Belief: an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.
I just finished another Nir Eyal book — Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Extraordinary Results — and it made a couple of things even clearer to me.
Beliefs, no matter how strong, are a choice of lens.
Like tinted glasses — some rose, some blue. The glasses don’t change reality. They change how reality looks to you.
And that changes your actions. Which changes what you experience. Which reinforces, or slowly rewires, your beliefs.
Believe → Anticipate → Feel → Confirm.
Round and round it goes.
Belief is not reality.
And that doesn’t make it useless. Just like prayer, which has positive psychological effects, regardless of whether you believe in some higher power or doubt it a lot.
It makes it into a powerful tool to curate your life experience, your growth and what you get out of life.
If you believe failure is feedback — that it shows you where your skills don’t yet match your goals — you become someone who bounces back faster. Does more. Learns more. Gets more chances at what you actually want.
If you believe failure is proof of permanent inadequacy — that you should quit, stay in your lane, don’t even try — that belief will keep you exactly where you are. Stuck.
How useful is that to you?
How useful is it to believe you’re not good enough for what you want? And that the condition is permanent?
Not very.
Because in most cases, with enough work and enough reps, you can get there. And in the worst case — you’ll get much further than you would have standing still.
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”
Two more things from the book that I think are useful for anyone trying to grow:
1. There’s evidence for and against every belief you hold.
About yourself. Your worth. Your work. Other people.
Right now, multiple truths are available to you simultaneously. So it’s worth asking — especially when you’re stuck somewhere you don’t want to be — is this belief actually serving me? Or am I sacrificing the quality of my life because I was conditioned to see only one side of the evidence?
2. Building beliefs is like building muscle💪
It takes practice. Feedback. Adjustment. Reps.
A lot of my clients want to change their self-narrative. Many arrive with this quiet assumption that knowledge alone will do it.
It won’t.
Knowing exercise is good for you doesn’t make you fit. Knowing which thoughts serve you doesn’t make them your default.
You’ve got to put in the reps to experience the difference.
Over to you, dear reader,
What belief about beliefs do you need to upgrade to start spinning your wheels in place and get moving?