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Archive for September, 2008

Negative Beliefs

September 27th, 2008
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Negative and self limiting beliefs can and very often do hold us back in life. These beliefs can stop us from achieving what we most want and need in our lives. Our limiting beliefs more often than not have been learned as we have gone through life and very often we have bought them with us from childhood. While they don’t serve us well, they are still very personal to each of us. Many people form strong identities from their beliefs, limiting or not and so any negative beliefs can become a deeply ingrained part of their personality one that they carry around with them for years.

Beliefs are personal; they are important and have the ability to define our entire lives. Our beliefs have governed how we have lived in the past, they govern how we are living now and they will govern how we will live our life in the future.

Examples of some negative and limiting beliefs:

  • I’m useless, I always have been
  • I am an idiot
  • I’ll never be a success
  • Everyone hates me at work
  • I won’t become rich
  • My Business will fail
  • I’m not clever enough
  • I’ll never be able to learn Japanese
  • I’ll never get promoted at work
  • I’m too fat

These negative and limiting beliefs ultimately serve no real purpose apart from to stop us from having what we want in our lives. They become so entrenched in our minds that we just accept them as normal, never really believing we can do anything about them.

Just one negative belief about yourself, your situation or anything else related to your life can dictate to you the action you take, the behavior you exhibit and the environment where you find yourself.

A negative belief can really make it difficult if you are looking to make a change in your life or accomplish some goal. It becomes your own personal roadblock that stops you dead in your tracks. You accept it and it becomes the way your life is.

Of course everyone is entitled to believe what they want. We have a choice, and we can choose to not accept our limiting beliefs any time we wish. Do you really want to continue creating mind made barriers for yourself?

You may want certain things in your life, you may want more for yourself, your family and even for the world around you, but yet your limiting beliefs never seem to go away, they have always been there and they will always be there in the future. They will remain a fundamental part of who you are unless you do something about it.

Remember that beliefs can be changed, and this is great news when we know we have beliefs that limit us. You probably used to believe in Santa Claus but I bet you don’t anymore. Rest assured that if you want to really change a negative belief you have, it can be done.

One useful strategy to use is to step forward into the future and envisage what will transpire (or not) as a result of the belief you hold.

When we do this we can see just exactly where our negative belief will lead us.

Types of question to ask yourself when taking the negative belief into the future include:

  • What will happen later on in the future if you persist with this belief?
  • What consequences will occur as a result of this belief?
  • What results will or could arise from the initial set of results?

For example:

I’ll never be able to learn Portuguese.

With a belief like this, where will you be in 2 years time? Imagine instead if you start learning Portuguese now, how much of it would you be able to speak in 2 years time?

Do you realize the more you believe this the more this will prevent you from actually learning Portuguese. So eventually over time you will not be able to learn any new languages with a belief like this.

So I guess you can forget about conversing with any Brazilians in their own language when you visit Brazil then?

You could carry on asking similar questions based on what you will be able or not be able to do as a result. Try it with your own negative beliefs and see if your perspective changes.

admin Positive Thinking , ,

Break free or suffer the consequences

September 22nd, 2008

If you continually run through again and again all the things that are missing in your life and how bad it is, you will be miserable no question about it. You will become annoyed and impatient with yourself including everybody around you. Constantly reliving or inventing new bad experiences will eventually cause you to stop taking action altogether towards making anything happen in your life. Any goals you once had set for yourself become utterly pointless, they are ignored replaced instead by indolence, it becomes preferable to do less and less, you begin to watch countless hours of television anything to distract you. The time you used to spend on constructive activities becomes too much like hard work and so the activities are forgotten altogether, along with all the other plans you may have made for yourself, eventually depression sets in.

You create a system for your brain to follow, every day the program runs itself, just like getting dressed in the morning and having breakfast, you also manage to forget all the things you should be doing and focus your attention on feeling miserable instead. It then starts to become regular behavior, which you start to accept as normal. It becomes easier to ignore the ‘goals’ and the ‘plans’. All of a sudden life becomes hard, a drag and to make matters worse you also beat yourself up for feeling lousy.

When you are in this cycle of doom nothing much ever gets accomplished. If it continues one day you will wake up and realize your life has passed you by and you have not moved forward one little bit.

Are we to blame?

Is it all our own doing?

Well in a word ‘yes’

Occasionally people feel down because of problems outside of their control, but a lot of the time people are the architect of their own blues. Life is ultimately a series of choices and we shouldn’t actively choose to feel bad by creating unhappy internal thoughts. It is always easier to cast the blame onto somebody or something else outside of our control, the reality is we are choosing to feel low and this is something we can choose not to do anytime we feel like it. We are all responsible for how we feel. If we feel depressed it will always be up to us to do something about it not anybody else.

The first step out of depression or any low miserable state of mind is to fully accept that it is your responsibility to get out of it and change how you feel, whatever that may involve. It could be eating an ice-cream, a big bag of sweets, feeding the ducks, cooking your favorite meal, or something else, but it is important to remember that it will always be down to you to break out of it. You can’t expect anyone else to come along and say ‘there, there, everything will be ok’, because it won’t unless you do something about it.

Once of the best things you can do to break out of a bad mood or depressive state is to take action, do something, a brisk walk, watch birds in the sky, you could even put your feelings down on paper so you can read them at a later date, some dark poetry perhaps?

A lot of the time depressive states pass within a few days, and are only temporary, however sometimes people can be their own worst enemies by feeding their low moods with more negative based thinking, and somber thoughts, this is the time when action is needed.

Exercise is always good, something that gets you out of breath and changes your state.

Just do something, don’t just sit there and ponder the injustices of life.

Become active and force a smile on your face.

admin Happiness , ,

Letting your future just happen

September 17th, 2008

Imagine if you were to just let your future happen, imagine if you took a reactive stance to life. What do you think would happen, or perhaps a better question would be – what would not happen? Are you about to let your life just happen to you? Are you being dictated to by others, your boss, family, so called friends? Or are you in complete control of everything that happens in your life? Do you want something more than what you currently have? Is there someone you aspire to become; is there something you wish to have in your life?

There are some people in this world who are not living the life they want, and who do absolutely nothing about changing it, or making it better than it currently is. To these people everybody else’s life is the main attraction and they are a part of the audience taking it all in. They are mere watchers, dreamers, the observers of life.

If you met these people at any time in their life and saw what they had and what they did, if in ten years you were to go back and revisit them, they would have exactly the same life as when you first visited them, with probably exactly the same views on life, how it is all so unfair and how only a select few get to live they life they want.

These people watch life evolve around them but they themselves don’t bother to evolve with it, choosing instead to carry on with the way things are and have always been.

Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Are you just along for the ride?
  • Are you just an observer?
  • Are you happy to be on sidelines watching other people?
  • Have you given up on your life?
  • Does it matter what you do while you are alive?

Your future will just happen if you let it, life will push you around if don’t stand up and take steps to do what is required to create the life you most want to live. Life is to be lived, every moment of it, especially while you have a healthy body and mind, both of which you should be using in ways that make your life the most fun and interesting it possibly can be.

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