In my previous blog entry, They're Your Emotions, there were two main ideas on emotion I wanted to share. One, your emotions are created from within you, by you, not by others. There is no secret ether through which external events can travel, penetrate your mind, and push your emotional buttons directly. Only you have access to those buttons. And two, the emotions you feel are based on your interpretations of events, not on the events themselves. That’s how three people can witness the same exact event, yet have different emotional responses. They each interpreted the event differently; therefore they each felt differently. These are the two truths I hope you’ve taken away from my previous entry.
I see these truths as being absolutely essential, because if we believed otherwise -- if we believed that our emotional well-being is perpetually and uncontrollably at the mercy of external events -- we’d never even begin to take action. Why? Because we wouldn’t have hope. We wouldn't believe there’s a way to change the quality of our emotional lives, because we’d believe our feelings are uncontrollable, dictated by external circumstance. And without that hope, we wouldn’t act. Fortunately, there is.
“Man is not the creature of circumstances;
circumstances are the creatures of men.”
-Benjamin Disraeli [1]
Our feelings are based on our interpretations of events, not on the events themselves. I know, I’ve said that already. But what does it mean? And more importantly, how can we change our interpretations of certain events, and therefore change our feelings? Let’s start with the first question: what does it mean?
Over the course of our lives, we have developed a multitude of beliefs about everything we have ever experienced. Growing up, we have formed beliefs about what is and what is not appropriate behavior, our morals. We have formed beliefs about what we’re willing to live with and what we’re not, our standards. And we’ve developed beliefs -- no, not beliefs, but convictions -- about ourselves: who we are, what we can do, what we cannot do, what our possibilities are or are not; convictions which, combined, form our self-esteem.
This complete set of beliefs that we’ve gathered since childhood, then, is applied to external events to form our interpretations. For example, let’s say your friend John loans you $10 so you can buy lunch, and you promise to pay him back during the week. Then, a few days later, you have the money to pay him back, but discover that he forgot you owe him. Knowing this, and because your favorite flip-flops are on sale, you buy them with the money you were supposed to return. Now you feel guilty. But you see, it’s not the fact that you spent John’s money (the event) that makes you feel this way. You feel guilty because in your mind you have a moral, a belief, which says, “I should not break promises I make to my friends.” This belief, applied to the event (breaking your promise), creates your interpretation: “I did something bad.” And it is this interpretation that is the root cause of you feeling guilty.
So, you believe you shouldn’t break promises to friends, and by buying those flip-flops, you have violated this belief, causing your feeling of guilt. But now let’s change something. Let’s say that your friend John doesn’t have a good track record himself. In fact, you believe, “John has always broken the promises he’s made to me, so it’s OK if I break mine.” Believing this, you make that purchase, and don’t feel the pang of guilt. Can you feel the difference this change in belief creates? Have you ever done this before? Acted in a way toward one person and felt guilty, but acted similarly toward a different person and not felt guilty? Why is that? It’s because you have different beliefs -- one for the first person, another for the second -- and this difference in beliefs is what causes the difference in emotion.
Here’s the important point: If we wish to change our emotional responses to an event, we must change our beliefs about the meaning of said event. A different belief, a different emotion.
And here, I stop. Because I know that what I just said does not sit well with you -- especially when you try to apply it to the flip-flops example above. You see, I’m not here to talk about morality, or to convince you to change your beliefs about what’s right or what’s wrong. Going back to my example, you may say that we should hold the belief, “I should not break promises I make to my friends”, and that by breaking it, we should feel guilty. It’s justified! And you know what, I agree completely. I’m not suggesting that negative feelings such as guilt are inherently bad, or that we should abolish all negative emotion. All I’m saying, at this point, is that you change the way you feel by changing what you believe.
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself,
but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment”
-Marcus Aurelius [1]
You change your feelings by changing your beliefs. But sometimes, the negative feelings your beliefs create are justified. So your next logical question is, “When, exactly, should I change my beliefs?” Easy. You change your beliefs whenever they are hindering or preventing you from living the life you want to live. That’s it. No complicated formula or special process required. If you have a goal that you really want to achieve, but have a belief that’s creating doubt or discouragement, then that is the belief you should change. The man who believes that he’s a failure in life and that there’s nothing he can do to escape his miserable state is, no doubt, depressed. And if he is to climb out of this state, he must sit down with a goddamn pen and pad of paper and begin to seriously examine, and ruminate on, his beliefs that are keeping him down.
Limiting beliefs -- that’s what he has. We all have them, some people to a greater degree than others. They are the beliefs we have that hold us back, that keep us down. If you ever find yourself telling yourself that you can’t do this, or you can’t do that; that you don’t deserve success, or happiness, or anything else you want in life, then congratulations: you’ve found a limiting belief. But if you’ll just take the time to honestly question the truthfulness of that belief, you’ll begin to find counterexamples which weaken its strength. If done consistently, you’ll eventually find that your belief was absurd, and months from now, you’ll look back with amazement and wonder, “Why in the world did I believe this in the first place?” Because you see,
“If you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”
-Henry Ford
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So I end this entry with a homework assignment. A single question that I would like you to ask yourself: “What are my limiting beliefs?” When you discover one, right it down. Do this for a few days. Then wait a day or two, and return to your list of limiting beliefs and begin to make an honest assessment of what they mean and how true they really are.
Regards,
Nick
References
[1] Awaken the Giant Within
Free Press, 2003
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