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Understanding Your Beliefs
Beliefs play a crucial role in personal development so understanding your beliefs and addressing them can really help you to effectively make those changes you want to make in your life.
What Is A Belief?
A belief is something you hold to be true. Formed throughout our lives we form various beliefs based on our upbringing, our friends and family, our faith and those we work and socialize with. We also form beliefs from books we read, what we watch on television and websites we visit. And it is this set of beliefs which determines our values (what is important to us) and underpins our attitude and behaviour.
Most of us also have what we call ‘limiting beliefs’. These are beliefs that we may have had for many years which limit the way we behave. For example you may want to change career but because of a limiting belief such as ‘you can’t change careers at the age of 40’ you find it difficult to make that first move. But the great news is that you can change if you change your belief…and yes that is possible!
When we examine our limiting beliefs we often find we only have outdated evidence to support it. Taking the example above you may have the belief that ‘you can’t change careers at 40’ because your mother may have told you that once when you were 10 years old, and this has stuck in your mind ever since…is this sufficient evidence to support the belief? Perhaps your mother had only one example to base this on, or maybe things were different in her day? Time to let go of this belief and start looking for evidence to support the belief you want to hold.
Conversely look at any successful person, what they have achieved will have been supported by beliefs that have served them well e.g. ‘I can run my own successful company, ’ ‘I can win,’ ‘I am confident,’ ‘I have successful relationships with people.’ And the more they focus on this belief, the more evidence they will find to support it and the stronger the belief will come.
So think about what you want to change and ask yourself what beliefs you hold which will support or hold you back. Once you start understanding your beliefs and identifying any limiting beliefs then you can decide what belief will serve you better and look for evidence to support it.
See Also:-
Understanding Your Values
Can You Coach Yourself?
Personal Development Articles
Personal Development Exercises
Personal Development Books
