We spoke about our perceptions and our self-limiting beliefs over the last couple of days.  Today let’s talk about our perceptions of self-limiting beliefs.  Sometimes we have to look at perception as allowing the possibility of something new. It isn’t so much what we are seeing or how we react to what we see, but how we start to feel and relate to things that are unseen or what they could be.  We receive a gentle nudge from the universe, a quiet whisper that tells us something along the lines that we can do more.  At first we may feel like, “who me?”.  We can choose to follow or ignore that—if we believe in the “who me” line of thought, we will continue on our current course.  We have to learn to shift the question in order to break the belief.  What If instead of, “Who me? we ask ourselves, “how do I move toward that?” or tell ourselves, “This is for me,”? Those questions position us as a new player in the game.  Who we were may not have been able to move forward or taken that chance, but this version of who we can be is capable of it. 

There are some things so engrained in us that we may not even realize they are a self-limiting belief.  Simple things like talking about not having x amount of money for something becomes a limiting belief in the regard we aren’t looking at how we do have the money.  What I mean is instead of looking at possible ways to shift things around to free up money or other opportunities to bring in money, we are looking at money as finite and stating it’s gone.  That removes the circulatory nature of cash flow.  For the record because it is a flow, that is how money functions as an energy exchange—it is a constant movement of energy.  What other beliefs do we have that may keep us stagnant?  I’m too old for this.  I’m not experienced enough for this.  I don’t have what they’re looking for.  I couldn’t run like that.  I can’t cook like that. I can’t draw/write/sing/dance etc.  While we may say these things feeling they are practical or reality, they stop us where we are—hence the limitation.

That leads me to the part of perception of self-limiting beliefs: we have to shift our thought to understand that these trains of thought are limiting.  It isn’t easy to stay open at all times or to see all possibilities at all times—that takes a lot of practice.  So the first thing we need to do is slow down our thinking and start shifting our perception of what is a limitation.  Instead of what we consider “reality” we need to speak in terms of possibility.  We also need to speak in terms of what will be and that should always be a positive connotation.  For example, instead of saying something like we can’t do it because we don’t have the time, we need to say something closer to I appreciate the consideration but I’ve chosen to do x at this time.  Make it about our choices and our ownership of the situation and it is no longer a limitation—it’s an action in our control.  The more we shift our beliefs to empowered actions rather than things holding us back, the more momentum we create in our lives.   

I heard a speech from Loren Ridinger the other day where she spoke about our relationship to past self. I am the first person to admit that I am no expert on this topic because this is one thing I’m working through and probably one of my biggest struggles. Loren spoke of forgiveness and understanding for the past self.  I assumed a long time ago that I had reconciled my past.  I understood everything that happened logically and I was able to compartmentalize it for a time.  I thought that meant I dealt with it and that it was normal for little pangs of nostalgia or embarrassment to pop up.  I never considered it was something that needed to be forgiven.  I was never taught that we could or should forgive ourselves for anything.  My family, especially the women in my family are excellent at holding grudges and have long memories, which means we hold onto that feeling and it’s always nice and fresh no matter how long ago the event may have happened.  This includes grudges and guilt against ourselves as well—we are great at replaying the most awful events of our lives repeatedly until we are so down in it we can’t move.  We feel the emotion of it now as we did then. 

I didn’t realize how trapped I was under the past until I really started to see some light on the other side.  That light was an understanding that I was simply not healthy.  My thoughts weren’t healthy, my behaviors and my actions weren’t healthy.  My actions came from my thoughts and my thoughts included things like what a loser I was for showing up at a party early, how stupid I was for repeating patterns, that I wasn’t loved for me but my money, that I wasn’t taken seriously in the business world (true to the extent I haven’t been taken seriously in my industry in the business world—doesn’t mean I can’t be successful in an aligned field).  Loren spoke about how if we don’t reconcile and rectify these thoughts we will continue to keep ourselves down.  We need to forgive ourselves for who we were and what we did because we were operating under what we knew at the time.  That logic is something I’ve followed for a long time—for everyone else.  I completely understood that as far as my relationship with my mother—I knew full well how hard she worked and that her behavior was because she did what she had to do with what she knew.  Honestly, that was also an indicator that I needed to look at the behavior I took from her and break that pattern in my life—it was another little light for me.

