Where your Beliefs Come From

Your life is shaped by your beliefs whether you’re aware of it or not.

The only thing is, you don’t always choose your beliefs. In most cases, they are transferred to you from the previous generations, especially your parents.

When you grow up with other people’s beliefs, they become hard coded within every part of your being as you grow up.

But before we find out if these beliefs are good or bad, let’s find out what a belief is anyway.

According to the dictionary, a belief is a feeling that something is good, right, or valuable.

It’s important to note that a belief is a feeling and not a fact. If your father is a fan of a specific sports team, you’ll grow up feeling that team is the best regardless of what the facts are.

So what’s happening here is that your life is driven by these feelings. You’ll end up making minor and major life decisions based on a set of feelings that others have passed on to you.

But how about your own beliefs? Where do you get those?

They come from your experiences. There are some experiences that will form certain beliefs and once formed, they’ll be shaping your future.

When you go to a restaurant and receive a bad service, what do you do? You stop going there and you tell everyone you know to do the same.

But what if your server just had a bad day. What if someone in the kitchen mixed up your order because it was super busy.

How about the time your luggage was lost by an airline? You got mad and promised yourself to never fly with them ever again.

You see, these experiences end up making our beliefs and they are not always rational. Why? Because life is random and things just happen.

Of course, not all beliefs come from negative experiences. Some also come from your positive experiences, like the time you got an amazing service at a different restaurant and told all your friends about it.

Or the time you travelled by a different airline and got a business class upgrade for only a little extra cost. Does that make that airline the best? Or maybe that flight happened to have empty seats.

The thing to be aware of is the origin of your beliefs, whether negative or positive. As long as you choose them wisely and consciously you’ll allow them to shape your life in a way that pleases you and no one else.

Beliefs are powerful. You have to make sure you get to choose them yourself and update them from time to time because nothing lasts forever so why should your beliefs do?

One last good thing you can do with your beliefs is keeping them to yourself. Don’t pass them to others, especially your kids. Allow them to experience life and form their own beliefs.

All you have to do is remind others about the power of their beliefs and let them do the rest.

I hope this has helped you become more aware of your beliefs so you can pick the rational ones from the irrational ones.

I wrote this piece as part of a 90-day challenge I took on to get better at this type of writing. To learn more about me you can visit my website here.