You Can’t See Everything Straight Away
Willingness is what opens the door. Once you’re prepared to look honestly at yourself, the next question is a practical one. Where do you actually look?
Many people make the same mistake. They sit quietly and ask themselves, “What do I believe about myself?” The answer that comes back is usually the one they’ve always told themselves. It feels reasonable because it is already part of their conscious story.
Ask me back then what I believed about money and I’d have said I was careful with it. The belief actually running my life was that money disappears whatever you do, which is why I had credit card debt and nothing put by. The first answer was true enough. It just wasn’t the one making my decisions.
The beliefs that shape your reactions most powerfully are the hardest to see. They have been operating automatically for years, often since childhood, so they don’t feel like beliefs at all. They feel like reality. That doesn’t mean they can’t be found. It means you won’t find them by thinking harder.
What changes things is watching yourself instead. Rather than being completely absorbed in your experience, you begin to observe it. Instead of being the anger, the anxiety or the defensiveness, you start asking, “What’s happening here? Why did I react like that?”
Ken Wapnick, one of the most prolific teachers of A Course in Miracles, describes this as becoming the observer rather than the experiencer. The moment you step back and watch your thoughts instead of automatically believing them, you create a little space. In that space, understanding becomes possible.
Paying Attention
Not everything will become obvious immediately. Some beliefs are deeply rooted and reveal themselves only over time. But you may be surprised how much you begin to notice simply by paying attention. Patterns you’ve overlooked for years suddenly become visible once you stop rushing past them.
You don’t need to analyse yourself endlessly or become an expert in psychology. You simply need to become curious about your own experience.
There are four places where your underlying beliefs reliably reveal themselves. They are already part of your everyday life. You’ve just never thought of them as clues before.
Your Reactions
Your reactions are the easiest place to start, because life supplies the material without you having to do anything.
Most reactions are perfectly reasonable and tell you very little. Someone is rude and you feel annoyed. That’s just being human.
What’s worth noticing is when your reaction is bigger than the event. A passing comment that stays with you all day. An email you’ve read four times. A small piece of feedback you’re still arguing with in your head at bedtime. The size of your reaction tells you the size of the belief underneath it.
In an earlier article I wrote about a family member whose football team was teased by a rival fan. To me it was banter. To her it was an insult she couldn’t let go of. Nothing had happened to her, but something had happened to a belief she was living inside.
Here is the practical part. Don’t try to work it out while you’re still upset, because you’ll only build your case. Wait a day, then ask yourself one question. What did that seem to be saying about me?
Not what it said about them. What it said about you. If the answer is something like “that I don’t matter”, “that I’m getting it wrong again” or “that they can see through me”, you have just caught a belief in the act.
Your Patterns
One event tells you nothing about yourself. Ten of them tell you a great deal.
Beliefs are hard to see in a single situation and much easier to see across a run of them. So pick one area of your life. Work, money, friendships, relationships, your health.
Then write down how things ended, rather than how they began. Beginnings are all different. Endings tend to look remarkably similar.
Now ask yourself two questions. The people were different, and the circumstances were different, so what stayed the same? And what would have to be true about me for this to keep happening?
One word of warning. This is where self-criticism likes to turn up pretending to be insight. A pattern is information about a belief. It isn’t evidence that you’re foolish for not having noticed sooner. If the voice in your head has started telling you off, you’ve stopped looking.
Your Dreams
I dismissed the dream that was trying to tell me everything, and it cost me a year I could have used.
Carl Jung believed that dreams are one of the clearest ways our unconscious communicates with us, and that they are worth exploring rather than explaining away. But they aren’t predictions, and they aren’t literal. Read them that way, and you’ll get nowhere.
The practical approach is to record the feeling rather than the story. The images are only packaging. The feeling is the message.
