How Beliefs Are Formed and How They Create Your Reality

Beliefs are part of our lives, and knowing how they form gives us an edge in any conflict. Have you ever asked yourself why you believe what you believe? Why the same patterns of thought keep returning, or why you feel what you feel? If you have felt trapped in a reality you do not like, if you live in a constant inner struggle, or if you have been blocked by your own beliefs, this post is for you. Here we show how beliefs are formed and how they create your reality. You will learn to spot your own thought patterns and change them.

What are beliefs?

Beliefs are personal opinions and points of view about the different areas of life. They shape how we understand the world, and they are often unconscious. Think of Mondays are always awful, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, or people from that city are all the same. We repeat them without checking them.

Every cause has an effect

We can look at the world with a cause-and-effect model (also known as the law of consequence, retribution or compensation). We usually control the causes and know what effect they will have, at least after a run of experiences. Machines give the simplest examples: press the brake pedal (cause) and the car slows (effect). Ishikawa diagrams are ideal for analysing this kind of cause and effect when solving problems.

The world is obviously much more complex, and when we deal with people, especially those who create toxic relationships, we need a better model. It matters to understand beliefs and this psychological cause-and-effect model.

The model in three steps

The outer world. Our surroundings include the education that shapes how we think, the stimuli that colour how we feel, and the circumstances that make us act in different ways. Surroundings and values are the first causes of how we act in life.
The inner world. Here we find our values (which values do I have?), which give shape to how we think, feel and act. The effects are simple and keep producing new experiences: ideas that follow our way of thinking, feelings that reflect our moods, and the most coherent actions among the many we could choose.
The side effect: beliefs. Our beliefs about how the world is form as a result, probably for the better, but always from our own perspective. They build up over a lifetime and give us a personal way of seeing and understanding the world.

How to change our beliefs

It is human to generate beliefs that push us to act for no good reason; you often see it in people who think they are better than everyone else. For example, many teenagers start smoking young, not because they like it but because it makes them look grown-up. In their original cause-and-effect model, smoking means being more socially accepted, and they carry on for the rest of their lives even though they know it is bad for their health. Their belief has become strong and they no longer question it.

Another common belief is that effort and perseverance will let you reach your goals. Often external factors, and time itself, get in the way of what we planned. The pandemic taught many people that lesson. To change a belief, it is very important to know how it formed and to ask whether it still makes sense from where you stand today.

Beliefs change and feed back into the model

It is very important to reflect on all the beliefs we hold, because they predispose us to act. However well we know ourselves and however clearly we define what we want to change, our nervous system tends to behave in the usual way. We need to be aware of our beliefs and exercise the right muscles to get the new effects we want. Often we will need to reprogramme some outdated beliefs if we want to change behaviours we repeat out of inertia.

This model of belief formation is simplified so that the importance of beliefs is easier to see. From a more systemic, dynamic point of view, all thinking rests on emotional premises. In other words, emotional triggers run deeper and are harder to control than rational ones, though they do not always win. Whether thinking comes before feeling is a debate we leave aside. It is enough to say that how we think, feel and act cannot be separated and forms a whole, in a cause-and-effect scheme.

Fear of change and resistance to it, produced from within, are often the biggest obstacles to full happiness, and it is worth learning some coaching tools that help you manage them. Setting aside the physical fear that keeps us from jumping off cliffs (we are naturally afraid of falling, and better not to change that), our fears are usually based on beliefs that do not always have a real basis.

Learn to manage your beliefs

If you want to be happy, begin by understanding how your beliefs work and how they affect you. Only then can you change them and focus on what really matters: your happiness. In happiness management it is important to know how beliefs are formed and how they affect your daily moods. It also helps to know the types of beliefs. With that understanding, we can take concrete steps to improve our quality of life and reach lasting happiness.

If you want to go further, try the life purpose exercise and read why happiness is personal and cannot be reduced to a score.

Quick answers

Can I really change a belief?

Yes, but usually you do not delete it. You test it, find where it came from and decide whether it still serves you. New experiences then slowly build a different belief.

Where should I start?

Pick one belief that gets in your way and write down the cause-and-effect chain behind it: what happened, what you concluded, and what you now do because of it.