Photo by jhritz.

Throughout your life, you’ll gain new understanding of how things work.  You can’t use it, if you can’t change your beliefs.   In Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Marcus Buckingham writes about 3 questions to help you break your myths.

3 Revealing Questions
Buckingham uses three questions:

• Question 1.  How does the myth serve you?
• Question 2. What would it cost you to stop believing in this myth?
• Question 3. How would it benefit you to believe the truth?

Question 1. How does the myth serve you?
How is the myth currently helping you?  Buckingham writes:

There’s a reason why each myth insinuates itself so completely into our lives.  Only by understanding how the myth helps people get through their day can you start to see how they can be disentangled from it.

Question 2. What would it cost you to stop believing in this myth?
What’s the impact of changing your belief?  Buckingham writes:

Since the myths serve us, to stop believing in them will require that we give up some things.  These things are presumably quite precious; otherwise each myth would prove much easier to dislodge.  Before we can think about what we will gain by changing our beliefs, we first have to fess up to what we will lose.

Question 3. How would it benefit you to believe the truth?
What do you stand to gain?  Buckingham writes:

This one’s the kicker.  Our answer had better be compelling enough to allow us to see past our answer to the previous question, otherwise out chances of living a strong life fall to next to nothing.  After all, why bother fighting to live a strong life if we can’t even describe the benefits?  But on the flip side, if we can capture in detail what we will gain by carving a life around our strengths, we’ll keep fighting for it for the rest of our lives.

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• Figure out how your current myth helps you.
• Figure out how changing your mind can hurt you.
• Figure out how changing your mind can help you.

It’s simple but effective.  Don’t be the one holding yourself back.