Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs_Final

>> Hello again. In the last lecture, you learned how to identify limiting beliefs. Now that you know how to do this, it's time to challenge yours and kick them to the curb. By now, you should have taken the time to identify your limiting beliefs and completed the beliefs versus facts, and the beliefs fill-in-the-blanks worksheets. If you haven't done this yet, please hit pause now and come back when you're done. Alright, so now that we're all on the same page, I'll walk you through the steps of how to disrupt these false thought patterns and put positive productive thoughts in their place. By the time you're done with this, you'll be well on the road to overcoming the biggest roadblocks that keep you stuck, and you'll know how to do this for your clients. To do this, I'll share with you my six-step process for overcoming your limiting beliefs. Ready? Let's go. Number one, acknowledge the belief. This is what we went over in the last lecture. Before you can replace a negative and an unproductive thought, you first need to know what it is and acknowledge that it's playing a role in the way you think and act. So let's say, for example, your client Sadie wants to start running, so she signs up for a 5K and commits to going for a run before work every morning. But after the first difficult attempt at a morning run, she finds herself hitting snooze until the last minute every morning thereafter. You work with her to create accountability, writing it into her planner, setting out her workout clothes the night before, seeking out a running buddy, but despite her efforts and her strong desire to run, she's still wondering why she's sabotaging her training time. What's going on? You explain to Sadie that this is likely an issue of mindset, and you sit down and explore her beliefs about herself as they relate to her fitness, her strength, and her desire to be a runner. You ask her, "What do you see when you picture yourself as runner in a 5K?" And she says, "A loser. I picture myself huffing and puffing all the way in the back. It'll be embarrassing." Bingo. Now you're onto something, so you explore this, and you ask, "Why do you see yourself as a loser and not a winner in this race?" She says, "Because I'm too fat to be a runner, I'll never be able to train to be good enough to run this race. I'll be a joke." You say, "So you want to be a runner, but you don't see yourself as one. You see yourself as a failure, and so it'll be embarrassing when the time comes to run your 5K. Every morning, you find yourself hitting snooze and avoiding practice which seems to reaffirm this belief that you won't succeed as a runner. From what you're telling me, it looks like you're failing before you even try. You're acting in accordance with your belief that you can't run. What do you think?" You've challenged Sadie to confront her limiting belief by holding up a mirror to her. She can reject it or accept it. She chooses to acknowledge it, and so you explore it with her. Now you're ready for the next step. Number two, seek the source. While the past is in the past, it can be super helpful to trace back where and how you developed a belief. This helps you see how you take the past and bring it into the present and project it onto your future. When you trace a belief back to its roots, you can see how you automatically take the supposed "lesson" you've learned and apply it to anything that resembles it, even illogically, it may have nothing to do with who you are or your life as it is today. You need to find where the seed was planted so you can dig up the roots. So getting back to Sadie, you explore with her where this line of thinking came from that she's not cut out to be a runner and that running a 5K will be embarrassing. And she tells you about when she was in high school, she tried out for the track team. And a group of boys, who happen to be watching, made fun of her as she ran by. They laughed at her bright red cheeks and called her Jiggles. Sadie recounts this almost in tears, and she describes how mortified she felt and how the name stuck with her throughout high school. Wow, no wonder her feelings of insecurity are being triggered now, many years later as she sees that she's carried this with her and that the experience came to define how she views herself athletically. Up until now, she has avoided running and she never gave much thought to why. She reflects, "Maybe I'm still letting that experience dictate how I feel about my ability to be a runner now, but that's how I feel. Running just feels embarrassing to me, so what do I do with that?" This is where step three comes in. Recognize the falsehood. Once you acknowledge that a limiting belief has power over your thoughts and you trace back the roots to see where it developed, it's time to examine its validity. How is this belief serving you? Is it protecting you from doing something scary, from making what might turn out to be the same "mistake" again? How is it actually serving you now? Chances are it isn't. What your brain does is assume that because this is what happened then, that this is what will inevitably happen again, but this is not a fact. Your subconscious brain files away your experiences to help you explain the world around you. This is useful to remember that a chair is something you sit on and a grizzly bear is something that can attack you, but your relationships to the world and to the other people just aren't that simplistic. Imagine if you sabotage all relationships for the rest of your life because a boy broke your heart in ninth grade or you scarf down an entire box of donuts just because you failed at dieting once, so you're doomed to be fat. This sounds extreme and kind of ridiculous, and yet this is how we habitually train our brains to react to things. We operate from these rigid beliefs that seem to make sense but are actually totally illogical because there's no element of truth you can attach to them. When we expose the falseness of our beliefs, we can see that they're typically rooted in some irrelevant assumption tied to the past. In Sadie's case, you help her arrive to the rational conclusion that she has no proof that because she was teased once when she was running that she'll ever be teased again for running. You ask her what evidence she has that she'll be the largest runner or the last in place. She has none. Sadie comes to see that her belief is keeping her safe from the imagined pain of being teased again, from feeling that pain again that she has associated with running, but all it's doing her now is causing her real pain as she lets this thought pattern sabotage her goal. This is her aha moment. Now she's ready for step