What They Are and How They Influence Us:
What do you believe?
Have you ever really thought about your beliefs?
I don’t mean ‘faith’ like lightning is the thunderbolts of Zeus hurled down in a random hissyfit, or Jesus rose from the dead, or that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the supreme being of Pastafarianism.
What I mean is, to use techno-geek phrasing, your default operating system.
What is a belief anyway?
A belief is a recurring thought process that you, either consciously or unconsciously, accept to be an accurate representation of reality.
This acceptance of beliefs-as-facts is usually incorrect.
Beliefs are merely the story you tell yourself, about yourself, and your place in the world. They are fictions, albeit useful fictions, but still, fictions all the same.
Beliefs are not a true representation of objective reality.
Reality is what you make it to be. That doesn’t mean you get to make up your own facts. But you can—and do—interpret the objective reality that we all live in.
A practical definition of objective reality is that it consists of the physical stuff of the universe; physical objects, human interactions—past and present, et al. (Most quantum physicists would take issue with this definition but that’s outside the realm of this article.)
These are the conditions that we find ourselves in at all times in our lives.
These are the things that any reasonable person would accept as facts: I am sitting at a desk typing these words into a laptop computer.
Those are facts that any observer would agree to be ‘true’.
However, if you were to say ‘I am sitting at a beautiful desk struggling to type these words into a very user friendly laptop computer,’ you are adding your beliefs. ‘Beauty’, ‘struggle’, and ‘very user friendly’, are subjective. They can be interpreted differently by anyone based on their personal realities. They are your thoughts about your circumstances, they are not facts.
For all practical purposes, it is your personal reality—your beliefs— that guide your life.
It is how you comprehend and navigate the world around you. To you, it is how the world actually is.
You take in input of objective reality—via your senses—and then you interpret those inputs though the filters of you life experiences, cultural influences, education, mental capacities and character.
Everyone does this.
And since everyone has unique life experiences, cultural influences, education, mental capacities and characters, we all interpret circumstances in our own specific way.
We all identify with our beliefs.
Literally. We usually consider our beliefs to be the substance that makes us…us.
Even when they no longer serve us in a positive way.
So changing any belief can be akin to a loss of meaning and purpose in life.
This is why making permanent life changes is so difficult.
The firs step is to separate your thoughts from your circumstances.
Set aside a few minutes each day to consider a specific circumstance in your life. Either mentally or on paper, list all the facts about that circumstance. Then, throughout the day, whenever that circumstance come up, pay attention to the sentences you are telling yourself and notice if they are facts or beliefs.
Having the ability to separate beliefs from circumstances is a powerful way to retain control and lead an intentional life.