How to Bypass Your Big Bad Belief Detective

Do you feel that you harbor beliefs about yourself that are sabotaging your success? What if there was a way to get past the Belief Detective that is guarding those old beliefs and not allowing you to become the person you want to?

When we are first born, we are an open book so to speak, we have no beliefs. As we begin to grow, every experience we have leads us to draw conclusions, make assumptions or make explanations for that experience. Over time, each new experience gets filtered through the beliefs we've set up from those earlier experiences and we tend to make it fit into the way we think about ourselves. It's become so ingrained in us that we don't even question whether our beliefs are accurate. In our minds, they are truth, but in fact they are only our beliefs.

We've all known children that have grown up in the same household that have turned out totally different from each other. How can that be? It's because the beliefs that they form are based on how they interpret their environment, not on the environment itself. If a child is neglected, one may become fiercely independent because they believe that they learned to take care of themselves. The other child might feel rejected and become needy and end up searching for the love they feel they missed out on. It's the same environment, but a different interpretation of the environment leads to different beliefs.

The beliefs we hold are the very foundation upon which we view our world. If our beliefs limit us in some way, then it is hard to move forward and break down barriers. Any time we learn something new, or do something that challenges a deeply rooted belief we experience great resistance. I know in my own life, I sometimes feel like there is a tug of war going on. It's like I have this Big Bad Belief Detective standing guard so that when a strongly held belief is challenged, the Belief Detective puts up a fight.

I'm sure you've experienced a time in your life when your negative beliefs have kept you stuck. If you believe you always get the short end of the stick, that's what you will get. Your subconscious will help to prove you right by giving you examples of how you always get the short end. But in truth, we all have many positive beliefs as well or we'd never get anything done. Most of these beliefs lay hidden in our subconscious and we never even know they are there until we try to do something that threatens that belief. Then trying to change them becomes very challenging.

Often, when we get lucky, beliefs that no longer serve us get replaced by more productive beliefs all by themselves (like you may believe you can't ride a bike until you do - presto - belief gone). So our task then is to root out the old negative beliefs that have been holding us back and replace them with beliefs that serve our higher purpose.

Now how do you go about changing these beliefs? First you have to be willing and you need to realize that your beliefs have some sort of payoff for you. Maybe they prove you right, maybe they keep you safe, but whatever it is, when you try to change it, your Big Bad Belief Detective will try to stop you. For instance, I was told that doing affirmations was very helpful in reprogramming limiting beliefs. However, I found that I just couldn't do them for any length of time. I'd get bored, tired or find other excuses not to do them. Why, because my Belief Detective put up those roadblocks to stop me from trying to change my beliefs. Insidious, isn't it? I finally realized that I would need to find a way to bypass my Belief Detective.

I just had to find a way, so I tried meditation, visualization, hypnosis and a lot of other stuff with some limited success, but the excuses would always creep back in and I'd stop doing them. What finally worked for me was to set my affirmations into short, catchy little tunes. Have you ever heard a jingle on TV or the radio that played in your head all day long? Well, I used that phenomenon and created short little jingles with affirmation statements in them. They would run all day long in the back of my mind over and over. I called them AttitudeZapz!

What do you know, I'd finally found a way to bypass that Big Bad Belief Detective. When was the last time your subconscious argued with you about song lyrics? Probably never. And once these little affirmation jingles get stuck in your head, you can sing them on autopilot and you don't even have to wonder if you believe the words or not. They just melt right into your subconscious mind with no effort at all.