Challenge Your Beliefs

By challenging your current beliefs about what is possible you will be able to release the brakes on some of the obstacles that have held you back from doing more, being more, and having more.

Take a Good Look at Your Beliefs

People rarely think about where their beliefs have come from. Over time, like a piece of human flypaper, you have picked up beliefs about yourself and your world and they have stuck to you throughout your life. Regardless of where they have come from, your beliefs drive everything you do. It is absolutely critical to your success in achieving your goals that you understand that getting what you want in life depends on what you believe about the possibility of achieving it.

Whether it’s learning how to use a computer or how to swim, it’s never too late.

Holding on to Your Beliefs

Beliefs, theories, and opinions are what you use to understand and define the world around you. They make it possible to take things for granted, but can easily become prejudices that remain fixed despite contradictory evidence.

In order to hold on to your limiting beliefs you will have filtered everything by one of three methods – deletion, distortion, or generalization – so that you can maintain your view of the world, the people in your life, and what is right and wrong.

• Deletion – When someone you usually see in a positive light does or says something that you regard as negative, you will probably delete this negative event from your memory because it doesn’t conform to your opinion of that person, or your belief about how she usually interacts with others. You may not even pick up the negative aspect because you automatically deleted the event as it occurred. It is as if the negative event never happened.

• Distortion – This occurs when you distort information that does not fit with your view of a person or situation. Your mind accepts the pieces of the story that match your view of a person or event and changes those that don’t.

• Generalization – This is a way of discounting or invalidating information that does not fit. When a normally positive person does something negative, you can still maintain your belief that she is positive by dismissing her action on the grounds that it isn’t her usual way of behaving.

Tip

Remember that the limiting beliefs that you have about yourself are just as harmful as those you have about other people.