“The meaning that you give an event is the belief that attracted it.” – Dr. Joe Vitale
Are you aware of the term “limiting beliefs”?
When I discovered what this was, it was one of the biggest “aha” moments of my adult life.
As someone who is passionate about personal development, this has had a deeply profound and transformative impact on my life.
Here’s the deal…a belief is not a fact. But we treat beliefs like facts. We attach deep meaning to our beliefs. And once we believe something to be true, we look for evidence of it to reinforce it.
A belief can be something that may have been passed down to you by someone else like a parent, or a religious institution, etc.
A belief can also be derived from an event, or multiple events that occurred in your life from which you derived meaning.
Beliefs can be formed by many different types of inputs. But they are not indisputable facts, they are assumptions based on knowledge attained from outside sources or past experiences.
For example, I know someone that truly believes she has bad luck. Every unlucky event that happens to her just further proves her belief to be true.
And she fully expects it to be true because it’s been true all her life. And she will continue to look for evidence to reinforce this belief everywhere. As a result of her unrelenting belief, it will continue to prove to be true for her.
She doesn’t realize that her unwavering belief is what is attracting this experience in her life. Her belief that she is unlucky is a “limiting belief” because it is limiting her ability to thrive in life.
She doesn’t realize that she is actually choosing not to believe that she is lucky. She glosses right over the lucky experiences of her life because they don’t line up with her beliefs that she is unlucky. And so in her world, she just keeps getting reinforcement of these unlucky experiences.
(See also Ten Ways We Keep Ourselves From Being Happy)
If you zoom out and take a look at the bigger picture of what beliefs are for humans, they serve as a sort of operating system. Each of us wired with different beliefs, each belief system so different from each another. And we each defend our unique beliefs so fiercely because we see “evidence” of our beliefs everywhere.
So if we were to become conscious of our beliefs, & understand that beliefs are not facts & we have a choice as to what we want to believe, we can consciously create a better experience for our lives than our limiting beliefs are currently unconsciously creating for us.
The operative word here is “choice”. If you became aware that you had the choice as to what to believe, would you consciously choose your current belief system?
