Are Your Beliefs Helping?

What is the most common reason to fail to achieve your goal?A lack of belief or an abundance of Limiting ones!

The Law of Expectations states that, what you expect is what appears in your world. Our expectations strongly influence our outcomes and play a key part in our relationships and how other people respond to us and vice versa.  Expectations are, in fact, beliefs about yourself, others and the world that are centered on the future.

They can be your greatest asset or your biggest limitation.

And why is that? It is because our brains are hardwired to seek evidence to prove what we believe in is right. The brain continuously looks for and collects evidence to support the beliefs, creating feedback loops and patterns and ignoring any evidence that says otherwise, fuelling our behavioural responses.

Therefore in a very same way, if you believe that world is full of opportunities, mind will seek for them actively, bringing them to your attention.  If you believe that the world is full of failure, then that is what you will see. Your mind will not recognise the opportunities as it is on a lookout for failure and you will respond accordingly.

There is nothing wrong with having expectations.  As long as your expectations are flexible enough to change as and when needed to reflect the reality; they will work for you, helping to fuel your motivation and drive. 

Our experiences in life influence what we believe in. We form beliefs in early childhood having been influenced by our parents and other people around us, by people who inspire us, by our environment. According to Albert Ellis: “ Common sense is the collections of prejudices acquired by age eighteen”. Modern media plays a strong part through advertisements and even experiences such as trauma can alter our beliefs. 

Beliefs are changeable

Our beliefs underpin our thoughts, emotions and our behaviours and although great many of them have been acquired young, modern scientific studies have shown that the brain does not come fixed by one’s adult years, therefore it can be changed at any age!

You can start changing your beliefs by adapting the following presupposition (familiar from NLP and other disciplines such as CBT);

The map is not the territory

As human beings, we can never know reality, only our perceptions of reality. And it is not generally the reality that limits or empowers us, but the map of our reality.  

Your mind constantly filters information it receives according to the internal maps, beliefs that you have about yourself, others and the world around you. It is necessary as otherwise you’d become overwhelmed with the millions of pieces of information and signals coming at you all the time. The mind therefore deletes, distorts and generalises the information it receives to make it fit into what you believe.

If you believe that the world is against you, your mind will prove this to you by deleting every bit of information that does not fit with that, or distorts and generalises the information so that the meaning will change.

The problem with these internal maps is that they often get outdated and become useless, just like a satnav that has not been updated for a while; How well will your journey progress if you rigidly choose to follow the directions given and ignore the fact that major road works have taken place changing all road layouts?

There is no failure, only feedback

Many successful people have become successful only after having failed and tried repeatedly. Failure only tells how you went about things, not about who you are. They are a great provide you valuable feedback that you are not doing something right and essential for learning.

You can use this feedback like  any great raw material;  After each time, ask yourself what you learned from it and what can you chance for the next time around? Observe, try, feedback, try again.

Just watch a baby learning to walk. It is a process of trial and error and a feedback loop followed by eventually mastering to walk! 

You already have all the resources you need to succeed

We all are born with the right resources that help us succeed in meeting our goals in life. Sometimes we just forget about them and create conditions for failure. There are the times when you need to remind yourself that you are enough, more than enough to go for whatever you want achieve in life. Take a moment and remind yourself of your previous successes, even the ones that do not seem significant and list all the things that you are grateful for and make you happy.

People always make the best choice available for them

Even what you do is destructive or does not make a sense, you do it because on some level it benefits you. Remember, you are not your behaviour.

Ask yourself: Is anyone ever going to do anything that they  know will cause them harm? No, usually not.   What people do is their choice and it is based on what is their best option at the time. It just may be that they haven’t got enough information available to then at the time to make any alternative choices.