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 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.

You Can Trust Yourself

“I can’t trust myself.”

By the time I was starting to consider divorce, I had already had many years of practicing this belief.

I had developed a pattern of looking to people outside of me for guidance and insight into what I should do in my life.

This looked like taking copious notes at religious meetings and then trying to checklist everything that had been mentioned.

Listening to every comment from my spouse on my appearance – “don’t like bangs, too much jewelry” – and changing it accordingly.

And oversharing with my friends and family in the hopes that someone would tell me the right things to do.

And then, when I would actually decide on my own, when things got tough or didn’t work out like I’d thought, I would beat the crap out of myself mentally. “This was such a stupid idea. What were you thinking? You look like an idiot. Don’t ever do this again.”

It’s like a part of my brain had become this negative animus that was there to constantly shame and judge me whenever I struggled or wasn’t perfect.

It was a seriously sucky way to live. Always worried about what others thought. Always trying to control their thoughts about me by taking actions that I thought they would like.

It was exhausting and felt like a hamster wheel because, newsflash, you never have control over what another human being chooses to think about you.

But coaching changed all of this.

I learned that I could CHOOSE my beliefs about myself.

That the statement “I can’t trust myself” was just a thought. And after seeing what that thought was producing, I could choose to let it go and believe something else about myself.

Slowly, little by little, I started to understand how the negative thoughts I had about myself weren’t helping me at all.

Instead of “motivating” me to change and helping me “get better,” they were creating the very things I was trying to get away from – fear, inadequacy, anxiety, depression, abandonment of self, people pleasing, and hiding.

I slowly started to develop trust in myself by changing my thoughts and my life has steadily improved ever since. I now actively practice thoughts that help me develop trust in and love for myself.

Change is not impossible, and it’s also not as hard as you think. What you believe about yourself is not set in stone, and it absolutely is not a fact.

I work with my clients, step by step, to find these old beliefs about themselves that no longer serve them, and to try on new beliefs that start creating the life they want. Because when they know they can trust themselves, then the choice to stay or go becomes clear and they move forward.