Lesson 19 – How Changing Your Beliefs Will Change Your Life
“Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.”
MAHATMA GANDHI
YOUR BELIEFS SHAPE YOUR LIFE
You may have concluded that events control your life and that your environment has shaped you into who you are today. However, that could not be further from the truth.
. . . It’s not the events of your life that shape you, but your beliefs as to what those events mean . . .
BELIEFS AFFECT YOU AT ALL LEVELS
Beliefs are not just limited to impacting your emotions or your actions; they even extend down as far as being able to affect your physical body. You can transform your body in many ways through a simple but powerful belief. You can override the impact of drugs. By imposing a belief, you can send commands to your central nervous system and make measurable changes in your biochemistry.
GLOBAL BELIEFS
Some beliefs are so general that they can dominate virtually every aspect of your life, either negatively or positively. These global beliefs can affect your identity, other people, work, time, money, and life. These large-scale beliefs can shape and color every aspect of your life as though they had some outside physical control over these areas of influence. Yet, it is just a thought that goes through an empowering process that ends in what we know as a belief.
WHAT IS A BELIEF?
Most people treat a belief as though it’s a thing when all it represents is a feeling of certainty about something or someone. If you believe you’re intelligent, all you’re saying is, “I feel certain that I’m intelligent.” That sense of certainty allows you to tap into resources that will enable you to produce intelligent results.
COMPLETE KNOWLEDGE IS ALREADY AVAILABLE
We all have access to complete knowledge, which already resides within us, allowing us to accomplish virtually anything that we desire. If, for any reason, we lack knowledge in a particular area, we can access it through others and obtain the answers that we need to accomplish our goal. But often, our lack of belief and uncertainty prevent us from using the capacity that resides within us.
BELIEFS ARE NOT FOUNDED UPON TRUTH
In actuality, it doesn’t matter if what you believe is true. What matters for a belief to be fully operational is that it is empowering. If you can find references that support a belief through a person who supports your belief, or if you can find some personal experience that supports your belief (whether your belief is faulty or not), your belief is strengthened or weakened depending on the degree of support you can come up with.
You can draw from your personal experiences, other people’s experiences, books, movies, self-improvement audio tapes, or almost endless possibilities. Sometimes, you can create a belief solely through your imagination.
EMOTIONAL INTENSITY IS THE KEY TO EMPOWERING A BELIEF
The more references you have to support your belief, the stronger it will become. In addition, the greater the emotional intensity you feel about any of these references, the stronger your belief will become. With enough emotional intensity and repetition, your nervous system experiences something as being honest, even if it hasn’t occurred yet.
CREATE YOUR TRUTH
You can use imagined references to propel you toward your dreams. People can succeed if they imagine something vividly enough just as quickly as they had actual experiences. Your brain can’t tell the difference between something you’ve vividly imagined and something you’ve experienced.
Everyone who has accomplished some significant achievement could feel confident that they could succeed, even though no one before them had ever accomplished what they accomplished. They’ve been able to create references where no references existed and achieved what in the beginning seemed to be impossible.
FEAR LIMITS BELIEFS
People often develop limiting beliefs about who they are and their capabilities. Because they haven’t succeeded in the past, they believe they won’t be able to succeed in the future. As a result, out of fear, they constantly focus on being “realistic.”
Most people who constantly say, “Let’s be realistic,” are really just living in fear, deathly afraid of being disappointed again. Out of that fear, they develop beliefs that cause them to hesitate and not give their all—consequently, they get their expected limited results.
IMAGINATION DEVELOPS POWERFUL BELIEFS
Great leaders are rarely “realistic.” They are intelligent and accurate, but they are not realistic according to other people’s standards. They know human capacity is much greater than most of us dream. These successful people summon their imagination to picture themselves doing something, even after many failures and succeeding. Their special ability, this unique focus, allows them to persist until they eventually gain the distinctions that put them over the top. Success eludes most people because they have insufficient references to success in the past, so they fail to continue trying. All great leaders, all people who have achieved success in any area of life, know the power of continuously pursuing their vision, even if all the details of how to achieve it aren’t yet available.
