HOW TO BUST YOUR LIMITING BELIEFS

“Your reality follows your thoughts, so better thoughts create a better reality.”  

HOW TO GET A GRIP ON THOUGHTS

You HAVE thoughts, but you are NOT YOUR THOUGHTS.

I like to imagine my mind is like a galloping horse and my job is to be the “rider” of my mind.

All of us have the power to change our responses to our thoughts and when we do it literally changes your brain.

BASIC NEUROSCIENCE

If you think the same thought or type of thought over and over, it forms an actual physical cluster of neurons in your brain.

Over time you create “grooves” in your brain that your thoughts gravitate toward.

i.e. You repeatedly think, “I’m not good enough,” it becomes habitual to think in the direction of “I’m not good enough.”

Then you tend to see things in your life through the lens of “I’m not good enough.”

You can use your mind, to change your brain. It’s called self-directed neuroplasticity.

Bottom line: neurons that fire together, wire together.

By learning to stimulate different parts of your brain, you can transform yourself to become happier, stronger, more resilient and more loving toward yourself and others.

THE WHOAING TOOL

So when your mind sounds like a broken record, repeating the same fear-based thoughts over and over, you need to surprise it to get it to stop.

Try a calming sound like “whoa” that your brain will understand to mean slow down or stop.

The sound is meant to bring you back into the present moment.

REDIRECTING TOOL

After reining in your runaway thoughts with “whoa”, the next step is to redirect your thoughts.

Your mind will latch on to negativity, because your inner critic believes that being hard yourself protects you.

It may also believe you need to be hard on yourself to force you to get things done.

But listening to that inner critic is like putting cheap gas into a high-performance sports car.

The car will start, but it will not perform optimally and over time it will wear the engine down.

PENDULUM THINKING

If you try to counter your negative thoughts with positive self talk it doesn’t work!  It just creates “pendulum thinking.”

If you had a boss who consistently criticized everything you do and then one day starts praising you, would you believe it?

However, you may believe him if he simply said, “I know you are doing the best you can.  I apologize for being so hard on you.”

As you work with your mind more and more, your thoughts will naturally become more positive.

So begin by asking yourself if there is another way you could look at your situation that is believable AND makes you feel better.

Start by redirecting your thoughts to a neutral place by saying, “Whoa stop.  This is not the direction I want to go.”

Then create a new neural pathway when you hear the negative self-talk by saying, “I did the best I could and so did everyone else.” or “I goofed up and I’ll try it a different way next time.”

BUSTING YOUR BELIEFS

Beliefs like, “This always happens to me” or “Things never work out the way I hoped” imply a sense of permanence.

Bust those beliefs by questioning them.

How do you know things never work out of you?  The reality is you don’t!

When you ask a new question, your frontal lobe begins to disengage the old neural pathways.

“Instead of thinking the way I have been, I am now willing to think…”

When your brain is no longer firing the same way, you are no longer creating the same mindset.