Step

18

Don’t change your beliefs

Think about it. Did you pop out of the womb with your beliefs already hard-wired in? No. So where do you get most, if not all, of your beliefs from when you are a child? That’s right, your parents. Now, maybe you were unlucky enough to have parents who filled you with empowering beliefs about yourself and the world in general. A mum and dad who believed in you, who encouraged you to fulfil your potential, who taught you anything was possible, that you could be, do and have anything you deeply desired. Parents like that are rare. Which means the rest of us probably had parents who, in a well-intentioned attempt to avoid us being disappointed, or just to keep us safe, gave us a set of severely limiting beliefs. Just like the little boy who, in a really excited state, said to his dad, “Dad, Dad, can I be an astronaut?” to which his dad replied, “Don’t be stupid, son, you come from Doncaster” (a place in England not known for its output of outer space adventurers).

So where do you think you get most of your beliefs from when you are a teenager? Yes, your peer group, other teenagers. Do you know any teenagers? Maybe you’ve even got some. Would you want their beliefs? Absolutely. A survey in the UK claims that by 14 years of age, 98% of children have a negative self-image and feel insecure (what a marvellous start if you want to live a life of startling underachievement).

What I’m saying is, unless you’ve changed your beliefs – and by the way the most important beliefs are the ones you hold about yourself – you will definitely enjoy lasting failure.

You see, many people reading this guide once believed in Father Christmas or knew someone who did. Have you noticed how, when children believe in Father Christmas, it affects their behaviour? If they are misbehaving close to Christmas time, we parents only have to issue the threat “he won’t be coming” or “all you’ll be getting is coal” and our children immediately fall into line.

Beliefs are just things you feel certain about based on some references you’ve got. I think it was Tony Robbins who first described a belief as being a bit like a table. The tabletop was the belief and the legs of the table were what supported that belief. It’s a great metaphor. Your parents told you Father Christmas existed, so there’s one leg for your table. Your teachers did too, there’s another. All your friends believed in him, that’s a third leg. And on Christmas morning you got a fourth leg for your table when, magically, all these presents appeared. Yet at a certain age you managed totally to rearrange your entire belief system. Sometimes overnight you destroyed one table and built a new one just by changing your references. Firstly, some members of your peer group told you, “Hey, it’s your parents.” You confronted your mum and dad and they confessed. Your teachers owned up too. And now before Christmas it was a case of, “Here’s the toy catalogue, pick yourself a present.”

My son Finlay, when aged nine, confronted me with the big question: “Does Father Christmas exist?” Parents be warned, this was in the middle of spring and completely out of the blue. So my wife and I told him: “Well Finlay, you are a big boy now, so no he doesn’t, it’s just something parents made up.” Well, immediately the tears began to flow. And that was just me. Of course, we explained that our intentions in joining this worldwide conspiracy were honourable, but to not much avail. Then straight on the back of this, Finlay puts two and two together and, between gulps for air, looks me straight in the eye and asks: “So how about the tooth fairies, they are real, aren’t they?” “Er, no,” I confess. Anyway, ­Finlay is tearful most of the night, and several hours later when I go to tuck him in bed he says: “Dad, I’ve been thinking, no Father Christmas, no Tooth Fairy¹ . . . surely the Easter Bunny is real, isn’t he?” More explaining, more tears. Here’s the thing. Within moments Finlay had completely reconstructed his belief system and adjusted to a new reality. Next morning when he got up, he was perfectly fine about it all. Now of course, I’m not suggesting that you could totally reconstruct your entire belief system in moments just like Finlay. I’m not saying it is easy to change your beliefs about anything just by changing your references. Or that by changing your beliefs you will immediately change your behaviour and therefore the results you enjoy.

The whole idea is that it has got nothing to do with what you believe to be true. It’s got everything to do with how what you believe, usually at a deep, subconscious level, will determine how you behave, every minute of every day, for the rest of your life. And how you behave, on a consistent basis, will determine your results. Change the belief at one end and you change the results at the other. As Maxwell Maltz says: “Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as soon as you can change your beliefs.”

