Your beliefs are one of the very personal aspects of your personality and the means through which you see the world. These beliefs can impact your thoughts on relationships, goals, family, faith, and more. One of the key characteristics of beliefs is that yours will rarely match anyone else’s.
This is a result of how beliefs are formed and confirmed. Since a person’s beliefs are so integral to who they are, understanding where beliefs come from will be a valuable tool in understanding and relating to others.
The Origin of Beliefs
Every person in the world lives a unique life. There are going to be similarities that result in shared beliefs, such as people from the same family, those who grew up in the same country or town, lived through the same experiences, or are part of the same faith.
But even sharing a few of these experiences and backgrounds still leaves you open to many additional experiences, creating a life that is unique to you and generates your beliefs based on:
- Genetics
- Parents
- Childhood Experiences
- Current Lifestyle
- Education
- Career
- Relationships, and More
When formulating your beliefs, your mind will look at all of these different factors and create a belief system that makes sense in this context, making your beliefs the result of a highly personal thought process that will feel inherently right to you because they are right based on what you have experienced.
This is also the reason that someone else’s beliefs can feel inherently wrong. Your experiences have not necessarily given you the context to understand and accept their beliefs. The result here is that no single person’s beliefs are right or wrong, just as no experience is right or wrong.
Knowing this, when you are confronted with another person’s beliefs, the most productive response is to consider just their beliefs, but the history and experiences that may have led to that perspective while also keeping in mind none of this is wrong, only different.
From here, you can begin to cultivate a relationship and a stronger understanding of each other, or potentially start to change beliefs if either you or another person is open to expanding your knowledge. Alternatively, being more conscious of other people’s perspectives may simply help you to be empathetic and maintain a more positive outlook on the world and the people around you.
