One of the things I’m exploring right now: Beliefs and how they shape our experience. A belief is simply a thought you think over and over again until it becomes true for you. It is something you might have been told as a child, or you decided based upon some experience. But just as you decided at one point to “believe that belief,” you can also decide to “unbelieve that belief” by replacing it with something else that you choose instead.
For example, as a child I believed with all my heart that if I hung my foot over the side of the bed in the dark, a monster would grab it. I was absolutely positive that this would happen. I’m delighted to share with you that I no longer hold that belief and it didn’t even take a lot of work to let that one go, LOL!
But some of my other beliefs are more difficult to dislodge. Thoughts that I no longer say out loud but that swirl around in the depths and show up in the middle of the night: “I’m just a small-town girl, people like us don’t…” “What makes me think I can make this work? I have failed before.” “I can’t do this.”
One of the techniques the experts teach is to use Affirmations to replace those old beliefs. An affirmation is a thought you choose to think because you like the results it will produce for you. All of our thoughts are affirming something, so an affirmation is simply one you choose because it is going where you want to go. They need to be positive and present-tense, blah, blah, blah.
But my clients frequently say to me, “how can those work if I don’t believe them?” And you know what? I agree with them. I’ve had those same exact thoughts. And what I think is that if you don’t believe they will work, they won’t.
I have two ideas I want to share with you that could make our work of shifting beliefs much easier:
- My new favorite affirmation, which I use at the end of my list of affirmations/new beliefs every single day. It makes me giggle and I believe it wholeheartedly. Here it is: “My affirmations all work for me, whether I believe they will or not.”
- Afformation is a word made up by author Noah St. John. The concept is based upon the idea that we’re always asking internal questions and our subconscious mind is always answering. Most of us are unconsciously going around asking ourselves negative, disempowering questions like, Why am I so stupid? Why am I so fat? Am I doing the right thing? Lousy questions return lousy answers. By turning positive statements into “why” questions, the subconscious mind still looks for answers, but now great questions return great answers. For instance: Why is everything working out so incredibly well for me? Why am I so loved? Why do I have so much confidence? Here’s an incredible list that will really get your brain going.
Try these and let me know what happens!
