Reply To: Exercise 9: Adopt a Challenging Belief
Exercise 9: Adopting a new challenging belief, by Evelyn Wallace
It turns out last week’s exercise actually qualifies as a challenging belief, so this week I tried to adopt a new less challenging belief. I’m going to go off script here because I have some things to say:
First, as I shared in my last reflection, I’ve had some profound experiences with behaviors-as-identity long before I enrolled in this class. I shared the example of simply deciding back in 2017 that I wasn’t a person who ate sugar in excess anymore, even if I had behaved in that way often throughout my life up until that point. Once I decided inside my own head that that wasn’t who I wanted to be, all I had to do was allow my behaviors to match. I just needed to give it time to enact the new belief. Josh said that he sees this as will-power, or simply believing the opposite of the old belief; I experienced it differently, but I also began to understand after last week’s session that this exercise is coming at beliefs in a different way. As soon as I recognized that these exercises are more about a transformation of an old belief (as opposed to the deeper dive of identity/ behavior), it was easier for me to see it through. I still maintain that I did the assignment correctly last week, even if I didn’t provide the clarity Josh was looking for in his 4-part question (old emotion/ old belief; new emotion/ new belief). Also! I updated my belief from last week about my ex. My new belief is that he is on his own journey doing the best he can, which makes me feel patient and compassionate.
This all got me thinking that I still have some work to do in recognizing my own “smaller” beliefs. For example, I sent a semi tongue-in-cheek email to Josh and Hayden about the community platform research we were each tasked with having completed by a certain date. I said something to the effect of “I’ll be as prepared as I can be, but you two have already done a lot more research than I have. Just do me the favor of offering a decent severance package when the time comes.” Hayden called me out (supportively!) right away. He encouraged me to use the following belief for the week’s assignment: “I believe that Josh and Hayden know more than I do about community platforms and therefore I’m going to get fired.” Something clicked when he said that. Oh! Maybe beliefs ARE everywhere. And maybe they can be contradictory and even temporary. I’m starting to get it, I think?
I’m not going to share the belief that I chose to address this week because it’s personal and embarrassing. Instead, I’ll share the process/ evolution with blanks. “I believe that competent adults don’t [do this thing,] but I [do this thing] so I am not a competent adult.” That starting point felt too challenging. Like, do I change my mind about what competent adults do/ don’t do? Do I change my mind about what I do/ don’t do? Isn’t that just doing the thing Josh told us not to do by negating/ “oppositing” the old belief?
So then I recognized the behavior pattern of when I [do this thing]. It tends to be at the same time of day/ under the same conditions. And because I don’t want to get in trouble for not answering the question, here is the 4-part belief/ emotion transformation.
• Old belief: I [do this thing] under [x conditions]
• Old emotions: this makes me feel like an incompetent and immature adult
• New belief: I can [do other things/ replacement behavior] under [x conditions]
• New emotions: this makes me feel like a more competent and mature adult
I got to practice nearly every day and it got easier. I also didn’t succeed every day. I did [the thing] once or twice. But I stopped myself sooner and practiced the replacement behavior. It feels like I’m on the right trajectory.
I would also like to share that there is a pinnacle challenging belief that I thought I was going to use for this “challenging belief” exercise, back before I knew that the belief about my ex qualified as challenging. The pinnacle challenging belief (and the associated behavior) have transformed organically in the last few weeks; it seems like just shining a light on the fact that I harbored conflicting beliefs which led me to behaviors I had conflicting opinions about, just that alone was enough to shift the belief and the behavior.
Okay I’m ending there. Josh: go easy on me if you believe I didn’t do any of this assignment properly, okay?