Change your mood, change your life

As our general mood improves, we start to see changes in our lives. Things, or situations that used to affect us are waved off with a smile. We start developing more patience, more faith into the workings of the universe, and more importantly, we start to feel more empathy towards people.
As soon as we consciously let ourselves wallow into dejection, and despondancy, our "mood muscles" get weaker, we start to fret over ordinary situations and we get overwhelmed by insignificant problems.
Beliefs as opposed to principles are a set of assumptions that we hold about our environment and about ourselves.
Most of them are inherited from our parents, the rest is absorbed unconsciously through repeated exposure to ideas and opinions gleaned from our friends, teachers, or neighbors.
They constitute the manual by which we move through the winding labyrinth of life, dealing with its ever-changing nature.
We hold firmly to these beliefs thinking that they are immutable, and we forget that they need to be malleable to be able to fit the wavering nature of our world.
A concrete example would the transportation system. We use boats to sail across the oceans, airplanes to fly around the world, and cars to commute using the roads.
Each one of these modes of transportation serves a specific purpose, and we trade it for a more suitable one once our way of travelling changes.
While this seems logical, and hardly anybody would dare to argue against it, everything changes once we involve beliefs.
Ideas that contradict our beliefs are described as illogical, or irrational.
It is important to be able to be flexible, to drop some beliefs and to pick up new ones as the terrain that we are treading changes. 

We should be able to take some "irrational" decisions that go against some of our firmly-held beliefs if need be.
This flexibility give us more options over how we deal with life's changes.
Beliefs shape our lives, they are the gatekeepers that steer us clear of wandering too far into the unknown by limiting the reach of our decisions.
If you believe a country is not suitable for you, you will not enjoy life once you get there, and if you believe certain fruits would make you sick, you will feel queasy upon eating them.
Sometimes these beliefs serve our purposes, and sometimes they seriously stunt our progress and development.
What if our beliefs don't serve us anymore?
Beliefs are just programs that, unbeknownst to us, dictate most of our behaviors.
The good news is that we can replace them in the same way that we have acquired them, through gradual exposure and repetition.
The first days, weeks, or months would require a conscious effort to rewire new areas of our brains. Those areas would function automatically according to the new system after a belief becomes unconscious.
There are no wrong or right beliefs, each one serves a specific purpose.
Because of the conscious effort needed to change a belief and the sudden departure from our familiar automatic ways that "adjustment" entails, we feel a certain apprehension, and emotional pain when we consciously start altering our ways of thinking.
When trying to adopt a new sets of beliefs, we will have to go through the usual angst and the emotional turmoil that accompanies the task of persuading our brain to change.
Our brain is very economical in its functioning, it would not yield easily to changes in its paradigms because the process requires energy and effort.
We could achieve this by "showing" that we are very serious about our transformation through daily persistent repetition, and exposure to the new ideas.
Ideally our beliefs need be temporary tools, to be discarded as soon as they become a hindrance to our advancement in life.
If we hold on to them longer than is necessary, we would be like a distraught tourist trying to find his way around Rome while looking at a map of Venice.
When do we know that our beliefs don't serve us anymore?
We start to have a deep feeling of dissatisfaction, a feeling that nothing works anymore no matter how hard we try.

We don't have to radically change our beliefs, sometimes small tweaks yield enormous results.
Another major hurdle to overcome, is the social stigma that associates this kind of flexibility with being fickle and unreliable, traits that are frowned upon in society.
Opportunities are all around us, we fail or succeed to see then depending on their alignment with our beliefs, internal maps and paradigms.