Busting Through Sticky Beliefs

Your belief system is creating everything in your reality, from how you feel to the results you have, and who you show up in the world as. The great news is that once you’re aware of this, there are limitless possibilities available to you.

But sometimes we have beliefs that aren’t serving us, and these beliefs are sticky, meaning they feel really true and our brain seems to want to keep holding on to them.

Tune in this week to learn how to bust through sticky beliefs so they’re no longer holding you back.

If you are trying to lose weight and feel like you’re doing all the things and you’re wondering why it isn’t working, then signup for a Lose The Weight For The Last Time Joy Makeover.  

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER

• The most basic definition of a belief
• What a mindset is
• Mother Beliefs and her Thought Babies
• If it even matters what we believe?
• How to reprogram a belief
• Do positive affirmations work?
• Ladder thoughts

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• Website

TRANSCRIPT

This is The Joyful You Podcast, episode 96, busting Through Sticky Beliefs.

Welcome to The Joyful You Podcast.

On this show, I talk all about the tools you need to cultivate a healthy relationship with food, your mind, and your life.

I’m your host, Rachael Collins.

As an eating psychology practitioner, a certified life coach, and a weight loss expert, it is my mission to show you how to work with your body, manage your mind, process your emotions, and create supportive habits so you can live well, feel well, and become your strongest, healthiest, happiest, most amazing self, a joyful you.

Hello there.

I hope you are having a really good week.

If weight loss is one of your goals, then listen up.

I hear from so many of you that are trying to lose weight, and you’re doing all the things, and you’re wondering, why isn’t this working?

I know how frustrating and defeating that can feel.

I also know that struggling with extra weight is not fun, and neither is dieting.

Know what’s even less fun?

Dragging yourself through a torturous diet, losing weight, and then gaining it all back.

And when this happens, it is so hard to lick yourself in the eye, because you know you’ve blown it again.

You’re mad at yourself, which then you take out on your spouse and your kids.

So now, not only do you feel even more disgusted with yourself, you feel guilty and ashamed for losing your patience and snapping.

Ask me how I know.

I get it.

It’s super frustrating when you’ve tried everything to lose weight and nothing seems to be working.

It is so easy to feel broken, less than, and like you are the problem.

You are not the problem.

There is a good reason that you are not losing weight, why you can’t stop eating all the things, why past diets didn’t work, and why those stubborn pounds just won’t seem to budge.

It is not you, it’s the diet.

One of the reasons that weight loss feels so hard is because you are trying to implement a strategy that is wrong for you.

And trying to lose weight using a strategy that doesn’t fit you or your life will never work permanently.

So if you have been trying to lose weight and it’s not working, I want to give you a plan that will.

Let me take a look at what’s going on for you.

Let me see what you’re trying.

What’s not working for you?

What is working for you?

And then give you a plan that is customized and personalized for you specifically and your life.

I am offering lose the weight for the last time joy makeovers.

So essentially, you’ll fill out a questionnaire asking you about your weight loss, what’s working, what’s not.

And then I will design a personalized plan just for you to follow that will help you lose the weight for the last time.

So that you can stop dieting and start living the life that you’ve always dreamed of.

If this is something that interests you, you can click the link in the show notes for more information and to sign up.

Alright, on to today’s podcast topic.

Today, I want to talk about beliefs.

What are they?

Do they matter?

And if they do matter, why do they matter?

Now, the dictionary defines a belief as an idea one accepts as being true or real.

But my favorite definition of a belief comes from Abraham Hicks, who said a belief is just a thought you keep thinking and feeling over and over and over again.

So it’s a thought that you routinely think, not just some random, I randomly thought one moment, one day thought, but it’s a thought that we keep thinking over and over and over again.

And because you’ve thought it so much, it’s become true to you.

Now, sometimes on the podcast, you’ll hear me talk about mindset.

And a mindset is this.

It’s just a belief system or a collection of beliefs, similar thoughts that you keep thinking.

I like to call these a mother belief.

So when you work with a mindset coach like me, what we’re helping you do is we’re helping you work on your whole belief system, your mother belief.

That collection of thoughts you keep thinking over and over and over again around the same theme or that have the same sort of flavor.

There are a lot of different mother beliefs.

So today, let’s just pick one.

And one that I see a lot is a scarcity mentality, which is basically just a set of beliefs and a mindset that there is not enough.

This is a super common one.

It shows up in so many areas of our life, as all mother beliefs do.

They don’t just stick to one certain area.

They bleed out to every single area of our life.

So when we have a scarcity mindset, we will see this show up around ourselves, that we’re not good enough, that there’s something wrong with us.

We’re not as special or worthy or valuable as others.

We’ll also see it show up in our body image, how we eat and how we are around food.

It also shows up in time.

We don’t think there’s enough time.

There’s too much to do, not enough time to do it all in.

I’m so busy, which leads to overwhelm.

We also see it in money as well.

We have beliefs like, there’s never enough.

I always run out of it.

I need more.

There isn’t enough for everyone.

There’s poor people and rich people.

All of these thoughts make up a mother belief, a scarcity mother belief.

Now, as we all know, a mother has babies, and mother beliefs are no different.

