You may have heard the old saying, ‘You are what you eat’ – a phrase that many nutrition-oriented speakers often use to make a point about eating healthier foods.  The real symbolic meaning of the phrase is, you/your life will be whatever you put into your body, i.e., whatever you “feed” yourself.  Simply put, you can feed your mind thoughts and beliefs the same way you feed your body food.   Those beliefs can either lead you towards peace and happiness or lead you towards fear, discord and unhappiness.  Finding peace then may just be a matter of changing your mind about what you think and believe…

Create Your Own Peace and Success – Think it So!

You may not know this, but the beliefs and thoughts you grew up with, learned from whomever, are ingrained into your thinking and your behavior.  Similarly, your actions are outward manifestations of those beliefs and they attract more like-minded events back to you. This is one of the major reasons why some people continue to experience the same “bad luck” over and over in their life.  It’s not luck at all.  It’s their negative, self-defeating beliefs that become negative, self-defeating actions that perpetuate a cycle of things not going well for them.

The famous playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “Progress is impossible without change   and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” How true these words are.  Another way of putting it, I believe the inspirational speaker Tony Robbins said, “If you want to keep getting what you’re getting, keep doing what you’re doing”.  And that simple explanation is just as true.

Your own beliefs and thoughts can either push you towards peace, success, greater love, greater abundance of things in your life, or they can lead you towards a lack, or deficit, in all these areas.  If you’re going around thinking, I’ll never get that great job, I’ll never get that raise, I’ll never have enough money, I’ll never be able to start my business, I’ll never finish that project, I’ll never lose this weight  – you’re programming that little computer atop your shoulders – your brain – to do exactly what you’re telling it to do – fail!  You’re giving it negative directives, and bolstering negative belief sets which lead to actions that produce negative results.  So, like Shaw said, if you want to make progress towards peace and success – and whatever else “good” you want in your life, then you have to change your thoughts and beliefs to align with those concepts.

But, you have to be willing to change them.

You may not realize that you’re carrying around – and living by – old, worn out mind sets and beliefs that were passed to you through your family, friends, teachers, ministers, other people’s words you’ve read from books, or heard spoken.  You may also have some underlying fear or anxiety about changing these beliefs/thoughts for fear of going against the “group grain” that you were born into or learned from peers.

If those thoughts and beliefs are not working for you – if you’re not happy with who you are because of them, and they’re not bringing you the peace, happiness and success that you desire, then it’s high time to dump them.  In order to truly change your life, you’ll need to substitute “working” beliefs, thoughts that support the core beliefs you have – or want to have.

As a Certified Empowerment Coach, I often have my clients do this exercise to determine if their own outdated, or out of synch, belief systems may be what are stopping them from achieving success in their goal.   Sit down with a pen and paper and ask yourself the following questions.

1.  Do the current beliefs you hold (about anything, everything) make you feel secure and empowered, and moving confidently toward your goal? Or, do they make you feel angry and resentful and fearful that you’ll never make it to your goal?

2.  Can you honestly say that the thoughts and beliefs you hold are truly yours and really reflect who you are and what you want from your life?

3.  Do you know exactly what you want out of your life? Do you see your ideal life as corresponding to the thoughts and beliefs that you have or do they seem like they don’t go together? For example, you may dream of being a successful, visible, business owner, yet you have always thought of yourself as a “do your job and go home” kind of person.  You either have to change what you think about yourself, start seeing, and believing in yourself as the successful business owner, or you’ll never reach that goal. Your self-deprecating thoughts are not compatible with those of a successful business owner.

4. Do you seek out new information; update outdated thoughts and beliefs about yourself and how to achieve your goals? Or do you keep finding information that reinforces the negative/fearful “I’ll never do it” view of yourself?  To change this, surround yourself with new contacts with information and behaviors that support your goals. For example, if you want to start that successful business, join the organization where those business owners meet, start thinking of yourself as one of them, learn the self-think they have, and replace those old negative, fearful beliefs with goal-supporting information.

Finding peace, success, happiness in your life is only as difficult as you let your thoughts and beliefs make it.  Honestly assessing them and updating, or letting go completely, of those that aren’t productive can truly propel you to your goals, and your peace, faster.

Stay Well,
Dale Brown, B.S., M.A., C.E.C.
Certified Empowerment Coach

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/03/30/change-your-beliefs-change-your-world/