As a fellow Millenial or GenZ-er, I’m sure you might have had a moment in your existence where you wondered whose life are you living. I look around at my fellow friends from the same generation and I see them leading lives that don’t fit them. It’s not even about happiness at this point. It’s about fulfilment. And many of my millennial or GenZ clients face this battle: how can I get more fulfilment in my life?
Building your foundation
Your set of values and beliefs can make you or break you. You either have a really strong set inherited from family and past experiences, and you developed into a really strong, motivated, happy, and fulfilled person, or you didn’t. In which case, you inherited a set of values and beliefs which can bring you to your own doom. Unless you change them. Your values and beliefs represent your foundation and just like any other foundation, they must be strong and secure. Else the whole thing breaks down.
Types of beliefs & how they influence us
My values are different from yours simply because no two persons are alike. This is due to our various backgrounds, genetic information, education, experiences, and so on. In my previous post, I was explaining that we use our values and beliefs to decide what kind of information we want to pay attention to. For years your unconscious brain has been gathering piles of data that can be used at any given moment.
What are beliefs?
Our beliefs represent “how our brain navigates our complex world”. as explained by psychiatrist Ralph Lewis. They represent ways in which our brains expect things to roll out around us on the back of previous experiences. Beliefs are both positive and negative and for some reason, our brain tends to focus on the negative ones rather fast.
Some examples of positive core beliefs are:
- I am loved
- I have a purpose in my life
- People are positive at their core
- I can be, do and have anything I want if I work for it
- I am the owner of my reality
- I am proud of who I have become
- My past is part of my present
- I trust in myself.
These beliefs are so important in our daily lives simply because they fuel our actions. Most of the time we find it easier to give examples of negative beliefs. If we try to turn the negative ones into positive ones, we will notice an immediate change, especially in our internal dialogue.
Speaking of negative beliefs, here are some from my very own backyard:
- There is something wrong with me
- I am unworthy
- If I love someone, they will leave me
- I am never good enough
- Everything is my fault
- I am ugly
- I am stupid if I fail
- I must always work and achieve something – rest is not a good thing.
Does any of these ring a bell? They sure do with me. Because these are my negative beliefs and for years I’ve been trying to break them down one by one. Nowadays, I know that these were not my beliefs, to begin with. They were slowly planted in my mind by various events in my life.
Turn negative beliefs into positive ones
For the sake of this post, I want to turn some of my negative beliefs above, into positive ones. I’m not saying I’m the best at always turning them around. What I’m trying to say is that where there is a will, there is a way. I don’t want my brain to be controlled by negative thoughts. I want to teach myself (and you) that bit by bit it’s possible to have a positive attitude about yourself. This exercise can help you achieve things you never thought you could. It’s like unlocking a new level in a video game.
- There is something wrong with me – There’s nothing wrong with me, whoever put that in my head is not right. I am myself and I’m unique. Everyone is different.
- If I love someone, they will leave me – This one’s based on some old childhood trauma. Even though nobody left me, I always felt that if I don’t behave perfectly, my mother would hate me. The truth is that I’m sharing a wonderful and happy life with my husband whom I know for 13 years. We are together since 2008, and no matter how rocky my life got, he stood by me. And I was far from perfect.
- Everything is my fault – My therapist once told me that children have an amazing capacity to be very egocentric. I’ll explain this complicated word: basically, we all think of ourselves first when we’re young, without caring about the feelings or desires of the ones around us. So when we think that everything is our fault, or everything is about us regardless of how much it hurts others, it’s in fact that inner child of ours who takes over our thinking. I had to work hard with this inner child while in therapy, and if you haven’t done this work, I urge you to. Our inner child is really strong simply because the ones who raised us were unable to educate us. Another subject for another time.
- I am ugly – By the pop culture defined standards, I am far from the definition of beauty. I look around me and I see many walking skeletons and I know my mother would have loved me more if I looked like that too. But I don’t. I’m overweight, I have shapes where I’d rather not and I don’t fit in all the clothes from Primark. Having said that, who’s to say that I’m ugly? Yeah, I ain’t perfect, but I’ve come to terms with that. I just want to be healthy and if my healthy means 90kg with some shapes instead of 50kg and counting my ribs from the moon, then so be it. Having said that, my self-image work was another big one for me. I’d like to go further in-depth with this topic once we get to it.
- I am stupid if I fail – Right. This one I’m still working on simply because I want to ace everything that I do from the first try. I know, it’s impossible to do anything right the first time we do it. After all, we all kissed the ground soon after we stood up for the first time. But my negative belief, in this case is quite strong. How I try to turn this around is by focusing on the learning journey instead of the destination.
The process of turning negative beliefs into positive ones takes time and patience. Now that you have unlocked the Sword of Positivity, you can train with it. Challenge yourself to take every negative thought and slash it apart. Then turn into a positive one. And don’t worry if it doesn’t come out right from the first try. That’s why I’m here; to guide your steps with various methods and exercises which will make this journey a smooth one.
What are values?
Speaking about journeys and special powers, let’s look also into values. Imagine values like a keyboard, full of buttons. You press every button to activate a special symbol or superpower. In our case, each button activates a superpower in the shape of a value at the unconscious level.
These values act as motivators or demotivators and they are at the root of your actions. As soon as you did something, you use these values to analyze if you took a good or a bad action. For example: if you value honesty, you might want to pick up that wallet you found in the bus and bring it to a police station.
Want to find out what your values are?
Simply ask yourself ‘What’s important to me?’
Your answers represent your values.
Types of values
Another important aspect to mention about values is that they usually are created within three periods of your life:
- Imprint – starts at your birth and ends around the age of seven years old, a time during which you learn mainly from your parents or other family members
- Modeling – starts at around the age of eight and ends at the age of 13 years old, when you learn by copying your friends – some of the most important core values are formed at around 10 years old
- Socialization – occurs between 14 and 21 years old when you accumulate values that affect your relationships.
If you recognize areas in your life which you’d like to improve, we can follow various exercises together to break down each situation. We can discover hidden values and understand how they impact your life. Sometimes you might want to change those, but sometimes you might realize that you’re not the one who should change.
Furthermore, values can drive you towards pleasure or away from pain. For example, love, freedom, health, happiness, are all ‘towards values‘. Guilt, sadness, loneliness, anger, poverty are ‘away values‘. These away values, stem in various negative emotions, or negative decisions and with various techniwues, they can be overcome.
If you’re wondering what some other values are, then here’s a Readers’ Digest version of a list:
- Courage
- Kindness
- Patience
- Integrity
- Forgiveness
- Love
- Growth
- Listening
- Respect
- Authenticity.
In a previous blog, I mentioned that I want to dedicate a special blog to this topic and I’m glad I did. Discovering one’s values and beliefs takes some time. I find that this is the part where curiosity played a major role in my journey. I was just so excited to find out what’s the next value or belief so that I can make my self-awareness journey complete.
Should you want to find out more about this part of yourself, just drop me an email. I’d like to find out a bit about yourself and we can give it a go.
