How To Make Yourself Have Better Beliefs
While the psychology behind forming beliefs is rather complicated, we can say that there are three general forces that create the beliefs you have:
The words in your mind, the experiences you have, and the interpretations of your experiences.
While you can't always control your experiences, you can always control your interpretations of those experiences as well as the daily language you allow to flow through your mind. Therefore, your beliefs are largely within your power to shape.
For example, a basic belief that most human beings are generally selfish flows from one's experiences with other people. Because they've encountered selfishness in others in significant ways, the holder of this belief has interpreted these encounters to mean that most human beings can be expected to behave in the same way. Moreover, they've packaged their interpretation into language form with words like "most" and "generally selfish." Their belief becomes crystallized as they repeat this language to themselves in their inner dialogue, and they will look for proof in the world around them to confirm their beliefs (psychologists call this "confirmation bias": the tendency to interpret experiences according to what we want to believe is true, not necessarily according to what is actually true).
Most people don't realize that they practice these belief-reinforcing behaviors each day, much less realize that they can use these behaviors to engineer new and different beliefs.
So, how does this process of changing or creating new beliefs occur?
It starts in evaluating the way you interpret your experiences. Do you have an accurate view of the way things are in your world? Do you have a view of people that has largely been shaped by influential people you respect, or a view that you have developed through careful critical thinking on your own? Make sure you're interpreting your experience of life in a healthy way.
Second, if you want to change or create new beliefs, you may need to create new experiences for yourself. While we can't control everything we experience, we can control a lot more of it than we realize. So, stop doing the activities and being with the people that reinforce negative beliefs. Try something different than anything you've done. Read different books, go different places and talk to different people. Experiences are at the core of belief, and changing what you experience will play a powerful role in helping you shape the beliefs you want.
Third, take a clear and honest look at the language you tell yourself every day. We all have an internal dialogue: a running set of messages that flows through our mind, telling us what we must do, what makes us valuable, what we're doing wrong, who we need to be for others. The more these messages run through your mind, the more your brain becomes used to them, and the less it's willing to deviate from them. So, it's important to regularly interrupt your internal dialogue and refine it with better language. Language is the bridge between experience and belief.
For example, the belief that most human beings are generally selfish can be challenged by saying, "I don't have definitive, sweeping proof that this is true. Instead, I'm going to affirm the more reasonable statement that human beings can be both selfish and unselfish, and I'm going to actively and look for experiences that either confirm or deny this broader belief." This resolution is linguistic in the sense that it denies the words "most" and "generally" while replacing them with better words like "can be both," and it's practical in the sense that it seeks to look in an unbiased way for experiences that could reinforce the new belief.
Your behaviors come from your beliefs. Your beliefs come from the language in your mind and from the way you interpret your experiences. If you want to change these things, you can.
Jared Lafitte is a speaker, coach and author who leads Lafitte Coaching, a firm dedicated to helping leaders thrive and organizations build effective cultures. His work has been featured in Forbes, The Business Journals, and other leadership publications.
(This piece was republished from the Lafitte Coaching blog)