Today, I would like to offer you a challenge that will help you to understand how your beliefs impact your experience of reality and what you attract into your life. Most people don't take the time to examine what their beliefs are and they stumble through life as a result, often with little or no direction. Becoming aware of your beliefs and then determining to change those that are not supportive is a huge first step in changing your life.
Now here's the challenge:
Take a long, hard look at your beliefs in a certain area of your life. For example, what is your belief about people? Do you believe that people are generally good, and would like to help others? Or do you believe that people are mostly out for themselves and will take advantage of others at every opportunity? If your belief about people is one way or another, what I would like for you to do is to, just for a day, flip that belief on its head. Turn it completely upside down and for that day, believe the opposite of what you believe at the moment.
Now it doesn't have to be your beliefs about people. It can be your beliefs about anything at all - money, relationships, your parents, your siblings, your boss, etc. You have beliefs about all these.
If you can commit to doing this, I can promise you that you will begin to see how your perception of the world around you is affected by your beliefs. You will begin to see different things as you go about your day-to-day business of living your life. Dr. Wayne Dyer has a fantastic quote in this area: "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."
Reading that quote several times will permit you to scratch the surface of the power of your beliefs, and it will perhaps allow you to connect with this concept on an intellectual level. However, if you actually accept the challenge and do the exercise I've outlined, you will see firsthand how your perceptions are altered simply by changing the filter through which you see the world.
It's analogous to wearing a particular colour of sunglasses. You may be wearing a pair of sunglasses that causes you to see everything as blue, and not even realise it. If this were the case, you would simply think that everything has a blue tinge to it, and that this is the way the world is and the way everyone sees it.
The point here is that we do not see the world the way it is. Instead, we see the world the way we are. Become aware of the fact that you're wearing those blue tinted sunglasses and then swap them for a pair of red tinted ones and suddenly the world seems like a different place.
Your beliefs act in much the same way as the metaphorical sunglasses to filter the way you perceive the world around you. If you believe all people are out for themselves, you will see and experience this in your reality. This does not mean that good people do not exist. It simply means that because of your deep seated belief that people are selfish and will walk over others to get what they want, this is what you will tend to focus on and notice in your experience of life.
Your belief system filters out the good deeds done by selfless people and sees only the harm done to others by the selfish.
The challenge has a double benefit for you if you will take it on. Firstly, it will allow you to become aware of what your beliefs actually are. That simple awareness has tremendous power to help you to make positive changes in your life. Secondly, it demonstrates on both an intellectual and an emotional level just how influential your beliefs are in your perception of reality.
You can choose any area of your life you wish to, or you can do it with several areas, but make the genuine commitment to truly change your beliefs for the day in order to experience the full impact. You will most likely come across some beliefs you didn't know you had, and you'll learn how you can change those beliefs to improve the quality of your life.
Dante Petrilla has been studying the success literature for the past decade and used the techniques and skills he learned to turn his own life completely around. He transformed himself from a depressed person to a happy person once he learned to direct the focus of his thoughts and emotions. The one thing he found that made the techniques he learned so effective was the use positive affirmations to install them into everyday thinking. Dante is also a writer who enjoys writing in the personal development area.
Dante is also a memory training expert, and has written the book How to Memorize Anything with The Secret of Your Perfect Memory which is available on Amazon. He is also in the process of turning this into an audio book, which will be available in the near future.
Dante is an AUNLP certified life coach and NLP Master Practitioner, member of the American University of NLP, and also a Global Sciences Foundation member. He is now making a deeper study of NLP in order to implement what he has learned on his journey so that he might impart that knowledge and help others.