They have thought babies, lots and lots and lots of them.

These are all the thoughts that make up the cluster or the belief system or that mother belief.

So all the thoughts that I just mentioned, those are thought babies.

So this was things like, I’m not enough.

I’m not a good enough mom.

I’m a failure.

I’m not smart.

I’m letting my kids down or my husband down or my family down, whoever it is.

I’m letting them down.

I’m too busy.

There’s never enough time.

I’m fat.

I’m ugly.

I need more money.

We could go on and on and on.

All of those are thought babies of the mother belief behind the scarcity mindset.

Now, does it really matter what we believe?

Do our beliefs matter?

I had this exact conversation with a coach friend of mine the other day, and she asked me, do you think our thoughts and our beliefs really matter that much?

And I said, yes.

100% they do, because our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings drive all of our actions, and our actions, all the things that we do or don’t do, are what create our results.

So essentially, what’s happening or not happening in our life right now is a direct result of our beliefs.

Notice how you feel when you have thoughts like, I’m a failure, I’m a bad mom, I’m ugly, I’m fat, there’s never enough money, I don’t have enough time.

I don’t know about you, but those thoughts make me feel bad.

They don’t make me have a positive feeling.

And when it comes to our beliefs, I would say that we notice the feeling way more than the thought or the belief at first.

We will notice that we’re not happy, we’ll notice that we feel bad, we’ll notice that we feel overwhelmed.

And how do we act when we’re feeling these ways?

We’re usually short with others, we yell at our kids, we yell at ourselves, we emotionally eat, we play small, we put others down, right?

We make them small so that we feel big, and we tend to hide the light that God gave us to shine out for others.

We’re certainly not creating the results that we want from these actions.

So yes, 100% our beliefs matter.

Our mind is a very powerful computer, and the things that we focus on, aka the thoughts that we have, are what our mind seeks out and creates for us.

Our beliefs are kind of like software that tells our mind what programs or results to run.

Our mind is just doing what we programmed it to do.

It will always create what the software tells it to.

So if we don’t like the program, we can reprogram it.

And we do this by upgrading this software, or in this case, by upgrading our belief system.

So you’re probably wondering, okay, sounds good, but how the heck do we do that?

Many of us and many other coaches think the answer is to change something outside of us.

We think that if we lose weight, then we’ll feel good enough.

Some of us believe that if we could just get more done, if we could do more things, have a full calendar, then we’ll feel good enough.

This just looks like busyness.

Running to dance and soccer and piano lessons, and cleaning the house, and doing PTA, and doing Zuma, and play group, and bunko, and all of this before lunch, right?

And then some of us think the opposite.

If we just had less to do, or if we could just get more done, so we had less to do, then we would feel less overwhelmed, we would feel better.

So we keep adding things to our quote unquote to do list, thinking that if we could just accomplish this, if we could do all of this, then I will believe I’m good enough.

People will see that I have a full life, and I’m successful, and I have a lot of money, and they will tell me that I’m good enough, and that will validate that I am good enough.

That’s how it tends to work out in our minds.

We keep adding to our to-do list thinking that if I could just do all of this, then I will believe I’m good enough, and people will see that I have a full life, and that I’m successful.

If I could just win the lottery, then I would never run out of money again, and I would have a lot of money.

People would see this.

They would tell me that I’m good enough, and then it would validate that I am good enough.

Do you see how these things are outside of ourselves?

They are circumstances, and our circumstances don’t make us feel anything.

They can’t make us feel good enough.

They can’t.

Now, some of us know that it’s our thoughts.

If we have been introduced to coaching before, we have a mindset coach, we know that it’s our thoughts.

And so what we do is we’re like, hey, the reason that I’m feeling not good enough, and I’m not getting these results in my life, is because of what I’m thinking.

So I need to change all of these thoughts, and I need to flip them to be positive thoughts.

And anytime I have a negative thought, or a negative thought about myself, I just need to flip it.

Flip the switch is what this is called.

I need to repeat positive affirmations, and that will get rid of my mother belief that there’s not enough, which will then clear all the thought babies that go with her.

And this method doesn’t really work, because one, it’s a lot of work to take all the hundreds of thought babies that we have, flip them, repeat them over and over again, and try to believe them.

Two, life is 50-50, so we’re always going to have 50% positive and 50% negative.

And when we try to only live in the positive and get rid of the negative, it just doesn’t work, because it’s not reality.

And then three, it doesn’t work to just flip the switch, because we need to, in an even 1% way, believe the thoughts we’re thinking, and we need to feel them in order for our mind to hold onto them.

And if we don’t, what happens is our mind just rejects them almost immediately.

Think of it like antivirus software on your computer.

It just shuts it down immediately.

So positive affirmations, flipping the script, and trying to run away from reality doesn’t really work.

It’s just a lot of work that usually leaves us feeling more overwhelmed, more exhausted, more broken, more not enough.

So that is not the way.

What is the way?

My favorite way to teach this is using the analogy of a Jenga game.

If you have never played Jenga or heard of it before, basically what it is is it’s a stack of these rectangle shaped wooden blocks that you stack on top of each other, forming a tower.

