I can safely say that people generally are a product of their beliefs. What we are, what we have and what we will become are all a function of our belief. In truth, you can never be more than the sum total of all your beliefs. It therefore means that if we must attain any level of success in anything we do or plan to do, we must first get there at the level of belief we must convince ourselves that we can. Very often because of its subtlety, people do not realize what a belief system is first and foremost and that every single day, they are in the process of their belief system being created.
This write attempts to unveil what our belief systems are, and to give us an insight on how they work and how they are being created.
Your belief system are those things you hold as true about yourself, things and people around you and the world generally. They are like the silent voices in your head that influence how you appraise reality. Many people have called it our internal conditioning that gives individual meaning to the world out there and who we are. Significantly, our belief system is located in a portion of our mind we have no conscious control over. It is almost like the software programmed into a computer system that gives functionality to the computer system. Many of us grew up in communities that have folklores and superstitions that passed down through generations by stories told by forebears and parents. Such stories and folklores that are held as true by members of such communities become part of the basis for how people from that community ultimately view reality. There is a community in Delta state that reveres the reptile Iguana, which they see as deity. Such belief system created by stories told by forebears about the reptile inadvertently informs the behavior towards that portion of reality (the reptile); they don’t kill the reptile, and they allow it enter their houses at will. This clearly shows that our beliefs are created by the things we have heard and read about ourselves, other people, things and the world around us; which in any case may be true or false. Our beliefs can also be created and/or influenced by experiences gotten from our interactions with reality, and the people with whom we spend our time. All your life you have heard, seen and experienced things, we have interacted with people, and this all currently now form the basis of why you perceive things the way you perceive them, almost as if the old adage “seeing is believing” is more appropriately reversed to “believing is seeing”. In other words, we see what we believe. For the purpose of this article, self-belief is our primary interest. This is because your belief about yourself and your abilities determine your capabilities. The things you decide to do or not do depends chiefly on your belief about yourself and things. According to Brian Tracy, “you always act in a manner consistent with your beliefs, especially beliefs about yourself”. For example, while growing up, it is a belief among girls that Mathematics and Engineering are fields for men, and this belief largely attests to the rather few female engineers and mathematicians we have around until relatively recently. It is such limiting beliefs that creates the fear that cripples the creativity needed to excel in mathematical and engineering fields, and not necessarily because men have better intellectual capacities. It is all a function of belief.
How many times have you been told that you cannot do a thing well, that it is beyond your capacity, see how powerless it can make you feel before that thing when you believe it. I am one of those people who believed that mathematics was too difficult and I could never be good at it, and true to it, I never learnt mathematics well enough to pass it with a good grade during my secondary school days, probably because of the kind of teacher I had earlier mathematics was painted as a very difficult subject. This negative belief followed me into my earlier days in the university, until I “re-created” my beliefs about my mathematical abilities, then I started teaching my colleagues statistics, which requires a relatively strong mathematical background. All that changed was my belief about mathematics, and then my behavior towards it changed, and then it unraveled itself before me. Your belief influences your behavior which in turn affects your outcome. A time ago, it was believed that nobody could run a mile in less than four minutes. It was thought that the human body lacked the ability to sustain such feat. Everybody but Roger Banister believed it. After Roger Banister broke the four minute barrier in 1954 by running a mile within four minutes, other runners duplicated the feat within months. Right now records have been broken that completely rubbished the former belief of the inability of the human body to run a mile in four minutes. What changed in the runners after Banister did it? Belief, and their body responded. The good book admonishes that nothing is impossible to the man who believes. We are only limited by our belief system and pattern of thoughts. Henry Ford said “If you think you can or you think you cannot, you are right”.
