Beliefs Reboot [How to Get Rid of Limiting Beliefs]

“Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality.”

-Bruce Lee

We, humans, are naturally gatherers. We love to accumulate stuff. If you are sitting at home right now, take a look around you and question honestly if you absolutely need every single thing that you see.

Chances are you don’t need half of them, yet there they are.

You are already thinking about all the reasons why you could not get rid of any of these things, just in case I come up with the crazy suggestion that would be a good idea to donate some of it or simply throw them away. After all, you might need that Nacho Libre’s promotional cup someday. Don’t worry; even though I dig for de-cluttered spaces, right now I am more interested in your ideas and fundamental beliefs about reality.

You see, just as we hold on with teeth and nails to material objects we collect over the years, our mind also gets fixated to ideas and beliefs that do not serves us of much today.  Ideas and beliefs we gather growing up and even as adults, on our walk through life.

If you get defensive when someone suggest to throw away your Nacho Libre memorabilia, no wonder why you have so much trouble trying to open your mind to new ideas and get rid of the old ones.

I’m not referring here to our music taste or to our favorite meal. I am talking about our fundamental beliefs about life, those beliefs that affect the way we see and experience reality.

My Game, Your Rules?

We all have a set of fundamental beliefs, even if we do not think about them consciously. These beliefs are the rules of the game, what give a sense of order and meaning to the events and situations we encounter throughout our lives. We cannot play without them. The problem is that when we accept a set of rules without seriously thinking about it, we end up playing by the rules of someone else’s game.

The realization that I was living my life by a pre-ordered set of beliefs created by somebody else and that I had accepted this without a beep, and actually without knowing I was accepting something, was a terrifying moment for me.

What of all the things I believed was a product of my own comprehension and out of my personal experience and what was a washed up belief set by default by society out of convenience?

In that moment I understood that I could not be sure about anything I believed anymore, all the data was corrupted and a total wipe was needed. So I empty my mind of all and every belief I had and made the best effort to start over again. It was like if I was a newborn in need to learn everything from scratch, but this time under my own terms. This was the biggest opportunity I have ever given myself.

 

30 Days Trial Period

I set a period of 30 days where I would approach to every experience I had as something completely new and out of every experience my beliefs about life and reality would develop. I read and learned as much as I could. I learned new concepts and re-learned old ones. But this time I questioned everything. No one was a “master”, no one was “the authority” on anything and I adopted only the ideas and beliefs that would finally make sense for me in the great scheme of things.

I invite you to give yourself the same opportunity. For an established period of time reset your beliefs database and start over from scratch. Allow yourself to discover the world again and build a set of rules on top of the ideas that makes sense to you, no over the pre-packaged, labeled ideas imposed by society(es). The worst that could happen is that by the end of the trial period you decide to go back to your previous set of beliefs, but that’s very unlikely. By the end of the 30 days (or whatever time frame you chose) you will be a different person.

 

Most Common Limiting Beliefs

What we believe about life and reality is greatly determined by our experiences and the environment we have grown up. However, there are certain topics about which we have a very strong, defined opinion. These are the ones we should tackle first. The strongest our opinion about it, the greater it’s influence on our lives and our decisions:

 

• Life and death:  Maybe you have been taught from an early age that death is the end of life or maybe after reading some brochures you concluded that after death you will live for eternity in a special lot of Central Park cuddling with tiger pets. It doesn’t really matter what you currently believe, what matters is that you forget about it. Wipe it out. Now start researching, read, learn, listen, talk, wonder, question and finally conclude by yourself, even when you end up completely confused and nowhere near a definite answer. I prefer to acknowledge that I am completely ignorant about a subject, that to live in a lie just because is easier.

 

• Good and evil: Black and white as concepts helps us make sense of the world from a very early age, when we lack the cognitive tools to develop an opinion based on personal experience or a reasonable conclusion from factual evidence. We tend to generalize and a scale of good as positive and evil as negative serves us very well to classify persons, ideas, things and experiences. But once we enter into adulthood, or mental maturity, we have no reason to generalize anymore and the good and evil scale should be disregarded. To classify anything as pure black or white (or plan good and evil) is unrealistic, always inaccurate and unpractical.

 

• Mistakes and failure: Our natural inclination to avoid failure has an evolutionary reason, but does not make much sense anymore. All of us avoid making mistakes and that is natural, but the fear to be wrong or to fail can become paralyzing if we let it run wild. The truth is that much can be learned out of our mistakes (see The Power of Mistakes). To meditate about the way you see mistakes and failure in general might have several benefits.

 

• Money and wealth: The flawed beliefs related to money and wealth are usually the results of a scarcity mindset, like thinking that there are no enough opportunities in the world for all of us or that the fact that others get wealthier means we get poorer. It’s very unlikely that you reach financial independence if you see money and wealth like a limited resource depleting constantly.  If this ridiculous idea seems provokes you anxiety, then some of your beliefs about wealth are fundamentally wrong.

 

• Love: Our definition of love can vary based on our experiences, our expectations and other beliefs related to human relationships, but our definition and understanding about what love is and mean is usually also influenced by society and the media. Define love by yourself and live by it.

 

• Worthiness: Sometimes we might feel we don’t get the desires results out of our actions because we do not deserve it: We didn’t work that hard, maybe we are a little lazy, maybe we are not pretty enough, or smart enough. So this should be the reason why we are not successful right? Well, no. Of course, if we don’t try our best, we cannot expect that the results exceed the average, but the failure is not related to our worthiness; you are not lazy because you don’t worth it. You don’t try your best because you simply are not motivated enough, you might not be living passionately, or you might be sabotaging yourself to get out of a unfulfilling career or relationship. But to believe we don’t worth it will just reinforce this idea and attract situations that match the idea.

 

• Nature of reality: For me this is one of the most interesting subjects to question. We rarely wonder what “reality” is. We simply give it for granted and don’t even bother to debate about it. Nevertheless, if your fundamental beliefs about reality are inaccurate, it will hardly matter what you believe about anything else. This is a complex subject, but highly debatable.

 

The Effects of Accurate Beliefs

The beliefs that influence us the most are those that operate below our consciousness. Those truths that we have accepted as fact, even though we have not concrete evidence. In order to effectively challenge our beliefs we must question every single conclusion that our mind comes up with. Give nothing for granted.

This period of time will be like taking care of a garden (your mind) that has been let unattended for a long time. Weed (flawed beliefs) has grown and take it out one by one is not very productive. You must wipe the whole garden and start planting again, this time giving much more attention to what you allow inside your garden.

To live your life under the parameters established by society just because to question them is too tiresome or too problematic, is like buying a PC in 2014 with Windows 95 and make no attempt to upgrade. You can go and live your life with your old operating system running on your brand new machine, but you will be missing the opportunity to exploit the full potential of the equipment in your hands.