1. The Seductive Lure of “Belief Above All”
I recently came across an Anthony Robbins post on LinkedIn:
“What we consider possible or impossible is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.”
It’s the kind of line that goes viral — short, uplifting, and vague enough that everyone can project their own meaning onto it. We all want to believe our limits are just stories we tell ourselves, merely to be demolished on our way to extraordinary achievement.
But slogans like this carry a hidden cost: they make belief sound like the master key to achievement while quietly suggesting that if you fail, you just didn’t believe enough. That’s the belief burden — a dopamine hit ¹, a sugar high that wears off quickly, leaving only the hard edges of reality behind.
2. The Belief Burden
The belief burden is the unspoken message:
“If at first you don’t succeed, believe harder!”
Didn’t get the job? Believe harder.
Business failed? You weren’t committed enough.
Still struggling? Your mindset needs work.
It’s a perfect trap — psychologically addictive but factually bankrupt. Instead of examining what actually went wrong (skills, strategy, timing, genuine constraints), we’re told to double down on self-belief. “Believe harder! Your faith is lacking!” It’s victim-blaming disguised as empowerment. And it conveniently absolves the self-help industry from the burden of delivering real results — most of the time.
It keeps you spinning in the identity trap — the very thing I wrote about in my essay, Before the Learning, the Undoing.
My First Unlearning was realizing I am not my identity. Robbins’ framing makes belief in identity the whole enchilada.
Real growth comes from subtracting illusions, not inflating them. Because reality has sharper teeth than belief can dull — and she’s not buying your affirmations.
3. When Belief Backfires
The belief myth assumes most people underestimate their capabilities. The research reveals the exact opposite: we’re most often dangerously overconfident.
Psychologists call it the Dunning–Kruger Effect — people with the least competence in a domain are the most likely to overrate their skill. (Crypto in 2021, anyone?)
Hands down, if I ever need cardiac surgery, I want a surgeon with wicked skill — not one who merely believes he’s the greatest of them all.
Then there’s Illusory Superiority, the tendency for most of us to believe we’re above average in abilities, intelligence, and even driving skill — a statistical impossibility that lands us squarely in Lake Wobegon². (Ninety-three percent of drivers think they’re better than average.)
Layer in Confirmation Bias, our built-in habit of seeking evidence that confirms what we already believe, and the picture gets worse. Strong beliefs can blind us to contrary facts, keeping us stuck in bad decisions long after reality has rendered its verdict.
Here’s what the research actually shows: while mindset matters, genuine constraints are real — and often underestimated, not overestimated. The bigger danger isn’t limiting beliefs; it’s overconfidence driving poor decisions.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that we believe too little. It’s that we believe too much in the wrong things.
4. The Middle Ground
If the belief myth oversells possibility, pure cynicism undersells it.
Belief does matter — sometimes more than we think — but not in the way Robbins’ soundbite suggests.
Research and lived experience both show that many people dounderestimate what’s possible for them, especially for incremental improvements or adjacent skills. If you can run five miles today, you can probably train for six. If you can hold a basic conversation in Spanish, fluency isn’t fantasy. Belief can be the spark that gets you to try.
But sparks don’t burn without fuel. Possibility isn’t determined by belief alone:
Possibility = (belief × effort × circumstance × reality) ^ clarity
Where the exponent clarity is the propulsive force of clearly understood objectives, prioritized ruthlessly in an ocean of competing desires. Without clarity, the other terms scatter energy in every direction; with it, they focus monochromatically into a single intense beam, burning through obstacles like a high-powered laser.
A healthy mindset extends your reach, but it’s only effective when paired with skill-building, accurate feedback, and an honest appraisal of the terrain. Without those, belief becomes all throttle and no gas. And the real tragedy isn’t just overconfidence — it’s the talented person who never tries because they’ve convinced themselves they’re not “that type of person.”
I’ll explore the catalytic — and sometimes explosive — role of clarity, and how to create it, in a future essay.
5. Beyond Belief: The DMN and Mindsparks
Robbins focuses on conscious beliefs — the stories we tell ourselves in the mirror. But the real action happens backstage, in neural networks we can’t directly control. Not yet.
The brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) isn’t just the source of creative insights; it’s also where the inner critic operates during those “off-task” moments. Mindsparks — sparks of insight and sparks of self-criticism — both emerge from the same deep neural combustion (a theme I explored in more depth here). The same neural networks that generate breakthrough solutions can also fuel 3 a.m. worry sessions about why you’ll never succeed.
This is where the self-help industry often goes off the rails. It sells “the subconscious mind” as a mystical, all-powerful entity you can “program” like a computer to manifest whatever you want. In that framing, it’s a genie you summon through affirmations and visualization. But reality is a terrible genie: it grants the wishes you’ve earned, not the ones you’ve chanted.
The factual reality is less magical and far more interesting. The DMN is unconscious processing: pattern recognition, memory consolidation, and associative thinking happening far below the threshold of awareness. It follows well-charted neural patterns, operates within measurable constraints, and runs in the same biological system as conscious thought.
Self-help: Your subconscious is a genie — rub it right and get whatever you want. Didn’t get what you wanted? Rub harder. Still nothing? You are not rubbing it right.
Neuroscience: Your brain is a pattern-matching machine working within biological and physical limits. Want more? Feed the brain.
Robbins’ statement is essentially the same “subconscious programming” myth, rebranded as beliefs about who we are. Both miss the more grounded truth: background mental activity can be powerful, but it’s not magic — and it still operates inside reality’s lines.
You can tend the conditions for mindsparks — curiosity, downtime, exposure to new ideas — but you can’t dictate when they’ll ignite, what they’ll illuminate, or where they’ll land. Understanding this prevents both magical thinking and learned helplessness.
6. Full-on Contact with Reality
Reality doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t care about your affirmations, your vision board, or how deeply you believe in your potential.
It plays by its own rules — physics, economics, biology, and the agency of other people — and no amount of internal programming changes those external facts. We don’t live in Keanu’s Matrix.
The self-help fantasy says you can think your way around reality instead of through it. But breakthroughs don’t come from ignoring constraints — they come from understanding them so deeply you can leverage them. Engineers don’t defeat gravity; they use it. Great investors don’t eliminate risk; they price it accurately.
The illusion here is thinking we control reality by believing in it, when in fact belief seldom survives first contact with reality. That’s not an argument against belief — it’s a call to ground it in skill, feedback, and the unfiltered facts of the world as they are.
Remember: reality has sharper teeth than belief can dull — and she’s not buying your affirmations.
True contact with reality — embracing both its possibilities and its limits — is where authentic growth and genuine peace are found.
This is the real unlearning: not believing less, but believing more precisely. Not avoiding reality, but learning to dance with it — without succumbing to the lure of fuzzy thinking. No matter how good it feels in the moment.
Your Turn
Have you ever believed you could do something that others thought impossible — and succeeded? Or believed in something strongly but reality had other plans? How did you know when to push harder and when to recalibrate?
I’d love to hear your stories, insights, or even disagreements. Please feel welcome to share your reflections publicly in the comments or privately via email at: undoing_raaj (at) proton (dot) me.
Footnotes
- A “dopamine hit” is the brief surge of pleasure or motivation you feel after a rewarding activity, like eating sweets, scrolling social media, or achieving a small goal. Dopamine is the brain’s reward chemical.
- Lake Wobegon is a fictional Midwestern town from Garrison Keillor’s radio show A Prairie Home Companion, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” It’s shorthand for the human tendency to overrate ourselves.
Gratitude to Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash for the image.
