Identify Limiting Beliefs _Final

>> Welcome back. In the last lecture, I explained how willpower is an ineffective mechanism for change, and that you and your clients will be much better served focusing your time and energy on identifying and replacing your limiting beliefs. Now that you have an understanding of the concept of limiting beliefs, it's time to take the next step forward and look at how to identify these irrational beliefs that keep us stuck. It can be tricky to identify the thoughts that keep you stuck since they're usually hiding in plain sight. They guide all of your behavior, but they're typically automatic and subconscious. If you stop to really think about them and question them in your daily life, they wouldn't be powerful because you'd realize they're outdated and irrational. There are many ways to explore and identify limiting beliefs, but the first step for any technique is to be open to the idea that you're stuck because of the way that you believe things to be, not the way things actually are. This in itself is a huge paradigm shift because it places the responsibility squarely on yourself. If you want to get rid of your limiting beliefs, you have to be willing to accept the idea that the way you're thinking about things is messing up the way that you do things, so it's up to you to create a shift. Next, you'll need to raise your awareness of how you operate and explore just why you do the things you do. Now I want to stop here to clarify an important point. Whether you're doing this for yourself or for your clients, this exploration should never be done from a place of judgment. You're not looking for why you're flawed or what's wrong with you. What you need to understand is that we're all subject to operating from our seven year old self's beliefs, and given our circumstances, we're all doing the best we can at all times. So when you self-sabotage or do things that make no logical sides, they actually make perfect sense in some way. It's just say, operating from a faulty belief system with an impulse of subconscious, so you're not always hitting the mark. It's like trying to see out of glasses at the wrong prescription. No matter how hard you try to focus and look at things, you're just not going to see things clearly despite your best efforts. Your job as a coach is to get creative with your clients, to help them identify their limiting beliefs which are causing them to see things how they think they are instead of how they actually are. There is a great exercise for helping your clients visualize this. We've included a blank template for this exercise that you can print out to use for yourself and with your clients. You could also easily do this from scratch out of blank piece of paper if you're in a pinch. So you want to draw too big circle side-by-side. The first one you'll label what actually happened, and the second one you'll label what I think happened. Easy, right? Here comes the hard part, filling it out honestly. The circle on the left is where you want to jot down what actually happened. Events that are completely factual like, "My mom left the house. My husband bought junk food. I didn't go to the gym today." There's no debating these statements, they're facts. The circle on the right is where you fill in what you think happened, the way you perceive the situation. Now even if you think you have 99% reason to think it could be true or you feel really strongly about it, it still belongs over here and not any other circle. These are things that have no actual concrete evidence, like, "My mom doesn't care about me. He left the food on the table because he doesn't care about my diet. Or there is no point going to the gym because it's always too crowded this time of day." Now this is tricky for some people to wrap their heads around because a lot of times we consider what we think happened to be what actually happened. And so we function off of our assumptions instead of truths. Our assumptions are the stories we tell ourselves about things. We make up stories all the time about our lives and what people think about us, and we never really stop to think about the other reasons why things could be. Because we treat past experience as evidence of what's going on in the present. There's always more than one way to look at things, this is called perspective. Your job as a coach is to open your clients up to perspectives and possibilities. When you remove a limiting belief, you open yourself up to all of the possibilities out there. You want to get yourself and your clients in the habit of looking at things from multiple perspectives. So when you experience something, consider the many other ways and you can interpret it outside of your initial response. Here's a story that really exemplifies the power of doing this. I had a client whose dad weighed her every week as a kid. How much she could eat was dependent on how much she weighed. She thought it was because he didn't love her and because he was a jerk. And would you agree? That sounds awful, right? But we spoke some more, and it sounded like he actually did care very much about her wellbeing. As an outsider, I saw the possibility of a new different perspective of that situation, and I asked her if she'd be willing to try it on for size. Now you don't want to force a viewpoint. You're not telling them, "No, actually I think it's like this." Instead, you're offering up a different way of seeing things based on the facts you've collected from them. A great way you can do this is to use this powerful suggestion starter. "I have it that..." So here's what I said to the client in this example. I have it that your dad really loves you and cares about you. So coming from that perspective, if dad loves you and cares about you, what might have been going on back then? We discussed what she thought, and then I said, "This is just a thought. It may not be true. For all I know, he's just a jerk and you're 100% right. But I have it that your dad loves you, and if he did love you when he was doing this, what if it was because maybe he was bullied for being overweight when he was a child, and he wanted to protect you from being bullied and hurt. And that's why he weighed you and measured out your food." I'd asked her if her dad was overweight as a kid, and she said, "Yes." My client then broke down into tears realizing that for years, she held this experience against her dad when really he was just trying to help. Granted, we may look at this experience and say, "Really, dad, you thought that would work?" But there's a reason why they say hindsight is 20-20. Dad was doing the best he knew how, even if he missed the mark. This is also a perfect example