How Changing Your Beliefs Can Change Your Life

Learning what I’m about to share with you changed the course of my entire life, career, and future. At first, questioning and challenging your beliefs can be a little deflating, and the ego will probably take a hit or two. But eventually, it can provide you with a level of freedom and agency you may never have experienced before.

The reason is simple: while we don’t have complete control over what happens in our lives, we have far more influence over how we interpret, respond to, and move through life than we sometimes realize.

And much of that begins with what we believe.

Is that not one of the quintessential human questions: how much of our fate is within our control?

Are We in Control?

The bad news is that nothing is completely within our control, no matter how arrogantly we might like to think it is.

Life happens. Other people make choices. Circumstances change. Things we never planned for arrive at our door. Sometimes wonderful things happen that we did nothing to earn, and sometimes painful things happen that we did nothing to deserve.

But within all of that uncertainty, we still have agency.

We can influence the direction of our lives through the choices we make, the meaning we give to our experiences, the environments we put ourselves in, the actions we take, and the beliefs from which those actions emerge.

That itself is a core belief, and one of the most powerful of all.

Do you believe you have some responsibility for the direction of your life, or do you believe life simply happens to you?

I don’t think the answer is as binary as I once did. We are neither completely in control nor completely powerless.

But I do believe that the more responsibility we take for what is within our control, the more agency we have over the lives we build.

In very plain and simple English, the beliefs we hold profoundly influence our experience of life.

They don’t magically determine everything that happens to us. But they influence what we notice, how we interpret events, what we believe is possible, which decisions we make, how we behave, and whether we persist when things become difficult.

Change enough of those things, consistently enough, and the direction of your life can change dramatically.

And the bloody fantastic news?

Beliefs can change.

Do We Choose Our Beliefs?

The challenge is that most of our beliefs were not originally chosen out of our own free will.

They were handed to us by our parents, our communities, our culture, our experiences, and the people we spent the most time with.

I know that might sound like I’m saying you have no original beliefs, and naturally nobody particularly likes that idea.

What I’m saying is slightly different.

Many of the beliefs we now consciously identify as “mine” began forming long before we were capable of consciously examining them.

This becomes particularly interesting when you start thinking about what it means to be a man.

As men, we inherit an enormous number of beliefs about what being a man is supposed to mean long before we’re old enough to question them. What success looks like. How much money we should make. How we should relate to women. Whether showing emotion is strength or weakness. What sex means. What our value comes from. What responsibility means. Even what kind of life we’re supposed to want.

Some of those beliefs may serve us extremely well.

Others may quietly run our lives for decades without ever being questioned.

Now, that’s not to say every belief you hold is a belief your parents held. Many people arrive at completely different beliefs from their parents, friends, or communities.

But ask yourself: what influenced that change?

Was it something you experienced? Something you read? Someone you met? A relationship? A failure? A conversation? An idea you encountered?

Even when we develop beliefs that are different from the people around us, they rarely appear from nowhere.

I don’t find that depressing anymore. I find it incredibly freeing.

Because if beliefs can be learned, examined and updated, then we aren’t necessarily condemned to spend our entire lives operating according to the beliefs we inherited.

And to me, that is a fundamental part of freedom.

You aren’t fully free if you’re unconsciously living according to beliefs you never chose.

Choose Your Influences Carefully

Once you understand how beliefs develop, your environment becomes much more important.

The people you surround yourself with matter. The books you read matter. The conversations you repeatedly have matter. The content you consume matters. The people whose lives you admire matter.

Spend enough time around people who see the world in a radically different way and, whether you realize it or not, some of their thinking will begin challenging your own.

This doesn’t mean blindly adopting someone else’s worldview.

The goal isn’t replacing one form of conditioning with another.

It’s becoming conscious enough to examine what you’re absorbing and decide whether you actually agree with it.

Core Beliefs

My focus here isn’t really political beliefs or opinions about individual issues.

I’m talking about core beliefs: the deeper assumptions we hold about ourselves, other people, and the way life works.

These beliefs often sit quietly underneath our behaviour.

Take money.

Do you believe money is evil? Do you believe wealthy people are inherently greedy? Do you believe money creates freedom? Do you believe you’re capable of creating wealth? Do you believe financial security is extremely difficult to attain?

