Marisa Peer: Most Replayed Moment: Your Thoughts Shape Your Reality! How To Rewrite Limiting Beliefs

The host opens with a question he says he has also explored in his own recent book: if our lives are governed by beliefs about the world, ourselves 'and everything in between', can we actually choose them? The guest answers 'I think so' and uses her own life as the first piece of evidence. She describes her childhood as one that 'wasn't awful, but it also wasn't amazing', and says the beliefs she held then are completely different from the ones she holds now because she chose to give herself better ones.

you make your beliefs and then your belief turn right around and make you

Her mechanism rests on confirmation bias: once you have chosen a belief, you look for proof of it, and you will find it. Her example is animals. Someone who believes dogs are 'barky, yappy, horrible things' will feel so anxious around a dog that the belief becomes true. Someone who believes dogs are 'the most loyal, gorgeous, loving things' will bring a different energy to the same encounter. Her conclusion is that people should keep upgrading, updating and questioning their beliefs.

where did I get that from? Is that true? Who told me that belief? And even if it's true for them, does it have to be true for me?

She then argues that many beliefs are inherited and out of date. She says she sees a lot of women who believe that if you are 'really famous and rich, you'll never find a guy.' In her view that was 'probably true' a hundred years ago, when men wanted women at home, but it is not true now. 'So your grandmother's belief is not your belief,' she says. As a contrast, she points to her daughter's generation, which she says does not do body shaming or fat shaming and has 'a whole different language', and which she finds 'so refreshing.' She repeats her central claim: you can always choose your beliefs, and you should keep asking whether they are even true, 'because so often it's not true at all.' Often, she says, a belief is just something you were taught or went along with.

The host pushes back using the guest's own cat example. He says he likes all animals but finds cats 'a little bit scratchy, sometimes a little bit, you know, annoying, not as loving as dogs', and jokes that he may annoy a lot of cat people. If that is what he believes, then telling himself that cats are wonderful and don't scratch feels like 'just lying to myself.'

He then makes the objection personal. He could tell himself he is amazing and attractive, he says, but in his subconscious mind he still carries the experience of being bullied at seven years old by a kid who called him fat. This is the main tension of the excerpt: can a deliberately chosen belief overcome one formed by experience, or does it just sit on top of it?

am I just not lying to myself?

The guest does not deny that it is lying. She embraces the word.

I think you should lie, cheat and steal every day of your life, lie to your mind, cheat fear and steal back the confidence you were born