Delving even further into your mind

As regular readers know, we not only talk about tech stuff here: we also like personal development and time management topics. This post is one of those that fits into the personal development and self-understanding categories.

In a previous, related post, I talked about the importance of spending time to understand your beliefs. For example, if you procrastinate, you are not going to stop procrastinating until you figure out why you do it. The why will be related to a belief you have, or to several beliefs. Once you identify those beliefs, you can then work on modifying them so you can overcome procrastination.

Because I consider this to be such an important subject, I am going to share some personal beliefs that I recently realized, ones that have contributed to my addiction to cigarette smoking (a 35-year addiction).

Frankly, these beliefs embarrass me. I am not proud to share them with you, but we all learn from sharing, so I am willing to embarrass myself if it can help you.

As I dug deep into my beliefs, I discovered that one of my core beliefs is that:

• I am nothing but my brain, because I am small and unattractive.

This probably relates to my continuing to smoke because I believe that

• My brain is “not superior” if not charged by smoking (the effects of nicotine) and by getting caffeine (I drink a lot of coffee, too).
• Smart people are different than other people and do things different than other people … most people don’t smoke, so smoking makes me different, and “therefore” makes me smarter.

Am I just making excuses? Gosh, I hope not. I hope identifying these beliefs can help me overcome them. Now that I have written them down, I can see how stupid they are. Knowing that I have some stupid beliefs makes me want to change them. How do I change them? Well, I haven’t gotten there, yet. But, I can and I will.

Uncovering these beliefs took a lot of thinking and a lot of writing. I went through several pages of writing down a behavior I have, asking what belief likely leads to it, asking why I have that belief and what underlying belief causes it, and so on. Getting down to the beliefs that are buried in your subconscious takes effort. My estimation is that I still have several more beliefs to discover.

But, fundamental to all of this is that, even though I have had beliefs for years that I did not realize, they still impacted my behaviors, my actions. And, digging down to the core belief level, as I have begun to do, ties a lot of things together. For example, my core belief that I am nothing but my brain also contributes to my restlessness (I am always doing something from the time I get up to when I go to bed) and to some other behaviors, too.

As I noted above, I am embarrassed by some of my beliefs. You will likely discover you have a few you are not proud of, either. But, to discover them, you have to invest the time and you have to keep looking at your behaviors and asking why, and then why again, and so on.

Your thoughts on this (other than the obvious fact that I need to stop smoking)?