There are two psychological states that must be fulfilled before a smoker will willingly quit smoking. 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 quit smoking, you must have a DESIRE to stop. You probably want to quit smoking, at least some part of you does, or you wouldn't be reading this article.

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

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

MOTIVATION, we all want it. The source of each of our motivations is what we believe. Give it some thought; if you didn't have a belief that you could be injured if you walked in front of moving traffic, then you would not experience motivation 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 the smoking habit, people who are addicted to smoking cigarettes need to feel a lot of motivation to make the DECISION to break the smoking addiction. Motivation is based on the thoughts that we believe. So you will need to DECIDE which ideas would motivate you if you believed them. Because when you feel a great deal of motivation, you will quit smoking. 

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

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 is not."

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 human being.

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 smoking addiction. We call this is a negative motivator, because it is a belief that motivates you by giving you dire 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, that which is most important to you will become enhanced, then you will also feel the motivation that you require to quit smoking. This is a positive motivator, because it motivates you by promising good feelings if you stop smoking.

The first mission is for you to DECIDE what the most vital aspects of 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 purchase would 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 give up cigarettes. 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 won't happen. Eliminate the "not" word from the beliefs.

In this example we will say that your children's welfare 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 quit smoking: (something very important will be enhanced)." 

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

CORRECT: "I believe that if I quit smoking, my children will be safe because I will 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 reality. Instead, your beliefs have everything to do with what your perception of reality is. 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. 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 picture that makes you experience that feeling of love. 

I'm going to ask some questions, and there aren't 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 doesn't matter what your answers are just write them down. These are the computer codes that your subconscious mind uses to indicate your feelings of belief. In this case they are the codes for positive belief, because you have chosen a belief that gives you an excellent feeling. You have just calibrated your positive belief.

Every positive belief picture is bright and focused. If yours aren't, then 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 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 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 awful.

Once you have 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 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 sick."

1. Sense how motivated you feel to quit smoking.

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

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

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 help you to quickly memorize the belief.

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

By using this procedure 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 quit smoking. A DECISION to quit means: I'm quitting no matter what I have to go through. If you are similar to most people, you won't want it to hurt and you don't have to. Because there are several hypnotic and NLP techniques that can greatly reduce, or even completely eliminate the discomforts of withdrawal from the cigarette smoking addiction. And you can read about them in my library of unique hypnosis articles.

I also host a free entertaining video filled with quit smoking tips. It is titled How To Stop Smoking The Easy Way." It is available both on my site as well as most of the Web 2.0 video sites.

Alan B. Densky, CH offers quit smoking hypnosis MP3s for breaking the tobacco addiction. He is the developer of an effective stop smoking hypnosis technology, which received a US Patent because of its success. Contact him through the hypnotherapy MP3 downloads website.

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