Analyze Your Beliefs
The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible.
RICHARD M. DEVOS
Perhaps the most important of all mental laws is the Law of Belief. This law says that whatever you believe with conviction becomes your reality. Wayne Dyer says, “You do not believe what you see; you see what you already believe.” You actually view your world through a lens of beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, and preconceived notions. You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.
Proverbs 23:7 says that as a man “thinketh in his heart, so is he.” This means that you always act on the outside based on your innermost beliefs and convictions about yourself.
In Matthew 9:29, Jesus says, “According to your faith, it will be done unto you.” This is another way of saying that your intense beliefs become your realities. They determine what happens to you.
Dr. William James of Harvard University said in 1905, “Belief creates the actual fact.” He went on to say, “The greatest revolution of my generation is the discovery that individuals, by changing their inner attitudes of mind, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life
All improvement in your life comes from changing your beliefs about yourself and your possibilities. Personal growth comes from changing your beliefs about what you can do and about what is possible for you. Would you like to double your income? Of course you would! Here is the question: Do you believe that it is possible? How would you like to triple your income? Do you believe that is possible as well?
Whatever your level of skepticism, let me ask you a question. Since you started your first job, haven't you already doubled or tripled your income? Aren't you already earning vastly more than you earned when you started? Haven't you already proven to yourself that it is possible to double and triple your income? And what you have done before, you can do again—probably over and over—if you just learn how. You simply must believe that it is possible. Napoleon Hill said, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
Your Master Program for Success
Perhaps the greatest breakthrough in the twentieth century in the field of human potential was the discovery of the self-concept. Everything you do or achieve in your life, every thought, feeling, or action, is controlled and determined by your self-concept. Your self-concept precedes and predicts your levels of performance and effectiveness in everything you do. Your self-concept is the master program of your mental computer. It is the basic operating system. Everything that you accomplish in your outer world is a result of your self-concept.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Here is an interesting discovery about self-concept. Even if your self-concept is made up of erroneous beliefs about yourself or your world, as far as you are concerned these are facts and you will think, feel, and act accordingly.
As it happens, your beliefs about yourself are largely subjective. They are often not based on fact at all. They are the result of information you have taken in throughout your life and the way you have processed that information. Your beliefs have been shaped and formed by your early childhood, your friends and associates, your reading and education, your experiences—both positive and negative—and a thousand other factors.
The worst of all beliefs are self-limiting beliefs. If you believe yourself to be limited in some way, whether or not it is true, it becomes true for you. If you believe it, you will act as if you were deficient in that particular area of talent or skill.
Overcoming self-limiting beliefs and self-imposed limitations is often the biggest obstacle standing between you and the realization of your full potential.
Ignore the Experts
Albert Einstein was sent home from school as a young man with a learning disability. His parents were told that he was not capable of being educated. They refused to accept this diagnosis and eventually arranged for him to get an excellent education.
Dr. Albert Schweitzer had the same problem at school as a boy. His parents were encouraged to apprentice him to a shoemaker so that he would have a safe, secure job when he grew up. Both men went on to earn doctorates before the age of twenty and to leave their marks on the history of the twentieth century.
According to an article in Fortune magazine on learning disabilities in business, many presidents and senior executives of Fortune 500 corporations today were diagnosed in school as being not particularly bright or capable. But by virtue of hard work, they went on to achieve great success in their industries.
Thomas Edison was expelled from school at age seven. His parents were told that it would be a waste of time to spend any money educating him because he was not particularly smart or capable of being taught anything. Edison went on to become the greatest inventor of the modern age. This kind of story has been repeated thousands of times.
Self-limiting beliefs, sometimes based on a single experience or a casual remark, can hold you back for years. Most people have had the experience of mastering a skill in an area where they thought they had no ability and being quite surprised at themselves. Perhaps this has happened to you. You suddenly realize that your limiting ideas about yourself in that area were not based on fact at all.
You Are Better Than You Know
Louise Hay, the writer, says that the roots of most of our problems in life are contained in the feeling “I'm not good enough.” Dr. Alfred Adler said that it is the natural inheritance of Western man to have feelings of inferiority that start in childhood and often continue through adult life.
Many people, because of their negative beliefs, most of which are erroneous, falsely consider themselves to be limited in intelligence, talent, capability, creativity, or skill of some kind. In virtually every case, these beliefs are false.
The fact is that you have more potential than you could ever use in your entire lifetime. No one is better than you and no one is smarter than you. People are just smarter or better in different areas at different times.
You Could Be a Genius
According to Dr. Howard Gardner of Harvard University, the founder of the concept of multiple intelligences, you possess at least ten different intelligences, in any one of which you might be a genius.
