Reality is a Thing of the Past…
What if the reality you trust is nothing more than a story your subconscious tells you? What if your beliefs, formed before you even understood the world, are secretly running your life?
The truth is, the world you see isn’t what’s real; it’s what your mind wants you to see. Deep within the hidden corridors of our minds, potent beliefs about ‘self’ are quietly scheming.
Our core beliefs silently shape every move we make and the reality we craft for ourselves each day. And forgotten beliefs from your earliest days hold the key to unlocking the confidence we seek as adults.
This chapter will reveal not just how these beliefs form, but how they grow to become our self-image or Identity. And this is what secretly governs our lives, often in ways we least expect.
How Beliefs are Born and Grow Into Self-Image
Our self-image begins to build as soon as we come blinking into the world as a newborn child.
From the very first moments of life, a child experiences an explosion of learning.
The infant’s subconscious becomes a sponge, soaking in every exchange, every event. It absorbs every sight, sound, scent, sensation, and taste encountered.
The child’s senses stream millions of bits of data every second, a vast torrent so fast and chaotic that the child’s mind is at risk of being overwhelmed.
To cope with this flood, the child’s subconscious starts to pick out and store fragments of information that it believes are part of recurring patterns. They become a kind of mental shorthand.
The child’s subconscious predicts what it believes these patterns mean in the child’s world. It’s trying to make sense of chaos and find order in the sensory overload.
It merges the meanings learned from these patterns into the child’s evolving sense of reality, shaping how they analyse and react to the world around them.
The ‘shorthand’ we all work out in our early years can last a lifetime. And, as adults, we still use it to quickly extract meaning from the torrent of data streamed through our senses every second.
But this practice can lead to mistakes. Because our subconscious will use these shortcuts as a frame through which it views the world, a little like wearing glasses with coloured lenses. Everything you see is tinted and changed.
The Concept of Edited Reality
For example, take a look at the cow picture above, which vividly illustrates how our subconscious edits our perception, leading to what we term as ‘Edited Reality’.
Very early in your life, you stored away an image of a cow deep in your subconscious. Whether you saw one in real life or in pictures, your subconscious doesn’t waste time checking this one.
It picks out a part of the pattern it recognises and assumes it’s like every other cow you’ve seen. And so it presents that ‘reality’ to your conscious awareness. After a few moments, your senses adjust, and you notice that its markings are, in fact, a map of the world.
Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are conditioned to see it.
Stephen Covey
By the way, did you also notice the two faces on the head of our cow above?
The pattern selection process does more than store shortcuts for Sifting and Sorting meaning from confusion. We develop beliefs about how the world works during our early years.
And, as we did with the cow image above, these beliefs colour our perception of the world around us. For example, take a look at the next picture.
If you spent your childhood in a city, you would likely see a drawing of a group of people in a room. You’d see walls, the corner of the room and a ceiling. Perhaps the figure standing on the right is leaning against a wall?
In fact, this image is a picture of people sitting and standing under a tree.
Can you see both versions now?
Children who grow up in modern cities see straight lines all around them from birth.
They’re everywhere: in buildings, street fittings, furniture, household objects, toys, and more. This becomes a familiar pattern to the subconscious, and so it’s stored away.
Whenever the subconscious thinks it has found that pattern in real life, it’s placed into your conscious reality. And so, when you look at the picture of the group under a tree above, you assume it has straight lines, and your reality is that there are walls and a ceiling.
On the other hand, the bush is an organic environment with no straight lines. People who grew up in such a setting have assumptions of a more natural world. And so, they construct a reality of an outdoor scene from that group picture, seeing it simply as people standing or sitting around a tree.
So we can see that our subconscious develops beliefs about how the world works. And these beliefs guide it to edit the way we see the world around us. In other words, it changes our reality to fit its beliefs.
This is what we call Edited Reality.
Now, we’ll see that Edited Reality is about more than just ‘editing’ what we perceive through our senses. In fact, the editing is shaped by beliefs about our self-worth, confidence and abilities.
The Building Blocks of Confidence and Self-Belief
The subconscious can model and hold a vast store of the type of shortcuts we describe above. However, some of the patterns to emerge from this rapid learning phase are many times more potent.
Safety, Belonging, Esteem & Capability
A child’s most meaningful beliefs are about whether they are safe, loved, and belong. And whether they believe they are capable, and whether their life has a purpose. These are the building blocks of confidence, self-belief and mental strength.
The lessons they learn for each of these qualities develop into beliefs about their place in the world and how it treats them.
And, as with our pictures above, these beliefs will edit the child’s reality to match. For example, imagine a child falls out with their best friend:
- A high self-esteem child’s Edited Reality could be that their friend is often moody and will get over it. They’ll soon be pals again. The child is relatively happy and can carry on much as usual. Their reflex thought is, “What’s wrong with them?”
- The Edited Reality of a low self-esteem child may be that the fallout came about because they are less popular than the others. This child is hurt and feels alone. Their reflex thought is, “What’s wrong with me?”
A child’s view of the world and how they fit into it is 60% built by age six. These ingrained beliefs from childhood become a fixed and reflexive way of making sense of events that will last them for the rest of their life.
