Your personal development coach

Update Attitudes and Beliefs

Attitudes and beliefs are formed over time, influenced by culture, parents, social circles, and more. As you mature, it is important to question them – to test their validity and even update them for the new perspectives and conditions of today and your adult life.

A key learning outcome, therefore, may sometimes be a new attitude, belief, viewpoint. Follow these suggestions when you realize that your attitudes, beliefs and values need updating.

Name your attitudes, beliefs, values, and assumptions related to what you are trying to learn or change.

  • What is your deeply embedded view and attitude about the importance of what you are learning – the values that underlie it?
  • For example, in a supervisor training program you learn how to delegate and support people. Do you believe that people want to take responsibility or that they have to be watched?

Identify what new knowledge and skills you are comfortable and not comfortable using – feel the discomfort in your body.

  • Recognize that discomfort with new knowledge/skills may be a call to learn at the belief and attitude level – the start of a special kind of learning agenda.

Place old and new beliefs “side-by-side.” List all the benefits of the old and of the new attitude/belief. Decide if you really want to make the shift.

  • Know that changing your attitudes, beliefs and assumptions is not easy. If you are going to learn and change, you must believe -- deep inside -- that seeing things in a new way is the right thing to do – is better for you, your life, and things that matter to you.
  • Changing your assumptions and attitudes may be critical for better dealing with reality. So, take this comparison seriously, immersing yourself in its implications for your view of yourself – who you are and what is important to you.

Imagine yourself putting on a pair of glasses labeled, “my new attitude goggles.” See and feel yourself experiencing the benefits of having a new point of view.

  • Consider revising your Future Card (in Tools) or immersing in a future vision where the benefits of having a new point of view are in play.
  • See yourself in specific situations where your attitude, belief or value may affect what you do and say. Feel, see, and experience the imaginary world where you approach work and life from a different point of view. Step fully into the new value system you know is important for your success.