The Psychology of Beliefs: Why Change Is So Hard

Welcome. Today we're going to be talking about why change is so hard. And we're going to be really diving deep into the psychology of your beliefs. Because if we want to change, there's aspects of our beliefs that have to change and our thinking needs to change as well. Let's dive in. Just because you believe something does not make it true. Sorry, that's just the way that it goes. And when you look at people who have such strong beliefs out there in the world, they hate anything that comes to be the opposite of their belief or that challenges their beliefs in some sort of way. Let's talk about it real quick. So I've been really diving into beliefs a lot recently and thinking about them a lot recently. Basically, here's what a belief is. Is you think something for a long enough time that eventually you believe it to be true. So it could be religion, it could be politics, it could be something about yourself like you could believe, oh, I'm just a lazy person. And you might think that today, but if you think it today and tomorrow and the next day, and you think of it 2 times a day and 3 times a day and 10 times a day and 20 times a day, eventually you just build this belief of, I'm just a lazy person. No, that's bullshit. It's not true. Because if somebody had a gun to your head and said, hey, you have to get this done, you wouldn't be like, I'm just a lazy person. Right? So it's not true. It's just something that you've been thinking for so long that you actually believe that it's true. And so thoughts happen over and over and over consistently enough, and they become so consistent, happens so much that you believe them to be true. But just because. Just because you believe them to be true does not mean that they are facts. When we believe something long enough, we assume it to be fact. And so I'm gonna give you a bunch of examples today. I'm gonna give you examples of politics, I'm gonna be giving you examples of religion, of beliefs, even talking about your favorite sports teams as well. But one thing else, this is really just thinking about how our brains work. Here's the thing that you, you want to learn and know about the human brain is that humans don't like inconsistency. The reason why we don't like inconsistency is because we like to be able to predict the future for safety. And whenever we have inconsistency, it makes us feel like there might be a little bit Of a threat. And so we don't like it when somebody comes into our life and says something that they believe that challenges what we believe. And because the reason why is because our belief, quote, unquote, belief is not actual true, in fact. But we've been trying to pretend that it's true, in fact. And it causes our, quote, unquote solid ground that we feel like we're building our life on. It starts to make our solid ground feel like quicksand, which makes ourselves start to feel threatened. Our mind feels threatened, our body feels threatened. And when we come across an inconsistency, which means, like, we could have a belief and somebody could literally bring in a fact that is completely opposite, we always want to try to restore consistency in some sort of way, like as soon as possible. And so we usually try to do a couple different things. Number one is we usually try to rationalize our behaviors or our thoughts. We try to explain away why, explain why we are the way that we are or why we do what we do or why our beliefs are okay or why they are fact. We're basically, what we're trying to do is we're trying to re solidify the quicksand that we're building our life upon. Because you don't want to build an entire house on quicksand. You want to build it on solid ground. And when someone starts to really shift things up, then you start to feel like it's quicksand. And so we can rationalize like this happens sometimes where somebody will vote for a president and they become president, right? And then that president does something that's completely, utterly ridiculous, that is actually against the person who voted for them's beliefs. But they tried to rationalize it so that they can re solidify that. Oh, yeah, well, I voted for him. And they're a good person because of this. Or, you know, they're not the only president that does that. Or, you know, you know, that was. That thing in the news was wrong. You can see it happen all the time. So a lot of people try to rationalize their beliefs or another thing that we'll do is we'll trivialize whatever else is coming out, so. Or whatever it is, whatever it is that they did. Oh, yeah, he said that thing. It's not a big deal. It's not a big deal that he did that. Oh, that person that came up to me and said that thing that was completely opposite of my beliefs. They don't know what they're talking about. They try to trivialize either the thing that happened, or they try to trivialize the other belief or even the fact that could have come in against them. And so we feel like we have to have this resolve. We have to resolve it. And why do we. Then the question to me always goes back to why? Like, I always think, why? Why, why? Like, it's kind of a hard thing to exist in inside of my brain. But, like, I'll sit quietly drinking coffee, and I'm like, well, why is that person this way? Why do I believe this? Why is it this? Why do we act this way? And I always. I'm always like, everything. And the reason why we try to really resolve and make ourselves feel better is because we don't want inconsistency. It makes us mentally uncomfortable. But even more than mentally, sometimes it makes us physically uncomfortable. When you find something that is inconsistent with your beliefs, like when I say physically uncomfortable, your heart rate increases, you get to shortness of breath. Sometimes. Sometimes you can get. You can see people get, like, really fidgety when their beliefs are really started to be challenged. Because it's. It's mental. It's mental and physical discomfort is what it comes down to. And so, you know, sometimes heart rate, heart rate increases, we get shortness of breath, people can get fidgety. And we really feel like the reason why I want resolve is because we want to restore consistency, to feel better mentally and physically, to put our house back on solid ground. Because our beliefs are never solid ground. They're not. Almost every single belief that somebody has could be challenged. And there is another side of the coin, almost every single one of them. And we always want to know who we are and where we stand. That just tends to be the thing that a lot of humans have, is we want to know who we are. We want to know where we stand. Someone on one side says something to someone on the other side that is threatening to their beliefs. One person that's on one political side and the other one's on another political side, and one person says something to the other one, it's