We are what we believe

If you believe you are no good at meeting people, then he result is that your belief that you are no good at meeting people is reinforced. What happens is we behave in a way that meets up with our beliefs, and prove to ourselves we were right to have that belief in the first place.

If for example you believe that people will react unfavourably towards you, then you will give off unconscious signals to this effect and the response you will get will reaffirm this.

If you believe you are bad at sports, cooking, driving, writing letters (I met someone who thought because he “couldn’t write a letter the right way first time, he was useless at writing letters” (it’s always useful to check your letters for errors, typos, wrong information and perhaps leave it overnight)), you will look for examples to confirm this and dismiss any examples that prove the contrary.

Some people’s beliefs are so strong and become such a habit that other people get carried along with this. I once had a lodger who believed other people always acted unfairly towards her, and shouted at her and then ended up in a situation where I started to behave like this and shouted at her! All over a plastic bag.

Our brains recode every single event of our lives; this has been well documented since the 1950s. This includes verbal messages we hear around us even when we are not actively paying attention and they go straight to the unconscious mind. The same applies to those things we constantly repeat to ourselves – “You stupid fool”, “I know I’ll mess it up.”

Messages are given to us (and we give them to others - our children, our work colleagues, our partners) as a form of hypnosis, and if we or they hear them often enough they become true.

Eeek!

So when I was on my own and believed that guys weren’t interested in me, because I was independent (and I still am) and could look after myself perfectly well, I didn’t need a man, certainly not one who wanted to sponge off me and laze around all day watching TV, smoking cigarettes, was work-shy, no good at odd jobs, didn’t have his own car, didn’t like my friends, was jealous of the fact that I have friends (in some very odd places) – a man once asked me if I had any normal friends? I had to check out his criteria for normal – it was they liked a drink, well lots of drinks, they liked to get off their faces on drink and smoke a lot and be generally miserable and have “real jobs” (I have a friend who is a crane driver, but many of them are musicians (one of them is a carpenter as well), trainers, lawyers, a professor, store detective (not sure what was “real” according to that particular man).

Well guess what I got in my life? Ah yes and there’s another one, I didn’t want a man who was married, or in any kind of relationship (I value exclusivity). I got exactly what I was concentrating on, most of the time (well not always exactly, but fulfilling most of the above things I was thinking I didn’t want), because they were the things I actually concentrated on.