3 minute read Download PDF

Starting a new project is a lot easier when you feel confident, right?   So how do you summon confidence and dispel the doubts that are holding you back? 

A simple psychological hack you can use is to remove toxic beliefs that steal your confidence and replace them with ones that boost your confidence.   

We all have beliefs, whether we are conscious about them or not.  Beliefs are thoughts we have about ourselves or how the world works that we assume to be true.  And the more you have that thought, the more it becomes true for you. 

Beliefs can be helpful or harmful.  So, what you believe makes a big impact on how you feel and your confidence.

You are your beliefs

What do you believe about yourself?  Do you believe you are capable, adaptable and valuable?  Or are you unfortunate, undeserving and unlucky? 

And what do you believe about the outside world?  Is it all hard and everyone is out to trap you or is there support and opportunities available if you look to help you live your best life?

We are born with no beliefs.  As kids we believe anything is possible.  There are no limits at all.  Our experience as we grow develops into beliefs that we use to navigate the world.  Our mind uses them to provide shortcuts to help protect and direct us to live and survive. 

Research studies have found around 80% of our core beliefs are formed by the age of eight.   These early beliefs can be so integrated in our thinking that they stay with us for the rest of our lives, unless we consciously expose and replace them.

Beliefs that direct us to do things or avoid things that aren’t in our self-interest are toxic beliefs. And often we don’t know these beliefs are driving us to take the actions we do.

You’ve probably come across people who blame the world or others for all their problems.  That’s a toxic victim belief that external circumstances have complete control over them and they are powerless to do anything to change it.  It leads to a sense of helplessness and lack of accountability.  This type of belief is usually formed as a coping mechanism to trauma as a young person.  It’s a defense mechanism to process and rationalise what happened to them at the time.

The good news is, when you examine a belief and expose it as not true, your mind becomes open to replacing it with something you now believe to be true instead.

“Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as soon as you change your beliefs.” said Maxwell Maltz, author of Psycho Cybernetic.  In his book he shows how you can program your mind in the same way that you’d program a machine to achieve the results that you want. 

From an investing point of view, beliefs or assumptions are regularly identified and tested to arrive at decision to purchase an asset. Where an investment assumption is tested and evidence proves it wrong, changes are made to the model that increases confidence in decisions to be made. In their book Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction authors Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner are forthright in their views that “beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be protected.”

If challenging beliefs and assumptions and removing ones that aren’t true provides greater confidence to make investment decisions, the same logic can apply to our own beliefs.

Author Byron Katie has four questions that help expose and examine a toxic belief and then use a turnaround statement to replace it with a new more constructive and self-serving one.

Four questions to examine a toxic belief:

1.     Is it true?

2.    Can you absolutely know it’s true?

3.    How do you react when you believe that thought?

4.    Who would you be without the thought?

Turnaround statement: Replace the toxic belief with the opposite of the original belief. 

Example

An example of a toxic belief for someone with a lack of confidence to work on projects might go like this:

Belief: “I might fail working on this project and that will be really bad." (Fear of Failure)

1. Is it true? – I believe it is but I guess I can’t be sure.  There was one time that I failed and felt awful.

2. Can you absolutely know it’s true?  I can’t know for sure that I will fail and if it will be bad for me if I do.  I now know that the most successful people have had many failures on their path to success.

3. How do you react when you believe that thought?  I feel scared and it stops me from doing things I want to because I fear I might fail.

4. Who would you be without the thought?   My career and development would accelerate if I tried new things and gained more experience.

Turnaround statement (new belief):  "Even if I fail, I will learn more trying than I will from doing nothing."

If you find your confidence could do with a boost when you start working on projects, take some time to examine the beliefs you have that may be working against you.  Use Byron Katie’s four questions to help you do this and if you find a toxic belief, replace it with one that will serve you better.

Here are the five most common toxic beliefs I’ve come across when coaching people to improve their project execution skills and replacement statements we’ve used to overcome them.

If you’d like help to improve your project execution skills, check out our coaching programs that aim to give you four years development in just four months.