making quicksand. It's our house. It's threatening their beliefs. And so they must bring it down in some sort of way. That person can cause cognitive dissonance inside of them, making you start to believe or maybe see or understand something that opposes what you already believe. And, you know, when you look at like, the law of consistency, it's this law that we want things to stay consistent. We want our beliefs to feel consistent. We want our. Our image, our self image of ourself. To stay consistent like we have. Whether you realize or not, you have an image of yourself that you have built over your entire lifetime of who you think that you are. And we have this image that we want to uphold. We want to keep that image going. And we have this image of who we are in our heads. And we try to push away or fight anything that is against that. And, you know, that's. You'll see a lot of people that will get really angry to be above the thing that they just heard or the thought that they just had, or the thought that someone else just gave them. They wanna be above that thing, to stand more firm in where you are. And so we'll challenge it. We'll get pissed, whatever it is. There's lots of different things that people can do. So when you look at that and you really start to realize that your beliefs are not truth, right? It's not written into the fabric of the universe. You start to go, well, damn, do I want to continue to keep believing in this thing? Right? Because here's what we should do. We don't have to prove someone else wrong for us to feel better. We can have other people have other beliefs. You know, we can allow both of those realities to exist. You know, someone doesn't have to have the same beliefs as you. It's pretty crazy how much I see people trying to change other people's beliefs. It's like, just chill out. It's not really necessary. You can hold your beliefs if you want to hold your beliefs and you feel like that's what you want. But just because you have your beliefs and someone else has some other belief, doesn't mean you have to change theirs. You know, for example, what you believe and who you're. If we're. Let's take it political. Who you're voting for is right for you. Yeah, it's right for you. That's fine. What someone else believes and who they're voting for is right for them. Whether it's the same person or whether it's a different person. You cannot change someone else's mind. Most people, if you try to go and change someone else's mind, it actually makes them stronger in their beliefs. If you wanna try to change someone's mind, try it. You're gonna usually make their stance in what is they believe even stronger. And it comes down to like, you know, another thing that happens in politics, but also religions and all of this stuff is that is partisanship. As humans, we want to feel like we're a part of a group you know, we used to be in tribes, and so we want to have our own tribe. And that could be, like I said, it could be political, it could be religion, it could be watching a sports team. It's built into us to, to search for the tribe and to be part of a group and humans, we want to create an identity. That identity could be Democrat, it could be Republican, it could be Christian, it could be Buddhist, it could be Hindu, it could be any, you know, Jewish. It could be many different things, or it could be, you know, Tampa Bay Bucks, or it could be the Philadelphia Eagles. We're always trying to be a part of something and create an identity around those things as well. And this is, you know, why people like to fall into an political identity or religion identity or sports team identity is because they want to feel like they're part of the tribe. But in turn, what ends up happening is they will defend that group and they will defend that group against the other group. So whether that's a political group or that's a religion or whether that's a sports team, like I was at the super bowl was the last football game that I went to and saw a fight before the game even started, like a fist fight. The Eagles fans and the Chiefs fans got into a fist fight and like 10 people were removed and didn't even get to go and watch the beginning of the game. Like, they were kicked out immediately. And so that's what happens. People will defend their groups like, like attacking a neighboring tribe from attacking, you know, before they attack you. And this is where it really starts to kind of like become dangerous. Not necessarily. I mean, it could be physically dangerous, but it's just dangerous for ourselves is you really need self awareness. Like, you can believe a religion and you can be friends with somebody who believes something completely different as you, and you could still be friends with them. Like, you can believe in a political party and you can still have friends that are a completely different political party. You can believe and be a part of a sports team and you know, you know, have a friend who's a part of another sports team. Like, when did it become wrong to have opposing beliefs? When did it become wrong for someone else to believe something different than us? It's fucking crazy, isn't it? And so if you want some. If you want to believe something, do it. You can. And it really comes down to you can hear something in your head over and over and over again. Like, I'm even go back to. We could do all these different ones, but we can even Go back to just who we think we are and the beliefs that we have in ourself and you know, we can hear something in our head and a story and a narrative of like who we think that we are. And we can believe, we can hear it over and over and over and over and over again. And we can say it to ourselves over and over and over again. We start to actually believe that it's true. This is why affirmations and the way you talk to yourself is actually works. It's not just like some woo woo stuff is because you actually start to believe that it's true because you hear it over and over and over again. The problem is a lot of us have a narrative in our heads that we don't really want. We have a story that's been going on our heads for years that we don't want anymore. Then we believe it to be true about ourselves. Like going back to the example I gave earlier about being lazy. It's not that you're lazy. You know, you can change it and you could change it very quickly, but if you just been thinking that for a really long time, you believe it to be true. And so you really start to, you really, what you need to do is start figuring out where you want to be is. And you can be on one side and other people can be on other sides. When you look at like the battling between people in certain religions or the people that are certain sports teams or people in certain political groups, it's really just like modern day tribalism. You know, tribalism is hardwired into our brains. You know, and even if you go back