15 Oct I Was Wrong About Beliefs!

This is not easy to admit.

I’ve spent more than twenty years teaching people how to clear their limiting and negative beliefs. I’ve trained hundreds of coaches and helped thousands of people transform their lives. And this year, I discovered that one of my fundamental assumptions about beliefs was wrong.

Not wrong about whether beliefs matter. Wrong about what beliefs actually are.

And I’m delighted to find out I was wrong.

A Fifty-Year Search for Transformation

I’ve been exploring human consciousness and personal transformation for more than fifty years. In 1975, I earned an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree focused on physiology and human consciousness, one of the earliest undergraduate degrees in this emerging field.

Over the decades, I’ve studied psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, spirituality, and the physical sciences. I’ve participated in more than a hundred workshops, trainings, therapies, and transformational experiences, from meditation and yoga to hypnotherapy, somatic work, inner child healing, inner voice transformation, shamanic practices, and intensive personal development programs.

I was searching for psychological healing, spiritual development, and lasting, durable transformation of my old patterns.

Most of these experiences were valuable. Some were extraordinary. But I noticed something puzzling. Around 90% of the approaches I tried produced temporary insights, short-term emotional releases, or partial change. Two hours, two days, or two weeks later, I was essentially the same person, perhaps with a new insight that gradually faded.

But every once in a while, POW!

Something happened that changed me from the inside out. I was a different person on the other side. My perspective expanded. My experience of myself shifted. New possibilities appeared that I hadn’t previously imagined.

And the change lasted.

I became fascinated by the difference. What happened during those rare experiences that produced permanent transformation? Why did most changes disappear while others became part of who I was?

Curious, I began analyzing my own major transformations looking for what they had in common.

I discovered that each one was accompanied by a fundamental shift in a deeply held belief.

For example, my belief that “I’m separate from others” disappeared and was replaced by “We are always already connected.” A childhood belief that “I’m weird” transformed into “I’m unique and special, just like everyone else.” And “I am this body” became “I have a body, which is my temple.”

These weren’t merely new ideas I decided to adopt. They were profound shifts in how I experienced myself, other people, and the world.

That discovery launched my investigation into beliefs themselves.

What are they? Where do they come from? How do they function? How do they affect one another? And most importantly, how can we change them in ways that last?

Beliefs Are More Than Thoughts

For centuries, philosophers and spiritual traditions have explored how our interpretation of our experience shapes our life. William James investigated the relationships among belief, attention, habit, and experience. Later thinkers and movements popularized the idea that changing our thoughts could change our lives.

More recently, research in perception and predictive processing has shown that the brain doesn’t simply record reality like a video camera. It actively interprets incoming information through patterns established by previous learning and experience.

One popular metaphor for beliefs is that they operate like colored lenses through which we see the world. Change the lens, and the world looks different. Clean the lens, and you experience more of reality.

That made sense to me. But my own experiences suggested that something much more complex was happening.
Consider what you’re experiencing right now as you read these words.

You’re looking at patterns of pixels on a screen, interpreting them as letters, words, sentences, and meaning. You may hear the words in your mind. Your body is sending signals to your brain about sensation, location, the environment, and internal conditions. You’re breathing. Your heart is beating. You may be experiencing curiosity, agreement, skepticism, excitement, or boredom.

And all of these experiences are occurring simultaneously, interacting with your memories, expectations, identity, and understanding of the world.

Human experience is multidimensional.

When we draw a conclusion from an experience, such as “I’m not good enough,” “People can’t be trusted,” or “The world is dangerous,” that conclusion doesn’t arise from language alone. It emerges from experiences involving emotions, bodily sensations, perceptions, memories, and interpretations of meaning.

The words are only the outward, visible expression of something much deeper and more complex.

I concluded that beliefs must be multidimensional constructs – not just mental constructs – formed through experience and embedded within the enormous associative network we call the mind.

This understanding became the foundation of the Clear Beliefs Method.

