You don’t know anything.

I know what you’re thinking: who the fuck writes a blog related to seeing Jesus in mirrors, throws a picture of Homer Simpson in the middle and then blatantly insults his reader in the first line?

If you haven’t left yet due to the outrageous presentation of this blog post, I’m glad. Funnily enough, they are all relevant to what I’ll be writing about.

When I say you don’t know anything, I say it as a fact. As in literally…. you do not know a single thing.

No matter how much evidence you have to support an opinion of yourself or the world around you, it still isn’t something you know for certain.

You think that you know it, but you really don’t.

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing” – Socrates

The only fact we know for certain is that we are all just clueless.

Do you know where we came from? How we got here? Who the fuck we are?

You may believe that we came here from an evolutionary ‘big bang’ or God or whatever else you believe in, but ultimately you just heard that from either Charles Darwin or the Bible.

Charles Darwin was a person. The Bible was written by people. Jesus Christ was a person.

No human has or ever will know anything for certain – it’s all just ideas & opinions. We’ve been coming up with opinion after opinion after opinion for centuries on end; but we still know nothing.

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So, if nothing is for certain – why not create your own reality? Why be so attached to what you have been conditioned to believe to be true? Why not create opinions and beliefs which benefit you; rather than confine you?

I touched on this in my How to mindfuck YOURSELF blog , but I feel it ties into the topic of self-image also.

If you’re not getting the results you want from life – accept that you’re fucking wrong.

Accept that the way you are currently viewing the world is not helping you. To get the results you want in life, you’ll have to change the way you view reality.

Most people who live life unhappy or unsatisfied are slaves to their own perception of reality. Their ignorance & stubbornness keeps them clinging on to their perception of reality and ultimately holds them back from evolving as a person.

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Self-image is a term that gets thrown around carelessly these days. Often, we just think it is the same thing as confidence. If someone has confidence, then the self-image they hold just follows hand-in-hand with that confidence, right?

Wrong.

You, like most of society, probably believe that someone’s confidence is just due to the cards they’ve been dealt in life. If they were born good-looking, or born into a wealthy family, then they’ll automatically have confidence, charisma and charm.

Wrong again.

Confidence is just a result of someone’s self-image.

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Your self-image is often due to your circumstances, but not in the way you’d think.

When we think of the ‘sort of person’ we are, we are consulting the conception we hold of ourselves in our mind. Our self-image is built up by our own beliefs about ourselves. These beliefs have been unconsciously planted in our mind through past experiences – our triumphs & failures, and the way people have reacted to us (especially in childhood).

From all of these experiences we created the formation of our self-image. We mentally constructed a picture of ourselves.

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The self-image we hold creates problems in two ways:

1) Emotions

If you aren’t getting the results you want, your emotions are not on your side.

All of your emotions are always directly associated with the self-image you hold. They don’t want to change. Your emotions end up holding you in your comfort zone; attached to your self-image.

If you want to go and do something completely outside of your comfort zone, your emotions don’t want you to do that. This is how success barriers, terror barriers, anxiety and whatever else come around.

2) Confirmation bias

We continuously create more and more problems for ourselves due to something called the confirmation bias. The confirmation bias is the human tendency to only notice and observe evidence which supports our self-image.

For example, let’s say you think you’re unattractive and you go out to meet girls. To the regular eye, girls are eyeing you from across the room, smiling at you. To your eye however – which is dictated by your self-image – the girls aren’t interested in any way. You don’t see the opportunities right in front of you because your self-image is clouding your vision.

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Our self-image causes us to ‘act like’ the sort of person we conceive ourselves to be.

Ever wondered why you are constantly having money problems?

The reason is, you perceive yourself to be someone who is constantly having money problems.

It sounds so stupid and obvious; but it is true. The more you dwell on your money problems and associate them with your sense of self, the more money problems you create in your life.

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Every single thing you do, say and think is a direct result of your self-image.

Want more money? Want to be more confident, more charismatic?

All you have to do is alter your self-image.

The self-image you hold is the key to your personality and your behaviour. Change the self-image you hold in your mind and you change your personality and behaviour.

The self-image sets the boundaries of your accomplishments as an individual. It defines what you can and cannot do. Expand your self-image and you expand the ‘area of the possible’.

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The billion-dollar question is… how do we alter our self-image?

Firstly, detach yourself from yourself. Start viewing yourself in the third person. Once you remove the stubbornness of your big-fat-ego from the equation, you can start being open minded enough to actually make beneficial changes to your mentality & perception of reality.

Once you do this, try a few of these:

1) Question your beliefs

The next time you feel incapable of achieving something, ask yourself if that’s a useful belief to have. The same goes for whether you feel unattractive, unworthy or whatever else – question these beliefs.

It doesn’t matter what’s true or what’s not. The truth could be endlessly debated, so why not debate the side that helps you?

2) Disassociate yourself from your emotions

Ignore your emotions of nerves or anxiety. Don’t let them suck you in. View your situation from a logical standpoint and start taking the right action – not the action ‘the type of person’ you are would take.

3) Plan/Imagine/Act

This is the method that worked for me when I realised my self-image was fucking me up, so I’ll throw it in.

Plan – write down all of the characteristics you’d like to have as a person. Think of the things that appeal to YOU, not to other people/society. Model yourself after Jesus Christ if you like, it doesn’t make a difference.

Imagine – form an image in your head of the person you’ve described in your plan. How would it feel to be that person? What would they do/say/think?

It sounds crazy, but your mind can’t tell the difference between an imagined situation and one that’s real. Got anxiety issues? Just imagine conversations with people going super-smoothly. Imagine the feeling you’d get when people are laughing and enjoying your company – keep doing that over and over and over. Eventually, with all these reference experiences, you’ll build up that inner confidence and start seeing yourself as a confident person.

Act – just act exactly like the person you’ve described in your plan. With the images of that person now in your head, it shouldn’t be as hard as you think.

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Changing your self-image will enable you to disregard insults & insecurities that don’t coincide with your perception of yourself. It will enable you to walk through the world with ease, and to create the best results from any situation.

Not only that, but once you change the image you have of yourself, you’ll want to act & behave in a way which strives towards the realisation of that image. Say you’re overweight, often when you imagine how you would look when ripped – you will begin to take action in order to make that image a reality.

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Thanks for reading. Like what you read? Follow me on Twitter @TRRyanPotter for updates

E-mail me at (ryanpotterblog@gmail.com)



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