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What’s true for you, right here, right now? What do you believe about the world around you, or what’s possible for you? Do you understand the power of your beliefs in the context of your day-to-day life?
We like to believe that the stories we tell ourselves are the truth about how the world works or who people are, but they’re really just our observations and interpretations of reality. Your belief system is creating everything in your reality, from how you feel to what you have, and who you show up as in the world. The great news is that once you’re aware of this, there are limitless possibilities available to you.
Tune in this week to learn my top lessons learned about beliefs in 10 years of coaching. I’m showing you how we contribute to making our beliefs true, why you don’t need proof to believe in what you want, and how to create momentum in strengthening your beliefs, especially when doubt arises.
If you’re serious about succeeding in your coaching business, you want to join our newest program, The Lab: Coach Access. To celebrate our 10th birthday, sign up during May to get it at a discounted price of $125 a month. Click here to find out more!
What You’ll Learn on this Episode:
- The most basic definition of a belief.
- How we know beliefs aren’t true.
- Examples of how the brain tries to filter out irrelevant information.
- How we contribute to making our thoughts true.
- The most significant thing I’ve learned in 10 years of coaching.
- How you might be confusing self-awareness with truths about yourself.
- Why you don’t have to have proof to believe in what you want.
Mentioned on the Show:
- Call 888-HI-JODY-M or 888-445-6396 to leave me your question, and I can’t wait to address it right here on the podcast!
- Come check out The Lab!
- Follow me on Instagram or Facebook!
- Grab the Podcast Roadmap!
- Brooke Castillo
- Dr. Benjamin Hardy
What do you believe and why do you believe it? Most people think these questions are about existential beliefs or religious faith, and they can be. But today I want to talk about the power of them in a different context, in the context of your day-to-day life, right here, right now, I’ll tell you that in my 10 years of coaching I’ve witnessed the power of beliefs. And I’ve seen people change beliefs that seemed impossible to let go of. Welcome to episode 462, 10 Years Coaching – Lessons Learned, Part 4: Beliefs.
This is Better Than Happy. I’m your coach, Jody Moore. And on this podcast, my objective, just so we’re clear, is to change what you’ve been taught and have likely believed about yourself up until now. Here’s what I believe about you. I believe that what you think is real is mostly imagined And what you imagine is actually creating what’s real. I believe that in the ways you desire to achieve, you 100% have the capacity to succeed.
And finally, I believe that joy, love, and miracles are your God given natural state of being. And any time you feel far from them, the way back is much simpler than you think, but that’s about to change. Are you ready? Let’s do this.
What’s happening? We made it to spring. Did you make it to spring? We’re having the most beautiful weather here. I’m loving it. I’m spending as much time outside as I possibly can, soaking in the sun and just really appreciating it.
I want to talk to you about this topic of beliefs today because this is at the crux of everything that I do. It is really the tipping point of any major success or progress that I see my clients make. Think about a door, a big door that maybe you’re trying to open or close. And I want you to think about the tiny little hinges that that door swings on, small hinges swing big doors.
And our beliefs are thinking the stories that we’re telling ourselves and that we believe to be just truths about how the world works are the small hinges that swing those big doors but the hinges are small. We don’t really pay very close attention to them. We forget about them, actually, until something breaks, maybe on a door. And this is how we operate as human beings, what we can see is our actions, the things we do, the things we don’t do, the words that people say. The things happening externally are the most obvious, those are the doors.
But what’s happening in our minds, what we’re believing to be true, what we believe is reality, which is actually just our observance of reality and our interpretation of reality, I should say, that is what is swinging that door whichever direction it’s going.
So, let’s just start with a basic definition of a belief. My favorite definition of a belief comes from Abraham Hicks, who says that a belief is just a thought that you keep on thinking. Isn’t that a beautiful, simple way to distill a belief down? It’s just a thought that you keep on thinking. Now, when I’m talking to people about beliefs and we notice a thought that someone keeps on thinking, oftentimes they’ll say to me, “But it’s true.” In other words, this is my observance of what is actually true and real in the outside world, happening here in my head.