This means that when a child becomes an adult, their subconscious mind continues Sifting and Sorting to create an Edited Reality that matches their self-image.
They may, as adults, be ‘consciously’ aware that their Edited Reality isn’t a true reflection of who they are or what they are experiencing.
But the beliefs that shape self-image are more emotionally charged than any others. They can’t easily be changed. And so the Sifting and Sorting, shaped in childhood, continue to dominate their lives.
Our subconscious is like the director of a silent film, shaping our life’s narrative without us realising it.
At the top of the page, I referenced The Matrix:
Reality is a thing of the past.
The Matrix
I hope now that it makes sense in the context of the 7 Skills and that it reflects how your Edited Reality is shaped by rules your subconscious learned by age six. In other words, your reality is shaped by lessons in life learned as a child.
Ananya’s Struggle: The Shackles of Anxiety
Ananya’s panic at the workshop clearly showed how beliefs and Edited Reality can limit anyone in adversity.
She was intelligent and capable. Yet her racing heart and brain freeze were signs of an intense inner battle.
For as long as she could remember, Ananya had suffered criticism and rejection from her mother. This led her to subconsciously believe she ‘just wasn’t good enough’. She believed that others would find fault in hurtful ways when judged.
Therefore, anytime Ananya was the centre of attention, her subconscious wanted to protect her. Sensing danger, it edited her reality to amplify panic, which led to the Fight, Flight or Freeze Response.
At the seminar, when she looked at the blank faces in front of her, she was looking at a group of people who were relieved that they weren’t in her shoes. And who felt sympathy and empathy for her situation.
But that’s not the reality her subconscious mind made for her. It projected the image of a sneering and aggressively critical group.
And so, her anxiety was not just about the task itself but a product of deeply ingrained beliefs that shaped her Edited Reality.
Eddard’s Confidence: Wings of Composure
In contrast, Eddard’s beliefs led him to have faith in himself. At his core, he never doubted that he was safe, wanted, respected, or good enough.
Eddard’s subconscious shaped his Edited Reality so that he noticed opportunity rather than danger. He viewed the challenge as a chance to learn and practice, not as a threat to his Safety, Belonging or Esteem.
Eddard’s remarkable composure in tight corners flowed from this empowering Edited Reality.
I offered Ananya free coaching at the end of that seminar. I’m happy to say she accepted. I coached her through a 7 Skills to impress™ toolkit called Review and Preview.
What You’ve Just Learned and Why It Matters
In The Illusion of Reality, you discovered a fundamental truth:
We don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we were programmed to see it.
From our earliest years, our subconscious creates shortcuts, snap judgments and beliefs to help us make sense of life. But these mental “shortcuts” don’t just shape how we interpret what’s happening around us. They shape who we believe we are.
This is Edited Reality in action: the world filtered through a lens made of early experiences and beliefs. And it explains so much:
- Why Ananya felt judged in a room full of support.
- Why Jacqui could no longer imagine hope until Eddard helped her see it.
- And why Eddard himself could remain calm: his Edited Reality was built on a foundation of safety, belief, and self-trust.
You now understand that these automatic perceptions aren’t facts; they’re beliefs, and beliefs can be reprogrammed.
What’s Coming Next and Why It’s Important
In Who’s in Charge? You or Monkey Brain?, we go deeper into the tug-of-war between your two minds:
- System 1 (the fast, emotional, instinctive Monkey Brain), and
- System 2 (the slow, rational, thoughtful Computer).
You’ll learn:
- Why your Monkey Brain often hijacks you before your rational mind even gets a say.
- How System 1 exaggerates danger, especially when your Identity tells it to.
- And how people like Eddard learn to keep their System 2 online, even in crisis, while others, like Jacqui, in her darkest moment, feel completely taken over.
The real question is no longer, “Why do I feel this way?”
It becomes:
“Who’s running the show, and how can I take back control?”
This next chapter shows you how. It lays the groundwork for understanding the battle between impulse and intention, and begins revealing how the 7 Skills to impress™ were designed to help you win it.
When you understand how to spot your Monkey Brain in action, you can stop reacting and start leading.
UP NEXT: CHAPTER 3: Who’s in Charge? You or Monkey Brain?
Previous Chapter
Index
Glossary of Terms
Further Reading
Markus, H. R., & Wurf, E. (1987).
The dynamic self-concept: A social psychological perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 38, 299–337.
Markus and Wurf argue that the self-concept is not fixed but constantly shifting in response to context.
Harter, S. (1999).
The construction of the self: A developmental perspective. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Harter shows how children gradually build a sense of self from early interactions, especially through perceived approval or rejection.
Damon, W., & Hart, D. (1988).
Self-understanding in childhood and adolescence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Damon and Hart explore how children come to understand themselves through cognitive development and social comparison.
Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999).
The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54(7), 462–479.
Bargh and Chartrand demonstrate that much of human behaviour is automatic and unconscious. This reinforces the idea that subconscious pattern-matching shapes perception without our awareness.
Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2002).
The pursuit of meaningfulness in life. In C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp. 608–618). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Baumeister and Vohs discuss how humans search for meaning through coherence, purpose, and significance.
Wegner, D. M. (2002).
The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wegner argues that the sense of conscious control is often a constructed illusion created after the fact.