I Decided I Could Be a Member
Some years ago, I found the belief that had been running my money for most of my adult life. As discussed in my previous article, I had stored away a belief, caused by my poor upbringing, that I wasn’t in the “well-off” club. Other people had enough money and could treat themselves to nice things. I was just a bystander. I wasn’t a member of the “having enough club”.
Finding it was a relief rather than a blow. But finding it isn’t what changed anything. What changed things came a few days later, and it was a decision about what I believed. I decided I could be a member of the club.
To be honest, I did not feel particularly convincing. I didn’t wake up brimming with self-worth. I looked at the belief, recognised it as a conclusion drawn by a frightened child in a house where money was a worry, and decided I was no longer going to run my life on it.
Then I set up a spreadsheet. It sounds like a very ordinary response to all that, and it was exactly the right one, because the belief had been keeping me from looking. I didn’t open bills. Nor did I check balances. I spent money without ever wanting to know what was left. People who believe they can have a good life know what they have. So the spreadsheet was simply me finding out where I actually stood, and then having something to aim at.
What surprised me was how easy it was. I had tried to get on top of my money before and never lasted more than a fortnight. This time I didn’t have to make myself do it, because I was no longer doing it against a belief that said it wouldn’t make any difference.
That was my first real lesson in how change actually works.
Why Fake It Till You Make It Only Sometimes Works
Most of us try it the other way round. We change the behaviour and leave the belief exactly where it is.
Sometimes that’s enough. If the belief is a mild one, or you already half doubt it, then doing the thing supplies evidence and the belief quietly updates to fit. That is what fake it till you make it is really describing, and it works more often than the cynics allow.
It stops working when the belief is old, deep and unexamined. Then you are asking yourself to keep doing something that part of you still believes isn’t meant for you, and that is expensive. The belief doesn’t argue with you. It just waits. And the first time you’re tired or disappointed, or things get hard, it collects.
I know this because I did it that way once, at considerable cost.
When I set up my own business, I changed my behaviour completely. New hours, new risks, new everything. What I hadn’t changed was the belief underneath it, which was that I had something to prove. A new action running on an old belief. When the business began to struggle, I didn’t fight for it, because there was nothing underneath it worth fighting for.
So in practice it is usually both. Choosing the new belief is what makes the new behaviour sustainable. The new behaviour is what makes the belief credible. What you can’t do is leave the belief out of it altogether and hope that effort will carry you.
Awareness Is Not Enough
This is the uncomfortable part, and I’d rather say it than have you discover it on your own.
You can see a belief clearly. You can describe it, trace it back to the house you grew up in, explain it to a friend over coffee, and go on obeying it for years. I did exactly that. Understanding a belief and deciding about it are two different things, and only one of them changes anything.
Seeing is where change starts. It isn’t the change.
The reason is simple enough. Until something replaces it, the old belief is still the default, and defaults don’t need your permission. They run whether you’re paying attention or not.
Is This Belief Really True?
This is where the higher self comes back in, and this time not as the one who watches but as the one who asks.
The question it asks is not “what’s wrong with you”. It’s kinder and more useful than that. It asks: is this actually true?
Take the belief and write it down as a plain sentence, in your own words, the way you’d say it out loud. Then ask the question. What usually comes back isn’t “no”. It’s something more like: it was true then. That’s enough. The moment a belief goes from being a fact to being something that was once a reasonable conclusion, it has become a thing you can put down.
One word of caution here, because this is where people often go wrong. Don’t replace it with something you don’t believe. Telling yourself you are abundant while you’re staring at an overdraft just starts an argument in your head, and the old belief wins that argument, because it has the evidence.
Choose the smallest true thing instead. Not “I’m wealthy”, but “people who started where I did have managed this”. You can believe that one, and it’s enough to be going on with.
Choosing Is Smaller Than It Sounds
Nobody is asking you to become a different person by Friday.
Take one belief. Not the biggest one, and not the one with the most pain attached. Choose an ordinary one that turns up regularly, because you want plenty of chances to practise.
Then, the next time it makes a decision for you, notice it, and do the other thing once.
Send the email without softening it three times. Ask the price you actually want. Put your name down for the thing you were going to talk yourself out of. Say you can’t, when you’d normally say yes and resent it all week.
Once is enough to begin. You aren’t proving anything to anybody. You are gathering evidence for yourself, and a belief will not shift on argument alone. It shifts on evidence.
Why It Sticks
There is a reason the old belief feels so effortless and the new one feels like hard work, and it isn’t a character flaw.
Our brains keep changing throughout our lives. What we think and do repeatedly strengthens the pathways that carry it, and what goes unused gradually weakens. You have been practising the old belief for thirty or forty years. Of course it’s smooth. You have practised the new one four times.
Which means the first time you act from a new belief it feels like pretending. The tenth time it feels awkward. Somewhere after that it stops being a decision you have to make and becomes what you do.
That’s not positive thinking. It’s repetition, and it’s the least glamorous and most reliable part of all of this.
The Paradigm Answers Back
You should expect the old way of being to reassert itself.
It tends to happen when you’re tired, unwell, under pressure, or back among people who knew the old you and preferred them. The familiar thought arrives, sounding exactly like common sense, and for a moment it’s as though none of the work happened.
It doesn’t mean you were kidding yourself. The old pathway is still there, and it will be for a long time. Something in you knows the way home.
The test isn’t whether the belief comes back. It’s how long it takes you to notice that it has.
At first it might be a fortnight. Then a few days. Eventually you catch it in the moment, which is a strange feeling the first time it happens, because you can see the whole thing operating and still feel the pull of it. That is what progress actually looks like.
We Don’t Need Fixing
This matters more than any technique in these five articles.
When we realise our beliefs are not who we are, we realise we don’t need fixing. We just need to understand ourselves, and change the beliefs we adopted that aren’t working.
Nothing has been wrong with you. You were running on conclusions that made complete sense when you drew them, and some of them stopped being useful a long time ago, and nobody told you, because nobody knew. Not your parents, who were running on theirs, and not you.
Try This
Take one belief you found using the last article.
- Write it down as a sentence, in the words you’d actually use.
- Ask yourself: is this true now, or was it true then?
- What is the smallest true thing you could put in its place?
- What would you do differently this week if you believed that instead?
Then do that one thing. Not all of it. One thing.
Three articles ago you were the experiencer of your life, inside it and subject to it. Then you became the observer, watching it rather than being it. This is the last part. You become the one who chooses, which doesn’t mean choosing your circumstances, because a good deal of those were never yours to choose. It means choosing what you conclude about them, and living from that instead.
Mine is still playing out. I still catch the old belief making decisions for me, usually when I’m tired and off guard. The difference is that I know its name now, and a belief you can name is a belief you can put down.
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Self-Awareness: The Gateway to Your Higher Self