How to Find the Hidden Beliefs Holding You Back

Nir’s Note: This guest post is adapted from Steve Kamb’s new book, How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos & Making Change that Sticks

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Every single day, we’re bombarded with the next big thing that will solve all of our problems, make us happier or healthier or more successful. And all day, every day, we’re faced with choices:

Do we dive headfirst into the latest trendy celebrity diet?

Do we follow the optimized morning routine of our favorite podcaster?

Do we embrace the productivity routine of the CEO of a company we admire?

Maybe! But probably not. One of the fastest ways to guarantee future failure is to chase the wrong goal for the wrong reason. When our brain tells us to get overly excited and chase the shiny new object, when we’re suddenly faced with conflicting lifestyle choices from two equally charismatic influencers, we need a personal filtering philosophy that helps us decide confidently where to put our efforts.

As Nir explains in Beyond Belief, the decisions we make and the reality that we see are all downstream of our belief system. If we want to start making better decisions, we need to go one level higher to interrogate the very beliefs we’re bringing along for the ride.

Unfortunately, so many of our beliefs were never ours to begin with. No matter how much of an independent, critical thinker we believe ourselves to be, we all have decades of ingrained behavior that guides how we view our reality.

Our Beliefs Can Go Back Generations

During the tumultuous year of 1917, it was believed that “food will win the [Great War].”

President Woodrow Wilson asked Herbert Hoover, head of the U.S. Food Administration, to decrease the nation’s food consumption and waste. This would free up more food to be shipped over to Europe to feed the soldiers on the front lines.

Hoover created the Clean Plate Club, encouraging household to sign pledge cards:

“At the table I’ll not leave a scrap of food upon my plate. And I’ll not eat between meals, but for supper time I’ll wait.”

The government encouraged people to reduce food waste by putting less food on their plates, but making sure to eat all of it. Every wasted meal was one less meal that could have been sent to feed soldiers in Europe.

Thus, the “clean your plate” became a catchphrase appearing in hundreds of posters across the country. It created a new belief system for an entire generation of Americans (who soon went through the Great Depression).

It’s why the greatest generation told their baby-boomer children to clean their plates: it was a matter of survival for them! And it’s why baby-boomer parents passed along this same lesson to their children too: because that’s all they’ve ever known too.

No wonder why our daily food choices carry such emotional baggage: our beliefs and relationship with food are downstream of generational beliefs, attached to a specific environment, that aren’t connected to our current reality.

Modern serving sizes are gargantuan compared to meals our parents or grandparents encountered. Snacks and candy are available in every store, on every corner, at all times of the day. We exist in an environment that encourages us to eat more, with a belief system that attaches guilt to not eating more.

For many people, not cleaning their plate is the kindest, most important, and most helpful thing they could do for themselves.

You might not have been raised in the “Clean Plate Club,” but I bet there are generational, societal, and cultural beliefs that are part of your belief system too that go way beyond food.

Our reality is shaped by beliefs we never chose

How we feel about religion, personal finance, success, happiness, home-ownership, where we go on vacation, how we treat our loved ones, and even how we view our own identity are all downstream of the people in our lives and the time in which we live.

Our mom called us shy when we were very young. We didn’t think we were shy, suddenly, that became part of our identity. We started to raise our hands less in class, and we eventually became shy.

A bad gym class experience made us decide, “I’m not athletic.” And suddenly, we’re skipping out on the fun activities we want to try because we don’t want to have that same experience. Decades later, we’re afraid to be seen trying a new physical activity because “that’s not who I am.”

We were taught that hard work is the only thing missing from reaching all of our goals. We’re raised to chase specific outcomes, work hard, and that success at all costs will solve all of our problems. If our company isn’t growing, it’s dying. No matter what we’re working on, we can always do more, more, more.

That last one is certainly true for me. I have workaholic tendencies, and lionized entrepreneurs and CEOs who believe that hard work solves all problems and should be prioritized above every other part of life. I also prided myself on being self-made: I was a reliable person who freely offered help to others but never asked for help myself.

And for 35+ years, this worked for me!

And then life kicked my ass, personally and professionally, for a number of years. It kept throwing problem after problem at me that couldn’t be solved with just “work harder.”

I paused long enough to start wondering if the beliefs that I had inherited, absorbed, and adopted were no longer serving me. I asked myself some really, deeply uncomfortable questions that challenged my identity around work and success.

Two questions that changed my belief system

It started with a simple question that Nir would encourage us to ask: “Wait, is this belief really true?”

I had spent years building my company, Nerd Fitness, into a bigger and bigger company because I believed this was “what successful people do,” only to realize it brought me more stress than fulfillment. I spent five years focused on becoming a better manager, a role I actively despised, because I believed “that’s what CEOs do.”

During that same time period, I went through multiple challenges in my personal life that couldn’t be solved with “just work harder.” I had to ask if asking for help was really a sign of weakness. I asked myself, “Is it really true that I should put on a brave face and cram down the challenges I was facing?

I then embraced another question that Nir would endorse: “What if the opposite is true?”

With this reframe, my belief of “shut up and just work harder” became a weakness, not a strength. Forcing myself to work harder to become a slightly less bad CEO kept me from working on the skill I loved, which brought me joy and fulfillment: writing. I promptly demoted myself and put somebody else in charge so that I could refocus my efforts on putting my next book out into the world.

Personally, this reframe taught me that asking for help wasn’t a sign of weakness, but a rational decision and a sign of strength. I leaned on friends and family to help me navigate a chaotic personal pivot, and I leaned on trusted friends to help me push this book across the finish line. In both instances, asking for help was the best decision I could have made.

Our new beliefs can help shape our reality

Questioning our inherited and generational beliefs can be uncomfortable.

It can be painful to realize we’ve been viewing our own lives through the wrong lens and that the belief system that got us here won’t get us where we want to go next. Fortunately, there’s good news here: our beliefs determine our reality, which means we can see this challenging reframe as an undeniable positive too.

So, when we ask these tough questions about our identity and life philosophy, we can offer ourselves grace and compassion: many of our beliefs were formed decades or generations before we were born.

But that’s the work ahead of us: to ask questions that give us a chance to upgrade our beliefs. The resistance we keep trying to force ourselves through might instead become a warning sign to stop going in that direction. Opportunities that aren’t right for us suddenly look like red flags that distract us from our real mission. And the parts of our identity that felt permanent are much more malleable than we ever would have realized.

It’s amazing what can happen when we ask “Is this really true?” followed by “What if the opposite were true?”

Whether we’re navigating a tumultuous professional moment or a personal one, taking time to sit and think deeply about where our beliefs came from can give us permission to adopt beliefs better suited to today.

I’m thankful for upgrading my own belief system: it’s the only reason you’re reading this essay today.

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