With inner beliefs we refer to deeply held convictions that influence one’s perception, thinking, decisions and behaviour. They are personal assumptions or thought patterns about oneself, about how the world works, how people are, or how to assess a particular situation.
Inner Beliefs are an accumulated mix coming from experience, upbringing, interpretations and cultural influences throughout our lives. Not all of them are helpful and often we are not aware of them.
What are examples of supportive and hindering inner beliefs?
Here are a few examples of limiting, hindering beliefs:
- I’m not good enough.
- It’s hard to make money in my profession.
- Other people are unreliable.
Here are a few examples of supportive beliefs
- I am a darling of fortune
- If I set my mind to something seriously, I can do it.
- I am valuable.
You can think of inner beliefs like an imaginary map based on thoughts and feelings that helps you navigate through life. It shows where dangers supposedly lurk and where it is likely to be worthwhile to wander. It includes personal preferences and indicates how flat and easy or steep and stony a path is to get to the points of interest such as dreams and goals.
How can we work with Supportive Inner Beliefs?
Working with Supportive inner beliefs is a practice to review and redesign this inner map in order to pave ways to the promising destinations and to keep from going to places that are not beneficial. It is about looking at single sentences in order to understand one’s thought patterns and aligning them with goals and dreams.
Unconditional Forgiveness
This is a method for empowerment through increased awareness and through a release of energy. The release happens when letting go of anger and blame.
(a) It can be taught, to an individual or group, using a ‘small’ issue for practice, and for later use with bigger issues; either old or fresh.
(b) If the person is ready, they can be immediately coached through an issue that they perceive as a direct obstacle or problem.
(c) It can also be used for self-forgiveness; the presence of a coach or friend is recommended.
Relationships are life. Every person builds up a social network in the course of their life. It is fed by family, friends and professional contacts. In times of crisis, we notice in particular whether this social network is actually sustainable and nourishing or not.
You can imagine your relationships as different types of plants in a garden. Just as you would regularly water, weed and care for them, you can go through your relationship garden every now and then in the same way.
In a professional context the Garden of Relationships can be used as a subjective and qualitative snapshot which reveals important issues of stakeholder relationships. Subsequent to that, it is possible to prioritise these issues and to focus on solutions.
The tuk-tuk game is an activity in pairs which aims at giving the participants the sensation of trust: receiving trust to lead and giving trust to be led by someone else. It has different levels as it can be carried out by people who have known each other for a long time, or it can also be tried out in a group where the participants have only been working together for a short period of time.
There are different types of Metaphoric Cards. In general using cards is a way for people to exchange feelings, fantasies, and ideas within a framework that protects privacy and vulnerability. In this game everyone wins. Each deck can be used on its own or in conjunction with any (or all) of the other decks, like building blocks for creativity. Unlimited variations are possible. Easy-to-follow instructions for play and work are included with every deck.
The originator of Deep Listening, Warren Ziegler, describes six modes of Deep Listening. An experienced listener can weave them together or dance between them, for the beginner it can be good to practise them one at a time. They are:
- Be silence – Do not respond in any way to the talker, either with words or with body language. Look away. No eye contact. This is not something you do, not a task but a state of being. Thus, be silence throughout your whole being.
- Give attention – This is an early form of the sixth mode, emptying. Focus your entire self on what the speaker is saying, to the exclusion of all else. Their words are the only reality.
- Be empathic – This is a grand act of the imagination through which spirit lives. Enter the talker’s story and live it as your own. Feel it in your body, your mind, your spirit, as if you were living her story with her.
- Be non-judgmental – A difficult practice when the talker offers images (values, ideas, intentions) in conflict with yours! But essential if you are to allow the other to come to the fullness of their images before judgement is rendered, whether their own judgement or yours.
- Nurture – This is an advanced form of being empathic. Enter into the talker’s story and help them search for elements they may have missed. Remember: it’s their story, not (yet) yours. Ask a question only if you must ask it in order to clarify what the speaker means – a ‘compelling question’.
- ‘Empty’ – Put to one side (‘park’) your present: your longings, knowledge and experience, hopes, dreams, problems, visions. When you do that, you will find your way to deep listen to your creative side without any limitations. Basically you’re in meditation mode, focusing not on your own breathing or your mantra but on the words of the speaker.
PRINCIPLES
A deep-dive sensing journey requires engaging in three types of listening:
1. Listening to others: to what the people you meet are offering to you.
2. Listening to yourself: to what you feel emerging from within.
3. Listening to the emerging whole: to what emerges from the collective and community settings that you have connected with.
Go to the places of “most potential” (the places that provide you with new perspectives). Meet your interviewees in their context: in their workplace or where they live, not in a hotel or conference room. When you meet people in their own context you learn a lot by simply observing what is going on. Take whatever you observe as a starting point to improvise questions that allow you to learn more about the real-life context of your interviewee.
Observe, observe, observe: Suspend your voices of judgment and connect with your sense of appreciation and wonder. Without the capacity to suspend judgment, all efforts to conduct an effective inquiry process will be in vain. Suspending your voices of judgment means shutting down the habit of judging and opening up a new space of exploration, inquiry, and wonder.
The Pro Action Café is a space for creative and action oriented conversation where participants are invited to bring their call / project / ideas or whatever they feel called by and need help to manifest in the world.
Many ideation approaches are mainly cognitive and we easily disregard the silent voices of the heart and the foggy not-yets of something that is only about to emerge. This ideation approach invites us to deeply connect with different perspectives within and around us and generate ideas from those places. It allows us to step into different roles and to generate ideas from multiple perspectives we would not automatically include (like the future generations, a tree, a person we dislike, Buddha).
What we like and what we don’t like influences the way we think and the type of ideas we like. Why would we create an idea we don’t like? This technique deliberately asks that question by empathically stepping into someone’s mind we don’t like at all. This gives us the chance to leave our standard paths of thinking. It is a good exercise
if you are looking for new ideas in an area you are very familiar with
if you keep coming up with the same ideas
as an instrument to check weaknesses of your idea and possible problems you haven’t thought about