The primary thrust of the advertising industry is that repetition forms beliefs, as do associations of beliefs with images of sex, love, and other strong positive emotions. However, even educated people, well aware of the process by which beliefs form, still strongly cling to their beliefs, and act on those beliefs even against their own self-interest.
Have you ever considered what you believe? Where the belief originated or why you believe what you do? Most people easily tally their religious and political beliefs or site a few moral and ethical values. However, beyond that they remain contently unaware of what they believe on a realm of ideas. Even moral or ethical statements are rarely inspected beyond global statements ushered as fact such as always do the right thing. People quickly nod their head in agreement that the right thing to do is a valued belief of theirs.
When you take the statement always do the right thing, for example, it is without consideration of the areas of impact. Always do the right thing, for whom? Who gets to define what the right thing is? Are there times when you wouldn’t do the right thing? In the 1940’s Hitler told the German people that annihilating the Jews was the right thing to do. In 1692 Salem Massachusetts young girls suspected of witch craft were lit on fire. Understandably that was the right thing to do in 1692 Salem. According to the laws of the United States of America, arguably the law would be the right thing do, prior to 1920 allowing men the sole vote was the right thing to do. I’ll ask you again: Should you always do the right thing?
The roots of your beliefs penetrate like outstretched tentacles deep within the conscious mind creating other assumptions on matters never occurring to you. If your intention is to move along the path of success, happiness, abundance, joy, harmony or wellness considering what you believe about these paths, the means of obtaining each and the result the end holds is well worth undertaking. Each of these is likely wrought with limiting beliefs, not necessarily wrong, just restraining.
Your thoughts contain the arsenal to annihilate faulty beliefs because you can just as easily guide thoughts into shaping advantageous beliefs. However, you cannot overpower a belief without knowing which one to assault. You have to confront the right belief(s). You can steer around your beliefs on the paths of money, but if you fear rejection of your ideas by other people you will again end up stalemating yourself.
How do you know which beliefs are the correct beliefs to do away with? They are the ones that conflict with your ideal intention of you. For example, if health is desired, beliefs and thoughts that contradict this ideal image of you should be dismissed from your mind. Before you stammer with, “But I am sick or I am overweight or I do have cancer,” let me ask you this. How does believing in the destruction of yourself help you? The answer is it does not. There is a long list of people who have conquered illness, weight problems and even cancer with a belief in their ideal self image. Harboring beliefs in your own self demolition does you no service. You cannot hit a building with a wrecking ball and expect no damage. Your destructive thoughts are your wrecking ball. Accept the damage you have done as your responsibility. After you have done that, claim your power to change your situation.
Upon first inspection of your beliefs, you may overlook several culprits. Often it does not occur to you to look for certain beliefs. You have grown so accustomed to accepting your beliefs as actuality that identification and dissection are very difficult.
Asking yourself questions is a good start to unraveling tangled beliefs. What about your current situation feels limiting to you? Are you having difficulty finding a job? Why? Do you believe the job market is saturated with overqualified candidates? Each time you feel the inclination to defend a belief, stop! Instead ask yourself what the advantage is to holding the current belief. How does believing the economy prevents you from moving forward help you? How does believing your body is failing favor you? In what way is it self serving to believe you are too old for the job. If beliefs do not serve you, let them go. Giving refuge to discouraging beliefs restrains you. If your focus is on the limit, then you cannot see the opportunity.
Wouldn’t you receive far greater benefit holding beliefs that opportunity is plentiful in downward economies? What about the benefit in believing your body is capable of eradicating disease? What new and invented challenges await you after 65? As your beliefs turn course, so will your experiences. However, the thoughts must come first. Experiences chase your thoughts. Thoughts lead the way.
The greatest challenge we face when trying to make change is convincing ourselves that we believe we can change since we have mental corridors crammed with existing beliefs supporting the status quo. Introductions of new beliefs won’t formerly last unless we make a concerted effort at whittling away the old belief. It can be done. You have changed your beliefs many times without realizing it. You have changed your thinking on previous romantic relationships, jobs, and ideas on health. We have all likely switched from butter to margarine and back to butter depending on the disposition of advertisers. You change your beliefs more often than you realize.
Deliberate change requires active and deliberate thought until the thoughts becomes passive beliefs. How do you get a new belief to stick? You actively seek validation. You do the same thing you did when building up your current beliefs. The difference is you are now building beliefs aimed at your ideals with an awareness of what you are doing. Previously, you allowed beliefs to build unsupervised.
This means you have to chip away at it until you are absolutely convinced that the new belief is true and valid. You will know when you are absolutely convinced of this new belief when you find yourself defending it; much like you did with your old beliefs when you found yourself defending your excuses (excuses are only beliefs). You defend what you believe in because you think it holds truth. When your beliefs pivot you will find yourself defending new beliefs in abandonment of old. When and only when this defensiveness of new ideals takes place have your beliefs truly changed.
