Get Motivated To Quit Smoking Utilizing NLP

There are two psychological states that must be appeased before a smoker will willingly quit smoking. These elements are called “Desire,” and “Decision.”

DESIRE: A want, crave or a wish for

DECISION: Making up of one’s mind / a verdict or judgment

In order to quit smoking, you must have a DESIRE to quit. You probably want to quit smoking, at least some part of you does, or you wouldn’t be reading this article.

In addition, in order to quit smoking, you have to DECIDE to quit. Since you haven’t kicked the smoking addiction, it simply means that you have not DECIDED to stop yet.

So what you need is to feel a strong motivation to make a “DECISION” to stop.

MOTIVATION, we all want it. The source of each of our motivations is what we accept as true. Give it some thought, if you did not have a belief that you would be hurt if you jumped from a tall building, then you would not experience motivation to be vigilant. If you did not believe that the gnawing sensation in your stomach meant that you were hungry, you wouldn’t feel motivated to eat.

When it comes to breaking the smoking addiction, people who are addicted to smoking cigarettes need to feel a lot of of motivation to make the DECISION to give up their addiction to tobacco. Motivation is based on the ideas that we believe. So you will need to DECIDE exactly what thoughts will motivate you (when you start to believe them). Because when you feel a great deal of motivation, you will quit smoking.

Thanks to NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and hypnosis for motivation, it is a lot easier to learn how to believe these new ideas than you think it is. However, you don’t believe the ideas that will motivate you to quit smoking right now, or you would have already broken the addiction.

For the purpose of this discussion, we need to define a few words.

DOUBT: Uncertain/distrustful/dubious - “maybe it’s this way, and maybe it isn’t.”

BELIEF: Trust/faith/tenet - A state of mind devoid of all doubt. In other words, belief means, “this is the way that it is.”

HIGHLY VALUED CRITERIA: What is most important to you, as an soul.

When you totally believe that if you continue to smoke your highly valued criterion is jeopardized, you will feel the motivation that you require to break your addiction to cigarettes. We call this is a negative motivator, because it is a belief that motivates you by providing you with terrible feelings. Negative motivators are great for getting you to make decisions and changes in your life.

When you believe that if you do stop, that which is most important to you will become enhanced, you will also feel the motivation that you require to quit smoking. This is a positive motivator, because it motivates you by promising good sensations if you stop.

The first chore is for you to DECIDE what the most important aspects of your life happen to be. Your most highly valued criteria are usually things that you can’t see. For example: Money would not be highly valued criteria, but the freedom, fun, or security that money can purchase would be. Write your list of highly valued criteria down on a piece of paper.

Next you need to figure out what you would need to believe to feel motivated to quit. Here is the good news, sort of: Logic has nothing to do with belief. Things don’t have to be logical for a person to believe them. As a matter of fact, they rarely are. So don’t worry about logic!

The format for your negative motivator beliefs will be: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, something horrible will happen to my most highly valued criteria.”

Make sure that you frame your motivators in the positive. In other words, always state what you want or what will happen. You should not state what won’t happen. Eliminate the “not” word from the beliefs.

In this example we will say that your children’s health is your most highly valued criteria.

WRONG: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, I won’t be doing my kid’s health any good.”

CORRECT: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, my secondhand smoke will give my children cancer.”

Next, create a list of positive motivators. “I believe that if I quit smoking: (something very important will be enhanced).”

WRONG: “I believe that if I stop smoking, I won’t give my kids cancer.”

CORRECT: “I believe that if I quit smoking, my children will be safer because I’ll eliminate their contact with the dangers of my secondhand smoke.”

The next step is to modify the computer codes in your brain to make yourself actually believe these new ideas. Now for a shocker: Your beliefs have nothing to do with real logic. Instead, your beliefs have everything to do with your perception of reality. In other words, it has a lot to do with the way that you see things.

Our belief systems are based in our unconscious mind. The unconscious is like a computer. Computers do not reason. The input to a computer controls the output from a computer. To demonstrate, I want you to think of anything that you already believe without the slightest bit of doubt. So come up with a belief that gives you a good feeling.

For instance, it’s easy for most people to believe that they love their children. If that is true for you, make a mental image that lets you feel that feeling of love.

I’m going to ask some questions, and there are not any right or wrong answers.

Is your mental image a moving picture, or a still?

Is it in color, or in black and white?

Is it close or far?

Is it focused or fuzzy?

Is it normally bright, overly bright, or dim?

Is there a border on it?

Is it borderless?

Is it a panorama?

It doesn’t matter what your answers are, write them down. These are the computer codes that your subconscious uses to indicate your feelings of belief. In this case they are the mental codes for positive belief, because you’ve chosen a belief that gives you an excellent feeling. You’ve just calibrated your positive belief.

Every positive belief picture is bright and focused. If yours are not, then you probably do not really have total belief. An element of doubt is probably present. So find another belief from which to calibrate.

If you think of something that you doubt, and you make a mental picture of it, one or more of these computer codes will probably be different. Similarly, if you have a belief that gives you a bad feeling, (a negative belief): one or more of those codes or submodalities will be different.

In NLP we call these particular computer codes visual submodalities.

Now you will need to calibrate a negative belief. So repeat the same exact process, but do so using an idea that you already believe, that makes you feel awful.

Once you’ve calibrated both your positive and your negative beliefs, it is a simple affair to influence what you believe so you can motivate yourself to DECIDE to quit smoking.

So, to summarize, using the above example: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, my secondhand smoke will make my kids ill.”

1. Sense how motivated you feel to quit smoking.

2. Make a mental image that illustrates the above belief.

3. Adjust the codes (visual submodalities) of the mental picture to match the submodalities from your calibrated negative belief.

4. If you are right handed, move your eyeballs (and your picture) up to your left and hold it there for five seconds. If you are left handed, go up to the right. This will help you to memorize the belief.

5. Now become aware of how well motivated you feel to quit smoking. Do you feel more motivated? Do you feel less motivated? Or are your feelings the same?

By utilizing this method you can make yourself believe almost anything by making a picture in your mind that illustrates your new idea and then adjusting your mental image to make it match your calibrated belief images.

And if you have a belief that is holding you back, you can use the same technique to change that belief to doubt by changing one or two of the submodalities and memorizing it that way.

Now that you can motivate yourself to DECIDE to quit, you will quit smoking. A DECISION to quit means: I’m quitting no matter what. If you are like most people, you won’t want it to feel the pain and you do not have to. Because there are several hypnotic methods that can greatly reduce, or even completely eliminate all of the discomforts of withdrawal from the cigarette addiction. And you can read about them in my hypnosis article library.

(c) 2007 By Alan B. Densky, CH. This document may be re-printed as long as it is not altered and the author’s name and clickable web address are retained.

Alan B. Densky, CH. offers NLP CD’s for breaking the cigarette smoking habit. He is the developer of the Neuro-VISION(r) Video Hypnosis Technology for smoke cessation. It received a US Patent because of its uniqueness and effectiveness. Mr. Densky can be reached through his Neuro-VISION web site.

- Alan B. Densky, CH