Working with beliefs using The Work

What is The Work?

The Work was developed by Byron Katie and became known through the book Loving What Is (with Stephen Mitchell, 2002; German edition Lieben was ist). The basic form consists of four questions and the turnarounds. In German trainings it has been developed further and combined with elements of NLP, such as inner images, perceptual positions, or the timeline.

The basic idea: it isn’t the situation itself that causes the most stress, but what we think about it. In the example above, three things can be distinguished:

Behind this are working assumptions, not scientific laws: the further your own idea is from what actually is, the more stress arises. A stressful feeling is a reminder that there is a thought you can question. And:

Letting go of thoughts doesn’t work. When you question a thought and realize it isn’t true, it lets go of you.

Two further assumptions belong to this. Thoughts lead to feelings, feelings to an action, the action to a result. When you question the thought at the start of this chain, you often change what comes out at the end as well. And: you don’t need stress to know what to do. Clarity tends to arise when the pressure eases, rather than under it.

What it’s for

The Work helps when a thought keeps coming back and causes more stress than the situation itself. Typical concerns are:

• Judgments and expectations of others: “She should listen to me.” “He’s inconsiderate.”
• Self-judgments: “I’m not good enough.” “My inner critic should finally be quiet.”
• The past: the feeling that something back then should have been different.
• Pretending and fitting in: when you behave in ways you don’t really want to, because you believe it’s the only way to get recognition, safety, or belonging.
• Behavior patterns that don’t change despite good intentions.
• Steps into something new that are held back by a statement like “First I need X to be able to do Y.”

What often comes at the end is more clarity, more composure in dealing with others, and a concrete next step.

Three kinds of business

The basic distinction in The Work:

A lot of stress arises when we mentally live in someone else’s business: when we decide how another person should be, or struggle with what no one can change. So a helpful question is: whose business are you in right now when you believe this thought?

Interpretation or expectation

The Work distinguishes between two kinds of stressful statements:

The four questions

There are four questions for both kinds of statements. With an expectation, reality comes first, because what is being examined there is, in a sense, a parallel world: how it should be instead of how it is.

One statement will accompany us through the rest of this article:

The first two questions loosen certainty. Is it true? Can you absolutely know that it’s true? The third question makes visible what the thought does to you: what feelings come up, how your body feels, where your mind travels, how you see yourself, how present you are. Here you can also ask what you get out of holding on to the thought, and what you fear if you no longer believe it. The fourth question opens a moment without the thought: what would it be like in this person’s presence if you simply couldn’t think it?

Sub-questions

The third question also includes your self-image as an inner image: where around you does it appear when you believe the thought? How big is it, how bright, how colorful, how old, which way is it looking? Details like these later make visible what has changed. Another direction to look in is the good in the situation: what is it good for, the way it is? Where might there be meaning in it? What is the gift for you?

Many people find the fourth question hard to answer at first, because the thought seems so self-evident. Small ways in can help:

• Dropping it for a moment Let go of the thought for just an instant and describe what you experience. Or: who were you before the thought first came up?
• Feeling two points Feel the sole of your left foot, then the right, then both at once. What is it like in this person’s presence while you feel both soles of your feet?
• Quieter and farther away Hear the thought only very faintly and from a great distance. What is it like when you can no longer hear it at all?
• As if With an interpretation: what would it be like if your mind could no longer hand out labels like “good” or “bad” and simply perceived? With an expectation: what would it be like if your mind no longer designed a parallel world and were only in contact with reality?

The turnarounds

After the questions, the statement is turned around. “He’s unloving toward me” becomes three new statements:

For each turnaround, you look for three genuine examples. It isn’t a pretty replacement statement, but a hypothesis you test against your experience.

With expectations, the turnaround goes like this: act as if you were doing it yourself, and find reasons why that would be a good idea. “He should accept me as I am” also becomes “I should accept myself as I am” and “I should accept him as he is.” You do it for your own sake. At the end there can be an if-then plan:

The layers of a belief

Behind one stressful thought there are often others. Using the example “Peter lied,” five layers can be shown:

If you keep asking what would happen if you did bring it up with him, two deep statements appear:

Each layer is a statement of its own that you can do The Work with. Often, the most changes when you reach the deeper layers.

Variations

The same logic of questioning can be applied to more than judgments about others. Some variations from the further developments:

A closer look at each variation.

Loving what is in you

With a self-judgment like “I’m not good enough,” the judgment itself is not what gets questioned. First, the inner part that speaks it is found. In your imagination, you go into a situation in which the judgment comes up, and you notice which direction the voice comes from and where in your body the feeling is strongest. From this a figure emerges: how far away, how big, how old, what it looks like, what name fits. The distinction is important: the feeling is not the part. The part is the figure that emerges from the feeling or from the direction of the voice.

What is then questioned is an expectation of it: “[Name] should give me ….” The four questions follow the form for expectations and begin with the inner reality. In the turnarounds, you first give yourself what you expected, picturing your self in front of you, upright and at eye level. Then you offer it to the part as well. Finally, you look for reasons why it’s good that the part is the way it is. After each step, you look at how it appears to you now: size, position, direction of gaze, color, brightness, movement. At the end, you go a week ahead in your imagination and check how true the old judgment still sounds then.

