Wherefore “Belief Craft?”

“Belief Craft?” What’s that all about?

Did you ever meet somebody who expressed a belief about something and you thought, “Can he really BELIEVE that?” You may even have been left speechless.

Have you ever been in a situation – maybe as a salesperson or as a therapist – where you are diligently trying to get your client to loosen their hold on an old, stuck way of thinking and to persuade them of a better, healthier viewpoint and they JUST WON’T BUDGE?

These are examples of where REALLY understanding the nature of beliefs would save the day.

“BELIEF CRAFT” is a merging together of two disciplines, “Sleight of Mouth” and “Knowledge Engineering.” Basically taking the most useful understanding of how beliefs are structured (derived from the computer science of Artificial Intelligence, “Knowledge Engineering”) and combining it with the most sophisticated understanding of how beliefs are changed (“Sleight of Mouth”).

The results are game changing.

When you really get a handle on Belief Craft there will be times where you COULD do Sleight of Mouth with a person in a particular circumstance, but instead you’ll use Belief Craft and just “wire around” the problematic belief so that it never gets triggered in the first place.

It is awesome stuff.

I think Belief Craft started when Jonathan Altfeld attended a Sleight of Mouth training I was doing down in Florida a few years ago. I’d be teaching Sleight of Mouth for many years even then, but he was asking questions about the structure of the beliefs and came up with insights about different beliefs we were eliciting that were wonderfully challenging.

Honestly, part of me was a little unhappy about this because you always like to appear to be the uber-expert when you’re training something like NLP.  I was becoming afraid that maybe I wasn’t as expert as I thought I was. But fortunately it all worked out well and everyone learned a lot that day.

The other part of me was thrilled because it really felt that there was something new being discovered here. Jonathan and I started some private conversations based on the realization that we both looked at the structure of beliefs in the same way – the “Normalized Belief Structure”. He gave me his outstanding CD/workbook set he called “Knowledge Engineering” which is all about this.  I devoured it.

I was blown away because I could easily see where this would interface so seamlessly with Sleight of Mouth and make it much better because we’d first start from a more complete understanding of precisely what the belief is that we’re dealing with.

Jonathan Altfeld and I will be presenting a three day certification class in Belief Craft July 7, 8 and 9, 2011 up in Burlington, Vermont as the kick-off to our summer NLP Master Practitioner Class (July 7-17, 2011)

Read more about it here: http://www.altfeld.com/mastery/seminars/desc-belcraft.html

Join us in Vermont. You won’t believe how much fun learning can be.