What is the impact, of my beliefs on my reality?

He does not believe, who does not live according to his belief.  

 Thomas Fuller

How do your beliefs impact the  perception you hold about reality?

  • Little or not at all?
  • They have some effect?
  • High?
  • Total. My beliefs absolutely define how the reality of my life is, the good aspects, the not quite so good and the most challenging?

Think again about the journey of you becoming you.

We are Born

We begin to learn and form beliefs about  reality, from direct experience and from what the big people around us teach us to believe. We are very trusting of the big people😯😀

We learn to believe in our beliefs as they help us build a representation of reality.

We learn to trust that representation of reality, because it “works”. We look through the lenses of our beliefs and “see that it is so” and then learn of course, “I am right” and now defend our representation of reality, as if our very life is threatened.

 

 

 

What we ‘see’, becomes true for us, our truth.

We form Points of View, views from a Point!

We sense threat when others disagree with our view on reality (because our representation is, you know, actually real-‘Duh’ 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️)

Our Amygdala floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline, and we are in ‘fight-flight-freeze acting as if our very life is in real danger  with our mature thinking, Prefrontal Cortex  shut down! 😖

As this happens over and over again, we are learning that if people disagree with us, we need to win the ‘battle’, otherwise the emotion, the feelings we get in our body, will not be good🤯. The brain learns by repetition and this reinforces the belief ‘I am right.’

So it is, that we become defined, not by the reality that is ‘out there’, rather we are defined by what we believe, what our lenses, perceive…

It is that perception and our consequent representation, which becomes true for us.

Thus we become what we believe, e.g. Needing to be perfect, not good enough, better than everybody else, confident, not confident, able to listen, not able to listen, bullied, bullying, nervous, certain, over-analysing, taking everything personally, etc etc.

  • Unless?
  • Unless what?

We change our mindset about changing beliefs?

Change your beliefs – Change your life

A question to ask yourself

Is your mind your master? Or Are you the master of your mind?  

 

What is the mindset required to change belief?

Changing  beliefs is part of the journey of me becoming me, or you becoming you.

mindset for belief change

There are a lot of beliefs I have changed over the years, a lot I hold still to be right for me and a lot of beliefs, I do need to change.

What is the Mindset I need to give rise to, invoke,  that change?

And why do I even want to change those beliefs?

Change your beliefs – change your life.😀

My personal experience of this?

In the last two years my reality has become one,  in which my weight has dropped 33 kilos😀

Becoming you (self actualisation)

                                                      maslow’s hierarchy

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs motivational model
Abraham Maslow developed the Hierarchy of Needs model in 1940-50’s USA, and the Hierarchy of Needs theory remains valid today for understanding human motivation, management training, and personal development. Indeed, Maslow’s ideas surrounding the Hierarchy of Needs concerning the responsibility of employers to provide a workplace environment that encourages and enables employees to fulfil their own unique potential (self-actualization) are today more relevant than ever. Abraham Maslow’s book Motivation and Personality, published in 1954 (second edition 1970) introduced the Hierarchy of Needs, and Maslow extended his ideas in other work, notably his later book Toward A Psychology Of Being, a significant and relevant commentary, which has been revised in recent times by Richard Lowry, who is in his own right a leading academic in the field of motivational psychology.
Abraham Maslow was born in New York in 1908 and died in 1970, although various publications appear in Maslow’s name in later years. Maslow’s PhD in psychology in 1934 at the University of Wisconsin formed the basis of his motivational research, initially studying rhesus monkeys. Maslow later moved to New York’s Brooklyn College. Maslow’s original five-stage Hierarchy of Needs model is clearly and directly attributable to Maslow; later versions with added motivational stages are not so clearly attributable, although in his work Maslow refers to these additional aspects of motivation, but not specifically as levels in the Hierarchy.

Interpreting behaviour according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is an excellent model for understanding human motivation see Figure 14 Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but it is a broad concept. If you are puzzled as to how to relate given behaviour to the Hierarchy it could be that your definition of the behaviour needs refining. For example, ‘where does ‘doing things for fun’ fit into the model? The answer is that it can’t until you define ‘doing things for fun’ more accurately.
You’d need to define more precisely each given situation where a person is ‘doing things for fun’ in order to analyse motivation according to Maslow’s Hierarchy, since the ‘fun’ activity motive can potentially be part any of the five original Maslow needs.
Understanding whether striving to achieve a particular need or aim is ‘fun’ can provide a helpful basis for identifying a Maslow driver within a given behaviour, and thereby to assess where a particular behaviour fits into the model:
• Biological – health, fitness, energising mind and body, etc.
• Safety – order and structure needs met for example by some heavily organised, structural activity
• Belongingness – team sport, club ‘family’ and relationships
• Esteem – competition, achievement, recognition
• Self-Actualization drivers – challenge, new experiences, love of art, nature, etc.
However in order to relate a particular ‘doing it for fun’ behaviour the Hierarchy of Needs we need to consider what makes it ‘fun’ (i.e. rewarding) for the person. If a behaviour is ‘for fun’, then consider what makes it ‘fun’ for the person – is the ‘fun’ rooted in ‘belongingness’, or is it from ‘recognition’, ie., ‘esteem’. Or is the fun at a deeper level, from the sense of self-fulfilment, i.e. ‘self-actualization’.
Apply this approach to any behaviour that doesn’t immediately fit the model, and it will help you to see where it does fit.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs will be a blunt instrument if used as such. The way you use the Hierarchy of Needs determines the subtlety and sophistication of the model.
For example: the common broad-brush interpretation of Maslow’s famous theory suggests that that once a need is satisfied the person moves onto the next, and to an extent this is entirely correct. However an overly rigid application of this interpretation will produce a rigid analysis, and people and motivation are more complex. So while it is broadly true that people move up (or down) the hierarchy, depending what’s happening to them in their lives, it is also true that most people’s motivational ‘set’ at any time comprises elements of all of the motivational drivers. For example, self-actualizers (level 5 – original model) are mainly focused on self-actualizing but are still motivated to eat (level 1) and socialise (level 3). Similarly, homeless folk whose main focus is feeding themselves (level 1) and finding shelter for the night (level 2) can also be, albeit to a lesser extent, still concerned with social relationships (level 3), how their friends perceive them (level 4), and even the meaning of life (level 5 – original model).
Like any simple model, Maslow’s theory not a fully responsive system – it’s a guide which requires some interpretation and thought, given which, it remains extremely useful and applicable for understanding, explaining and handling many human behaviour situations.

