This post was inspired by my personal experience, but I later came across a concept in psychology which was very related to it, it is called core beliefs, from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). I do not plan to explore that concept from CBT perspective (although there may be overlap), I just wanted to share a small summary of my own reflections. If you’re interested in that concept, you can look it up for more information.
Basically belief is something that you believe is true. People may have beliefs about other people, the world, or themselves.
Let’s take examples of some beliefs:
- Someone believes that breaking a mirror brings bad luck.
- Someone believes that smoking is not actually bad for health.
- Someone believes that hard work always pays off.
Now let’s say we take a person who holds above beliefs. We can expect that this person will try to not break too many mirrors in their life. Also we can expect that in case they like smoking, they will be a smoker, because there is nothing to deter them due to their belief. Finally, we can also expect that they will be a hard worker.
So we can clearly see that beliefs have chance to affect our lives in significant ways. The extent of their effect can vary depending on the: number of beliefs we have, the content of beliefs, and the degree to how much we believe in them.
We can also see that some beliefs may have negative results in our lives (e.g., the belief that smoking is not harmful) or positive results (e.g., the belief about hard working always paying off).
Also many of our beliefs are formed as a result of our experience. For example, if someone breaks a promise to another person, that person may think promises are meaningless.
Since beliefs can have big impact on our lives, as we discussed above, it is in our interests that we stay open to revisiting them. This process might not be easy sometimes because we may need to admit we were mistaken - yet, it is important that we engage in this process. For example, in one of our earlier examples, the person might need to convince themselves that not all promises might be meaningless, and that they shouldn't generalize based on the actions of just one or two people who broke their promises.