DESIRE: A want, crave or a wish for

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

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

In addition, in order to kick the smoking habit, a person must DECIDE to give up the addiction. Since you haven't stopped smoking, it simply means that you have not DECIDED to stop yet.

So what you need is to feel an incitement to make a "DECISION" to stop.

MOTIVATION, we all need it. The starting place for each of our motivations is what we believe. Think about it, if you did not believe that you could get hurt if you stepped in front of a moving freight train, you would not feel motivated to be vigilant. If you did not believe that the gnawing feeling in your stomach meant that you were hungry, you wouldn't feel motivated to eat.

When it comes to giving up the cigarette habit, people who smoke need to feel a lots of motivation to make the DECISION to give up their addiction to cigarettes. Motivation is based on the ideas that we believe. So you will need to figure out which ideas would motivate you if you believed them. Because when you feel powerfully motivated, you will kick the smoking habit.

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. However, you do not believe the ideas that will motivate you to kick the smoking habit at this point in time, 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 free 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 cigarettes your highly valued criterion will be in jeopardy, you will feel the motivation that you need to stop smoking. We call this is a negative motivator, because it is a belief that motivates you by providing you with dreadful sensations. Negative motivators are great for getting you to make decisions.

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

The first task is for you to figure out what the most vital 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 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 would need to believe to feel motivated to break the habit. Here is the good news, sort of: Logic has nothing to do with belief. Things don't have to be logical for you to believe them. As a matter of fact, they rarely are. So do not 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 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 ruin my children's health."

Next, create a list of positive motivators. "I believe that if I kick 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 kick the smoking habit, my kids will be healthier because I'll eliminate their exposure to the dangers of my secondhand smoke."

The next step is to make changes to the computer codes in your brain to make yourself actually believe these new ideas. Now for a revelation: Your beliefs have nothing to do with or what is real. 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 subconscious mind is like a computer. Computers do not reason. The input controls the output. To demonstrate, I want you to think of something 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 kids. 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 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 does not matter what your answers are, just write them down. These are the computer codes that your subconscious mind uses to make you feel 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.

All positive belief pictures are bright and focused. If yours are not, 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 are unsure of, and you make a mental image 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 bad.

Once you've calibrated both your positive and your negative beliefs, it is a simple matter to manipulate what you believe so you can motivate yourself to DECIDE to kick the smoking addiction.

So, to summarize, using the above example: "I believe that if I continue to smoke, my secondhand smoke will ruin my children's health."

1. Become aware of how motivated you feel to kick the smoking habit.

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

3. Adjust the codes (visual submodalities) of the mental image to match the computer 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 become aware of how well motivated you feel to kick the smoking habit. Do you feel more motivated? Do you feel less motivated? Or are your feelings the same?

Using this system you can make yourself believe almost anything by making an image 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 kick the smoking habit. A DECISION to quit means: I'm quitting no matter what. If you are like most, you will not want it to feel the pain and you do not have to. Because there are several hypnotic techniques that can greatly reduce, or even completely eliminate all of the discomforts of withdrawal from the smoking addiction. And you can read about them in my library of original hypnosis articles.

(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.