Beliefs are interesting. And the human beings that have them are even more so.
What is a belief?
It is something that is held in the mind about how the world or ourselves are.
The funny thing is that they don’t necessarily reflect reality, yet in having them they organize how reality is for us.
While true, this doesn’t really do much to HELP you believe in yourself if you don’t. Also belief is contextual meaning if you believe in yourself about one thing it doesn’t automatically you do about another.
In my previous post I discussed how my limiting beliefs around how I sucked at the squat kept me there. But by transforming that into an empowering belief I’m making better progress in the exercise, and enjoying it, unlike I’ve ever done before.
Since beliefs are held to be TRUE we don’t look around often to change our beliefs. In fact all information is then skewed to meet our beliefs. Once again, reality doesn’t have much to do with it. You can’t get away from this bias, even if you think you’re the most logical person alive.
While most beliefs stay static throughout most of our lives, other do change regularly.
There may have been a time when you believed Santa Claus was real but now you no longer do.
You may start to doubt a belief because of something in your experience. Then further things occur and you discard that belief.
In its place something new emerges.
Other times you become open to the possibility of a new belief. More data and experience back this up to the point where it becomes a solid belief.
I use to not believe in energy. But I read books and went to seminars where it was demonstrated. I saw a person get healed from an old long lasting injury basically by laying on hands.
I saw more and more of it. Then one day I felt it in an absolute way. And now that’s a common occurrence for me.
Just recently I picked up an item that had been charged with energy in a certain way. An intense shockwave moved up my arm. Whoa! But I digress…
If you believe that bodyweight training is the best way to train that is what you’re going to do. This can be okay, but if you believe that anything else is worthless you can’t get the benefits that those things can bring.
If you believe you could never do X, do you think you’re going to even attempt it?
If you don’t have motivation (or time to train) this comes down to your values and priorities, which are beliefs in how important something is?
These beliefs can be transformed over time naturally, especially if you pay attention to them.
A big clue is anytime you say to yourself you have to, or should do, or can’t do something? There is always a belief behind that statement.
But just transforming them through experience is slow going.
If instead you could radically speed up the process what would that do for you?
In my case I transformed my belief around squats and now am excited to do them, making fast progress.
Awhile back when working on freestanding handstand pushups I believed they were hard to do. Because of this I could never do more than one at a time. I changed this belief in a few minutes (it was an easy one to handle once I realized it was there) and I instantly performed doubles and triples in the exercise.
Learn more about beliefs and how to transform them in this month’s issue.