How Beliefs Develop

Have you ever taken time to explore how your beliefs came to be your beliefs … and why?

Beliefs can be very powerful motivational, or de-motivational forces and, as such, time spent considering their origin and how they develop can be fascinating and the personal insights revealing.

Life coaching involves working with many different clients, all of whom have very different life stories to share. That’s what makes it such an interesting and varied career.

But with different life stories come different belief systems and, depending on the situations that gave rise to the beliefs that a person chooses to adopt, they can be either empowering, neutral or disempowering.

[box type=\”shadow\”]“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”

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How beliefs develop (continued)

 

Exploring how and why?

Many clients report that the greatest benefit of life coaching comes from exploring just how and why they adopted their now-entrenched beliefs, and realising how flimsy the foundation for some of their beliefs actually is.

I’ve written on many occasions about how each of us who is born to the earth arrives with the gift of an open mind and a free will. We are not born with beliefs. We have a choice over which beliefs to adopt and which not to.

Many influencing factors

That said we don’t lack for influencing factors!

In our formative years, our minds are like sponges and we readily soak up information that will help us grow and develop. In those early years we are also inexperienced about what works and what doesn’t so we are easily influenced by those we regard as more experienced or carrying more authority, such as our parents and our teachers.

In our pre-teen and early teenage years, we enter a phase where we are heavily influenced by our peers. We avoid standing out and go to great lengths to blend in with what the group regards as acceptable thinking and behaviour.

Only later in life do we start to become more comfortable with forging a unique identity but by then many of our beliefs have already been installed.

From thoughts and ideas …

Beliefs start out as simple thoughts or ideas. They then develop over time, moulded by the rich tapestry of experiences that life brings with it and the unique feelings and meanings that we associate with these.

The environment in which we are brought up, our education, the events and their outcomes we experience and even our fertile imaginations all play a role in constructing the concepts that eventually become our beliefs.

…To convictions and beliefs

Slowly these concepts solidify into more developed forms of focused awareness and understanding about specific issues. We call these convictions.

Human nature is such that we enthusiastically look for any supporting evidence (no matter how flaky) that may affirm and validate a conviction we hold – and when we find it, hey presto, a belief is formed.

Gathering strength as we seek out confirming evidence

Our natural bias for seeking out confirming – rather than conflicting – evidence, means that even the beliefs that do not serve us well (in life coaching we call these ‘limiting beliefs’) get stronger and stronger as we gather more ‘reference legs’ or ‘proof’ for them.

Let me offer a purely fictional example to illustrate this:

 

Tom is a highly talented violinist who lives and breathes classical music and whose deepest desire is to play for the London Symphony Orchestra one day.

Unfortunately, when Tom enters his teenage years, his peers at school start to tease him about being a musician. His so-called best friend, a surfer and ‘outdoorsy’ type, tells him that playing the violin is a sign of an effeminate character.

This weighs heavily on Tom’s mind, despite the best efforts of his parents and teachers to try to dispel this as the utter nonsense that it is.

Some months later, Tom stumbles across some dodgy research on the internet that claims that females are more attracted to orchestral music because of their genetic make-up. Tom links this new piece of information with that which his friend carelessly blurted out. Suddenly the idea that male musicians must be effeminate gains more strength in his mind.

Another year goes by and Tom, who now boasts a beautiful girlfriend, invites the girl out for dinner. She tells him how much she appreciates his love for the violin and his dream to play for an internationally acclaimed orchestra, saying that she finds him far more attractive than all those ‘normal macho males’ she meets.

Her comment, though sincere and well-intended, has the unfortunate effect of affirming and validating Tom’s previous thoughts to the point where Tom becomes convinced that he must be effeminate!

Tom becomes reclusive and despondent, not wanting the outside world to be exposed to his love for the violin and his presumed effeminacy. His newly adopted personal belief proves disastrous for both his musical career and his social life.

 

A belief, like Tom’s, that acts as an obstacle to achieving what you truly desire in life, is called a ‘limiting belief’ because it restricts or limits your potential.

Limiting beliefs abound

Most of us have limiting beliefs in one area of our life or another.

The good news is that they can easily be dismantled.

More about that next week!

 

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