Want To Change Your Life? — Part One: Beliefs
--
Why do you take certain actions? You might answer because of your thoughts, emotions, your body (sensations); you might answer that it is because of your attitude, your parents or that it is simply how the ‘world’ works. However, the deeper underlying reason is your beliefs.
Everything you do comes down to what you believe reality to be and what you believe yourself to be, your identity itself, your self-image.
Most of us want to change in some way. In this article I will explore one of the fundamental pillars to life: beliefs.
Once you identify your limiting beliefs, you can begin to challenge and change them to free yourself from addiction, bad habits or on a positive note to go towards your life’s purpose.
Identifying Limiting Beliefs
There is a reciprocal nature between actions, thoughts, emotions and sense perceptions.
For example, if you see a beautiful girl (and you’re single), you’ll have a much stronger response than if you are in a loving relationship.
Depending on your conditioning, you might start thinking, “I’ll never get someone like her, she’s way out of my league” , which might make you feel discouragement, unworthiness or any other negative emotion. As a result your next action may be to use a coping mechanism like drugs or overindulging in food or entertainment.
Naturally, you may also have positive programming, leading you to go talk to her or affirm to yourself that you are loveable.
In either case, you can use the situation to identify your limiting beliefs.
Spirituality have long argued that we are essentially awareness — everything else changes, and we are the unchangeable. Thus, the process of growing actually implies that we become more aware.
We do not want to become more attached to our physical sensation, nor our mental plane. We want to spend more time as the neutral observer.
The first method exemplified by seeing the beautiful girl means we use our conditioned reactions to begin to understand ourselves.
At first, we do not need to do anything. We just need to become conscious of what was previously unconscious.
You may say that you already know that you are afraid of going to talk to a beautiful girl. Or that you already know that you do not think you deserve a raise. Or whatever else.
But almost certainly, you are only conscious of the top-most surface layer beliefs you have. And even if you are aware of the beliefs underlying those — your core beliefs — stick around to see how we might begin to challenge them.
So one method is becoming conscious of our thoughts and feelings throughout the day as we experience external stimuli. Feelings are simply the juicier part of thoughts so they always go together, though you may be more aware of one than the other.
Another is more direct and I suggest you give it a try. Say you have a drug addiction or a really persistent bad habit. You have probably tried — and I mean genuinely really tried — to stop.
What I have found is that we need to write down all our beliefs associated with that particular “problem”.
On another note, try to view problems as opportunities to strengthen your skills, personal qualities or beliefs.
You should spend a fair amount of time, say 20–30 minutes doing this. You want to make a list of all the beliefs that you feel is contributing to your addiction or bad habit. You can do this for wanting to start a positive habit as well, if you find yourself unable to do so.
For example, I found that my weed and nicotine addiction (Snus — small nicotine pouches) was largely connected to a number of beliefs, like:
- I must succeed in life
- To succeed, I have to work hard
- I do not like working hard
- I prefer relaxing
- In order to relax, I want to play video games
- I only enjoy video games when I smoke weed or take Snus.
And so on — you get the idea…
Your beliefs will be totally different.
I got my beliefs because I had achieved wild success in my late teens and early twenties through my ambition and as I fell in love for the first time, I saw the futility of working for external prestige. I quit my job in private equity and my beautiful girlfriend would sit and roll joints for me watching me play League Of Legends for 12 hours a day.
In some ways, those were the days. Some part of me wish that I could go back, but the only constant is change. The universe is always growing, and so must we.
I'll write another article on the most common limiting beliefs we have. For now, let’s look at how to challenge them.
Challenge Your Limiting Beliefs
So assuming you have identified a collective of nearly exhaustive beliefs through either the mirror that is your world or conscious analysis, we can now challenge them.
For each of your beliefs, you must now write down the most positive reframing that you can authentically believe. My beliefs might become:
- I must succeed in life → I like my life the way it is right now
- To succeed, I have to work hard → Success comes easily to me
- I do not like working hard → I like working, when I am working on something I enjoy
- I prefer relaxing → Time flies by when I am living my purpose
- In order to relax, I want to play video games → I follow my intuition and relax whenever I need to
- I only enjoy video games when I smoke weed or take Snus → I am not sure I actually like playing video games anymore
These feel authentic to me, and through finding my purpose (which I will also publish articles on) they have also become truths.
I know there will be some doubt, you might say well, what about action? Can we just sit here and change without doing anything?
Yes, and no. Doing this “exercise” is not nothing. You might be very strongly identified with your body or your mind, but you are what is aware.
You might find when you look down the list of negative limiting beliefs and positive expansive beliefs that both columns seem to contain some truth.
In actuality, both sides are true. As philosophers, spiritual masters and quantum physics all agree, the observer effect is very real. You are awareness and that awareness affects the outcome.
As Shakespeare put it, “nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. Your perception creates your so called reality.
Assuming you have done this exercise, you have already taken a very important step. You may not believe me, but this is definitely the way to quit your drug addictions, bad habits and ultimately explode way beyond the confines of your current prison.
When you become conscious of your limiting beliefs and their positive possibility, you will automatically begin to change and take new action. However, we may speed up the process through the law of assumption.
Identity Shifting
It is well-known within the self-help industry that the most powerful way of changing is to assume that you already are what you want to be.
If you only force yourself to go to speak to that one beautiful girl without changing your identity to being a charming, action-oriented and courageous (or whatever you want to be) man, you will quickly fall back.
An addiction — or on a smaller scale any bad habit — is simply a symptom of an underlying sickness. Just removing the symptom will not fix the real problem.
The void left will refill itself with new negativity. The cure is to replace your lower desire (drugs or a bad habit) with a new identity.
You want to create a mental picture of who you would be if you did not have this problem. You must then consider yourself to be that person, thinking those thoughts you would think and feel the feelings you would feel if you were that person.
Not in an, I’m trying to get to that new point in life, way, but in an I’m already that person way.
The world is really complex, but these are — to the best of my knowledge and they certainly transformed my life — the steps you need to take.
The process of getting the life you want — and here I also mean beyond an addiction or a bad habit — is to become more. By becoming more life, more aware of how we hypnotize ourselves into familiar patterns, we automatically begin to break free.
You might not succeed the first time, and I wish I could express how much I understand your pain, but you really will succeed if you keep following your intuition to search for the solution to your problem.
He who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened — Matthew 7:8
When I wanted to quit snus, I used the Law of Assumption to assume I had already been free of nicotine pouches for three months. This made quitting the addiction almost totally pain free. Every time I would get a craving — which happened much less than when I had tried other times — I would simply say to myself, “why would I ruin my progress, now that I have been clean for three months.”
Depending on where you are in your journey, this article may be your tipping point, but statistically it is not. Life change is a difficult process (mostly self-caused because we resist killing our old identity).
If progress is not happening “fast enough”, consider this:
Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from 25 to 31 degrees. All the action happens at 32 degrees — James Clear (Atomic Habits)
Right now, a certain circumstance — such as a drug problem — may seem to be your biggest problem and if you could only “fix” that one thing, life would be good again. However, I urge you to take a bigger perspective and consider that the process of change is always to become more conscious. Not just of your limiting beliefs or their reframing, but also about what positive thing you wish to replace your addiction with.
What I taught in this article is a fundamental principle for life change. Try to learn the fundamentals and at some point, you will find that all your “problems” easily dissolve due to the new identity you have acquired.
MUCH LOVE