DESIRE: A want, crave or a wish for

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

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

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

So what you need is to feel a strong provocation to make a "DECISION" to break the smoking habit.

MOTIVATION, we all want to have it. The foundation of each of our motivations is what we believe. Give it some thought, if you did not believe that you would be injured if you walked in front of moving traffic, you would not feel motivated to be cautious. If you did not believe that the gnawing sensation in your stomach meant that you were hungry, you would not feel motivated to eat.

When it comes to giving up an addiction to smoking, people who are addicted to cigarettes need to feel a great deal of motivation to make the DECISION to quit. Motivation is based on the ideas that we believe. So you will need to DECIDE exactly what thoughts would motivate you if you believed them. Because when you feel a great deal of motivation, you will break the smoking habit.

Thanks to NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and hypnotism for motivation, it's a lot easier to learn how to believe these new ideas than you think it is. However, you do not believe the ideas that will motivate you to break the smoking habit at this point in time, or you would have already quit.

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 individual humanbeing.

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

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

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

Next you need to DECIDE what you will need to believe to feel motivated to stop smoking. 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 cigarettes, something awful 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. Never state what will not happen. Eliminate the "not" word from the beliefs.

In this example we will say that your children's health and welfare are 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 make my children sick."

Next, create a list of positive motivators. "I believe that if I break the smoking habit: (something very important will be enhanced)."

WRONG: "I believe that if I stop smoking, I won't make my kids sick."

CORRECT: "I believe that if I break the smoking habit, my children will be healthier because I'll eliminate their exposure to the dangers of my secondhand smoke."

The next step is to change the computer codes in your brain to make yourself actually believe these motivational ideas. Now for a bombshell: Your beliefs have nothing to do with or reality. 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 subconscious mind. The subconscious is like a computer. Computers don't reason. The input controls the output. To demonstrate, I want you to think of anything that you already believe without the slightest bit of doubt. Make it a belief that makes you feel good.

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 makes you experience that feeling of love.

I'm going to ask some questions, and there are not any correct or incorrect 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 does not matter what your answers are, write them down on a piece of paper. These are the computer codes that your unconscious mind uses to indicate your feelings of belief. In this case they are the mental codes for positive belief, because you have chosen a belief that gives you a positive feeling. You've just calibrated your positive belief.

All positive belief pictures are bright and focused. If yours are not, you probably don't 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 are unsure of, 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 negative feeling, (a negative belief): one or more of those codes will be different.

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming 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 ghastly.

Once you have calibrated your positive and negative beliefs, it's a simple thing to control what you believe so you can motivate yourself to DECIDE to stop smoking cigarettes.

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 break the smoking habit.

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

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

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 quickly memorize the belief.

5. Now sense how motivated you feel to break the smoking habit. Do you feel more motivated? Do you feel less motivated? Or are your feelings the same?

By using this technique 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 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 break the smoking habit. A DECISION to quit means: I'm quitting no matter what. If you are similar to most, you will not want it to suffer from withdrawal and you don't have to. Because there are several hypnotic techniques that can greatly reduce, or even completely eliminate all of the discomforts of withdrawal from the cigarette smoking 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.