A former president of France, Charles De Gaulle, once said, “Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.”
Beliefs guide us to conclusions, and therefore they teach us how to feel and what to do. However, Tony Robbins believes that there are different levels of beliefs that have different levels of impact on the quality of our lives. Some are very specific. For example, the beliefs you have about a particular friend will determine how you think and feel about his behavior, and the meaning that you will link to anything that he does. If you “know” that he is loving, then even if he appears to be angry at the moment, you will not question his ultimate intent. This belief will guide all of your interactions with this person. But this will not necessarily affect the way you deal with a stranger. These beliefs impact you in only one specific area of your life: your interactions with this friend.
Some beliefs, however, have an expanded influence on your life; Robbins calls these global beliefs. These are the beliefs that have much further-reaching consequences. For example, the beliefs you have about people in general will affect not just the way you deal with your friend, but with everyone you meet. These beliefs will powerfully impact your career, your level of trust, your marriage, and so forth.
The global beliefs you have about the concepts of scarcity and abundance, for example, will determine your stress level and your generosity of time, money, energy, and spirit. If you believe we live in a world with scarce resources—where there is only so much money, so much time, so much love—then you will constantly live in fear that you will not have enough. This stress will affect the way you think of your neighbors, your co-workers, your financial capabilities, and opportunities in general.
More powerful than any of these, though, is the core belief that is the ultimate filter to all of our perceptions. This belief directly controls the consistency of your life’s decisions. These are the beliefs you have about your identity.
What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are. In fact, if you have ever found yourself unable to even consider doing something, where your response to someone is, “I could never do that” or “I am just not that kind of person,” then you have run up against the barriers of a limited identity. This is not always bad, of course. Not perceiving yourself as a murderer is a very important distinction! Not perceiving yourself as someone who would take advantage of others is probably very useful. It is important to realize that we define ourselves not only by who we are, but by who we are not.
What exactly is identity? It is simply the beliefs that we use to define our own individuality, what makes us unique—good, bad, or indifferent—from other individuals. And our sense of certainty about who we are creates the boundaries and limits within which we live.
“Your capability is constant, but how much of it you use depends upon the identity you have for yourself.”For example, if you feel certain that you are an outgoing, outrageous person, you will tap the resources of behavior that match your identity. Whether you see yourself as a “wimp” or a “wild man,” a “winner” or a “pushover,” will instantly shape which capabilities you access. The book “Pygmalion in the Classroom,” details the dramatic change in students’ performance when they become convinced that they are gifted.
Time and again, researchers have shown that students’ capabilities are powerfully impacted by the identities they develop for themselves as the result of teachers’ belief in their level of intelligence. In one study, a group of teachers were told that certain students in their classes were truly gifted and to make sure that they challenged them to continue to expand. As can be expected, these children became the top achievers in their class. What makes this study significant is that these students had not actually demonstrated higher levels of intelligence—and, in fact, some had previously been labeled poor students. Yet it was their sense of certainty that they were superior (which had been instilled by a teacher’s false belief) that triggered their success.
The impact of this principle is not limited to students. The kind of person other people perceive you to be controls their responses to you. Often this has nothing to do with your true character. For example, if a person sees you as a crook, even if you are an honest person and do good things, this person will search for the sinister motive behind your acts. What is worse is that, after making a positive change, we often allow others in our environment who have not changed their image of us to anchor our own emotions and beliefs back into our old behaviors and identities. We all need to remember that we have tremendous power to influence the identities of those we care about most.
This is the power that most of us educators command when we influence our students to believe that they are the masters of their destinies, that they are as talented as any human being who has walked on earth. We all will act consistently with our views of who we truly are, whether that view is accurate or not.
The reason is that one of the strongest forces in the human organism is the need for consistency. Throughout our lives, we have been socialized to link massive pain to inconsistency and pleasure to being consistent. Think about it. We label people who say one thing and then do another, who claim to be one way and then behave another hypocritical and fickle. As a result, whenever we take a stand—especially a public stand—and state what we believe, who we are, or what we are about, we experience intense pressure to remain consistent with that stand, regardless of what that inflexibility may cost us in the future.
Conversely, there are tremendous rewards for remaining consistent with our stated identities. Thus, the need to remain consistent becomes irrevocably tied to your ability to avoid pain and gain pleasure. The Pygmalion effect also works in reverse. If you feel certain that you are “learning-disabled,” it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is quite different from believing that your current strategy for learning is ineffective. The ability to change one’s strategy is perceived by most of us to be a simple and achievable task, as long as we have the right teacher. However, changing ourselves—changing the essence of who we are—is perceived by most to be next to impossible. The common response, “I’m just this way,” is a phrase that murders dreams, Robbins decries. “It carries with it the sentence of an unchangeable and permanent problem.”
A person who believes they have developed a drug addiction can clearly change. It will be difficult, but a change can be made, and it can last. Conversely, a person who believes himself to be a drug addict will usually return to the use of drugs even after weeks or months of abstinence. Why? It is because he believes that this is who he is. He does not have a drug addiction; he is a drug addict. Once a person has a conviction about anything, he will ignore and even defend against any evidence that is contrary to his belief. Unconsciously, this person will not believe that he can change long-term, and this will control his behavior. However, when this person develops the conviction that he is absolutely clean, that he is now a new person or “born again” or a leader or anything else other than a “drug-addict” that is when his behavior changes. “As we develop new beliefs about who we are, our behavior will change to support the new identity.”