how everyone is doing the best they know how with what's available to them, their beliefs, emotional stamina, and circumstances. If they could have done better, they would have done better. In this example, dad was doing the best he could to make his daughter feel safe based on his own past experiences. He just did what he thought would be best without thinking ahead that what he was doing to his daughter might be detrimental to her physical and mental health. For all those years, she held on to the story that her dad didn't love her and was this cruel awful person, and it negatively affected their relationship. But when she changed the story that she had about him, and the assumptions that she held onto, their relationship changed. So to recap what we've covered so far, we can start to create a powerful shift in our lives by identifying the thoughts that keep us stuck. And a great way to do this is to open ourselves up to multiple perspectives by looking at what actually happened versus what we think happened. Another great way to uncover limiting beliefs is to figure out how staying the way you are is actually serving you. Now, most of your clients are going to be really adamant that whatever the behavior is that they're trying to change is not serving them. I'll go with the example of being overweight again since this comes up so frequently in health coaching. If you asked your client who's trying to lose weight that they're getting out of being overweight, they'd probably say something like, "It's not serving me at all. There's no way. That's why I'm here. I just can't change." Then it becomes your job as a coach to get creative and use what information you know about them. Use your intuition to ask high mileage questions to get how their current condition is serving them. For example, you could ask, "Does being overweight keep you loyal in your relationship?" Because if you lost weight, you might be more attractive to more people, and maybe you'd be tempted to cheat or feel like you could do better. And maybe you didn't hit the mark, but there can be lots of reasons why they're maintaining the behavior. And whatever it is, it's based on a belief. Maybe it feels safer to feed into the background where they're used to being and not having people notice them. There are tons of reasons. You're not trying to throw a million hypotheses in their direction of what you think could be going on. What you're doing here is stepping into their shoes and using your intuition to think about what might be going on if you were your client in that particular situation, not what you would do as you in the situation, got it? Once you get good at this, your intuition will help you to easily pick up on this kind of information. And then you can present it to them among an array of perspectives, and let them pick the answer for themselves so they're still arriving at their own conclusion. I like to sandwich my hunch of what the right answer is between two other possibilities, like, "It could be this or this or this. Any of those resonate with you." Whatever it is, all of our clients have some kind of need to be met. Be it safety or avoiding discomfort that they believe maintaining the status quo will give them. With the example of eating unhealthy foods, if you think about it sometimes eating indulgent food is the most excitement and adventure that some people get. Their life is monotonous, and eating an exotic meal seems like all they have to look forward to. Their beliefs might be something like food is the only fun I have. If you pick up on something like this, you can zero in and explore alternative ways to meet this need. Ask them, "Do you have enough fun and adventure in your life? What could you do to spice things up and break out of the monotony of life besides eating?" So now we've covered two great ways to uncover limiting beliefs. I'll share one more of my favorite methods with you. Filling in the blanks. When we do this exercise it can uncover how we think about things that we don't normally stop to question. Filling in the blanks is awesome because it puts us in a position where we can ask why. Your client's hidden gems will come out after several rounds of answers. You can work this into your dialogue with the client or you can do this as a written exercise by having your clients literally fill in the blanks. We've included a work sheet that you can use for yourself and with your clients to check out after this lecture, but for now, here are a few examples of what I mean. I can't run a successful business because... I can't find love because... I can't lose weight because... All you're doing here is making an enquiry. Why can't you run a successful business? Let's say the answer was, "I can't run a successful business because I'm afraid to take a risk." This is the starting point, not the ending point. From here, you want to peel back the layers by asking why. Why are you afraid to take a risk? Because I don't think I have what it takes. Why? Because I'm lazy. Why? Because I'll get mad if I try and fail, and I did all that work for nothing. Why? Because I feel shame. Why? Because I've always felt shame when I felt the things. Why? Because when I was a kid, my dad was really hard on me if I wasn't good at stuff, and ever since then I hate letting people down. Bam! See what that little exercise took us. Now this belief is exposed and you can explore it with your clients so that they can see that it really has nothing to do with the present. Why it can be the most powerful question in your toolbox as a coach. As redundant and silly as it sounds, sometimes you just need to keep asking why until you're client leads you to what's really going on. You can always frame it like, "I want you to humor me here because I think there's something going on here. I'm going to ask you why and you're going to keep answering. We're going to keep going until we feel like we have gold." I encourage you to try this out this week and see how it goes. So to recap, you can identify limiting beliefs by separating the truth of what actually happened from what you think happened, by figuring out what the behavior's serving, and by filling in the blanks and asking why. Remember, how I said in order for the stuff to stick and be effective as a coach, you really need to do the work for yourself. Well, now is the time to start trying it out. Head on over to the Learning Center, and complete the beliefs versus facts, and the beliefs fill in the blanks worksheets. Then when you're done, pop on over to the Facebook group and join the discussion. I hope you enjoyed watching this lecture as much as I enjoyed teaching it. Thanks so much for watching. See you soon.