Do you feel that you harbor beliefs about yourself that are sabotaging your success? What if there was a way to get past the Belief Detective that is guarding those old beliefs and not allowing you to become the person you want to?
Most people don’t realize that the beliefs that we hold about ourselves are really the sum total of all of the assumptions, conclusions and explanations we’ve bought into starting when we were babies. They have become the filters by which we see and perceive our world. They have become so much a part of who we “think” we are, that we don’t even question their “truth” anymore, when in fact they are not the truth at all.
Many times two children can grow up in the same household, in the same environment and end up with vastly different beliefs. How can that happen? It happens because the individual’s beliefs are based on how they interpret an environment, not on the actual environment itself. One child may grow up feeling neglected because their parents worked a lot. They may end up being needy and always seeking love because they felt rejected. The other child may become fiercely independent because they believe that they learned to stand on their own two feet. Same environment, different interpretation, different beliefs.
Since beliefs are the foundation upon which we build our view of the world, its difficult to move forward in life and to break through barriers if our beliefs limit us. They define our world, and anything we do that challenges a deep-seated belief meets with great resistance. I know for me, it feels like an internal tug-of-war! It seems like I have this Belief Detective, and anytime a belief feels threatened, it retaliates.
I’m sure you’ve experienced a time in your life when your negative beliefs have kept you stuck. If you believe you always get the short end of the stick, that’s what you will get. Your subconscious will help to prove you right by giving you examples of how you always get the short end. But in truth, we all have many positive beliefs as well or we’d never get anything done. Most of these beliefs lay hidden in our subconscious and we never even know they are there until we try to do something that threatens that belief. Then trying to change them becomes very challenging.
Sometimes old beliefs that no longer serve any purpose dissolve on their own and are replaced with more productive beliefs. (YEAH!) Our work, then, is to uncover and remove the negative beliefs that no longer serve us and are holding us back from achieving all that we desire.
So how do you go about changing these beliefs? Well, first you have to realize that your beliefs, no matter what they are serve some purpose for you. Maybe they keep you safe, maybe they prove you right. Your subconscious wants to help you keep the status quo, so every time you try to change a belief, the Belief Detective stops you. In my case, I started using affirmations, which are positive statements which help to reprogram limiting beliefs. But they were statements aimed at my beliefs so my Belief Detective sabotaged my efforts by making me bored, tired or just too busy to do them. It’s very tricky. I had to find a way to bypass my Belief Detective.
Although I experimented with a variety of techniques including hypnosis, visualization, meditation, and more, with some limited success but I still could not seem to get past the excuses. What I finally found that worked for me was setting my affirmations to catchy tunes. You know how you can get a song stuck in your head that just won’t go away? Well, I took advantage of that and put my positive statements to short jingles and went around singing them all day. I called them AttitudeZapz!
Do you ever remember arguing with yourself about song lyrics? Probably not! It has also been proven scientifically that when the critical mind, or the conscious mind is absorbed in the music, the uncritical subconscious mind, just receives the affirmations without filtering them. So there’s no voice inside your head saying “Liar, liar.” And because once you get these stuck in your head, you can sing them mindlessly and you don’t even have to wonder if you believe the words or not. They just slip easily into your subconscious mind.
So finally I’d found a way to bypass the Belief Detective. Because of that one little thing, I’ve grown by leaps and bound and you can too. You can do the same thing with your own affirmations if you want to, or if you don’t feel that creative, try AttitudeZapz!, and your Belief Detective will soon be out of a job!
