A belief is thought or a collection of thoughts that determines a person’s perceptions of the world and so influences, and even dictates, the choices that person makes, the relationships he/she has, the creations he/she manifests, the behaviours he/she demonstrates and ultimately the life that person lives…
Your Beliefs Are Your Filters Of Perception
As we go through our day-to-day activities, our senses are bombarded with billions of “bits” of information every minute. As a Sportsman or woman, we rely heavily on our all of our senses in order to react quickly to the rapidly changing environment around us.
Our brain and nervous system are designed to filter huge amounts of this information from our conscious awareness so that we are not overloaded and can order the world, making sense of it. On the field, we cannot be distracted by the spectators, judges and screams around us. We have to learn to filter out everything except what is happening on the field or in the ring.
Most of the information that bypasses our conscious mind is either lost to us or is stored in our subconscious mind. It’s for this reason that many scientists, especially psychologists and consciousness researchers, say that our subconscious mind is our primary mind and that most of who we are and how we act is influenced by the content of it.
How does this filtering process work?
Think of a time when you were looking for a book on a crowded bookshelf. You couldn’t find the title you were looking for. You checked again, and then again—but still no book. So you walked away or checked another bookcase elsewhere.
Later you came back to the first bookcase, and lo and behold the book you were looking for popped out at you. It was there all along. You just couldn’t see it. Your mind deleted it from your awareness.
There are many reasons why this might have happened, from you being distracted thinking about something else to just being lazy and giving the bookshelf a cursory glance a couple of times. This kind of filtering happens all the time.
Our daily lives are subject to the same kind of filtering processes. We screen our experiences according to our beliefs, focusing on what our beliefs tell us is important and ignoring or glossing over the rest.
It’s a stereotype, even a cliché, that women are bad drivers. Yet if you believed that was true, you would see many more erratic woman drivers than I would. According to your expectation of seeing them, you would see more mostly because you would be less tolerant of how women drive and, more important, because you would have a tendency to screen out seeing all of the skilled women drivers. We tend to filter the world for information that supports our belief system; conversely, we filter out that which contradicts it.
The world shows itself to us largely as we perceive it to be, so your world is a very different world from mine, according to our belief filtering systems.
A very common belief that plays a huge impact on your sports performance is the belief that you are not good enough. Self-doubt and lack of confidence are limiting emotions that will hold you back from conquering those goals that you have set out for yourself. Often external influences such as the people around you, a coach or the crowd can drop comments that get stuck in your subconscious mind, take root there and hinder all progress and growth and start changing the way you perceive yourself & the world around you.
The media around us, the people we associate with and this new generation of social media “influencers” can bombard you with information that one doesn’t realise gets stored in their subconscious mind. Without realising it, these small pieces of information can become huge blocks in your subconscious mind, preventing you from progressing towards your goals. One can sign up for a number of fitness programs from the world’s best coaches, train rigorously and do everything right externally, but if internally, or their subconscious mind is not on the same page and is working against you, the programs and training will never work as well as they could.
This just goes to show that changing and updating your Subconscious Belief Systems is the Most Powerful thing you can do to in order to fully reach Peak Performance.
Let me show you how to do this in the Masterclass to Optimise Your Mindset!
Recent Comments