Author Articles

The Power of Beliefs

By Joel Martin
eWomenNetwork Member: Scottsdale, Arizona
Author: How to Be a Positively Powerful Person, 2004

Dr. Joel Martin is one of the nation's leading experts on workplace diversity and the unleashing of personal and organizational power. As President of Triad West Inc., a Phoenix-based training and consulting firm, Joel has 15 years experience as a speaker, trainer, and consultant assisting professionals in Fortune 500 companies, nonprofit organizations, and entrepreneurial organizations to find ways to successfully leverage diversity and leadership potential.

Since receiving her Bachelors in Visual Communications, Masters in Psychology, Doctorate in Communications, and credentials as a Wharton Business School Fellow, Joel has supported thousands of groups in their creation of solutions to diversity, leadership, and empowerment challenges.

What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Dr. Martin’s book.

If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning. --Mahatma Gandhi

We each come into the world as perfectly positive powerful little people, but as a result of what we decide about the actions, words or lack of action and words of others, we little boys and girls will either grow up feeling loved or unloved, wanted or unwanted, precious or unimportant. By the age of five our core set of beliefs about ourselves and the world around us are formed.

Over time, we decide the beliefs that will shape our lives.
It is important for you to become aware of your beliefs in order to accomplish your goals. You must come to know the beliefs that work for you and those that don’t; you need to know your power sources and your power drains. As a trainer buddy of mine says, “Your beliefs define your horizon of possibilities.”

Your beliefs also determine what is right and what is wrong for you. Rightness is what is consistent with your belief system. Our minds can justify anything to be right. People can break up relationships to be right. They can dead wrong driving on the highway wanting to be right.

There is an expression, “If I see it, I’ll believe it.” I believe it is more accurate to say, “If I believe it, I’ll see it.”

Imagine people saying something derogatory about one of your closest friends. No matter how much they may try to get you to see this friend through their eyes, they can’t because you don’t believe what they are saying is true. Our beliefs are fixed until we challenge them, take them on, resolve them, handle them, and change them. No one can make us change them; we have to be willing to do this on our own. And this is what positively powerful people do—all the time.

If you want to unleash the power you possess to change your beliefs, there is a way to begin:

• You must first want to become aware of your beliefs: what you consider the good, the bad, and the ugly. This takes facing up to your ‘stuff.’ Your stuff is like baggage that you don’t want to carry any longer such as feeling like a victim, having low self esteem, etc.

• Once you’re aware of your beliefs, you then need to ask yourself, “Does this belief work for me or not?” Here are questions to ask yourself to determine whether a belief works for you: Does it lead to my feeling more powerful or less powerful? Does it empower me to be actively engaged in accomplishments or does it take me off my path to success? Does it serve my highest self?
  
• If it does work, keep the belief. If the belief doesn’t work for you, recognize that it’s time to handle it and replace it.
   
• If it doesn’t work for you, do your best to find the source, the beginning point where you think you first started believing that way. If you have difficulty figuring out the source, look to the two examples of my non-working beliefs about myself in the Introduction of this book. Your beliefs too may have arisen because of some experience you had in childhood, so try to THINK BACK!
  
• Once you’ve come up with a source, ask yourself, “What value is there in my giving this event my power?” The events in the past are history – or herstory. They are over and done with. It may be time to let these remembrances go, to release them, to forgive yourself or another. Awareness of the source is a step forward for the positively powerful.
   
• Now, about the belief. Ask yourself, “If I keep believing this way, what do I get out of it?” This will show you the payoffs you receive. In my story the payoffs I got were that I didn’t need to try to write or trust others. I got to be right about the way my life was and why I had the results that I had. Being right meant I didn’t need to risk. My payoff was that I got to stay in my comfort zone.
   
• Next ask, “If I keep believing this way, what are the prices I will pay?” The prices I paid were that I may have missed out on new relationships and educational accomplishments.
   
• Now it’s time to ask yourself a critical question, “Is my belief true or is it false?” A belief is simply something we hold to be true and act as if it is. As I explained earlier, it’s what we started to believe as children. But what if it ain’t so?! Beliefs are not facts like the fact that gravity is a force on earth. Beliefs are things that we’ve decided and to which we make automatic connections. For example, I could have decided that my third-grade teacher was having a bad day and was being cranky or that she wished she could write a beautiful poem as I did; who knows what the truth of that day actually was?
   
• It’s important to add that you may get to the source, know the belief is not true, be aware of your prices, and your pay offs and still not feel any better. MOVE ON ANYWAY! Put a smile on your face, get out of your comfort zone, and get on with it.

A colleague asked me, what if the belief works for you but doesn’t work for someone else? That is a great question, and here is what I told her: If it works for you and not for someone else, you have a conflict and a choice to make. You can notice the disagreement and continue on your course. Or you can let the other person know your intention and do what it takes to understand the way they believe. And continue on your course. It is likely the latter strategy will be a relationship builder and that you will learn something in the process.

There are positively powerful beliefs that move you forward. But there are also dream-slaying limiting beliefs. You must take on the beliefs that seem most important if you want to be successful and feel fulfilled. It’s up to you to decide whether a belief is positive or negative, empowering or sabotaging, ridiculous or understandable. And you do this based on whether it works for you, and whether it gets you where you want to go. Again, if it doesn’t work for you, if it sabotages what you say you want, get rid of it and replace it with another.

As my colleague Duane Smotherman says, “Beliefs are like clothes in a closet…some fit, some don’t.” When you do a cleanout of your “beliefs closet” you can sort through the beliefs that work, that don’t work, and that you need to send to goodwill because you’ve outgrown them. Beliefs define what we say is right and wrong, and what we think will come true. They form the boundaries of our comfort zones. If you are willing to challenge your beliefs, what is possible?

There are millions of events in your life, from the moment you wake up to the time that you fall asleep, and in between. Life is a series of them. And, how you approach these events with your beliefs determines your ability to experience personal power. Whether you feel sad, depressed, numb, happy, hate, fear, anger, elation, joy, excitement, fondness, love, or lust is connected to your belief about the event.

The phone rings. Someone taps you on the shoulder. You watch an exciting movie. You walk into a bakery where they are taking fresh cinnamon rolls out of the oven. The man you’ve fallen for walks by your desk after he’s stood you up for the fifth time. You remember the last time you met with your mother. Whatever the event, one or more of your senses gets triggered. Your hearing, smelling, seeing, touching, and/or tasting sense(s) go into action. It’s no surprise that when we’re sad (thinking sad thoughts) we are more apt to get sick.

Your beliefs shape your attitudes. Your attitudes shape your results. “You can’t get the latitude if you don’t have the attitude.” So if you want to change your situation you need to change your attitude. Neuro-Linguistic Programming and other theories of change say that changing attitudes (the domain of beliefs) is more effective than changing skills (capabilities), behavior, or environment (external surroundings).

In our comfort zones are all of our beliefs, habits, current knowledge, skills, and attitudes. In our comfort zones, we do things automatically, based upon what we’re used to. If we habitually stay in this zone, we will always have, maintain, and generate the S.O.S., the same old stuff. So take it a step further: if we keep doing what we have always done based on what we have always believed, what we will always get? What we already have. We will maintain the status quo.

Is this bad or wrong? No. But ask yourself, is staying in your comfort zone allowing you to live up to your highest aspirations? I suggest not. Is it limiting your contribution to others and yourself in terms of the relationship you could have with them? Yes. Does it allow you to handle the stress, threat of violence, and chaos of today’s world? No! Only outside of your comfort zone can you create the impossible thing you envision – your dream. Stick with me, and you’ll discover that positively powerful people are uncomfortable being too comfortable!