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Exploring the Power of Belief Messages in America's Complicated Identity

Bill Stierle • May 25, 2021
PT 183 | Belief Messages

Everyone has their own versions of the truth because of the so-called belief messages. One topic will always be refuted by another because they either believe it so much or are aggressively against it. Sadly, the entire nation is saturated in this kind of messaging, and thus putting America into further political imbalance. Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how belief messages play a significant role in the civil war happening within the Republican Party and its followers. They delve into their still ongoing battle against the supposed election fraud and how this mindset is directly influenced by Donald Trump's political branding. They also look at this on an individual level, talking about how the people's perception of truth is affected by this endless government dispute.


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Bill, there's an awful interesting dynamic playing in our government with the power struggle and the infighting within the Republican Party. It's important that we talk about that and try to understand the power of belief messages. At the same time, we need to contrast that and look at the opportunity the Democrats have that they're not taking advantage of with this. It's fascinating.


Communication is important, Tom. One of the biggest challenges that we have is whether you're in business, politics, or personal life, you got to watch the messages that you lay down in front of people. As you lay these messages down, they take them up and you don't know if they're taking the message as something literal, a metaphor, dangerous, something scary or something that you've got to be cautious of. The language messages that come up are ones that we've got to pay attention to because they're activating or solidifying a belief, a habit pattern of thinking. People like to think that they're stronger than their thoughts and that's not the way it works.


Your thoughts are influenced in your body and where you're going in. If I want to get good branding and marketing message out, all I got to do is keep trickling the message out. As human beings, it's the same thing. If you keep trickling the message out, the person gets hooked on that message because they don't want to change their belief. They don't want to move off of it. They won't even question what the belief is. In language and even in psychology, there are two terms for this. One of them is called a curse and another one is called a spell. Two different languages fall into this thing, whether it's a Democrat, Republican, or somebody that is following a certain thought structure.


What ends up happening is that we don't question our beliefs and double-check them. Once the belief is there, it's easier for us to stay in line with the belief because then you'd have to rewrite stuff. You'd have to go out on your own and make your own point of view. That's where language is important for the listener to realize, “Am I being affected by a belief I already have? Is that belief being reinforced because somebody has said it over and over again?” I don't know, Tom. Does Tide laundry detergent clean better than Gain? What do you think?

PT 183 | Belief Messages

People like to think that they're stronger than their thoughts, and that's not the way it works.

CLICK TO TWEET

I don't know either. I was thinking about the dishwashing detergent for your dishwasher and they all say, “You don't have to pre-wash any of these dishes. Put them in with all the worst grime and caked-on food and use this one. It'll do better than that one.” I don't know if I believe that.


It's very challenging. As human beings, our message gets fixed. If somebody looks to talk with me about a belief that is opposite of my belief, I know what feelings are going to come up. There are two powerful feelings, doubt and skepticism will come up. My belief is already indicating a truth that I have or that's something I'm already trusting that I'm standing by. As a communicator and as a mediator, as I get into a situation, I've got to understand that the belief bias is in place. A person might be operating from a curse and might be operating from a spell that is, long ago, might have been in their childhood. It might have been an experience that came up in their adult life that defined, “Don't drive down this road. This road is dangerous.”


There are people that don't go back to the city they were born in because when they go around, they'll get reactivated by all the different memories that are from that place. They go back and they're not going to visit their old house. That's tough because as human beings, if we're going to call ourselves free, then we need to free our minds from a limiting belief and question facts. Those are things that you would count on. You count them again. You count them 2 or 3 times and then you say, “We counted these things three times and we are trusting the people that counted those.” We're not listening to the other messages other than the truth of these people and the trust that we have. That's the thing that's being called into question, which is hard for us to live through.


It's being called into question in many different ways. We have a 3rd or 4th recount going on in Arizona, Maricopa County by this independent company who's never recounted election results before called Cyber Ninjas. The Republican Party in Arizona fought to get the right to recount it again the 3rd or 4th time because the Republicans in the state of Arizona don't like the result that came up. They have cast doubt and skepticism on the recount results.


