How To Transform Your Belief System For 2015
As we admire the riotous colours in a field of wildflowers, the insects pollinating those flowers are sensitive to ultraviolet light and experience that same field as a very different “reality” to our own; as does the snake beneath our gaze through its heat-sensing organs; and our faithful dog by our side through his monochromatic vision. No riot of colour for the dog, but the smells – oh that ocean of smells! – most of which are lost to our dull human senses.
In the scene above, each creature is trapped within the confines of whatever scraps of data its senses can filter from the vast flow of data. The dog’s world lacks our colour but of the light frequencies from extreme ultraviolet to far infrared our human eyes see only a tiny rainbow that is less than one-thousandth of the spectrum present and out of those scraps of data we fashion a model that we are all too ready to insist is “reality”.
On the “seeing is believing” light scale we humans score .076% for accuracy and because of that limited data accessible to us, for comprehension as well. It has taken scientific tools to detect and bring more data within reach of our limited senses so as to expand our understanding of a wider reality and how it all impacts on us.
Just as our senses limit what we perceive, our beliefs about what we will see (or hear, or feel, or taste, or smell), limit our perception and limit how we process what we do perceive. In fact there is strong evidence that “believing is seeing”.
In other words, what we believe limits what we perceive in the same way as what we perceive limits what we believe.
So, to the point of this piece: Could an upgrade in your BS (that’s “Belief Systems”) lead to an upgrade in the results that you experience from the application of your BS? We think so, and so by way of a New Year’s gift, we’d like to offer you some upgrade components for your personal BS.
Feel free to pick and choose from the giftbox below – or to take the lot, a sort of “BS transplant” if you like! – and see how your New Year begins to turn out as a result of your applying your new BS to it.
Are Your Beliefs Barnacles or Pearls?
Barnacles grow on the hull of a ship as a result of time, passage and neglect. Pearls are won by holding your breath, diving deep and working through a whole lot of oysters.
Belief system, mindsets, attitudes are the same. They can be the ones implanted by parents, swapped with schoolmates, picked up from the media or contracted in the street that have just stuck there like gum and now slow you down.
Or they can be part of a hard-won, hand-picked, graded and polished set that decorate every moment of your life.
In the eyes of the Greek Philosophers, your key responsibility in entering adulthood was to form your philosophy – your belief system about how Life works and what it all means, and what role you have chosen to play in the scheme of things. Two thousand years later that still seems to produce better results than most alternatives.
Task 1 for the New Year: Every day make the choice to check for barnacles and scrape off any beliefs that don’t serve you well; and to dive for pearls and begin polishing your collection of beliefs that strengthen and extend you.
Do You Practice Optimism or Pessimism?
Henry Ford said, “If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right!”
Optimism is about the conversations you have with yourself every day about everything. It is a thought discipline not a genetic factor. No one is “naturally” optimistic (though some of us have more positive childhood models to work with than others). Anyone can become a “practising optimist” simply by consciously choosing to do what optimists do and equally consciously choosing to not do what pessimists do.
Here’s a few things that optimists do differently:
1. Generalise successes, and particularise “learning experiences” (On succeeding at something they will tell themselves, “I’m usually lucky/successful in most things” and on processing a setback they will quarantine it with, “Win a few, lose a few. What do I need to learn from this challenge to win next time?”). Pessimists do exactly the opposite.
2. Play the numbers – they don’t expect to win every time but they do expect to win more than they lose. That creates resilience and persistence. Pessimists expect to lose most of the time which creates hopelessness – and self-fulfilling prophesies.
3. Disconnect happiness from achievement, so that they sustain themselves with joy in the doing long past the time when pessimists have given up for lack of results. When optimists achieve their outcome they are grateful and recognise and accept the effort and the learnings that went into bringing it about. Pessimists have already gone home.
4. Expect luck, which keeps them going through hard times and ready for the “right time”. Louis Pasteur observed that, “Luck favours the prepared mind”. Optimists are usually prepared for when they are lucky. Pessimists expect back luck, which is painful and to be avoided. No point in preparing for that.
