beliefs

Socrates on Self Confidence

March 18, 2009 by David

This is going to be a rather weird post. At the bottom is a 24 minute video, I guess 9 years old, about an accident Greek philosopher who died (after being forced to drink Hemlock – as in picture) in 399 BC.
deathofsocrates As the presenter Alain de Botton says, Socrates, despite his ugliness, is the only philosopher to have been given the honor of a fridge magnet!

The Socratic path to self confidence is to have confidence in our own beliefs and not be swayed by the opinions of others. He believed humans were like sheep, that we passively follow each other. We assume others, particularly those that lead us, know what they are talking about – we trust those in authority. [Read more…]

Start Challenging Your Beliefs

November 3, 2008 by David

Last weeks post looked into our beliefs and came up with the, unsurprising, suggestion that perhaps we should abandon our unhelpful, negative beliefs.

People confuse their beliefs with facts, and generally a belief is something we see as being true. Having been told all their life that they’re useless, a person with low self esteem may see this as a fact of life, rather than a belief they have learnt over the years.

Our mind is full of thoughts, that we are conscious of; our belief system is generally silent and we don’t notice it. But our thoughts arise from that belief system.

“Just because you’ve believed something for a long time doesn’t mean its right. It just means you’ve believed it for a long time!” Craig Harper.

Take Stock

Thats why its useful to take stock and separate out what you believe and why. For example, you may be a vegetarian because of a decision you made in your teens that eating meat was unhealthy and cruel to animals. Or it could be that you were brought up in a strict “meat is murder” household, where there was never any questioning of this as a fact. In both cases you would have an underlying belief that eating meat is wrong, but reached from different directions.

If we are out driving a car at night, we only see the bit of the world that our headlights pick up. Our whole awareness, what we take see, is determined by what our beliefs allow us to see:- [Read more…]

Do your Beliefs help your Brand?

October 26, 2008 by David

If you meet someone for the first time, one of the first questions you exchange is “What do you do?”. Our reply tends to focus on what we do for work, our occupation. We label, or “brand” ourselves as “a student”, “a nurse” or (dare I say it) “a plumber”.

There was a very interesting post recently on one of my favorite blogs The Positivity Blog. In describing 10 steps to be the brand you want in life, Mike King says:-

“Work is really just a portion of our lives since working for 40 hours a week and 50 weeks a year for up to 40 years (about 80,000 hours) is actually only about 11.4% of our entire lives (700,000 hours) if you expect to live to an age of 80 years old.

Even if you took 1/3 of your life away to account for sleeping, you still only work about 17% of your waking hours in a lifetime. Think about that for a minute. Is work really that important in the whole scheme of things if it is such a small portion of our lives from birth to death? I’d say not.”

After going through the 10 steps he feels we need to take to review and build the “brand” you want to be, Mike closes the post with another interesting statement:- [Read more…]