This concept of forgiveness for myself still feels foreign to me.  I can’t help but feel that there were instances I should have known better.  There were moments I am 100% positive that if I had chosen differently the outcome would have been different. I guess we can say that about anything.  I struggled because there seemed to be a series of definitive events that I chose in my life and I felt obligated to stick with the results because that was my choice so I needed to be responsible.  But the difference is responsibility doesn’t mean replaying those moments over and over again.  Responsibility means adjusting toward what we really wanted.  Unless it comes to death, the decisions we make aren’t permanent in regards to keeping our position.  We are always able to move toward where we go.  It isn’t a chess game where we are check mated and have to wait for a new round—we are able to find a new path across the board.  Staying where we are doesn’t serve anything.  So it’s more important to learn how to adapt and adjust than it is to make the right decision the first time all the time.  That’s how we learn from the past.  That’s how we forgive the past.  We learn to dance with it.  

“You begin to fly when you let go of self-limiting beliefs and allow your mind and aspirations to rise to greater heights,” Brian Tracy. I thought I had worked through all the self-limiting beliefs.  I thought I knew everything I had that was holding me back.  Sometimes there are these little insidious pieces that we hold onto that we didn’t even know we created.  These monsters can eat us alive inside and we may not know they exist until we are in a moment when we need to be something and suddenly we can’t.  At the same time, we can’t become an entirely new person overnight, but we have to find the piece that’s holding us back. Sometimes it’s simply aligning thoughts/words and actions.  Sometimes it’s digging deeper and finding the things that we didn’t know were holding us back. 

When we start to question why we think a certain way or why we believe things have to happen a certain way, that’s when we discover the truth.  Sometimes there is no reason.  We are afraid of thinking outside the box because we’ve been told outside the box is dangerous.  Either that or we’ve become so comfortable in the box that we don’t even realize it’s holding us back.  Language we used to consider pragmatic or simply the truth can truly be language that engrains itself in our minds and makes us believe we aren’t capable of something—something that may in fact be our purpose, the exact thing we are meant to do.  So while it may be true to say that we are experiencing something in the moment, it’s important to train ourselves to qualify it to exactly that: a moment.  Sometimes the self-limiting beliefs are a matter of putting aside any reason to believe that the things we want aren’t meant for us or that we aren’t able to do it.

We have to start asking why repeat the patterns we do.  Is it because we don’t know any better?  Or do we know better and are afraid to go on the other side of that fear?  Some patterns aren’t that easy to identify as unhealthy or a limiting belief because we’ve done it for so long that it’s a part of who we are.  There is some real discomfort in tearing down who we have always been to see if that is still the person we are.  We are meant to grow and evolve and that means shedding the skin of who we used to be and allowing ourselves to become who we are meant to be.  When we hold ourselves back because of the familiar, we tell ourselves we are safe when really we are preventing who we are meant to be from emerging.  We have to learn to not clip our wings before we know how to fly.  Look at how we really feel and work on allowing that—from there we can do anything.

Today I am grateful for recognizing fears.  It takes a lot of work to dig deep enough to find the specific fears that hold us back—even more work to find the cause of them.   When we do that work, we tap into parts of us that need to be healed.  It’s amazing how much healing takes place in this life.  The mind is also a fascinating thing when it comes to finding out what it needs to heal from.  There are things we don’t even think would be a bother for us only to find out it’s a rooted fear.  There are fears we inherit from our parents—and those can be trippy when we find out it’s something we aren’t afraid of at all.  But the point of recognizing a fear is to heal and in that regard, that is the piece I’m most grateful for.  It can be a slow process to move forward/recognize all of this (it has been) but once we know what the issue is, once we address it, there is no holding back.

Today I am grateful for cleaning up the spaces around us.  It’s true that the oust side truly does reflect what’s on the inside.  When the space around us is chaotic and disorganized, that is typically reflective of our mindset.  Yes, it takes time to clean and organize, but doing the work is so worth it because once the outside clutter begins to clear, the inside clutter begins to unwind and clear as well. We carry so much with us, so many things we don’t even think about, and the longer we ignore them, the more cluttered our lives become.  Seeing the clutter can be overwhelming and we may not know how to begin to address it, but sometimes all it takes is moving one piece.  We can’t let our perception of how long it takes to fix it intimidate us or prevent us from starting to clear the external and internal spaces.  We often make the process bigger than it actually is.  Once we get started, the rest kind of falls into place.    

