This is a consolidated transcript from a past lecture that had accompanying slides. My hope is that the core ideas continue to resonate, despite their somewhat clumsy presentation in this format. Enjoy! -Dalton
Your beliefs are the foundation upon which your life is built. They are the structure within which your thinking, feeling, and willing function and manifest.
If there is dysfunction in your life—whether it’s physical disease, mental dis-ease, or relationship or financial problems—the first place to look is at yourself. Examine your thoughts, feelings, and actions as a way of uncovering the underlying beliefs.
Maybe you’ve heard the quote before: “Whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re right.”
Let’s follow this cascade. If you believe you are inadequate, that things never go your way, that you’re a victim of life, you approach new opportunities with less energy, less enthusiasm, less motivation, and less commitment. This is the precursor to a poor result.
If, however, you believe you are destined to succeed—and that even if you fail externally, you will have learned a valuable lesson that brings you closer to your goals—you approach life and its challenges with energy, excitement, and vigor. This is, not coincidentally, a precursor to a better result.
Your beliefs—the underlying assumptions you make about who you are, how reality works, and your relationship to time and space—define the ways that your thoughts and feelings will be expressed in different circumstances.
Here’s the important part: If you don’t consciously choose to restructure your beliefs, your body will naturally default to the subconscious ones that are pre-installed by virtue of being, physiologically, animals.
Our instinct is to survive. This means that by default, we’ll always be looking out for threats, always concerned if we’ll have enough resources for the tribe, always wondering if we’re a worthy mate, and so on. If you do not choose to evolve your perspective, this is the operating system you’re running, and it’s not a very pleasant one, at least not with the current structure of society.
If you don’t make a conscious choice, you are defaulting to your subconscious choice. And, might I add, choosing not to choose is a choice. Reflect on that.
Ask yourself: To what degree do my beliefs or perspectives provide me with a higher degree of awareness, clarity, vitality, love, and freedom? This is the best way of ascribing any semblance of “value” to a belief. The presumption I am making is that awareness, clarity, vitality, love, and freedom are desirable to you. If they aren’t, then you’ll need some other way of evaluating your beliefs.
Question and evaluate your beliefs—all of them. The ones that are eternally true will continue to resonate.
This, to me, is the sign that someone has reached mental adulthood and independence. When they no longer default to “common sense” or whatever their parents taught them, but they actually begin to think for themselves, question all of their assumptions, and consciously participate in restructuring their own beliefs—even the really primal ones.