On Beliefs, Habits and Choices

When we were born, we were free of beliefs.

Observe how a toddler behaves. They don’t have any filters powered by their beliefs.

For a toddler, everything is seen with utter joy and surprise – no tags, no judgments, no sense of religion and no care about looking good or bad.

But as he grows up, he starts to have experiences that enable him to develop his beliefs. He learns what’s acceptable and what’s unacceptable. He learns what’s valid and what’s invalid. He learns what’s right and what’s not…

He learns about fear, he learns about what works, what doesn’t work, and learns to develop strategies and plans to base on the learned knowledge.

The purpose of having belief systems in place is to create a tried and tested ground to deal with life situations that seem otherwise chaotic and uncontrollable.

But most of us don’t deal with belief systems deliberately. Belief systems have a tendency to take over human beings. More often than not, belief systems get installed subconsciously into a human mind. They come as a passive result of the way humans perceive their world, environment, knowledge, and experiences.

But there’s a ray of hope. Every human being has complete power over creating, nurturing and operating through deliberate belief systems. We call them habits and a good thing about habits is that we can develop them by putting in certain efforts.

Habit is our automated default response when we encounter a situation that we can trace in the database of our experiences. Like any database, it can be normalized, indexed and optimized.

We create our habits. We impact our belief systems the way we want. We make choices and we create the life that we shape…intentionally or unintentionally.

Key is to make deliberate, imitational and active choices and create habits that lead us to establish positive belief systems through which we experience the positive side of everything that we experience.

Today, why not pause for a moment and create a space within us to be fulfilled by habits that can empower us to establish and live by belief systems that serve us vs. belief systems that don’t.