Episode 042 – You’re Not Stuck: Shift This One Belief and All the Others Must Follow

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

If you’ve been in personal growth for a while, you’ve probably started to pay more attention to the inner dialogue that controls the narrative of your experience of life. You’re paying more attention to your limiting beliefs and the meanings you gave your life during childhood that manifest themselves in your present experience of reality.

You’re doing the personal development work, but it might seem like some of these limiting beliefs are exceedingly difficult to change. It might feel like you take two steps forward and three steps back and right back into the same limiting beliefs you’ve been trying so hard to transform. If so, you’re not alone – so let’s take a look at why that is and what you can do about it.

Will Your Limiting Beliefs Ever Go Away?

It’s important to understand that the moment you have a desire for something, the mind does two things. It’s now aware of the desire for something, but it’s also aware of the absence of that thing that you want. Essentially, the mind thinks that if it pays more attention to the problem, it’ll figure out a way to solve the problem and create the thing you want. But what happens is that the mind is giving meaning to this absence.

When it comes to having the desire to transform our beliefs, a lot of people working on their personal growth reach a point where they’ve become so aware of the limiting beliefs they want to change that they begin to question whether or not they’ll ever go away. They might think that continuing to hold onto these beliefs is going to prevent them from living the life they want.  They might see other people successfully transform their beliefs and start to compare themselves to them. They might begin questioning if something is wrong with them and that they can’t seem to overcome these beliefs.

In this instance, the mind is giving meaning to this continued experience of limiting beliefs and, since the brain is a goal-achieving machine, if you believe you’re not doing personal development “right”, that something is wrong with you, or that you should be further along with your transformation by now, your mind continues focusing on the problem you’re wanting to overcome – your limiting beliefs.

As I’ve talked about in-depth many times before, if your beliefs about your beliefs continue to be limiting, you’re not going to have thoughts and emotions that support you in transforming those limiting beliefs into empowering new decisions and ultimately transforming your experience of reality. You’ll continue taking action from a primal state of desperation, which only serves to reinforce the beliefs that started this whole process.

Desire + Non-Resistance = Desired Result 

This equation is the key to all transformation and it’s really quite simple. Desire is self-explanatory and it’s the “easy” part of creating the changes we want to see. Whether we desire to make more money, attract a soulmate, or overcome a health issue, whatever the case may be, we’re all clear on what we want or, at the very least, what we don’t want. The name of the game to achieve that desire is to be in non-resistance.

Notice that the equation isn’t desire plus hustle & grind, doing things perfectly, controlling your external environment, or coming up with the perfect plan. This comes back to the foundations of everything I talk about and it’s rooted in neuroscience and behavioral psychology because we know that when we’re non-resistant to the changes we want to make, we’re going to have thoughts and emotions that support us in taking the inspired action to achieve that goal – 100% of the time.

The problem when it comes to changing our beliefs about our beliefs is that we “check in” too quickly. Maybe you get really excited about the idea of transforming your beliefs, you come up with some new affirmations, and you feel really good about shifting your consciousness…at least for a couple of days. But when your life doesn’t change overnight – money doesn’t fall into your lap, your soulmate doesn’t show up at your door, your health issue isn’t cured, or your beliefs aren’t fully transformed – you unintentionally reinsert resistance back into the equation.

The Two States Of Being

So what’s the key to transforming our beliefs (about our beliefs) more effectively? Again, it comes back to eliminating the resistance. Where does this resistance come from? The meaning we give the experience.

So many people think that they need to hurry up the process…or else. They think they should’ve gotten rid of a certain belief by now, or that there’s something wrong with them, or that they’re not good enough to successfully create a breakthrough. It’s kind of ironic really, that the only thing preventing us from changing our beliefs is the beliefs we have about our beliefs (say that five times fast ; ).

In order to get rid of this resistance, it’s important to consider that we’re only ever operating in one of two states of being – primal or powerful. Primal states are states of stress, anxiety, indecision, overwhelm, anger, and the like. Powerful states are states of joy, calm, empathy, excitement, passion, and the like. Being in a powerful state is the same thing as operating from non-resistance.  

What determines whether or not we’re operating in a powerful, or non-resistant, state is the thinking that’s occurring within us on a moment-by-moment basis and the meaning we give our current experiences. Additionally, it’s the quality of that thinking, because after conducting over 10,000 coaching sessions I’ve come to see that 100% of the time we’re having thoughts that move us into a primal state, those thoughts aren’t actually true.

How do we know they’re not true? Our nervous system sends us signals. These thoughts don’t make us feel good because they’re not in alignment with what’s true. I’ve had people in our community say that it’s not in alignment with God’s will for you. So when it comes to this struggle to overcome your limiting beliefs and the thinking that maybe they’re never going to change, that’s not your higher power’s perspective of what’s actually going on.  

Then, you can begin to explore it because you can say, well if that belief I have or the thinking I have around my own personal growth journey – that I should be further along, that these limiting beliefs are never going to change, that the more self-aware I become, the more I struggle with them – if none of that’s actually true because it doesn’t feel good, then some form of the opposite must be true.

So if it’s not true that you should be further along by now or that there’s something wrong with you, then some form of the opposite must be true – perhaps you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be in your personal growth journey and you have all the capacity in the world to create the transformation you seek.

You can begin entertaining this new belief based on this new hypothesis of what’s actually true about the experience. From there, you can start to look for evidence around this new belief. For instance, what evidence do you have for the fact that it’s totally appropriate that you’ve been experiencing your limiting beliefs for a prolonged period of time? Well, as a result of experiencing these limiting beliefs, you’ve gone deeper into your personal growth journey.  You’ve opened yourself up to receiving new perspectives and information to help you along in the process. You’re still clear on your desire to create a breakthrough.

That Which We Resist, Persists

The only reason you’re experiencing these limiting beliefs is that you’ve been feeling pressure and desperation to get rid of these limiting beliefs. After all, you’re afraid that they’re going to impact you in the future negatively.  But the fact that you’ve been experiencing these limiting beliefs longer than you would like to has brought you to this conversation here today. 

What if you experiencing these limiting beliefs for as long as you’ve been experiencing them has been part of the miracle of the process of you finally finding a set of tools and getting into a conversation that can not only create a breakthrough, but to also become more powerful than you could ever possibly imagine?

So often we put this unnecessary pressure on our personal growth journey, where we become aware of our limiting beliefs and start becoming afraid of our thinking. But if we just relax around it, the tools, the support, the wisdom, and the awareness necessary for us to transcend and transform those limiting beliefs into expansion in our lives will arrive. 

I’d go so far as to say that if you start relaxing a little bit more about your limiting beliefs, you open the door just a little bit for the help that is always on the way to reach you. The only thing keeping that help outside of our perception is the resistance we have about the desired outcome that we want to produce. 

So what I’m suggesting to you is that if you’re already aware of your limiting beliefs and the fact that you’d like to let go of them, leave it alone. Move into non-resistance. Go for a walk with the dog. Take a bubble bath. Spend some time with some friends. Stop working so hard on your personal growth.

Because the key to you actually materializing this desire, which is the elimination of some of these limiting beliefs, is not to actually continue to work on these limiting beliefs harder and harder and harder. It’s to move into non-resistance. And you can move into non-resistance by removing yourself from the problem or by using these distinctions that I’ve been sharing with you to transform the problem into less of a problem.