Do you struggle to stick with habits or achieve your goals? It may be your beliefs that are standing in your way. Are your beliefs the reason you struggle and fail? Let’s take a deeper look..
Our beliefs about ourselves can make us or break us. If we believe we can do something, we quite literally can and will do it. If we believe we cannot, we will not do it. As you can imagine this plays a drastic role in our habits and whether or not we will achieve our goals.
Let’s look a bit deeper at exactly what a belief is..
According to psychologist Dr. Nicole LePera, “A belief is a practiced thought grounded in lived experience. Beliefs are built up over years of thought patterns and require both interior and exterior validation to thrive. Beliefs about ourselves (our personality, our weaknesses, our past, our future) are filters that are placed over the lens of how we view our world.
The more we practice certain thoughts, the more ourt brain wires itself to default to these new patterns. This is especially true if the thoughts activate our stress response and vagus nerve. This creates an internal turmoil that can easily become compulsive over time, which the definition of the conditioned trauma reaction we know as emotional addiction.
The habit of thinking a particular thought over and over again changes our brain, our nervous system, and the cellular chemistry of our entire body, making it easier to default to such thought patterns in the future. In other words: the more we think something, the more we are likely to believe it. Our practiced thoughts become our truth.”
Not only is a belief something we think, a belief can create emotional addiction within us, cause emotional turmoil and defeat us. On the other hand a belief can lend itself to all of the success in the world.
First, let’s create awareness surrounding our beliefs to determine if they serve us.
We all have beliefs about ourselves that we have had instilled for as long as we can remember. There’s a chance they were instilled within us from childhood. We want to look at these beliefs and create awareness around them and determine if they serve us or not. That’s always the first step. Write them out.. journal them.. determine if they help you or not.
For those that do serve us, great, let’s lean into them. For the beliefs that do not serve us, we actually can change them. Beliefs are learned and conditioned. They CAN be changed, but it takes practice.
Next, we want to determine where this belief has come from and if it’s even rational.
Is it possible you tell yourself that you cannot afford a personal trainer because you have a negative relationship with money that goes back to your childhood. Is this belief rational today? Or perhaps you tell yourself you aren’t a morning person and you can’t wake up at 5am to workout, but how do you even know this is true? Have you ever really tried?
The next step in changing our beliefs is to create new ones.
For example, let’s say one of your beliefs about yourself is that you don’t have time to workout. You believe you are just so busy that there’s not enough time to workout. Instead, try reframing this belief to “I have time to do whatever I prioritize.” You may not suddenly have the time to workout, but after a few days or weeks of this, your mindset begins to shift and now you see how scheduling a workout before you start work is possible.
Or for example, let’s say one of your beliefs is that you can’t eat 100g of protein in a day. Instead, you practice a reframe of “100g of protein isn’t that much.” Right off the bat you may not eat 100g of protein everyday, but you start logging your food. The you realize you are getting 75g and realize you could bump that up with just an ounce of extra chicken and you are almost there. So you really go for it, add some Greek yogurt and BOOM, you’re at 100g!
Finally, we need to consider our beliefs as we set goals.
One helpful tool I suggest to clients when doing this is creating goals that are identity based. When we set out to lose 20 pounds that may seem like a lot, but when we simply say “I am a fit person who enjoys daily exercise.” Then, the act of working out becomes pretty easy because we identify with it, and the weight loss naturally happens because we workout often. This will help instill the beliefs we want so we can act accordingly to achieve what we truly want in life.
This all takes practice. But we have a choice – we can practice limiting beliefs and never get anywhere, or we can practice challenging the ones that do not serve us and replace them with beliefs that do. Either way, it takes work, so we may as well work on the ones we want, right?
If you need help getting out of your own way, let’s work together. Learn more about 1:1 coaching with me at commit2fitcoaching.com or reach out to me here.
Your Coach,
Kyra