Beliefs and where they came from

A journey I just don’t have a map for

Darren Hayes

As you all know by now, I love quotes. In one of his songs, Darren Hayes (Savage Garden) sings about “a journey I just don’t have a map for”. I realized that I also talk about “the journey of life” and about finding the map to navigate through it. Our map is the set of beliefs we use to navigate the world. 

I think the idea we have no map,  describes the way most people feel about life and what they believe about themselves – confused, like they are on a journey without a map, with circumstances that control their lives, without the ability to choose their path.

 

Every person in the universe is searching for happiness.  Our thoughts about ourselves, our self-esteem, about what is right or wrong,  about health and wellbeing, about the source of sickness and the cure for it, are part of that one “map” that everyone is looking for, the one map we think fits us all.
That’s the problem!

We all have different experiences and mindsets. Therefore, we each use a different map to guide us to our own happiness.

On our journey toward happiness, we take roads, stop at stop lights, drive through dirt roads, and encounter round-a-bouts. Some roads are longer than others, some are shorter. In some, we face junctions, some in which we get stuck at, not knowing what is stopping us.

 

Our internal map is made up of things that happen to us during our lifetime. This is why there are as many maps as there are people on Earth. Our beliefs are the roads on this map. Our beliefs about ourselves are highways.

If I believe that “people can’t be trusted”, then I will ignore the road called “people are doing the best they can” and never set foot on it. If I believe that “I have wonderful children”, I will ignore the road called “my daughter wasn’t nice to my son”, even if I cross it many times.
It is the way we are wired. Ignoring things that are not part of our “Maps” is a defence mechanism that our subconscious ( crew) uses to protect us.

People like to take the roads they know, even if they are slow, long, or even painful. And the more they take a particular road, the more they ignore other roads.

We each start drawing our maps from childhood. We draw both nice and not-so-nice roads, long and short roads and we use our beliefs as the pencil.

We draw roads and signs to allow us to navigate our lives in the future. It is the certainty we draw, the same confidence you have when you hold a map and try to find a friend’s house in an unknown city.

The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in determination.

Tommy Lasdora

How do we actually form our beliefs?

There are 5 sources we take our beliefs from: Education, Environment, Media, Past Outcome and Creative Thinking. Our highways – The thick, fast roads of our success and happiness  are formed the same way.

Education

Mom, dad, or a teacher said something when we were young and thought they were ‘gods’, so we created a belief – a road or a highway that we believe it to be true.
The more they said it, the more defined the road became. “You are a very responsible child”, they said and, sure enough, whenever we had to choose between being responsible or not, we took the highway of “responsibility”.

If they said, “you’re forgetful”, many years later, the highway of forgetting would be the fast road we would take it, without stopping to really choose. It just seemed like the only one there.

Environment

We look at the people around us, the way they dress or do their hair and we create roads like “only girls have long hair”. We eliminate any trace of “long hair looks good on guys too”.

We grow up in a certain type of neighbourhood, where the houses are made of timber, and learn to believe that it’s like that everywhere, not ever being able to imagine tall buildings made of bricks and concrete or how it is possible to live under the starts.

 We hear a certain language spoken by everyone and expect strangers to be speaking the same language when we meet them.
Everything we think about culture was learned through our environment. This is the main reason shifting from one culture environment to the other is challenging. Hence the phrase “ culture shock”

Media

TV,  newspapers, movies  and social media  have the ability to shape many of our beliefs. Millions of people take roads they only see on media, like fashion, status, politics , drinking roads or smoking roads, some of them are highways.

Do you know how many women around the world take the road “If I use Revlon’s moisturizer, I’m going to look as pretty as the model on media”? Other roads like “all moisturizers just add water to the surface and a $3 moisturizer can do the same” are ignored, since the companies selling the $3 product do not advertise (If they did, their product would not cost $3, would it?).

Media in general and social media in particular, has a huge effect on our belief systems. We are taken on certain roads so many times that, after a while, these roads become familiar and comfortable to us.

Remember, all the roads about your beliefs about yourself are highways, once you set foot on them, you go 100 kilometres an hour.

Past Outcomes

Past outcome is one source of beliefs that goes straight to our highways and shapes our life significantly. If we went through positive experiences we would have confidence about anything related to that experience. If we went through negative experiences we would avoid anything that is slightly similar, even if we are facing it 20 or 30 years later and we are no longer young helpless children.
Our mind, with the help of the Amygdala does that to protect us, but it also prevents us from moving forward and sometimes, from living life to the fullest. 

