Hi I'm Julie Tietz. And welcome to Conflict Resolution, Putting the Pieces Together. Today, we're going to cover belief systems and assumptions. So let's start off with our key terms.
Belief-- a person's mental sense of what is true, or right, or correct in a situation. Belief system-- a combination of belief that becomes a model for an aspect of a person's world. Assumption-- an expectation formed from a person's beliefs. So why don't we break down beliefs, belief systems, and assumptions for a bit here?
So our beliefs are what we believe to be true or right. So this is our internal gut feeling or what we believe to be what is right in certain situations. And from this, we have assumptions. And these are formed from our beliefs. And we get assumptions based on experiences, whether that's through our own experiences or through other people. And then this creates the belief system, which is the models for our world.
So the models for our world is making sense of the world around us. And so we use our beliefs and our belief systems to make sense of certain situations. And a lot of us, or all of us, have beliefs, whether that's surrounding political, maybe we are socialist, or capitalists, or communist, whatever it is. But we base situations on those models of the world, based on what our belief system is.
They could also be religious. Maybe we base our world upon a certain or particular religion. Or education-- maybe we believe that education is the only way we're going to succeed. Or it could be around certain parenting models that we hold to be true or correct for our world. And a lot of the times, we share our beliefs with group members. But even though we share these beliefs with each other, our beliefs are really unique to our own sense of self, sense of how we view the world.
So when we come across a situation, we do this internal evaluation to see how does it fit within our beliefs and our belief systems. And we ask ourselves, does this confirm what we believe? Or maybe this possibly challenges what we believe. So we do this internal waiting to see how it fits in with what we believe.
And another interesting thing that we do is, when we encounter a situation, we try to confirm that with our beliefs, rather than revise it. So we are trying to make sense of it by making it somehow fit in with what we believe, rather than changing what we do. Isn't that really interesting that we do these sort of internal gymnastics to make things fit in with what we believe?
And why do we do this? It's because belief systems are really hard to change. And this also makes a lot of sense, because we learn our beliefs from a very young age. And so if you think about it, you're coming along through life believing one thing. And then all of a sudden, something comes along and really rocks the boat on your belief systems. And you don't like this rocking feeling, so you're doing everything that you can to stabilize it.
And it's also important to know that our beliefs and belief systems can create and escalate conflict. And why do beliefs create conflict? It's because we are only taking into account the situation from our own belief systems and our own perspectives, rather than looking at the other side's point of view or the other's beliefs. And so when we are only looking from our point of view and, in some sense, maybe not taking into consideration the other's point of view, we could be offending them by not taking in to their accounts. And so this can create tension, and discomfort, and lead to a conflict situation.
So now that we've covered belief systems and assumptions, let's go over our key points. Beliefs and belief systems are what we feel to be true and correct. And we take this as a perspective of the models of our world. So we take our beliefs and weight them in how it fits in with our world. And we form assumptions from our experiences, and they are formed from our beliefs. And we make these internal evaluations to confirm or challenge situations with our beliefs. And belief systems can create conflict, because we often are only looking at the situation in terms from our personal beliefs.
Thank you for taking the time out to view this tutorial. I hope you learned something. And I can't wait to catch you again next time.