Who You are? What you are? - Part III

In our last post we discussed about how our core beliefs affect us. As I said, though two people can have the same core belief, the question is why one is progressing in his life and why one is a failure? Can you find an answer to this? Yes though the core beliefs can be the same, how they think about their core beliefs will decide their destiny. This is what is called as thinking errors. I may believe that I am failure. But in many instance I might think that, “Is the statement I am a failure is a fact or just mere words?” I can question this statement and test its validity. But many people blindly accept others opinion and further add their thinking to it.

Dad: You are a failure my son.

Elder Son: (Thinking ) Yes I am a utter failure. I can’t do things on my own. I don’t know what I am going to do in my life. My life is very dull.

Younger Son: (Thinking) Yeah it can be true that I am a failure. But I failed this time and it does not mean that I will fail every time. My dad is coming to conclusions with this one particular incident. But things will change and I will work hard to change this identity. I have to identify my talents and design my destiny.

In the above scenario, both had the same core belief, but how they thought about the core belief decides their life. So it is our thinking process that determines who we are. But many a times without our knowledge we have so many errors in our thinking. These are some of the thinking errors which we apply in our day to day.

Now that we have learnt about various thinking errors and how it affects us, we now see how to identify the thinking errors. First write down the list of some of the harmful thoughts you have.

Once you have identified various thinking errors that you have, think how these thinking errors are affecting you. As discussed in the previous post we feed our core belief by selective attention. We attend only to that information that fits our thinking error.

Apart from our selective attention, our behaviors also contribute to our thinking process. As discussed in the first post, the thought process is a vicious cycle interacting with the physical sensation, behavior and the emotions. 

Take this scenario:

A man is injured and was admitted in hospital for intensive treatment.  After a month he gets discharged from the hospital and returns home. He is so afraid of his future, and to cope he adopts certain behavior which further aggravates the problem. Let’s see how?

Initially he thought that because of his wound his life his going to become worse. He himself made his thinking come true, by behaving and thinking in faulty manner but blamed his wound. We can see from the above diagram that, actually it is not the wound that made his life worse but how he reacted to the problem and how he worsened the problem by having faulty thinking patterns.

In the next post, let’s see how to change these core belief and thinking patterns.