We all have to believe in something, even if we don’t believe in anything. Generalizations are a core subconscious function that allows us to efficiently move through life, cognitively speaking. Beliefs are generalizations on the level of categories.
Even holding it core to your identity that you don’t believe in anything, is a belief in itself. We don’t know it to be true, but instead of trying to know for certain something that cannot be known for certain, we end the otherwise circular conversation by saying to ourselves we believe [x].
Many of our beliefs at the beginning of our journey are self-limiting beliefs. I think this comes from a learned psychological behaviour of doubting ourselves, learned from society perhaps. It’s often praised to doubt, because doubt is often considered to be the same flavour as scepticism, and we know how powerful skepticism is considered as an ideology in the tech world. It helps us arrive at scientific truths by uncovering hidden assumptions. But doubt is significantly different than skepticism because doubt exudes a lack of confidence. The lack of confidence is an emotional phenomenon that does not hold any value other than it is a phenomenon of life that is to be embraced equally as all phenomena are to be.
Self-limiting beliefs are statements. They are pessimistic and focused on oneself. They often sound like “I would love to do this thing that is good for me, but I know I can’t.” As you can see, self-limiting beliefs are not known, but we trick ourselves with the language and don’t revise our self-limiting beliefs, so we get trapped in believing that we are limited in our capacity to affect change on the world around us, to have a malleable mind that can adapt, or to have an identity is not a fixed entity.
Self-limiting beliefs paralyze us. We get stuck because we like to indulge ourselves in this seductive, ego-full line of thinking that seems irrefutable. That’s why they’re dangerous – because it can’t be proven otherwise (except by skilfully questioning one’s self-limiting belief, which usually uncovers its poor logic).
The worst part of self-limiting beliefs is their confirmatory nature. We may tell ourselves that there’s no way we can do a given important thing fast enough to meet a deadline without sacrificing quality. The very act of believing this belief only reduces one’s ability to prove the belief wrong. It certainly does not increase your odds to defy your belief if you’re telling yourself this day in day out until the deadline. And then we go on to say to ourselves “See, I told you so,” further convincing us this belief is actually a fact.
The way to starting shifting momentum in the other direction is by cultivating more awareness. By doing so, we are able to catch these thoughts and have enough distance from them to hear them and not identify with them, which leads to questioning them and eventually calling bullshit on them.
I do think there is a state that exists when we extinguish, let’s call it 90% of our self-limiting beliefs, that we enter a “no beliefs” state, whereby you are loosely holding your opinions, or in others words are open to being not-right all the time. This state can co-exist with seeking knowledge, you’re just not attached to holding the answers insomuch as asking questions, learning what’s not true, and asking more questions.
I believed I was in this state last year, and one year later, I can tell you the blindspot that exists in it. When I thought I was attached to no beliefs, I subconsciously believed that I was more closely in line with reality than others, which is so crazily arrogant that I laugh at myself while typing this! I still had beliefs, they were just more subtle and therefore more deceiving. Like what it meant to live a good life or how one should spend their time. But who am I to know the optimal option for these questions?
Now I’m in a place that I acknowledge how little I truly know. I really can’t know how a random person ought to do with their life. I know what’s worked for me and some other people with different contexts, but those are just data points from a relatively super small sample and therefore shitty conclusions that cannot be applied generally speaking.
What I like to focus more on now is uncovering what belief serves me best in a given moment or context. In every situation, there seems to be a belief that if embraced, would enable me most.
I stumbled upon this by catching myself asking in my head: “what belief would serve me best” when searching for which city I should move my family to in 18 months because of work commitments ending. There was this seemingly boring, small town that seemed like a suburb (not my vibe) that was so close to our parents and city we grew up in, and so affordable. But I thought the town was super lame. By consciously identifying that believing this town was actually awesome, it would lead to a way better life for me and my family.
I worked hard on loving this town. The thing about this framing of finding the belief that serves you best is once you identify the belief, you need to grow into it. This means doing stuff to test out whether you can honestly believe the belief or not. So I did solo day trips in the town, talked to locals, asked them specific questions about the town, and got to know the public services and proximity to schools and nature and grocery stores.
I can honestly say I love this town now and am very excited to move there and receive all of what it can enable for us. Being honest with yourself, in every situation but especially this one, cannot be overstated. One can easily trick themselves into thinking the best thing for them to do is to move in with their in-laws, yet be vehemently be opposed to it and suppress this feeling to conform to the belief. Of course this will lead to yet a greater level of suffering because of intentional self-deception.
Another thing to note is to get your criteria right. Self-honesty may help you realize that believing an uncle or aunt is malicious because your mother thinks so, would be most ideal to have peace in your household, but might be least ideal to having peace in your mind. It’s because of how you’ve defined what’s best in this case. Instead, if you defined what’s best as what is most morally correct, it could be a worthwhile quest to have a conversation with your mom to see your family member in a different light, yet being open to doing a u-turn once new information appears and you can’t possibly believe in this belief anymore.
We can see that self-limiting beliefs paralyze us into inaction, whereas discovering which beliefs serve us best and experimenting with trying them out leads to action. This can serve as a good heuristic to catch whether you’re stuck in telling yourself stories that serve your poorly, or if you’re on a path to creating the life you want to live.