YOU CAN CREATE ANYTHING THAT YOUR MIND CAN CONCEIVE
Develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide. You can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including things other people are certain are impossible.
HOW TO CHANGE A BELIEF
All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in beliefs.
One effective way to change a belief is to get your mind to associate massive pain with the old belief. You must feel deep within yourself that not only has this belief caused you pain in the past, but it’s causing you even more in the present and, ultimately, can only bring more pain in the future. It would help if you associated tremendous pleasure with adopting a new, empowering belief.
Operating from the center of your frontal being, your outer personality, everything that you do is either done out of your need to avoid pain or your desire to gain pleasure. If you associate enough pain with anything, you’ll change. The only reason you have a belief about something is that you’ve linked massive pain to not believing it or massive pleasure to keeping it alive.
DOUBT TOPPLES MOST BELIEFS
Another way to change a belief is to create doubt. As you examine your past experiences, you will find that there are some beliefs in your past that you used to defend entirely and totally, and one day, they lost their power and their hold on you. Something caused you to create doubt. It may have been a new experience that negated your old belief, showing that it wasn’t what you thought it was, either weakening it or disproving its validity.
Yet, experience doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you will change your old beliefs, even if the experience runs counter to its premise. New experiences trigger change only if they cause you to question your beliefs since whenever you believe something, you no longer question it in any way. When you honestly question your beliefs, you no longer feel confident about them – you lose your feeling of absolute certainty.
BY QUESTIONING ANY BELIEF ENOUGH, DOUBT IS GUARANTEED
Another observation becomes interesting in the light of gaining access to voluntarily changing or altering your belief system. If you question anything enough, you will eventually begin to doubt it.
Based on the different levels of emotional certainty and intensity, your beliefs are either relatively easy or very difficult to change but still changeable. It would be better classified as an opinion if it has a low level of emotional certainty and intensity attached to it. It could be called a belief if it has a medium level of certainty and intensity. But if it has a high level of certainty and intensity attached to it, it would then be classified as a conviction.
RAISING A BELIEF TO THE LEVEL OF CONVICTION
Probably the most significant factor separating a belief and a conviction is that a conviction is usually triggered by substantial emotional events, during which your mind is forced into intensifying the belief since it links massive pain with not believing.
If a conviction is strong enough, it can become crucial to a person’s survival. On the positive side, the empowering effect of a conviction can inspire us to great heights of achievement.
Often, the best thing you can do to create mastery in any area of your life is to raise a belief to the level of conviction. Conviction has the power to drive you to action and to push you through all kinds of obstacles. Beliefs can also do this, but some areas of your life may require the added emotional intensity of conviction.
For example, a conviction that you are an intelligent person who can always find a way to turn things around can help steer you through some of the most challenging times in your life. Similarly, if you can develop a conviction, you can make consistently healthy lifestyle choices, thus avoiding the everyday problems that most people struggle with, such as being overweight or through other unhealthy lifestyle habits that can lead to sluggishness, illness, or low self-esteem.
DEVELOPING CONVICTION
To create a conviction, you need to start with a basic belief and reinforce it by adding new and more powerful references.
The most potent reference you can find will be that of another highly motivated person who has already turned your desired belief into a conviction. As you locate and talk with various people who have raised their beliefs to the level of conviction, you will more easily get the fire to start burning within your own belief. The more references you develop and the more emotional the references are, the stronger your conviction will become.
CREATING A TRIGGER TO PROPEL YOUR CONVICTION
Once you have acquired adequate references, you need to find a triggering event or create one on your own. To do this, you need to ask yourself, “What will it cost me if I don’t empower my belief to the level of conviction and make it real within my life?” Ask yourself questions that create emotional intensity.
