See why your mindset is everything. Transforming your mindset is necessary to overcome these harmful ideas. Are you ready to learn how to do this?
If you hold unhealthy or false beliefs, they will show in your choices. Your life will reflect the decisions you make. Changing the way you look at things is imperative.
In life, we encounter countless obstacles, setbacks, and challenges. Some people seem to conquer these hurdles, while others struggle to find their way. Have you ever wondered what sets these individuals apart? The secret lies in their mindset, their ability to adapt and change.
Reasons for Redefining Beliefs and Values
Dr. Dyer (1) says that when we change our mindset, something miraculous happens.
Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change. — Wayne W. Dyer
Changing the way you look at things is the key to growth and development. Yet, some people fight against making progress. They are deeply entrenched in their beliefs and reject any facts that do not align with them. Challenging and redefining beliefs and values is not always easy. If you engage in the process we outline, it will change your mindset for the better. There are good reasons for cultivating the ability to change our minds when we obtain new, valid facts and information.
As we grow and change, it’s natural to question our beliefs. This isn’t about being rebellious or hostile—it’s about making sure our beliefs support the life we want to live now. When we pause to reflect and redefine our values, we create room for growth, clarity, and freedom.
Here’s why transforming your mindset is worth it:
- To grow into the person you truly want to be.
- Make choices that match your current life, not your past.
- To feel more confident and grounded in what you stand for.
- Build deeper, more honest relationships.
- To stay open-minded and curious, not stuck or afraid of change.
- Live with more presence, purpose, and mental freedom.
Challenging and redefining beliefs and values is not about losing old ideas. It’s about finding a clearer path forward.
Be the change that you wish to see in the world. ― Mahatma Gandhi
Learn Why You Believe What You Believe
The bottom line is you believe what you believe because you think it is right. No matter what your beliefs are, you hold them as being valid, accurate, or correct. If you believe the Earth is Flat, you do so despite the scientific evidence that the Earth is a sphere. No amount of evidence can convince you otherwise.
Most people want a better world, but there is a difference of opinion about what constitutes a “better” world. One of the best ways to find common ground and solutions is to shift our perspective on the situation. Changing the way we look at things can make a difference. It can reduce the tension in a conversation.
People adopt and defend beliefs because they offer a sense of safety, identity, and belonging. Beliefs don’t need to make sense. There is a whole group of people around the world who believe the Earth is flat. Beliefs help people make sense of the world and feel more in control.. Some people defend their beliefs with violence if necessary. This is one reason why your mindset is everything.
The Process of Challenging and Redefining Beliefs and Values
Not all beliefs need to be challenged, but when they cause harm, limit freedom, or no longer reflect what’s true, they deserve a closer look.
The processes that reveal these harmful values and prejudices can be challenging. Removing harmful socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, and lifestyle prejudice is serious inner work. Approximately half of the population is influenced by this kind of thinking. It can be traced directly to extremist political and religious ideologies.
One way to help people understand that their beliefs and values are harmful or incorrect is to define what they are. Harmful or incorrect beliefs and values are those that:
- Cause unnecessary harm — to yourself or others, emotionally, mentally, or physically.
- Limit personal growth — by creating fear, shame, or discouraging change and learning.
- Block understanding — by rejecting new information or different perspectives.
- Create unfair judgments — leading to prejudice, exclusion, or treating others as less worthy.
- Don’t match reality — when they ignore facts, evidence, or lived experiences.
- They are based on control, not truth — used to maintain power, not support well-being.
These harmful ideas manifest in our individual lives and the broader social arena.
The Social Arena
There is a polarization between religious superstition and scientific evidence. The clash between science and religion is intensifying. Religious extremists want to take us back to the 12th century, and science wants to move us to the 21st century. How can we reconcile these two vastly different worldviews?
People are not engaging in meaningful dialogue about global issues. The next time you face this dilemma, reverse your focus. Don’t start thinking of a rebuttal. Instead, stop, listen, and think. Begin changing the way you look at things.
Ask questions about why they believe what they believe. Knowing why they believe something will help you understand their perspective. Engaging them in this way calms their emotions and disarms their attack.
To accomplish this, you need to overcome two key challenges. First, we must overcome our emotional response to them and the issue. Second, we must also overcome the propaganda that bombards us. Both are intertwined, which makes it more challenging to negotiate.
The propaganda machine ensures you hear the message it wants to project. If you learn to recognize what is happening, you can ignore it or minimize its effect. We recommend using an “emotional check-in technique” to help maintain your emotional equilibrium. If you can stay calm, you will think more clearly. When you think more clearly, you can spot the propaganda and sift out facts from the fiction.
Challenging and redefining beliefs and values is difficult for those with extremist mindsets. People with far-right ideological positions suffer from political and religious indoctrination. Facts that oppose their ideas only strengthen their resolve to uphold their beliefs.
