The Truth About Believing

One of the biggest challenges I face in teaching people the Art of Self Motivation is leading them to understand how you and I learn to believe.

By the Mach II definition, a vision is not a vision unless you have some belief that it is inevitable. Otherwise, it is nothing more than a wish, at worst, and a goal, at best. Neither a wish nor a goal compare in power to a vision. Once we write some affirmations or a storyboarded vision, the big challenge comes in “being with it.” Every time we visualize it we may feel like a fraud. We may “know” it is not true, and so reading it every day becomes a chore and soon we may lose interest. So how do we learn to believe?

Here are the first two commonly accepted ways people learn to believe:

First, if you have actually experienced something, then you will believe it. This is because you hold that an actual experience is the truth and you automatically believe what you hold as true.

Next, there is input from authority figures, whether it is your parents, teachers, bosses or the media. If an authority figure says it is true, you often automatically believe it is true.

Imagine how easy it would be to “expect success” if you had been successful at the same venture before. Imagine how naturally you would make things happen if everyone important in your life – from your parents, to your clergy, to your spouse, to all your friends – insisted that you had the magic touch. It is easy to believe these first two ways. Unfortunately we don’t all have this going for us on every new venture we choose to tackle.

There is a third nearly lost art of believing that anyone can use, which is to “learn to believe” in anything. And it works like this:

There are two parts of you that make things happen. First is your conscious mind. Its job in life is to disce
things like right and wrong, hot and cold, danger and safety, pleasure and pain. It draws on an infinite storehouse of experiences to match up what it is sensing with what it has sensed before. Out of all that, it draws conclusions in the form of opinions (“facts” if they are your own opinions and just opinions if they belong to others). You may call it judgment, or knowledge, or experience.

The conscious mind, in comparison to the other parts of you, is small and weak. It may have as many limiting judgments and opinions as it has empowering ones. It usually keeps you playing small and safe. It competes with others; it makes others less than you. It is the part of you that sits in a movie and “knows” that what you are viewing is all contrived. It knows that the movie is not real and that nothing really has happened to any of the people, regardless of what the film script dictates.

The other parts of you that makes things happen is comprised of your subconscious mind, your emotions and, if you will, your spiritual self. These parts, in combination, are the power within you that makes huge things happen and attracts good fortune to you. For most people, these parts are left to idle away in life, barely being utilized for anything truly desired.

These parts, in combination, create your intuition, your enthusiasm, your courage, your persistence and even extraordinary physical power, if needed. Anything that has ever been created or accomplished that is extraordinary in human history has been accomplished by placing these powers in play.

These are also the parts of you that do not – in fact cannot – distinguish the fact from the fiction in a movie. They are not influenced by the facts; they are only influenced by the story. They cannot tell the difference between a real event and one that has been vividly imagined. They cannot, will not, do not. If it is clearly imagined, it is to these powers as though it actually happened. And they respond accordingly. That is why, regardless of the facts, we cry in sad movies and we fear for the life of an actor in danger.
Our power to move mountains lies in our sadness, our fear, our joy and our anger. We can do anything and attract anything to us when we are moved to do so.

Herein lies the opportunity to believe in your visions. When you visualize something you want, and you do so according to Mach II, you will visualize it not as something you want, but as something you already have. That will trigger two things: One is the chatter of your conscious mind, which may have lots of opinions about your vision. Some may be empowering, others not so.

The other thing that happens – though not obvious at all – is that your spiritual self experiences the visualization of this “movie” as though it is actually happening. To your spiritual self, it is actually happening; it is a real experience; it is true. When you watch it once you get what we call an imprint. Watch it twice, you get two imprints; fifty times, fifty imprints. Each time it is to your spiritual self as though it has happened to you in real life. It starts to become part of your truth about you. You are now learning to believe.

This is the subtle behind-the-scenes way we believe, and given the chance, it will sneak up on you and start to influence your actions and attractions. For as you learn to believe in your visualizations, they become textbook visions. And the result is always the motivation to act and attract them into fruition.

The real challenge in mastering the Art of Self Motivation is to believe that you can, and will, learn to believe this way and then to act on it. You can trust in this process; it does work. It is working now for you … whether you choose the outcomes or not.