Beliefs play a big part when it comes to achieving our learning goals.

How many times have you heard your teen say any of the following statements?

“I always fail.”

“I’m always bottom of the class.”

“I’m rubbish at Maths.”

“My brother/sister/cousin/best friend is cleverer than me.”

“I’m just average.”

I hear these statements all the time in my coaching sessions with teens and the first thing we do is clear them to create the space to form shiny, new and more helpful beliefs that will empower their learning.

All beliefs start somewhere. No child is born thinking that they are good at something or not good at something.

Most beliefs are formed before the age of 10 (most commonly between the ages of 3 and 7) when a child encounters a situation, doesn’t quite know what to make of it and so will bring all their knowledge and experience learned in life so far to derive a meaning from it and then form a behaviour to keep them “safe”.

Every experience we have is recorded in our unconscious mind. The unconscious mind has the best of intentions. It was programmed in Neanderthal times to keep us alive and alert to the dangers of predators. If the unconscious mind forms a behaviour which keeps us safe once, it continues to repeat this behaviour over and over again. As a result, these behaviours we form as a result of beliefs formed in childhood will often stay with us into adulthood. This means that as adults, we will often unconsciously keep repeating a behaviour long after it stops being helpful.

This is how that scenario played out for me personally:

“I am not sporty”.  This is something I have said countless times throughout my lifetime. Because, up until recently, as far as I was concerned, it was a fact. Just a part of who I am.

Except, it isn’t a fact. It’s a belief.

So, what was it in my case which first led me to believe that I wasn’t sporty? I was 8. I had a teacher that year who was particularly keen on outside sports. We played rounders. A LOT. A pattern began to form whereby I would miss the ball, run to first base, and then be out. At that time, it genuinely wasn’t a lack of effort. I can still hear the groans and exasperation of my long-suffering teammates angrily yelling my name and feel the prickle of shame and humiliation. Gradually, a new pattern began to form: it became my mission to be “out” as soon as humanly possible so that I could sit on the grass at a safe distance.

This pattern continued all through secondary school. During high jump, I ran straight into the pole without even attempting to jump, to spare myself the humiliation of failing. In my mind, sport equalled ridicule. I became more and more creative in my ways to escape the horror of it.

I know I am not alone in this. There were 3 or 4 of us just in my class who, for similar reasons, hated PE and probably in every PE class throughout history. What I find sad about it though is that my avoidance of sport didn’t end when I left school. Throughout my twenties and thirties, I would attend the odd exercise class once, catch sight of myself in the mirror of the gym, tell myself that sport was for the “cool kids” and that I absolutely didn’t belong. And then I would leave. For the past 20 years, exercise has been a strictly solitary activity (usually an exercise DVD or a swim in the local pool). I boycotted all sport to the point where I didn’t even watch it on TV or enter into conversations about it. It was easier just to claim I was disinterested. This isn’t something I did on a conscious level and it has never bothered me. I considered it a fact of life. I stuck to what I was good at.

Then I learnt about the power of beliefs on a course.

I suddenly felt the urge to start running. I pictured myself several months down the line, having done it many times before, and I realized that it was not beyond the realms of possibility that I could be the kind of person who wears trainers. And actually runs!

It was November. At first, I could only face doing it at 6 am when it was dark and there was nobody around to see me. I think that I genuinely expected people to stare incredulously and laugh. But of course, people took no notice. There is no “type” of person who runs in the same way that there is no “type” of person who drives a car or mows the lawn. It is something that anybody can learn how to do. The more you do it, the better you get at it.

You may now be recognising a pattern in your own teen. Perhaps it is not sport – maybe it is Maths or English … or something more general like reading, writing or learning in general.

Imagine how different learning will be once they have cleared those old and unhelpful beliefs. It can be a quick fix. Simply by helping our teens separate facts from beliefs, we can clear their path for a much more fulfilling future for them.