“One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety nine who have only interests”
(John Stuart Mill)
With so much being talked about in Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility about values and beliefs I started thinking about beliefs. We all have a choice as to which beliefs we choose to be affected by. There is the old adage of whether you cant or whether you can, whichever you believe is true. We look around to support our belief systems. If we believe everyone and everything is against us we will find evidence to support it but also if we believe that everyone and everything is working for us we will also find evidence to support it.
Many people exclude themselves from situations because they believe they “do not fit in” that people are against them. This leads to social exclusion; part of my mission is to combat social injustice and exclusion. Of course there are many issues to be dealt with surrounding social exclusion, only some of them based on belief systems. The good thing about working with beliefs and values is that they are not set in stone they can change.
If our belief systems were static, I would now not be writing this. My early beliefs about myself were very negative, restricting and self-defeating. I firmly believed wealth visited only the wealthy and that poverty was my lot. I held this belief because of my childhood environment, but like all beliefs it was not a universal truth. I discovered books and a route to acquire knowledge through them. This is what led me to challenge what I was seeing and hearing in my surroundings it allowed me license to change my belief systems. This was 30 or so years ago, but it is still true today and it highlights the importance of the influence of education in producing a Socially Inclusive society. Education not only impacts on beliefs and values but also has a direct correlation to many of the other issues encompassed by Social Inclusion.
This knowledge though only acted as a small part of my motivation to change my belief systems. What really did it for me was a school trip. This was to a Steel Foundry. I still vividly remember the scene — it was a huge building, hot, smoky, dusty and very very noisy. My classmates and I stood whilst hot molten metal ran in rivers by my feet. Men, who looked grey, shouted to each other and manoeuvred through the heat and the noise. This whole experience terrified me, and then came the sentence that would change my life’s path. A teacher turned towards me and said in an authoritative voice “this is where you will be coming to work when you leave school”.
I received this sentence like I had been knifed; my internal dialogue screamed out to me “NO”. Seconds after that sentences delivery I made a vow to myself that this was not for me, and I believed it. I didn’t know what I was going to do or how I was going to do it, but at that time I was fully and utterly committed to not returning here. My environment was not supportive to this change, my friends, family and school was completely at odds with my belief. I now wonder how many times this situation arises for people, to maintain by commitment I relied on books and education and the experience of that school trip. To me it was a route out. A key element for me is to ask what are your beliefs around Social Inclusion and what is your motivational factor.
For me I chose a belief system that meant I excluded myself from my environment. That in its self produced many issues, but my belief system was supported by educational opportunities and my memory of the trip. How many people today are denied these opportunities and as a result go along with unsupportive belief systems. So when we come to talk about beliefs and values in Social Inclusion they are vitally important issues, they are powerful and can change people’s lives.
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