It’s you against yourself

Transcripts were done with AI and may contain a few minor edits for readability (removed filler words and repeated words). Enjoy!

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**Jump to a moment:**

• 01:55 “It’s you against yourself”
• 02:23 Introducing the three types of belief
• 05:43 Why people turn aggressive defending a belief
• 08:14 How the strongest beliefs limit your freedom
• 08:31 Why these beliefs are so hard to spot
• 09:39 Blame keeps you in the past
• 11:10 The key question of the episode
• 11:38 A personal story: attracting the wrong people

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**DAVID**

Hello and welcome to The Pattern Room podcast. I’m David, your host, and in today’s episode we’re gonna talk about beliefs. It’s gonna be a short episode, and as usual I have my notes, and at the end I’m gonna try to answer a question that I believe is quite important. I’m gonna start with a story, and it’s about beliefs.

**[00:30]**

Quite recently, I think one month ago, someone was sharing with me their situation, and that was about struggling to get proper sleep. They told me that they tried so many things and they still can’t get proper sleep. They can’t fall asleep at a decent hour, and they can’t get proper sleep. Because it worked for me, and it’s working for me, I recommended them to try some prayer, to try to remove the negative beliefs around prayer that they may have, because most people in today’s society connect prayer to religion, and I was one of these people. I suggested that they try to remove any negative belief they have around prayer and try to practice it, and say one prayer before they go to sleep. Their answer was that they had some negative experience with religion in the past, and they’re not gonna do it. I get it, I get it.

**[01:55]**

But at the same time, it’s you against yourself. There’s no one there stopping you or making you do things, it’s just you and your beliefs, and your way of looking at things is just you. There’s nothing else there.

**[02:23]**

In a tool that I created a while ago, maybe five, six years ago, I talk about how to better understand your beliefs. I also talk about the three types of beliefs. These three different types are based on the intensity of the belief, and I’m gonna mention them shortly, right now, because I believe it makes sense for this episode.

**[02:58]**

The first type of belief, and I call it “maybe, probably,” is the belief with the lowest intensity. That is how you respond to questions when it comes to how you leave your life… let’s say. So if someone asks you something and you answer with “maybe, probably,” then you have a belief there that it’s not so intense, and it’s easy to change it. Let’s say someone asks you, “Are you a good dancer?” If you answer with “maybe,” then you can easily change and influence that belief.

**[03:36]**

Then the second type of belief is the “yes or no” belief, and this is kind of normal intensity. I don’t know how it’s described, it’s a normal intensity belief. Let’s say someone asks you what you do for a living, and you say you’re a writer, and then they ask you again, “Are you a writer?” and you say, “Yes, I’m a writer.” Through these beliefs we create a lot of certainty in our life, and they are not so easy to change. It requires spending time with the belief, with the environment that the belief gets active in, and with everything that influences that belief. If you’re a writer and you’ve written a few books until now, and you have events where you go and present yourself as a writer, then the belief is not “yes” anymore, it may be a third type, a level of belief. I don’t know how else to name this, but there are three different kinds of beliefs, and this could be the third one.

**[05:04]**

Which is, of course, “yes” or “of course not,” and this is the belief with the highest intensity. When you answer with “of course yes” or “of course not,” it’s like an absolute version of what there could be. These are the most dangerous beliefs, because in the example with the writer, you will identify as a writer, and you will take that with you for as long as you live. All the things that you have around you that confirm that you’re a writer will enhance the belief, but at the same time, these are the kinds of belief that make us sacrifice various things in our life to maintain the belief.

**[05:43]**

That is why people are aggressive, that is why people are violent, when this belief is threatened, because it is so deeply engraved in their identity that they’re willing to risk everything, including their life, to protect the belief. This is the strongest representation of what it means to have a belief in your life.

**[06:24]**

Going back to the story that I shared with you initially, I would say that this person that shared with me their belief, they had the second type of belief, the second level, which could have been changed if they were willing to spend enough time with that belief and eventually decide that prayer is not so connected to religion, you don’t have to be religious to pray. Through shifting perspective, they could have eventually changed their belief connected to prayer and religion, but it requires spending a lot of time with that belief, and we have so many beliefs.