I’m the same way. I think that what I believe is true, is just true, and that’s okay. That’s how we’re supposed to operate as human beings. It helps us to feel safe and to feel like we understand the world and we can make enough predictions to keep ourselves safe and all of that, so it’s okay. But if you recognize that a belief is just a thought that you keep on thinking and keep in mind every time we think the same thought, we ingrain neural pathways into our brains as those two neurons connect. And so, it becomes a really deep rooted pattern in the brain every time we think the same thought.
So, interesting to think about a belief that way, as less an observation of what’s real and more a sentence that we’ve been thinking in our brains over and over again. Now, I’m not saying it’s not based in reality. I’m not saying you don’t have good reason to believe it. I’m not even saying it’s not true. It is ‘true’. And it’s also not true, a belief because beliefs are subjective. So, here’s the thing, our brains are so amazing and efficient, they try to focus on reinforcing what we believe is true.
That is the brain’s job to scan for evidence or proof that what we are thinking and believing is reality. This is called the reticular activating system. Your brain knows to pay attention to things that reinforce your beliefs or things that might be relevant to your life, especially if they’re relevant to your survival so your brain believes. I mean, there are some things relevant to our survival, but our brain thinks a lot more things are relevant to our survival than what actually are.
So, anything that might be threatening or dangerous or relevant to your life or reinforcing to your beliefs, that’s what your brain is scanning for. Now, it’s doing its best to filter out anything that doesn’t fit into one of those categories. It’s trying to ignore things that are irrelevant or not potentially dangerous or even potentially super beneficial. It tries to filter all of that out, thank goodness.
Because imagine, I don’t know about you but by about 9:00/9:30, I’m done. Physically I’m tired, but more even so mentally and emotionally I’m tired. Because of the stimulus I’ve been taking in all day, the work I’ve been doing, the conversations I’ve been having. All of that requires a lot of our brains to interpret and so we’re tired. Imagine if we didn’t have a reticular activating system, if we weren’t able to filter out things that are irrelevant or not necessary. Imagine if we gave every stimulus the same weight.
Stimulus comes in through our senses, so things that we hear, things that we see, things that we taste, touch or smell. And many things in our world contain multiple of these types of stimulus, that speak to multiple of our senses.
So, imagine if we couldn’t filter out what was relevant and we just had all of the stimulus available to us coming at us with the same degree of importance. We would not make it more than a couple of hours, is my guess. I don’t know in reality what a scientist would say, but my guess is that we would be so exhausted so early on, we couldn’t function optimally as we do now. So, this is why the brain tries to filter out irrelevant information.
My favorite example of this is an airport, because there’s so much stimulus in an airport, typically. There’s a lot of people. There’s lots of sounds, there’s smells, there’s lots to see, lots to take in and it can be overwhelming, being in that kind of environment. So, our brains try their best to filter out anything that’s irrelevant so that we can focus on what is relevant, because we’re also usually trying to get somewhere and we’ve got to be there on time and all of these things happening.
So, we focus on what is my gate, when does my flight leave, where do I need to be and then maybe if we have time to get a snack or whatever else we’re going to be doing in the airport. And it tries to filter everything else out. Now, imagine that you’re just walking to your gate, you know where you’re going, you’re focused. By the way, the reticular activating system is not perfect at filtering everything out. A lot of stuff gets through that doesn’t really matter, isn’t relevant. So it’s not that you’re not aware of anything else. We are aware of other things, but it’s trying its best.
So, you’re walking along to your gate, you’re focused, you’re going to go have a seat and wait to board your flight. And suddenly they call your name over the intercom and they say, “Please come to the security checkpoint, you’ve left your phone or your ID”, or something. Your brain would hear that unless you had AirPods on and it was literally blocking out all sound. Then you would go, “Wait, what?” Because they just said your name. Our names are relevant to us.
And so even though we’re pretty good at kind of ignoring whatever else is happening over the intercom, if they said your name, you would pick up on it because of your reticular activating system. And hopefully you would hear that and go pick up your ID. So, this is a beautiful thing. What it means though, is that our brains have been filtering for, again, the reinforcement of what we believe is true and we’re pretty good at it.
