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.

Why Loving Yourself First Matters

Love – noun: an intense feeling of deep affection.

Somewhere along the way while growing up, I missed the self-love memo.

Instead I picked up the idea that love was something I earned from others by making them happy.

When I was doing what my parents wanted, they loved me more. When I was pretty and funny and easy to be with, my boyfriends loved me more. And when I wasn’t those things, it felt like love was withdrawn.

So I learned how to change my behavior to try and match what I felt would illicit more love from whomever was in front of me. And I learned how to wear different masks to get love from different people.

But then Brooke Castillo blew my mind with the idea that love is a feeling. And feelings are created with our thoughts. Thus, no one else can “give” you love or make you feel loved, because it all starts in your brain.

So I went and peeked in my brain to see what thoughts were there creating love and I found quite the opposite.

Thoughts like:

  • He doesn’t care about you.
  • If he really knew you he wouldn’t love you.
  • You’re so naïve and needy.
  • You don’t have anything valuable to offer.
  • You’re failing.
  • You need to be better than you are.
  • Why can’t you handle all of this like everyone else?
  • I’m broken.
  • Something is wrong with me.

Any of these sound familiar?

For some of us, it really is true that we say things to ourselves in our minds that we would never utter aloud to another human being.

But it’s like our brain thinks, “If I just beat you up enough, you’ll feel motivated to change and be better.“

It doesn’t work that way my friends.

The more negative and self-deprecating our internal dialogue, the more negative emotions we create for ourselves and then end up acting from.

And when the foundation of your thoughts about yourself is, “I’m broken and there’s something wrong with me,” you’re going to feel that in every aspect of your life, from your career to your parenting to your marriage.

We think the solution is to get up and DO more. Go out and be kinder, say nicer things to others, show up more generously, be more “loving.”

But all of that is like trying to share from a glass that’s already empty.

Instead, the answer is found in cleaning out your thoughts about yourself, feeling and processing what you’ve created, and then deciding intentionally what you want to believe and feel about yourself going forward.

This is the work that creates the foundation of a life filled with loving others effortlessly.

You cannot fully love others when you do not love yourself first. It will always come back to that.

How to Make the “Right” Choice When Considering Divorce

3 step process my clients go through in coaching.

Your thoughts are the most powerful tool you have for creating your reality.

One of the areas we focus on extensively in the style of coaching I use is a focus on your thoughts and how they create your feelings and actions.

We can take the exact same facts of a situation and what would be interpreted as awful and tragic for one person, can be viewed by another as life changing and inspirational.

It all depends on the thoughts of the person viewing the facts.

This is how divorce can be interpreted for some as the best decision they ever made, and for others the worst.

So what makes your decision “right” then?

How can you know what the “right” decision is?

I take my clients through three steps to find the answer:

  1. Clean up your current mind drama and process emotion so you can make the decision from a clean space mentally and emotionally.
  2. Know your reasons for your choice and love them.
  3. Make the decision and choose intentionally to have your own back going forward. 

This is the process that allows my clients to take whatever they choose, whether it’s staying married or getting divorce, and make it the “right” decision.

This is how they finally move forward after years spent spinning out in indecision and living half-in and half-out of their marriages.  

This is how they go on to have better lives no matter what their decision is.

There’s no “right” answer out there waiting for you to find it. 

You are the one who MAKES your decision either “right” or “wrong” with your thoughts.

That’s why it’s so important to do the work of cleaning up your brain ahead of time before you make the final decision. 

Photo by marianne bos on Unsplash