By viewing yourself a certain way, as having a particular set of qualities or traits, or as being a good or bad person, you can change the deeply ingrained behaviors that feel second-nature to you, ones you didn’t think possible to change.

In this article, we’ll discuss how who you think you are greatly affects your behavior, decisions, and how you treat others.

What You Believe to Be True about Yourself Affects Your Behavior

The person you believe yourself to be and the traits you believe yourself to have will seep into how you behave. If you believe yourself to be a good person that tends to make morally good decisions, you’re likely to seize every opportunity to give of yourself in some way.

Similarly, if you believe yourself to be a bad person or a deadbeat, you’re likely going to make poor decisions more frequently. You are more likely to behave how you expect yourself to behave, rather than break that mold.

We tend to fall in line with our expectations of ourselves. These behaviors can be hard to change because changing them involves changing your view of yourself and what you believe to be true about that. We’ll go more in-depth on how you can go about changing these in the last section.

What You Believe to Be True about Yourself Affects the Decisions You Make

Believe it or not, your expectations of yourself affects the decisions you make daily. As we said above, whether you see yourself as a good or a bad person could lead you to make good or bad decisions.

If you believe that you will make a certain decision, you’re likely going to make that decision. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve already made your mind up on it before the decision was ever presented to you.

This can also cause you to be indecisive. If what you believe to be true about yourself is leading you to make a certain decision, but your brain is warning you against it by making you doubt this pull or just feel wrong about it, it can lead you to be extremely indecisive and could even render you incapable of reaching a decision at all.

What You Believe to Be True about Yourself Affects the Way You Treat Others

The qualities and traits you believe yourself to have greatly affects how you treat those around you. As we’ve said above, you’ll behave how you expect yourself to behave. If you believe yourself to be a generous person, you’re going to behave more generously.

If you believe yourself to be an introvert, you’ll likely to not spend much time with others, where if you believe yourself to be an extrovert, you’ll likely spend little time with just yourself.

This can affect the way you treat others around you. You can be more or less willing to be involved in their lives. It can cause you to be grumpy or cranky when you’re asked to be in certain situations and can even cause you to neglect those you care about most simply because you don’t view whatever it is as “your scene.”

So Can You Do About It?

In light of this fact, how do you go about making changes to those ingrained behaviors? Well first, you have to identify the problem areas or areas you’d like to change and analyze how your beliefs about yourself could be affecting them.

Next comes the hard part, actually making the changes to your behavior. This step takes time and diligent effort. You have to work at it consciously for a while to be able to effectively change it.

Remind yourself daily that you can change the type of person you are, control the decisions you make, and thus control your destiny. If you change what you believe about yourself, you can change these deeply ingrained behaviors and see a difference in how you behave, the decisions you make, and how you treat others.

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