So, when I’m coaching, I always tell my clients, when we start talking about a particular belief system. Let’s say a client comes on and says, “My sister’s mad at me.” That would be a belief, my sister’s mad at me, I think she might be mad at me. Now, we put that in the thought line of their model when we’re coaching. We don’t make that the fact, my sister’s mad at me, even if my sister said, “I’m really mad at you”, which is usually not the case. But still the fact would be my sister said, “I’m mad at you.” But my sister’s mad at me is just a belief. It’s just a sentence that you’re thinking.
And I would ask my client to give me more details and more information. And they would start telling me about their sister. They would tell me about how she hasn’t called and she normally does or she hasn’t been replying to text messages like she normally does, or how she was just really cold and standoffish. And they would give me all this evidence about her behavior. And we could draw the conclusion that she’s mad at you and she might be. You might be right about that. My point is that you’ve been looking for proof of that and you’ve collected it and you’ve created evidence for your story that your sister’s mad at you.
Today’s episode is brought to you by the Lab Coach Access. This new level in our coaching program, The Lab, is available for coaches who want to build thriving, successful coaching practices or take their businesses to the next level. In this program I’m teaching workshops every month. I’m available to answer all your questions and guide you as you build your business. And I’m even showing you behind the scenes of my own business to help you achieve phenomenal levels of success.
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Now, here’s the other really interesting thing about our reticular activating system and just our brains in general is that we actually even contribute to making those thoughts true. So, if I think that my sister is mad at me, then I start to mirror her in certain ways. We have also mirroring neurons. So, if I think that she’s avoiding me, she’s kind of standoffish and she’s kind of cold, guess what happens for me? I either become really clingy and needy and sort of try desperately to get her to reply, which is kind of annoying. We don’t tend to like people when they become really needy and weird.
Or I might distance myself and kind of become a little bit more cold towards her. So now notice who’s mad at who. I’m sort of mad or hurt or upset with my sister, which makes me behave not as my best self, which makes me less likable to my sister, or at least maybe she’s confused by my behavior, which gives her more reason to be unhappy with me. I’m actually contributing to making my beliefs true unless I slow it down and realize it, I should say. You can override any of these systems at any time, but we can’t do that all the time, we would be exhausted.
So, it’s good to know that what we’re believing even in the most subtle, undetectable ways to us, certainly we’re unaware of our own behaviors. We are contributing to making our beliefs true. And we are gathering up as much evidence as possible that they’re true, even the thoughts and beliefs that we think we don’t want to be true. That’s just how we work as human beings.
So, here’s what I want to tell you. I kind of mentioned this in the intro, but most of the time when people think about questioning their beliefs or what do you believe, and you can believe anything you want. And when they hear people talk about questioning beliefs, they think that we’re talking about religion or existential truth. And again, that can be a part of this but that’s not really what I want to talk about today. I do coach people sometimes who are going through these types of existential questions, and I know that can be challenging and I think it’s important to explore that in a safe space, whatever that looks like for you.
But again, today I don’t want to talk about those types of beliefs. I want to talk about just figuring out what’s real and what’s true and what you want to create right here, right now with your human life while you’re alive on planet Earth in a body. So, whatever you want to believe about where we came from or where we’re going or whether or not there’s a higher power guiding any of it. Again, I’m going to kind of set that part aside. I want to talk about your experience right here and now.
And I know those two things impact each other significantly. But I guess what I’m saying is one of the things I love about coaching is sometimes just paying attention to what we might call more surface level beliefs. The more day-to-day things that don’t feel so again, big and existential and heavy and universal or eternal or whatever you want to call them.
Trying to just manage your thoughts and pay attention to your beliefs around the day-to-day may be ‘small things’. Actually gives you a lot of leverage over your brain and can help you explore some of those deeper issues if that’s something that you’re interested or finding necessary to explore in your life. So, what is true right here and right now? What do you want to believe? What do you want to believe overall about the world around you? Now again, you can take specific parts of the world around you and you’ll find it easier maybe to apply what I’m teaching you here.
