Beliefs  are not some special category of idea sitting at a higher station of truth that are ordinary everyday mortal thoughts. Beliefs are not necessarily “the truth” at all. Beliefs are nothing more than specific patterns in your brain, thoughts that are so ingrained that they have become automatic. They are not there because they are “the truth” they have simply been handed down from generation to generation. They are there because someone put them there.

We are not talking about your faith or religious views here. We are not here to challenge your faith. We are talking here about your beliefs… your habits of thought, opinion and attitude about the world around you and especially your beliefs about you, about your life and your prospects for financial fulfillment.

By the time you’re 17 years old you’ve heard ‘No, you can’t” an average of 150,000 times. You’ve heard “Yes, you can” about 50,000 times. That’s 30 no’s for every yes. That makes for a powerful belief of ” I can’t”.

Most people view their own goals in the form of hopes or wishes. I hope I succeed in this business or I wish I would earn a million dollars. Here is the rest of the unfinished thought whether conscious or not that usually lines after those three dots…” but I bet I won’t.” The biggest obstacle to most people’s goals has nothing to do with any external conditions or factors. It is this: They don’t believe it will happen or that it can be done. If you don’t believe it will happen it is almost guaranteed that it won’t. You simply cannot achieve a goal that you do not believe you can achieve because those beliefs live in that part of the brain that is running the show. Even though we technically are not aware of this.

Let’s say you love your family very much. You place a high value on family and one of your biggest goals in life is to have a rich whole family life, yet you also have a belief that the only way you can be truly successful and earn enough income to provide for your family is to work really really hard. So what happens? You find yourself working 80 hours a week and never see your family, why because you don’t value them? No you value them alright, but your beliefs have you captive on that 80 hour track like a hamster on a wheel. Beliefs trump desires every time.

If you have credit card debt and financial struggles in your life lack of money is not the problem, is only the symptom. Lack of money is simply the fruit. To find the cause you need to look at the seed. The fruit will always match the seed. And the seed is your habits of thought.

Here’s the problem: Beliefs tend to be self-fulfilling. This is because habits are thousands of times stronger than desires. That is worth restating: not twice as strong, not even three times as strong, but thousands of times stronger. You may have the desire to increase your income tenfold, but if your habits of thoughts do not expect anything like that to occur, it will be next to impossible for it to happen. You will take no lasting productive action toward that goal. Why not? Because it is your habits not your desires or other conscious thoughts that run your actions.

This is one of the greatest discoveries for the past decade of neurological research: 96 to 98 percent of all your behaviors are automatic. This is why we set goals, but don’t reach them. Setting them is a function of the conscious mind. Reaching them is a function of the non-conscious mind.

HOW TO TAP INTO THE POWER OF THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE

Here is the critical question, if the beliefs you presently have are not serving you, how do you change them? How do you adopt new beliefs?

You could try using willpower and simply decide to have new beliefs. And that will probably work very well… for a few minutes. However, conscious thoughts are hard to sustain, as we have seen. If you are going to change your habits and beliefs, you have to do it where they reside, which is in the non-conscious mind.

Your conscious mind is excellent assessing the situation and formulating a plan. Your conscious mind is where you design your new beliefs… but it is not where you hold those beliefs. It is like a brilliant conductor: He understands the music perfectly and has a masterful sense of how it should sound, but he doesn’t actually play any of the instruments. Unless he gets the members of the orchestra to actually play those instruments, the music remains nothing but an idea in his head… not a sound is heard. Which is exactly what happens to most people’s goals.

Retraining this non-conscious part of your personality is a two step process. First using your conscious facilities, you choose the thoughts you want to have as your beliefs. Then you systematically impress these thoughts on the non-conscious part of your brain.

It’s just like placing your order at your favorite restaurant. Choosing a thought from the universe of possibilities is like sitting down at the table and choosing a great selection from the menu. We can imagine that delicious meal and we can congratulate ourselves knowing we have made an excellent choice. We can already taste this great dish but there is a problem: no matter how much we look forward to this wonderful food, no matter how excellent a choice we have made, our plate continues to be empty. We tuck our napkin under our chin, hold our fork and knife ready in anticipation: Oh, boy! Still no food.

What’s missing ? We haven’t actually place the order. The Frog has only decided to jump off the lilly pad… he hasn’t actually jumped yet. Until we relay our order to the kitchen nothing happens. We know what we want, but nothing is being cooked backed there.

The glory of our conscious mind is that using the power of will and imagination, we can pluck an idea out of the quantum sea of possibilities. We can choose what we think. Our mistake is assuming that because we have that idea, we will act on it; we believe that because we think it we will do it. But the odds are we won’t…not unless we take those conscious thoughts, buff them to impeccable clarity, and deliver them to our non-conscious facilities.

This is what makes the difference between setting goals and achieving goals. Setting goals is a conscious exercise; achieving goals is a spiritual and non-conscious exercise. To achieve our goals, to actually crate and build our dream business, we need to become expert at using both parts of our brain. That is what most of us have never been taught to do. And that is what I will be sharing over the next several articles.

“You can’t always get what you want,” sang the Rolling Stones, and they were absolutely right, because what you want has very little to do with what you end up getting. Simply having the desire to achieve something does absolutely no good in and of itself. You can want all you want, and nothing happens. But impress that desire onto the power center of your brain as a set of new instructions, and you can transform that desire into a habit of thought… a belief. And once you do that, no force in the world can stop it from happening.