Our beliefs create the blueprint for our lives. They dictate what we feel we deserve, how we think, how we feel and ultimately our life experiences.
What is it that you believe? When all is calm and quiet and your soul has an opportunity to speak, what does it whisper?
Is life, with all its inevitable ups and downs, intrinsically good? Is life stressful and unsafe? Are challenges really opportunities (or probabilities)? Are you worthy, lovable and perfectly imperfect?
The truth is that we will all experience the full range of emotions from joy to desperation, love to loathing, fear to being fearless and we will go through the spectrum of emotions many times, sometimes all of them in one day. But we also have a set point that we come back to: our natural resting emotion, and it could be any emotion positive or negative, happy or sad. You can learn what your natural resting emotion is by letting yourself to become more aware of how you feel; the resting point will be the one that you experience the most over a longer period of time.
So how does your natural resting point relate to your beliefs? Well, our beliefs are the blueprint for our lives; they determine what we expect, how we feel, how we behave and ultimately how we experience life.
There are 12 common irrational beliefs that you might be holding and by identifying them you can begin to challenge them and ultimately establish other beliefs that better serve you and your experience of life.
Here are the 12 irrational beliefs established by Albert Ellis along with a suggestion for an alternative perspective that you might like to take:
1. That it is necessary for adults to be loved by significant others for almost everything they do. An alternative could be concentrating on their own self-respect and on loving rather than being loved.
2. That certain acts are awful or wicked and that people who perform them should be damned. An alternative perspective would be that certain acts are self-defeating or anti-social and that those performing such acts are behaving stupidly, ignorantly or neurotically and would be better if they were helped to change. These poor behaviours do not make people bad.
3. Those things are horrible when they are not the way you would like them to be. An alternative would be to change the bad conditions or accept them and gracefully move forward.
4. That human misery is invariably externally caused and is forced onto us by external events and other people. An alternative would be to focus on taking responsibility for how we react to situations and how we perceive unpleasant or imperfect situations.
5. That something that we perceive as dangerous or fear-inducing should cause us to be upset and obsessive about it. An alternative perspective would be deciding to face it- fear only has a charge for as long as we don’t face it head on.
6. That it is easier to avoid life’s challenges. Which in reality usually turns out to be harder than facing them head on.
7. That we need something stronger than ourselves to rely on. Instead of adopting this attitude it is better to take the risks and responsibility of acting independently.
8. That we should always be competent, intelligent, and highly achieving in every area of our life. An alternative would be to be the accepting of our imperfections and the fact that we are beautifully human. That doesn’t mean we can’t work on our development areas but equally we don’t have to rock everything all of the time.
9. That because something once affected our lives strongly it should always affect it. An alternative would be realising that we can learn from our past experiences but not be overly attached or prejudiced by them. In truth our biggest challenges often become our biggest gifts.
10. That we must have perfect control over things. Alternatively, we can realise that the world is full chance and uncertainty and we can still enjoy life in spite of this.
11. That human happiness can be achieved by inertia and inaction. Alternatively, we can accept that we tend to be happiest when we are vitally absorbed in creative pursuits and when we are dealing with projects outside of ourselves.
12. That we have virtually no control over our emotions and that we cannot help but feel disturbed by things. Alternatively we can accept that we have real control over our destructive emotions if we choose to persist in working to develop control over them.
I invite you to check in with yourself, without judgement, say each of the beliefs out loud and notice if any of them feel true for you, listen to what your body is telling you. If any of these irrational beliefs are true for you take a look at the alternatives and plan how you can implement them in every life. The main difference between the irrational belief and the new one you chose for yourself is that you have probably been practising the old belief for a long time but that doesn’t mean you can’t change it: most of the time it will just take awareness and practice.
So go ahead and get creating the beautiful beliefs you deserve.
And if beliefs are a biggie for you (I know they have been for me) you may want some assistance and I’d love to help. Why not book your complimentary discover session by calling me on 07957416962 or emailing me @ louise@attheheartofhealth.com.
During this complimentary session we will:
1. -Establish together the feelings and experiences that you no longer want in your life.
2. -Get absolutely specific about what you do want to experience and the great feelings you do want to have
3. -Identify the blocks that you are currently facing
4. -Share my secret for a fantastically simple technique that you can use at any time to feel happier, calmer, in control and back on track
5. -Agree together whether I can help and the form that help will take as well as how many subsequent sessions might be needed to achieve your goals.
Love Lou xx
Please share with fellow humans 🙂
Louise Alexander Emotional Wellbeing Therapist
At the Heart of Health
louise@attheheartofhealth.com
07957416962