A curious titbit from the book Useful Delusions by Shankar Vedantam:

(all about how self-deception can weirdly improve our chances of success)

Researchers conducted brain imaging scans of volunteers and found something unexpected:

When volunteers tasted $10 wine from a $90 bottle, their medial orbitofrontal cortex lit up more than when they tasted the same wine from a $10 bottle.

This part of the brain is activated when people experience pleasure.

So people experienced more pleasure when drinking the $10 wine from the $90 bottle than when drinking the $10 wine from the $10 bottle.

They were not simply deducing that the expensive wine was better.  To them, it actually tasted better, even though the wine in the bottles was identical.

This passage reminded me of a famous Gandhi quote:

Your beliefs become your thoughts…

Your thoughts become your words…

Your words become your actions…

Your actions become your habits…

Your habits become your values…

And your values become your destiny.

A bit of a jump from $10 bottles of wine?

No doubt.  But the principle is the same.  

It’s not our actions which determine how our lives unfold, despite what productivity blogs, goal-setting tools and the Tony Robbins fanboys & fangirls might tell us.

Instead, it’s our beliefs. 

Our beliefs come before our actions, whether we realise it or not, and however much we might like to think they don’t.  

So depending on what sort of destiny you’re seeking, it really pays to question your beliefs.

To be open-minded about them…

Not too attached to them…

Maybe even suspicious about them.

The more flexible you can be with your beliefs, the more possibilities can open up.

So far so good.

But perhaps there’s a simpler way to think about beliefs.

What if you gathered up all your beliefs, filed them neatly into a paper binder and returned them to the Library of Kickass Beliefs alongside every other set of beliefs in the world?  Then, whenever you wanted to create something new, you searched the library’s index and withdrew the most useful set of beliefs to help you get the job done?

So if you wanted to get ahead in your career, you used the most helpful career beliefs you could find.

If you wanted to be less stressed, you used the most helpful stress beliefs you could find.

And so on.

This way you’re starting from a blank slate, rather than tackling the mental acrobatics of questioning an existing belief.

From where I stand, this seems like a much smoother approach.

Something to chew on perhaps.

In the meantime, there’s coaching.

The essence of my coaching is exploring how life really works.  

I'm increasingly realising that life operates in ways radically different to what I used to believe and what are generally accepted as common beliefs.  And when anyone starts to move closer to how life really works, a host of new possibilities can open up.

One way to experience this is through coaching.

If you'd like to find out more:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com

That’s all for today.

 - Tom