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Episode 48 – How To Change Your Beliefs To Catapult Your Success

“Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Henry Ford hit the nail on the head with this quote.

What you believe about yourself is incredibly powerful.

We talked last time in Episode 47 Letting Go To Move Forward – How To Believe In Yourself.

In that episode, I talked about three different ways that our brains and our behavior literally operate like a self-fulfilling prophecy, to make what we believe is true about ourselves become true.

Unfortunately, we often believe negative things about ourselves rather than positive.

One of mine was “I’m not good at English”.

My justification behind this was it was my worst subject at school and I lived abroad for a long time, so I didn’t speak English all the time.

Then when I did speak English I had to make sure I wasn’t using any words from my home area and make sure I wasn’t saying anything particularly complicated.

So in my own mind, my English got dumbed down, from a not-too-great level to begin with.

That would have been a great excuse to not start an online business.

Because business does involve a fair amount of writing.

Mental Flexibility

Enter the idea of Mental Flexibility.

When I started my business I believed I could get better, at writing and all of the things running a business involved.

I still thought my writing was shit and I struggled for a week over one three hundred word blog post but I thought I could get better.

The Mental Flexibility Model says this – If you can believe you can get better at something, are open to a more positive belief e.g. “I could probably write a 300-word blog post if I put some effort in.” and are willing to take action on it, something amazing will happen.

You try on that idea, try and write the blog post, succeed and the new belief becomes true.

Your belief got upgraded.

And over time the compound effect of that can be huge.

Like me, writing this blog, doing this podcast and writing a book.

Repetition Works

What are some of the other ways you can change your beliefs?

One of the main ways you can do this is repetition. As annoying as the saying is: Repetition works.

Over time repetition can move from a conscious belief to the subconscious.

This is why so many blogs talk about journaling and writing out your future and exactly how you want it to look over and over.

If something is repeatedly reinforced you start to at least think it could be true.

Once you are open to that your brain starts scanning for reasons that your new more positive beliefs are true, start giving events different meanings and starts paying attention to different things.

The whole process starts working for you to reinforce your new more positive beliefs.

It’s the same self-fulfilling prophecy of your negative beliefs, but working for you instead of against you.

Modalities that directly access the subconscious mind

The other, often easier, way to work on your beliefs is to do work that accesses the subconscious mind directly.

So instead of trying to use the part of your mind that isn’t running the show most of the time (the conscious mind), go straight to the real brains of the operation – the subconscious mind.

Your subconscious mind is actually running your thought processes 95% of the time.

What are your options here?

There are many and I haven’t tried them all.

Hypnotherapy.

Kinesiology.

EFT. (Emotional Freedom Technique)

Theta Healing.

EMDR.

Psych-K.

These modalities can be used for different areas of life and they are by no means the only ones.

I would encourage you to do your own research.

What I will say is your beliefs really really matter.

Way more than I could wrap my head around when I started my business.

I just thought if I worked hard I’d get results, but that will really only get you so far.

You can make huge strides by doing inner work. By working on your beliefs and working on your mindset.

If you’re interested I do have some more information on mindset and the typical thought patterns that keep us stuck in my Zero To Paying Clients Masterclass as well.