Let’s say you’re shopping for a house, you’re looking to buy a house, you’re looking to move or you’re looking to sell a house. What do you want to believe about the housing market in whatever area you currently live in or are trying to move to? People will tell you what’s ‘true’ about the housing market there, they will. And most of them have good intentions of trying to help you but what’s true is whatever people decide to believe. That’s the reality.
Now, are there some facts that exist about the housing market? Yes, there are, just a few though, and they change on a daily basis, maybe even hourly basis or every minute they’re changing. So, what’s really true, it’s a great market. It’s a tough market. Inventory is low. It’s a great time to buy. You must be cash. It’s hard to get in. All the things people are going to tell you, just know that they’re all thoughts or beliefs, and that’s okay, not wrong, just up for grabs, up for grabs. What do you want to believe about people in the world?
Now, again, you can look at a broad spectrum of people in general. Do you want to believe that people are really struggling and things are really hard? That might serve you to believe that. Do you want to believe that people are doing the best they can? Do you want to believe that people are just out to get each other and they’re in it for themselves, people are selfish? Do you want to believe that people are mostly good? What do you want to believe about people in general? But again, the easiest way to apply this work is to just look at specifics.
What do you want to believe about the specific people in your life, in your immediate family or in your extended family or at your job or that you interact with at school? Or if you have a business, your clients or customers and specific clients and customers especially, what do you want to believe about people? You can choose. There is no capital T truth about any certain person because people are dynamic.
Think about it. When we say, “She is so kind and generous.” Well, sometimes she’s kind and generous, but in reality she’s human, so she probably has times when she’s grumpy and not so generous. That’s the reality. So how do we know if she’s kind or generous? How do we know if he’s selfish or greedy? Nobody is actually those things, people behave in those ways at times, and they operate from certain thoughts and emotions that we might label as nice or greedy or selfish or generous but people aren’t those things. People just behave in those ways at times.
What do you want to believe about yourself? I’m going to do a whole episode next week on this topic. This is the most significant mind blowing thing I’ve learned in 10 years of coaching is how much our relationships with ourselves impact everything that we do. But I’ll just touch on it here, which is, what do you want to believe about yourself? So many times, we confuse self-awareness with capital T truth about ourselves.
So, in my work as a coach, I am trying to help people observe themselves and become aware. So, it’s a really useful thing to be able to notice. I do some people pleasing in this area or I don’t follow through on what I say I’m going to do or I do follow through and I’m very good at this thing. So that kind of awareness can be useful, but only so long as you understand that it’s just a belief. It’s just a thought that you’re thinking.
And it can be useful to think it to gain some awareness and some leverage if you want to change a certain part of your life or it’s a part of your life that you value and you want to keep. But it’s just a thought that we’re going to look for evidence for and then reinforce and make true. So, I always, when my clients come on the call and they say, “I’ve noticed for the past week that I really tend to people please with my dad”, let’s say “I really want my dad to be proud of me.”
I’m like, “Okay, first things first, I want you to know that’s just a sentence in your mind. It’s not a fact about you. You’re not 5’6 and you always try to get your dad to be proud of you. You’re 5’6 and maybe there have been times when you’ve tried to get your dad to be proud of you but that’s not who you are. That’s not an ingrained, unchangeable part of you.” Good to know. I’ll tell you though, with all of these things, I’m not talking about being super positive and I’m not talking about trying to believe something that you don’t actually believe.
I’m just talking about noticing the sentences in your mind and how much we collect evidence for those sentences and then we contribute to the truthfulness of those sentences. Good to know. What do you believe about what’s possible? What’s possible for you in your life? What’s possible for other people? So many people are giving advice, I don’t know about you, but I was raised being taught by a lot of people who I appreciate and value that taught me, though, to be realistic.
What is realistic? How do we know? We only know by looking around at the world outside of us at what other people have done. But we’ve all heard the story about people thinking what was realistic was true until somebody breaks the record and then suddenly everyone starts changing their idea of what’s realistic and they break the same record over and over again. So just again, I don’t think it’s wrong or bad to have ideas about what’s realistic and even to want to aim for what’s realistic.
