2.2. Beliefs

By beliefs, we mean those silly little thoughts that we hold unspoken inside, which would, if exposed to the light of rationalism, fall apart in a second's worth of examination. Like the belief that makes you kick the lawn mower when it doesn't start even though the only outcome is to stub your toe (“This thing should work and I'm punishing it for misbehaving”). Or the belief that makes you snap at your spouse for not putting the cap on the toothpaste tube even though you make as many mistakes of that nature as he/she does (“They should live up to certain standards which I punish even myself for not meeting”). Or, to use a more familiar example, the belief that error return checking can be omitted (“It's only a little test program … nothing will go wrong”).

Beliefs can be either enabling (“I can do this!”) or limiting. Check out these common limiting beliefs and see if anything sounds familiar:

• “I could never be as good a programmer as so-and-so.”

• “My programs just never work right.”

• “I could never understand that complicated computer science stuff.”

How good a person you believe yourself to be is termed self-esteem. And yes, it does have a bearing on how well you program. It's been our experience that the people with low self-esteem (insufficient hubris, in Perl terminology) are the ones who unconsciously compare themselves to the computer and come up short. If you think the computer's going to beat you, you've handicapped yourself unnecessarily. You need the gall to believe that you can handle any problem it can hurl your way. Even the kind you've never met before. Of course, nothing feeds the ego like a track record of success, but some people who have that track record still don't acknowledge it. And if you don't have that track record yet, how can you get it? What resources do you have for improving your knowledge, skill, and experience?

To sit in front of a computer with a limiting belief is to handicap yourself before you even begin. But it's not always easy to tell that you have limiting beliefs, because they almost always go unspoken, unvoiced even in your thoughts. They just sit there like a faceless bureaucrat in an anonymous government office rubberstamping “Application Denied” on your hopes and ambitions.

So, like an astronomer finding a black hole, you identify a limiting belief by its effect on what surrounds it. A good way to do this is by observing changes in your mood that have no good explanation. If you're working on a program and realize that while you entered the office in an upbeat mood, you're now sitting under a cloud of funk, ask yourself what changed, and when? If you're aware enough to notice that it happened the moment you sat in front of the keyboard, what was going through your mind at the time?

Like firefly flashes in the night, limiting beliefs trigger sudden negative statements that zip through your brain almost too quickly to notice. Was it the “Computers always end up beating me” thought? Or the “I'm afraid I'll screw something up horribly” thought? Or one of thousands of other possibilities? Whatever it was, the moment you catch it, it will dissolve under the power of awareness like blowing on a dandelion. Because you know that whatever your history, you're not bound to repeat it, and you know if you talk with the right people about what you're doing, no honest mistake is going to be catastrophic.