Beliefs, behaviour and the mind

Category: Coaching Notes

"Your beliefs are your reality. Beliefs are assumptions about the nature of reality, and because you create what you believe in, you will have many ?proofs? that reality operates this way."
Sanaya Roman

Put simply, if we go into a situation believing that we are going to fail then our behaviour will increase the probability that we will fail, thereby reinforcing our feelings of failure. And so it goes on. The evidence of our actions, and their result, is stored in the records bureau of our sub-conscious – without undergoing any cross-examination. This evidence is from the external world and we then construct it, normally without challenge, into our underlying, deeply held beliefs. These then become our reality. Since philosophically, reality can only ever be internal we can change it by changing our self-beliefs. This will change our feelings and behaviour, leading to a different view of how the rest of the world perceives us. Grasping this concept of the inner-self is fundamental to changing our beliefs. Without such a transformation, changes in our feelings and behaviour will be superficial and short lived. Herman Hesse said

"There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many lead such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the inner world to assert itself."

One model of the mind used extensively in coaching characterises the sub-conscious mind as a non-judgemental filing cabinet, with the conscious mind acting as a filter, removing those things that are inconsistent with our beliefs. As a "lapsed" chemical engineer, I attempted representing this as a simple flow diagram to show whether these functions occur in series or in parallel. However, I gave up since it became clear that the reality is far more complex than my engineering approach could capture. Take for example the following two models of the mind from the field of psychoanalysis.

Appignanesi and Zarate, (1979) describe Freud?s two divisions of the mind as the preconscious and unconscious. The first is all the memories and ideas capable of becoming conscious and the latter is made up of desires and impulses. Jung (Hyde and McGuiness (1992)) however describes the psyche as consisting of the unconscious mind which compensates the conscious attitude. He believed that whenever the conscious attitude is too one-sided, its unconscious opposite manifests itself. Although not explicit in these descriptions, the models clearly also reflect an impact on beliefs (attitudes) and subsequent behaviour.

These models are not necessarily inherently inconsistent. The value of any model is its usefulness in a particular application. The "filing cabinet/filter" model has in my experience a valuable role to play in coaching. It states that our beliefs come from the accumulated memories of the sub-conscious. When they are retrieved from the filing cabinet, the conscious mind responds to a particular situation in line with the pre-programmed belief. But this programming can be reprocessed using the filter of the conscious mind to place only positive memories into the filing cabinet, consequently overwriting those that lead to limiting beliefs. In this way clients can be helped to change their behaviour and habits but only after recognising and then challenging those old limiting beliefs.

John Duncan is Director of Huxley Strategic Choice, and specialises in Transition Management and Executive Coaching. He has thirty years experience in the engineering services sector where he has held board level roles and lived and worked in Europe, the USA and the West Indies. John is currently working with Brefi Group on a project in the steel industry.

USEFUL LINKS:

(1) "Introducing Jung" - Hyde and McGuiness, published in the UK by Icon Books Ltd - www.iconbooks.co.uk, ISBN 1 84046 062 8
(2) "Introducing Freud" - Appignanesi and Zarate, publisher as above, ISBN 1 84046 054 7.
blog comments powered by Disqus