I just want you to know it’s just a belief system. It’s just a sentence in your head and it can be really useful to help you be compassionate and patient and kind with yourself, to have an idea about what’s possible, what’s realistic but it also is limiting to a certain extent. If you want to do something that you’ve never done before, you’re going to have to think bigger, you’re going to have to think differently.
So, these are some kind of deep thoughts, to think that it’s really all just a story, it’s all a belief system. These beliefs, these sentences I’ve been thinking over and over again are continuing to create my reality and create what I am capable of and what I have and how I feel and who I am. And we don’t have to unwind all of it. But I do like knowing that it’s possible and that the shortcut to really making significant changes in my life is through my thinking, through my mindset.
So, there are a couple of courses I’ve taken recently. One, I think it was a couple of years ago from Brooke Castillo that was called, I think it was called The reinvention Experience, something about reinvention. And it was amazing because she really made us think about some things on a new level. So, for example she asked us this question, “What is your favorite color?” So, at the time I said green and this was in writing. She had us do it like a homework assignment.
And then she said, “What do you want your favorite color to be?” And I was like, “Green.” That’s what most everybody, most of us picked our favorite color and then we said that’s what we wanted it to be was the same thing. Now, it doesn’t matter what your favorite color is at all. What she was simply pointing out to us is that green is my favorite color and I think I want it to be because I’ve been gathering evidence for a very long time about how much I like green.
I’ve been looking out for green in ways that I value and appreciate. But if I wanted to change my favorite color to yellow, which I did do in this class, I decided to just experiment with it. I absolutely could. I just decided my favorite color is now yellow. And my reticular activating system went to work looking for proof that I like yellow, looking for yellow things that I found to be aesthetically pleasing, looking for reasons to like yellow. And there’s plenty of it out there, plenty of examples of it.
Now, the other thing she had us think about was how many colors there are in the world. And I can’t remember the number but something like 17 decillion colors. If you think about all the possible shades of every color of the rainbow, there’s a lot. Most of us think about 12 to 15 colors when we go to answer that question or seven or eight colors but there’s a lot of colors. So just notice how limited our thinking is. And again, this is because our brains are trying to save energy. So, it’s not coming from a bad place.
It’s just if you step back for a minute and you recognize my brain is only considering the 8 to 12 colors I can even think of off the top of my head, but there are almost limitless possibilities of colors to choose from. And this is true with our lives as well, my friends. Think about the choices that you made in your life that led you to where you are today. I made choices about colleges to attend or not attend. I made choices about jobs to take. I made choices about who to marry and to have children and where to live.
I made a handful of choices that have created the life I have today, a lot of choices, actually, but there’s some that are more obvious than others. And then Brooke had us think about all the choices that we didn’t make. Now, most of us, including myself, started thinking about other choices that we considered in our past, maybe different schools that I considered going to or different relationships I was in and where those paths took me or where they could have taken me had I stayed in certain relationships.
But she said, “Instead of thinking about the choices that you considered, I want you to think about choices that you didn’t even consider, that never even crossed your mind, possibilities that exist and how many of those are there?” Oh, my goodness, so, so many, more than we could even count. So, this is fascinating to think about, because if that has been true in our past, that’s also true in our future. The choices that are available to us today and for our future are beyond what we’re considering as we just go through our day-to-day routines. Good to know.
Now, another class I took recently was a workshop with Dr. Benjamin Hardy on rapid transformation. And Dr. Hardy, who has become a friend of mine and is just such an amazing, brilliant guy, has a book coming out about this that I’m so excited for you to get. So, I don’t want to give away what he writes in that book, but he really blew my mind by encouraging me to think about what I’m letting go of. What things do I need to let go of to become the next version of me?
And what’s tempting to do is to let go of a few things, let go of the things that I can see are obviously not working and not serving me. But what Dr. Hardy encourages us to do is to let go of 80% of what we’re doing and a lot of that 80% is going to include things that are working well today. Why would we let go of, and when I say let go of, I’m talking about your actions, but I’m also talking about your belief systems.
Why would we let go of belief systems that are serving us well today, or routines or habits? Well, you don’t have to let go of all of them, but some of them are just going to keep you in the same place. And if you want to have a rapid transformation you have to be willing to let go of even things that are working. It’s super scary to do. I love the way Dr. Hardy describes this and it really does stretch my thinking in so many different ways.
