Have you ever stopped to think about what you believe about yourself?
That, what you believe about yourself has a really big impact on what you accomplish in your life.
“Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” -Henry Ford
So what do you think about yourself? What are you capable of? Who are you?
That all affects e.g. to what you are going to do in the first place, and to how you are doing whatever you do.
For example, if you believe that you are not worth something – for example, worth winning in a race – or that you are not capable of it (because you are a man or a woman, or tall or short, or fat or skinny, or just about anything), you will most likely not succeed in it – no matter what it is.
However, all those are just thoughts. They have nothing to do with truth or reality. They are just our thoughts – our perceptions and assessments – of ourselves and this world around us.
An important question, then, is who the heck defined it all in the first place? You see, we may all have had situations in our past, such as as a child in school or kindergarten, where we have perhaps answered a question or performed in one way or another, and others have laughed at us.
In a situation like that, our little mind might make the interpretation that I’m not good at this, or even that I’m not valuable – or whatever like that. Our young child’s mind makes strange interpretations of situations and things for which we then set out to seek evidence.
Our Need to Be Right and the Proofs of It
We all have a tremendous desire and need to be right. Nobody likes to be wrong. Once we have made a definition or interpretation of something, we begin to look for evidence for it.
However, it is all largely based on our own interpretations of things and situations. If, for some reason, we have formed a perception of ourselves as a not-so-valuable person, we could interpret another person’s smile as a mockery, even though that other person’s intention is to communicate something completely different, perhaps even interest in us.
This is how we go through our lives. We make interpretations based on what we, as a small child, have sometimes come to believe about something concerning ourselves. And because we want to be right, we pay attention specifically to those interpretations that support our beliefs. In addition to this, as a rule, we completely ignore information that could challenge our beliefs.
So if you now stop for a moment to think about what you really believe about yourself, then who really defined it in the first place? Other children in the kindergarten? Or maybe your mother, who has sometimes snorted “Aren’t you clumsy!” when you stumbled upon something or spilled your glass of milk. And based on this snort, you’ve then found yourself clumsy and set out to get more evidence for that idea.
No. Although other people have probably influenced to the formation of your beliefs, the only person really who determines who you are, what your identity is, or what you are capable of, is you yourself. And it really is just about beliefs.
Therefore, what if, instead of believing about something that you can’t do it or that you’re not worth it, you believed that you can do it and, above all, that you are worth it? What would that make possible for you?
I don’t think there is one single child in this world who wouldn’t be precious at birth. What has happened since then are just the meanings we have given ourselves to different things.
However, you can change those meanings just as they were formed in their time.
No, it’s not always easy because we always want to be right and it’s hard for us to admit we were wrong, but what it’s about.
By giving things a new meaning in your mind, by giving yourself a new meaning of who you are, what you are capable of, you begin to achieve different results in your life. By changing your own beliefs, changing the meanings of things, what you accomplish changes, sometimes very radically.
So what do you believe about yourself? And if your beliefs don’t work, decide that you will start believing something else about yourself, something that will serve you and your goals better. If needed, you can get help with all this, with NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
