Incredibly Believable

• Understand the distinction between stated beliefs and operative beliefs: how to identify what one actually believes by examining the patterns of behaviour and experience that one reliably produces — since these patterns always reflect the true operative belief regardless of what one consciously professes
• Grasp the mechanisms through which beliefs acquire their sense of certainty: repetition, emotional charging, social validation, and the self-confirming nature of beliefs that determine what evidence is noticed and what is screened out
• Recognise how inherited beliefs function as invisible constraints: the specific ways in which beliefs absorbed in childhood about one's worth, about what is possible, and about how the world works continue to shape adult experience long after the original context that generated them has been outgrown
• Learn the process for deliberately revising unserviceable beliefs: not through simple positive thinking (which the book shows to be insufficient) but through the more fundamental work of genuinely questioning the evidence for old beliefs and building a sustained relationship with more accurate, generative alternatives
• Appreciate the relationship between believability and the spiritual path: how the capacity to genuinely believe in one's own larger nature — rather than merely wishing it were so — is both the goal of genuine spiritual development and the necessary condition for the quality of life that reflects that larger nature