personalgrowth
The Core Belief
It is the key to personal success.
It is what you truly believe about yourself in relationship to the Universe at the deepest level of your soul, your psyche, your heart, your subconscious or unconscious. It is not what you want to believe or think you should believe. It is not what you choose to believe and attempt to paint over what you truly believe with a few coats of denial or positive thinking. No matter how many times you paint over the Core Belief, the original colors always bleed through-- maybe not right away, but eventually, and always when the heat is on, when you are being tested.
Changing Your Core Belief
You didn't create your Core Belief (henceforth referred to as CB). It was drilled into you. It could be positive or negaitve. It cold b e overly positive. It could simply be skewed. It is a result of what you have...
been told about yourself by others, repeatedly and/or at some key moment in life, some key event, by someone you have given authority, rightly or wrongly.
interpreted about yourself from indirect messages you have received repeatedly or at key points
inferred or assumed about yourself from experiences you have had of success or failure throughout your life, especially early in life, especially when being challenged or when taking risks.
It is the perfect storm of inaccurate information reinforced by direct and indirect affirmation of this information, further reinforced by experience interpreted from the perspective and context of this information, until this inaccurate belief about oneself defines oneself and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Whether your CB is too negative, overly positive, or simply inaccurate, it is a barrier to the real truth about yourself and therefore prevents you from true success and true integrity. Because your CB is so deeply ingrained it is almost impossible to change. It is so deeply ingrained we often don't realize it is there. It is as much a part of us as our bodies, as much a part of our lives and being as the air we breathe, or perhaps more accurately, a s much a port of your psychic "air" as hidden pollutants are in our physical air. We can breathe this "lie" about ourselves all our lives, potentially, and not even realize we are breathing poison until one day we discover a tumor-- a spiritual tumor-- something that, like a malignant mass, has attached itself to the soul, taking increasingly more space, more nourishment, weakening and starving its host, becoming increasingly painful, toxic, paralyzing, and ultimately fatal, if it isn't diagnosed and treated.
You didn't create your CB. You may not even realize it's there. It is often confused with truth-- if not always.
But it is the Great Lie.It is not what we see when we look at ourselves in the spiritual mirror-- it is a very realistic portrait of someone who appears to be you or me that has been painted over our spiritual mirror-glass.
It could be negative. You could have a CB that you are not a good singer. You might have a voice like Calas or Pavoratti but somehow, somewhere, sometime very early in your development someone told you, you couldn't sing and then someone else laughed when you sang, and then when you were in Elementary School Chorus the teacher passed you over for a solo, giving it to someone you thought was not very talented, a nd by then the die was cast.
Your CB is that you are not a good singer. What makes the CB so strong and so difficult to overcome is that you have learned to doubt your ability to self-evaluate. You used to think you could sing. Your mother may have occasionally complimented your voice, but no one else did, and someone you thought wasn't very good got the solo, so now you doubt your ability to judge yourself and your ability to recognize talent or beauty in general because by now you believe you don't know what good singing sounds like.
It could be overly positive. What if the the opposite is true? You are tone deat, but you love to sing and your parents and teachers and other adults in your life told you how "beautifully" you sang when you were young. They meant well of course, wanting to encourage and affirm. But at some point you put yourself out there as a singer and suddenly you are told very directly that you can't sing. (Perhaps this is why those who audition for American Idol seem to b e the only ones who don't know how badly they sing.)
As a result you spend your life in torment over the conflict between the absolute truth about you and the life you have grown up believing at the core of your being.
A variation on this is a skewed view of oneself. Your CB might not be dramatically positive or negative. It may just be wrong. You may be a fine singer but an even better dancer but because your CB is that your greatest talent is your vice, you have neglected developing your talent as a dancer.
All of these examples have one thing in common: we grow up with a core belief at the very depths of our soul, at the very core of who we are that in some sense, whether positive or negative, skewed, all of the above, whether pervasive or more peripheral, we are someting we are not.
In the sense that this lie, this distortion of our core view of ourselves prevents us or even fights us from being our true selves, living our true purpose, achieving our true potential, it is spiritual cancer, and if left untreated can cause spiritual and psychological death.
The bottom line is that success in life, whether personal, professional, financial or otherwise only comes when our Core Beliefs about ourselves are in line with our conscious perceptions, and are also accurate. It does no good to realize you believe you are worthless at your core if you do nothing about it. Awareness of the CB is the first step. Re-shaping it to conform to reality is the second step. But that's another whole article. Check back soon.
-jwh-