It’s a very scary thing when someone openly disproves your limiting beliefs. If you have empowering beliefs, being disproven is a triumph rather than an attack, because you’ve been given the easy opportunity to fine-tune your belief system, which can only lead to improving your self and your model of the world. But if your mind is holding you back, you’re highly afraid of breaking the chains. The three major reasons for this are:

1. If you’re disproven now, whose to say that you won’t be disproven again? If you switch from Catholicism to Protestantism, couldn’t what you really want be Unitarianism? If you disconnect yourself from your heart and intuition, you have no reason to ever change or grow. Depending on where you are in life, that could be much more comfortable than change.

2. Changing your beliefs invalidates your past. If you spend all your life buying groceries at the normal price, and then a spendthrift tips you off that you could easily pay half the price with judicious acquisition and use of coupons, what does that say about all the groceries you’ve already bought? If you accept your new couponing beliefs fully, you’re acknowledging that your previous shopping beliefs cost you thousands upon thousands of dollars. It could be much more comforting to simply block coupons from your reality.

3. Changing beliefs may conflict with your actions. If you don’t want to do what you’re doing, then you must either stop doing it, develop the want, or be a coward by doing what you don’t want. If you’re a lawyer now, and you find you can’t win a case without dishonesty, but you want to be honest, then you have to be a hypocrite, an unsuccessful lawyer, or an unemployed person. But if you continue believing dishonesty is okay, you …

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Sorry for the lack of updates this week. It’s been busy for me… mainly because I have school and work (20 hours per week for the summer). And that’s right in the middle of the week (Monday-Thursday), where it keeps me busy.

Anyway, I’m trying now to switch jobs… to move back to the Ormond Beach library from Holly Hill (I’ve written of the two on my about page). My boss isn’t being nice to me. I told her that maybe she shouldn’t go into library service, because she doesn’t seem to enjoy the work. That hit close too home apparently, so now she’s threatening to fire me for being disrespectful. I didn’t know it was so easy to fire a public servant.

I can definitely see her reaction is rooted in fear rather than reason. Now, I have little bias for emotion or reason… half the time emotion is intuition, and that is a great skill to have. For the other half, the emotion is fear. Fear-based decisions are never good. They distract your focus and weaken your resolve. You get stuck in a repetitive loop of non-achievement.

What I told her, is pretty much the same thing I’ve been feeling myself. Librarianship is a public good and a necessary field, but I haven’t been seeing it as my best way to contribute to the world. Why should I limit myself to the narrow medium of reference requests, when I can be helping people everywhere, on a much broader level? I think my photography does that. I give out print copies often, and hear how people find it beautiful and inspiring. Actually, I’ve never heard those exact words… but a lot of stuff like it. Photography hasn’t been profitable, but that’s in part because …

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