What are Beliefs and Values?

As I said in a previous post, I came across this several years ago.

Everyone knows what a belief is until asked to define it. I thought about this for a long time and in the thinking the subject of Values came up also.

My definitions:-

A Belief is an internally held representation of a lens through which we perceive reality. It defines what is ‘true’ (for me) in any given context.

A Value is an internally held representation of a principle, used to determine who and how I am.

A value may be overridden in any given context e.g. My life is under immediate threat.

Values operate in a hierarchy.

The interesting thing here, is  people will perceive the same reality differently, because of what their lenses enable and disable in their perception e.g. internal biases. It is also true that when we hold a belief about something / someone, we will always have evidence to back that up, obtained via our lens 🙂

It is also my belief and as I said previously, the strongest belief we all hold from a young age is I am right, that beliefs are learned and hence can be unlearned or relearned

There is hope for the World.

I will come back to Beliefs and Values many times