Habits are stronger than reason.

— George Santayan

Do you ever feel like you’re an imposter and someday everyone will figure it out?  I know I do.

For most of my adult life I’ve wanted to change my beliefs.  You see, I tend to believe some very disempowering stuff about myself – not at a conscious level, you understand, but at a subconscious level.  Because I struggle every day to overcome what I “know” is true about myself, when I succeed, it’s in spite of myself.

Like many people, I believe that if you all knew how much I struggle to:

• write a post
• lose weight
• maintain a positive attitude
• you name it

– you would think I was an imposter.  Some of you probably identify with that belief.  On some level, I know that you aren’t going to think that I’m an imposter.  I know that we all struggle to some extent and I know that I don’t believe other people are imposters because they struggle.  As a matter of fact, I tend to admire those who struggle successfully.  But underneath it all, I’m afraid that you’ll figure out that I’m a fraud.

Living with disempowering beliefs is like driving the car with one foot on the brake.  You depress the gas pedal and the car goes, but not as quickly or smoothly as it could, because the foot on the brake makes the progress slow and uneven.  I’m very conscious of this pushmepullyou approach to life.  That’s why I really want to change my beliefs.

Habits in Our Heads

Over the years I’ve signed up for classes, read books and listened to audio programs but in the end, I decided that no one really knew how to deal with beliefs and you just had to fight against the ones that didn’t serve you.  On the other hand, as Sonia Johnson said “What we resist, persists.”  So I was in a bit of a quandary.

In a recent comment on one of our posts, Dogmom quoted Aristotle, “We are what we repeated do.  Excellence is not an activity, but a habit.”  Then, this morning I read “Beliefs are not some special category of thought sitting at a higher station of truth than our other ordinary, everyday mortal thoughts.” in The Answer.  (I obviously haven’t given up the search for an answer.)  John Assaraf and Murray Smith continue, “Beliefs are nothing more than specific neural patterns in the brain… your habits of thought, opinion, and attitude about the world around you.”  Of course! Beliefs are just another habit, this one in our head.

Where do these habits come from?  Well, here’s where it gets tricky.  You weren’t born with these thought patterns already in your head.  You learned them.  No one deliberately taught you to think a certain way.  You observed the world around you.  You saw how your parents lived in the world, how they reacted to events in their lives.  You heard how they talked to you about what you could and couldn’t do and as if from the womb, like genes, you inherited your parents’ beliefs.

I’m NOT My Mother/Father

I know, I know.  You aren’t your parents, at least not consciously.  The thing is that beliefs aren’t developed consciously.  If they were we could just decide to change them and it would be done.  The strongest beliefs that you hold are the ones you absorbed unconsciously because they are unconscious.  They are the ones that may make you the most uncomfortable, yet you may not know why you feel so badly.

Let me give you an example.  When I was a manager in Corporate America, part of my responsibility was to take care of my people.  Most of the time, this meant nominating them for promotion and awards.  It meant getting them choice account assignments so that they could shine and then I could get them awards and promotions.  But, as time went on and Corporate America needed to cut back, it became less about positive care and more about defending them against attack.

I was good at both types of employee care and I found that if I had to fight hard to take care of someone, I could succeed.  But when I got home I wanted to curl up in a ball and hide.  Over time, I finally figured out that fighting conflicted with the messages I’d received my whole life about how a lady should behave.  The fights cost me – on a personal level.  It would sometimes take a couple of days, usually over a weekend, to recover.  As a business professional, defending my people was exactly what I was supposed to do, but no matter what I said to myself, I still felt awful.  I wasn’t my mother, but I wasn’t comfortable being me either.

Discovering the Beliefs in the Feelings

Knowing what your unconscious beliefs are is the beginning of dealing with them.  If you’d like to discover your unconscious beliefs, please complete the following exercise over the next few days so that you can examine and choose what beliefs you want to keep and which you want to eliminate.

Feelings flood through us all day long.  Many of them are so fleeting we hardly notice them.  Some of them are significantly good or significantly bad.  Over the next few days, pay attention to those feelings that are good or bad in your day.  At the end of the day, complete the following exercise.  Write down the answers to the following questions:

What action led to the feeling?
Why did you feel that way? (first belief)
Why did you feel that way? (deeper belief)

I’ll give you an example from my own life.  As you know, I’m a bit of a pet person.  I have a dog, two cats and fish.  I’ve always been attached to my cats but when I got a dog I realized just how detached the cats were.

Last Tuesday evening, my darling dog started bleeding (all over the white carpet and other places) from somewhere under her tail.  The first impression was that she was bleeding internally.  I was, to put it mildly – hysterical.  Luckily, being female, I called in the reinforcements.  My first call was to Teri.  She lives four hours away and obviously couldn’t come right over but she’s been a dog mom for at least 40 years… and she understood my hysteria.

My local dog mom friend wasn’t home, but when she got home, she came right over.  With three children and multiple dogs in her past, she was a calming influence.  She got the area cleaned up and it became apparent that my darling dog’s problem was a hot spot or abscess.  No need to go to the emergency vet.

Next day, we go to the vet (darling dog and I).  The vet examined the dog and came back with a treatment plan that cost $500.  The plan was highly detailed (which was probably their mistake because it gave me ammunition).  Based on the detailed plan, I negotiated the required treatment down to $90.

Now, with the emergency over, I felt yucky.

After all was said and done, it turned out my judgment of the actual danger had been correct and I had learned what many a new parent learns over time – the vet hospital or pediatrician’s office is a business.  It’s their job to sell their services and it’s mine to use my best judgment to balance cost with adequate care.

The next time this happens, I will probably feel yucky again for a little while.  But because I know where the feeling is coming from, I can become conscious about something that used to be unconscious.

In a later post, we’ll look more at unconscious beliefs.  For now, knowing what your unconscious beliefs are is the beginning of understanding.  It’s the place to start.