Motivation (The Brian Tracy Success Library)

The Structure of Personality

Imagine that your personality is made up of concentric circles, like a dartboard, beginning with your core values. Your values in turn determine the second circle, your beliefs about yourself and about reality. You always see your world through the screen of your beliefs, whether valid or invalid, self-limiting or unlimited.

To put it another way, you see the world not as it is, but as you are. As William James of Harvard University once said: “Beliefs create the actual fact.”

The third level of your personality, the third concentric circle, is your expectations. Just as your values determine your beliefs, your beliefs determine your expectations about yourself, other people, and the world around you. Your expectations ...