How To Untangle Your Beliefs
Our beliefs literally shape our reality, your world is totally different from the world I live in right now and that’s great. We all live in a world shaped by our beliefs and our beliefs have been shaped by the people around us in childhood and the experiences we had when we were younger. New beliefs are also formed when we are older but most of our beliefs are formed at a young age.
It’s time to untangle the messy world of beliefs and start a new life, get rid of the outdated beliefs, update the one which no longer serve us and even form new beliefs. Is this even possible? without a doubt it is.
Untangling your current beliefs
To start untangling the box of beliefs you have, you first have to know what beliefs you currently have about yourself and that involves asking yourself lots of questions. A lot of people would not have a clue where to start with this so let me give you a shortcut: If you figure out who you really want to be then you have figured out who you don’t want to be and therefore you’ve figured out your beliefs about yourself.
So, first of all what kind of person do you want to be?
Take Bob for example, he wants to be intelligent, funny, attractive to women, rich, caring, kind, and settle down and have a family one day. We can take it piece by piece here and he would ask himself: do I believe I am intelligent just now, do I believe I am funny just now, do I believe I am attractive to women and so on. When you have a list of questions and a list of yes and no’s you can start working on your beliefs from there . So we might have a list like this:
Intelligent – No
Attractive to women – No
Funny – Yes
Rich – No
Caring – Yes
Kind – Yes
That’s only the start but at least it’s a start. So we now know Bob doesn’t believe he is intelligent, attractive to women and rich. He believes he is kind, caring and funny. We have a basis from which to start untangling his beliefs.
Updating your beliefs
Once you have a list of beliefs about yourself you can start to work on each one in turn. You are now a scientist looking to prove your hypothesis correct. Your hypothesis is your belief.
Going back to Bob, he doesn’t believe he is intelligent so his hypothesis is the opposite of what he believes, so we are turning a negative belief into a positive one, so it is ‘I am intelligent’. Scientists look for evidence to support their hypothesis and Bob is going to do this too. He looks at his achievements in life: high school diploma, good grades in college before dropping out, loves reading, likes to talk about scientific facts, knows all the American presidents and all the facts on them, knows and loves American history, and so on. These are all signs of intelligence. Yes he may have dropped out of college, but that was due to unforeseen circumstances and he couldn’t go back to college to complete his studies as he needed money to help his family. So in his old belief system he found evidence to say he wasn’t intelligent by quoting ‘I didn’t finish college.’ Now he is proving to himself that he is intelligent by looking at the grades he got while he was at college.
Bob looks for more evidence as the days go by. He also does this with each negative belief he has about himself and proves that his old beliefs were wrong and he updates them accordingly.
Bob untangles one belief at a time. As the months and years go on, Bob is continually reinforcing his positive beliefs about himself until they are engrained.
What are your beliefs?
This may sound a little too time consuming to change your life this way but think about it you have spent years getting to where you are now with negative self beliefs, why not spend a few days and months untangling the negative beliefs and turning them into positive ones.
© Steven Aitchison, February 7, 2010
Related posts:
- Developing Your Own Beliefs and Values The hallmark of any philosophical venture and the living...
- Our Beliefs About Our Mental Health Having a mental health problem such as Depression, Bipolar disorder...
- Writing about what we care about It is always best for writers to write about what...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
