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There are two mental states that must be satisfied before anyone will freely break the smoking addiction. These fundamentals are called "Desire," and "Decision."

DESIRE: A want, crave or a wish for

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

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

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

So what you need is to feel a strong motivation to make a "DECISION" to stop smoking.

MOTIVATION, we all require it. The starting place for each of our motivations is our beliefs. Give it some thought, if you didn't have a belief that you would be injured if you jumped from a tall building, you would not feel motivated to be cautious. If you did not believe that the gnawing feeling in your stomach meant that you were hungry, you would not feel motivated to eat.

When it comes to breaking the cigarette addiction, people who are addicted to cigarettes need to feel a tremendous amount of motivation to make the DECISION to stop smoking. Motivation is based on the ideas that we believe. So you will need to DECIDE exactly which ideas will motivate you (when you start to believe them). Because when you feel powerfully motivated, you will stop smoking.

Thanks to NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and hypnosis for motivation, it's much easier to learn how to believe these new ideas than you think it is. However, you don't believe the ideas that will motivate you to stop smoking at this point, or you would have already quit smoking cigarettes.

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 individual humanbeing.

When you 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 addiction to cigarettes. We call this is a negative motivator, because it's a belief that motivates you by giving you terrible feelings. Negative motivators are great for getting you to make decisions and changes in your life.

When you believe that if you do stop smoking, your highly valued criteria will become enhanced, then you will also feel the motivation that you require to stop smoking. This is a positive motivator, because it motivates you by promising good sensations if you stop smoking.

The first chore is for you to DECIDE what the most vital aspects of your life are. 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 buy would be. Write your list of highly valued criteria down on a piece of paper.

Next you need to figure out what you 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 don't worry about logic!

The format for your negative motivator beliefs will be: "I believe that if I continue to smoke cigarettes, something horrible 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 make my children sick."

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

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

CORRECT: "I believe that if I stop smoking, my children will be safer 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 bombshell: Belief has nothing to do with real logic. 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 mind is like a computer. Computers don't reason. What goes in controls what comes out. To demonstrate, I want you to think of anything 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 children. If that is true for you, make a mental picture that lets you feel that feeling of love.

I'm going to ask some questions, and there aren't 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?

Whatever your answers are, just write them down on a piece of paper. These are the computer codes that your unconscious mind uses to make you experience 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 good feeling. You've just calibrated your positive belief.

Every positive belief picture is bright and focused. If yours aren't, you probably don't really have total belief. An element of doubt is probably present. So find another belief to calibrate.

If you think of something that you doubt, and you make a mental image of it, one or more of these computer codes (which we call submodalities) 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 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 terrible.

Once you've calibrated your positive and negative beliefs, it's a simple affair to manipulate what you believe so you can motivate yourself to DECIDE to stop smoking.

So, to summarize, using the above example: "I believe that if I continue to smoke, my secondhand smoke will make my children ill."

1. Sense how motivated you feel to stop smoking.

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

3. Adjust the codes (visual submodalities) of the picture so that they match the submodalities from your calibrated negative belief picture.

4. If you are right handed, move your eyeballs (and your mental image) up to your left and hold it there for five seconds. If you are left handed, go up to the right. This will make you memorize the belief.

5. Now become aware of how motivated you feel to stop smoking. Do you feel more motivated? Do you feel less motivated? Or are your feelings the same?

By utilizing this method you can make yourself believe almost anything by making an image in your mind that illustrates your new idea and then adjusting your mental picture so that it matches your calibrated belief pictures.

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 stop smoking. 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 don't have to. Because there are several hypnotic techniques that can greatly reduce, or even completely eliminate the discomforts of withdrawal from the cigarette addiction. And you can read about them in my library of unique 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.

Alan B. Densky, CH. offers hypnosis and NLP CD's for breaking the cigarette smoking addiction. He developed the Neuro-VISION(r) Video break the smoking addiction hypnotic technology. It received a United States Patent because of its uniqueness and effectiveness. He can be contacted through his Neuro-VISION web site.