How Your Beliefs Shape Your Reality And How You Can Reprogram Your Mind

What do you think of yourself?

Do you believe you have endless potential?

Or is there a bit of self-doubt in there?

Today we’re going to discuss how your beliefs shape your reality. And how you can reprogram your mind with one simple trick

Story Time

Have you heard of the story of The Eagle and The Chickens?

It goes something like this:

Once upon a time, a farmer found an eagle egg and placed it in the chicken farm along with the other chicken eggs.

The eaglet eventually hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled.

And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old.

One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents.

The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said one of the chickens. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth - we're chickens."

So finally, after a long life, the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he believed he was.

The moral of the story: I’m sure you’re smart enough to figure out the moral of that story.

Are you an eagle or a chicken?

Do you struggle with maintaining good habits and eliminating bad habits?

Have you ever considered that your beliefs might be limiting your true potential?

Your negative self-talk and self-image are the driving factors behind your destructive habits.

Your lack of positive reinforcement is stopping you from becoming the person you want to be.

And the shocking part is - these beliefs weren’t even fabricated by you. Your external environment planted these beliefs into your head.

For all your life you’ve been told what’s right and wrong. Your family, friends, school, and society have hammered into your brain the "correct" way to live your life.

And unfortunately, unless you have a major wake-up call (near-death experience, psychedelic experience, etc.) you never learn to question our beliefs.

We grow up and live our lives the way we’ve been programmed to.

We’re all like that eagle surrounded by chickens telling us we’re chickens.

Reprogram your mind.

So… after painting that gloomy picture, what can you do about this?

Simply put, you need to change your beliefs. Success starts with the beliefs in your head.

You need to change the way you see yourself and the world.

This is the secret behind all those spiritual "law of attraction and manifestation" people you see.

That whole sphere of self-help is popular because it gets results.

When they’re “manifesting” something they want in their life, they’re visualizing themselves achieving it. Doing this reframes the way they see themselves and the world.

And as a result, their actions and habits change to achieve what they “manifested”.

Habits will always follow beliefs.

Here’s a simple analogy:

If you believe you’re a male, which bathroom do you use? If you believe you’re a female which bathroom would you use? You wouldn’t even think about it because your actions are based off your beliefs.

How To Change Your Beliefs

Change the way you see yourself by using identity affirmations.

You need to believe you are the type of person who achieves whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish.

For example - Want to hit the gym consistently? Want to stick to your diet?

See yourself as a high-performing athlete. Have zero doubt in your mind that you are a high-performing athlete who takes tremendous care of his body.

Is there a destructive habit you’re trying to get rid of? Identify the self-limiting belief enabling the negative habit and reframe your belief.

For example, if you always snooze your alarm and wake up late, you may have an underlying belief that you’re a lazy and unproductive person.

Instead, affirm to yourself that you're a productive person who wakes up early and gets shit done in the morning.

Once you change your mindset around that, it will be easy for you to get up early and execute your productive morning routine.

If you want to start reading more, start believing that you’re a bookworm who loves reading. Imprint the idea into your brain that you're a curious individual always in search of more knowledge.

Journalling

To help me reframe my beliefs, my morning journaling template includes a section for “Identity Affirmations”.

Each morning I will sit down and re-affirm certain aspects of my ideal identity to myself.

I’d recommend using the Notion app, but you can write this out on paper if you’d like.

I prefer Notion because it’s super easy to use a template where there’s already a section for affirmations each time I open a new entry.

Here’s an example of what a daily entry could look like:

If you’d like to use this template here’s a link for you to duplicate it into your own Notion:

You can use the same affirmations every day or you can write different ones each day. It's really up to your imagination and how you’re feeling in the moment.

So try it out, trust in the process, and you will see a transformation.

Cheers,

– Ivan