If belief is the active ingredient for being able to attract the things we want in our lives, then this surely begs the question ‘How do I change the existing beliefs that I have?’. After all beliefs are usually arrived at after many years of experience and are generally not things that you can change that easily. If thoughts are largely transient, then beliefs are stronger and therefore harder to budge.
But think about it; there has probably been a time in your life when you stopped believing in something, even though at the time your conviction was quite strong.
We have, as children, stopped believing in Santa Claus. Maybe we stopped believing in one partner’s ability to make us happy and started believeing in another, or we stopped believing that we could gain satisfaction from our careers alone. If you are reading this blog, you are probably at least toying with the belief that we do, in fact, create our own life circumstances.
In these above situations, however, the change in your belief was triggered by an external factor. You stopped believing in Santa Claus because as you became older, you started to see empirical truth that he didn’t exist or make logical conclusions (there’s no way he could fly from the south pole and get to all of those kids in one night). In the case of a relationship, you probably got a ‘feeling’ that something was amiss, started to see things in your partner that provided ‘proof’ of their immaturity level (or some other undesirable trait). In the case of your career, you probably lost your enthusiasm and realised that there must be something more out there. In all of these cases, you didn’t make a conscious choice to change your beliefs, there were circumstances that led to the change and you were a passive actor during this process.
I’m sure you have at least one belief you really wish you could change. If you aware of it, it is probably stopping you from achieveing your goals. You are also probably asking yourself how to go about changing beliefs that are ingrained.
And it’s a good question. In fact very few of the self-help ‘gurus have even touched on this subject and yet it is so important to the whole process.
In my opinion, the best person to read on this subject is Alan Tutt. In his ‘Choose to Believe’ series, He talks about the ‘Hierarchy of Beliefs’, which differentiates between surface and core beliefs and the relative strength of the different types. Surface beliefs such as the belief in whether or not it will rain tomorrow are very different to our self-image beliefs and the beliefs we have about another specific person. The most powerful level of belief, however, are the ‘world-level’ beliefs; these would include our beliefs about general truths about the big things in life and the beliefs we have about these things set the context for which all of other beliefs are formed. And, of course, our conscious minds not always aware that our beliefs influence each other. So a general belief that people are, in fact, selfish will not allow us to believe that Sue is a caring and generous person. It also explains why reality can contradict what we think we believe.
Alan also explains how to recognise when you actually have a strong belief in something, by monitoring the strength of your feeling reaction on a belief scale, so you can get an indication of where you stand with your beliefs. For instance you may discover that you in fact have quite negative self-beliefs or negative beliefs about members of the opposite sex or people in general.
Well I didn’t actually set out to write a product review here, but I can really recommend you check out Alan’s work as you really can’t afford to ignore how important belief is to the overall picture and like I said, he is probably the best person writing about the subject today.
Why don’t you sample some of his stuff. You can actually download a free sample of his work, which is basically an introduction to the ‘Choose to Believe’ series. You can also check out my other articles
‘How Quickly Can I Change A Belief?’ and ‘More Stuff About Beliefs’
Good luck with making it happen.
Your friend
Linda
Tags: beliefs
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