BELIEFS

Think of the “I am weak and worthless” versus the “I am strong and powerful” exercise (do try this exercise out before you continue with the reading). Remember how much difference there was in your existence saying the two different phrases. The scary and the exciting thing is that you were just asked to say the two different phrases; you didn’t necessarily have to believe them. What if you believed you were weak and worthless? Do you think your life would be different than if you believed you were strong and powerful?

To see how beliefs are created you need to understand how your brain works. Whenever anything happens in your life, your brain asks, “What does this mean?” To find an answer your brain searches through your beliefs.

A belief is a generalisation. Rather than having to evaluate each incident that occurs on an individual basis, a belief groups incidents of similar nature together and makes a blanket rule about them. For example if someone smiles at you, you will probably think that they like you. This is because people have a belief that “if someone smiles at me, then they like me”.

A belief has a major effect on the way you operate. We do not consciously think about our beliefs very often (although we are usually aware of what they are).

A belief is a lot like a table. The surface of the table is held up by its legs, similarly a belief (the tabletop) is held by references from our past (the legs).

Let’s say you had abusive parents, the kids at school treated you badly and had been mugged. Each of these are references. These references could support a belief (the tabletop) that people are bad ad will try to cause me harm. Someone from a cosy background who got on well at school has a very different references (legs). They are much more like to have a belief like “People are good and kind”.

What causes a belief to develop is having enough strong references to support it. Just say someone had abusive parents but everyone else treated them well. Although the abusive parents are a strong factor, there might not be enough references (legs) to support the belief that all people are abd and will try to cause me harm”.

Just like a table a belief can’t stand on one leg alone.

Beliefs affect the way you associate meaning to carious occurences, which in turn affects your behavior. Just say that a person with belief “people are bad and will try to cause me harm” drives past a broken down car. More likely that they won’t stop while someone who has a different belief (e.g. People are good) would.

The challenge is that we quickly become convinced that our beliefs are true when often – times they are wrong. The key to beliefs is to become aware of the references you have from your past to support them, then you can determine, based on the quality of the references, whether or not they are useful beliefs to have.

For example if you have the belief that “all people are dishonest” based on the reference of the someone stealing 15 cents from you when you were in kindergarten then you probably need to review and change that belief. If you realize that you have silly or unimportant references for your belief then you can quite easily change them. It’s like kicking the legs out from under the table – if you wreck the references, the belief will no longer stand.

The opposite is true about building up good beliefs. If you want to believe you are confident, think of the many times you have acted or felt confident, the more legs your table has, the stronger it will be.