And each player takes a turn pulling out a block and stacking it on top of the tower.

And as the blocks are removed, as you can imagine, the tower gets weaker and weaker and more wobbly.

And the goal of the game is to not knock over the tower.

Well, in my analogy, the tower represents the mother belief, and each individual block making up the tower represents the thought babies.

And the goal of the game when it comes to mother beliefs is to knock over the tower.

So, in order to break up the mother belief, what we need to do is we need to start taking out and looking at some of these thought babies.

So, what we’re going to do is we are going to pull one block out.

We’re going to look at it.

We’re going to get really, really curious about it.

We’re not going to look at it like a judge.

We’re going to look at it like a scientist.

So, a judge is really judgy, right?

It would pull the thought baby out, take a look at it, judge it as terrible, condemn it, send it away to life in prison, right?

And we would have so many judgy thoughts about that.

Like, I can’t believe you think this, or yes, that is 100% true.

There’s nothing we can do about that.

That’s just how we are.

All these judgy thoughts.

We’re not going to do that.

We are going to look at it openly like a scientist would.

Makes sense?

So, a scientist has a theory, and they try to poke holes in it.

That’s what we want to do with all our thought babies.

We want to look at one thought, and then we want to poke holes in it.

We decide what else could be true.

Do I really want to keep thinking this?

Isn’t it interesting that I think this?

Hmm.

We want to look at it from a scientific viewpoint.

We want to get really curious, and we want to just start poking holes in that thought baby.

And then from there, we either get rid of the thought altogether, and we’re just like, you know what?

I am tired of living this story.

I’m done.

I don’t want to believe this anymore.

So we just chuck the block.

We remove it from our programming.

And this is what the power of awareness and being aware of our thoughts can do.

We can just decide we’re done with them, and out they go.

Sometimes it really is that easy.

This is where coaching really comes in handy, because I can help you become aware of thoughts that you didn’t even know you had.

I remember watching a YouTube video that had these two fish swimming in a fish bowl, and another fish swims by, and he says, hey boys, how’s the water?

And the two fish are like, water?

What’s that?

They didn’t realize they were swimming in water, because it’s what they’ve always known.

Some of our beliefs are like this.

Some of our thinking is like this.

We have thought them for so long that we don’t even recognize them.

So a coach can point them out, and from there, you get to decide what you want to do with them.

And throwing them out is definitely an option.

Now, some thought babies are harder to get rid of.

We really strongly believe them, and we are connected to them, kind of like a wubby, like our little blank, like I’ve talked about.

They feel like they are a part of us, and that they’re just true.

I just believe this.

I’ve always believed this.

So, when it comes to these harder to get rid of beliefs, we use what I call ladder thoughts, which instead of flipping the thought completely, we want to change it just slightly.

So, for example, if our thought baby is, I’m too fat, flipping it to I’m skinny and beautiful just doesn’t work because it’s not believable, right?

Our brain is like, reject, yeah right.

That is false.

antivirus software doing its thing, right?

So, we use a ladder thought, a thought that takes this up just one rung, one step.

So, that could be like, I’m working on becoming skinny.

See how that feels true?

Another thing that we can do is we can neutralize a thought.

So, instead of, I’m too fat, we neutralize it by saying, I have a body.

Notice there’s really no charge when you say, I have a body.

It feels pretty neutral, right?

Everybody has a body.

If you’re alive, you have a body.

Then, when you are ready, you can slowly, as it feels true to you, ladder up or change the thought baby to something a little bit more positive.

Then you need to just keep practicing the new thought, leaning into it, believing it, becoming it.

And as you one by one keep pulling out these thought babies and looking at them and start poking the holes in them, the mother belief starts to get weaker and she starts to wobble a little bit.

And eventually the whole tower falls down and we tear down our mother beliefs.

That’s how we do mindset work.

That is a huge chunk of coaching.

I have a fellow coach who calls it story coaching, which I love because we are taking a look at all of our stories, our belief systems.

We are gaining awareness as to what they even are.

And sometimes, like I said, this is challenging because like the fish in the water, our beliefs are just running in the background.

It’s kind of like an open app on our phone.

It’s just hanging out in the background.

We don’t even know it’s there.

But we do notice that our battery is draining or we notice how we feel.

We notice that we don’t like the results that we’re getting in our life.

So, a coach comes in and can see the water.

I’m speaking a lot of analogies here, guys.

I hope you’re following me.

A coach comes in, can see our belief and our belief systems, and can help us figure out what’s going on, and then help us to reprogram our software, which sometimes can get tricky.

Here’s what I want to leave you with.

You don’t have to take every single thought and flip it and believe a positive affirmation about it.

All we need to do is take one thought, one thought baby at a time, and poke holes into it.

And when we do this, it’s going to tear down the big mother belief that we have.

All right, guys, try it this week.

Let me know how it goes.

You can DM me on Instagram or write me an email, Rachael, R-A-C-H-A-E-L, at ajoyfulyou.com.

And if you’re thinking you would like to dive further into this, let’s work together.

You can check out the link in the show notes and sign up for coaching.

See you soon.

Thank you for listening to The Joyful You Podcast.

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