{"id":1907,"date":"2010-03-14T23:18:46","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T07:18:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pickthebrain.com\/?p=1907"},"modified":"2013-08-21T12:31:36","modified_gmt":"2013-08-21T20:31:36","slug":"change-your-beliefs-change-your-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pickthebrain.com\/blog\/change-your-beliefs-change-your-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Change Your Beliefs, Change Your Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Mosk” courtesy of Maciej Mizer<\/a>
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Our life is what our thoughts make it. Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil. ~Marcus Aurelius<\/em><\/p>\n

A belief is something you consider to be true. You cannot decide to believe one thing this week and another, opposing thing, next week. You might think you can, but it really doesn\u2019t work like that. I read recently that baby circus elephants are tied to a strong metal post with a heavy chain because they will try to escape and expend a lot of energy on pulling at their tether. After some time, they accept that they will not be able to escape and so stop pulling. The adult elephants are tethered to a wooden stake with a light rope: they could easily escape, but they believe they are unable to do so, and so the light tethering works as a kind of symbol of their bondage. It is clear that whether your beliefs are true or not is irrelevant. What matters is what you regard to be true. It seems to me that this is a good definition of \u2018belief.\u2019<\/p>\n

People believe all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. Some beliefs are trivial and others are very important, but two things are certain:<\/p>\n

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  1. Our underlying beliefs operate at a deep, subconscious level, and<\/li>\n
  2. These underlying beliefs affect what we experience in life, including our level of success or failure in any endeavor.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Where do these beliefs come from?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Philip Larkin said \u2018They f**k you up, your mum and dad.\u2019 Which might seem a bit cruel, but then he did admit that \u2018they do not mean to, but they do.\u2019 What he\u2019s saying, of course, is that we learn our worldview from our parents, and if our parents think that life is a struggle and that money and success don\u2019t come easily, then this will be our \u2018defaults mode,\u2019 too. We spend many years being \u2018drip fed\u2019 these beliefs and they get embedded deep in our subconscious. It\u2019s fine to say \u2018just change your beliefs,\u2019 but it\u2019s not always so easy. We have picked up many limiting beliefs from parents, teachers, friends, religion (dare I say?) and society in general. Some of these beliefs are holding us back, so doesn\u2019t it make sense that we should want to shed them?<\/p>\n

    Do we really want to get rid of these beliefs?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Actually, it\u2019s not that simple. We can get a tremendous payback from some apparently harmful and limiting beliefs. I\u2019m sure we all know people who seem to identify themselves as a victim, believing that they are helpless and needing someone to look after them or \u2018save\u2019 them. These people get a feeling of security (they don\u2019t have to try to be better or take any risks because they know it\u2019s pointless and they will fail), and they get people running around after them, looking after them.<\/p>\n

    We need to look at our beliefs and examine what kind of payback we are getting from them and so why we might not want to let go of them. Some examples of limiting beliefs might be:<\/p>\n