Unfortunately, only two intelligences are measured and reported throughout school and university: verbal and mathematical. But you could be a genius in the areas of visual-spatial intelligence (art, design), entrepreneurial intelligence (business start-ups), physical or kinesthetic intelligence (sports), musical intelligence (playing musical instruments, writing music), interpersonal intelligence (getting along well with others), intrapersonal intelligence (understanding yourself at a deep level), intuitive intelligence (sensing the right thing to do or say), artistic intelligence (creating works of art), or abstract intelligence (physics, science).
As the sign on the wall of an inner-city school reads, “God don't make no junk.” Each person is capable of achieving excellence in some way, in some area. You have within you, right now, the ability to function at genius or exceptional levels in at least one and perhaps several different areas. Your job is to find out which one.
Your responsibility to yourself is to cast off all these self-limiting beliefs and accept that you are an extraordinarily capable and talented person. You are engineered for greatness and designed for success. You have competencies and capabilities that have never been tapped. You have the ability within yourself, right now, to accomplish almost any goal you can set for yourself if you are willing to work long enough and hard enough to achieve it.
Your Beliefs Are Acquired, Not Inborn
The good news about beliefs is that all beliefs are learned. They can therefore be unlearned, especially if they are not helpful. When you came into the world, you had no beliefs at all—about yourself, your religion, your political party, other people, or the world in general. Today, you “know” a lot of things. But, as the comic Josh Billings once wrote, “It ain't what a man knows what hurts him. It's what he knows what ain't true.”
Many things that you know about yourself are simply not true. And these are almost always self-limiting beliefs. The starting point of unlocking more of your potential is for you to identify your self-limiting beliefs and then ask, “What if they were not true at all?”
What if you were possessed of an extraordinary ability in an area where you didn't think you were very good, such as selling, entrepreneurship, public speaking, or money making?
Think of Yourself Differently
I have taught these principles to tens of thousands of people throughout the world. I have file drawers full of letters and e-mails from people who had never heard this idea of self-limiting beliefs before. But once they heard it, they changed their entire attitudes toward themselves. They began to see themselves as far more competent and capable in key areas of their lives than they had ever been before.
In no time at all, they began transforming their lives and changing their results. Their incomes doubled and tripled and quadrupled. Many of them became millionaires and multimillionaires. They went from the bottom of their companies to the top, from poor performers in their companies to some of the best, and sometimes to the highest earning people in their businesses.
After they changed their beliefs about themselves and their personal potentials, they learned new skills and took on new challenges. They set bigger goals and threw their whole hearts into achieving them. By questioning their beliefs and by refusing to accept that they were limited in any way, they took complete charge of their lives and careers and created new realities for themselves. And what countless others have done, you can do as well.
Select the Beliefs You Want
Imagine that there was a “Belief Store,” very much like a computer software store, where you could purchase a belief to program into your subconscious mind. If you could choose any set of beliefs at all, which beliefs would be the most helpful to you?
Here is my suggestion. Select this belief: “I am destined to be a big success in life.”
If you absolutely believe that you are destined to be a big success, you will walk, talk, and act as if everything that happens to you in life is part of a great plan to make you successful. And as it happens, this is how the top people think in every field.
Look for the Good
Successful people look for the good in every situation. They know that it is always there. No matter how many reversals and setbacks they experience, they expect to get something good out of everything that happens to them. They believe that every setback is part of a great plan that is moving them inexorably toward achieving the great success that is inevitable for them.
If your beliefs are positive enough, you will seek the valuable lesson in every setback or difficulty. You will confidently believe that there are many lessons that you have to learn on the road to achieving and keeping your ultimate success. You'll therefore look upon every problem as a learning experience. Napoleon Hill wrote, “Within every difficulty or obstacle, there is the seed of an equal or greater advantage or benefit.”
With this kind of an attitude, you benefit from everything that happens to you, positive or negative, as you move upward and onward toward achieving your goals.
Act Your Way into Feeling
The Law of Reversibility in psychology and metaphysics says, “You are more likely to act yourself into feeling a particular way than you are to feel yourself into acting.”
What this means is that when you start, you may not feel like the great success that you desire to be. You will not have the self-confidence that comes from a record of successful achievement. You will often doubt your own abilities and fear failure. You will feel that you are not good enough, at least not yet.
But if you “act as if ” you were already the person you desire to be, with the qualities and talents that you desire to have, your actions will generate the feelings that go with them. You will actually act yourself into feeling the way you want to feel by the Law of Reversibility.
If you want to be one of the top people in your business, dress like the top people. Groom yourself like the top people. Organize your work habits the way they do. Pick the most successful people in your field and use them as your role models. If possible, go to them and ask them for advice on how to get ahead more rapidly. And whatever advice they give you, follow it immediately. Take action.