I have also found it useful to associate Maslow’s hierarchy with something called Spiral Dynamics in looking at motivational drivers

 

  • Which level are you at?
  • What needs to happen to move up?
  • If you are at Self-actualisation, anything you need to do to sustain at that level?

Which brain causes you to change?

                                                                   our 3 brains

A useful way to think about changing behaviours or patterns of thinking is; people will change when they fully understand and can integrate the change at three levels:
• Head
• Heart
• Gut
From my own experience, let’s take stopping smoking, which I did In 1997. The history is; started at 21 years old at 25 per day for around 20 years, stopped for about 5 years, started again for 5 years at 20 per day or 5 cigars per day, then stopped finally. I must admit it looks awful seeing it written down😳. Any way how did I finally stop? Like a lot of smokers , I knew intellectually (in my head) that it is unhealthy to smoke; it is not good for you for all sorts of well explained reasons. At the head level then, I had accepted (but not integrated), the need to change. That was not enough to make me stop😏. One day, I was invited to a medical check-up by my Company and asked to blow as hard as I could into a little machine. The machine did not play happy music and the output, along with the doctor person’s interpretation, caused a ‘gut’ reaction. A pulse of fear ran through me and now I have two of the three reasons to change, head and gut. Having the two together, caused me to analyse the consequences of the habit much more, i.e. what would happen to me if I carried on smoking, what would happen if I stopped, how would I cope? From this I developed a possible strategy to do the ‘stopping’. With this in place, I searched and knew in my heart of hearts, I would stop (I got the power). With my head, heart and gut now in agreement, I stopped.
If you are a smoker, this is my ‘warm turkey’ strategy for stopping.
Since most smoking is habitual i.e. I always have one with a cup of tea after eating breakfast, then I have one in the car on the way to work, then I have one when I arrive at work etc.. I simply delayed having the first cigarette for an hour, on the first three days, then next three days delayed by another hour, then next three days by another hour etc.. What I found was, when I had delayed the first cigarette to four o’clock in the afternoon, I’m saying to myself, “you can wait this long, so why bother with this one?” I’m choosing now not to have it and could finally throw the packet away. The key here is I chose, I made a conscious choice🦉

The reasons you’d want to know about this are:-
• Becoming the ‘real you’ will most certainly involve change on your part
• This insight will help you create the conditions for change, also execute and sustain the change

What is this about?
This is to do with how we, as humans, approach change. It is useful to think about change requiring agreement within us, across three parts.
There is an intellectual part of us (head) that does the analysing and thinking about the reason to change, what the change actually will be, how we will do it and what the consequences will be. In my stop smoking example above, at the beginning, this part had only really looked superficially at the evidence available about why I should stop and not associated what it was finding with the true ‘me’.
The second part, (gut) came into play in the doctor’s office, with that pulse of fear. I had a visceral response and now instinctively, if you like, knew, something was amiss. Having this part in play now, as it were, caused me to associate the damage of smoking directly to me, and triggered deeper intellectual thinking around why, what , how.
Finally, in this example the third part, the (heart) came into play where I examine in my ‘heart of hearts’, do I have the will, the power, to do this?
I have a belief that our heart is the seat of our power (e-motion). It is the driver. It is where our love comes from and is the part that contains the spirit within us.
Note, I’m equating these three parts thus:-
• Head —- Intellect
• Heart—- love / spirit / power
• Gut —– Instinct / visceral / intuition
Also I believe the order in which we ‘get’ things varies. So we may get something intellectually first (head), as I did with smoking, or maybe the first thing we get is an intuition (gut), or maybe we experience a deep instinctual trigger (gut). The important thing for change to happen is, we need agreement across all three👍👍👍.
How can we use this insight?
As I have said, only you can change you and you will only do that if you truly want to change.

It is my belief that this is where the ‘want to’ gets sorted out – in the agreement of these three parts Head – Heart – Gut

Think about a change you are considering but you haven’t really made yet.

  • Are all the parts in agreement?
  • Are you sure?