I deal with a lot of young people in my teaching of which many are teenagers. They are full of the unshakable belief that you know nothing and they know it all even if you have forty years of experience. I remember being like that; in fact the only thing that life experience gives you is that you know less and less as the years go by, so in a way they are right. The things that seemed certain when you were younger seem more uncertain as you age and then if you are lucky you get to an age when you realise that everything is open to the challenge of its unreality.

So might it not be better to stand in a place of uncertainty, in the Chinese view you do not need to believe in something just suspended your disbelief to make things move and change.

What would happen if we changed our point of view? Maybe it would give us the possibility of seeing something different and new? From my own experience when I first became interested in playing the guitar I detested reggae and if someone had said to me that within five years I would be playing in a reggae band I would not have believed them, but I did, I then realised that reggae contained the essence of music that I also later found in other roots music such as the blues, it acted as a doorway to a new assessment of what music was. So look at the point of view that you currently hold and try out the opposite viewpoint for a couple of weeks and see what happens. Sometimes as you do you notice new things and start discovering ‘by accident’ things that confirm your new view.

What happens if we change what we believed we are? Now here is a good one, when we are younger we believe many things that as we age we realise were ridiculous, however as I have said before naivety is an important ingredient to success because if you were not naïve you would not even start because the odds are so impossible but ……

If you are old enough, look back and remember what you believed then and compare to what you believe now then think of what you might believe in ten or twenty years’ time. Then think of what you would need to believe to make the changes or achieve the things that you want and just do it. Because it is quite likely that the changes that you have already made in life are more radicle than the ones that you need to now make.

Ask yourself the question ‘what would I have done differently if I had changed my beliefs earlier’, remember that everything that ever existed started as an idea, so get the idea.

Vic