3. Beliefs

Rachel A.

“There are no facts, only interpretations”.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beliefs are a funny thing. People of times past were convinced the earth was flat. The ancient Greeks believed a Titan named Atlas held the sky up. And a whole bunch of us used to think a jolly man in a red suit leaving presents under our Christmas tree once a year was totally legit. But the only reason that people thought these things was because:

1. They were told to by the people they trust,

2. They made ‘logical’ inferences and deductions, and

3. Through osmosis, their environments and experiences rubbed off onto them.

I once heard of Indigenous Australian women giving their babies Coca-Cola. The women had seen the company’s advertising, and noted that the people drinking Cola were happy. The women interpreted this to mean that drinking Cola would make one happy. Naturally they wanted their children to be happy, so it made sense to give their babies this ‘happy juice’.

When we are born into this world, we arrive with clean belief slates; yet, over time, things heard from family members, friends, and the influence of society as a whole, all contribute to building our belief systems. The majority of these are formed whilst we are still young. The thing is, what is true based on fact (absolute truth) and what you have convinced yourself to be true (relative truth) are two very different things. Decapitation will equal death, that’s an absolute. It is universally excepted as fact. Very few people would argue against this statement. Believing everyone is staring at you, that you are not worthy, or that you “can’t stop eating the cookies once the packet is open” is relative. I’m sure the offer of $1,000 not to eat the rest of the cookies would do the trick. You’d just chuck the packet away, right?

All of us are guilty of believing relative truths and giving meaning to things that happened in our early years, and these beliefs then follow us into adulthood. Maybe you grew up in a household where expressing anger or frustration was frowned upon. Today you have trouble telling others when you are not happy with something. Perhaps there is an underlying fear that they will reject you, get angry with you, ignore you or not like you. These are things that you came to believe as a child and have carried across with you into adulthood; but, these are relative truths. You have convinced yourself that others will respond in this manner when you speak up, but it is not a fact that they will do so.

Without going too much into the brain science, each of us has a conscious mind (essentially our rational, thinking mind where we weigh up, calculate, decide and talk to ourselves) and a subconscious mind (our instinctual, feeling mind). It was this latter, subconscious mind, that was doing the work in our early years and it dealt with all the unfiltered information thrown at us: language, facial expressions, tone of voice, emotions, laughter, oft repeated statements, advertising, news media, etc. If mum or dad constantly said you were ‘a clever cookie’, you believed them. If instead they said you were ‘a little shit’, you believed that. As a child you had yet to develop the ability to weigh up the truth of such statements. It’s not until later when our conscious mind fully develops that we can properly rationalise whether or not we want to take on a belief. So, whilst as an adult, within your rational, conscious mind you are thinking: ‘I’d quite like to get promoted into a leadership position’; messages you received early on about who a leader is and what they look like, may have affected your subconscious to the point that it is telling you there is no point trying because you don’t ‘fit the bill’. Weird, yes, but the core beliefs we develop during childhood bias how we perceive things in adulthood. They become our lenses.

Take someone who, in their goal to lose a lot of weight, got liposuction or a gastric band. They may have taken some tangible, logistical actions, but if they don’t change the underlying scripts they have around food, that weight is going to creep back on. Many of us are running scripts in our head that in reality are only relative truths, yet which we have taken on as absolute: ‘I’m not smart enough’, ‘I’m ugly’, ‘no-one will ever want to go out with me’, ‘I don’t have the smarts to learn that’, ‘I don’t have the will-power’, ‘I’m too old to learn something new’, ‘I’ll never be able to quit smoking’, or ‘life is tough’. All of the aforementioned are ‘limiting beliefs’, and they are the psychological obstacles that stop us from moving forward. (By the same token, we also have scripts running in our subconscious that can be positive and helpful. The more of these we can collect and create, the better!)

Just think, who is enjoying life more? The bloke who runs the script of: “life is a bitch and then you marry one” or the bloke who is telling himself that “life is wonderful, and I am truly grateful for each and every day”.