What are pearls in your mind? Well, that’s the way I think of what traditional psychologists call a Gestalt.

We’ve all heard of Gestalt. It’s a form of psychology that has been prevalent for decades. Gestalt also offers a vivid way to describe how we store and manage our expectations that control our experiences.

First, let’s start with the definition of Gestalt.

A structure, configuration, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts.

That’s exactly what our mindware apps/pearls resemble.

Gestalt, Pearls and Your Mindware

When you think of the Gestalt of your mindware, the image I use is a string of pearls. Actually, thousands of strings of pearls. Each string is devoted to your mindware about a specific belief or experience in your life.

For example, you have Gestalt (s), or string(s) of pearls that create your belief about your skill at music, your response to a certain type of situation, your triggered behavior when someone yells at you, your unconscious decisions about what you can and can’t do. Everything you think and do is associated with these strings of pearls, the mindware that controls our behaviors and decisions.

You also have strings of pearls that keep your body functioning for you. Many of them. I’m focused on the pearls that direct your experience in this post.

How You Create Your Pearls

Here’s how the pearls of our mind work:

Each string of pearls begins with a single pearl. The first mindware app that is created in response to a situation or stated truth. Most of our initial pearls are formed in childhood, when we do not have a critical faculty to determine whether an experience or statement is true or false. Everything we experience and hear, see or feel is taken as true and we create a mindware app to reflect these inputs. By the way, we each create our own unique critical faculty based on what we are taught individually as right and wrong.

That initial pearl of mindware begins to filter our data stream, selecting a reality that reaffirms that mindware pearl as truth.

As we hear, see, feel or experience other situations that reflect that initial pearl, we create more pearls of mindware and associate them with the initial pearl.

With each new experience that matches our initial and follow on pearls, we create another mindware app and add it to the string. The more apps, or pearls, we add to the string, the more influential the mindware app becomes.

Over time, that initial pearl becomes a powerful Gestalt of mindware, driving our thinking and behaviors. If it’s conscious, we recognize that we’re responding. If it’s unconscious, we don’t even know it’s happening.

The Power to Change Our Minds

People ask me all the time how they can change their mindware, especially the unconscious mindware that we aren’t even aware is running in the background of our lives.

The first step is to find the behavior or thought patterns that are the result of the mindware. This isn’t as simple as we’ve been taught. Just because we are adults does not mean we can easily recognize the pearls in our minds.

In fact, we usually recognize what we want to see, hear or feel – not necessarily the reality of our mindware. That’s why it’s important to have an objective party involved in identifying the pearls that are driving our minds.

Once we discover the mindware apps, which are usually represented as a core decision, belief or emotion (I can’t get ahead, I’m afraid of being poor), then we can delete that app, or string of pearls, in our minds, and our responses and our experience changes..

How do we change our minds?

It takes a blending of mind methods and theories from quantum mechanics, hypnotherapy, neurolinguistics, and ancient energetic practices to shift our minds. I combine them all in my Lifeline Journeys.

Once the string of pearls associated with a specific mindware app or apps is released, that limiting process or emotion is gone. We no longer filter our data in the same way and our reality changes. As my clients say again and again, “How can I have ever believed (or felt) that? Wow! It’s gone.”

Changing our mindware is just one of the amazing gifts of neuroscience. I’m blessed and honored to share it with folks from every walk of life, as part of my coaching for people who want to live a life free of anxiety, depression, fear and just plain negativity.

Imagine – being able to delete the negative beliefs and replacing them with joyous wonder.

You Can.

It’s all in your mind!

Image courtesy of caroliend