How Do You Change Beliefs? by Karen Taylor

How Do You Change Beliefs?

You might have heard a lot about how you can change your beliefs and subsequently change your feelings and behaviors, but how do you do that? How can you change beliefs, especially when you’ve had them for a long time?

Many of us are well aware we hold beliefs about ourselves and/or the world around us that produce unhappy feelings. These may be limiting beliefs about our self-worth, our capability or attractiveness that we know only serve to make us feel unhappy, but for the life of us we can’t seem to shake them. Beliefs can seem so solid and unchangeable – more like truths or facts rather than something that sounds like a choice we are making.

Oddly enough we are always in the process of reviewing and changing beliefs. Our beliefs have changed, and will continue to change throughout our lives. Let me give you a few examples. How many of you believed in Santa Claus as a child, or believed your parents were all knowing wise beings, but don’t believe these things now? How many of you have a very different idea of romantic love or marriage now than you did when you were sixteen? How about parenting? Are your ideas about what it takes to be a good parent the same ideas you had when you began the process?

Case in point, our beliefs change as we continue to grow and gather new experiences. They can also change as we gather new information from books, the media, or professionals. As we learn new things and they ring true for us we adopt or embrace new beliefs. We aren’t consciously thinking about this fact, or calling it such, but it is in fact what we all do. You may have seen or known someone age and grow and have noticed they have become more and more embittered and negative, feeling unhappy so much of the time that you don’t even want to be around them! They didn’t start out that way, you can be certain! They might have even had many difficult life challenges, however they continued to choose their perspective of seeing life as mean, hard, unfair, etc. and grown their unhappy feelings and responses as they proceeded.

The beauty of seeing that we are always changing beliefs, and acknowledging that we don’t really do this consciously, is realizing that if we’re doing it anyway than we can become conscious belief changers. We can consciously choose and embrace beliefs that support the feelings and behaviors we want to have and the life we want to make for ourselves.

We are not typically taught we have the power over our emotions. Or perhaps we are taught we can attempt to change some of them but not all. This is a relatively new idea with several different modalities on how to do it. Some people practice the power of positive thinking, repeating mantras hoping to have them sink into their unconscious and become habits. Others use the practice of logical thinking or trying to rationalize themselves into seeing the illogic of their negative perspective so that they will want to embrace a more logical, happy viewpoint. Still others might try hypnosis, hoping to have someone else hypnotize them into believing that cigarettes really do taste like lima beans so they certainly wouldn’t want to keep smoking them! And as always there is the standard method of continuing to search for and find information and evidence that supports what we want to believe.

All ways are good ways, as whatever works is splendid. The Option Method offers yet another way that you can consciously change your beliefs. With Option you can gain a deeper understanding of how your beliefs create your feelings and behaviors, and learn about your power to choose and change, or discard unwanted beliefs. You can become a conscious belief changer increasing your ability to create more of the feelings, and behaviors you want, and more of the life you want to experience.

by Karen Taylor

If you’d like to have someone help you through the dialogue questions the first few times, consider working with an Option Method Practitioner.

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How Do You Change Beliefs?