As an example, if you want to develop a conviction never to do something again that is highly harmful to yourself or others around you, go out and interview others who have gone further with this action and have incurred real pain and suffering in their lives. See firsthand what your actions are leading you toward so that you can feel what your actions represent in the end. Identify powerfully with the full extent of the path that you are following. These kinds of experiences have the power to push you over the edge and establish true conviction.
TAKING ACTION
Finally, after working through the steps listed above, you need to take action. Each action strengthens your commitment and raises the level of your emotional intensity and conviction.
DO NOT LOOK TO OTHERS FOR GUIDANCE – STAY CENTERED
One of the challenges with convictions is that they’re often based on other people’s enthusiasm for your beliefs. So, usually, people believe something because everybody else believes it. However, others’ beliefs are not always accurate. Even so, when people are unsure what to do, they look to others for guidance.
Looking to others for guidance is one of the most powerful ways to limit your life – to make it just like everyone else’s. Some of the most vital guidance that people use is information that they get from “experts.” But are experts always right? Think about human history over the last several hundred years and look at the various expert opinions regarding the observation of life. Whether medicine, religion, or whatever, time has shown a significant number of expert opinions as unfounded.
Trusting experts blindly is not well-advised.
Don’t blindly accept anything in your life, no matter the source. Consider all things as they relate to the entire context of your life and determine how what you are trying to make a decision about makes sense to you.
Sometimes, even the evidence of your senses can’t be trusted. In the end, only you are responsible for your own actions, and you need to develop a knowledge system that goes far beyond your senses or the opinions of others.
PAIN IS THE ULTIMATE TOOL FOR SHIFTING A BELIEF
You will find it true that pain is the most powerful way to change a belief. However, you may only be substituting one faulty belief for another unless you can figure out how to acquire a “correct” belief.
In the next lesson of this course, you will be presented with a method for acquiring “correct knowledge”, a method called “Correct Responding.”
Suppose you are working with clearly harmful beliefs. In that case, you should work toward attempting to release their negative hold on your life so that you can more comfortably receive and assimilate actual knowledge that I’ll release in the later sessions of this course. It’s vital to examine your beliefs to determine who you have become and your current beliefs’ consequences on your life. Are they empowering you, or are they disempowering you?
CONSCIOUS SELF-OBSERVATION OF YOUR CURRENT BELIEFS
To determine your beliefs, you need to go through a period of conscious self-observation.
Stop everything else you’re doing. Take the next ten or twenty minutes to begin brainstorming all your beliefs, both those that empower you and those that disempower you.
Include your lesser beliefs that don’t seem to matter much and your stronger ones that seem to make a big difference.
Make sure that you cover:
- If-then beliefs like, “If I consistently give my all, then I will succeed,” or “If I’m passionate with this person, he or she will leave me.”
- Global beliefs include beliefs about people—“People are basically good” or “People are a pain”—beliefs about yourself, beliefs about opportunity, beliefs about time, and beliefs about scarcity and abundance.
Write down as many of these beliefs as possible for the next few minutes.
EMPOWERING BELIEFS
What have you learned by going through this exercise? Take a moment to review the beliefs you have written down. Decide upon and circle the three most empowering beliefs on your list. How do they empower you? How do they strengthen your life? Think about the positive processional effects they have upon you. Do you have any beliefs that haven’t yet been powerfully employed within your life that would have an immediate and positive impact on it? Review your list and strengthen your emotional intensity and sense of certainty that these beliefs are genuine and authentic so that they can guide your future behaviors.
DISEMPOWERING BELIEFS
Now, look at your limiting beliefs. As you review them, what are some of the consequences that these beliefs carry with them? Circle the two most disempowering beliefs. Decide right now, once and for all, that you’re no longer willing to pay the price these beliefs take upon your life. Remember that if you begin to doubt any of your beliefs and question their validity, you can weaken them so they no longer impact you.
