Change Your Beliefs and Change Your World
Man is made by his beliefs, as he believes so he is - Bhagavad Gita 500BC
My
good friend Steve Smith is dyslexic, he has struggled to read and write
his whole life believing he just wasn't meant to do these things. He fell off some scaffolding and now spends most of his time in a wheel chair. He had never picked up a computer in his life until after his accident (what's the point I can't even read and write properly).
Now
the guy is a computer expert, he is brilliant with all sorts of
technical gadgets and you should see him handle a wheel chair. The guy is amazing, the accident changed him physically but he had to change his own beliefs in lots of areas.
We all know about beliefs but why do we find it so hard to use and change our belief systems?
We
get a great idea, for example I am going to start a diet. We start with
great intentions but never seem to get very far, why is this? The
answer I believe is that we consciously say "right that's it, time to
lose some weight, I ve had enough of being fat, I am really going to do
it this time." However our subconscious mind then kicks in with lots
of questions and doubts, for example (notice if any of these are
familiar to you):
It's too hard, I am bored already, why am I doing
this?
I don't look too bad, I'm not that fat, other people are bigger
than me, it's the weekend I will start on Monday,
I will start tomorrow.
Who determines who is fat and who is skinny any way?
Who are you to be thin?
This is going to take ages. I can't do it. I am useless. I am big boned and just meant to be fat. I
am a failure. It's ok to be fat at my age. I am too old.
The fat keeps
people away and I don't like people getting too close to me (change to I
don't like my self).
What if I go through all the trouble and hard work to lose the weight and still don't feel any better about myself.
I am weak, I am a failure, I am useless, a waste of space, not good enough.
Fuck it I will stay as I am hand me another piece of cake!
We sabotage ourselves far better than the best saboteurs in the world could ever do, we are masters at self sabotage.
Where
do all of these thoughts come from? We know for definite that most of
our thinking is shaped from a very early age approximately between
birth and 7 years old. Children are very resilient but sometimes our
parents and quite often with the best intentions knock that resilience
out of us or at least seriously dent it.
We start to believe that we are not good enough, we are a disappointment,a let down, weak, a failure - does, this sound familiar?
We
then carry these beliefs around with us for the rest of our lives. We
get an idea; for example, I want to lose weight and am determined to do
it , and then all of the old, tried and tested beliefs come flying at us
from all directions and angles and we go back to the start again - just re
affirming that the beliefs are right once again and we are indeed weak
and a failure.
After completing literally thousands of one to one
coaching and counselling hours and group sessions with clients, I have
noticed that we keep playing out the same scenarios over and over again,
all the way through our lives and in all areas. We even set these scenarios up over and over again to practice our Pavlovian learned behaviours - for
example, at an early age a child forms the belief that it is weak and a
failure. This belief is very painful but also very powerful. Pain is a
great motivator, so the child time and time again throughout its life
will set out to prove that it is not weak, in fact it is very strong;
this is a sort of "I will show you" mentality; the question to ask here
is who is she really trying to prove this point to?
As an adult she
is over weight and feels weak because of the way she looks and the fact
that she has let herself slip. Thus confirming that long held belief
that she is indeed weak and a failure. So she reaches a point of such
frustration and pain that she decides to go on a diet to lose weight
and the " I will show you how strong I am scenario" kicks in again.
Let's
say on this occasion she sticks with the diet and does really well. She
only has a stone to go before she reaches her target weight, and then
the self sabotage kicks in again.
What will happen if I reach my
target weight? People will expect me to stay there, I will draw lots of
attention to myself because of how I look (good) and what I have
achieved. People's expectations of me will rise.
The old belief of
not being good enough kicks in again with a vengeance. If they look too
closely they will see that I am really a fraud!!
So she starts to put weight back on, until it gets too painful and the whole process starts all over again. Yo, yo dieting. She is concerned about other peoples expectations but it is her own expectations and beliefs that are the problem.
If
at a deep level I don't like myself, if I think I am weak and a
failure, then why or how could I ever believe that anyone else could
ever like me?