**[07:29]**

That’s why I like to say that it’s you against yourself, it’s me against myself. There’s no one else there to force me into doing anything. There’s no one else there, absolutely no one. When I realized this, when I realized that no one is entering my life and making me do things, or making me avoid things, because I believe things are a certain way or not, it’s just me and myself, and that’s it. When I realized that, it gave me freedom, because in that moment I realized that I have the freedom to choose what I want to do.

**[08:14]**

But the problem is that the freedom of choosing is limited by these third type beliefs, where I believe that things should be one way or another in an absolute manner. And because these beliefs are like that, it is difficult to spot them.

**[08:31]**

Because if I say to you, “Yes, I believe I’m a male, and I’m convinced that I’m a male,” I’m gonna have a hard time changing that. And I’m looking at woke culture, and how people believe they are female when in fact they’re biologically male, and something happened along the way that they got to change their belief. There’s nothing else there, it’s just the belief that they have about themselves and about their identity. Because they believe so hard and so blindly that things are one way or another, and there’s no room for gray areas, that’s going to be very difficult to change, because they’re not open to shifting that perspective so they can adjust and change the belief.

**[09:32]**

When you have a third type belief, you get to stay stuck in that moment of your life.

**[09:39]**

As I said, it’s just you against yourself. There’s no one else there, it’s just you. You could blame society, you could blame your friends, your family, you could blame whoever you want to blame. Eventually you realize that it’s just you against yourself, because blaming whoever you want to blame, society, friends, family, when you do that, you go into your past, when you believe something happened that changed the way you think. Through that change, you also change your belief system, but that goes into your past. And when you put blame onto something, you are not present here, now, anymore. Realizing that it’s just you against yourself is a way to connect to the present moment and try to solve whatever is holding you back right now, and solve it here and now, when you can actually solve it, because you can never go into your past and solve it there. You can get some understanding from your past, but if you’re trying to get understanding from a foundation of belief, that will never happen.

**[11:10]**

As I said, this is going to be a short episode, and I have a question that I’m trying to answer. It goes like this: how can we look for the belief that is holding us back the most? My answer to that would be, look at the negative events that are happening on repeat in your life.

**[11:38]**

I’m gonna give you a personal example here. I used to be surrounded by the same kind of people in my life, people that were not really open to change, people that were saying one thing and doing something else, or not doing anything, they were just saying they were doing things, but nothing was really happening. People who were not trustworthy, or people who were basically trying to take advantage of how I am as a person. I kept bumping into those people, and I kept bumping into those people because… well, the first reason was that, okay, I was going through this experience with them, let’s say someone was promising that they were doing something, and then they were not doing it, and then I was saying, “Hey, I can’t continue like this, I can’t be part of your life anymore.” And then, after one month or two months or so, I was like, “Hey, that person was a good person, yeah, they promised something and they didn’t deliver, but they were a good person, I’m gonna start talking with them again.” I didn’t realize that, through that action and through that mindset, I was bringing these people back into my life. And because I was bringing these people back into my life, it was a specific kind of energy, I was attracting more people like that into my life. That was it, I eventually learned and realized that it was me who was making, or in a way manifesting, that part of my life and keeping it alive. All I had to do was pay a lot more attention to the negative events that were repeating in my life, and it was very difficult, because I believed that I was giving them a proper second, third, fourth, and fifth chance, but at the same time I wasn’t able to see how me giving them a second, third, fourth, and fifth chance was hurting me. I was not able to see that, and eventually I saw it, but I went through a lot of suffering.

**[14:23]**

One extra thing that I would like to add here, in case you see yourself in the same space, I would like to say that I was not doing justice to them either, because they were not able to see their mistakes, and the things that they had to change in themselves, because I was saying, “Hey, I’m gonna re-invite you into my life.” When I did that, they thought that they were good, and they did nothing wrong, and there was nothing on their side that they had to adjust, because it was me who was coming back and re-inviting them into my life, they had no intention to. So I was not doing justice to myself, and also to them, and that was it.

**[15:17]**

So it was a short episode, and if you would leave this episode with one thing, remember that it is you against yourself, and the beliefs that you have are what’s holding you back. There’s nothing else holding you back.

Thank you for listening. It was the second episode. It was a pleasure to share this knowledge with you and these insights, and if you have any kind of feedback, don’t hesitate to reach out. I am David the Optimist, and you can find me on social media, especially on Instagram, at David the Optimist, or you can find this project at Magister Coach. Just search for me and give me feedback on this episode. Thank you for listening, and I’ll hear from you in the next episode. Bye bye.