Twenty Years of Clearing Beliefs

I brought together the most effective transformational techniques I’d encountered during my decades of exploration, refined them through practice, and developed a comprehensive approach to identifying and transforming limiting beliefs into a process for healing, awakening, and empowerment.

The Clear Beliefs Method includes 20 different and integrated methods for coaches, therapists, and helping professionals, techniques they can incorporate into their practice, making them more effective.

I’ve taught this system to practitioners around the world for the past two decades, with more than 800 graduates in 45 countries.

The feedback has been extraordinary. Many graduates have said that the methodology allows them to transform their clients in almost every session. Others have called it “a magic wand.” Some graduates have told me that these tools are the most effective they’ve learned in their entire professional careers.

I’ve witnessed profound, life-changing shifts in my own clients, and heard countless accounts from our graduates of remarkable changes in their clients.

My working model was straightforward: Find the limiting belief at the core of the psyche. Trace it back to the experience where it originated. Delete the underlying memory and belief completely at sufficient depth. Help the client establish a new empowering belief aligned with who they truly are and want to become.

And most often, the results are remarkable.

So how could I have been wrong?

The Discovery That Changed Everything

Last year, I was reading an article about statistical physics when I encountered several unfamiliar terms: attractor basins, dynamical systems, and Hopfield networks. I had no idea what they meant. As usual, I asked my friendly AI companion, ChatGPT, to explain them to me.

After walking me through these concepts, it asked whether I wanted to hear how they might relate to the Clear Beliefs Method.

Really? Statistical physics and belief change? I was intrigued.

That question launched a deeper investigation into dynamical systems theory, complexity and chaos, predictive processing, and the mathematical models scientists use to understand how complex systems organize themselves.

As I explored these ideas, something remarkable happened. A new understanding of beliefs began to emerge.

I realized that I’d been treating a beliefs as multidimensional constructs – things – that existed within a person. Things which could be located, identified, and deleted.

A belief may not be a “thing” at all.

What we call a belief could instead be a verbal expression at the outermost surface of an entire complex and self-organizing psychological system.

What if a belief emerges from, and is continuously sustained by, the interactions among memory, emotion, bodily experience, identity, expectation, attention, and behavior?

In other words, I had been treating beliefs as the thing that needed to be changed, but I began to see it as one visible part of a much larger psychological organization involving multiple dimensions of being human. And that idea changed everything. What we were calling a belief was a summary of the interaction between multiple elements. It wasn’t an element itself.

The Landscape of the Mind

Imagine a landscape of hills and valleys. Drop a ball somewhere on that landscape, and gravity carries it downhill until it settles at the bottom of a valley. Push the ball uphill and release it. It will most likely roll right back down to where it landed before.

In dynamical systems theory, that stable resting point is called an attractor. The surrounding territory in which the ball tends to move is its basin of attraction.

Now imagine that your familiar thoughts, emotions, beliefs, expectations, memories, and habits form something like that landscape.

A deeply established psychological pattern might resemble a deep valley. New experiences are interpreted through that pattern, and even when something temporarily pushes you out of it, you tend to return to your familiar way of understanding yourself and the world.

Consider someone who believes, “I’m not good enough.” You tell them they’re intelligent, capable, and lovable. They dismiss the compliment out of hand.

You remind them of their accomplishments. They explain why those successes don’t really count. You point out how much their friends and family appreciate them. They insist that those people don’t know who they really are. They may even agree with you intellectually. But something inside them continues to insist, “Yes, but I’m still not good enough.”

Their attention selectively notices evidence that confirms the old conclusion. Their memories supply supporting examples. Their body responds with familiar sensations. Their emotions reinforce the interpretation. Their behavior may recreate the very circumstances they fear. The entire system works together to preserve its familiar organization. The ball rolls back into the old valley.

This understanding was the breakthrough for me: The belief isn’t necessarily the central problem. It is just one expression of a larger, self-reinforcing psychological organization.

