Beliefs are powerful, powerful things.
They can save your life, or they can kill you.
For example, someone with a grave illness and little chance of survival might be given a placebo, and they really believe it’s going to cure them… and somehow the placebo effect kicks in and they recover. Plenty of documented cases show this.
But a belief can also kill you. The sad examples of people taking drugs, believing gravity has no grip on them, and falling to their death while trying to fly, are there.
And inbetween those two extremes, there are many ways in which your beliefs will either hinder or help you.
It all comes down to what you believe to be true or false.
Beliefs are strong. So strong that they can cause the mind to act up and deny evidence, no matter how compelling it is.
Say an artist doesn’t believe that they can live well off their art. But one day a ‘miracle’ happens, and they sell a piece at a really good price. That’s evidence that the belief just might be false.
And yet, it’s very easy for that person to argue against it. “It was a fluke” or “I could never reproduce that” or “That happens once in a lifetime”.
Problem is, beliefs influence how you think and act.
And whatever you believe to be true, your mind will look for confirmation of it. And if it can’t find confirmation of the belief, it’ll re-engineer your perception so as to make false proof look like it’s real proof.
This is what psychologists call confirmation bias, and it’s a nasty little bugger.
Very often when we struggle with things, the problem is a hidden belief, somewhere in the background.
Something that tells us that the evidence can’t be true or right.
So it’s really useful for you to start looking at the beliefs you have.
And when you struggle, or you can’t seem to get the results you ought to get, ask yourself:
“What belief is there?”
“What belief is there that’s holding me back? Causing me to sabotage results? Making me ignore evidence?”
What belief do you have, that stands in the way of getting what you want?
