Beliefs

I believe that life on Earth arose from nonlife. I believe that evolution explains the origin of humans through natural processes. I believe that the development process to our current life has been a gradual process of biological evolution with a duration of more than four billions years. I believe that humans share a common ancestry with other primates such as chimpanzees and gorillas. 

I believe that Jesus lived and that Mary was the mother of Jesus. I have difficulty believing that a non-human being was the father of Jesus. In addition, I have difficulty believing that Jesus was able to perform miracles such as walking on water or calming storms. I understood that Jesus lived less than 35 years and chose to remain single during his life. He did not have a wife. He did not have children. I believe that the important values of Jesus - including love, kindness, compassion, humility, thankfulness and forgiveness - are values that are important to live a good life. Also, I believe that finding purpose is important to live a life of service. 

I believe that when a human being dies, the heart stops beating, the person stops breathing and the blood stops flowing. When the heart stops pumping blood, oxygen and nutrient delivery to tissues and organs halts. Without oxygen, cells begin to die. I am not sure if death is the end of consciousness and existence. It may be possible, I think, that the inner self of a human being - including thoughts we have, emotions we feel, personality, personal values and beliefs, strengths as well as purpose - becomes a part of nature. 

What is this belief about?

Over many years a core belief of mine was that I must be perfect all the time to in order to be as worthy as other people. Reading the book Freedom from your inner critic as well as the book Positive intelligence I learned more about this inner critic, which I call the perfectionist, and which is a part of me. When the perfectionist voice enters my mind, it tells me to hate mistakes, be critical of myself, feel frustrated, disappointed and angry of things that are not perfect enough. The perfectionist voice also tells me to organize everything well, worry that people will mess up the order I created, and criticize people - no matter how hard they work. When the perfectionist voice enters my mind, it tells me to be very sensitive to criticism of myself and stop doing things, which I cannot do perfectly.

Where does this belief come from?

I believe that a key reason for this perfectionist belief, which I have, is that my father had a similar belief. For example, my father openly said that products, which he created, must be the best quality. His buying behavior was also strongly influenced by his perfectionist inner critic. For example, he only bought the best kitchen machines for my mother, the best furniture on the market, the best cars, and the best clothes. Also, he only wanted to live in the best places and houses. Nothing was good enough. Everything had to be the best. I think it is possible that I developed the perfectionist in my childhood because I thought that by being perfect I would be better accepted and more loved. 

What does this belief make me feel?

Because I believed that I must be perfect all the time, I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform in all kinds of situations. For example, I believed that it was of very high importance to be accepted, respected and loved that that I had the best marks in all subjects at school. Also, I believed that being the best in any sports, which I practiced, would mean that I would be more accepted, respected and loved. Being perfect and being the best was very important for me to feel worthy. The perfectionist belief forced me to feel fear of what would happen if I did not perform perfectly. To what extent would I get criticized, belittled, laughed at and/or ridiculed for not performing perfectly? As performance was, for me, equal to personal worth, not being perfect also meant that I felt less worth than other people. The perfectionist belief forced me to also feel shame when I did not do things perfectly. For example, I recall that if I made a mistake doing something - even doing something the first time - I would blush, because I felt shame of not doing that particular thing perfectly.

What do I do to manage the perfectionist voice?

There are several actions that can help me manage the perfectionist voice, when it appears in my mind. For example, when the perfectionist voice enters my mind, I ask questions to the perfectionist voice such as, “Hello perfectionist, are you there again saying that I should....?" What also helps me is to be kind to myself and practice self love, for example by showing appreciation, compassion and forgiveness with myself and reminding myself that I was created through love. Because I know that the perfectionist voice in my head is a part of me, I try not to get angry with it. Why? Because being angry with the perfectionist voice in my mind would mean that I do not show myself love. Instead, I visualize myself as a child doing something that I love to do. An additional initiative, which helps me, is to develop ideas about how I can turn the critical perfectionist voice into a helper. I found out, for example, that it works well for me to use my perfectionist voice when practicing something. Then, in a performance situation, I try to simply enjoy the time with people around me.

Growing up as a child in Aarhus in Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s, I remember I had a view that success was measured primarily by money people earned. It was something I learned from my parents and more or less everyone else. I recall that I did not question that belief. I recall thinking that it is simply how life is. My logic was this: Some people are more successful than others and earn more money than others. Therefore, they have better lives than others. At the start of the 2020s, I recall I started having conversations with my mother about this belief. And I was positively surprised that she opened up about what happened in her life in the 1960s.