As we’ve seen repeatedly, simply changing a verbal belief rarely produces lasting transformation – because the organization itself has remained intact and functioning the same way. The ball was temporarily lifted up by an insight, but it rolled right back down to the same resting place.

Of course, the landscape is a metaphor. Psychological patterns are vastly more complex than balls rolling downhill, and attractor dynamics is a theoretical framework rather than a proven explanation of how beliefs function. But the model offered a powerful new way to understand something I had observed for decades. People don’t merely hold beliefs. They repeatedly return to familiar ways of being.

A Client Who Believed Nothing Worked

I recently encountered a striking example in my coaching practice. A client repeatedly expressed the belief, “Nothing works for me.”

Yet by ordinary standards, quite a few things had worked for her. She had built a reasonably successful business, raised three children into adulthood, and maintained a solid marriage. There was abundant evidence contradicting her belief.

Using my traditional approach, I might have focused on finding the origin of “Nothing works for me,” clearing the belief at the core of the subconscious mind, and helping her establish a more empowering belief in its place. But as we explored the pattern, I discovered something much deeper. Her mother had died when she was five years old.

For a young child, losing her mother was incomprehensible. Her mind struggled to make sense of something that made no sense.

Why had her mother disappeared? Why did she go away? Had she done something wrong? Was she bad? Was she being punished for something?

Over the decades, she searched for answers through psychotherapy, workshops, spiritual practices, healers, and other approaches. But nothing had resolved the fundamental question: Why had her mother left, abandoning her forever? Even her adult understanding that “everyone dies” did not shift the complex of fear, anger, frustration, and confusion at her core.

She had spent much of her life searching for an explanation that would finally make sense of the tragedy. And because she couldn’t find a satisfactory answer, she came to another conclusion: “Something must be wrong with me because I can’t figure it out.”
Suddenly, “Nothing works for me” looked very different.

It wasn’t simply a negative belief about her abilities. It was systemic. It touched every part of her life. The successes didn’t change the underlying assumption. It was a predictable outcome of an impossible strategy: “I must find the answer to a question that has no satisfactory answer. And if I can’t find it, either I am inadequate or the world is against me.” Her entire psychological organization had become invested in solving an unsolvable problem.

I offered a different perspective: “Your mother died because she was mortal,” I told her. “Her death was a tragedy. But it wasn’t evidence that you were bad, that you had done something wrong, or that you were being punished.”
She resisted my explanation because it didn’t fit her conclusion. She insisted, “There has to be a reason.” This was the desperate inner child demanding an answer.

We explored her conviction that there must be some larger purpose, explanation, or plan involved in her mother’s disappearance.

I wasn’t trying to persuade her to abandon her religious or spiritual beliefs. I was helping her distinguish between the reality of her mother’s death and the childhood conclusions she had formed about herself because of it.

Her strong resistance to my offer of an explanation was evidence of an entire system powerfully organized around the necessity of finding an answer that explained the cause of the her mother’s death.

Her memories, emotional responses, identity, expectations, and lifelong search for meaning were all intimately connected at the core of her being. The belief “Nothing works for me” was not an isolated problem. It was part of an intricate psychological pattern that had been organizing her experience for decades.

What was needed to change that entire complex pattern? Asking her to change the sentence to the affirmation, “Things DO work for me” was clearly unworkable She needed to be freed of the original false belief, which is quite common in children who experience loss or trauma: “It must be my fault.”

Fortunately, I was able to use multiple techniques from the Clear Beliefs Method to finally unwind the complex, and after the session, she said she felt more peaceful than she had in decades. The stone-like knot in the pit of her stomach was gone.

What Actually Changes During Transformation?

This discovery didn’t invalidate the methods I’ve been teaching. In fact, it helps explain why they work so well. Techniques that produce deep, lasting transformation don’t just replace one belief with a better belief. They disrupt and reorganize the complex psychological system that kept the old belief in place.