From an early age she believed she was weak so she
decided to cover up this belief by acting strong. The problem is that
she just covered up the belief, it is still there, lurking in the dark
shadows in the recesses of her mind.
It needs to be disowned brought out into the light, picked apart.
This
game or scenario has now became an integral part of her life and all
because of a belief she developed when she was 5 years of age, or even
younger. She will never be happy or satisfied even if she reaches her target weight until she gets rid of this belief.
But
what are these beliefs? They are a random series of thoughts that we
first picked up as four or five year olds. We are still being controlled
by that little five year old boy or girl who was getting their
resilience knocked out of them. Beliefs are very very powerful, it's
well documented that people can make themselves seriously Ill through
beliefs and even die because of what they believe to be true. On the
other hand people have healed all sorts of life threatening illnesses
and even put off their own deaths until they are ready.
People have gone to war over beliefs, people have been persecuted because of beliefs but what are beliefs? All the bibles talk about belief, all the top motivational and inspirational gurus talk about beliefs, but what is a belief?
A belief is a series of thoughts, usually based on limited and seriously flawed information. We make these thoughts and these beliefs real, so real in fact that they control our lives. People
get stressed, depressed, I'll and even die because of their beliefs.
People create great wealth and power and have amazing lives because of
their beliefs.
As a five year old I had very limited knowledge and
information, I depended on other people to teach me how to survive and
how to live but this was according to their beliefs. As an adult I
now have access to masses of information I can shape my own life but to
do this I have to be aware of my own beliefs. I also have to believe
that I can shape my own life. The catch is that I have had these old
beliefs for the last 50 years - they are stubborn very well embedded
little buggers and they have great resilience. But by being aware of
them I can challenge them, I can fight them, or I can choose to
laugh at them when I see their little heads pop up: "it's you
again, isn't it time you retired". They mean well, they protected you as a
child, but you are not a child anymore you don't need them.
You made
them real - you can unmake them, change them. Make some new empowering
beliefs. You have already proved how powerful your beliefs are, you have
had a life time of believing them. You believed as a child that these
beliefs would help you, that they would keep you safe. But they are not
real and they never have been. Only you made them real in your own mind, outside of you they do not exist.
There are even scientific facts about beliefs. We are born with something like
130 billion neurones and by the time we get to adult hood we have about 40
billion left. If you put 30,000 neurones on a pin head there would still be lots of space between them, they would not be touching each other. We
learn by creating neurological pathways, if you have believed something
for a long time then you have created a very strong neurological
pathway. The good news is that there are 40 billion of these things
floating around just waiting to be called into action ( we never use
most of them, what a waste, they are amazing little things).
You can create new pathways!!
This takes belief that it can be done. It takes clarity. In other words, you need a goal - what do you want to achieve? Have no regrets. It takes Commitment.
Commit to making changes, even just to commit to the next step of your journey.
The
big one for me is consistency. Don't give up, persevere - you are undoing years of old ways of thinking, and this may take time. Be
consistent with your new affirmations and visualisations - there are now
massive amounts of information, and proof that these things really do
work.
It takes Confidence, which comes from experience. You have had
years of making your beliefs work. You are the expert in you, and you are
where you are now because of past choices which came from your belief
system. You may have even been confidently wrong.
It takes Certainty. Be certain that you can change, you are a very powerful being, perhaps
the most powerful being in the whole universe.
Use the words "I AM" they have power of biblical proportions. God said to Moses "I AM"
Even
Muhammad Ali didn't say I might be the greatest, he said I am the
greatest - and you can bet he really believed that fact, and I, for one,
would not argue with him.
Here is one to get you started. Say it with real deep-from-the-heart-feeling. Believe it, aand mean it - and take action. All the affirmations and visualisation techniques count for nothing without action.
I AM POWERFUL BEYOND ALL MEASURE, I AM SUPREMELY CONFIDENT IN ALL AREAS OF MY LIFE, AND I AM TAKING MASSIVE ACTION NOW!
Never forget who you and where you come from.
Copyright © 2011 -2012 www.stuart-williams.com and Tony Somers - all rights reserved.
