I recommend reflecting on your experience with this chapter’s exercise before continuing. You can reflect about anything you found relevant, but here are some questions you may want to consider:

Did your initial candidate belief feel fake?

Did that feeling change?

Did you feel like you could change not just a belief but beliefs in general?

Did you sense how your mind adopts beliefs and changes them?

Where and how might you apply your experience in the rest of your life?

Data from Exercises

This exercise is to change a belief deliberately. We know from experience that our beliefs change. Now we’ll do it intentionally. We aren’t changing reality, just our internal representations.

Start with Your Emotions Use your emotions to find beliefs to change. Emotions you don’t like arise from conflict between what you want and what you observe. Emotions you like arise when your beliefs are in sync with your observations. Bauby, Zupan, and Frankl’s message was that when you can’t change the world. you can change your beliefs and create as much meaning in your life as you want. You work with your beliefs, but your emotions guide you.

Trying to adopt a belief that will make your life worse won’t work. New beliefs rarely take root without considering the emotions they will create.
For example, thinking, “I can go to the gym twice a week for a year,” if it means sacrificing something you like more than the gym, like time with your children or some equivalent, fails for most people. It creates too much emotional conflict. Instead of seeking a behavior, which takes willpower, seek an emotion, which motivates without willpower, like joy from exercising.

What to Do

The exercise is to adopt a new belief following these steps, which I’ll elaborate on:
1. Find a belief that leads to emotions you don’t like.
2. Think of emotions you would prefer in that context.
3. Think of a belief that would create an emotion you prefer.
4. Consciously and deliberately think the new belief.
The first three steps of the process are fast. They can take a few minutes.
The fourth usually happens over several days. You don’t have to dedicate time to it, though; you can do it in the background of your regular life.