Force of Habit, Force of Belief

By John Assaraf and Murray Smith

Beliefs are not some special category of idea sitting at a higher station of truth than our ordinary, everyday mortal thoughts. Beliefs are not necessarily “the truth” at all. (Remember, there was a time when everyone believed the earth was flat.) Beliefs are nothing more than specific neural patterns in your brain, thoughts that are so ingrained they have become automatic. They are not there because are “the truth,” they have simply been handed down from generation to generation. They are there because someone put them there.

We are not talking here about your faith or religious views. We’re not here to challenge your faith. We are talking here about your beliefs—your habits of thought, opinion and attitude about the world around you, and especially your beliefs about you, about your life and your prospects for financial fulfillment.

By the time you’re seventeen years old, you’ve heard “No, you can’t,” an average of 150,000 times. You’ve heard, “Yes, you can,” about 5,000 times. That’s thirty no’s for every yes. That makes for a powerful belief of “I can’t.”

Most people view their own goals in the form of hopes or wishes. “I hope I succeed in this business,” or, “I wish I would earn a million dollars . . .” Here is the rest of the unfinished thought, whether conscious or not, that usually lies after those three dots: “. . . but I bet I won’t.” The biggest obstacle to most people’s goals has nothing to do with any external conditions or factors. It is this: they don’t believe it will happen or that it can be done. If you don’t believe it will happen, it is almost guaranteed that it won’t. You simply cannot achieve a goal that you do not believe you can achieve, because those beliefs live in that part of the brain that is running the show, even though we typically are not aware of it.

Let’s say you love your family very much, you place a high value on family, and one of your biggest goals in life is to have a rich, full family life—yet you also have a belief that the only way you can be truly successful and earn enough income to provide for your family is to work really, really hard. So what happens?

You find yourself working eighty hours a week and never see your family. Why, because you don’t value them? No, you value them, all right, but your beliefs have you captive on that eighty-hour track, like a hamster on a wheel. Beliefs trump desires, every time.

If you have credit card debt and financial struggle in your life, lack of money is not the problem: it is only the symptom. Lack of money is simply the fruit. To find the cause, you need to look at the seed. The fruit will always match the seed. And the seed is your habits of thought.

Here’s the problem: beliefs tend to be self-fulfilling. This is because habits are thousands of times stronger than desires. That is worth restating: not twice as strong, not even three times as strong, but thousands of times stronger. You may have the desire to increase your income tenfold, but if your habits of thought do not expect anything like that to occur, it will be next to impossible for it to happen; you will take no lasting, productive effort towards that goal. Why not? Because it is your habits, not your desires or other conscious thoughts, that run your actions.
This is one of the greatest discoveries of the past decade of neurological research: 96 to 98 percent of all of your behaviors are automatic. This is why we set goals, but don’t reach them. Setting them is a function of the conscious mind. Reaching them is a function of the nonconscious mind.

# # #

This article is adapted from The Answer, by John Assaraf and Murray Smith (Atria Books).

About the Author

John Assaraf is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker and entrepreneur. The author of Having It All and a contributor to The Secret, he has appeared on Larry King Live and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and on ABC, CBS and NBC programs worldwide. Over the last twenty years, he has built four multimillion-dollar companies. He lives in San Diego, California.

Murray Smith is a business turnaround guru and consultant who has launched or revived fourteen highly successful businesses and helped thousands of other business owners increase revenues, profits and value. With John Assaraf, he is cofounder of OneCoach, the world’s fastest-growing provider of small-business coaching services. He lives in San Diego, California.

Related posts:

Hosted by uCoz