So let me give you some practical examples here for a minute. I talked about the housing market for a little bit. So, my family and I are actually about to move to San Diego. We’re so excited. I’ve done enough complaining about the weather and decided, let’s just move where it’s like spring all year round. So, we’re moving to San Diego. And so, we’ve been paying attention to the housing market. I don’t try to believe something like it’s a super easy market, especially in San Diego. Nobody wants to move there and it’s very affordable.
Those thoughts are not believable to me, but the thought, it’s really hard to buy a house. It’s very competitive. The interest rates are so high. The prices are crazy, whatever. All of those kinds of thoughts that people try to offer me, I’m just like, “No, I don’t think I’m going to go with that story.” So, what I chose to believe was that we will find the right house, the perfect house at the perfect time and it will work out. I don’t need the whole housing market to be easy to navigate or to even be working in my favor. I just need one house. That’s all I’m trying to buy right now, one house.
And the perfect house will come along at the perfect time and sure enough it did. And I still, even though I believed that and that was the thought I led with and that was the energy that my husband and I went house hunting from. I still look now at the house that we are able to buy and even our agent who helped us is like, “I can’t believe you got this house.” And I really do attribute it to choosing to believe something that most people don’t walk around believing. Most people are looking for what’s true outside of them.
I, when possible, as much as possible, choose to believe what’s true inside me, I do, and it serves me really well to do so. Many of you have heard me tell the story about wanting to speak at Time Out for Women and not knowing how I was going to make that happen and just choosing to believe that I would. And even when it felt like the paths that I thought would take me there weren’t leading me there, I just kept on believing it. And I nurtured that belief and I let it be true in my mind and I didn’t get really caught up on how or when, and I was very patient and it took many, many years actually.
And I was able to speak at the last Time Out for Women tour. It was their 20th anniversary and then they discontinued Time Out for Women. What are the odds? Your beliefs are creating your reality, my friends. You are creating your reality by filtering with your reticular activating system and then contributing to it, even in ways you’re not conscious of all the time. So, listen, I just want to give you permission right now to believe what you want to believe and to tell you that you don’t have to have any proof, you don’t.
Again, I don’t try to believe things that I genuinely don’t believe, but I can usually find a belief that I’m like, “I kind of believe that.” I’m going to focus on that. I’m going to let that be true, and I just want to give you permission to do the same. You don’t need outside proof. You don’t need to know how. You don’t need to know when. You’re allowed to just believe whatever you want.
Now, I want to talk about doubt for a minute because I coach a lot of people who are trying, especially my entrepreneur friends, they’re trying to believe in their ability to achieve their goals. And I coach a lot of you trying to believe that you can change your eating habits and your exercise routine and your health. And sometimes it’s challenging because doubt comes up and says, “I don’t know”, especially when things don’t work out how we thought they were going to then that doubt comes back. It’s okay, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.
I don’t want you to feel bad when you have doubt. Doubt is part of the deal as well. You just have to keep your belief a little bit stronger than your doubt. So, you might have a day when you let yourself have some doubt, but I wouldn’t overly indulge in it. I would just kind of let it be there in the background. I wouldn’t run away with it in your mind. Again, if your belief is just a little bit stronger than your doubt then you’ll keep going and you’ll build evidence for your belief. And you will create results that support your belief and you will find external evidence as well.
So just keep your belief a little bit stronger than your doubt. Now, I want you to think about this for just a minute, that we have a lot of amazing tools and resources and just a lot of knowledge and modern conveniences in our world that to us just feel ordinary and every day and so they’re very believable. I could have a house that has lights and I could just flip a switch and lights will come on. And even if the sun is down and it’s dark outside, I will be able to see anything I want to see in my house because of a switch that I just flip on.
That’s so ordinary to us because that’s the world we were born into and have lived in forever but that wasn’t always the case. And somebody had to believe that it was possible before it was actually possible in the world. Somebody had to believe it, even though they had no proof, they had no business believing it. They just believed that it was possible to create it and then they went to work until they created it.