For when people believed the world was flat – and they once did – it didn’t half limit travel. (Although you’ve got to admit ­Christopher Columbus wasn’t exactly a master of goal setting – see step 7. Here was a man who set off and didn’t know where he was going, when he got there he didn’t know where he was, and when he returned he didn’t know where he’d been.)

I remember when my daughter Megan was two and we suddenly realised that we were going on holiday in two weeks’ time and she was still sleeping in a cot. My wife and I decided it would be great if she was used to sleeping in a bed. But we had only two weeks to train her to get used to the idea. When the two boys had swapped from cots to beds it had been a real struggle. Night after night we’d find them wandering about on the landing, screaming and bawling. In fact, we resorted to tying the bedroom door with string in an attempt to stop them escaping. Of course, cots are great because they are like little prisons, cell block ‘H’ and all that; the kids can’t get out, you can dump them in and leave them to scream all night (just joking). So we thought, “Let’s just bite the bullet, we’ll have to put up with the short-term inconvenience for the long-term gain.”

We carefully sold Megan on the idea of a bed. “You’re a big girl now and so you can have your very own bed,” we enthused. We get the new bed and the first night we tuck Megan in and she goes off to sleep sweet as a lamb. Then we sit downstairs waiting for the daring great escape and prepare ourselves for having to put her back into bed several times during the night. But guess what? We don’t hear a peep all night. She doesn’t get up once. We explain this away to ourselves as the fact that, of course, girls are much easier work than boys. Anyway, the next night it’s the same routine. We tuck her in and not a peep all night. This goes on for a full seven nights. And then exactly a week after we started there is Megan screaming and bawling at four o’clock in the morning. And that’s when I got it. Megan didn’t realise you could get out of a bed. She had learned to be helpless; that because of her previous experience, nothing she did mattered, so why even try? (More on the fun of believing you are helpless can be found in step 30.)

“Have you noticed that just about everything is a generalisation, including this sentence?”

Another way we build beliefs is by generalising from our experiences of the world. Have you noticed that just about everything is a generalisation, including this sentence? This is a good thing when you are learning something new. Imagine if once you’d learned how to open a door, you had to figure out how to do it each time you approached one. No, having done it once, we generalise that this is how all doors work. However, generalisations can be a bad thing if you are trying to generate a different way of doing things. To prove it they once did an experiment where the hinges (which were hidden) and the door handle were on the same side of the door, like this:

Then they asked a load of adults to see whether they could open the door. Of course, they couldn’t. They were stuck with their generalisation for doors. The only explanation they could come up with for their failure was that they thought the door must be locked, which it wasn’t.

I’ve met many women who have, with a good deal of venom, expressed the following view: “All men are bastards.” Now typically, if you explore their experience, often they had a really bad time with one or possibly two blokes, who if truth be told were of uncertain parentage, but they then generalised it to be true of all of us fellas. Can you see if you construct a map of the world along these lines how difficult it would be to ever change your behaviour? Or get a decent boyfriend? By the way, in case you are wondering, all women are bitches too (obviously, I only said that to even up the score).

So please, please, please, if you want to remain a failure, don’t mess with your beliefs.

¹ The kids’ tables (references) about tooth fairies were hard to shake. My wife and I had got into the habit of not only leaving money but also Post-it Notes covered in tiny spidery writing that the kids thought were from a whole family of tooth fairies. We created a complete universe. My notes were always from Billy One Leg who had lost a leg to a cat but had had a wheel fitted so he could still dash around at high speed. Whereas the ones my wife wrote were from a posh fairy called Princess Crystal. My favourite from the Princess was when she wrote (or was it my wife?), “Dear Megan, I’m really cross because I have to do the night shift yet again because Billy One Leg is off sick with sticky wings.”