Beliefs - Grow

A Belief is something that we hold true, something that we associate with as being correct and something that influences our judgement of situations. You will actually have many more beliefs than you may think, and it is only when faced with situations that you begin to realise just what you believe.

Beliefs are created through experience, whether this be primary experience or secondary experience ie whether you experienced the situation yourself or whether the information came to you via a third party. If you trust someone and they tell you something, more often than not you will believe it to be true, unless it conflicts with your own already developed belief about the situation.

If someone told you that a good trusting friend of yours had been caught by the police for shoplifting, you might not believe them. In fact, you would need to find out for yourself before you believed it. If the person that had told you was actually a good friend, then you would believe them straight away, because in your belief system you know the good friend to be honest and trustworthy and well, a good friend.

Of course if you were witness to the person’s arrest, a primary experience, then you would have no doubts as to the truth of the story.

Our beliefs about some things are much more deep-rooted than simple opinions about people and things, and are often beliefs that we have developed over time, with little or no evidence to support them. Religious beliefs for instance, come from a much wider spiritual arena, to as faith. If you are religious you will hold many beliefs to do with rituals, do’s and don’ts, sex, marriage and all manner of things that you believe in because you associate them as being correct as part of your faith.

Life shaping beliefs are representational of our mental condition and are either positive or negative. Negative beliefs are often described as limiting beliefs, because they limit you or hold you back. Consider this statement,

‘Whether you believe you can, or your believe you can’t, you are probably right’

This favourite Grow Personal Development statement perfectly highlights the power of beliefs in shaping our lives. We are saying that if you believe in your ability to do something you will probably succeed and equally if you believe you can’t do something, then you probably won’t succeed.- this is a very powerful truth.

Limiting Beliefs
We have identified Limiting Beliefs as negative, and they are, but they are more than that. When you limit yourself you strongly believe that you exhibit traits that you cannot overcome. For example, if you believe you are clumsy and you can’t walk past things without bumping into them, then you are limiting yourself to a behaviour of always knocking into things. Even when you don’t you just think it’s an accident that you didn’t bump into it and go on reinforcing the Limiting Belief.
If you believe that you are no good at presentations then you will not take part in presentations if you can help it, you are limiting yourself, and again this abstinence reinforces your belief.

It is important whenever that voice inside your head tells you not to do something, listen to it and think, will taking part cause me any physical danger, or am I just being scared of the unknown? In most situations it will be the latter, try and take part, because when you do you will feel an overwhelming sense of achievement and you will go onto to shape your Limiting beliefs into positive beliefs, because of your primary experience.

Another form of a Limiting Belief or closed mindedness is believing that there is only one way to skin a cat, that the problem has only one solution. We may be correct that our solution works but this whole process has stopped us from opening our minds and seeing all the possible solutions, some of which may have been quicker and more successful had we not been limited by our beliefs.

Reinforcing beliefs
We have mentioned the word reinforcing when discussing Limiting Beliefs. As Human Beings most of our lives are shaped in some way by our beliefs, and as creatures who like to be right, we spend most of our lives looking for ways to prove ourselves right. This is particularly apparent as adults because we have experienced so much, we are less open to learning, and our belief generation slows down considerably from the open-minded children we once were.

Because we need to be right we won’t take part in that presentation, as a way of proving to ourselves that we shouldn’t be doing it, because we believe we can’t. If we do take part with the negative mindset then it is likely we will mess it up, through nervousness, forgetting what we are saying etc, and this is just our bodies proving our belief correct, we are rubbish at presentations and there’s living proof.

We constantly look to reinforce our beliefs, particularly in our opinions of others. If we hold a view that a person is a certain way, then each time we interact with them we will be looking, often subconsciously, for signs to reinforce our view. An example is if someone was irritable the first time we met them, and they behaved quite ignorantly, we would view them, or believe them to be an ignorant person. The next time we met them they may be perfectly civil, but we would subconsciously be trying to find fault, and any indication of ignorance would re-affirm our view, regardless of how overall nice and pleasant they were.

Belief therapy: Changing your Beliefs coming soon