By Naushina Kiely
What we think creates our reality – our beliefs, the accurate ones and the false ones, the ones that serve us well and the ones that don’t- all together – mold the direction of our lives.
Our personal beliefs were created through the various experiences and observations throughout our lives; more importantly our interpretation and evaluation of these experiences created the framework of our personal belief system.
Majority of people are not aware (or only slightly aware) of the power of their thinking – let alone where this thinking trickles from – our belief system! Our views on friendship, romance, career, finances – even ourselves, impact our emotions, actions/behaviours, and decisions. Therefore, destructive, self-limiting beliefs keep us stuck and cause us distress whereas self-building, positive beliefs allow for confidence and success.
We rarely question our beliefs and yet this is what makes up the software that runs our operating system. Beliefs and facts are often intertwined as new information is adjusted to fit into our current belief/operating system.
Some of our beliefs may have served us at one point, but they have outlived their usefulness. And despite the fact that it has outlived it’s usefulness, we often sub-consciously default to this form of thinking
Shift your thinking!
Our belief system plays a major role in our life satisfaction and day to day happiness. Because this process takes place on a sub-conscious level it can feel external to us. Like we have no control over it. However, once we can start to recognize and own the influence we have over our own beliefs – only then can we truly change our beliefs to serve us better.
To shift our thinking we need to take the time to evaluate our thoughts and beliefs about different areas of our life. This can happen with some brainstorming and time as you begin to pay attention to your thoughts and catch the ones that are running on auto pilot, that require no effort from you, yet they continue to be impactful. Only when we break down our self-limiting beliefs can we start to recognize the thoughts and beliefs that are causing us distress and replace then with empowering beliefs. Thoughts filled with themes of inadequacy and self-doubt can then be replaced with thoughts of self-confidence as we shift our thinking to see ourselves as more capable. Thoughts riddled with fear shift to curiosity and courage. These slow movements in our self talk and interpretations quickly pay off in our day to day life.