Take the sales strategies used in many companies like Amway Corporation, Mary K. Cosmetics, Tupperware, or Pampered Chef. You may not be aware of all of these companies. Hopefully, you are at least familiar with one of these very successful businesses. Under each of these establishments, sales consultants sell a product and promote ongoing business through recruitment of other sales consultants. The recruits are no different than you and I. At first the recruits may be hesitant and even skeptical at their selling abilities. However, with enough encouragement and reinforcement, at some point the new recruit’s beliefs about their abilities change. The recruit becomes on fire completely engrossed in the selling program wholly convinced in their ability to succeed at the job. As this occurs, if you happen to know anyone who has ever sold products for any of these companies, the new recruit attempts to convince you of the worthiness of the product and the benefits in partnering with their company.
This is the same sort of transformation that your beliefs need to go through in order for your experiences to change. You need to go from skepticism to complete embracement of the belief. You will know when you believe wholly because you will find yourself upholding the new belief. If you are not protecting, defending or shielding your beliefs, then you have not formed a belief. You defend what you believe in. It is that simple!
Beware! This defensive action towards your beliefs is exactly how you maintain your status quo. If you find yourself defending your disparaging circumstances, stop! Make note of what it is that you are defending. Send in thought power in opposition.
Positive thinking, wishful thinking, hopeful optimism and enthusiasm, while nice, are not enough to thwart an existing belief. Active contrary thought fired away at a belief causes it to decay. Equally important to fresh new thought is vigorous endorsement. Validating your new thoughts is the only manner in which they will stick. Through validation reinforcement occurs, sprouts of similar thoughts take shape and soon a new belief is sprung. Validating your beliefs means actively pursuing similar thoughts, actively pursuing examples of people or situations that strengthen your thoughts, actively pursuing material that sponsors the belief you are trying to grow and taking action. You are growing a belief. Beliefs must have thoughts.
Your goal is to get the new belief from active to passive state. Once it is filed away passively, it churns the butter of your thoughts uninhibited attracting other similar beliefs and thoughts. You can then move on to other areas of concern. This is exactly the way you formed your current beliefs and exactly the way reality is presented to you.
As you progress you must be willing to visit your beliefs often. Ones that seemed unapparent to you before will glare in error at you later. The layers of your beliefs will peel away and soon reveal the onions that you have been planting.
Beliefs have layers that must be delved into in order to “right” the faulty belief. Take public speaking for example. Most people fear public speaking. If you were to peel back the beliefs associated with the fear of public speaking, you would find that what you actually fear is what people think of you, not necessarily speaking in public. Thoughts spark emotion. Thoughts spark fear. In order to remove the fear, you must purge the thoughts. What thoughts do you have that cause the fear? People will laugh at me? I will feel humiliated? People will think I am an idiot? People will think I am not very good. Keeping peeling back the layers by asking yourself “why” questions. Why do I think people will laugh at me? Why are other people’s thought important to me? As you question your beliefs, they become less of a force. You start to question their integrity. As you do this, they lose their hold on you.
The most empowering belief that you can hold as you sift through your current belief structure is the belief that you are unbound and capable of absolutely anything. Retaining that belief aids in revealing false beliefs because any statements you can make to the contrary contains a limiting belief. You cannot have unbound power if: you are at the mercy of an economy, have poor health, are not at your ideal weight, lack abundance, or are without happiness. Each of these MUST then contain sets of forged beliefs. Your goal is to locate these beliefs and overpower them.
As an example, let’s examine your ideas on wealth. How do you define wealth? How do you believe wealth comes to you? Do you believe the only ways wealth can be created are through good ideas, physical labor, winnings or inheritance? Take a moment and really think about those questions. What assumptions have you made in regards to obtaining wealth? What do you consider a large sum of money? What is obtainable for you? What impression do you have of wealthy people? How will wealth benefit you?
Your answers should reveal many of your beliefs. If you could not think of another way that wealth comes except through ideas, labor, winnings or inheritance then you do not understand yet that wealth is a creation of the mind. How will wealth benefit you? Did you answer job freedom? The ability to do what you want? How is wealth preventing you from going after the job you want or the lifestyle you want? These are your onions!
Holding a belief that you need something, such as money, in order to get something else, say job freedom creates an environment for you in which you are always trying to get something. It is not really money you are after. It is not even job freedom you pursue either. Since your thoughts are not squarely on what you want, it does not arrive at your doorstep. You do not really consider what you are in pursuit of. Instead you have thoughts that somehow money will free you from your current restraints. More often than not, we have not identified what it is we want. Yet, we think that money will provide what we want even though we have never identified what it is we really want.
If a dump truck arrived at your house and dumped one million dollars in your backyard for you to count, roll in and smell would you be satisfied? Just imagine going outside every day to check on your pile of money. You could pile your money in different ways. Count it each Thursday and sort it by serial numbers. If all you want is money, monopoly money would suit the same purpose. It is not money that you want. It is always what money can buy. The quick physical form fix.
Just as it is not money that you are after, it is not really job freedom that you want either. You do not need a million dollars to sit around and do nothing all day. In all likelihood you probably do not know what you want. You probably have not taken the time to describe what job freedom means. Does job freedom mean having no boss or having no job? Do you want to work independently as a sales consultant? Or do you want to be the boss? How much job freedom do think company owners’ feel they have? More than likely, they are tied even more to their job. If you cannot define what you want and what you mean by job freedom, you cannot have it. Money is not going to free you from bondage, but your clarified thoughts will.
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