In my last post I wrote about how you can live your best life. Doing the things that you find important is a good start, but I realised that I didn’t mention one more important thing: changing your beliefs. When you start out with adjusting your daily habits you might fail some days and it’s easy to beat yourself up for it or just give up all together. To keep going, you have to alter the way you think about it.
When I say changing your beliefs, I don’t mean getting a new religion or anything like that. I mean becoming aware of what you’re thinking and see how that helps you. I think society and the media program us to worry and think negatively and that’s very counter productive for living your best life. Let’s say you want to wake up earlier or exercise like I talked about in the last post, but you have thoughts like “I can never do that” or “I’m not a morning person”. Or you want to learn to draw or paint and think “I’m not a creative person”. What does that bring to you? Will it help you actually do it? No, of course not. That’s why you have to question your beliefs. Who told you that you’re not creative? Who told you that you’re fat and not sporty? You can ask yourself if those thoughts are true, but what’s even better is to ask yourself if they are helpful. In these examples, those thoughts will only stop you from doing the things you like to be doing. Like a computer, you have to reprogram your mind. It might feel silly in the beginning, but it starts with telling yourself the new truth you want to believe. Every morning as you wake up, tell yourself “I am creative”, “I am sporty”, “I am full of energy”. Furthermore, fill your house with reminders of those beliefs. Maybe you have a picture of yourself at a time where you were more sportive or you have created something beautiful in the past. Frame it and hang it somewhere that you’ll see it every day, so you get reminded by it to believe your new belief. This is not an easy process, especially if it’s a strong belief that you’re trying to change. Have patience with yourself. If it took 20 years to believe you that you’re not good-looking, it might take a few months or years to believe that you’re beautiful the way you are. If you’re consistent, you can change your beliefs for the better and it’ll help you accomplish your dreams.
Once you’ve changed a belief, it’s important to keep reminding yourself of it from time to time so you don’t fall back in your old beliefs. That’s not because you’re failing, but because almost everything around you tries to reprogram you again. Just turn on the television and it’ll tell you that you’re not good enough and that you’re lacking in something. Why do you think they call it a television PROGRAM? I think especially for ladies this is an important thing since a lot of advertisement is targeted at you, telling you that you need expensive clothes, make-up and stuff to be beautiful. That’s such a big lie and even if we know how advertisements work, it’s still easy to fall for the unconscious belief that we’re not good enough the way we are. And it’s not the beliefs about yourself, even though that’s one of the most important ones. It’s also about life and the world in general. All those posts about terrorists and distasters will try to make you afraid and worried. Of course it can be handy to know a bit of what’s going on in the world, but you don’t have to overflow yourself every day with the selection of news provided by the media companies. It’s one of the reasons I’ve stopped watching the news or reading the paper many years ago. I’ve studied journalism and I know how subjective it often is. Once you understand that the way you think determines a big part of how your life goes, you’ll become more selective by what information you consume. What I do to make sure that I keep my thinking in the right way is to regularly watch motivational videos. Those movies contain short speeches from positive and encouraging people and help you keep changing your beliefs for the better.
This morning I stumbled upon this great video, it’s one of the best I’ve listened to lately:
To sum this up: think about what goals you want to accomplish and what beliefs you need to get there. If you want to loose weight, believe that you’re a sporty person, if you want to paint a painting, believe that you’re creative, if you want to be a dancer, believe you have the moves. It sounds very simple, but the challenge is to stay consistent in your beliefs. Keep reminding yourself of your new beliefs and act accordingly to them.