Today I am grateful for partnership and addressing mindset.  My husband and I are having a challenging time (I have more about this later this week or early next week…) and it has a lot to do with time and how we spend it and what we want for the future.  Cleaning up spaces was something I forced him to address yesterday because we were at the point we could barely walk through our garage (one of three key areas that were barely passable).  I told him that it’s time to get it done, procrastinating isn’t going to solve any of the fears/issues he’s having at this point, tackling them head on is going to get him the answers.  If the outside is clear, then maybe that will help clear the inside.  I didn’t go into anything deeper than that, I didn’t force him to discuss the fears he told me he’s having—we started simply with the physical work.  Sometimes we get so caught up in what we want to do that we focus on the things we don’t have when we really need to be focusing on what we CAN do.  Sometimes when we see what we can do, possibilities open up and the more possibilities open up, the more solutions we see to things that bother us—and we may learn that what we thought bothered us isn’t the actual issue but we see what IS. It starts with one step which is often less scary than we think it is.  We just need to begin.

Today I am grateful for health.  Part of what has been bothering both of us lately has been the passage of time.  As cliché as it sounds, we are at midlife and neither one of us are quite where we want to be.  We are well aware of that, and we are well aware that we need to make a choice in order to move forward.  Neither one of is entirely unhappy with where we are at, but we are acutely aware that this is not specifically what we were hoping for and we both have the sensation that there is more that needs to be done, shifts we need to make.  We have been taking small steps—the first was actually addressing the food in the house.  After we spoke about using our environment to set us up for success, we looked at the food in the house and realized that we needed better alternatives.  I downloaded an app that explained the quality of food and the specific issues with it (risky additives, too high in salt, saturated fats, etc.) and that started making my husband think in different terms—health is something that starts with what we put in our mouths.  We get one shot and we need to set ourselves up for success and that means taking care of our bodies.  Plus I love getting to teach my son early as well (he loved scanning items in the app—he was devastated by Doritos though).      

Today I am grateful for creativity.  I’ve been reading more fiction lately—my brain needed a break—and it has been delightful.  I have so much love and respect for the creative state and it’s a joy to read other people’s works and feel the inspiration.  I also love getting lost in a story, period.  It’s amazing how the art of story telling takes us to another world, another time, place, another viewpoint.  It is such a gift to take a medium and communicate an imaginary place and feel the experience of another person (that doesn’t even exist), and feel vested in their lives.  This is something that I want to do, but I want people to be able to wake up to their own creativity as well.  The creative state is filled with endless possibilities, and I think that is my favorite part about it.  We need a place where anything is possible, and that is the mind.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.   

We need a little reminder today: So much of life is about perception, rather our choice about our perception.  We can choose what we believe at any time.  We can choose how we react based on that belief.  We can choose what we think about any given situation.  Do we want to feel angry or are we trained to feel angry?  Do we want to be happy for someone or are we hiding jealousy?  Do we want to allow happiness in our lives?  That last question may strike some people as ridiculous but the truth is we spend so much time agonizing over how things aren’t what we think they should be that we forget that by focusing on the negative or challenging aspects of our lives we are simultaneously choosing to not focus on the good.

The good news about all of this is that we can change that story at any time.  We can look at it differently.  I don’t claim it’s easy—I’ve written enough pieces about that here.  The beauty is that we can also change that perception.  We can decide that it’s easy to view the world differently.  We can decide that today we want to do something different and feel differently.  Part of what does make it challenging is our tendency to want to change it all at once.  We can pick one thought and work on that and let it cascade into others. Pick one thing we need to change our perception of and work on shifting toward what we want to think and feel about it.  Amazing things can happen when we change our thoughts. 

“When you built different, you receive different,” George White the Speaker.  This is an encouragement to keep following the path, the feeling you know you’re supposed to follow.  I speak a lot about reaching our intuition and following our knowing, understanding our purpose and path.  Everyone has a path and a purpose, it’s up to us to fulfill that—and that means intuitively knowing what we are meant to do and doing it.  It means following the destiny laid out before us.  The more we honor that, the more we acknowledge what we are meant for, the more we align with that, the easier it is for the universe to give us what we need to fulfill that contract.  Energy can be confusing, manifesting can be confusing because we think we need to behave a certain way.  I know I told myself for years that I was doing all the things and I would complain that nothing was happening.  The truth is I wasn’t aligned with what I sought. 

Energy isn’t merely an action, it is a literal transmission of energy into the universe.  In order to get what we need to receive, we need to emit that same frequency.  Finding harmony with something we are unfamiliar with takes practice.  The more comfortable we become with honoring our vibration, with acknowledging that we are meant for something else, the easier it is to become that person.  I also want to remind us at this point that it isn’t so much a becoming, but rather an unbecoming of all we weren’t and an acceptance of all we are.  We can’t expect the same thing as other people when we are meant for something else.  It can feel lonely or scary at times, but the things we are meant for are greater than us.  This is a truly a new age and many of us feel discomfort because we know it’s a new age and we are still trying to operate in an old system we know no longer works.  That requires everyone becoming immensely comfortable with who they are. 

