by Marie Forleo
Then the researchers reversed the procedure. With their eyes still closed, the thirteen boys were told that they were being touched on their other arm by the leaves of a harmless plant. But in reality, those arms were now being touched by the poison-ivy-like leaves of the lacquer tree. This time, eleven of the thirteen boys showed no allergic skin reaction on their arms. None at all—despite the fact that they were highly sensitive to those rash-producing lacquer leaves.
Ultimately, the harmless leaves not only triggered a dramatic skin reaction but that reaction was greater than the one produced by the actual poisonous leaves. These intense physical responses simply come down to the monumental power of belief.1
Beliefs can also enhance our cognitive performance. In a small but insightful experiment, forty undergraduate students prepared to take a general knowledge test. Before doing so, half the students were told that just before each question, the correct answer would be momentarily and subliminally flashed on a screen in front of them. The authors of the study, Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan, write, “We advised them that although they could no longer consciously recognize what was written, their unconscious would still be able to pick up the correct answer.”
In truth, no correct answers were subliminally shown to that group of students. What they saw flash on the screen was a random string of letters. The result? Out of the two groups of students who took the general knowledge test, the group of students who were primed to believe they were subliminally shown the correct answers scored measurably higher on the test than the students who were not.2
Your beliefs are THE master commanders of your behavior and your results. Beliefs control our bodies and how we respond to crises, criticisms, and opportunities. They tell us what to notice, what to focus on, what it means, and what to do about it. The fact that your beliefs shape your reality is undeniable. They affect you physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially, intellectually, and culturally. Here’s what’s important to remember:
Long term, your beliefs determine your destiny.
Beliefs create behaviors. The cumulation of those behaviors adds up to your entire life.
Know what else? Every belief has a consequence. Your beliefs either heal you or harm you. They either support your aspirations or thwart them. Belief becomes the source of your limitation or your liberation. It doesn’t matter what’s true, it matters what you believe.
Because whatever you believe, you will react to. As clichéd as this Henry Ford quote has become, it’s a fact: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Now does this mean that anyone can do or achieve anything they imagine as long as they believe hard enough? No, it does not. Consistent action, creativity, and commitment all play a role.
But one thing is certain. If you don’t believe something is possible for you, it’s not. Period. End of story. The moment you tell your brain, “That’s not possible” or “I can’t” or “That will never work for me,” you’re 100 percent right. You command your brain to shut down. The mind and body will follow.
While our potential as individuals is unknowable, what we know for sure is that limiting beliefs guarantees limited outcomes.
FROM “BORDERLINE RETARDED” TO COLLEGE GRADUATE
Test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don’t tell you where a student could end up.
Carol Dweck
In the world of education, Marva Collins is a legend. Some consider her one of the greatest teachers of our time. Disillusioned after teaching in the public school system for sixteen years, Marva took $5,000 from her pension fund and opened the Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, Illinois, in 1975. Her goal was to open a school that would welcome students who’d been rejected by other schools, those labeled disruptive and essentially “unteachable.” Her mission was to prove that all children can learn if given the proper attention, support, and instruction.
Marva’s abilities were so impressive that she was asked by President Ronald Reagan to become secretary of education, but she declined so she could keep transforming one student at a time. An inspiring TV movie was made about her work starring Cicely Tyson and Morgan Freeman and, in 1994, Prince even featured Marva in his music video for “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.”
One student, named Erica, came to Marva when she was six years old and considered a hopeless case. Erica shared, “I was told that I was borderline retarded; that I would never read.” Talk about a destructive and devastating belief! (By the same token, Thomas Edison’s teachers said he was “too stupid to learn anything” and Albert Einstein didn’t speak until he was four and couldn’t read until he was seven.)
Yet Marva was undeterred. Erica began her studies at Westside Prep, and Marva imbued her with an unquestionable belief that she could, in fact, learn to read and write. This wasn’t a hope or a wish from Marva; it was an irrefutable fact. Marva also instilled in Erica her trademark devotion to discipline, dignity, and relentless hard work.
When the CBS show 60 Minutes profiled Marva and her students some sixteen years later, turns out that Erica did learn to read and write. So well, in fact, that she had just graduated from Norfolk State University.3
Take that in for a moment. Can you imagine how vastly different Erica’s entire life would have been if she continued to believe the so-called experts who said she’d never read or write—that she was simply incapable of learning? Can you imagine the devastating ripple effect that belief would have had on Erica’s family, emotionally and economically?
Now imagine the thousands of other students whose lives were forever transformed by adopting Marva’s unshakeable belief. Think about the generations of families indelibly influenced by the power of one woman’s conviction in a child’s innate potential.
