How to Change Your Beliefs

Your beliefs are what create your life. They are the lens through which you view the world and interpret reality.

So if you want a different life, than you have to start at the belief level.

If you try to change things with your actions alone, those changes will not stick. That’s why people can go on diets and lose 50 lbs but then gain it all back and more.

In those instances, core beliefs that are driving the overeating behaviors were not addressed and ultimately won out in driving the long-term behavior.

So what do you want to believe and how do you believe it?

There are 3 steps that can help you in changing your beliefs.

1. Find out what you believe now

What do you think about yourself? Your spouse? Your past? Your kids? Your future?

The thoughts that you think over and over again are your beliefs.

And what you believe is what you will subconsciously create.

You have to know what you are believing right now so you can see where you want to change things.

2. Decide what you want to believe

Once you’ve identified your beliefs and can see how they are creating your current reality, you get to decide which beliefs you want to keep and which are no longer serving you.

What would you like to believe instead? About your marriage? About yourself? About your spouse?

A word of caution here.

When changing old practiced beliefs, you want to select new beliefs that are believable for you. For example, if the old belief was “I can’t trust myself” and the new belief “I CAN trust myself” feels totally unbelievable, that’s okay. Recognize that your brain is rejecting such a big jump.

Instead, we use bridging thoughts to help us get there. Variations such as, “I am learning how to trust myself” or “I am experimenting with trusting myself” can help your brain move gradually to the new belief, “I CAN trust myself.”

3. Practice believing

Your old beliefs are just thoughts that you’ve practiced and told yourself over and over again, thus for the new beliefs, you want to do the same thing.

Like a muscle that you’ve never worked out before, building it up will take daily workouts at the gym. You do the same thing with a new belief.

Writing it down on a piece of paper and repeating it each morning. Setting it as a reminder in your phone. And most of all, staying aware of your old belief so that when it comes up, you can consciously replace it with the new one.

Our beliefs are changeable.

They are not set in stone.

You can create new beliefs to create a new life.

How Beliefs Create the Foundation for Your Life.

Beliefs are just thoughts that you’ve repeated over and over in your mind until they feel like truth.

Often they are thoughts you picked up in childhood while you were trying to make sense of the world and your place in it.

Your beliefs are what drive your life, and if you want to know what your beliefs are, just take a look at your life.

I like to visualize our beliefs as being the foundation of a house.

Here in Texas where I live, the soil is black clay and it is notorious for ruining foundations with its expansion and contraction throughout the seasons.

In a home where the foundation is compromised, the problems start out small.

A tiny crack on the ceiling, a door that starts sticking and won’t open and shut as easily as it use to, an uneven area in the floor.

Easy enough to overlook, but if left un-investigated, you can end up with tens of thousands of dollars of extensive damage repair.

Seeing the parallels?

In our own lives we have foundational beliefs that we’ve picked up, often unintentionally, from our culture, family, religion, schooling, etc.

We then go through life building the rest of our “house”- career, marriage, kids – on top of that foundation, and never think to check back up on it.

But then cracks start appearing in the ceiling. There’s more fighting in your marriage and less connection.

You notice the floor is starting to feel uneven. You wonder why you married this person in the first place. Life just feels so much more stressful now that you have kids and he doesn’t help out like you think a good husband and father should.

Doors start sticking and every time you go to close them you’re frustrated by the misalignment. You know something is off. Neither of you seem to be as happy as you hoped you’d be. You even see how those patterns in both of your parent’s marriages that you swore you’d never have in yours are ever so sneakily becoming a part of your everyday too.

These are the effects of un-examined beliefs.

When there’s an issue with the foundation of a house, no amount of WD-40, caulk, and paint is going to fix those cracks and sticking doors. You have to go back to the very beginning.

And trust me, you want to.

Cleaning up your foundational beliefs is some of the most important and life changing work you will ever do.

How Therapy and Coaching Changed My Life

When you understand how your brain works, you can make it your greatest asset.

10 years into my marriage I was hollowed out and drained.

I was still functioning as a wife and mom, but it was more a robotic completing of the motions than something my heart was in.

I felt disconnected from my spouse and kids and most of all, disconnected from myself.

I knew that something had to change, or I wasn’t going to make it through the next 20 years.

I found a phenomenal therapist.

A woman who met me exactly where I was at and ever so gently started to question my beliefs about myself and my life.

She didn’t believe my story that I was broken and needed fixing.

She questioned the health of the interactions I was currently having in my relationships. And she helped me take the hard, terrifying look at what I was really feeling inside.

I unearthed patterns and concepts that I’d learned as a child that were still driving my life then, but that were no longer serving me. In fact, they were causing a lot of problems.

Thus began a two-and-a-half-year process to come back to trusting myself and allowing my feelings.

And then two years into therapy, I found coaching.

Coaching was where I learned the tools that allowed me to really get into my brain and untangle my beliefs about myself, my relationships, and my roles. This was the fuel on the fire I’d started with therapy.

With the cognitive component of coaching, and learning that everything in my life was being created from my thoughts and feelings, I was able to make huge changes in my life faster than I ever had before.

I was able to see clearly how I was yelling and freaking out around my kids because of the mental suffering I was creating for myself around my role as a mother.

As I processed feelings I’d stuffed down and changed my thoughts, I saw a dramatic reduction in my reactivity with my kids.

I identified deep beliefs about myself I’d picked up as a child that were hurting me. Beliefs that I couldn’t trust myself, I needed to make others happy to be loved, and my wants weren’t important.

With the tools I learned in coaching, I began to actually process and dismantle them.

I started to see myself differently. To love my humanness. To embrace my imperfections.

Thanks to coaching I was able to finally get clear enough to really love my spouse for who he was and to ultimately still make the decision to get a divorce.

The difficult eight months of that process were only made possible because of coaching.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I went through it with more self-love, patience, and awareness than I’ve ever had before in my entire life.

I am far from being done with my life journey, but when I look back on the changes I’ve made in the past year, I am blown away at how coaching has accelerated my growth.

It has helped me be more decisive, intentional, focused, present, aware, and grounded.

I no longer see myself as the enemy, the broken human that needs fixing, but rather the master of my destiny and the dreamer of huge, beautiful, absolutely possible dreams.

This is what I want for all of my clients. And I know it’s possible.

I have watched clients in six months make the connections and shifts in belief through coaching that took me 2 years of therapy. The tools that I teach are life changing and empowering.

Once you understand how you’re brain works and what’s really going on in there, there’s no stopping you from changing whatever you want in your life.