As I shared last week, I am on a journey to radically transform my life and I am using the power of belief to help me to do that. This second part of a two part article breaks down the final steps of how to make sure your beliefs are convictions. For a brief recap, step one is to state a SPECIFC belief. Step two, hammer it reminding yourself of your belief daily. And step three, is to seek out other people who believe the same thing; birds of a feather flock together. And now, we go to step number four.
Step 4: Confirm Your Belief in Your Environment
If you’ve been continuously hammering your belief in yourself and surrounding yourself with people who share the same belief, you will start to find confirmation of your belief in your environment.
For example, people who believe in Christianity will go to church on a regular basis (habitually associating with those of the same beliefs) and they will begin to see atheists living a hard life and conclude that living life as a Christian is the best way to live.
On the other hand, atheists will see the wars waged in the name of Christianity and conclude that it must not be the true religion. Atheists will point at the suffering of the world and conclude that God does not exist, thus confirming their beliefs in their environment.
Reality will start to shape according to your belief. Whenever you see confirmation of your belief in your environment, RECORD IT.
Write it down. Start a belief confirmation journal. That way, it will serve as a reinforcing mechanism for your belief. You’ll find that one of the best ways to confirm your belief through the environment is to look to the people who have already done it. The greatest evidence that something can be done is if another person has done it.
Collect inspirational stories of people who have done it. Refer to them often and confirm your belief to reinforce it whenever you feel it fade. By confirming your belief in your environment, you drill your belief deep down in yourself even further.
Step 5: Take Action to Reinforce the Belief
All right. So you’ve STATED a SPECIFIC belief, hammered it in yourself continuously, frequently associated with those who share the same belief, and reinforced it by confirming it in your environment. You are now ready to take action. The great thing about this is that you’ve already laid the foundation of belief. Therefore, taking action will not be hard. It will be natural.
The reason that most people fail in the attainment of their high set goals is because they try to take action FIRST, without taking the time to really set the foundation of FIRST believing that they can. You know exactly what I’m talking about.
People who want to lose a lot of weight get psyched the first few days, go to the gym, run, bike, box, go home, throw out all their junk food and eat healthy for the next few days.
You visit them a week later, they’re sitting on their butt eating buttered popcorn with a big tub of Dreyer’s Cookies and Cream and a large coke with hot dogs and chili cheese fries watching all six Star Wars movies in a row.
If I were to ask you, do you believe you can make $1 today? The answer would be “Yes, of course”. And if I were to say “Show me.”, you would take immediate action by selling your DVDs, books or clothes and easily make that $1 today. You took action because you already had the belief inside of you that you can make $1 today.
If I were to ask you, do you believe you can make $1,000,000 today? The answer would be NO. You have NOT FIRST set the foundation of believing you can, therefore you would not be motivated to take any action. (If the person reading this is Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Tiger Woods, etc., your answer would be “Yes”, because you’ve already set the foundation of believing you can because you have the resources to do so.)
What I’m trying to say is that if you’ve done a good job of drilling the belief into yourself, you will find it easy to take action toward it.
Step 6: Acknowledge Your Own Progress to Further Reinforce Your Belief
So you’ve STATED a SPECIFIC belief and hammered it in yourself continuously. You frequently associated with those who share the same belief. You’ve reinforced your belief by confirming it in your environment by reading stories of people who have done it, meeting them in person, etc. You’ve also naturally taken action to fulfill it.
When you earn the first one hundred dollars, rejoice! You know you’re on your way now. If you can earn one hundred dollars, you can earn another, and another, and another, and another until your goal is met. This is where your belief starts to grow EXPONENTIALLY. You must feed your belief by acknowledging your own progress and reinforce it so it grows exponentially.
For you math people out there, think of the graph y=e^x. You know it slowly increases along the x axis until it starts to sharply increase exponentially. Acknowledging your own progress is the catalyst for the exponential increase. Because this is such an important catalyst, record it. Write it down. Don’t trust it to memory. Write it down so you can refer to it often to reinforce your belief.
Step 7: Loop steps 2-6.
Believing is analogous to starting a roaring fire. If you’ve ever tried to start a fire, you know it’s not as easy as taking a lighter and putting the flame on a big log. You have to first gather all the moss, twigs, grass, leaves, and build a small mound where the fire can reside, consume the fodder, and grow strength.
You have to work at it, coax it, feed it, breathe on it, until it starts to grow. When it grows, you have to keep on feeding it with more and more pieces of small wood until you start bringing in the big chunks of wood.
The result is a blazing fire you can use to do anything. You can use it to light other people’s fires. You can use it to burn down walls. You can use it to warm people and give them light. Even though I’m speaking metaphorically, you know what I’m talking about. So feed the fire of your belief and loop steps 2-6 to do it.
In conclusion, I believe if you analyze any one of your current beliefs, you will find that it went through exactly the 7 steps listed here. Try it and see for yourself.
Let’s use an example of a common disempowering belief that a lot of people have.
Bad things always happen to me. I can never catch a break.
Ok, let’s take it through the 7 steps.
1. They’ve sure STATED a SPECIFC belief.
2. They’ve hammered it in all right. They tell it to themselves on a daily basis and they tell their friends and family too, which hammers it in even more.
3. They hang out with other people who believe the same thing. Misery loves company. Birds of a feather flock together.
4. They point to all the bad things in their life to further reinforce their belief. They point at the flat tire they got that day on their way to work or the promotion they didn’t get and conclude that bad things always happen to them.
5. They naturally take action to reinforce their own belief. This is commonly known as self-sabotage.
6. They acknowledge all the bad things that are happening to them and use it to further reinforce their own behavior. This is also known as “always looking on the negative side of things.”
7. They repeat steps 2-7, get stuck in a vicious cycle without ever realizing it, and live a life that just plain sucks.
How can they get rid of this disempowering belief? By creating a NEW one and taking it through the 7 steps.
Step 1: You must state a specific belief FIRST in order to believe it.
Step 2: HAMMER that belief into yourself CONTINUOUSLY. Beliefs are NOT formed overnight.
Step 3: Continually associate with those who share your beliefs.
Step 4: Confirm your belief in your environment
Step 5: Take action to reinforce the belief
Step 6: Acknowledge your own progress to further reinforce your belief
Step 7: Loop steps 2-6.
Important to note is that your beliefs will not take root overnight. It takes time, discipline, and perseverance. Now you know the EXACT process of how to believe and in turn, achieve. You can do anything if you really believe it. Now you know how.
