with self-esteem. You can have beliefs that the president should do X and not Y. I mean, the best way to run a country is to be a republican or the best way is a democrat, that’s a belief. You can have beliefs about relationships or foreign policy or how to run a business. So we have beliefs about everything in the world that have nothing to do with self-esteem. So some of the beliefs we have are beliefs about ourselves that lead to a positive or a negative self-esteem. That’s true. But what I’m talking about in general has nothing to do with self-esteem at all.

Jason Hartman: Okay, got it. Got the distinction. I’m glad you made that distinction. And the reason I kind of asked that first, Marty, is I wanted to get to another thought. I mean we’ve all had examples like the one you gave about the room not being clean, the grades not being good enough. I’m sure everybody listening has encountered those types of things in their life – parents, significant others saying things like that. And I hate to admit it, I’ve done that to other people – I know I have. But here’s the question. Playing devil’s advocate here, I mean if someone doesn’t say something like that, for example, from when it’s appropriate from time to time, then how does one improve? How does the situation improve? I mean, the whole concept of like in the workplace, constructive criticism. Is there an appropriate time to say “Hey, that’s great. Look how it can even be better?”

Morty Lefkoe: Oh, absolutely. I mean what you’re talking about now is the parenting implications. Basically, what I’m talking about is that certain kinds of events lead us to form certain kind of beliefs and then those beliefs run our life. That’s basically what I’m talking about. Now, you’re talking about, well, what should a parent do if certain types of behaviors lead to negative beliefs then what kind of behaviors can make life work as you’re growing up and make life work in the household but form positive beliefs? That’s a very valid question. My wife has a 7 CD series on answering exactly that question. So I can give you a 60 second answer, but she has something “Parenting the Lefkoe Way” which has information that gives you lots and lots of information on parenting. But the basic idea as what parents need to look at is how can I interact with my child so life gets handled and they learn as they grow up. And at the same time I don’t say it in a way or do things that lead to negative beliefs. And there’s ways to do that. I mean there’s hundreds of techniques, once you become aware of that, if you say “Wait a minute, what would a 3 year old conclude or a 4 year old if what I do is talk about nothing they do is good enough?” And another “So how can I do it?” So one of the things you could do is say for a 3 year old, getting this stuff off the floor and under the bed is incredible. You don’t need to tell them how to be neater at 3. At 5, 6, 7, 8, you start telling them, okay, now you want to get it out from under the bed and put it in the draw, etcetera. But for a 3 year old to take stuff off the floor and throw it under the bed, that’s a major achievement. You don’t need to say anything.

Now, as a coach, if you’ve got some ideas, you can say “Congratulations on scoring the goal!” And then at some other time when you’re talking about soccer or you’re practicing with your kid or something, you might say “I got a suggestion maybe for the next game” and then totally apart from invalidating their achievement at the time you can say “It seems to me that there was something going on. What were you feeling when you scored that goal?” “I was really excited, I was really on purpose.” “And what were you feeling through most of the game?” “Well, I was feeling good.” “Did you feel the same way?” “I don’t think so.” “So maybe there’s something about that intensity or some sort of inner feeling that makes you more effective. Why don’t you sort of watch that the next time you’re playing?”
I’m just making that up off the top of my head, but there are just times and ways of doing it. It doesn’t mean you can never give feedback at work and you could never give feedback to your kids, except if you’re not conscious of it and all that it comes out is critical or dissatisfied with what is achieved because you want it to be better. But what’s likely to happen is the child’s gonna end up with negative beliefs. They’re not gonna get much value from what you say. They’re then going to go into life feeling nothing I do is good enough, I’m not good enough and there’s something wrong with me. And that’s not gonna make for a very happy adult when they grow up.

Jason Hartman: We’ve had several decades now of – for lack of a better name maybe I’ll call it the human potential movement – are they becoming more effective? Are people happier than they used to be? I mean, this is a pretty hard question to answer these questions. I’m wondering are we as a society moving in the right direction? How’s it going for us?

Morty Lefkoe: The number of people who are involved in personal growth is a very small percentage of the total population, number one, and so that wouldn’t necessarily be indicative of 10 million people in therapy of some formal with licensed therapists. And I’ve seen numbers on 20 or 30 million which are probably high who are involved to have taken…either read some personal growth book or taken some online or live course or something like that. And that’s relatively small percentage. And my experience of people that work with me or that I know have worked with other people in the field – some people’s approaches and techniques are more effective than others – but what I hear people saying is, absolutely, things that used to borrow them don’t borrow them anymore. I mean we’ve worked with 3 or 4 thousand people with a fear of public speaking who used to be terrified, who used to get up when they were going around the room in their business meeting and when they were about to come to them they went to the bathroom and came back when they passed them, didn’t show up for meetings, who just experienced incredible physical pain from the fear of public speaking who just don’t experience fear of public speaking anymore. You tell me. Is that positive growth or not? It seems to me it is.
Jason Hartman: Very positive, very positive.