Loving what was

This is about judgments of your own history. Your lifeline is made visible, for example with a string on the floor or on a flip chart. The actual timeline shows what really happened: important milestones, only facts, and experiences you are grateful for today. Next to it, the should-be timeline takes shape: how it should have been. Where you are resisting what happened back then, it veers far from the actual line. Where you are grateful, the two lie close together.

At a point where the gap is wide, the judgment is put into words, for example “Back then, I would have needed him to approve of my decision,” and questioned with the four questions, from a little distance, as if looking from outside. The turnarounds can no longer be lived in the past. So they are brought into the present: “Today I need to approve of my decision.” Your younger self becomes a reminder of how important it is to live the turnaround today. At the end, you move a little way into the future on the timeline: what does it feel like to have lived this way for a week, a month, a year? What advice do you give your present self from there?

Values Work

Values Work starts with the hopeless values described in the topic Working with values: you behave in a certain way in order to get something whose fulfillment lies with others. The starting point is a situation in which you pretend to be someone you’re not. What do you hope to get from it, and what do you do for it? The value and the behavior each go on a card and are linked into one statement: “If I [behavior], then [value].”

Before the questioning, your values hierarchy is made visible: three values of high, medium, and low importance, how they show up inside you, and where around you they appear. Then you look at where the hopeless value and the behavior so far stand within it. The fourth question here is: who would you be if you had never linked this behavior with this value? At this point, the two cards are actually separated. The turnaround happens on both sides of the statement: with the value (“… then I won’t get it”) and with the behavior, for which an opposite word is sought. At the end, you look at how the order of your values has changed and test the change against two or three further situations. Sometimes a forgotten value becomes important again in the process.

Alignment on the Logical Levels

The same type of statement can also be worked with using Robert Dilts’s Logical Levels. A statement of the form “If I [behavior], then [value]” often lies behind a behavior that won’t change, for example “If I hold back, then I’m safe.” This connection is questioned with the four questions and turned around. The turnaround is then experienced on the levels of identity and belonging, often as an image or metaphor, and from there carried back level by level all the way into concrete behavior. Exactly how this works is described in the topic Logical Levels.

Loving what is coming

What would be new territory for you? And what is holding you back? Often it’s a belief from old territory, in a form like “I need X in order to Y,” “I have to A in order to B,” or “If …, then ….” Before the four questions begin, you feel into both parts of the statement separately. With the third question, you also look at what happens to your values, your self-image, and your view of the present and the future. The fourth question here is: who would you be if you had never linked A and B? After the turnarounds, the statement that leads into new territory often sounds different.

This new statement is anchored through three stances, Robert Dilts’s “Three Minds”:

This brings body, thinking, and your connection to the world around you into harmony.

IntegrityWORK

Integrity here means acting in the way that feels right to you. Two cycles pull away from it:

The starting point is a concrete situation in which you don’t act in a way that feels true to you and you end up overthinking it. You relive it inwardly and notice where in your body something stirs or which direction an inner voice comes from. From this emerges the image of an inner part that holds a belief, for example: “If you’re not careful, the others will take you for a ride.” This belief is questioned with the four questions, also with a view to self-image, timeline, and the three stances of the Three Minds. From the turnaround, an integrity metaphor emerges: an image of what it feels like to be in integrity. With it, you go into the situation once more and look at what to do from now on.

Constellating situations

When several people are involved in a concern, they are placed in the room. For each person and for your self-image, a name card with a facing direction is made, which serves as a floor anchor. Guided by your feeling about each person, you place them where they appear to you: direction, distance, direction of gaze, eye level. For each person, or for one you choose, you put into words what bothers you and how they should be. Then you stand in another person’s place and, from there, perceive your self while these judgments are spoken aloud.

The Work can go two ways here: from your own position, you question your judgments about the others, or from another person’s position, you put their judgments and expectations into words and question them. After each round, you look at what has changed in the picture, including your self-image, and move the anchors. A second change of position brings it to a close: through the other person’s eyes, you see how you live your turnarounds, or through your own eyes, how they live theirs. You take the final picture with the new positions with you in a way that lets you call it up at any time.

Which variation for what

The variations can be sorted by concern and by the Logical Level they work on. In simplified form:

Where the “Level” column shows a dash, the source materials name no level.

The attitude behind it

More than the individual steps, what carries the work is the attitude behind the questions:

• Questioning instead of fighting. No thought is forbidden or glossed over. It is looked at.
• Curiosity instead of being right. The questions are real questions; the answers come from you.
• Staying in your own business. The focus is on what lies in your hands.
• Kindness toward yourself. Inner critics and old judgments, too, are not fought but gotten to know.
• Experience before theory. A turnaround only counts once you have found examples of your own.
• With all your senses. Body awareness, a stress scale from 1 to 10, and inner images are part of it: where do you feel the thought? Where around you does the person appear, how big, how far away? This way, change becomes something you feel, not just something you think.
• Seeing potential. A guiding idea in several variations: seeing more in other people again than what bothers you.

Common misunderstandings

The Work is not a trick for talking yourself out of bad feelings, and not a demand to put up with injustice. In acute crises or illness, the concern belongs in the hands of doctors or psychologists.