I’m a firm believer that if you want something, your mindset is crucial.
I also believe that people who succeed maintain a certain mindset despite appearances. Even when they seem to be failing, they maintain an inner certainty that they are destined to succeed.
So isn’t it interesting that the root of the word “confidence” is the Latin con fide.
With faith.
In a post last December, the Argyleist (named as a featured blog on Technorati last night, which is how I happened to find this post — congrats, Argyleist!) raises the subject of faith:
I’m not necessarily talking about faith in a god specifically, but faith in anything. Believing in something without any real solid proof.
My take on this is that people err when they compartmentalize “faith” as exclusive to religion or spirituality, something that can’t be applied to the compartment that is governed by “proof.” So this morning, Todd Zywicki at The Volokh Conspiracy put up a post about The Ethical Brain, by Michael Gazzaniga, which has a chapter on religion, and writes:
One interesting point he makes in passing is that it turns out that scientists are just attached to their particular theories as religious believers, and in fact, scientists are just as reluctant to surrender their beliefs about science when confronted with contrary evidence as are religious believers.
Exactly.
The simple fact is that “faith” or “belief” is an intimate aspect of our cognitive experience. We like to claim that there are some things that are objectively “true” because they can be experientially proven, but that’s not the case — things we “know” will happen are actually just pretty solid guesses. To use a somewhat absurdist argument: the Earth has circled the sun every day for some 5 billion years. That doesn’t mean our beloved orb will rise daily in the east forever. Granted, it would be a waste of time to plan for a contingency in case the sun fails to make its appearance tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t taking morning on faith.
This all sounds too esoteric to be useful, and when it comes to the sun it probably is, but parse it out in the more intimate workings of our lives and we find it can be useful indeed. Faith “in the substance of things not seen” is the cognitive equivalent of walking, which as Laurie Anderson observed so smartly lo those many years ago is actually an act of falling:
You’re walking. And you don’t always realize it,
But you’re always falling.
With each step, you fall forward slightly.
And then catch yourself from falling.
Over and over, you’re falling.
And then catching yourself from falling.
And this is how you can be walking and falling
At the same time.
We can’t make a move without faith, so as I wrote last night, the real question is not “to believe or not to believe” so much as “where does my belief lead me?”
My mom read a piece about this guy in her local paper and clipped it to show me when we gathered at my folks’ for Christmas.
He’s discovered, lo and behold, that if he doesn’t beat himself up about what he eats, he doesn’t gain weight.
If you don’t believe that I was the first one to have that idea, just ask Mom, she’ll tell you. It was in the 80s btw, predating this book by Evelyn Tribole: “Intuitive Eating”” by a decade, at least.
I’ve got it documented in any case. I wrote an essay about it that was published in this Chicken Soup for the Soul book about weight loss.
Only my version has a dog angle too, heh heh heh. I had a lively mixed breed at the time, named Brett, and I’d been coming to the realization that, with dogs, it’s better to reinforce what they’re doing right than play Obedience Commandante, chasing after them yelling no no no no no all the time.
It’s less stressful and, wonder of wonders, also makes for a better-behaved dog.
Next it occurred to me that if focusing on the positive worked for my dog, why not try it on myself? So I stopped punishing myself for eating “junk” and started noticing how nice it was to eat nutritious food that tastes good.
I’d “dieted” myself up to about 25 pounds over my ideal weight but it came off, slowly but surely, as soon as I committed to my new attitude.
I’m not necessarily in favor of the label “intuitive eating,” however. I know the concept of intuition is very trendy, but if you’re emotionally sensitive and even worse kinesthetically oriented, you end up with a lot of inner data to sort through, and I’ve never been able to isolate “intuition” from everything else.
In any case, you don’t need it. If you are worried about your weight, you need to de-charge the whole issue. Do that, and the rest will fall into place. Don’t do it, and you’ll keep proving your self-identity as “person with a weight problem.”
Or put another way, behavior follows intent — just like a dog’s behavior follows its trainer’s.
