For starters, it means play-acting. Play-acting is the practice of behaviors that are the opposite of what you think.

i.e., a young girl believes she's ugly. As a result, she always walks with a shuffling kind of gait, slouched posture, head down. (She’s trying to be invisible). The more she does this, the more her belief in her ugliness grows.

One day, she starts to walk differently. She holds her head up, makes eye contact & smiles slightly at people, picks up her feet & plants them with purpose. She still believes she's ugly of course; she’s only doing this on a dare.

After a week people are starting to greet her warmly in the halls. After 2 weeks kids are chatting with her at the start of classes. Eventually, she's plunged into a crisis:

...if she’s really that ugly, how come people are so nice to her?

This is the first crack in the belief. There are many to come. Sooner or later, the belief will be replaced with REALITY.

We see beliefs come crashing down all the time. The child who believes he can't ride without his training wheels; the individual who believes she can't meet a particular challenge, the people who believe others of a certain race or creed are awful, until they work with or live next door to some of those folks & have a good experience.

So believing that your life will always be awful because it always has been is just that: a belief.

You have no more certainty that your life won’t change than you have that you'll even be alive tomorrow. In any case, it doesn’t matter what you believe; only what you do.

If you practice living as though good fortune is around the corner, sooner or later it will be. The odds are with you. If you practice carrying yourself as a person of beauty & importance, you'll become so & most importantly, others will see you as such.

If you plan your life to include abundance, it will, eventually. Your choices will be different, your behaviors will be different & when opportunity comes, your eyes will be open.

And the universe itself responds differently. Whether or not you believe in such things, it's been shown repeatedly that optimists are luckier than pessimists.

So, it’s a 3 step process:

1. Act the opposite of what you believe.
2. Watch it come true.
3. Change your belief.

This method works. It feels funny at first, but who cares? You felt lousy to begin with; what’s a little more weirdness? The point is, TRY IT. You have nothing to lose, except maybe feeling a little silly; but trust me, no one will notice.

• ourselves
• other people
• work
• play
• hobbies
• the world
• concepts
• health
• emotions, etc.

Here are a few examples of beliefs, that make things more clear:

• I'm a brilliant / awful person
• My wife / husband loves me (not)
• The world is a terrible / gorgeous place to live in
• Nature is beautiful / horrible & scary
• The earth is round (yes, that's a belief, not as much a fact. As little as 600 years ago, people believed the earth was flat! Who knows, in another 600 years from now, people might believe the earth is just a disc with pictures moving from left to right on it & life on earth is merely a “circular illusion”………)
  
• Black cars are more beautiful than red cars (that’s a truth for me, but hey, even that's a belief!)
• When people look angry at me, I get scared / even angrier
• Driving a car is very dangerous
• The more I meditate, the closer I get to enlightenment
• I don't like being shouted at!
• I'm (not) good (enough)
• Working is what people are born to do
• Money only comes to me thru hard work Etc., etc.

Our beliefs are the mental maps we use to navigate the territory we call “our life”. We develop(ed) our beliefs over time, starting from the day we were born, out of our experiences in life. At birth, we don’t really believe anything. But soon after that we start to develop our first beliefs about life.

It all starts with a vague representation of something we experience. We haven’t got a clue where to fit that experience yet, but with time more & more clarity comes & “knowledge” arises.

That knowledge gets backed up by even more experience & solidifies. Now the knowledge becomes a “knowing,” something that you consider “true” in your life’s experience.

You've started to believe in what once was merely a thought, a possibility in the realm of options. If more validating & affirming experiences are stacked on each other, the belief develops even further, into a conviction.

From that point on, you've built a fortress around your belief & it might seem that no-one is able to prove your belief wrong anymore.

Are you still with me??

I’ll give you a real-life example out of my mother’s life. She got quite disappointed in people in her early life already. She experienced the German suppression in WW II, had a not-so-nice stepmother & quite a tough upbringing.

All these (& more) experiences developed the belief in her that “people aren't innately friendly, can't be trusted straight away & need to be regarded with caution at all times, otherwise they’ll disappoint you”.

Now that's / was quite a destructive belief, but nevertheless a true one in my mum’s life. When my parents divorced (another disappointment) & most of the family on my father’s side - sort of - dumped her like a hot brick, that belief got reinforced heavily.

It was true for her, wasn’t it? Later on, a few more not-so-nice encounters with the human race turned her belief into a conviction & she died (too young, in my opinion) convinced that “we” (yes, us humans) are not-so-nice beings to begin with, apart from a few special gems.

