“You will create your entire life around what you believe.” –– Me

Simple Truth #5: Examine Your Beliefs

First, let me set the stage with a little story.

The Christmas Ham — a story of tradition and beliefs

It was Christmas, and a girl and her friend were with the girl’s family preparing the Christmas feast. As she always did, the girl cut off the ends of the Christmas ham and placed it in the pan for cooking.

“Why do you cut the ends off the ham?” her friend asked, curiously.

“I don’t know. That’s the way my mother did it and the way my grandmother did it,” the girl replied.

“Grandma, why do we cut the ends off the ham?” the girl asked as she turned to her grandmother.

Grandma grinned and replied simply, “Honey, it just didn’t fit in my pan.”

Why this story? Because I believe this is exactly how many of us approach life. We just keep doing things the way they’ve always been done.

They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery. I say maybe, maybe not.

We grow up watching how others do things in life, and we become little copy cats. We mimic them innocently and with blind trust. And we are right where we need to be as we begin to learn about who we are and what we believe about ourselves, about life and about the people around us.

Here’s the catch. We tend to simply go along with these beliefs, our programming, about life and accept that this is how things are “supposed” to be done and how life is “supposed” to go. It never occurs to us to question the way things are done or why, and even if we wonder, for some reason, we still don’t ask. We just go with it.

We all have things we believe about ourselves, others and life in general. Often, our beliefs limit what we do with our lives. They tell us we “can’t”, “shouldn’t”, or “aren’t worthy” of this, that or the other.

These limiting beliefs come from our own personal interpretations of past experiences, whether our own or things we’ve watched others go through. And very often, these limiting beliefs are just plain old lies that may have been relevant to somebody else somewhere along the way but have no significance or truth in our own lives whatsoever!

Make sure you know what you believe, where it comes from and if it’s valid in your life today. Just by examining your beliefs, you will have taken one huge step toward getting real and staying real.

Do your beliefs support you or hold you back? Do you even know what you believe when it comes to who you are, who you can become, and how your life is supposed to go? If you don’t, you’re going to want to find out, because like I said before:

You will create your entire life around what you believe.
Do you like what you are creating?

I’d love to hear your thoughts so please remember to leave a comment below!!

Note to readers: The beliefs I am speaking of here may be influenced by religious or spiritual beliefs, but the point of this post is to focus more on personal limiting beliefs about ourselves, others and the world. My purpose was to open your eyes to limiting beliefs and the idea that they are often false and invalid and can prevent us from living as our truest selves.