Stop listening to those little voices in your head
What are you saying to yourself? Why?
We want to think that all the things we believe are factual and true. But often what we believe as facts are not necessarily that at all. Our brains don’t know the difference between what is true and what is false. For example, when you were six or seven, you believed in Santa, and you learned that red meant hot. How did you learn red meant hot? From experience with a hot stove or from repeated warnings from adults to “don’t touch, hot, red, danger.” Whatever the process of learning, you stored it away in your brain, and it served you well. How did you learn that Santa belongs in the false aisle?
How or why do we know what we know? Often whatever we have heard over and over again, we accept as truth. I could probably go on for hours about news versus shows like CNN or Fox of what I call talking opinion heads dressed as news people. Over and over again they tell us opinions and stories, and over time we record them as fact when in fact it’s just filtered processed information.
How do we know what we know?
How do we add information to our knowledge? The human brain is much like a computer. It reacts to whatever programming has been put into it. Like a computer, it doesn’t know the difference between good and evil. Our brains are just a storage unit of information.
Time for a test
Take a moment and close your eyes, breath in, and clear your mind. How many two’s are in your phone number? How many five’s are in your social security number? Which set of numbers has more nine’s? Now you can open your eyes.
I’m sure that until I asked those questions, you were not sitting there thinking about your social security number and your phone number. How did you come up with 100% correct answers on those three questions? You stored away information about your phone number and social security number, and when that information was required, you pulled it up on the screen in your brain.
Why is this important? Because your brain does whatever you tell it to. It believes whatever you tell it to believe. Your mind is always taking in information and building up file after file and waiting for a command on what to do with that data.
I know you talk to yourself, but what are you saying?
Self-talk matters because what you tell yourself about yourself is what eventually becomes the true you. If you are like most people, you probably don’t even monitor the things you say about your own life. You are the author of your own life. You dictate who you become by allowing specific thoughts to process over and over again.
Imagine I had a stack of files on my desk and one stack was blue folders about two and a half feet tall and the other pile was green folders about four inches tall. You walk into my office and say “can I have one of those folders?” which stack am I more likely to pull one from? The big, blue pile. It seems more logical and more relevant because there are more of them. The more files there are, the more likely it is to carry weight or value.
Each time you say things I can’t, I would never, it would never happen to me, etc. you are adding more blue files to that stack. We all have stories we’ve told ourselves over and over again. They become part of our legacy, our history.
What are your beliefs
Beliefs are things that are processed through information acquired and personal experience, judgment, and sometimes personal experiences of others. There are a lot of things we believe simply because somebody told us over and over again, it was the right thing to think when, in reality, it was just their experience. That expression “trust but verify” was never more accurate. Trust people but verify their information and knowledge, know what they are saying and find out how they know what they are saying.
You have beliefs about your own life that you accept as truth that aren’t true and are very much based on an experience that no longer applies to the present. You have beliefs about what you are capable of and what’s possible for you. You have these “truths” that you set up which are not because it’s not universal.
What are your truths?
Truth has to occur simultaneously outside of your personal experience and your self-judgment. Gravity exists equally for me as it does for you. Whatever those thoughts are will determine your limits. If you hold something to be self-evident to yourself and hold onto it hard enough and long enough and make it one of your truths you will never succeed beyond that because your brain can’t process outside of the information you have told it.
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not adding it to a fruit salad.
Final Thoughts
- Choose your words carefully when you describe yourself
- If your life is not where you want it to be. Ask yourself what you are programming your brain to believe. Then start getting it out of your head.
- Retire self-limiting beliefs
- Let go of negative things about yesterday and rewrite your future