We begin to see just how tragic and cataclysmic limiting beliefs can be. Not only to our sense of self and ability to grow but also to the trajectory of our entire lives and our ability to contribute meaningfully to society. That’s because . . .
When you change a belief, you change everything.
Our beliefs either propel us to or prevent us from living to our fullest potential. Our beliefs determine whether we fail or succeed, and how we define success in the first place. Just imagine the decades of relentless belief, action, and determination required to give women in the US the right to vote.
Or the unshakable belief that President John F. Kennedy and the team at NASA had in our ability to send humans into space and walk on the moon—something a mere one hundred years prior would have seemed preposterous.
Belief is where it all begins. It’s the genesis of every remarkable discovery and leap forward humans have ever made from science to sports to business to technology and the arts.
The power that beliefs have over our lives simply cannot be overstated. But before we begin to change our beliefs, it’s helpful to understand more about where they come from in the first place.
WHERE DO YOUR BELIEFS COME FROM?
She was crying uncontrollably. She hung up the phone and bent down so her eyes were even with mine. She grabbed my shoulders, shook me, and said, “Don’t ever, ever, EVER let a man control your life, Marie. You need to make your own money. You need to CONTROL your own money. Don’t be stupid like me. Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made. Do you hear me?! Do you see what’s happening to me right now? After all these years, I have nothing. Nothing . . .”
That’s what my mom said to me the day she and my father signed their divorce papers. I was eight. Once she let go, she put her head in her hands and sobbed. I stood there, frozen and terrified in our kitchen. I didn’t know how to make things better or when I would see my dad again.
Everything felt unstable and unsafe.
Why is my mom crying? How can I make things better and get my dad back? What can I do to make sure that something like this never happens again?
One thing was clear: I knew my parents weren’t fighting about drugs or alcohol or gambling. It was about money. Always money. Specifically, my mom having no control over it and, more broadly, that there was never enough to go around.
All I wanted was a way to get my family back together. Unwittingly, a powerful set of beliefs about money, men, and how the world worked began to take shape within me. Those beliefs sounded like this:
Not enough money = massive stress, pain, and suffering
Not enough money = losing love, security, connection, and family
Giving a man control over your money = being stupid and powerless
Giving anyone control over your life = ultimate regret and distress
Obviously, those beliefs aren’t the truth, but as an eight-year-old, they were ideas that I had decided were significant and true. I came to those conclusions by listening to what I heard from adults and from absorbing the emotions and circumstances I found myself in.
Some of our most pivotal beliefs are forged during significant emotional experiences—many of which happen in childhood. The more heightened and penetrating the emotions, the more likely it is that they’ll shape our lives.
While standing in the kitchen with my mom, I made myself the deepest promise I’d ever made. Somehow, someday, I’d figure out a way to make so much money that the lack of it would never take love away again. The stress and instability caused by the scarcity of money was intolerable, so my goal was to have an abundance of it. Not to buy toys or material things, but as a vehicle to restore love and alleviate suffering. I remember always seeing those classic “a dollar a day” ads on TV about children and animals in need. Every commercial said that “just a little bit of money” could help make a difference. I formed the belief that if I could earn a lot of money, I’d not only help my own family, but other people, too.
Looking back, it’s easy to see how some of those early beliefs like “money is scarce” and there’s “never enough to go around” played a part in why I had trouble with money as a young adult. I went into debt and struggled with my worth and earning capacity for years.
However, I never lost touch with that promise I made to one day figure money out and make enough to share. At a certain point in my early twenties—once I was fed up with being broke—I became obsessed with reshaping my financial beliefs and behavior. I educated myself on personal finance, cleared out my negative money beliefs, and built strong financial habits that I’m grateful for to this day.
Here’s what’s useful about investigating our old beliefs. It’s not an all-or-nothing game. We don’t have to reject everything we believe wholesale. There may be some beliefs (or perhaps pieces of them) that are useful and worth keeping, but we won’t know until we question them and see. So how does this intricate web of beliefs get established in the first place? Let’s take a short tour.
1. ENVIRONMENT
When you arrived in this world, your baby brain was neutral and free. It contained no programming—no opinions, knowledge, biases, or beliefs. Then, like a sponge, you began to absorb ideas about yourself and others from your family, friends, caretakers, school, culture, and society. Just as we learn how to walk and talk, we learn what to believe. Little by little, our environment programs our brains with beliefs about everything from love, health, sex, work, our bodies, money, religion, beauty, relationships, other people, the world at large—you name it! Most important, our environment programs our brains with beliefs about our own capabilities.
