The thing about belief is?

My weekend was great, full of time with the girls, doing stuff in the community (collecting money, lining pitches, coaching kids, organising a clean up) and playing and watching games. The lowlight of the weekend was having some of my ribs re-located in the game on saturday night. Ribs are a bit like electricity, you only realise they are important when there's a problem, you can do very little without pain when you have cracked ribs, no matter how enjoyable it might look.

On sunday morning I watched Celtic beat Rangers to probably clinch the league flag, the thing that amazes me about these games is the genuine belief of both sides that thier "cause" is the right one. Once we get a belief, whether from our parents (risk is bad) or schools (risk is bad) or our friends (risk is fun) then we go out of our way to collect evidence to back up the belief. In this sense every Celtic fan is wonderful and a brother - not true - and every Rangers fan is a violent lnatic who would stab you as quick as look at you - not true either -

This type of thinking leaves us very little scope to have an open mind, an open mind requires a willingness to take on the evidence of both sides and make an objective decision, and most of us have a great difficulty in doing that, there is definately a concerted effort by Government, the Media and the Religious establishment to prevent people from having "open minds", those who have questioned the "status quo" have traditionally been made to suffer by all 3 establishments and this will continue.

As people who attempt to sell or influence others, we need to understand the power of this belief equation, to understand that people will make thier minds up about you in double quick time, and that further they will then proceed to filter everything you say to justify thier belief that you are right, wrong, important or irrelevant. you have a very very short window of opportunity to appeal to the "open mind" after that you will only be listened to in order to justify thier original opinion.

Try getting a Celtic fan to see things from a Rangers fans point of view, or vice versa and you will discover that once we've made or minds up ...... that's it honey!

Hail Hail