Examples Of Unconscious Beliefs In A Restaurant

Last week I was getting dinner at a restaurant with a friend and I became aware of some of the underlying beliefs that we have. While there are little consequences to these examples, in truly questioning them we get to see the power beliefs have and how it shapes our lives in more meaningful ways.

Here are two examples.

First, someone walked into the restaurant to place the order at the front. There was no line, but rather than walking straight up to the cashier they rerouted their path through the barriers that normally contain the line to end at the waitress.

Looking directly at it, this makes no sense. Our brains are hardwired to conserve energy so adding extra steps contradicts our natural state. This means that something larger had to override it. In this case, it was a belief that in order to be a cooperative member of society we need to wait our turn and take our place in line. It’s just a social convention, and in this case the belief influenced the behavior.

Another example was when someone’s fork hit the floor. They didn’t really think about what to do next, they stood up and grabbed another fork. At some point in their past they learned that it’s unsanitary to eat with a utensil that touches the floor. They incorporated that belief. And their unconscious behavior flowed from that belief.

However some of us might think about the “5 second rule”. This suggests that we don’t have the same belief or same strength of belief in that core lesson. There's individual variability. This demonstrates how our beliefs are all integrated in unique and personalized ways.

With those examples, maybe it’s more apparent to see how beliefs about “money being evil”, “it’s hard to eat healthy”, “I’m not good at public speaking”, or other beliefs like that would impact our daily behavior (and from that behavior how it would influence our results).

This is why it’s so important for us to increase our level of consciousness. Rather than being at the mercy of these unconscious scripts, we can question them and choose to do something different that might better serve us. It helps us to break the pattern and in doing so, gives us the opportunity to create new results.