When you start to walk, talk, dress, and behave like the top people, you soon will begin to feel like the top people. You will treat other people like the top people do. You will work the way the top people work. You will start to get the results that the top people get. In no time at all, you will be one of the top people yourself. It may be trite to say “Fake it until you make it!” but there is a lot of truth to it.
The Secret of a Sales Manager
A friend of mine is a very successful sales manager. After he carefully interviewed and then selected a new salesman, he would take the salesman to a Cadillac dealership and insist that he trade in his old car for a new Cadillac. The salesman would usually balk at the idea. He would be frightened of the cost of the car and the huge monthly payments involved. But the sales manager would insist that he buy the Cadillac as a condition of employment.
What do you think happened afterward? First, the salesman would drive the car home. His wife would almost have a heart attack when she saw that he had bought a new Cadillac. But after she had settled down, he would take her for a ride around the neighborhood in the new car. The neighbors would see them driving in a new Cadillac as he waved on the way past. He would park his new Cadillac in front of his house or in his driveway. People would come over and admire it. Gradually, imperceptibly, at a subconscious level, his attitude toward himself and his earning potential would begin to change.
Within a few days, he would begin to see himself as the kind of person who drove a new Cadillac. He would see himself as a big money earner in his field, one of the top performers in his industry. And time after time, almost without fail, the salespeople in this organization became sales superstars. Their sales performance jumped and they earned more than they ever had before. Soon the payments on the new Cadillac were of no concern because their incomes were so much greater.
Create the Mental Equivalent
Emmet Fox once said, “Your main job in life is to create the mental equivalent within yourself of what you want to realize and enjoy in your outer world.”
Your focus must be on creating the beliefs within yourself that are consistent with the great success you want to be in your outer world. You achieve this by challenging your self-limiting beliefs, rejecting them, and then acting as if they did not exist.
You reinforce the development of new, life-enhancing beliefs by increasing your knowledge and skills in your field to the point where you feel equal to any demand or challenge. You accelerate the development of new, positive beliefs by setting bigger and more exciting goals in every area. Finally, you act continually as if you were already the person that you desire to be.
Your aim is to reprogram your subconscious mind for success by creating the mental equivalent in everything you do or say.
Behave Consistent with Your New Self-Image
You develop new beliefs by taking actions consistent with those beliefs. You act as if you believe that you already have the capabilities and competencies you want. You behave like a positive, optimistic, and cheerful person toward everyone. You act as if your success is already guaranteed. You act as if you have a secret guarantee of success and only you know about it.
You realize that you are developing, shaping, and controlling the evolution of your own character and personality by everything that you do and say every single day.
Since you become what you think about, you should only say and do what is consistent with your self-ideal, the person you most aspire to be, and your long-term future ideals. You should only think and talk about the qualities and behaviors that are moving you toward becoming the person you want to be and toward achieving the goals that you want to achieve.
Make a Decision
Make a decision this very day to challenge and reject any self-limiting beliefs that you might have that could be holding you back. Look into yourself and question the areas of your life where you have doubts about your abilities or talents. You might ask your friends and family members if they see any negative beliefs that you might have. Often, they will be aware of self-limiting beliefs you have that you are not aware of yourself. In every case, once you have identified these negative beliefs, ask yourself, what if the opposite were true?
What if you had the ability to be extraordinarily successful in an area where you currently doubt yourself? What if you had been programmed from infancy with genius ability in that particular area? For example, what if you had within you, right now, the ability to earn and keep all the money you could ever want, throughout your life? What if you had a “golden touch” with regard to money?
If you absolutely believed these ideas to be true, what would you do differently from what you are doing today?
Keep Your Words and Actions Consistent
Your beliefs are always manifested in your words and actions. Make sure that everything you say and do from now on is consistent with the beliefs that you want to have and the person that you want to become. In time, you will replace more and more of your self-limiting beliefs with life-enhancing beliefs. Over time, you will completely reprogram yourself for success. When this occurs, the transformation that takes place in your outer life will amaze you and all the people around you.
ANALYZE YOUR BELIEFS
1. “Act as if!” If you were one of the most competent and highly respected people in your field, how would you think, act, and feel differently from the way you do today?
2. Imagine that you have a “golden touch” with money. If you were an extremely competent money manager, how would you handle your finances?
3. Identify the self-limiting beliefs that could be holding you back. How would you act if they were completely untrue?
4. Select a belief that you would most like to have about yourself at a deep inner level. Pretend as if you already believe this to be true about yourself.
5. Look into the most difficult situation you are dealing with right now. What valuable lessons does it contain that can help you to be better in the future?
6. What would you do differently if you believed that you were destined to be a big success in life?
7. Who else in your life could you influence by telling them how good they are and how successful you think they are going to be?