The final note on this topic is that we can’t be afraid to receive what is meant for us.  Many of us have the underlying belief we aren’t worth what we know we are capable of—but we feel this thing inside of us that we need to do something.  If we consistently fear what others think or if we send out any signals that we aren’t worth our destiny, then it can never fully embrace us…because we are not fully embracing it.  If we are going to receive, we need to believe.  We need to shed the unnecessary fears and beliefs that hold us back and we simply need to attune with who we are and accept that.  The more we accept, the easier it is to receive.  Just believe that if we have these inklings that they are meant for us.  Even if it’s for only 20 seconds, start there.  See what it feels like and then work on expanding it.  See if we can taste it next and expand further.  Once every sense is aware of what it’s like to be in a state to receive and honoring who they are, the rest takes over. 

“You need a reason to keep showing up that is bigger than all the reasons the world will give you to stay small,” Ashmi Pathela.  It’s easy to be discouraged by the state of the world.  The inherent divisiveness, the fighting, the emphasizing the few ways we are different over all those we are the same.  The world makes us feel different if we aren’t the same.  If we stand out, the world will find a way to bring us back down.  Following our lotus discussion yesterday, we are meant to be who we are—we aren’t meant to play small.  We all have the potential to impact those around us even if it doesn’t feel like it.  Even if our impact doesn’t expand globally, think if we are the initial ripple in the pond.  It all starts with an idea, an influence and then that experience cascades out to others.  We (especially us in the West) are trained that if we don’t see immediate results it isn’t worth it or that we have failed.  We are also trained that standing out is a negative or that if we are different we’re weird. 

What if we consider ourselves differently?  When we look at the relationship we have to ourselves an others, what if we saw what we brought to the table as enough?  What if it was enough?  Well, I hope this serves as a reminder that it IS enough.  I think we get lost in the bigger picture of purpose because we’ve looked at the scope of our lives as a series of things to prove or acquire.  We feel we need to prove who we are by the number of people we influence or the number of things we have—or how big our house is, the car we have etc.  We need to understand that even if our influence only expands to our inner circle, that too is enough.  We never know how our actions impact those around us so we need to continue being who we are—no one else can be us, no one else can do what we do and that means no one around us can have the impact that we do.

We need the courage to continue on our path and that means no matter what others think we need to stay true to our purpose.  No one said our journeys were meant to be easy, and honestly, sometimes sticking the course is harder than blazing the trail.  I mean, it’s incredibly difficult to decide on a new course and step off the traditional path, but once we are there it’s tempting to turn around and go back to what others expect of us.  It’s those moments we feel like giving up that we need to stick to it and follow our course.  There comes a point on our journey we all have to go it alone for a while or when it feels particularly lonely if we have to do something new.  We must keep going anyway.  Being alone doesn’t mean we’re doing it wrong—sometimes that’s exactly what we must do in order to learn all the facets of what we need to be great.  We must do it to inspire confidence in ourselves and perhaps a few other people who can then do the same.  Keep going.  Keep going as big as you need to be.  The world is calling. 

“A lotus is beautiful as a lotus, she doesn’t have to become a rose in order to be beautiful,” Tich Naht Hahn.  I just wanted to share a brief reminder that the game of self-improvement is more about unbecoming what we thought we were and embracing who we are.  In order to grasp what makes sense and pick up who we are, we have to let go of what we knew before.  We’ve talked about this many times before, but I think Tich Naht Hahn’s message puts a different spin on it because it emphasizes the importance of being ourselves.  We are meant to shine as we are and in order for us to fully embrace and experience life, we need to be who we are—there is no other way.  If you’re a lotus, you must be a lotus.  The lotus is happy doing lotus things.  The same with a frog and a squirrel.  They both jump but they live in different environments.  The same is true for us.  It does no good to wish we were a rose if we are a lotus.  We fair far better loving and accepting ourselves as we are—that’s when the magic happens.

The beauty of being a unique, individual creature is that we can do things others can’t.  We see the world differently, we see different creative opportunities, we see other alternatives.  We are the only ones who will ever see the world as we see it.  That isn’t to say that we don’t have people who empathize with us or understand, but their experience is not the same.  It doesn’t do well to try and explain a frog experience to a squirrel.  A frog will never climb the tree.  We all have talents and abilities and we are all gifted—It’s what I spoke about in an older piece.  If you judge a fish by its ability to fly of course it will appear a failure. But when you look at it swimming and diving, it’s remarkable.  The way it adapts to its environment—we are all born to our environment no different than any other component of nature.  I’ve always found it fascinating that we have this understanding of all other natural things, but we hold ourselves to a different standard.  We are gifted with sentience, yes, but we need to apply it practically.  We are meant to be who we are.  We are all beautiful and unique as we are—let’s celebrate it.   

