An Overview of Beliefs

Posted on February 01, 2020 by Chris Wagnor, One of Thousands of Health and Fitness Coaches on Noomii.

But what are beliefs? Now, this is a great question. Many people never even get around to asking this all-important matter in life, “what are beliefs?” let alone exploring what beliefs we have in our lives and identifying where they came from.

Brought out into the open (or to the conscious part of our mind) we might find out core beliefs to be quite surprising.

All of the many beliefs we hold about ourselves, other people, the way the world is and what we’re capable of accomplishing in life serve as the very building blocks that we build and base our lives upon.

When we believe in something, we pledge a level of allegiance and commitment to it. Agreeing or disagreeing with another person’s worldview can be an excellent indicator that we have developed a belief about this ‘thing’ at an earlier stage in life.

Here are five interesting ideas about our core beliefs.

1) Beliefs are the ideas that we commit to and support.

2) Beliefs are the views and opinions that we have accumulated throughout our lifetime, that represent our standards.

3) Our beliefs are the rules that we ‘buy into’ and endorse.

4) Beliefs determine the attitude we have towards things and the way in which we perceive these things.

5) Our core identity beliefs determine how much confidence and self esteem we have in our day-to-day affairs and interactions.

What we believe in is what we usually stand to protect.

Becoming aware of our beliefs can give us insight into our own lives and a basis for personal development and self-growth. Consider how we interact with other people, and how we react to some routine situations or events? Knowing what we believe helps us to identify the parts of our belief system that operates at the foundation level of our lives. Many people become what they believe in.

Our beliefs give shape to our perception and constitute a considerable part of our understanding of the world. How we behave, what we commit our lives to and how we feel about ourselves each day will always be impacted by what we believe about who we are, and how the world is that we live in.

We all have varying beliefs about objects, culture, the past and the future. Our beliefs lead us to decide whether people are good, bad, right or wrong. We use our beliefs to predict the future, explain the past, to create new theories about things and even to console ourselves when life doesn’t go quite as we planned.

Some of our beliefs we might call theories, of which, we can all be extraordinarily creative at constructing them. To live a productive life, we must know our beliefs: how they serve us, where they came from and how we can modify them if necessary.

Our beliefs influence our actions and decisions. If we have beliefs about ourselves, other people or the world that are not valid – it’s crucial that we don’t ignorantly validate them by mistake. Many people fall into the trap of believing that what they think is true, is in fact true. This certainly isn’t true.

What is true, is that most people respond more to their perception of reality than what they do towards reality itself. This is commonly referred to as self-deception, which we can all be very good at sometimes doing – deceiving ourselves into thinking that ‘how we see things’ is the way things truly are.

QUESTION 1) Do your beliefs drive you towards fulfilling the dreams you have for your future, or do they keep you in the same place, with the same ‘old’ people and going around in the same old circles that you’ve been going around in for years?

There was a man who once got sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for internet theft. He bragged to his fellow inmates of a $12M stash that awaited him upon his release. The man had a wife and three children who were minus a husband and father for this duration.

There was another man, an ambitious law student who was awarded an 18-month internship with the most established law firm in his city. New guys would earn $55K a year, and company partners stopped counting their money in $1000’s years ago.

Company interns work 16hr days, most weekends and have sofa beds in their offices which they can pull out if needed to save them the chore of stopping work and going home to get sleep.

Ironically, the inmate and the intern are both serving sentences. Where the lawyer might get more time in the exercise yard, he can have his sentence extended to ‘life’ for good behaviour. The fraudster may get his early release for precisely the same.

The world’s greatest architects might argue that the grandest prisons are those built with cast iron and reinforced concrete. More often than not, the beliefs people have about how life can be best lived are far more efficient at keeping men and women enslaved.

QUESTION 2) Do your beliefs allow you to fulfill your full potential and do amazing things, or, do they keep you imprisoned in a safe and predictable ‘little box’?

QUESTION 3) Do your beliefs give you an objective perspective on life, or do they just remind you of your failures and allow you to justify a risk-free approach to life?

Reach out to me if this resonates with you and let me help coach you through these limiting beliefs and re-wire your brain to give you a new outlook on life