This is all a part of the bigger lie, which is called the Big Lie. Donald Trump started to sow those seeds of doubt and skepticism on election day. Even before election day, he would say, “If we don't win, then there was a fraud.” Afterward, he's like, “There are all kinds of fraud. There was widespread voter fraud.” This is the lie that was perpetuated. That doubt and skepticism that he keeps sowing seem to be something that people latch on to easily.


There is a logic in his messaging and that's what makes a curse or a spell powerful. The logic is by midnight, the votes that were counted were in our favor. By morning, how could the votes be all in the other direction? To the believer, that spell is a spell message. It puts them to sleep and saying, “That makes sense to me.” It makes sense if the easy people vote the counties that are easiest to count get their numbers in first. The counties that have a greater volume and are harder to count because there's such a greater volume, those numbers would come in later. It's not the other way around. The spell says, “I want to trust my messenger because my messenger is in alignment with my beliefs.”


A spell is a verbal poison. It's something that gets in and the person is overtaken by the belief message. To move this back to business for a second in branding and marketing, it's like, “How can I get a Febreze type response out of the population where it's a billion-dollar product? All you've got to do is line the message up with the belief of a clean house smells like this. All I've got to do is make a bed and spray it with Febreze and that bed smells good.” Now you've got a billion-dollar business. I'm talking about a product. The Democrats and Republicans have a product. The challenge is how do you sell, promote, or get that product to stick? It's harder to sell a product that is good than it is a product that's going to prevent danger. It's a weird way to say it but the limbic part of the brain is interested in engaging nervous, anxious, worried and scared more than it is satisfied, calm, peaceful and delighted.

PT 183 | Belief Messages

A spell is a verbal poison. It's something that gets in, and the person is overtaken by the belief message.

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That's why it's easier to sell, “If you don't fight for your rights, you're not going to have a country anymore,” than it is to sell, “We're going to have peace and calm and everybody is going to have a job.” It's easier to play into the fears.


Curses and spells activate that way because what they are doing with a spell is that, “I want to establish a belief that causes inaction. I'm going to be an inactive place.” With the poison, “I'm going to have pent-up resentment and bitterness about the other person that you caused me to do that because it's our identity or our tribe.” Whereas a curse gets a person locked into loyalty. A curse freezes and puts blinders up on a person's mindset. It causes the person to not question, “I'm not going to question what is going on. I'm not questioning that.” That's the hard thing.


If we're going to take a look at a healthy version of the truth, it looks like we've got to walk our way back to a healthy version of the truth. We're not fully engaging a healthy version of truth where one person sits on one side and one person sits on the other side and they say, “Here's what's best for the country. Here's the healthy version of the truth.” It's adversarial. Because it's adversarial, I'm holding my fingers up and they are shooting. I've got to get our mindset to move forward about what does truth and trust look like and break the bad news, the spell and the curse. There are no messages that are breaking the spell or the curse now and nobody is willing to try it.


This is shocking that the former president, Donald Trump, and the Republican leaders in Congress have been selling this big lie and aided by right-winged opinion media hosts. They've been selling this big lie that the election was a fraud since November 2020 or maybe even before that. It has taken root, especially amongst Republican-leaning voters and Donald Trump supporters. You see interviews with these people and they do not believe that the election was fair. They believe it was stolen.


Of course, that led to the journey of the sixth insurrection. That led to many people in the House and the Senate not voting against the certification of the vote on which didn't happen then until January 7th, 2021. Now you've got this continued infighting in the Republican Party from Republicans that do not believe they should be loyal to Donald Trump, who was leading them when they lost the House in 2018 and was leading them when he lost re-election in 2020. They lost the Senate in 2020. Rather than believe they need new leadership, they're trying to cast a spell on everyone. Instead of looking for a new leader, they continue to perpetuate this lie that the election was rigged or it was stolen. That's easier than accepting we need new leadership.


It's easier because no one's capturing the energy that the former president, Donald Trump, has captured. He has shown up as the person that has that strength and that power as a marketer and a brander. I've said many times that he's brilliant at staying on a marketing and branding message and not saying, “The truth is that my facilities are the best in the world. You got to come and play golf at my facilities. Aren’t they great facilities? You got to keep coming. Look at all the famous people that come to my facilities. Don't you want to be over here with my facilities?” He’s ungraded putting the name Donald Trump on stuff and branding and marketing these facilities.


