[This post is part of a series on “Mental models and beliefs: an exercise to identify yours.” If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.]

As you read posts in this series you may have read beliefs you liked and wanted to adopt but thought “I can’t believe that. It clashes with my current belief.”

You’ve certainly had things like that happen before. Maybe before giving a presentation you realized simply believing you were confident enough to give it confidently would help you give a fantastic presentation, but your lack of belief in yourself held you back.

Or you wanted to cold-call a potential sales lead but had never cold-called anyone and thought it would be rude. Others told you it was standard business practice,. you wished you could believe them but couldn’t, and you never got the sale.

All you needed was to believe and you’d do great. Or maybe you believed you should be humble and believed confidence clashed with humility. You believed you couldn’t change your beliefs.

Today’s belief suggests otherwise.

A model that makes changing beliefs easier: Beliefs are easy to change.

My clients have a hard time with today’s belief, but once they get it I know they’re nearly independent of me. Once you believe you can change your beliefs easily, you can voluntarily change how your beliefs filter your perception. That means you can change your mental models of your world — one of the major components of The Model and The Method.

Writing about beliefs about beliefs can get recursive and confusing, but getting today’s belief can unblock a major mental logjam. For one thing, once you believe it, it proves itself correct, especially if you didn’t believe it at first, so it reinforces itself. For another thing, if you have trouble believing it, if you just keep it in mind, eventually you’ll have your first experience willfully changing a belief and finding it easy. That experience will support this belief and you’ll start believing it.

In other words, having this belief in mind helps you adopt it when you first start intentionally changing other beliefs. Then you start believing it, which makes other beliefs easier to change, which reinforces the belief, continuing in a self-reinforcing pattern leading to having great flexibility about beliefs.

When I use this belief

I use this belief when I sense a belief is holding me back from improving my life.

I also use it when people ask my advice, but it’s harder to get others to believe it.

What this belief replaces

This belief replaces fixedness in beliefs with flexibility.

Where this belief leads

This belief leads to freedom in seeing the world how you want to and independence from beliefs others impose on you, including yourself in the past.

• ← A model to tolerate when people pre-judge me
• A model to make sense of complexity →