Why Discovering Your Core Beliefs Is Key to Personal Growth
If you can change your negative core beliefs, you can change your life.
Your beliefs are at the center of everything you’ve ever said or done your entire life. Often times we learn these beliefs as children or young adults, and they remain with us our entire adult lives. And they usually come back to haunt us.
Unless we addresss them and make an honest effort to change them, that is. We have to deal with it head on to make an improvement in our personal growth.
There isn’t a belief on this planet that cannot be transformed into a positive one.
Knowing what beliefs you hold dear is a big part of self-motivation. Keep reading to discover why your core beliefs are the key to your personal growth.
1. First You Must Understand Your Core Beliefs
We all have varying beliefs and values. And, because most of the time they’re instilled in us at such an early age, it can be hard to let go of them. Sometimes it can be difficult to even figure out what your beliefs actually are.
But make no mistake, these beliefs can shape your daily reality.
What Do Our Beliefs Affect During Our Day to Day Life?
- Decision making
- Your behavior
- Choices you make
- Your self-esteem
- Goals, dreams
- Your self-worth
- Our abilities
It’s safe to say that our beliefs have a lot to do with our daily lives, so when you’re able to alter the negative ones, and replace them with positive ones — it affects your entire being and your life as a whole.
The key is to understand what your beliefs and values are. Once you can distinguish what they are, for you personally, you can learn to deal with them and move on.
2. You Can Replace Them With Positive Beliefs
Once you’re aware of the negative beliefs that have held you captive your entire life, you open yourself up to replace those beliefs. Let the negative go, and make room for better things.
You can then rewrite your beliefs with positive beliefs and values that align with the life you’ve envisioned.
It’s like being reprogramed and erasing every thought, value, belief, decision, and choice you’ve ever made and will make in the future.
For example, if your entire life you’ve felt that you’re worthless, unworthy of love, or had low self-esteem, that’s a challenging belief to break. Not impossible, but strenuous if you put in the work. If this is how we grew up thinking about ourselves, chances are, it stems from our childhood.
Almost all of the negative core beliefs do stem from childhood. Once you’re accustomed to hearing you are nothing, or you’re stupid, or whatever the belief may be — it’s difficult to let that go as a young child. More times than not it stays with you indefinitely.
But the kicker is WE have the complete power to change these beliefs around. Our happiness, for example, has been proven to be a choice. We can choose to be miserable and live an unhappy existence, or we can pick ourselves up and choose to be happy and grateful for the life we have.
So How Can You Alter Your Core Beliefs?
- Take self-improvement courses
- Cognitive Behavior Therapy
- Self-improvement books
- Deal with one issue at once
- Find a different core belief
Some may underestimate the power of self-improvement and self-help books, but they’re actually a wonderful way to get to know yourself better and improve your life. This study indicates that self-help literature actually does help.
Another fantastic way is taking self-improvement courses to get to the root core of your beliefs that you want to change.
3. It Improves Your Self-Awareness
A key element to personal growth is learning self-awareness. Without self-awareness, you can forget about discovering your core beliefs and especially forget about improving them.
When you’re aware of your strengths, weaknesses, and emotions, you open yourself up to learning more about yourself, which will help in the process of discovering your beliefs and changing them.
Learning self-awareness is typically the first step in personal growth of any kind — so it stands to reason that it could assist in uncovering your core beliefs.
Once you uncover those beliefs — believe it or not, you’ve just taken the first step in self-awareness.
Not only will acquiring self-awareness assist in discovering your main beliefs and values, but you’ll learn who you are in the process.
4. It Allows You to Finally Be Free
To finally be free, emotionally, spiritually, and physically, you must unearth your true potential. To do that, you must go through quite a process.
But like with happiness — where we have a choice to be happy or not, we have a choice whether we stay stuck believing these dangerous core beliefs.
The wondrous thing about it is, we don’t have to stay stuck in these beliefs. Even if you grew up your entire life believing unhealthy thoughts about yourself, it is never too late to turn those around into something else positive.
And the moment you do, you will have true and utter freedom.
Take the Next Step
If learning how to establish your core beliefs is important to you, then your first step should always be learning self-awareness.
I’m not going to lie to you, when you embark on any personal growth journey, it’s not going to be a walk in the park. But like most things in life, if you put in the work, you’ll see results.
It may even be shocking when you finally see the kind of baggage you’ve been carrying around for all these years. But it is crucial to remember that it doesn’t make a difference how long you have been believing these beliefs, or if you have experience with personal growth or not — it’s never too late.
If you’re serious about personal growth, it’s time to take the next step.