This possibility changes how I think about transformation. A person can adopt a new belief, repeat an affirmation, and sincerely experience a different perspective for a while. But then life happens. Their partner criticizes them. Their business stalls. A customer rejects their proposal. Their child gets sick. Money becomes tight. Suddenly, the old reactions return. The ball rolls back into the familiar valley. Any kind of stress destabilizes the system, causing old patterns to jump back up, take over, and at times, bite us on the butt.

But after a complete transformation, something different happens. The person encounters the same situation yet responds in an new way. Criticism no longer triggers shame. Rejection no longer confirms inadequacy. Unexpected challenges become opportunities for growth rather than evidence of impending failure. The old thought may re-appear at times, but it no longer governs the person’s choices. One client told me, “Since our session two months ago, that feeling and thought that ‘something bad is going to happen’ is completely gone, and it hasn’t reappeared. Well, I did have that thought last week – but then I thought, ‘I don’t belief that anymore.’”

After a system has been reorganized, new possibilies becomes visible. A product manager at a consumer products company felt stalled in his career. We worked on his belief system for more than a year. Years later, he was a VP of Marketing of a billion-dollar company. What was previously unimaginable became actionable.

Quite often, a comprehensive reorganization shifts more aspects than just the one we work on. The product manager found true love and married an ideal mate. His relationships changed even though we never addressed relationship issues. Clients report that their body feels lighter and more vital. The world looks different. People seem friendlier. The landscape they were looking from changes– their perspective is wider, more open, more elevated.

This leads to four questions I want to investigate.

1. Did the Belief Content change?
Does the person genuinely experience a different belief about themselves, other people, or the world? Not simply as words, but as a different living truth?

2. Did the underlying Organizational System reorganize?
Have the relationships among memory, emotion, bodily sensation, identity, expectation, and behavior shifted? Does the person respond differently at multiple levels of experience?

3. Did the change Ripple Out and spread beyond the original problem?
Did a transformation in one area affect other parts of the person’s life? Did their primary relationship improve? Is previously impossible action now possible? Does the person develop greater freedom, curiosity, or agency?

4. Is the transformation Durable? Does it last for months or years?
Not for five minutes or five hours. What happened the following week? The following months? After an argument with a partner, or a financial setback? Does the change persist when life challenges it with stress?

These are very different questions than simply asking whether the client feels better at the end of a session. They invite us to investigate the mechanisms of transformation itself.

A New Beginning

After more than twenty years of teaching belief change, I find myself fascinated by a question I thought I had answered. What creates permanent, profound change?

I have 20 years of anecdotal evidence that changing deeply held Self Beliefs can produce profound transformation. But now I believe that the deepest change involves much more than replacing a limiting belief with an empowering one.

Profound and lasting transformation may be caused by a shift in the psychological organization that was sustaining a limiting belief, and that reorganization allows new ways of perceiving, feeling, choosing, and acting to emerge. The old belief can remain available as a thought or a memory without governing the person’s life. Experiencing an old thought without being controlled by it is genuine freedom.

We could learn to identify conditions that make this kind of transformation possible, understand how it spreads through a person’s psychological system, and discover what makes it last. Research could help us investigate these hypotheses.

I want to bring together the insights of experienced practitioners with research in psychology, neuroscience, dynamical systems, and human development. I want to understand not only whether transformation happens, but what changes, how it changes, and why some transformations endure while others fade.

We could develop more precise ways to recognize when a psychological system has reorganized. We could identify the conditions that make lasting transformation more likely. We could learn to help people move beyond the limitations of their familiar psychological landscapes and discover possibilities they previously couldn’t imagine.

After fifty years of exploring consciousness, and more than twenty years of teaching belief change, I feel as though I’m standing at the entrance to an entirely new territory.

I’m now seeking researchers, institutions, and funders interested in investigating the mechanisms of lasting psychological transformation. If you know someone pursuing similar questions, I’d welcome an introduction.

It’s true. I was wrong about beliefs.

And I’ve never been more excited about what we might discover.

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