Get Your SHIFT Together by Steve Rizzo

Author:Steve Rizzo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Published: 2013-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Beliefs, Labels, and Writing the Stories of Your Life

Many of us hold on to the questionable truth that our belief system was influenced or even forced upon us when we were young by our parents, teachers, religious leaders, or whomever, and that we never really had a choice in the matter.

The fact is, unless you’ve been literally brainwashed, even if your beliefs were forced upon you by other people, they were still registered into your mind by way of your own thought process. So ultimately, now that you’re an adult, on the most practical of levels, the original source is pretty inconsequential.

The point is that the beliefs you have about anything in your life are created by your constant thoughts. Imagine that your mind is a big cave, filled with different caverns. Your beliefs are truths that have been formed by a constant trickle of thoughts, depositing their positive, negative, and indifferent impressions, like stalactites and stalagmites, in your head. In one cavern are your beliefs about love, sex, marriage, children, and family; in another, about politics, religion, and your opinions of others. Like the unbelievable hairpiece your boss wears. Scattered throughout the cave are myriad formations that make up the positive, negative, and everything-in-between beliefs you have acquired, each being built from the slow, steady drip of your thoughts. Over time some beliefs seem set in stone and have become so huge that they are practically indestructible. Some are thin around the base and can crumble easily.

This mind-cave is a crude metaphor, but it illustrates how a constant trend in your thoughts can grow into beliefs. Sometimes that’s a good thing. If your beliefs are shaped by positive streams of thought, you’ll be left with positive beliefs that allow you to overcome, achieve, and succeed. If your brain is consistently bombarded by a barrage of toxic thoughts, a negative, self-limiting belief system is created and you can be crippled.

Now let’s take this a step further. Your beliefs, whether good or bad, create the labels you wear. Your labels are the key factors that write the story of your life. Let me offer a personal example of how such a label influenced the course of my own life.

In 1992 I was sitting backstage at the Sands Hotel in Atlantic City. I had just finished the rehearsal for my Showtime comedy special that was to take place the following night. Woody Harrelson, who was hosting the show, approached me and asked me how I wanted to be introduced. I thought for a moment and said, “Tell them that you’re going to bring in someone who was voted Least Likely to Succeed in his senior class in high school. Now he’s here in Atlantic City at the Sands Hotel filming a Showtime special!” Yes, as I mentioned earlier, I was one of a number of students voted Least Likely to Succeed. Although the names on that list never made it into the yearbook, and at the time I took it as a big joke, the damage was still done.

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