Before culture, politics or religion, the largest and greatest agreed upon social standard set of beliefs is language.
The language we use to communicate, label and define things is based on a standard set of beliefs. So when someone says “apple” we know what they mean because we know what they believe “apple” is. On the other hand, if someone says “manzana” and we don't understand them. It's because we don't know what they mean by “manzana”; we don't know what they believe that is.
Even though most of us look at language as a kind of truth, in reality all of the words we use are made up. Sometimes over 1,000 new words are added to our dictionary in a year. And if we read anything written by Shakespeare, we can easily find many obsolete words we no longer commonly use.
Words and their meanings aren't truths but beliefs. And this is why languages are able to evolve and grow or why languages die out. It's also why when we debate with someone with different religious or political beliefs it's difficult for us to understand each other. We might be using the same words but what we believe those words mean are different so we can't make sense of what each of us are saying.
Languages allows us to communicate, label and define things and the key is Belief. It's not the words we're using that allow us to make sense of what things are or what we're saying to each other but knowing and understanding the beliefs behind those words.
So when we communicate with ourselves, similar principles apply. If we tell ourselves we're “Not good enough”, do we know and understand exactly what we believe “Not good enough” is? And if we want to be “good enough”, do we know and understand exactly what we believe that is? If we don't know exactly what we believe about the things we tell ourselves we won't be able to make sense of them, making it impossible for us to resolve or achieve them if that's what we want to do.
If we want to know and understand what our feelings are communicating to us, we have to know and understand what we believe about them. So becoming emotionally intelligent is about knowing how to label and define our feelings but knowing what we believe about them.
We can communicate through words, symbols like the alphabet or kanji characters, emojis and memes but what we're really doing is communicating through beliefs.
Comments