Is that really true?

This is one of the most liberating questions you can ask yourself.

You first have to understand how it is you came to form your beliefs.

Some beliefs are shaped from your family and culture of origin.

Other beliefs come from life experiences you have had.

These often occur when you are younger, and these beliefs become integrated into your life as an adult.

But you also form beliefs as an adult.

These beliefs usually begin as a thought.

That’s right.

You have a single thought, and then you keep thinking it over and over, and then you begin to assign truth to it because it feels so familiar.

And over time, that thought becomes a belief.

To keep going, that belief then becomes a lens through which you view the world and interpret events that occur.

You also begin to filter for evidence that confirms your belief.

This is known as confirmation bias.

This filtering system in your brain is known as priming, and because you are looking for evidence to confirm your belief, your brain shuts down competing neural networks that effectively blinds you to evidence to the contrary of an already-existing belief.

So you end up reinforcing your belief over and over.

And some of your beliefs just aren’t that helpful.

They’re called limiting beliefs.

The way to break the cycle of limiting beliefs is to ask this powerful question:

“Is that really true?”

What this question does is begin to engage the neural pathways that have been shut down.

You can begin to look for evidence that might disprove your belief.

Or at a minimum, you can acknowledge that your belief isn’t based on factual evidence at all, rather it is based on a thought.

A thought that you made up once and kept having repeatedly.

And that begins the process of liberation.

You can be liberated from that thought that has become an engrained belief.

And then you can ask yourself,

“Who would I be without that thought?”

And then your imagination can take over.

You can begin to see all kinds of possibilities open up to you when you ditch your limiting beliefs.

Photo by James Wheeler on Pexels

What is a recurring thought you have that you need to ask, “is that really true?”

Love,

Audrey