During our life, we experience many things ourselves and draw conclusions from them. We smile at people, and they smile back, so we decide “if I smile at somebody, they will smile back at me”. We say some nasty things to our sister and get chased around the house and finally caught and we decide “it hurts to be nasty to big sisters”.

In much the same way we form beliefs about what we are good at, what we can and cannot do, how others respond to things we do, what to eat, what is healthy or not  and so on. Unfortunately, most of our experiences are singular events and are not an indication they will happen again, but we still hold them tight and choose to use those roads or highways again.

Creative Thinking

Our goals for example, come from our creative thinking. This is a source where we create the beliefs in our own minds. We imagine it will happen and force our subconscious in that direction.

Many athletes successfully use this technique in their training. Since the brain cannot distinguish 100% between imagination and reality, we use our imagination to pretend it is a road that is possible to take.

Unfortunately, feelings of anxiety also come from our creative mind. For example, we have never gone to an interview like the one we are faced with, but we are afraid we won’t make it. Every fear from a negative future outcome was formed in our mind. The thought itself can kill our self-esteem and shrink it long before we sit down before our interviewer.

The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants in life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it’s possible.

David Viscott

We form many of the beliefs without being aware of having formed them. We adopt them from our parents, teachers, circumstances, observations, and imagination.

If we look into them and the time when we adopted them, we’ll find that at that time we were young, with a different mindset, in different circumstances and with less knowledge. It may have been in a different culture or a different financial situation.

The circumstances may not be the same now, but that is irrelevant, because every belief we make, we keep until we choose to change it. For example, when I was young and it rained, it was cold, and I formed the belief that it is always cold when it rains.

Now that I live in Brisbane, it is hot when it rains and yet I still dress warmly. (The first time it happened to me, I was in Texas, coming out of a Walmart store, when and it started raining. I was wearing a short skirt and a singlet, and my body was confused).

Some of our beliefs are so strong that we do not notice other roads, which could set us free. To explain what I mean, I will tell you a story (I love telling stories):

The Little Elephant

One day, a boy went to the circus with his father and saw a huge elephant tied to a tiny stake with a rope.

“Daddy”, asked the boy, “This Elephant is so big and strong, and the stake is so small and short, he could set himself free just by taking two steps to the side. Why doesn’t he do it?”

And his father said, “My son, when this elephant was very small, just a baby, he did try to break away from this stake, but he wasn’t strong enough. He tried and tried for months, until he finally gave up, believing that it is impossible to break free.”

He continued, “Now, he doesn’t try anymore because he doesn’t believe it’s possible. We are the same, my son. Many things happen to us at childhood, which we try to change, but then stop trying. Many of us are still tied with ropes to tiny stakes, just like this big elephant”.

 

 

I’m sure you are asking yourself, “Well, does it mean we have to try again and again? When do we learn that certain things are simply impossible and shift our energy to other things?”

The answer to that is “Never! As long as something is important to you, it’s possible and you should try to get it again and again”.

You see, Thomas Edison tried 1,500 different types of wire to use on the light bulb. 1,500! Do you understand that if Edison thought like us, we would never have light?

In a sense, if we do not think like Edison, we stay in the dark.

Success is determined by those who prove the impossible possible.

James W. Pence

Your quest, in any desire to improve your life is to examine your belief systems and mainly focus on your highways and sort out the signs.  A good map is a  is thick, solid, modern, fast highways, which get us fast from one place to another, safely.

We have challenges  when our highways are wide roads that we take but it has many obstacles, it is old, has deep many cracks and a major traffic jam. When we don’t update our maps, it feels like we are on highway in peak hours all day long.

If we want to improve our life, we need to review our beliefs and leave only the ones that are good for us to have. We need to revise them to suit our new age, culture, role, circumstances, and mindset. In other words, we bring our beliefs up to date.

Make sure that on your map, you choose the roads of acceptance, love and motivation, Health and healing, highways that are easy to navigate, where happiness is part of our daily life. Choose roads full of light!

May the light shine on you and may you find your way even in the darkest moments.

 

Be happy,

Ronit

The Happiness Coach
https://www.behappyinlife.com
https://www.ronitbaras.com/