Asking my mother why she and my father invested in land, built houses, as well as bought cars, furniture, many kitchen appliances, plates, cutlery, clothes and several other things over a relatively short period of time, she explained to me that that was the norm at that time. Everyone did it. My mother also explained that when neighbors, friends and/or family members had invested in or bought something, other neighbors and/or other family members bought something similar or better. What I learned from what my mother told me, is that people were continuously comparing themselves with each other and wanted to impress each other by buying bigger, better, and more beautiful things. The assumption, which people based more or less their entire lives on, was - as I understood it - that when people had better and more beautiful things than other people had, they would gain more social status. And increasing their social status in the communities, where they lived, would help people feel more respected, more liked, and more loved. As a consequence of this, they would become more satisfied, feel better, could relax more and have better lives. As I understood what my mother told me, this was the story that people told themselves and believed in from the 1950s. 

I think there were more experiences that led to the change in belief from "the world is a place where success is measured by money people have" to the belief "the world is a place where success is measured in many different ways". I think the first situation that led me to rethink the belief was during the years after my parents divorced. For example, I recall me that my parents did not communicate much with each other. And because of the limited communication between the two of them, communication between them ran through me. In other words, I was passing on messages from my mother to my father as well as from my father to my mother. Without asking for it, I got the role as a kind of human communication app. What I recall was that relatively often, my mother as well as my father did not have the same version of a particular message that I passed on. This created much frustration in my mind and caused me to feel much pain my heart. I think this was an important incident that made me redefine how to measure success. The way people communicate with each other became an additional way of measuring success.

Throughout a large part of my life, I believed that I must be happy all the time. I have thought quite a lot about why I had this belief. Reflecting on research I did on this as well as on conversations I had not least with my mother, I believe that this belief goes back to the time when my parents divorced. Following the divorce of my parents, my mother had a strong will to make it work for her and me. And she wanted me to feel happy. She did not to accept negative emotions such as sadness. She wanted to cover those negative emotions up and push them away. Naturally, I did not feel happy all the time. For example, I recall that in different situations in life, I felt rather negative emotions such as anger, sadness, fear and shame. In several situations, I think I felt these emotions as a natural consequence of the divorce that my parents went through.  For example, I recall feeling fear that if I could lose my father, who moved out of our home, could I also lose my mother? I also recall feeling shame when I was with class mates, whose parents were not divorced. And I recall feeling anger because the divorce of my parents had happened when I was only 5 years old. 

I experienced that when I felt negative emotions, my mother was focused on fixing that and relatively quickly make me feel happy again. In particular, I remember situations during which I felt anger. Often, I felt criticized by my mother for feeling anger. And in those situations I did not experience that my mother accepted that I felt anger and tried to understand where that anger came from. I did not hear any questions or feel any interest from my mother to understand emotions I was feeling. Thinking back on my childhood, I recall that it was important for my mother to make me stop feeling anger and become happy as soon as possible. 

It took over 40 years years for me to change the belief "I must be happy all the time" to the belief "I accept emotions that I feel and believe that emotions come and go." How did I succeed with this transformation? It happened primarily through reading books such as Permission to feel, The language of emotions, The truth about children and divorse, Rising strong and Emotional Agility. Reflecting individually about what happened in my life and about what I have learned reading books and about conversations I have had with people have been beneficial to manage emotions well. In particular, I have found it useful to work on not fighting emotions I feel but accepting and understanding them. 

Earlier in my life I believed that creativity was limited to only a few people. In particular, I thought of people, who were painting. Over time, I experienced that this belief started to change. Gradually, I started to believe that creative thinking can be applied to more or less any task. Also, I gradually started to believe that everyone can get better at thinking creatively.  In education, for example, I remember I started to think creatively about what teachers do. What I had seen in my life as a student in primary education, high school education and higher education was that a teacher often sits or stands at the front of the class between a desk and a blackboard. Gradually, ideas started popping into my mind about the role and location of a teacher: What if a  teacher places herself or himself among the students? What if there was no desk at the front of the classroom? What if there was no classroom? What if students are teachers? What happens to learning if students - in particular children - get no grades? Thinking creatively about how we could learn better helped me to think creatively about how people do things in many other industries. What it also did was help me become aware that curiosity is a key value of mine. I like to ask questions. I like to explore how we can do things better. I like to do things that help serve people, so we can live better lives.

In our genes, we may be born with selfish traits as well as with cooperative traits such as empathy and fairness. Both evolved in our ancestors to help them survive in environments they lived in. More on this topic here.