Those beliefs don’t determine how much money appears in your bank account. But they can profoundly influence how you earn, spend, save, invest, negotiate, take risks, and respond to financial opportunities.

The same applies to relationships.

A man who believes his value is largely determined by female attention will behave very differently from a man who believes his value comes from living according to his own values.

The same applies to masculinity.

A man who believes strength means never appearing vulnerable will build very different friendships and relationships from a man who believes strength can include emotional honesty.

And the same applies to life itself.

One belief I used to hold was something along the lines of:

Life is all about struggle and challenges. Nothing comes easily. You have to battle your way through everything.

And unsurprisingly, I approached almost everything as a battle.

Today, my beliefs around struggle are different.

Difficult things still happen. Life still challenges me. I still experience periods where absolutely nothing seems to go according to plan.

The difference is that I no longer automatically interpret difficulty as evidence that something is wrong.

New belief. Different interpretation. Different response.

And over time, often a very different experience of life.

Changing Beliefs

I’m not saying changing a deeply held belief is an overnight process, nor am I saying it’s easy.

But it is possible.

I’ve worked hard to change many of my core beliefs, and I made a decision to challenge beliefs that came up that limited my potential, contradicted my values, or kept me living according to a version of myself I no longer wanted to be.

There is an important distinction here that I understand better now than when I first started doing this work.

Changing your beliefs isn’t about choosing whatever belief makes you feel good.

It isn’t about convincing yourself that you’re going to become rich, find the perfect partner, or live a pain-free life simply because you’ve decided to believe it strongly enough.

It’s about examining what you believe and asking:

Is this actually true?

Where did this belief come from?

Is it still serving me?

What behaviour does this belief create?

Is it aligned with my values?

Does this belief support the man I actually want to become?

That last question has become particularly important to me.

Because beliefs eventually become behaviour, and repeated behaviour becomes part of our character.

This is where beliefs start becoming a question of integrity.

If I say I believe women should be treated with respect, but my private behaviour consistently contradicts that belief, then I have something to examine.

If I say family matters deeply to me, but consistently give the best of my time and energy to work, there is a contradiction worth looking at.

If I say I value health while repeatedly behaving in ways that undermine it, the problem may not simply be a lack of discipline. There may be a belief underneath the behaviour that I haven’t yet confronted.

A man of integrity tries to close those gaps.

Not perfectly, because none of us live in perfect alignment all the time, but consciously.

The goal is for what you believe, what you value, what you say, and how you actually live to increasingly resemble one another.

Your Beliefs About Pain Matter Too

This is one area where changing my beliefs had an enormous impact.

Life comes with challenges, hurdles, disappointment and pain. No belief system eliminates those things.

But our beliefs about those experiences can change how we move through them.

If you believe pain means your life is going wrong, every painful experience becomes a crisis.

If you believe periods of difficulty are an inevitable part of being human, and that something meaningful can sometimes be made from them, the experience changes.

The pain may still hurt.

But you stop adding an entire second layer of suffering by believing it shouldn't be happening.

This has become increasingly connected to my spiritual beliefs too. I’ve had to learn that agency and surrender are not necessarily opposites.

I can take responsibility for what is mine to influence while accepting that I don’t control the timing, circumstances, or outcome of everything in my life.

For someone who spent a large part of his life trying to control everything, that has been one of the more difficult beliefs to learn.

The Beliefs That Made You Aren’t Necessarily the Beliefs That Have to Keep You

I remain a huge believer in examining and shifting our beliefs because I’ve seen the effects in my own life repeatedly.

But I think about it differently now.

The goal isn't to construct the most positive belief system possible.

It's to become conscious of the beliefs from which you're living.

Some you will examine and decide to keep.

Some you will strengthen.

Some you will realize belonged to your parents, your community, an old relationship, a younger version of yourself, or a culture whose definition of a good life you no longer share.

And some you will have to painfully let go of because they are keeping you attached to a man you no longer want to be.

You may not have chosen many of the beliefs that shaped the man you became.

But once you become conscious of them, you become responsible for deciding whether they will shape the man you become next.

To me, that is where real freedom begins.