A Look At Our Beliefs …

How Did You Develop Your Beliefs?

As I am new to blogging I would like to begin by laying the groundwork for trainings and classes I offer. Today’s subject is about beliefs. We all have them but how did we develop them and are we aware of what beliefs we have?

To begin, take a look at areas of your life

Take a look at where you feel frustrated or are struggling. Identify these areas so that you can take a look at how you are contributing to and creating your situation in real time. This is how you can begin to identify a belief, old or new, that is no longer serving you in life.

As you look at your beliefs and how they are contributing to your circumstances, you will notice that most of your beliefs were formed when you were a child.

Your beliefs were formed from your early life experiences with your family, care givers, religious and authority figures. Through interactions in your early life your beliefs were formulated around who you are and how you belong in relation to your immediate world and the world at large.

These beliefs were formed when you were too young to accept or reject them

You simply took them in and did what you needed to do to survive. As you may have already realized, these beliefs are at the core of how you see other people, how you see the world and how you see yourself.

So, once these beliefs have been formed and, since they have become beliefs, you operate from a place of assuming that they are true. This happens over and over again. They become firmly entrenched into your consciousness and in time, these beliefs are fully integrated, a part of who you are. This means that as this occurs, you are now acting from this belief as your truth, fully programmed into your consciousness. This has become a core belief which operates beyond your awareness. Consequently, it now happens without your conscious knowledge, under the radar, accepted as your truth over and over again … it has become a pattern that is repeated throughout your life, mostly without your knowledge.

Once you have a thought, your mind begins to organize around it

Once you have a thought, your mind checks in to ask, is this true? It looks for confirmation. And if it is in line with your beliefs, it  begins to attract the circumstances, synchronicity, attractions, and experiences necessary for it to come true or to seem to be true. Your brain will provide or create whatever proof you need that what you believe is true for you.

This process happens over and over again, reinforcing your beliefs be they positive or negative. Your outcomes can create happiness, or they can cause you suffering and failure, create your blocks and negative patterns in life, much of the time working behind the scenes without your awareness.

So you may ask: “Why would I keep creating negative outcomes?”

You see, we engage powerful emotions that are connected to our beliefs. So, as a child when your beliefs were being formulated, when you experienced a negative event or an event you interpreted as negative, your emotions became engaged. This, of course, resulted in formulating an emotionally charged negative belief.

Each and every time a situation comes up that reminds you of the initial negative event, you emotionally re-experience it with the same sense of danger even if in this moment there is no real danger. You are emotionally re-experiencing and reinforcing that original emotion.

When your thoughts focus on a negative emotion you are experiencing, whatever your mind focuses on it gives your brain an instruction, you create and attract more of it. Since your focus is on re-experiencing the emotionally negative event, the outcome created is exactly what you don’t want.

So, the really important thing to realize about beliefs is:

• Your brain creates your beliefs to be your truth. They are true for you because you have accepted and created it to be so. Your mind will give you evidence, make-up, attract or create whatever situations or evidence it needs to prove your belief is right. Your belief is true to those who believe it.
• A belief that you have accepted as true for you will always create the evidence you need to convince you that it’s true. Because, how could your belief not be true?
• You may think: “When I have looked at other people’s beliefs, I can find faulty logic, but my beliefs are always right and that’s why I believe them.” Because everything is true to the person who believes it, if you know that your mind will create evidence that your belief is true whether it is or not … your beliefs will always turn out to be true.

Since you created your beliefs, you can re-create them

So when you become an NLP Practitioner, there are three presuppositions that you could apply to the areas of beliefs:

• People respond to their map of reality, not to reality itself – you are responding to beliefs that have been created earlier in life. They may or may not be working for you now.
• People always make the best choice available to them – When your beliefs were initially formulated at an early age, they were about survival and got you through your early years.
• Every behavior is useful in some context – As a child you did what you needed to do to survive the event. As an adult with awareness, however, you have choice.

When you apply this to your beliefs and to your life, you begin to look at choosing what you want to believe. The question to ask yourself is: “Does this belief work for me now and if not, what can I do about it?” “What would be a more resourceful belief?” If you have beliefs that are no longer resourceful and that no longer serve you, since you initially created them, you are able to re-create and formulate beliefs that better serve you.

As you begin to become aware of and look at your beliefs, evaluate whether or not they help you or hurt you. If they help, they are resourceful even if they don’t immediately produce the desired result. Working with beliefs that are more resourceful will serve you much better.

One way you can begin to turn the tide and become more aware of your negative beliefs is to increase your awareness

By dissociating, observing yourself from a third person point of view as if you stepped out of yourself and were observing yourself, you can observe the process of how what you believe is being created in your life.

From your brain’s perspective, your prime objective is to survive

A healthy person would not do anything intentional to harm themselves.

So, the more awareness you have, the greater the choices you can create. Just the act of intentional observation, the act of stepping outside of yourself to observe what is happening, will begin the process of letting go of old beliefs since they are no longer serving you …

This is the end of part 1 …

You have looked at how your beliefs are formed and how you can begin the process of change. In Part 2 you will deepen the conversation to learn how you can change your beliefs and consequently, change your outcomes in life.