5. Enjoy positive stories, other people’s successes, positive people, the company of achievers. Pessimists don’t want to subject themselves to negative comparison and so avoid winners and prefer the company of achievers lower than themselves.
Who’s Responsible?
If you believe – or choose to operate on the basis – that you are a victim of circumstances, a pawn of Fate, powerless in the face of huge forces, then you see the locus (the pivot or axis) of control in your life as outside of yourself. Working from that premise you would see that something or someone is to blame for your circumstances; you would feel offended by the lousy hand that Fate had dealt you and righteous in feeling sorry for yourself; you would accept that you need do nothing or change anything about what you are doing as to you wait for God, Fate, Mum or Lotto to fix it.
Until it’s fixed, you are justified in telling everyone that you’ve been let down (by everyone), that you were just born unlucky, to the wrong parents; that Life sucks and if Fate had been kinder you would be a brain surgeon visiting the International Space Station by now.
Alternatively, you can choose – or simply operate on the basis – that the locus of control is within you; that you are directly responsible for everything in your life (including the family you chose and the genes your parents gifted you – but most importantly, what you have done with those since you inherited them).
From that basis if anything about your life right now does not please you it can be changed to give you different results. Expecting God, Fate and Mum to help you is fine (optimism), but don’t expect the cavalry to get involved until after they catch onto the path you’ve chosen from the distance you’ve travelled along it (Pasteur), so don’t wait for anyone before you launch.
Telling yourself you were born lucky, that Life is abundant, that Fate helps you at every challenge to discover more about your deeper self, and that your possibilities are limitless is likely to keep the furnace of your desires burning brightly enough to steamroller many an obstacle on the way to your victory.
Seek Wisdom
The Serenity Prayer neatly sums up this strategy: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
You can accept that seeing things that are not right demands that you do make a contribution to changing those for the better. You accept that “in order for Evil to triumph only requires that good people do nothing”, and so you do something, even though you are afraid of some of the consequences for yourself.
Sometimes the forces at work behind injustices make it impossible for you to change them directly, but accepting that every good deed ripples through the fabric of humanity – while nothing more than a belief – will prevent that evil from contaminating the space in which you still have the freedom of choice.
Accept Change
Vince Lombardi said, “Life is Change, Growth is Optional”. Everything is changing, all of the time. To wish that “everything stay the same” is to wish for a cessation of Life and of the Universe.
So, if change is inevitable what is the logical attitude to adopt in relation to it? That every change in your circumstances provides an opportunity for you to explore more of yourself, your capabilities, your courage, your intelligence, compassion?
Winners usually equate Change with “New Opportunities”. How will you choose to look at it?
Goal Setting Isn’t Goal Getting
Around 3% of the population set goals. Why? Because the other 97% don’t want to risk the pain of disappointment of setting them and not getting them! So they don’t!
Sports psychologist Randall Rattan nailed the purpose of Goal Setting when he summed up a decade of data gathered from high achieving sportspeople as, “Challenging goals, when accepted, result in superior performance”.
He did not say that setting goals resulted in achievement; setting goals resulted in getting those goals; or that setting goals led to winning.
Read exactly what he did say because it’s never been stated better!
Then ask yourself how you will apply that in practical terms starting in the New Year – and forever beyond.
The 11th Hour
It is said that “it’s always darkest before the dawn” and winners in pursuit of “challenging goals” adopt the habit – the mental trick, actually – of telling themselves that the harder the challenge right now the closer they must be to a breakthrough right now.
So, if the challenge is really hard, they must be really close; and if it’s really, really hard then they must be really, really close.
When do you give up? When it’s really hard? What, when you’re really close to a break through?
Are there more? Yes, heaps, but if you begin the conscious application of just a few (or all) of these strategies or mental tools – these pearls – we know you will begin to experience a better class of outcome, and we’ll look forward to you sharing some of your winning stories with us.
If you’d like more, we’ve assembled a collection into a weighty tomb titled the ProfiTune Personal Development & Goal Setting Business Building Block (half the weight of its 200+ pages is in the title!), which you can purchase online right now!
