Robert Hopkins

“The greater danger for most of us lies NOT in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

-Michelangelo        

Find Evidence

When looking for evidence, it is first important to acknowledge our strengths. So many time we point out the negatives about ourselves, but it is crucial we start looking at our strengths and finding ways to develop on them. Look towards your passions, your strengths can often be found here. Devote yourself to your passions, and share them with others, to help them grow.  

Now you might have doubts about your strengths or your abilities, and that is okay. Address those self-doubt fears. Don’t push them down, acknowledge they are there and then look to these potential problems for the solutions to increase our belief. Find ways to grow and overcome your fears, instead of suppressing them.

Change your perspective from one of hard to one of playfulness. Let your inner child come out. Have trust in yourself and others, and don’t be afraid to play every now and again. Too many times, we are being held down with the weight of our jobs and our struggles, but if we look at them from a perspective of playfulness and job, our whole deminer changes and the stress melts away.

Accept compliments, success, gifts, etc. graciously with positive self-talk. Too many time we brush off compliments or talk about ourselves after receiving one, which only brings our mindset down. We need to accept those compliments graciously and think to ourselves, “How can I help myself see that compliment as truth?” Not only will this help increase your state of mind, but it will help increase your belief.

Choose the belief you want, then collect evidence daily to support it. As sure as the day follows the night, are paradigm will shift to support this belief. If you want to believe you are smart, look around you. People might have been telling you how smart you are all along, but you have chosen to ignore the compliments.

Words of Affirmations & Self Talk

One way to help increase our beliefs is to use words of affirmations and self-talk. If we can’t win the head game, we are dead on arrival. What we tell ourselves every day, becomes our reality. It becomes what we dwell on, it becomes our actions, and it even becomes our habits. If you want to change something, the first step is to believe, truly believe, you can change it.

This is not an easy task. Positive self-talk requires discipline. Especially if it is a subject you have been speaking negatively about for most of your life. Just because it is not easy, does not mean it is not worth it. If you have had a belief about being overweight your whole life, it will take some time to retrain your thoughts to be more positive about your weight. The next time you find yourself trying on a new outfit, think about how beautiful you look in that outfit. Don’t let yourself go straight to the things you don’t like about yourself. Allow yourself to believe you are beautiful. Don’t fight it.

Words of affirmations and positive self-talk take time and practice. If you are struggling with allowing yourself to believe in your beliefs, let us help you.

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“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.”

-Arthur Ashe

   There is a direct correlation between studying about others belief and our ability to achieve greater belief; the same is true of success. We can learn more about the effects and power beliefs have in our lives, by looking at the two studies below.

Increase our knowledge with beliefs.

Psychologists Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan (Boston University, School of Management) recently asked two groups of people to answer questions. People in one group were told that before each question, the answer would be briefly flashed on their screens — too quickly to consciously perceive, but slow enough for their unconscious to take it in. The other group was told the flashes simply signaled the next question. In fact, for both groups, a random string of letters, not the answers, was flashed. But, remarkably, the people who thought the answers were flashed did better on the test.

Expecting to know the answers made people more likely to get the answers right. In many cases, thinking that we are limited is itself a limiting factor. If we have a belief that something is there to help us, it can, in fact, help us. This is why creating positive beliefs are so important.

Beliefs can help change our physical appearances

Next, we can also look at a study done about physical exercise. As humans, we tend to think our bodies respond to physical exercise in a mechanical way. We count our calorie intake, the calories we lose on a treadmill, etc. However, merely changing our thoughts about our physical activity seems capable of changing our bodies.

Hotel room attendants clean on average 15 rooms per day, each room taking between 20 and 30 minutes to complete. The physical activity involved meets the Surgeon General’s recommendation of at least 30 minutes of physical exercise per day for a healthy lifestyle. However, most hotel room attendants believe they do not get regular exercise; and a lot of them believe they do not get any exercise at all. Alia Crum and Ellen Langer decided to monitor two groups of hotel room attendants. One group was told their work provided the recommended exercise for a healthy lifestyle and the other group was not told. These two groups were monitored for 4 weeks. People in the treatment group lost weight; their body fat percentages, waist-to-hip ratios, and systolic blood pressures dropped. People in the control group showed no such improvement. These changes occurred despite the fact that the hotel room attendants’ amount of work, amount of exercise outside of work, and diets stayed the same.

Looking at the studies

As we look at these two studies, we can see how what we believe to be true, can have a direct correlation with the events in our lives. Believing what we are doing is helping us lose weight, can actually help us lose weight. Believing we are given the answers to a quiz, even though we are not, can actually help us do better on the quiz. Beliefs are power tools we should all use to help better our lives. Studying and learning more about how to grow your beliefs is even more important. Not sure where to start? Let us show you how. Reach out to STRIVE today.

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“Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.”

-Golda Meir

   Did you know, mental practice can increase one’s belief in something? For instance, Nathan Sharansky, a computer scientist who spent 9 years in prison in the USSR after being accused of spying for the US has a lot of experience with mental practices. While in solitary confinement, he played himself in mental chess, saying: “I might as well use the opportunity to become the world champion!” Remarkably, in 1996, Sharansky beat world champion chess player Garry Kasparov!

   A study looking at brain patterns in weightlifters found that the patterns activated when a weightlifter lifted hundreds of pounds were similarly activated when they only imagined lifting. [these are called mirroring neurons]. In some cases, research has revealed that mental practices are almost as effective as true physical practice and that doing both is more effective than either alone. For instance, in his study on everyday people, Guang Yue, an exercise psychologist from Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, compared “people who went to the gym with people who carried out virtual workouts in their heads”. He found that a 30% muscle increase in the group who went to the gym. However, the group of participants who conducted mental exercises of the weight training increased muscle strength by almost half as much (13.5%). This average remained for 3 months following the mental training.

   Brain studies now reveal that thoughts produce the same mental instructions as actions. Mental imagery impacts many cognitive processes in the brain: motor control, attention, perception, planning, and memory. So the brain is getting trained for actual performance during visualization. It’s been found that mental practices can enhance motivation, increase confidence and self-efficacy, improve motor performance, prime your brain for success, and increase states of flow – all relevant to achieving your best life!

   So try meditation and visualization for yourself. Think about what you want to achieve and really visualize it. You might be surprised by how much it helps you reach your goals.

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