Morty Lefkoe: And there are people with relationship problems. There are a lot of people in the relationship field who have given people tips in ways of looking at relationships in which their relationships are happier. So my sense is that psychotherapy, good psychotherapy, and people in the personal growth or this general area, whatever you want to call it, the people who are better ones, people who know what they’re doing absolutely make a difference in the lives of the people they work with and I’ve had literally thousands of comments on my blog and emails, etcetera, of people just telling me how their life is totally different than the way it used to be.

I just had a call just before you called me on somebody who was having a problem with their boss and was sitting there attacking her. And she said in the past I would have defended myself, I would have gotten angry, I would have screamed. And this time I just sort of listened to her and I said this doesn’t mean anything about me. There’s something going on with her. And if that’s what she needs to go through, I’ll just let her go through and just let her talk and I’ll answer if I have something to say. And she said “Morty, I just appreciate it. For the first time in my life, I didn’t take a criticism personally and I didn’t react and I didn’t get upset and I didn’t yell and I didn’t get plugged in. I just sort of sat there calmly listening and saying that’s what’s happening, this is the event but it doesn’t mean anything but so what?” I think that’s positive. And people who work with me get to that place and people who work with other people have other similar kind of benefits. So I guess the long answer to your short question is, yes, I think that for people who pursue growth and learn techniques to improve their lives, there are improvements, yes.

Jason Hartman: I guess to sort of dovetail on what you just said, everything in life is what you make it. It’s not what is that counts but how you take it. So that’s an example of people give too much significance to things that others say or do to them. There may be totally unrelated reasons and may have nothing to do with you whatsoever. So that’s very important.

Morty Lefkoe: The trick, however, is it’s one thing to understand that as a principle, but another thing to be able to live it. And one of the things we do is we actually have a course in which we actually teach people to recognize when they’re giving meaning to an event that they think is real. The simplest example, you’re in a room and somebody you know walks in and sees you and doesn’t talk to you and it’s like, well, I can see he’s angry. You can’t see he’s angry. You saw he didn’t talk to you. His angry is the meaning you made up. He may be angry, he may be deep in thought, he may be not wanting to talk. It could be 50 different reasons, but his angry is not at all what happened in the world.

So first thing you need to do is to learn how to recognize when you’re giving meaning to event and how that’s different from what really happened. And then it’s possible to learn techniques that have you sort of dissolve the meaning and be left just with the event. So you gotta do more than just understand what you just said which is the first step, but after that you need to learn how to deal with it, and there may be other people but we certainly have techniques where we teach people that where events that used to upset you because you gave it the meaning my wife doesn’t care or my kids are being fresh or my boss is unappreciative – that’s just what happened and you deal with it the best you can deal with it. But if you don’t give it any meaning, there’s no upset – there’s no negative feelings.

Jason Hartman: Talk to us, if you would, another where beliefs just run people’s lives and they can ruin their lives is the area of addiction, sometimes crippling addictions, whether they be to substances or unhealthy activities. Maybe you want to also answer this question: Are there any healthy addictions? That’s one I’ve always wondered. Or I guess you’d have to define how far is too far with an addiction.

Morty Lefkoe: An addiction is behavior you have no control over. So I would say that even if you’re doing something positive – creating something worthwhile in the world or contributing to other people – if it’s an addiction, you have no control and I don’t think you’re really – even though what you’re doing might be useful in the world – if you don’t have any control, I don’t think that’s a useful state to be in.

Jason Hartman: I was sort of referring to like exercise addiction. Exercise is good for you, but some people are really kind of addicted to it I find.

Morty Lefkoe: Oh yeah. You get addicted to the endorphins or you can get addicted when you get the endorphin high and you just keep going back for it because it feels so good. But, again, you can’t exercise too much or you can’t exercise if you’re hurt when you shouldn’t be because you’re addicted. So exercising a certain amount is good. Exercising too much is not good. Getting hurt or something and exercising because you think I’ve got to do it anyway, there are exercise bulimics. There are people who exercise as a way of keeping weight off. And they don’t even necessarily enjoy it – they just have to do it. So I would say, in general, any addiction which is a behavior that you have no control over is not good.

