Is Your Belief True? - Grasshopper

What do you do when you find out what you believe isn’t true?

If you’re like most of us, you deny the evidence and keep on believing.

Let’s face it, there’s not a lot of evidence for most of our beliefs. And yet, that doesn’t seem to stop us from believing them.

The fact is, we believe most things without evidence.

Which makes the question I started with a little more interesting:

What do I do when I find out what I believe isn’t true?

I suspect our first response is usually anger and defensiveness. And those two reactions can stick around for quite a while . . . until we find another way to respond.

And, by the way, I don't think there are right answers to that question. There are responses that either move us forward, or reactions that keep us stuck.

That reminds me of a story . . .

Years ago, when I was in radio as a program director and consultant, part of my job was coaching on-air personalities.

From time to time, I’d run into someone who believed they were God’s gift to radio . . . who, quite honestly, had no gifts.

Coaching them up was always management’s first choice rather than firing them, so the coaching process would begin.

Ask any coach in any profession if they can coach someone who doesn’t think they need coaching, and you’ll hear some hair-curling stories about people who were filled with anger and defensiveness.

So, that brings me back to the question:

What facts are you not facing?

Because denying the facts doesn’t make them go away. It just keeps your belief in place . . . and your feet stuck to the floor.

Anger and defensiveness may be our initial reactions when we discover that something we believe isn’t true.

But they don’t have to be our response.

Sometimes facts hurt. Sometimes they make us angry.

The mistake we can make is directing that anger outward at the messenger instead of taking a closer look at the message.

Are you fighting with the evidence?

That usually ends in a knockout.

Maybe the trick is to get out of the ring when you come to your senses . . . and get curious.

Curious about what you can learn about you.

Curious about what you might have been missing.

And curious about what you can do . . .  now that you know what you believed . . . isn’t true.

All the best,