four. Create a new empowering belief. This is where you explore the potential for a healthier, more productive way of thinking. Think of this as going shopping for new boots. You have an idea what you're looking for when you arrive at the store, but you don't know which pairs will fit or not, so you grab a bunch and try them on for size. This is what you'll do with the alternative beliefs you come up with. You're not going to automatically believe a new belief. It's not that easy. You won't come across the idea for a better way of thinking and say, "Yes, this is how I feel now." Just like a new pair of boots, it'll take some time breaking it in. This is just the stage that you ask yourself, "How do I want to think? How do I want to feel? If I were to overcome this thing in my life, what kind of thoughts would I have to be telling myself to create this new mindset?" You do this with Sadie, and she decides that instead of thinking, "I'm an embarrassing loser when I run." She'd be better off thinking thoughts like, "I get better every time I practice running. I'm running laps around everyone who's sitting on the couch. All that matters when I run is how I feel, and I feel great. I'm proud of myself when I run for pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Right now, Sadie doesn't actually believe any of these beliefs, and that's okay. She's not supposed to. We can't just magically undo years of thought patterns overnight. But do you see how Sadie starts telling herself thoughts like these every day, rehearsing them to herself when she goes to bed. When she wakes up and sees her running clothes laid out, when her feat hit the pavement, how much more empowered she'll feel than if she tells herself, "I'm a loser who is too fat to run." From here, it's time to put your beliefs into action, which means start "as if." To go from living a life through a framework of your old destructive thoughts to embodying your new awesome thoughts, you have to start "as if" and challenge yourself to operate as if your new belief was true. This is the art of fake it till you make it. At first, it can feel totally uncomfortable, and our old stubborn thought patterns will rebel and try to say, "No, that's stupid. You're stupid." So what you need to do when this happens is take a leap of faith and tell those thoughts to take a hike. This is when you feel the fear and do it anyway. You make a habit of rehearsing your new beliefs and take the bold leap to live your life as you'd imagine yourself thinking, feeling, and acting on the other side where you've overcome whatever it is that's holding you back and then act the part. So let's go back to Sadie. She decides to give this belief stuff a try, and she creates pop-up reminders on her phone and her computer of her new beliefs. She says them to herself before she goes to bed at night. When she wakes up, she remembers that she is committed to being a runner, and so she's acting as if she were one. Runners don't hit snooze. They get up, put on their workout clothes, and maybe drink some water and eat a banana, they stretch, they go outside and they start their run before they have a chance to talk themselves out of it. Sadie decides to push past her own resistance and follow through as if she's a runner. It' still hard, and she's still huffing and puffing, but she tells herself the whole time, "I get better every time I practice running, and I'm running laps around everyone sitting on the couch." She makes it home feeling great, no one made fun of her, nothing bad happened. She actually feels pretty proud of herself. The process was easier because instead of forcing willpower, "I have to run, I have to push. Move your lazy butt," she visualized success to get her through. And so at the end, she felt like she succeeded rather than feeling like she just survived. Now she has a positive experience under her belt, and she's ready for step six. Create evidence of success. When you act as if, chances are things go favorably at least to some degree, and that awful thing that happened to you when you were 12 years old didn't just happen again at the age of 34. Now you don't just have evidence against your limiting belief, you also have evidence in support of your new empowering belief. So this finally step is how you create a new thought pattern and make it stick, which is the process of actually turning this new belief into your new identity. It's really important to keep following through here so that all of your prior work wasn't done in vain. In this process, your old limiting belief will lose all of its power. What you need to do here is keep acting as if and subsequently repeat having this favorable outcome so that your brain automatically does that creature of habit thing and starts to genuinely form this new connection of, "When I do X, then Y will happen." Each time it gets easier because each time you act "as if," you gain even more evidence in your favor. Think of it as correctly programming your brain or creating an automatic pattern in favor of success. So after a few weeks of Sadie rising to the challenge of acting "as if" and telling herself, "I feel great when I run." And then coming back from her runs feeling unstoppable, she's going to automatically start waking up and lacing up her shoes because she really knows she feels great when she runs. And the statement, "I feel like a fat loser when I run," no longer holds any power because while she felt like that a long time ago, she has felt awesome like 25 times since then. So there's no reason for her to think that anymore. So to recap, the six steps to overcoming you limiting beliefs are to acknowledge the belief, seek its source, recognize its falsehood, create a new empowering belief, act "as if," and create evidence of success. Limiting beliefs have a really powerful way of taking hold of our lives. But what's really powerful is the way that we can transcend them when we make the decision and commitment to shift our mindset. Once you learn how to do this in one area of your life, it becomes easier to do in other areas because you start to build evidence in favor of the process itself. After a while, life becomes an exciting challenge and you start to see that anything is possible. As I mentioned earlier, it's so important to actually experience this yourself as a coach. So I encourage you to use this opportunity to challenge and replace the negative beliefs that have the strongest grip on your life. Take advantage of your coaching practice sessions or pair up with a classmate to take turns helping each other work through the process. I encourage you to get started right now and then report into the Facebook group and let us know how it goes. Thanks for watching. See you soon.