Note: My aim is to publish new articles at least once a week, which I've been able to do pretty well for the past 3-4 months, but last week was simply way too busy as I had to focus on work, school assignments, exams, and a few other commitments. I should be back on track now.

I think the topic of liming beliefs falls into "personal development basics," so to speak, but it is something that's useful to think about every now and then. It's also a topic I have never written about before, so hopefully it will be of interest to you :)

Now, what exactly is a limiting belief? Let's start with some examples:

• I love photography but I'm never going to be good enough to make it for living.
• It's always someone rich and famous who gets the kind of girl/guy I want.
• I was bullied as a kid which made me an introvert, and because of that I can never become successful in relationships.
• I am not smart enough to do well in business.
• I would love to write a book, but I don't have the talent/patience/creativity.
• My kids don't respect me because I don't have a well-paying job.
• Women/men don't like me because I'm fat.
• I'm overweight because of my genes, so I can never become fit.

As I've written before, our interpretation of the world and what happens around us is largely based on our beliefs. These beliefs can be roughly divided into two groups; positive and negative, or enabling and limiting. It's the negative, limiting beliefs that prevent us from achieving what we want in life, whereas the positive, enabling beliefs support us when we're reaching for our goals. 

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Note: I wanted to try something different and refreshing with this weeks article, and I can only hope that my message about the importance of learning what happiness actually is comes across despite the writing style.

The metallic doorknob was warm to the touch. The door itself was of sturdy, wooden make, and behind the door would be 28 second year high school students whose lives he wanted to change. This was the moment of truth, so to speak. This was what the hard work of the past two years had been leading to. This would be, for the first time ever, Happiness 101 - an elective course in the science and philosophy of happiness, aimed at students who still were to decide what they wanted to do with their lives.

He wished that he would have had a chance to attend this course back when he was a student. It would have saved him a few years of drudgery, moving from job to job, from illusion to illusion, trying to pursue fleeting images of what would make him happy. He imagined being happy traveling the world. He wasn't. He imagined having a nice house and a nice car to make him happy. They didn't. He tried other pursuits too; practicing martial arts and immersing himself in painting, and sometimes he did feed happiness, but the happiness was always on the run, always seeming to slip his grasp and move farther away when he was about to reach it.

Then, two years ago, a friend of his shared a link on facebook that changed his life. It was a video recording of Matthieu Ricard's speech about the Habits of happiness. In that speech there is a section that imprinted itself on his memory, a section which he can recall word-by-word even to this day: 

So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness? Very often we look outside. We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say "everything to be happy." To have everything to be happy, that very sentence already bears the doom of destruction of happiness; to have everything. If we miss something it collapses. And also when things go wrong we try to fix things outside so much, but our control on the outer world is limited, temporary, and often illusory.

So now look at inner conditions. Aren't they stronger? Isn't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering? And isn't that stronger? We know by experience, that we can be in what we call "a little paradise" and yet be completely unhappy within.

...The experience that translates everything is within the mind.

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One of the biggest life lessons I had in 2009 was that my personality is in a state of constant change. The change may be small, subtle, and quiet or take big, life-changing leaps, but it's there and it's continuous. The fact that personality changes over time is not a big surprise in itself; I think everyone can take a look back a few years and immediately see how they were different back then compared to who they are now. However, I've hold the assumption that it takes major life experiences - such as break-ups, marriages, parents getting divorced, moving to live on your own for the first time etc. - for a personality to change, but considering everything that has happened in my own thought and behavior patterns during 2009, I have had to abandon that belief.

According to Dictionary.com, the definition of psychological personality is

a) the sum total of the physical, mental, emotional, and social characteristics of an individual.

b) the organized pattern of behavioral characteristics of the individual.

In psychology, the act of learning implies behavior change. Meaning, that when something is learned, the behavior of the learner changes as a result. If personality then is an organized pattern of behavioral characteristics of an individual, learning changes also the personality of the learner. This does not require major life experiences. With open and curious mind it's easily possible to learn something new every single day, and the cumulative outcome of that learning is a changed personality.

It's very important to realize, that no one is born more confident, social, outgoing, competitive, creative etc. than anyone else. Your early life experiences are paramount in the forming of your personality, which affects how you behave and think in different situations. Although your personality greatly determines how you think and act, the way you think and act also affects your personality. It's a two-way connection.

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You have finished cleaning the plate of the last bits of ham. You take a sip of your beer, feel your stomach bulging and think: "This is Christmas, it's ok to indulge and eat in excess. Soon it will be next year, and then I will get back in shape. I will start exercising and eating healthy, and by the summer I'll look great when I'm lying on the beach in my swimming trunks and enjoying the sun. Promise."

I wonder how many thousands, or millions of people are making these kinds of New Year's promises: "I will lose 20 pounds", "I will go to the gym 3 times a week", or "I will become a vegetarian". Few weeks into the future and most of them have quit, and most likely also made up reasons and justifications for themselves about why they had to quit. It's always something external, so that one doesn't have to face the reality of being a failure and take responsibility for it.

There are a few reasons why this happens. One is motivation. And I'm not even talking about how to motivate yourself, or what kind of techniques can be used to build up motivation. Most people lose the motivation to make a change because they haven't really thought the whole thing through. They haven't had a long, honest conversation with themselves about what is the current reality of the situation, and why it needs to be changed. The motivation for losing weight is never the actual event of weight loss, and if you don't look deeper, your motivation will be short lived.

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I don't think I've ever read as much as I did in 2009. On top of hundreds of blog posts I've finished somewhere around 40 books. This year has also shaped me a lot as a person. A year ago I was way more shy, overweight guy spending days at work and nights playing World of Warcraft. Now I've started to take much more control over my social life and ambitions, lost 10kg's, and gotten very excited about how the human body and mind works.

This is my list of ten best, most influential books of 2009. Some of them have been published already earlier, so 2009 stands for the year I read them.

The Vegetarian Myth
by Lierre Keith

"The 4.8 pounds of grain fed to cattle to produce one pound of beef for human beings represents a colossal waste of resources in a world still teeming with people who suffer from profound hunger and malnutrition," writes Jim Motavalli. Yes, it is a waste, but not for the reasons he thinks. As we have seen in abundance, growing that grain will require the felling of forests, the plowing of prairies, the draining of wetlands, and the destruction of topsoil. In most places on earth, it will never be sustainable, and where it just possibly might be, it will require rotation with animals on pasture. And it's ridiculous to the point of insanity to take that world-destroying grain and feed it to a ruminant who could have happily subsisted on those now extinct forests, grasslands, and wetlands of our planet, while building topsoil and species diversity.

This book is arguably the most important one I read in 2009. No other book has carried such a profound message about how and why agriculture has driven species extinct and destroyed ecosystems. Most importantly, this book has taught me about the meaning of topsoil, and because agriculture is destroying topsoil instead of building it, agriculture in itself is not - and cannot be - sustainable.

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