A few weeks ago, I was discussing with a friend about how we are able to achieve things.

He was saying that he has to work a lot, while I was saying that if I want to achieve something, I just focus my attention on what I want to achieve and go through a relevant experience.

Simply because I can stay laser-focused, it helps me get closer and closer to the thing that I want to achieve.

And then, I started asking questions to both of us.

“How often it happens that you have to work really hard to achieve something?” I asked him.

And he answered ‘Almost every time’.

Also, I asked myself how often it happens for me to get to the second part of my adventure towards achieving the desired thing, only by being laser-focused and going through a relevant experience. The answer was the same – almost every time.

It looks like behind every spontaneous answer is a belief which is driven by the subconscious mind.

All your beliefs are inside your subconscious

Seeing that things are happening this way, I’ve started noticing something else.

If you want to spot a powerful belief, pay attention to questions and how people answer questions when it comes to what people want to achieve.

Realizing this, I’ve started asking questions almost everyone I met.

“What do you want to do for the next 1 to 3 years?” was the starting question.

Right after that, I was asking even more questions, in order to better understand them and their beliefs.

If you want to try this out, here are other questions that would work as well:

  • Why haven’t you achieved it yet?
  • What would you have to do to rush the process of achieving it?

Now comes the interesting part.

If the answer I was getting was a spontaneous and direct one, it was a belief. And most of the time, that belief was opposed to the things they’ve wanted to achieve.

It made me realize that those people won’t achieve their goal too soon (maybe never) or they will work way too hard to achieve it. Simply because that belief will drag them down.

The difference between self-confidence and ignorance

I’ve started thinking a lot about beliefs.

Besides the fact that I’ve found myself really interested in paying attention to beliefs this way – by asking questions and spotting spontaneous answers – I’ve started paying attention to myself and how I answer questions.

The mess I’ve discovered made me go even deeper.

It has helped me realize there’s a really tiny difference between being self-confident and being ignorant about what’s happening around you.

When you’re confident or you’re ignorant, you have some really powerful beliefs that are setting you on one of the two paths. As long as you are confident in your own strengths, you know that nobody can stop you, you know that the road you’ve taken is the road that you had to take, and so on.

The same happens when you’re ignorant.

You know you live in a shitty society, you know you are part of a bad entourage, you know that your family didn’t offer you the desired attention. Eventually, you start ignoring all these pieces of your life.

So, there’s a really tiny difference between being self-confident and being ignorant. Both of them are strongly connected to your beliefs. But that really tiny difference is going to define the way you live your life.

If you are self-confident but you’re not ignorant, it means that you know you can go towards your main objective without ignoring other paths you can take.

If you are ignorant but it won’t matter how self-confident you are, for sure you’ll be blinded and won’t be capable of seeing anything else that could be really important for achieving your desired thing.

The positive and the negative in self-confidence and ignorance

The belief that you’re confident in your own strengths can be both positive and negative.

Here are two examples:

  • I trust myself that I’m open to experience new stuff without being afraid – positive belief
  • I trust myself so much that I’m arrogant – negative belief

The same happens when you’re ignorant, and here are the two examples:

  • I ignore the things that are not helping me achieve my objective – positive belief
  • I ignore absolutely everything because everything harmed me in the past and I believe it will happen the same in the present – negative belief

The way our beliefs are handed to us without us even knowing it

I’m not talking about mass manipulation and the way society works around their people to only make more money.

I’m talking about simpler things than that: your family, your friends, the education get from school, and so on.

Our beliefs are so powerful because for over 20 years we only receive information, and we are receiving most of it without even questioning it. From the moment we are born to the moment we start questioning the information we have inside our brain, we are all living an illusion.

When you are born, you are given to your family and that changes everything.

Your family has a certain set of beliefs that are tens or hundreds of years old. If none of your parents decided to question their beliefs, then they got their beliefs from their parents, and the same happened to their parents.

That being said, your family is providing you beliefs that may be from your grandparents or even older. And that’s usually bad, considering how fast everything is going nowadays and how well you have to adapt to the current information.

For example, school was so important 50 years ago, but not so much in your present time. Because it was so important 50 years ago and because your parents didn’t question this belief, they will give it further to you. Therefore, it’s your job to question it and to understand what belief you should have in this case so you can survive in the present world.

More than that, as important as your family is when it comes to your beliefs, are your friends (entourage) and your school (educational system).

Your family, the entourage and the educational system will always be present in your life. You’ll have all these three elements at both 20 or 50. But it’s up to you to question the information provided by them and to decide what you want to keep or not.

Two ideas to conclude with

  1.   Your life is already decided by our subconscious.

If you want to have control over your life, you need to understand and calibrate your subconscious.

  1.   It doesn’t matter if a belief is positive or negative.

What matters is how much a belief is helping you achieve your objectives or not.