The problem with marketing and branding in that way is that if you go too far past the line, the shine wears off. The veneer wears off, it gets thin after a while and that's where some of his properties are struggling. Some of his things are going, “I don't want to be associated with that. I want us to have our own identity.” Those properties take his name off and they get sold. They get repositioned as a wonderful facility to come down. They read just the perspective to go, “This is a nice place. It's not what that other guy keeps talking about.” For America, it would be a return to certain core principles that we've left behind. That's the path out of this because we do need a path out.


It's hard to see that path because there's a civil war going on within the Republican Party. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has completely established his loyalty to former President Donald Trump. There's going to be a vote in the House about stripping Representative Elizabeth Lynne Cheney of her power in terms of the number three position in the committee and within their conference and all that. You mentioned spells and then curses. It's like Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans are putting a curse on Elizabeth Lynne Cheney because she is not getting in line and showing loyalty to Donald Trump. Instead, she is trying to stand for facts and truth that are not as juicy and people don't seem to be as interested in them, especially when they have some of these established beliefs of this Big Lie. This is a heck of a struggle that's going on there.


The party could snap back, which is an interesting thing with curses and spells because you can wake up from them. That's the point of Cinderella, Snow White, and Fiona. They’re like, “I'm supposed to this and it's going to break the spell.” We could do another whole episode of curses and spells. A curse causes a lot of doubt and skepticism because it affects truth and trust. Whereas a spell creates nervous and scared energy because it's about safety and protection. All a party has to do is keep playing those two things. Language-wise, you can watch the Republicans take turns at doing doubt, skepticism, nervousness, and scared. If you're not observing that, if you're a place of action and reaction of it, even the news media gets swirls about it. It doesn't matter how many times Don Lemon rolls his eyes about it because the curse of the spell stays in place. His viewers like that. It'll keep his ratings up but it's not helpful.


What’s helpful is talking about the cursing spell often and then empathizing and have compassion for the person that's caught with the cursing spell. By the way, it's not like the left doesn't have its version of curses and spells, too, Tom. The vaxxers got their set of problems. There are problems on the left on the belief about certain things, how to solve things and how to get there from here. There are problems being in both of those spots. There are lists of beliefs and biases that are in place that are causing our nation to go back and forth. We've got to remember what a collaborative cooperative nation looks like. You vote, advocate, become a politician until the voting booth is closed, and then you become a statesman. That's what the shift is and that's what's missing.


That's what it used to be. I agree. I remember one of the first meetings in the White House after Obama was inaugurated and John McCain, a senator, is in the room and there was this discussion about how the election is over. It's time to get to work and try to achieve consensus, compromise, or whatever. I've seen that throughout history, I remember, but that's not happening. Bill, it's important to point out the opportunity the Democrats have.


By the way, the Democrats are bad at marketing and selling compared to the Republicans or at least they don't seem to take advantage of trying to market and brand. They could be taking this civil war within the Republican Party and using some of the languages you're using about curses and spells to label all of this doubt and skepticism that they're trying to sow in the minds of the American people and establish these beliefs. If they put Kevin McCarthy talking about Elizabeth Lynne Cheney and the Big Lie or whatever next to spells that he's casting and if you label him, they're under his spell.


They're under Donald Trump's curse.


For that matter, Elizabeth Lynne Cheney did that as part of her defensive position against it.

PT 183 | Belief Messages

A curse freezes and puts blinders upon a person's mindset.

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If she gets voted out, the next thing is it looks like the party is under the spell of Donald Trump. It looks like it's going to live underneath that spell and fall under the curse of the old administration. Immediately, she will ascend and they'll go, “What?” They're living with the curse and the spell and they're believing things. They're not facing the facts that they need to face. As an adult, I'm choosing to face the facts. As a kid, they're choosing to follow the Dark Father. If they choose to follow the Dark Father the way he is still in and the way he's violent and allow the country to stay in violence because he can sell violence, he already sold violence once. Those poor people set empathy and compassion. The people that followed him during the insurrection were under a spell and a curse. Because they followed that message, they are facing legal consequences. I feel disheartened and saddened because their justice is going to be held accountable for doing what our former president, Donald Trump, told them to do.


