Belief is the centrepiece
What’s the core difference between you and steve jobs ? Why mahatma gandhi sacrificed his life while a lot of the people trapped in narcissism ? Why so much difference ?
The difference is our beliefs and I mean our real beliefs ( chances are we are not even aware of them ) not the one we tell ourself to feel good. Changing one’s belief can change their very course of life. For an example if jimmy has a core belief that if he fails people will reject him forever chances are he will avoid social interaction and tells himself it doesn’t really matter that much to feel good.
So the question arises how come jimmy formed that belief and is it possible to change that belief and how come we can validate if he has truly changed it.
Although the research on belief is poor and have no solid argument on how it formed but the way i understand is belief is more than result of experience but the blend of personality, place, time, surrounding and memories.
A person form a belief when he desires and found supporting evidence. Evidence like found a truth about something or just some experience but just one dot of evidence is not enough to form a belief specially when we live in constant bombarding of information.
If we look into the way our brain store a experience we find out - It doesn’t just store it like a film but set of abstract dots and reconstruct them as a story when we recall. It uses all those dots to make pattern which try to make new dots based on these patterns. interesting part is our brain treats the story we read or watch as almost real one and also uses them to create these dots and patterns which will participate to form our belief and ultimately decision. Thats why they just keep showing same advertise over and over again the idea is not to make you aware of product but to form a solid neural network about their product.
If we or some incident of our life don’t interfere we will be keep forming decision based on the pattern we have build so far in our mind but if we want to change these patterns or belief we can start being more conscious about our decision, start behaving likewise or just keep filtering the right stories in our mind. The idea is to create as much evidence as possible for our belief. To break the old patterns or belief we need to change the meaning of stories we formed so far.
We never change things by fighting existing reality to change something build a new model that makes existing model obsolete.