Don’t Believe What You Think

“The first place we lose the battle is in our own thinking. If you think it’s permanent then it’s permanent. If you think you have reached your limits, then you have. If you think you will never get well, then you won’t. You have to change your thinking. You need to see everything that’s holding your back, every obstacle, every limitation as only temporary.”~ unknown

Our thinking and our mind has a purpose, to help us survive. So we spend more time in our survival mode and brain than we do in our safety brain and mode. We focus so much on things we think we will not change; on things that create fear in us that we cannot see that we are holding ourselves back. We believe what our mind/brain tells us. We believe because we have created it, we have held onto those limiting beliefs. And we all have them. They can be assumptions we make based upon our history, or those beliefs may be based on our interpretation of something that has happened. Those limiting beliefs could be from social or childhood conditioning or from moments in our lives that were so formidable that we haven’t been able to move away from them.

And changing those thoughts so they are no longer permanent and no longer limiting is very difficult. I was speaking with someone recently about this and how my thoughts are so different now. I don’t sit and become anxious about something that I don’t know anything about yet, or something that I cannot control. In fact, I now focus solely on telling myself that “I will be fine.” That doesn’t mean that something out of my control may occur, but through it I know I will be okay. I no longer allow myself to catastrophize, and make things far bigger and far worse than they are or that I think they are. I wait to understand what is happening and then figure out the best way to move forward. I don’t get all caught up in the “what ifs” or the fear.

So often, we let that fear stop us from doing something new. Our brain says “NO!” and we believe it and stop ourselves. Our brain only knows to stop us from doing something that is new, it doesn’t understand that something new isn’t automatically bad. It doesn’t like the unfamiliar so it will work to convince us that we should not do something. That something could be getting on a stage and talking to a large audience, could be skydiving or scuba diving or it might be much smaller such as a new experience, a new person, a new home, a new car, a new thought, a new routine, a new exercise, a new anything! When we are trying something that we have never done before, our mind doesn’t like it and will immediately begin to tell you (both in words and feelings) why you should not do that new thing. And again, we believe it. We think our mind is smart. It isn’t. It is focused on keeping us safe and alive.

We want to stay safe and alive, but a new thought process, a change in how we do something isn’t going to make us unsafe and die. From my understanding nobody has died because yesterday they were people-pleasing and today they have boundaries. Nobody has died because yesterday they were focused on fixing other people and their issues, and today they realize that is none of their business and they are only going to focus on fixing their own issues. Nobody has died because yesterday they believed that all happiness and love come from external validation and what they do for others and today they realize that happiness is an inside job and it is up to them to choose to be happy.

Nobody dies from changing how they show up in the world so that they show up whole, worthy, focused on love and service and gratitude. Nobody dies from changing their belief structure from the need to be perfect to be loved, to realizing there is no such thing as perfection and love is internal. Nobody dies from the belief that work defines us to really living a life of love and service and that work is only a part of it, a way to impact the world.

Our mind loves to fuck with us, keeping us small, keeping us the same. As we do the work to make the unfamiliar more familiar and create safety in our body, we can continue to build a belief structure and life that is focused on who we want to be, not who we are. We can build a life that inspires others’ versus always feeling that we need to catch up to others. We can build a life that other’s opinions are meaningless and the only opinion that truly matters is our own.

Changing our thoughts are integral to becoming our next level self. And it is our next level self that will play bigger, that will love bigger and that will serve bigger. Then we can make the impact we were placed in this life to make. We can’t make it as long we believe our thoughts.

Don’t believe everything you think, until your thinking becomes so intentional that it is aligned with who you want to become. Then believe you!