It's a lack of language skills. She and her team should be doing that. What if they then equated that whole thing with Make America Great Again? Also, want to Make America Great Again like Donald Trump did lose the House in 2018, losing the election in 2020, losing the Senate in 2020. You could start to brand Make America Great Again as this curse and spell also and send Donald Trump out to pasture.


It's hard to break a curse. It's hard to get the antidote for a spell. Tom, if I came over to your house and I'm bringing something for a party or something like that, I'm going to go to the grocery store and I'm going to be influenced by a brand that is circulating in my mindset. I'm going to be affected by that. I'm going to bring one of those well-branded items not because it's the best but because it's the one that stuck in my head. There's a belief that it's the best. There's a belief that it's the thing. Why would I buy Budweiser beer when I can buy Modelo, who has a, “We're better together,” message to celebrate the immigrant. I’m buying that one.


I remember one of the biggest images in my mind of that is as a young teenager or preteen and my great uncle comes to visit from California. I was in New York at the time. It's summertime and he opens up this package of ice-cream-popsicle type things dipped in chocolate. I'm expecting a normal Fudgicle or something. He’s like, “No. These Dove bars.” As he's giving it to you, he’s like, “This is the best.” I was like, “Talk about a brand message.” Like you were saying coming to the party, he's the relative from afar and you haven't seen him forever and he's great. He's giving you the best.


The Dove bar, the thick chocolate ice cream and you're going like, “You're right. You are the best uncle ever.” Make America Great Again had that fading narrative. It's going to be a fading narrative. What they do with curses and spells, too, Tom, is they make it a shrine. They make it a worship piece. Curses and spells are at different altars that are showing up. They all have their veneer and their veneer starts falling off after a while and people don't believe it. They're going, “I couldn't believe that but there are not enough people around to believe that with me.” That's the unsettling thing.


It may be too late for Elizabeth Lynne Cheney. I hope that she or her staff reads this and realizes that there is a way to use language and message your way to labeling what's going on as curses and spells and wake the people up.


There's a waking-up, a reckoning both on the left and the right of how they're messaging each other. We're not advocating another set of curses and spells on the left. We’re advocating what is the higher vision of the American brand. How do you clean that off unless the American brand re-establishes itself as unified? The Chinese Ambassador said in the meeting was, “America doesn't have the same credibility that it used to.” As soon as the Joe Biden rep said this, the Chinese guy goes, “You don't have it the way you used to have it.”


That means that we got some international brand problems that are doing it because if they're not going to take us seriously, all of a sudden, it doesn't matter how much that we utilize our force because it becomes, “So what? We’ll outlast you. Welcome to Afghanistan.” “So what? We’ll outlast. Welcome to Iraq. We’ll outlast you because you can't maintain that you're fighting for freedom when you're not.” That's hard for Americans to believe that we've got to keep reinvigorating the things that we can do good in the world and not necessarily the things that pit us against each other, which is not a strong, collaborative and cooperative narrative.


The main thing with curses and spells is whether it's an individual struggling or a company struggling, these messages of the ability to create an identity or a value to bring it back to life like respect, integrity, truth or trust takes a joint pushing the boulder up the hill and saying, “I believe this word conservative but I also believe the definition of conservative. I believe the definition of what progressive means. I want to grow and progress and do what's better or what's best without letting go of something that worked in the past that doesn't work anymore.” We've got to work our language around and be careful about what the curses and spells do because they are a power that is activated by these already inherent belief messages that we've been saturated by. We're not going back. We've got to go forward, somehow. Back is not a viable path to where we were because we don't have that identity that we used to have in the 1950s.


It is a different time and so much has changed. It's been over 70 years since the 1950s.


It was a great identity, driving around in cars, going to the drive-in, starting to dance, doing the jitterbug or whatever the ‘50s music was, the birth of rock and roll and having fun. We need to take a look at where our identity needs to go as a nation and look at that. There’s more about that coming up, Tom because there's a lot to talk about with curses and spells, for sure.


That was helpful. I appreciate that discussion, Bill. It helps put some perspective on some of the languaging and messaging going on. It shows some tragedies of language and some opportunities as well.


Thanks, Tom.

PT 183 | Belief Messages

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