The #1 Reason Why Your Life Isn't Changing (And What to Do About It)

Imagine for a moment, a pie chart. Now imagine (for the sake of this example) that pie chart represents objective, external reality. Now imagine that your beliefs are the mechanism through which you gradually unveil and fill in more and more of the pie chart. As you become more conscious of yourself, your beliefs, and how the two of those things work in tandem to create your reality experience – more and more of the pie chart “fills in”. Because of this, your present beliefs may or may not be congruent with the way reality actually behaves. The greater your congruency with how reality actually exists and behaves, the more effective your actions will be, and the more abundant your results. Reality is what actually happens, not what you think or believe may or may not happen. Ultimately,it’s your beliefs which have the greatest greatest impact on how your life experience unfolds. Therefore, understanding how your beliefs work, how to uproot them, and how to replace them is a smart choice for any intelligent individual living in our modern, high-tech 21st century world. How Your Beliefs are Currently Creating Your Reality The huge and ever-popular misconception here is that “just by thinking it, you can make it so!”. Not, not quite. rnYour thoughts don’t manifest things out of thin air. Your thoughts are actually symptoms of your beliefs. Your thinking is much like a faucet with water slowly dripping out of it. Each of those water droplets is a thought, but the faucet (belief) is the source from which they’re originating. Negative and disempowering beliefs yield negative and disempowering thoughts. Positive and empowering beliefs yield positive and empowering thoughts. So the first step really is to take a step back, and correct our form on the level of belief first. Everything flows downhill from there. If your source isn’t correct/repaired, nothing that comes out of it can be of any solid use to you. You’ll know when you have an incongruent belief because it will naturally and intrinsically generate a negative emotional response within you. Even though you might be thinking this idea isn’t totally correct, upon closer inspection you might realize this is actually very accurate. Let’s look at two quick examples to illustrate this point. The Business of Crossing The Street Let’s say you’re feeling good about yourself in general. You’re doing good in life, and you’re living comfortably. You have solid self-esteem, you get along great with friends and family, and people don’t really have a reason not to like you. Life is good! That is until you contemplate starting your own business. Then, all of a sudden, a whole host of fear-based thinking pops up. This type of thinking is never present when you’re going about your day as usual – but whenever you think about business, your stomach churns and you start sweating. You’re having a negative emotional response to a situation which only exists in your head – it’s not even actually happening outside of you in the real world. However, the reason why you have such a reaction is because you don’t yet understand enough about business for it to not appear risky, dangerous, uncertain, etc. Since you don’t have enough information to fill in your reality pie chart with, your beliefs will automatically take over and “fill in the gaps” as best as possible with what you currently know. Knowledge – whether through education, experience, or experimentation – is always the missing puzzle piece in situations like this. The reason for this is both profound and simple: when you have knowledge of something, belief is no longer required, because you know the correct answer(s) to your problem(s). Belief is really only necessary up to a certain point, such as with motivating yourself to work toward something that you may not understand quite yet, but have faith that it’s a good course of action. I believe the nature of my work will produce value for others, but I don’t let that belief get in the way of the objective knowledge I have about writing and crafting articles like this one. In this case, my belief doesn’t interfere with my ability to take constructive action. That’s a benign belief. If you knew the truth about the things you’re currently convincing yourself of to be scary, you more than likely wouldn’t react in such a way anymore. You’d stop believing in the bad stuff, and start knowing the good stuff as it gradually replaces the bad in reality. REMEMBER: reality is what actually happens, not what you think or believe may or may not happen. Because of this, your present beliefs may or may not be congruent with the way reality actually behaves. The greater your congruency with how reality actually exists, the more accurate your perceptions, the more effective your actions, and the more abundant your results. An even simpler example is a child crossing the street for the first time. They hold their parent’s hand, trusting that this will work out. For all they know, Godzilla could swoop in and grab them off the street; they’ve never crossed one before, so anything may as well be possible here! After enough time crossing streets, the child matures, and the activity becomes so second nature that it’s not even consciously recognized as a threat anymore. This same exact process occurs everywhere in life where you experience fear and doubt. You’re always crossing streets, but you’re not always conscious of it. The Only Constant is… Did you notice what both of these examples have in common? A belief. A belief that this is dangerous, unsafe, uncertain. This one belief causes a whole cascade of other negative thoughts to support and rationalize its own existence. This is the function of the human ego; to preserve, perpetuate, and do what it deems is needed in order to survive. Those negative thoughts resulting from negative beliefs are a defense mechanism, built in over millions and millions of years, to keep your species thriving. It serves some great purposes, but here in the 21st  century, it almost always oversteps its boundaries and/or is allowed off its leash much too frequently. You know this is true by the surge of very real feeling emotional responses when contemplating something beyond your present comfort zone. This should show you how powerful your consciousness truly is. It can make you “feel” like you’re actually experiencing something that your mind has simply cued up for review and contemplation. This happens more on a daily basis than most of us give ourselves credit for. Why Do Our Beliefs Stop Us Like This? The honest, truthful answer to this question is because we allow them to. We’re constantly choosing. Choice is so subtle, most of us just miss what’s going on. Every thought is a choice. Every belief is a choice. The smallest, most potent, and most important choices you make on a daily basis are the ones taking place between your ears. Just as choice is a symptom of belief, the results you get in life are symptoms of what kinds of thinking you’re perpetuating. You know this is true because you won’t take action in a particular direction if your thinking and feeling (belief-level experience) doesn’t support it. The parts of your personal pie chart which are shaded in represent the areas you’ve explored, and thus understand enough of whereby you feel confident and secure in your understanding. The more unexplored area that remains, the more uncertain, ambiguous, and disconnected life is going to seem to you. The limitations of your present beliefs are the very limits which constrain your current experiences. What are your current results in life telling you? What sorts of thinking are they symptomatic of? Where are you finding walls where you wish there were doorways to pass through? Are you sure you’re not just convincing yourself you can’t do something as an excuse based in fear? Do your beliefs allow you to be honest with yourself, or do you have more beliefs holding you back than you may have initially believed..? If you were raised like most of us here in the United States, your beliefs probably support the idea of working for someone else, paying higher taxes, needing credit cards and loans to get by, and someone else to tell you what to do in order to get paid. Whenever someone suggests anything beyond this comfort zone (like starting your own business), you lock up and panic because you have no idea how you could possibly earn money other than by working for someone else. Your beliefs do not support that new reality…yet. If you first dedicate yourself to working on the level of belief, you will gradually enable yourself to ease out of your old belief set. Eventually you’ll enable yourself to find the information needed – and eventually the actions required – to start your own business. Your clothes didn’t change. Your hair didn’t change. Your beliefs changed. If your current beliefs instead supported the idea of you being a millionaire, you’d have no problems allowing yourself to take the actions needed to bridge the gap between where you are and where you’ll be as a millionaire. In both situations, you’re the same person. All that’s changing is your beliefs. It really is that simple. If you feel any resistance to this fact, use it as an opportunity to recognize a limiting belief rearing its head for you right now. You’re already on your way! The problem most have isn’t with setting worthwhile, challenging goals; it’s getting the hell out of our own way – especially on the level of belief - so we can take the actions required to make our goals a reality. Now THAT’S true manifestation! :)