The idea here is not to change their minds but to get them to question their beliefs. Don’t be surprised if this leads to a discussion about what they hate or makes them angry. The source of these emotions drives all bias and prejudice.
Individual Values and Beliefs
The second thing we need to deal with is our ego. Our personality likes to control what we think to maintain control. Changing the way you look at things underscores the importance of why your mindset is everything. Changing how we look at things helps us regain control of the mind from the ego. It means turning off living on autopilot and showing up fully present.
We must understand our self-talk to remove harmful scripts. The Enneagram is an effective tool for identifying these scripts. Your personality isn’t a bad thing. It’s a necessary tool of consciousness, but few people learn when to turn it off.
It may seem like a relatively simple strategy, but it’s hard to implement. Routines run our lives. The autopilot mode makes things easier. We don’t have to think consciously about what we need to do. But patterns make it easy to slip into bad habits. If we want to see things differently, we must start with ourselves.
Today, bad habits come from the conveniences of our modern society. The first is the hypnotic effect of being entertained. When we are engaged, we lose ourselves and time, which is a waste of opportunities in life. The second bad habit is filtering our social interaction through electronic media.
Learning Why Your Mindset Is Everything
Your mindset is the lens through which you perceive the world. It shapes your thoughts, attitudes, and actions. With a healthy, positive mindset, you unlock unlimited potential for success. A healthy mindset equips you to overcome challenges. It enables you to learn valuable lessons from failures.
Best of all, it improves your mental health and well-being. However, if this filter is flawed, your experience of reality will be distorted. Eliminating unhealthy programming is difficult. These scripts are often associated with important values and individuals.
Becoming More Present
To get started, you need to become present. Being present means being deliberately aware of what’s happening now. When you are present and aware, your attention expands. It includes the body, feelings, and immediate surroundings. We can be mindful of the body while observing thoughts and emotions.
Being present doesn’t mean agreeing with those who promote harmful ideological views. However, when we are present, we can gain a better understanding of why they hold these positions. We may be able to help them change their thinking using a process we call “an unconventional approach to save the believer.”
The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it. ― Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
You can change your life if you really want to. You can improve it, make it better. And it all starts with changing the way you think. — John C. Maxwell
The starting point for thinking lies in the quality of your mindset and your worldview. By changing the way you look at things, it reshapes your perspective and, in turn, your reality. Therefore, it makes sense to understand what’s in our filter that shapes our reality. This is where the real work begins.
The Process for Transforming Your Mindset
1. Digging into the Foundations.
The first step in changing the way you look at things is to assess the filter through which you view the world. Start dedicating time to the process. Challenge and redefining beliefs and values involve inner work that will take some time. It’s wise to schedule adequate time, at least an hour per session. The total time needed for transforming your mindset depends on several factors:
Internal Factors:
- Emotional discomfort – Feeling anxiety, guilt, or fear when questioning familiar beliefs.
- Identity conflict – Changing beliefs may change “who you are.”
- Cognitive dissonance – The mental stress of holding two conflicting ideas at once.
- Fear of being wrong – Admitting past beliefs were harmful means admitting personal failure.
- Loss of certainty – Feeling unsettled without the “solid ground” old beliefs provided.
Social Factors:
- Pressure from family or community – Fear of rejection, judgment, or being labeled a traitor.
- Loss of belonging – Leaving a belief system means losing friendships and group identity.
- Cultural traditions – Struggling against norms that have been passed down for generations.
- Backlash or conflict – Facing hostility or social punishment from those in the belief system.
Psychological and Practical Challenges:
- The amount of harmful beliefs and values you encounter and the length of time you have held them make it harder to change
- Habits of thought – Long-held beliefs can be automatic and hard to interrupt.
- Lack of information – Lack of access to reliable news or education makes change harder.
- Fear of the unknown – Letting go of old beliefs may leave a gap before new ones form.
- Time and effort – Real change often takes deep reflection, patience, and consistent effort
Understanding these factors can help make the process more manageable—and show that resistance is a normal part of growth. Inner work tools that reveal your true beliefs and values are the best place to start. We recommend:
The Enneagram Personality Profile. This will outline the automatic thinking patterns of personality and instinct. This helps you identify programming that is affecting these components of the psyche.
Comparative Analysis. This is a structured method of comparative religious study. Examining your beliefs and comparing them with others helps you see where ideas originate and what they lead to.
Cultural Values Test. This tool pinpoints the harmful programming that comes from indoctrination.
The time spent taking these evaluations will provide a snapshot of what and how you judge, what you value, and what you consider important. You can find out how to use these tools by clicking on the links.
