How many of our beliefs are we consciously aware of? What impact do these have on my life, sport and or career? The Loop of Insanity is what drives our actions / reactions in life, both on a conscious and even more so on a subconscious level.
Let's explore what a belief is:
o Take a little time to write down what some of your beliefs are
o Where do these beliefs stem from?
o What impact do they have on your actions, choices and decisions??
o Which of these conscious beliefs serve you?
Where do our beliefs come from?
They are encased in us through, our past experiences and our perceptions of these experiences. This then has an impact on us and from that we develop our belief system. We then believe these serve and protect us. Yet these experiences are based from our past, therefore our beliefs are based on the past, making them outdated. Our subconscious beliefs are instilled in us in our informative years – before the age 7 years old.
Our perceptions, are interpretations of experiences and events in our life. Our beliefs impact our perceptions and our perceptions impact our beliefs. Consider, that when 2 or more people experience the same event, their recall and perception of the event differs. I invite you to test this theory and observe how your recall of an event differs from someone else’s.
o What were your biggest differences?
o How did your beliefs impact your perception of the event?
o Was the impact positive or negative?
There is over 50 billion bits of data happening per second yet our brain can only detect around 50 bits per second thereby resulting in what we call deletion. This deletion creates our unconscious processing power resulting from both our perceptions and our beliefs and creating our perceptions and beliefs.
Why am I heading down this rabbit hole?
Our beliefs and perceptions create our expectations (be it either conscious or subconscious)) causing a re–action, producing a result and this is all done from the past outdated beliefs we so dearly cling to.
These beliefs and perceptions are mostly negative which drives us in creating, almost all the time, a self sabotaging behaviour, proving ourselves right. The result then re-confirming the belief keeping us in our loop of sanity. I think we are the crazy ones in life. We do not operate from our true-self, we operate from an old outdated belief system.
What can I do to shift my beliefs and behaviours?
Who am I?
Our actions, thoughts and beliefs do not define us. We can shift them by knowing our true self, using this as our defining platform to work from. We are emotionally triggered by our actions, beliefs and results. If we are strong in our true self belief, we would observe our emotions, actions, beliefs and results using this to guide us towards our actions that will achieve our core desired results.
Without judgement and thought, answer the question who am I?
Write down what comes to mind, working through all our layers until, one day you will be clear on Who I am?
Start becoming an observer of yourself
I would like to suggest that we become aware of our emotions, how do we feel after an event or experience? Use your emotions to empower you and guide you. Step out of the emotion and observe yourself.
o Was my experience a positive or negative one?
o What caused me to have this re-action?
o Did I over-react to the event?
o What belief was triggered within me to react this way?
o Is this really a true reflection of who I am?
o How could I have handled myself better?
o What can I be aware of within myself as a flag to stop myself before I react?
We have an impulse knee jerk reaction. As with anything in life, change and self-growth takes work, focus and staying the course, even when we feel like we want to give up or it is not working.
Let's take a look at the above in practical life example.
Standing on the Tee, you are choosing the right club, giving yourself a positive self–talk – I will drive this straight down the fairway and birdie this hole, then you slice the ball into the rough. Then the fun starts with our negative self–talk – you idiot, and I am sure you have some more colourful language you can insert here …. How does this one shot impact the rest of your game? Or are you able to drop it and continue with your game without it impacting the rest of your game?
If we played from a space where our bad shot did not reflect negatively on who we are we would not be emotionally moved by the 1 shot. This would then not negatively ripple through our entire game. In fact one of the greatest golfers come to mind here – Tiger Woods – he is well known for not being emotionally affected by 1 shot that did not have his desired effect.
We are given choices in life, do we allow them to destroy us or we use them to build us?
Life is about our journey, our learnings and our choices.