In my dream I was hosting a party in my own home, and my friends and neighbours were looking at me with pity. The story doesn’t matter. The feeling was that I didn’t belong there and hadn’t earned my place, which was exactly how I felt about my house, my money and my life, and had never admitted to anybody, including myself.
So when you wake, before the details fade, write the feeling down in one sentence. Then ask where in your waking life you feel that same thing. The answer usually isn’t far away.
If you don’t remember your dreams, leave this one alone. The other three work perfectly well.
Your Choices
This is the most reliable of the four, because it is a matter of record.
What you believe about yourself shows up in what you have arranged. Not in what you say matters to you, but in what you actually chose, and even more in what you didn’t.
So look at what you’ve turned down. The course you looked into and didn’t book. The job you read twice and never applied for. The invitation you had a good reason to miss, and then the next one.
Every one of them had a reason at the time, and the reasons were probably sound. What matters is whether all the reasons are the same shape.
Then look at what you have put up with, because that tells you what you believed you were entitled to.
Your diary and your bank statement often know more about your beliefs than your journal does.
When Nothing Comes Clear
Sometimes you will look, and nothing will come. Sometimes you’ll be certain you’ve found something and realise a year later that you were wrong.
That is normal, and it isn’t a sign you’re doing it badly. Some beliefs don’t give way on first inspection. The looking is what starts them moving, and the moving is what eventually makes them visible. A good deal of this only becomes clear afterwards. You notice first and understand later.
Whatever you do, don’t force an answer. A conclusion you have pushed for is usually the same old story dressed up, and those are worse than no answer at all, because they feel like progress.
It’s more useful to know when you’re getting close. Watch for irritation with the question. Sudden tiredness. A strong urge to change the subject, tidy the kitchen, or decide that all this self-examination is a bit indulgent and there is proper work to be done.
Resistance isn’t a sign you have gone wrong. It is usually a sign you are standing next to something important.
The Day I Found It
My aha moment about money came on an ordinary day, and not because I sat down to look for it.
The dread I felt every time a bill came through the door had got too big to ignore. Cigarettes and food had always been how I pushed it down, and they had stopped working.
Then one day I wanted to take my son swimming, and I didn’t have enough money. Imagine being so poor you can’t afford the swimming baths. That crossed a line for me, and I started properly asking for answers.
And one day the answer arrived, fully formed. I remember it clearly. I was one of the poor people who watched the others. The people with good lives, with money to do the things they wanted, were over there. They were a club, and I wasn’t a member and never had been.
I had been living inside that sentence my whole adult life without ever once hearing it.
What surprised me was that finding it wasn’t devastating. It was a relief. You can’t put down something you can’t see, and the moment I could see it, it stopped being a fact about the world and went back to being what it always was. A conclusion drawn by a child in a house where money was frightening.
That week I decided to start where I was, and I set up a spreadsheet to manage my money. It stopped me overspending, but more importantly, it gave me the information I needed to aim for more. It was also the first thing I did from a different belief about myself, and that turned out to matter more than the spreadsheet.
Try This
Choose one of the four and use it for a week. Reactions are the easiest place to begin, because life will supply the material.
At the end of the week, ask yourself three questions.
- What pattern keeps repeating in my life?
- What belief might be creating that pattern?
- If I no longer believed it, what would I choose instead?
Don’t rush to answer. Stay curious rather than trying to be conclusive.
You may notice that the third question is a different sort of question from the other two. The first two are the work of the observer, which is what you have been practising. The third one belongs to somebody else.
Because looking, on its own, doesn’t change anything. I have known people who can describe their beliefs in great detail and have never once acted against one. Seeing is where change starts. It isn’t where it finishes.
In the next article, what happens when you stop watching and start choosing.
Articles in Self-Awareness
Self-Awareness: The Gateway to Your Higher Self
- Why You React the Way You Do
- How Beliefs Shape Your Experience
- The Only Thing You Have to Do Is Be Willing
- Turning From Experience To Observation
- From Observing to Choosing