to like, I always try to test the validity of my thoughts. I always challenge myself. It's whenever I have a belief or I have a thought or I have something that I feel, I always try to play the other side of the coin. And so like, you know, I was watching basketball not too long ago and I'm a Miami Heat fan and there was a really bad foul and it was a blatant foul. And I noticed myself want to rationalize the foul that my team had created on the other team and I noticed that in myself and I was like, hold on, shut up. This, that was clearly a blatant foul. But you know, if it's our team, sometimes we'll justify the. Oh well, yeah, the other team did that as well and they haven't been calling it stompy deal or justify why it wasn't that bad. Oh, it wasn't that big of a deal. Or you Know the other team, they did, they did that just a little while ago. So it's fine for us to do it or, you know, oh man, the refs have been bad all game. It's literally hard to admit that your team was in the wrong. And so we have to be able to start testing our thoughts. And we must, you know, we try to justify what our team did to have the feelings of resolve. Humans don't want to feel like they're in the wrong. And, you know, when you look at these cases, everything I'm starting to say to you guys, people are more likely to agree with their group than actually see the world as it is accurately. So we're more likely to believe in our political beliefs more than see the world accurate. We're more likely to believe in our religious beliefs than actually see the world accurately. We're actually more likely to believe our sports teams than see the world accurately. And it's because we want to stay in that identity because. And we then we tend to reject any evidence that's inconsistent with that. And it comes down to, you know, a psychological term called psychological or, sorry, it's called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is literally like having a filter on your brain that only allows you to see what you agree with or that what you want to be true. It happens all the time. It's about looking for evidence for what you want to believe and ignoring or trying to ignore everything that's against it and only see the evidence that that shows our side of the table is correct. You know, whenever we hear, we ever, wherever we see or we hear a story, we look through the lens of our own beliefs. Everybody's seeing the same world, but everyone's seeing something different, you know, and I want you to really start to understand that. And, and then it makes it really hard. Just complete side note for the, the social media, whatever you engage with, whoever you follow on social media, you're gonna get more of that stuff, whatever it might be, whatever is going on, whatever you're following, whoever yours that you're engaging with their stuff, liking their posts. And it creates these echo chambers, these political echo chambers, these team echo chambers, religious echo chambers, and you know, they're gonna give you more of what they know that you're going to engage with. Then if you watch news stations, you're gonna get more of that. The algorithms are gonna show you more of what you're, you're gonna want to enjoy. And so really what it comes down to is there's a part of our brain, you know, the Animal part of our brain is worried about survival, and it links to a survival group. And so we only see through that lens of our own beliefs. And we find reasons why, you know, our side is right and other sides are wrong. And we look for evidence that supports our beliefs that we, you know, we look for evidence out in the external world that supports the belief that we already have versus looking at the evidence from the other side that might make us feel wrong. And so when you look at this, and the reason why I'm really going into the psychology of beliefs is because I want to challenge you to test the validity of your thoughts. When you look at cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the things that cognitive behavioral therapists are trained to teach people is to test the validity of their thoughts, test the validity of their beliefs. I want you to challenge what you're thinking. I want you to challenge, like, if you want to be free, you got to start challenging your beliefs. It's not easy to do, but you've gotta go. Imagine that you're, you know, you have your beliefs and your beliefs is one side of the debate. And you're in a debate, right? You're arguing for this side. Is there a chance that you could take yourself out of that and argue for the other side and start to really realize that you are on quicksand? You have built a belief system based on a house of cards. And it's fine for us to believe what we wanna believe. I don't care, care what people believe, to be honest with you. But sometimes our beliefs become a prison that we are stuck in, and we should just start to test them a little bit more. Don't believe your beliefs for a little bit and just see what happens. Try to believe the opposite of what you believe or think the opposite of what you believe for just a few minutes. Give yourself an hour and just see what happens. See if you can test the validity of it becomes really freeing to realize that the thoughts that we have and the things that we believe are not 100% fact. And so what do I want you to do with today's episode? Start to identify your beliefs. Start to identify what you have going on and what's going on in your head and what you think about yourself, what you think about other people. Once you think about different religions and politics and sports teams and all of that stuff, and just test the validity of it and see if it is 100% valid. And if it's not, that means that it's a belief that's inside of your head but doesn't exist in reality. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and Tag me Robdial Jr R O B D I A L J R and if you're out there and you want 2024 to be the best year of your life, check out my level up 30, which is a 30 day challenge happening in January where I'm going to be coaching you every single weekday throughout January. I'm going to be live with you guys. You're going to be in a group of people who are all going through the exact same challenge. We're going to be challenging ourselves every single day to grow. We're going to have six different pillars that have to be hit every single day for the month of January and we're going to be working together on it. So, you know, nothing's going to change your life unless you change. And this is designed to have massive breakthroughs in your life. So if you want to learn more about it, go to levelup30levelup30.com and there's a video that explains everything. If it's right for you, just join us and I'd love to see you every single day through the month of January. And with that, I'm leaving the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.