Beliefs
BELIEFS -> THOUGHTS -> ACTIONS -> RESULTS
THE IMPORTANCE OF BELIEFS
Much of who you are is based on your beliefs. Either your conscious beliefs or your unconscious ones. They make up your ‘map’ of the world and your place in it. These ‘maps’ allow you to negotiate life as best you can.
WHAT ARE BELIEFS
Beliefs are a sense of certainty about what something means. A feeling supported by references i.e. life experiences (what you have been told and felt). Imagine a table if you will with four legs. The table top is your belief and the legs your references that support and hold that belief up.
However, your beliefs are not real – they are constructs. The ‘map’ is NOT the territory – merely a subjective representation of it. In other words beliefs are the minds way of creating meaning to all that it experiences. They are the fabric of the meaning you give to life and to the events you experience in life.
Because they are constructs and therefore not ‘real’, no belief is either right or wrong. However, they can be either empowering or limiting, as they are the basis for what we think and therefore do.
In many cases our beliefs are not even our own, but were ‘taught’ to us when we were young and very impressionable. But now they determine our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors and are the basis for the construction of our personal realities. We often forget that our beliefs are subjective and not necessarily even true.
“The outer conditions of a person’s life will always be found to reflect their inner beliefs.” – James Allen
THE POWER OF BELIEFS
Conscious Beliefs
Your mind filters everything you experience through your senses according to your beliefs. Different people can witness an event such as a crime and give different descriptions based on how their mind filtered it. This is normal but begs the question – do we ever experience reality or just our notion of it. It is said that we can never really know reality but only ‘our’ version of it based on how we have percieved it. Our perception of reality is exactly that – a perception. Different people perceive the same thing differently.
Hidden Subconscious Beliefs
Hidden beliefs are those buried deep in our sub-conscious. We don’t consciously think about them and we might even deny that they exist. But in actuality they play a significant part in how we enact ourselves.
We are only conscious of a tiny fraction of their influence in our lives. The rest lays submerged in the subconscious, driving our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Sometimes what we wish to create for ourselves, fails, because one, some, or all of our subconscious beliefs contradict us.
What you believe determines the world you live in, and by changing one, you change the other.