2. Remove Unhealthy Sources of Programming.
When you use the above tools, you will not only reveal the harmful values, beliefs, and thought patterns but also where you acquired them. Family, friends, religious, and political affiliations are common sources of unhealthy influences.
So, now comes one of the biggest choices of your life. Do you have the courage to remove harmful sources to improve your health? Many people get stuck here. They fear making these changes, which alter significant relationships. But changing the way you look at things requires this kind of decision.
3. Replace the Harmful Programming.
Don’t skip step two and try to reprogram without removing the source of the bad input. Old thought scripts and values are powerful; they resist change. Most likely, the people who help reinforce them don’t want you to change either. But if you try to reprogram with affirmations or any other tool, you’ll find they won’t work.
After you’ve removed harmful values and beliefs, replacing them with positive ones becomes a simple process. An inclusive, sharing, and caring mindset comes naturally. It’s easy because that is how we were born before the culture tainted our programming. Therefore, we utilize the habitual aspect of the mind to cultivate good habits rather than harmful ones.
4. Reinforce Positive Behaviors
Limit TV and Internet
Your mind needs space, time, and the opportunity to create habits. The first step is creating space for new, healthy ideas. So, most people can cut this time from their social media consumption.
The goal is to limit TV, the internet, and social media to two (2) hours per day. Yes, it’s a hard step, but you’ll save, on average, about four (4) hours a day or twenty-eight (28) hours a week. This will save you a lot of time that you can use to grow and develop your body, mind, and soul.
We are subject to a great deal of social programming and propaganda. It can become addictive, making change more difficult. We get an adrenaline rush when we encounter something that triggers our emotions. But this “triggering” of emotion does nothing to change our perspective. It often does the opposite by reinforcing the message of the propaganda. What we see changes because the filter of propaganda programs allows us to act like a trout chasing a shiny lure.
One must always be careful of books,” said Tessa, “and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us. ― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
Find a Used Book Store
Now, with all the time you’ve saved, find a used bookstore and buy the oldest and cheapest book in philosophy, religion, or history. After you buy the book, don’t leave.
Next, please sit down and read it for at least an hour. Use a pencil or yellow marker to make notes in the margins. Think about what you’ve read. You are expanding your awareness by creating new neuro-connections and sparking new ideas.
You’ll be surprised at how quickly the time passes once you engage your mind with new ideas. It will become a positive habit that replaces the negative one caused by the overuse of social media.
Talk to People
When it is safe, meet people face to face—otherwise, substitute “FaceTime” or Zoom. Chat rooms will allow you to see people. Sign up for free webinars. Explore new interests and subjects. Healthy relationships can have a significant impact on transforming your mindset.
If you are still in the used bookstore, ask other guests if they’ve read it. What did they think about it? Tell them some interesting tidbits. The goal is to meet new people and open your heart. Use a book as the focal point; find out what others read. Find people from different backgrounds and points of view. It will expand your social awareness.
Now that you know one another, ask them their opinion on what you’ve read. We also suggest making a follow-up meeting, but don’t forget that step two’s primary purpose is finding someone new to talk with about the book.
Repeat the Above Steps
The results will surprise you. In less than a month, you’ll discover that connecting and doing research is more enjoyable than passive entertainment. You’ll find your mind hungering to learn and share.
You may also discover other freethinkers. There are more people like you than you think.
Final Thoughts on Changing The Way You Look At Things
Understand why your mindset is everything. Learn that challenging and redefining beliefs and values is a characteristic of the healthy mind. Transforming your mindset is within your power. You can overcome bias and prejudice and create a more inclusive and empathetic world.
References
- Change Thoughts Change your Life, Dr. Wayne Dyer
- Cognitive Reappraisal and Emotion Regulation: The Role of Beliefs. National Center for Biotechnology Information.
- Changing Beliefs and Behavior Through Narrative Persuasion: A Meta-Analytic Review. National Center for Biotechnology Information.
- Mindsets and Human Behavior: Theories and Evidence. National Center for Biotechnology Information.
- How Mindsets Shape Motivation and Behavior. Development and Validation of the Mindset Assessment Profile. Frontiers in Psychology.
- Changing the Self: The Role of Self-Affirmation in the Process of Belief Revision. National Center for Biotechnology Information.
- The Role of Emotional Intelligence and Cognitive Reappraisal in Enhancing Emotional Well-Being. National Center for Biotechnology Information.
- Digital Media Use and Mental Health: A Review. National Center for Biotechnology Information.
- The Effects of Habit Formation on Behavioral Change: A Review of Mechanisms and Interventions. National Center for Biotechnology Information.
- Why Do People Hold Misperceptions? A Motivated Reasoning Perspective. National Center for Biotechnology Information.
- Collective Dynamics of Belief Evolution under Cognitive Coherence and Social Conformity. National Library of Medicine.