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 will it all work out if I get divorced?

You want to know the how right?

  • “But how am I going to move forward once I decide?”
  • “What will all of that look like?”
  • “How can I avoid mistakes?”

This is a point that all of my clients reach once they’ve coached with me long enough to have identified what they want, figured out their reasons for their choice, and are now ready to move forward.

And I get it, I really do.

I remember when I talked to my lawyer that first time and she told me that it would take 8 months minimum to get divorced and my brain was like “Say what?!”

I could not imagine how on earth I was going to make it through 8 more months. I felt like I was already at the breaking point and needed things to change NOW.

But here’s the reality, I didn’t.

I’m still here, still alive, and I went through each and every day of those eight months that it took to get divorced without knowing ahead of time what it would be like. 

And I was able to do that by trusting in my choice and managing my brain along the way.

The obsession you feel with knowing the “how” is just part of what our human brains are built to do.

You brain wants to analyze all of the risk, try to figure everything out ahead of time, and plan each step.

Some of that is what we do in coaching; we go in and clean out all the closets in your brain and sort and organize everything so that you have a solid foundation, but then there comes a point when it’s time to trust the foundation you’ve laid and just get in there and start going. 

Because here’s the thing, you never know “how” to do something until you actually “do it.”

Like learning how to swim or ride a bike, there’s only so much you can gain from talking and thinking about it before you just have to jump in the pool or get on the bike and start pedaling.  

And with the tools you learn in coaching, that journey of figuring out your “how” becomes less painful because you know how to not make all of the moments when things are tough and you fall down, mean that you’re failing and it’s never going to work. 

You know how to love yourself through all of it and manage your brain so that it’s working with you instead of against you.

Coaching is what helps you find your reasons for your choice and a strong “why” that you can come back to for commitment and resilience as you go through the “how.”

When you have a strong enough why, the how gets naturally figured out each day.

So ask yourself,

  • Do I know my reasons?
  • Do I have a “why” that I love and feel solid about?

If you don’t, invest in coaching to help you create that foundation, and then once you do, trust that the journey will reveal the “how” to you along the way.