Here’s where things get dicey. Many of our most deeply held convictions are hand-me-downs. They’re old, unexamined, and unquestioned ideas that we innocently accepted from others. We didn’t take the time to examine, question, and choose them for ourselves. Sadly, many of those hand-me-down beliefs are counterproductive to what we’re trying to achieve.
To be clear, when it comes to those hand-me-down beliefs, our parents, teachers, and caretakers did the best they could. Everyone is always doing the best they can. Blame and resentment have no place here. But it’s important to recognize that, whether positive or negative, our environment is one of the most significant sources of our current beliefs. This was true for us as young children and it continues to be true for us as adults. That’s why it’s important to stay mindful of your environment, especially as you work to incorporate new, more supportive and expansive beliefs.
2. EXPERIENCE
Direct experience helps us further cement our beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world at large. Naturally, these beliefs are often influenced by hand-me-down beliefs.
Here’s a simple example. I love roller coasters. It’s hard for me to express how much joy and aliveness I feel when I’m on a fast, smooth, speeding bullet of a ride. It’s something I first learned to enjoy with my dad. But I know lots of people who won’t step foot near a roller coaster! In their experience, roller coasters mean terror, anxiety, and hours of motion sickness.
Direct experiences, both positive and negative, stack up over time and begin to coalesce into stronger and more deeply rooted beliefs about our identity, who we are, and what makes up our reality.
3. EVIDENCE
Evidence-based beliefs are thoughts and ideologies we accept as “the truth” from authoritative figures and sources: scientists, clergy, research studies, doctors, academics, authors, the media, and general society. But as technology, science, and culture progress, so does what we believe to be true. As such, our evidence-based beliefs can and do evolve over time. This is great news because it demonstrates that, as individuals and as a society, we can indeed change and evolve our beliefs. Remember—humans once believed the world was flat, that margarine was better than butter, and that an ice-pick lobotomy cured mental illness. Aren’t you glad those days are over?
4. EXAMPLES
When Oprah Winfrey was sixteen, she saw Barbara Walters on television. She was so deeply moved and inspired that she said to herself, “Maybe I could do that.” Oprah went on to share, “There’s no other woman that deserves more in terms of opening the door for my career.”4 In that statement, Oprah is not talking about Barbara Walters “opening doors” by recommending her for broadcasting jobs. She’s talking about the fact that merely witnessing another woman on television cracked open a possibility within Oprah’s consciousness about what was possible for her. It’s hard to become what you don’t see.
Finding role models outside your immediate circle is one of the best and most powerful ways to transcend your own limiting beliefs. Alive or dead, famous or unknown, find inspiring examples through reading biographies, watching movies, listening to interviews, or simply paying closer attention to good people in your life.
5. ENVISIONING
Sometimes we have no examples to look to for inspiration, yet a belief in what’s possible burns so brightly in our hearts that we devote our lives to making it a reality. Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile in 1954 is one example. No one had achieved this goal, yet deep in his heart he believed he could. So he did. Then countless others followed.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described a vision of freedom and equality that didn’t exist yet. In his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, he shared:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Dr. King forever shifted our culture, and millions of people to this day are working toward his dream. Envisioned beliefs seem to emerge from another plane of consciousness—our intuition, or from some inner voice or vision—and get forged in the fire of our hearts.
WHY OUR BELIEFS TEND TO STICK
We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.
Anaïs Nin
Naturally, all five sources intertwine, overlap, and interact. They also tend to reinforce each other, which can create some hiccups when it comes to upgrading our beliefs
if we don’t keep a watchful eye.
For instance, perhaps as a result of your parents’ divorce, you formed a belief that marriages never last. Then you personally went through a divorce that further cemented the belief. “See! Marriage just isn’t worth the trouble.” It’s not hard to find even more evidence that reinforces those beliefs as the “truth.” A quick search of popular statistics shows:
Between 40 and 50 percent of first marriages end in divorce5
In the US that means one divorce approximately every thirty-six seconds6
That’s nearly 2,400 divorces per day—16,800 divorces per week or 876,000 divorces a year!
Chances are, you’ll continue to affirm the belief that “marriages never last” by listening for and retelling stories of broken marriages from family, friends, and the media.
This highlights another fundamental fact about our beliefs. Our brains tend to reinforce what we already believe. This well-documented phenomenon is called confirmation bias. Simply put, confirmation bias means we look for and find evidence to support our beliefs. We cherry-pick information that confirms what we already know, while ignoring (consciously and unconsciously) information that challenges our existing beliefs.
In this scenario, any example you find of a couple who’s happily married either is immediately dismissed as a fluke or a lie, or doesn’t even register on your mental radar because it doesn’t line up with your existing belief!