“Don’t try to change your willpower, change your environment.  Discipline is really a carefully crafted environment encouraging certain behavior.  It’s not the goals we set up, it’s the cues in our environment.  Growth doesn’t happen by chance, we need an environment of growth,” Dritan Hodo. We have a theme, friends. What’s around us is instrumental in determining our outlook and results in life.  The environment of our lives, those around us, and of our mind.  I love the idea behind this that willpower isn’t necessarily what works to create change or to create momentum toward a goal. Even I tend to fall under the impression that it takes sheer force of will to create a result.  Maintain focus at all times, only do what’s “right”.  But it doesn’t work like that.  It isn’t about power and control in regards to perfecting our behavior, it’s about letting what doesn’t support us fall away.  It’s about removing negative influences and adopting new habits.  The discipline comes into play when it’s about creating a new habit, sticking with it because we know it will yield the result we need.  When we set ourselves up for success, we limit our options to those that will make us successful.

These things don’t happen overnight, not by any means.  Creating new habits and new thoughts takes time.  But that’s also why it’s key to create a space that fosters new patterns and behaviors, those that align with what we hope to be or achieve.  It requires a lot of letting go.  A release of what we know and the understanding that we need to dive into the unknown. Sometimes doing things that are good for us can feel uncomfortable, especially when we haven’t really considered that an option before.  Sometimes we are used to a struggle and we don’t even know.  We choose the behaviors that keep us in struggle because it’s familiar.  The same reason is how we end up choosing environments that keep us in struggle—it’s because we know what to expect of it.  There’s a saying something like we will choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven simply because we know it.  We need to get comfortable learning new things, things that keep us healthy and move us toward our goals.  We always have the choice of our hard: the difficulty of not changing and letting things slip by, or the difficulty of doing the work.  We set up our choices through our actions—creating an environment that supports that makes it easier. 

I have a little reminder, a little mantra for us today: To have a healthy life, I need a healthy mind.  After our last discussion about our environment, I really wanted to dive into the environment of the mind.  I was never taught how to control my thoughts as a kid. I grew up under the assumption that our thoughts were simply our thoughts, coming from some source (never really considered what it was) and we had no say in what went through our minds—it was just something that happened.  If they were negative or sad, then I was negative or sad and that was just how it was.  I hated hearing things like snap out of it because I literally felt no control over what went through my head.  I often distracted myself with work and books so I wouldn’t have to deal with anything up there.  I put myself in such a routine that I would end up doing the same thing daily for days on end, never really considering anything else as an option.  When my mental health really became an issue, that’s when I understood at the basest of levels that I needed to do something about my thoughts. 

Enter years of working through things, trying natural alternatives, trying pharmaceutical alternatives, faking belief in myself, becoming different people (including mirroring those around me), and learning to understand that I was really everyone else but myself.  As I peeled those layers away, I started finding things that I liked and understanding more about who I am and what I want—honoring my talents.  I really began to understand that there is no other way to have a healthy life if our base structure, if the thing that generates our lives (the mind) is negative.  We can’t live in an unhealthy environment and expect ourselves to be healthy—and the main place we live is in our minds.  We need to monitor what goes on in our minds all the time.  I’m not saying to make the mind a fantasy land where we disassociate from reality, I’m saying we need to regulate our thoughts and choose what we allow.  We can allow positive thoughts and disallow negative thoughts.  In order to live a healthy life, we need an overall environment that supports health and that starts with our mind, the thoughts we think.

So when we decide to start on any type of journey to who we are, any type of health journey, we need to begin with the mind.  We need to make sure that we are setting ourselves up for success and that the very place we generate the ideas about what our lives can be is healthy and supportive.  It can be challenging to admit that we need to do a deep dive into who we are, it can be challenging to accept responsibility for what’s around us—but it can be done.  And it needs to be done in order to follow through with anything.  The hardest part is learning patience for ourselves as we navigate new waters so to speak.  Learning to behave differently takes time.  Make sure we know what we are looking for, make sure we are familiar with ourselves and what we hope to do—and always make the first goal of any journey one of creating stability and power within our thought processes.  It will make all the difference in keeping the focus clear.  A healthy life starts with a healthy mind.