Every modern convenience and thing that we have that makes our life better and easier, somebody had to believe it before they could create it, they had to believe it was possible. And they didn’t have any proof, and it wasn’t realistic at all. Thank goodness there are people who do this. And you don’t have to go to that extreme.
The things that I’m trying to believe are not things that nobody’s done, they’re just things that I haven’t done, but I can rely on other people’s success. And I can rely on the proof that I get by looking at how other people have done it. Now, if your brain’s like mine, it wants to go, “Yeah, but you’re not as smart as them. You’re a lot older. You’re probably too old or you’re too young or you’re just not whatever enough.” That’s just normal brain chatter.
I just let it kind of be there and I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t know, we’ll see. They’re a human being. I’m a human being. It’s probably possible for me if it’s possible for them.” I’m just choosing to believe that it is. So just know that again, whatever you’re trying to believe, people have had to believe things to innovate and to make our world better from the beginning of time and that will always be the case. So please let yourself be one of the brave ones who believes things that are ‘unrealistic’.
I use this analogy a lot when I’m coaching people who are trying to believe things. We use the analogy of a newborn baby because they’ll say things like, “Yeah, I was really feeling good about this and really believing it. And then I talked to my friends and they said, “Well, don’t forget about this and also this might be hard and there’s this thing that you haven’t considered.” And suddenly now my doubt feels stronger than my belief today.”
And so, what I always tell people is, “Listen, when you’re trying to practice believing something, you haven’t been thinking that thought over and over again yet. You haven’t collected enough evidence yet. You haven’t created any proof for yourself of it. It’s like a newborn baby, it’s very fragile.”
And we don’t take our newborn babies out and pass them around to everyone to hold because that newborn is fragile and we don’t want it to get sick. We wait till it’s a little stronger, till it’s been around a little while and its lungs are a little more developed and we know that it’s a little healthier, a little stronger, has a little bit stronger immune system. And then we might let someone else hold our baby. Think about when you have your newborn and you’re like, “Wash your hands”, even when that’s someone in your family going to hold the baby, we have to wash our hands.
This is how your new belief is, it’s very fragile, don’t just pass it around to everyone. Just share it with people who you know are going to be gentle and tender and you know who those people are? They are the people who are also up for believing unrealistic things and/or your coach. Come and tell it to me. I’m really good at helping you believe what you want to believe. I’m really good at even helping you find evidence and proof for it if I think it’s going to serve you. But don’t just pass it around to anyone until it gets stronger because momentum matters.
If the person that you’re telling your belief system to has really strong beliefs that are contrary to yours, and they have more momentum around the doubt than you have around the belief. Then it’s hard not to get washed away in the doubt that they’re offering you. So, until your momentum is strong enough that it can stand up to someone else’s belief system, you want to protect it.
So last thing I just want to tell you is, as I’ve been teaching this over the years, I still remember a live workshop I did years ago. And we were talking about this and I was coaching someone and this girl who is now a successful coach herself, by the way, she said to me, “Wait a second. Are you saying we can just believe anything we want to?” And I said, yeah. And she had this big smile, this light bulb went off in her head when she realized. I can just believe anything I want to about myself, about my future, about my family, about my job about, my house. I can just believe anything I want to.
And I said, “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.” And it’s been fun to watch her create such an extraordinary life since that moment. I want to offer you that moment today, too, that you genuinely literally can believe anything that you want. If you want help, find a coach, find a good coach who is trained in paying attention to your belief systems, not just an accountability coach.
I have no problem with accountability. I like accountability actually, it can be useful in a lot of ways. But you need someone who’s also able to help you believe totally unrealistic, impossible things if you want to see your life explode in the best possible way. Alright, thanks for joining me today. I’ll see you next week. Take care. Bye.
If you find the podcast to be helpful you’re going to love The Lab. In Better Than Happy: The Lab we experiment with applying all of it in your real life. Whether you’re in the middle of a challenge and ready for some relief or you’re ready to commit to pursuing your dream goals and making them a reality, come join me in the lab at jodymoore.com/thelab. That’s jodymoore.com/thelab.
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