9. How You Formed Your Current Identity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHOmBV4js_E
FINDING YOUR IDENTITY
Of all the beliefs held within your belief system, there is one particular set of them that directly controls the consistency of all of your life’s decisions. This set of beliefs is more powerful than any other that you possess.
These powerful set of beliefs make up your identity. They are the beliefs that you use to define your Frontal Being, your outer personality, and through which you see yourself as different from all other persons. This sense of certainty about who you are creates the boundaries and limits within which you live.
You will only tap the resources within you if your identity that defines who you believe yourself to be allows you to do so. Whether you see yourself as successful, powerful, a failure, a wimp, a winner, a timid person or whatever, your identity will instantly shape which capabilities you allow yourself to access at any given moment.
Researchers have shown that students’ capabilities are powerfully impacted by the identities that they develop for themselves as the result of a teachers’ belief in their level of intelligence. In the same way, the kind of person other people perceive you to be controls their responses to you.
HOW YOUR APPROACH TO LIFE IS CREATED
It’s not events that shape your life or determine how you feel and act, but, rather, it’s the way you interpret and evaluate your life experiences. The meaning you attach to an event will determine the decisions that you make, the actions that you take, and consequently your ultimate destiny.
1. The first element that affects the way that you approach life is the way you evaluate everything and the mental and emotional states that you are in while you’re making an evaluation.
To make proper and superior evaluations about anything, you need to be in an extremely resourceful state of mind and emotion. Anything less will lead you to making poor evaluations.
There are four major definable modes of evaluation that we each use as part of our mental processing. These modes are:
Evaluation through logical and rational thinking;
Evaluation through organizing factual information through sensory input;
Evaluation through our feelings and emotional states; and
Evaluation through the use of intuitive and imaginative processes.
2. The second element that affects the way that you approach life is the questions that you ask. Questions create the initial form of your evaluation process. In response to anything that happens in your life, your mind evaluates it by asking questions: “What is happening? What does this situation mean? Does it mean pain or pleasure? What can I now to avoid, reduce, or elimante pain or gain some pleasure?”
You end up dealing with habitual questions coming from your mind which try to evaluate each situation or circumstance to support some emotional pattern that you have become caught up in.
3. The third element that affects the way that you approach life is your hierarchy of values. Each of us has learned to value certain emotions more than others. We all want to feel good. But our life’s experience have allowed us to create a personal coding system which we use to determine what equals pain and what equals pleasure. These patterns grow into values and the creation of an entire value system upon which we direct our lives.
4. The fourth element that affects the way that you approach life is your beliefs. Through beliefs, we create a set of rules by which we lead our life. These rules are created through our beliefs we have about what has to happen for us to feel that our values have been met.
Our global beliefs determine our expectations and often control what we’re even willing to evaluate in the first place. The force of these beliefs determines if it is appropriate for us to experience pain or pleasure, and they are the core element of every evaluation we will ever make.
5. The fifth element that affects the way that you approach life is the multitude of memories which retain your “reference” experiences. In order to decide what something means to us, our mind checks our memories to find a prior experience with which to compare the new situation against. When an experience from the past is uncovered which can be utilized to compare a current situation with, a reference is made. This referencing process forms the raw material that we use to construct our beliefs and from which we make our current decisions.
Any change that you want to make in your life can be done in one of two ways:
You can adopt a new global belief that will help to change the way that you currently feel or the way that you are currently behaving.
Or you can change your values, and through their change totally modify how you will feel or behave when faced with a particular type of circumstance or situation.
A single shift in one of the five elements of your Evaluation System will powerfully affect the way that you think, feel and behave in multiple areas of your life simultaneously. If you change just one element in your System, there are certain evaluations you won’t even consider, certain questions you won’t even ask, certain beliefs you won’t even accept. This process of creating a global change can be a powerful force for shaping your destiny.