To question the certainty held by your disempowering beliefs, ask yourself the following questions:
1. How might this belief be ridiculous?
2. Was the person I learned this belief from worth modeling in this area?
3. What will it ultimately cost me emotionally if I don’t let go of this belief?
4. What will it ultimately cost me in my relationships if I don’t let go of this belief?
5. What will it physically cost me if I don’t let go of this belief?
6. What will it ultimately cost?
7. What will it cost my family or loved ones if I don’t let go of this belief?
If you’ve taken the time to answer these questions, you may find that your beliefs have been significantly weakened just through the analysis of these questions.
Now, become entirely associated with what these beliefs have been costing you and the actual costs in the future if you do not change. Link such intense pain that you’ll want to rid yourself of them forever, and then, finally, decide to do so now.
IMPORTANT
You won’t be able to eliminate a belief pattern without replacing it with a new one. So, write down the replacements for the two limiting beliefs you’ve just eliminated. What is their opposite, their antithesis?
If you are not getting the results you want in your life, you need to ask yourself, “What would I have to believe to succeed in this area?” “Who is already succeeding in this area, and what do they believe differently than I do about what’s possible?” or “What’s necessary to believe to succeed?” You may very well discover the critical belief that has been eluding you.
If you’re experiencing pain, if you feel challenged, frustrated, or angry, you may want to ask yourself, “What would I have to believe in order to feel the way I do?” This simple process is miraculous because it will uncover beliefs you aren’t even aware you have.
While you’re examining these limiting beliefs, notice how your feelings change. Realize, believe, and trust that if you change the meaning of any event in your mind, you will immediately change how you feel and what you do, leading you to change your actions and thus transform your destiny.
Changing what something means will change the decisions you make. Remember, nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning you give it. So make sure that you consciously choose the meaning most aligned with the destiny you’ve chosen for yourself.
Beliefs have the tremendous potential to create or destroy. Do you truly want to harness the power to make the vision you wish to rather than ruin your dreams? If you do, learn to choose the beliefs that empower you. Create convictions that drive you toward the destiny that calls from your higher Self.
IN CONCLUSION
If, through the analysis of your belief system, you agree that up until now, you have become a product of your conditioning, particularly the first eighteen years of life, open your mind to the possibility that you can use the same process to design an entirely new life and become anyone that you would like to become?
Is this possible? Yes and No. Technically it is totally and completely possible. However, the problem is that we all come into life carrying a unique blueprint, a purpose that needs to be carried out to further the development that our soul requires of us.
If you could clearly identify this unique soul’s purpose, you could then utilize the techniques for changing your beliefs outlined above. You would be able to determine what new beliefs would empower you and help you pursue this path, and you would be able to define which old beliefs need to be removed to do so.
Beliefs are powerful tools, and until you know what you came here to do with your life, you cannot blindly play with your belief system.
Your belief system has become a chaotic heap of both empowering and unempowering beliefs. It is possible that some of your disempowering beliefs are there in your life to help direct you through the experience required to pursue your path.
Until you know for certain what your life path actually is, you can’t evaluate your beliefs based on moving away from pain toward pleasure or on any other polarity judgment, such as good or bad, empowering or disempowering.
You first need to obtain the answer to the question, “What is My Soul’s Purpose? What is it that I came here to do with my life?”
That’s why I spent seven full-time years working on finding my actual life path and why I needed to gain the answer to all three of life’s key archetypal questions. And that’s why I’m now sharing this process with you.
Define, know, and accept the answer to your question, “What Is My Souls’ Purpose?” you are well on your way toward success. If you don’t find the answer to this question and allow your life to be led solely by the throw of the dice or the gust of the wind, you will never receive true fulfillment and will always have a gaping hole within you that still needs to be filled.
What are the odds that you will accidentally stumble upon and powerfully implement your Soul’s Purpose without conscious effort? Probably zero!