Your Beliefs Are Actually Preventing Your Success
Yikes!
Our beliefs are things that we often hold dear. They are things that we have seen hold true throughout our life. Our various experiences have shown us that these beliefs are true. But, what if these beliefs were actually holding us back? Let’s take a moment to read this quote and then continue on the other side.
Maybe there is something to this quote.
After all, how many times have we heard stories of people being held back by their personal “backward” beliefs. It is easy to see the logic when we think of this quote in terms of other people, especially when our personal beliefs are the opposite of theirs. But what about our own backward beliefs? Logically, we know we have them. It’s impossible for everything that we believe to be true to ACTUALLY be true. Especially when many of our beliefs are shaped by one single experience.
Here is an example. You start a new job and on your very first day, someone who reports to you is three hours late and has completely missed not only your department meeting but a one-on-one meeting you set up with them. Chances are, you already have a negative opinion of this person and will have a negative opinion of them from here on out. But what if this employee is actually extremely punctual and it just happens that your first day was also the first time they were late in over five years? The sad fact, to your brain that doesn’t matter. Chances are that if someone asks you 6 months later about this employee’s punctuality you would still say that they are “usually” on time and immediately think of that one time that they were three hours late, even if they still have only missed that one day in almost six years.
When we think about it in this context, it is suddenly so easy to see just how many of our beliefs could be wrong. And, once we realize that, this quote holds an entirely new meaning. Let’s look at it again:
“We are bound by nothing except belief.”
– Ernest Holmes
…yup. Suddenly this seems to make so much sense. Think of all of the experiences that we have chosen not to pursue simply because of our beliefs. Each and every experience we have, no matter how big or small, is colored by as many as 30 separate beliefs that we have decided are true.
What would be possible if those beliefs weren’t factors? Our lives would be completely different. I’m not saying that some (or even most) of our beliefs are unfounded. Chances are that we have most of our beliefs for a very good reason. But what about those others? What beliefs to you hold true that may actually be false?
Today I challenge you to take a look at some of your beliefs that you are convinced are true from an outside point of view. Are there any beliefs you can let go? If you let these beliefs go you might just be surprised at how free you have become.
Deed Seeds
“To be doing good deeds is man’s most glorious task.”
– Sophocles
Beyond the parochial lessons we learned in childhood about doing good deeds — still valid, and yet perhaps needing more umpfh as an adult — we can consider what we are seeding in our deeding.
How we go into a meeting, a negotiation, a sales call, a group project, or our very day can be shaped by the little and perhaps inconsequential tidbits of blessings we put out just before.
Letting someone climb into traffic in front of us, picking up trash as we walk down the sidewalk, leaving a voicemail for someone saying we’re thinking about them, paying for the customer behind us in the fast food lane, give away an eBook…all of these have the potential for feeling good, generous and overall better about ourselves and, perhaps, more worthy to receive our own good.
We’ve heard these acts carry even more power when done with nobody watching.
Where can you plant deed seeds in your experience of life being good for yourself and others today?
Got deed seeds?
“Thinking good thoughts is not enough, doing good deeds is not enough, seeing others follow your good examples is enough.”
– Douglas Horton
