Recently I’ve been reading a book by Robert Dilts about belief systems. Beliefs are interesting for many reasons, the main one that interests me is how they constrain our actions.
The funny thing about beliefs is that they aren’t fact. In fact what is fact… when does belief become fact? Before Sir Isaac Newton “discovered” gravity, did people wantonly jump off tall buildings? I would suggest no for the most part. So those people pre-Newton believed that jumping out of buildings was dangerous, even though they did not know why. And the fact that jumping out of buildings has been hazardous in the past does not mean it will be so for you, as banks often say, past performance is no indication of future situations.
Now in all likelihood jumping out of a tall building will be hazardous to your health and I wouldn’t want you thinking that I encouraged you, however just because it is a statistically hazardous activity doesn’t mean it is always that. However we believe that it will be, and this belief constrains our actions, in a pretty healthy way to be fair.
After a while of believing something, it becomes fact, one of the foundations of who you are, and those self-imposed constraints become unconscious limitations. These limitations serve to help you delete irrelevant information from your perception of the world… information that could prove to invalidate your beliefs is deleted before it can affect you.
When we are born, we have no beliefs, and over time we accumulate them, inherited from parents, family, the TV, books we read, people we meet. I wonder how many beliefs that we carry by the time we are 18 that could already be limiting our potential…?
So my question for you today is, putting aside laws of nature (we’ll assume them to be true for now), what do you believe about you and the world around you that just might not be so true when you spend a few moments to think about them? If you inherited them from others, wonder whether you ever had any proof before integrating them in to who you are and what you do.
June 1st, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Wow, that is deep. Well it is to me. But it set me to thinking about beliefs, and whilst there are some tangible ones such as the jumping from a building one that you mention, there are probably a billion such other beliefs that people obtain over the years that shape and mould the people that we become. There could be life changing beliefs or simple ones such as DTS is better that Dolby Digital 5.1 (or not, as the case maybe). But in the same breath reading what you wrote here [“ After a while of believing something, it becomes fact, one of the foundations of who you are, and those self-imposed constraints become unconscious limitations. These limitations serve to help you delete irrelevant information from your perception of the world… information that could prove to invalidate your beliefs is deleted before it can affect you.â€]
If you delete what you consider to be information that will potentially alter your perception then how would you ever change your beliefs?
June 1st, 2007 at 3:03 pm
That’s a very interesting question Steve. It happens to people all of the time, and usually though external forces.
Have you ever been forced to do something you really didn’t think you could do? Run a certain distance, beat a fear such as flying or change jobs, and the reason you did them was that circumstances conspired to force you to do them even though you believed that you would, or could fail?
These external factors force you to change your beliefs once they have been conquered, and consequently you become free to do things that previously you would have deleted as possibilities.
The other, more subtle way your beliefs get changed, is through the influence of others. Listening to the opinions of others and integrating their evidence for their beliefs will shift your views on many topics, however as this tends to happen over time it is hard to detect where the tipping point was.
A good coach will spot your limiting beliefs and get you to take a long, hard look at their validity. This exercise in itself can often release you from their chains.
Of course how quickly your beliefs become fact depends very much on how much you believe that beliefs are self limiting… If you believe that beliefs are guidelines that can be changed rather than fact then you are already well on your way to being receptive to information that you would previously have deleted!