I would say that there are a lot of addictions that have physiological components. In fact, most of them probably do which makes it more than just beliefs. There is a physical craving for certain kinds of drugs. There is endorphin high for certain kind of activities you can get addicted to, etcetera. But I would say underneath them all is ultimately beliefs and conditioning. And basically, what it is is these are, for the most part, ways of dealing with negative feelings that we don’t want to deal with. So we either eat or we drink or we take drugs or we have sex or we do something to not have to experience the depression, the anxiety, the anger, the feeling of unlovability, whatever it is, and that’s how that gets started. And then, at some point, it becomes a physical addiction, too. But, if you stop, you can get people detoxed from any addiction by putting them in a rehab center and you can get people so that their body no longer needs the drug or the alcohol or the whatever. However, when they get out, if you haven’t gotten rid of the beliefs that are producing the negative feelings that they can’t handle, they’ll either go back on the same or a different addiction.

So what we can do and what we’ve done many times is help people eliminate the beliefs that cause the negative feelings that have them feel depressed or anxious or scared or upset where they need something to cover up the feeling because they can’t deal with the feeling. So what we can do is help people get rid of the beliefs that cause the feeling so there’s nothing they need to escape from.

Jason Hartman: So, if that’s the case, I think a lot of people that suffer from addictions, they don’t know what the belief is that’s causing the feeling they’re trying to avoid.

Morty Lefkoe: That’s true. Not addictions, but most people with any problem, people with a fear of public speaking, have no idea that beliefs have anything to do with it at all. They just say I stand up in front of a room and my hands sweat and I go unconscious and I’m petrified. So one of the things about our work is that the people who are trained to do it are trained to not only help people eliminate beliefs, but when somebody comes in and says “I have a fear of public speaking” or a drinking addiction or a concern with the opinion of others, whatever it is, we’re trained to help them find what specific beliefs are causing your particular problem. So you obviously have to find the beliefs, but very, very rarely does the person coming in know what the beliefs are. They don’t even know that beliefs are involved in most cases. They just know I drink too much and I can’t stop or I get angry too much and I have no idea why. I mean it seems like the people make me angry. I don’t know why I’m angry all the time. And we have to explain here are beliefs that cause anger. Could you see that these beliefs would make you angry? Help get rid of the beliefs and then they notice they’re not angry anymore.

Jason Hartman: Human beings are obviously such complex creatures. There are many beliefs involved in each of these things. It’s not like there’s just this one belief, right?

Morty Lefkoe: Yep. It depends on the issue. Like public speaking, some phobias can have as many as 5 beliefs which is relatively few, fear of public speaking is about 10 or 12. Procrastination for most people is 15-16. Depression and eating are some of the more complicated ones. Depression can be maybe 20 or 30. Emotional eating or overeating, eating problems, there’s a lot of beliefs, but there’s also an awful lot of conditioning. So every issue is different and every individual can be different. Most people have most of the same beliefs as somebody else with the same problem, but any individual can have a couple that most other people don’t have or not have a couple that other people do have. So it’s all pretty custom tailored.

Jason Hartman: Sure, it is. Okay, good. Well, Morty, where can people find out more and just wrap up with any closing thoughts you have?

Morty Lefkoe: Well, I guess the closing thought is that very often we sort of feel after maybe trying therapy or reading some books or something or maybe after doing nothing that sort of this is the way life is. And we sort of say it’s human nature to be afraid of making a mistake or taking chances. It’s human nature to have these feelings or do these things. And it’s just worth thinking about. Maybe it isn’t human nature. Maybe there’s some beliefs that I have that are responsible for some things that don’t work in my life and it may be possible to change. So people who have resigned themselves to this is the way life is might be worth asking the question maybe that’s the way my life has been but does it mean it has to be that way or maybe it can improve? So that’s the thought I’d like to leave people with. And there’s two places you can get some help. One of them is he website I gave you before, RecreateYourLife.com, and there are three of the most common beliefs that are available in an online program, just go through the program, and after 20-25 minutes the belief will be gone. So you could do that and then I’ve written well over 100 blog posts on y blog that explain conditioning, beliefs, different kinds of issues and problems, how beliefs are formed, etcetera, so you could really learn a lot about this area. And that’s just my name MortyLefkoe.com. And there’s a table of contents. Just take a look and there’s about 100 – I think the last I looked, 132-133 blog posts for just more information.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. Well, Morty Lefkoe, thank you so much. Appreciate that and we all need to take a look at how beliefs are affecting our lives and how eliminating some may help us live a happier, more fulfilled, more successful life. Thanks for joining us today.

Morty Lefkoe: It is my pleasure, Jason. Thanks for helping me.

Narrator: Here’s your chance to catch up on all of those Creating Wealth shows that you’ve missed. There’s a 3 book set with shows 1 through 60, all digital download. You save $94 by buying this 3 book set. Go ahead and get these advanced strategies for wealth creation. For more details, go to JasonHartman.com. Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival Show, protecting the people, places, and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating Wealth show which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today’s economy. Learn more at www.JasonHartman.com or search “Jason Hartman” on iTunes. This show is produced by The Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional. Information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed. (Image: Flickr | entirelysubjective)

Transcribed by Ralph


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