And mind you, my mother was quite spiritually evolved in many ways & taught me great wisdoms. This “parasite” belief, however, had fully invaded her thoughts & made her life experience, well, not-so-nice, to say the least.

I'm quite convinced I didn't take that specific belief on board, luckily enough. My experiences with the human race are very positive!

The above example goes to show that you can believe anything (how idiotic the idea might seem to other people), as long as you hold an initial representation & find evidence in your experiences that validate & confirm that representation.

Slowly this “idea” turns into a truth, something that's true for you in your world. The belief my mother held (or at least my translation of it) was quite a negative one, but of course we hold very positive beliefs as well!

They make your life interesting & enjoyable & allow you to soar high above mediocrity!

You’ll probably agree with me (I assume you got the picture) that the sum total of your beliefs makes up your global representation of “the world”. Some beliefs you share with others, other beliefs are purely yours.

A fact is, that many of the beliefs you hold in your life right now are derivatives of beliefs your mother & father held in their lives. Our parents leave an enormous mark on us, because they've been with us from the day one & are our prime teachers for the first bunch of years of our lives.

And so there's a lot of truth in the biblical wisdom the “the sins of the father are visited upon the son”, where “sins”, in my spiritual perspective, are the limiting beliefs our parents held.

In my coaching practise I work a lot with beliefs. I teach my clients how to find out what their beliefs are in the first place, how to grow & reinforce the beliefs that are supporting them in their lives & how to undo & break down the limiting, non-effective beliefs.

The simple truth (no, not a belief) is that if we're able to create beliefs (& we are), then we're also able to un-create & re-create beliefs. It's just a matter of finding a new (desirable) representation in reality & searching for evidence that confirms & validates that new representation.

Moreover, there are simple but very powerful tools that I use to break down an old, limiting, not honoring belief, so the client & I are able to work at both ends of the issue. A tad of effort & persistence on the client’s side to establish the new, honoring & effective belief means his/her world will change. It can't do anything else but that. Change your beliefs, change your world & enjoy it more. Simple & very powerful!

Marc de Bruin
LandMarc Coaching & Health Solutions

Belief System

What people believe to be true is that which is coherent to their already established cache of truisms. This cache is developed over time and is significantly shaped by the significant people in the environment. Its development is monitored by the rigor with which each new proposition is analyzed in relationship to what already exists. But the child who has a poorly developed set of logical skills; whose information cache is personalized and moralized; and has little energy to deal with noncoherent propositions, will develop a reality which very likely depreciates his/her self concept which is likely to result in antisocial behaviors which set in motion a reality [pragmatics] which reinforces this perspective.

What people believe to be true is that which is coherent to their already established cache of truisms. This cache is developed over time and is significantly shaped by the significant people in the environment. Its development is monitored by the rigor with which each new proposition is analyzed in relationship to what already exists. For a scientist, the coherent belief system is developed through a continual examination of nature.

Theories which are incongruent to such natural aspects are suspect. When incoherence is met with physical evidence of truth [the new theory proves capable of answering questions and predicting outcomes not able to be done earlier], the belief system is found to be potentially flawed and a decision to change becomes possible. In fact, it can be theorized that all change requires sufficient dichotomy with the known in order for new development to occur.

Douglas Hofstadter [1995], a physicist and mathematician has developed a computer program which has a set of overall tendencies which might characterize the human mind as it takes random elements and formulates a degree of perceived order.

- There is a general tendency for the initially activated concepts to be conceptually shallow, and for concepts that get activated later to be increasingly deep. There is also a tendency to move from no themes to themes [i.e., clusters of highly activated closely related, high-conceptual-depth concepts].

- There is a general tendency to move from a state of no structure, to a state with much structure, and from a state having many local, unrelated objects, to a state characterized by few global, coherent structure.

- As far as processing is concerned, it generally exhibits, over time, a gradual transition from parallel style toward a serial style, from bottom-up mode to top-down mode, and from an initially nondeterministic style toward a deterministic style.

In such a manner, do human beings create beliefs from random facets of situations. If you feel uneasy about a proposition in which greater intelligence can result from making random decisions rather than using systematic ones, Hosfstadter suggests this is an illusion caused by a confusion of levels.

