How Do You Create & Change Beliefs?
I'm going to start with the Oxford Languages definition of belief:
-
An acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.
-
Trust, faith, or confidence in (someone or something).
We all have beliefs. If you don't believe that, then you have a belief that another version of that statement is true. Either way, you have a viewpoint that is driven by an underlying belief. We need to have beliefs about the world and the things or people in it. It is part of our filtering system that allows us to process and store information. Without beliefs, we wouldn't be able to make judgements or decisions effectively. We would likely go round in circles when evaluating the evidence because in the absence of a belief how do you know if the evidence supports or contradicts it?
Our beliefs play an important role in how we see the world. If you believe something to be true you are more likely to seek and retain information that confirms what you believe (known as confirmation bias). If you believe in someone you trust, respect, or have faith in you are more likely to readily accept the information they provide. It is also the case that you will dismiss information or evidence from people you don't trust
or that goes against what you believe.
It is worth noting that we are not born with beliefs. We do not arrive into this world pre-programmed with what is true and what is false. So how are beliefs created?
Beliefs can be created from the following:
-
Your Environment
-
Your Knowledge
-
Past Results you've experienced
-
Key events in your life
-
A future vision of yourself/your life
A good number of our beliefs come from our early childhood experiences. At a young age, we readily accept advice and guidance to be true from parents, guardians, family, teachers, friends. Sometimes we don't even need to be given advice and instead, we draw conclusions based on observing how those around us behave. It is only until later on in life, when we have developed the capability to think and reason for ourselves that we can make our own decisions about what to believe in or not. We would still be believing in Santa Claus if we hadn't been told otherwise or found our parents sneaking presents under the tree (spoiler alert: he is not real).
Beliefs also tend to be generated when emotions are high. If I started to challenge a person's deepest held beliefs about who they are or what they believe in there is a good chance they will either become upset or defensive. No one likes to be told what they believe to be true is not actually true.
Context and person-dependent, beliefs span a spectrum depending on whether they help or hinder you. On one end of the scale, a belief could be incredibly positive, empowering, and inspiring. On the other end, a belief could be severely limiting and debilitating. This is because our beliefs influence our emotional state, our emotional state drives our behaviour and our behaviour determines the results we get in life.
Becoming aware of your beliefs, especially your limiting ones, is the first step to changing them. This is where the challenge lies. Since we formed a number of beliefs in early childhood it is highly likely that these beliefs are unconscious, that is to say, you are not aware of them. And so, they remain hidden under the surface, influencing the decisions we make, how we feel and what behaviours we do as an adult even if they originated from when we were younger.
"Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will come" - Brooke Hampton
I'm not advocating that you spend your precious time going back over your past and re-evaluating your beliefs. The purpose is to make you aware so that if you have a bad experience as a result of a limiting belief you are more empowered to challenge and change it. In situations where a person is consistently suffering then a trained therapist would help the person explore the past and identify the root cause of the suffering.
In less severe cases that don't require professional help, we can tackle negative beliefs in a number of ways. In this article, I will share two methods which are:
-
Gaining leverage
-
Fact-finding
The first method is to generate leverage for change by associating pain with the limiting belief and pleasure/joy with an empowering belief that you want to replace it with. To do this you could look at the impact the limiting belief has had on your life and will continue to have on your life. What opportunities are you missing out on because of it? Who may no longer be in your life because of it? What has it prevented you from doing? Then you look at the benefits of having a new empowering belief in your life and then you commit to making a decision to move forward and leave the limiting belief behind in the past.
The second method seeks evidence that conflicts with the limiting belief and supports the new empowering belief. I can reassure you that if you look hard enough you will find examples that support this new belief and discredit your limiting belief. The method relies on you reassessing the evidence you use that gives your limiting belief power and changing it if necessary. Ideally, you want this evidence to be as factual as possible and not something that is subjective (i.e an opinion).
You might be sat there wondering how all of this works in real life, so let me give you a personal example of how important re-evaluating your beliefs are.
Growing up I felt I was a fairly quiet and relatively shy teenager/young adult that had trouble expressing himself. I was comfortable with people I knew but struggled to connect with people I didn't know so well. I was the kind of person who you would find in 1 on 1 conversation rather than getting involved in group discussions or debates. I listened far more than I spoke and over the course of my school years, I rationalised and justified my quietness in a number of different ways. "I'm worried I'll say the wrong thing", "I don't know enough about this topic to comment", "Listening is a more valuable skill than speaking", "I'm not confident enough", "I'm an introvert" and "I've inherited my lack of self-expression from my parents".
To be clear me perceiving being quiet, shy, and lacking self-expression as a negative thing is completely subjective. Depending on the type of person they might find those attributes a good thing and that's completely fine. For me, I felt that this wasn't who I really was. I found evidence to support those limiting beliefs. I held on to comments that people made about me, especially the comments about me being quiet or comments about how people couldn't tell what I was feeling.
The culmination of these limiting beliefs had influenced my behaviour. My internal voice grew louder and as it did I became more and more the person that I was trying to avoid becoming. This created plenty of internal conflict and a consistent stream of thoughts trying to figure out who I really was and why I couldn't express myself better.
It was only years later (when all of these rationalisations were unconscious) that I had a breakthrough. I was attending a personal development course and after lunch I was captivated by a man who got up to share his story about his relationship with his father and how he was holding onto resentment, believing that if his father had acted differently they would have had a better relationship and he would have been a better person for it. As the story was unfolding I started reflecting on my relationship with my dad. I realised that I too had been holding onto a deep-rooted belief that I had inherited a lack of self-expression from my parents, especially my dad. I would describe my dad as a relatively confident person, but when it came to emotions I found him to be very closed off and only through the occasional outburst would you get a glimpse of how he was truly feeling.
So I called my dad during the session break and after a bit of back and forth I said that I needed to apologise to him for holding onto a story about why I was the way I was because of him. We had never talked about his before because I hadn't shared what was really going on inside my mind. My dad took a moment to reflect on what I said and he replied saying he had felt the same way with my grandad and that growing up he rarely had a chance to say what he wanted to. When he found that freedom after he left home, a bad experience caused him to close off because he didn't want to feel that way again.
As I listened intently to what my dad was saying, I started feeling this wave of emotion and I started crying, something I hadn't done for a long time. Internally, this new information had broken my limiting belief that I couldn't express myself because of my parents. Instead of it being fixed, I realised that my parents had made choices in their lives about how to deal with emotions. That meant that I could too and I chose to express myself. That decision changed the course of my life and has allowed me to connect with others on a much deeper level. I am now comfortable saying what's on my mind and in doing so being more authentic with the people I connect with.
I hope that short personal story goes to show how powerful beliefs can be. None of my rationalisations or justifications were true. They were just meanings that I had given to certain events and experiences in my life and then I had compounded these limiting beliefs by finding evidence to support them.
Change the meaning, change the evidence, change your life.
Exercise:
- Make a list of your positive and negative beliefs. There is no right or wrong answer here, just your subjective opinion about what is positive and negative for you.
- Take a negative belief and imagine what your life will be like in 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, 5 years if you continued with this limiting belief. What opportunities will you miss out on? Who will be impacted? What will it prevent you from accomplishing? Write down a detailed paragraph that outlines this future.
- What is the positive belief you would like to have instead? Again write a detailed paragraph about this future and the benefits it brings you.
- Write down any current evidence/facts you have to support this new positive belief. Try to make the supporting evidence as solid as it can be.
- Make a commitment to leave the negative belief behind in the past, where it belongs. This is your moment to decide what future you want to have for yourself.
- Repeat the steps above with any other negative belief.
