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Our beliefs are the fundamentals of our experiences, decisions and patterns in our lives. By changing our beliefs, we can change our experiences, and create our own realities.
Have you ever stopped to reflect about what ‘you’ think about yourself? Are you aware of the impact that low self-esteem and a rapidly decreasing self-worth can have on your mind? Have you ever tried to challenge your own antiquated, deep rooted belief system? The truth is that our core beliefs, which are the beliefs that we hold about ourselves in our mind, reflects in our behavior, body language, words and actions and they play a massive role in our ability to succeed in life. Individuals who lack self-confidence are prone to feeling shy, reticent, worthless, uncertain and inhibited most of the time. Their physical presence, social confidence, personal relationships and every other aspect of life is bound to be negatively impacted.
Do you identify with these feelings and emotions? If your answer to this question is ‘yes’ then you must know that such beliefs are sure to hamper your growth and success. In this case your core beliefs will occasionally enable you to be proactive but what about the rest of the time?
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Do you feel morose because of this? Are you going through the ‘IMPOSTER SYNDROME, also known as the DUAL IDENTITY SYNDROME/MASK SYNDROME, where you cannot seem to validate your own accomplishments and you persistently feel inadequate in spite of being on the brink of success?
Are you one of those people who constantly feel burdened by a feeling of incompetency and experience severe bouts of self-doubt? Do you often downplay your success and overplay your fear of never being good enough? Rather than claiming your own power and potential are you often left feeling troubled and despondent?
If this is the case, then you need to work on your beliefs so that you can create a strong core belief system which serves as a source of inspiration and helps you to believe in yourself and your innate abilities to excel in every endeavor. It is very important to build a super strong and bulletproof core belief system so that you can protect yourself and permanently terminate your self-doubts.
Change your beliefs, change your destiny. A tree takes shape from a seed. Likewise, we take shape from our belief system. We are, what we are, because of our belief system.
What are Beliefs and Belief System?
A belief is a state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case with or without there being any empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty.
Simply stated, a belief is something we consider to be true. However, our consideration that something is true, may or may not be based on facts.
How is a Belief Formed?
Beliefs are formed either from our experience or from the lessons that we learn from these experiences or what we learn from others.
To explain this better, let me give you an example. Your child doesn’t finish his meal and every time he has leftovers on his plate. What is your reaction? You admonish him. You tell him that there are so many people in the world who don’t get anything to eat and go to sleep on an empty stomach. You explain to him that wasting food is a bad habit because by doing so you are disrespecting God. Have you ever wondered why do you do so and what impression does this make on your child?
You are telling this to your child based on what your parents told you when you were a child. I’m sure this was told to you with a tone of certainty and drilled into your head every time you refused to finish the food on your plate. Soon you believed this to be true and therefore you pass the same knowledge to your child. Over a period of time, your child will also believe this to be true thereby forming his own belief which he will then pass on to his children. This is how our core beliefs are formed in our childhood.
Now let us take another example from our everyday life. When we go to the market to buy vegetables from a vendor most of us try to bargain. Why? Because we have found out from experience that by haggling, we can get the vegetables at a lesser price. So, we have formed a belief that bargaining with the vegetable vendor is a must.
In both the above examples what we believe to be true may not be factually correct. None of us have seen God, and we don’t know how he will react to us leaving food on the plate, yet most of us believe it to be true. In the second example, there is no guarantee that bargaining will always result in saving money. We can’t bargain in a mall or in a high-end store. So, we end up bargaining only when we purchase items from small vendors. Some consider this as exploiting the poor who do not have any bargaining power. If you are influenced by people having such a belief system, then you will soon develop a new value system and stop bargaining.
These examples prove that beliefs are formed from our experiences as well as from what we learn from others who have the power to influence us. However, the good news is that our beliefs are not permanent and therefore they can always be changed. After all, beliefs are just thoughts that we repeat over and over in our head and a thought can be easily changed.
Now that we know how beliefs are formed, we need to understand what is a belief system?
According to Wayne W. Dyer a belief system is nothing more than a thought you have thought over and over again. Let’s suppose that you have tried to do something but failed. You again tried to do it a second time and a third time but each time you failed. So, finally you formed an opinion that you are not good at doing similar things, and this is how your belief system was formed.