As sensory information is gathered there is a drive towards global coherence and deep concepts. As the person acquires more and more information, s/he starts creating a coherent viewpoint and focusing in on organizing themes converting from the initial largely bottom-up, open-minded mode to a largely top-down, close minded one. This movement toward coherent pathways results in macro decisions being made non-randomly. "Thus, randomness is used in the service of, and not in opposition to, intelligent nonrandom choice."

Hofstadter metaphorically suggests that this is the equivalent of the fluidity of water. 

...It is interesting to note that non-metaphorical fluidity - that is, the physical fluidity of liquids like water - is inextricably tied to random microscopic actions. A liquid could not flow in the soft, gentle fluid way it does, were it not composed of tiny components whose micro-actions are completely random to one another.

This does not, of course imply that the top-level action of the fluid as a whole takes on any appearance of randomness; quite to the contrary! The flow of liquid is one of the most nonrandom phenomena of nature that we are familiar with. This does not mean that it is by any means simple; it is simply familiar and natural-seeming. Fluidity is an emergent quality, and to simulate it accurately requires and underlaying randomness.

It is critical, it seems, that people be allowed the potential to follow risky pathways in order to have the flexibility to follow insightful pathways, and in order to do so they must have random, not directed influences. In this complex world we are unlikely to know in advance what concepts may turn out to be relevant in a given situation and examination of a limited number, but randomly selected variables are most likely to enable us to consider nonconforming solutions.

We want to avoid dogmatically open-minded search strategies which entertain all possibilities equally, while at the same time, avoiding dogmatically close-minded strategies, which in an irrational way rules out certain possibilities a priori. It might be argued that people with problems in living have a tendency to be too dogmatic in regard to close-minded strategies and develop automatic thoughts which quickly move toward limited [and often ineffective] ends.

Many people, even in civilized societies operate with beliefs that are unexplainable. Many others have explained their beliefs in nonlogical and inconsistent patterns which fluctuate between the conscious [able to be understood in symbolic terms] and the unconscious [without common symbols]. Where the understanding breaks down, the faith comes in.

What is difficult to define is why people believe what they believe. We are aware that people absorb knowledge [used here to define understanding through common language symbols] and lore [used here to define understanding through subconscious characteristics such as style, tone, affect, demeanor, etc.] through their senses, but we are not able to delineate why they know what they know.

This is of course, because the very existence of what we are calling lore is predicated upon our inability to define symbolically these experiences, thus we know more than we can say. Even belief systems which appear to be formed based on logical, rational data often rely on unsayable mental constructs.

Gilbert [1993], in writing about Spinozian theories, suggests that all we mean when we say that a person has a belief is that there exists in a person*s mind a coherent mental representation which contributes to that person*s behavioral propensities. He further suggests that these beliefs are what bind us to the reality outside.

What we believe creates our reality and we believe that which is coherent with our prior beliefs. In this process, each person creates his or her own comprehensive perspective of the world based on an attempt to make all experiences congruent to former experience.

Gilbert further cites Spinoza's speculation and later research evidence, that all propositions [mental representations using symbolic language] are considered by the person to be true unless the person has the energy and desire to do the analytic work to determine the proposition's coherence. This analytic work must implement the set of rules [syntax] that the system has available and the truths [semantics] that that system already accommodates.

This suggests that a system [child] needs energy, logic [syntax] and information [semantics] to create belief systems which provides an independent view of the reality of the world. Thus the capacity of an individual to arrive at a more or less objective sense of the reality around us is contingent upon an energetic desire to learn the "truth", a finely honed set of logical skills and a willingness to expose each "truth" to stringent tests of empirical evidence, and finally a large and growing set of beliefs which have stood the test of time; been shielded from personal feelings which cannot be supported through evidence, and exposure to critical thinking.

But the child who has a poorly developed set of logical skills; whose information cache is personalized and moralized; and has little energy to deal with noncoherent propositions, will develop a reality which very likely depreciates his/her self concept which is likely to result in antisocial behaviors which set in motion a reality [pragmatics] which reinforces this perspective.

The important impact of words, both internally [thinking] and externally [communicating] upon people is of concern if we are to develop a society [school culture] which is capable of creating a more or less objective reality. Of particular importance to the development of competent children are metaphorical words which convey large generalizations of concept. [i.e., bad, lazy, stupid, etc.]

Such words, when used pejoratively, without consistent data to support them, become euphanisms for who we are. While the logical [conscious] part of our brain may be significantly less powerful than the instinctive part, it is nonetheless important. We must be able to help people process the use of symbols consciously and correctly, if we hope to find a way to have significant impact on how people perform [communication and behavior] in day to day life.