5. New Belief: "What new belief would you like to have in place of the belief that you now have and don't like?" Be sure this belief is stated in positive terms, without negations. "I can learn to change in response to feedback," rather than "I won't be unable to change what I do."

Also be sure that your partner thinks of the new belief in terms of an ability or a process, rather than having already achieved a desired goal. "I believe that I can learn to change and maintain my weight" is a useful belief. "I weigh 107 pounds" is not a very useful belief, especially if she actually weighs 350 pounds! We want to mobilize new abilities, not install new delusions.

You also need to ask the person to check for ecology: "If you have this new belief, how could it cause you problems?" "How will your husband or your family respond to you differently if you have this new belief?" "How will this new belief affect your work?" etc. Modify the new belief to take into account any possible difficulties.

Your partner doesn't have to tell you what the new belief is. All you need is a word to identify this new content.

6. Belief to Doubt: Keeping the content the same, change the unwanted belief to doubt by using one or more of the most powerful submodalities you discovered in step 4. For instance, if the two most powerful differences were movie to slide, and close panorama to distant framed picture, have the panoramic movie slow to a still slide as it moves away and becomes a framed picture.

7. Change Content: Using some other submodality, change the content from the old unwanted belief to the new desired belief. Use something she already does, or any gradual analogue method. For example, if she flips pictures back and forth in doubt, she can flip from the old content to the new content. You could have the old belief picture go off into the distance so far that it's impossible to tell what it is, then have it come back with the new belief image. You can have the picture get so bright or so dim that the old content disappears, and then have it come back with the new content, etc.

8. Doubt to Belief: Keeping the new content, change doubt to belief by reversing the same submodality changes you used in Step 6. If shifting location to the right changed the old belief to doubt, you now shift location back to the left to change the new content from doubt to belief. As you do this, be very alert for any "resistance," or difficulty that your partner has. If the new belief is stated poorly, or has any negations in it, some part of the person may object to it. When you encounter objections, honor them, gather information, and back up to step 5 to redefine the new belief.

9. There are several ways to test. You can ask "How do you think about this new belief?" Ask for information about submodalites, and use nonverbal behavior to confirm (or disconfirm) the verbal report.

10. When the new belief is in place, the old belief will probably change to the submodalities of disbelief. If you find out how the old belief is represented now, you can compare that with the submodalities of doubt, which you already know, or with the submodalities of disbelief, which you can find out by asking the person to think of something else she firmly disbelieves.

I've often said that good NLP work is 95% information–gathering and 5% intervention. The first five steps are setting things up for the intervention. That makes it easy to make the actual intervention smooth and fast. Remember, brains learn quickly; they don't learn slowly. If you get it all set up ahead of time, it's a lot easier to do a good job. It's a little like setting up a whole string of dominoes, and then tapping the first one.

Go ahead and try this pattern now, in groups of three. I know some of you have questions; many of those questions will be answered by the exercise itself. The questions you still have later will be a lot more interesting after you have had some experience of actually trying out this pattern. My answers will make a lot more sense to you, too.

Now that you've had some experience trying this, let's take some questions and comments.

Man: When I made the belief change, I had a lot of profound internal sensations. It felt as if there were a lot of little fish swimming around in my brain and my body, and the two people observing saw a lot of visible shifts, too. Is this typical?

When the belief is a major one, that's a typical report. Core beliefs organize a lot of a person's behavior. When you make a change in a core belief, you often get a profound internal reorganization. If it's a more peripheral belief, the changes aren't as striking.

Man: I found it hard to think of a useful belief to change. I'd like to hear some content examples of what people changed. Woman: I've been struggling and struggling for years to lose the last five pounds to get to the weight I want to be. It's easy for me to get close to the weight I want to be, but I've always believed I had to struggle and fight to control myself in order to lose that last five pounds. So I changed my belief that it was hard, to the belief that it will be easy to lose those last five pounds. What a relief; I feel so much more relaxed,

Man: I worked with her on that, and it was really nice to watch her go through the change. Her face, her voice, her whole body — everything was a lot more relaxed afterwards.

Woman: I've had a runny nose and I changed the belief that I couldn't do anything about it. I was amazed, because I can actually feel my nose beginning to dry up.

Man: I started with the belief that it was dangerous for me to drive at night without my glasses. I wanted to change it to the belief that I could safely drive without my glasses at night. Then my partner pointed out that my desired belief was a goal, and that it might be dangerous to change to that belief, I might go driving at night thinking I was safe when I wasn't. So we changed to the belief that I can learn to drive safely at night without glasses. I think I was really working on a much more general belief that I couldn't learn, period. I have a sense that this will affect much more than just driving at night; it seems much broader than that.

Great. Changing the belief that you can't learn something is useful for a lot of people. Many people try something once, don't succeed at it, and conclude they can't do it and they can't learn to do it. I know a man who "knew" he couldn't play the piano: "I sat down at the piano and tried it once, but nothing came of it." I start off with the belief that as long as you have most of your brain cells intact, anyone can do anything. You may need to chunk down the task, or learn to do it differently, and it may take you a while to get good at it, but starting with the belief that you can learn will take you a long way. My belief may even be wrong sometimes, but it makes it possible for me to do things and get results that I would never even consider if I assumed people were genetically incapable.

Man: Several people are using firewalking as a way to change people's limiting beliefs. Can you comment on that?

If someone believes they can't do something like firewalking and you get them to discover that it's possible, that can certainly shatter an old belief, particularly if they're told, "If you can walk on fire, you can do anything!" However, there's no way to carefully specify the new belief that gets put in its place. I read about one person who went through a firewalk and said, "Now I believe that I could be standing right at the explosion of a nuclear warhead, and it wouldn't affect me." If he's lucky, he won't ever get to test that belief, but it's an example of the kind of junky beliefs that can get installed that way. If you install beliefs that way, people often put in beliefs that don't relate to evidence or feedback. One firewalk teacher is calling himself "the foremost NLP trainer," when he hasn't even been certified as a master practitioner, much less a trainer! Some of his other beliefs have even less evidence for them.