It might seem like a strange question to ask, but I’m going to ask anyway:
What personal beliefs do you hold about yourself?
I’ll give you a few minutes to think about that one, as it’s a little trickier than you might first imagine.
Tricky, isn’t it!
Slave or Master?
The reason we find it so difficult is that we rarely pay attention to the beliefs we have. However, we have to recognise that either we are a slave to our beliefs or we are a master of them.
If you were to master just a few of your personal beliefs, your life would change beyond measure. Imagine if you managed to install a new belief that you are a supremely confident person. How do you think this one belief would change your life? It would change your life in every way. Simply understanding and mastering your beliefs is going to bring about a massive shift in your life.
Uncover Your Personal Beliefs
You’ve learned the theory of beliefs, how they are formed, why we have them, what role they serve in our lives, and the rules that come from our beliefs. Now it’s time for the good stuff, the stuff that truly helps us to transform our lives.
It’s time to break all the rules.
Okay, so here is the really simple exercise to start uncovering your beliefs. This is going to open your eyes, amaze you, and give you huge insights into your own life that you may not have thought about before.
THE BELIEF WHEEL
No doubt you will have seen something similar to this called the Wheel of Life, which is used a lot in life coaching.
We are going to break your life up into eight sections.
The red area represents all of the areas in our lives. It lets us see immediately what areas we might want to focus on more. The example above shows us that “Recreation” is out of balance with other life areas.
Your exercise for today:
Choose one of the areas in the belief wheel e.g.
Health – This is obviously to do with how healthy you are at the moment: Do you get enough exercise, do you have any detrimental habits that could harm you, do you eat well, do you have a lot of energy, are you stressed?
Think about what is holding you back from having a score of ten in the area you chose.
For example, you might say for health: “I don’t have enough time” “I’m too busy,” “other areas are more important,” “I don’t have the energy.””I am too stressed to stop smoking”
With the example above, you can easily see that these are things you tell yourself. I used to tell myself that I had no time to go to the gym, and I was making myself believe that, which always prevented me from going to the gym. You do have time – what you don’t have is your priorities in order. I valued my health but not as much as I valued my work, my family, money, or anything else. So I created a new belief that I do have time for my health and set that belief up to make it extremely important. Without my health, my family time suffers, my ability to make an income suffers, my work suffers-so it’s about setting up your beliefs and setting up your priorities.
So you see, by saying simple things like “Oh, I don’t really have the time to do that,” you are creating a belief that prevents you from doing the very thing you need to do.
Go through all the areas of your life and ask yourself why you haven’t scored a ten in each area, and you’ll find out the beliefs that are currently holding you back in general.
Now, I am not saying you need to score a ten in each of the areas; that’s not practical, not necessary, and not realistic. Your belief wheel is not about having a perfectly balanced life, as there really is no such thing. That may sound odd to hear, as we have heard so much about work-life balance, but what it’s really about is working with what you have to do and making the most of what you want to do. We’ll talk more about this later.
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