What is a limiting belief and how is it formed?
Did you try something, but failed despite several attempts and finally formed a belief that you are not good at it? For instance, did you try going to the gym to shed a few kilos but failed to lose the flab and concluded that the gym is not the place for you and that it does not always help in losing weight?
Did you try to woo the prettiest girl in your school but failed and concluded that you are not handsome or good enough? Did you work hard to improve your financial position but despite your best efforts you didn’t succeed and are still in debt which made you believe that it you are not cut out to be rich?
Unpleasant experiences like these give rise to limiting beliefs and therefore we always try to avoid similar situations that might lead us to experience something on the same lines.
How to Change Our Limiting Beliefs?
In the previous example, I discussed how our belief that we can get a better price if we bargain, prods us to bargain with small time vendors. However, if we come across someone whom we like and respect who believes that bargaining with the poor who are doing business to sustain their families isn’t the right thing to do, then their thinking will influence us. As a result, we gradually stop bargaining and also teach our children to do the same. Through this example I have tried to demonstrate that we create our beliefs, and therefore we can just as easily replace an old belief with a new one. This is important when it comes to replacing limiting beliefs.
The good news is that it is very easy for each and every individual to replace limiting beliefs and build a strong core belief system because it stems from positive thinking, self-conviction and daily practice. Although we all aspire to have a super strong core belief system, we often struggle to cultivate it.
Self-doubt is largely a learned phenomenon which exists due to our own attitude towards ourselves and therefore can be easily corrected. Moreover, not believing in yourself can get really exhausting and exasperating.
In this section, I am going to tell you how to cultivate a super strong and powerful belief system 24*7 and become UNSTOPPABLE and INVINCIBLE.
Do you think that you need to:
- Generate a sense of self–worth
- Build on your confidence
- Work on your capabilities
- Overcome certain limitations
- Learn to accept yourself and believe in yourself
- Detect and filter possible ‘thought viruses’
- Develop a winning belief system
After giving these questions a serious thought if the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’ then it means that you need to work on your deep rooted limiting beliefs, negate the so called ‘thought viruses’ and create new, positive and empowering beliefs which will help you to become more self-assured and confident, thereby giving a boost to your morale and capabilities. You will feel more enthusiastic and optimistic about creating a bright future and enthused with these uplifting beliefs you will be able to perform to the best of your abilities in all the areas of your life.
The true test of your belief system takes place in times of crisis and that is when you realize the significance of having a strong and positive belief system. Your belief system during trying times determines the degree of your inner strength which plays an instrumental role when you are faced with challenging situations.
Your empowering beliefs can help you to elevate your emotions and ultimately evaluate the current scenario and take the best possible action. On the other hand your own disempowering beliefs will magnify your negative situations and lure you into REVERSE MODE STRATEGIES like attack, retreat and rebound. A disempowering belief system will feed your thought viruses and infect your mind, thereby giving rise to more unfavorable circumstances. All you need to do is constantly keep feeding your empowering beliefs and starve your disempowering beliefs so that your life story can become a phenomenal success story.
The first step towards creating a powerful belief system is to get rid of your old, rigid and disempowering beliefs which have been ingrained in you since childhood and UNLEARN them. Next, you need to restructure and build new positive beliefs and expand your horizons. It is important to keep monitoring your new beliefs because sometimes you might unintentionally go back to your old ways of thinking and believing. This can get a bit challenging because relapsing into old belief patterns is very easy, but as challenging as it may seem, it is totally worth all the hard work and effort of reprogramming your mental thought patterns and intentionally building a positive and powerful belief system.
Establishing a new and positive belief system will help you to stay away from your own internal blocks and resistance and finally change the old negative core patterns that keep getting in your way to success. The key takeaway here is consistency, perseverance and steady efforts. Unfortunately most of us give up long before that happens due to impatience and lack of dedication.
Conclusion
Cultivating a positive mindset is a lot like tending to a garden where you must water positive thoughts and beliefs on a daily basis and pull out the weeds of old thought patterns, negative beliefs, doubts and uncertainty not just from the ground level but from the very root so that they are permanently removed.
