Don’t Lie to yourself.

EVERY self-defense seminar I teach revolves around this concept: “don’t lie to yourself.”
We discuss it in the seminar, we talk about allowing false narratives to alter our perception of the world. We believe that we cannot be targeted and become a victim of crime, that crime doesn’t happen in our neighborhood, that the donut doesn’t have real calories, that one more beer is ok, and that our good works will get us to heaven. We lie to ourselves about our fitness, our capabilities, who our friends are, and how cool we are. These lies are typical beliefs and these beliefs alter the view we have on the world – they color every action, decision, and the relationship we have. So, the question that has been on my the mind is the this: how do we rewire our brain to correct erroneous beliefs, and what is the most important belief I hold?

As a result of my desire to increase my professional training and ability to share the message of safety with people, I have studied material from and attended seminars by Blauer Tactical, which is training from the life’s work of Tony Blauer. One of the best tools I have learned and adopted from this training is the Cycle of Behavior™. This tool breaks down, in a simple way, how our motivations, expectations, beliefs, and other critical things can affect our control of fear and how we process the data from the world around us. The often-identified primary function of the COB is how fear affects us, and as Coach Blauer says, “fear throttles everything”. My initial understanding of this was that the COB was a tool to manage fear, and it is, but it is also a tool to identify sticking points (bias) in our view of the world.

So the topic of the day (don’t lie to yourself) is primarily an issue of belief. I spent the morning writing down what my Personal Directives are in different parts of my life, including finance, personal safety, health, and business. I also wrote down the overreaching personal directive that covers all of these things. I would encourage you to write down your personal directives as well, as it helps you define what your beliefs are, and you can start to see how they affect your view of the world. Seeing your beliefs on paper also helps you process them and see if they are actual yours or if you are just borrowing someone else’s belief. A belief can be true or false, and because you hold a particular belief does not make you correct or make your belief superior to someone else, however, there is truth and I hope that you study and make sure that your beliefs are true.
It is my belief that we are created in the image of the creator of the universe, and herefore we are made in three separate but inseparable parts (at least while we are breathing and above ground). These are body, mind, and spirit.

I strongly believe that the most important part is our spiritual being. This part of us is eternal – it is the part that recognizes the actions of God, hears the whisper of the Holy Spirit and is filled with the love of Christ when we accept his gift of forgiveness and become a part of the Kingdom of God. I feel that we often accept these things with our mind, but our actions don’t reflect what being a part of God’s kingdom should be. If our spirit is not filled with the love of Christ, it becomes a vacuum and is filled with junk. Things like addictions. Things like lust. Worldly obsessions that have no business being in our spirit. This is also where we run amok in relationships, where we expect our significant other to “complete us”.

This Jerry Maguire crap is literally just that. Crap. The missing piece that needs completing is a relationship with God. It must be filled before we can truly love, serve or be truly complete. If we rely on something or someone in the world to complete our spirit, (which is not of the world) our spirit is not filled and remains a void we attempt to fill with junk.
So when we hear the screaming that is so common in the world, the vitriolic spewing from politicians and their minions, the divisiveness amongst Churches that purport their way is the only way to have a relationship with God, or they are open to altering God’s word to allow peoples physical desires direct the church, and we are not “completed” with a relationship with the King of the Universe, that darkness leaches in (sucked in by the vacuum) and we become part of the distressing, debilitating, hate-filled cacophony of the world. This is precisely why our spiritual beliefs are so important. If we do not have a solid grasp on our spiritual beings, if our spirit is weak and immature, we are vulnerable to allowing our spirit to be filled with unneeded and undesirable things. So, in simple summation – Our beliefs color our world view, if we believe we are complete without God, we leave a void in our spirit and it becomes filled with addiction, self-centeredness, greed, lust, and other junk that we would do well to avoid. God’s love is what completes us. To be spiritually complete requires a relationship with the creator of you.