Ep. 9- From Self-Doubt To Self-Love: Overcoming Limiting Beliefs
EPISODE 9-
From Self-Doubt to self-love: Overcoming limiting beliefs
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Ever feel like your own thoughts and beliefs are keeping you from the happiness you deserve?
Well, I've been there which is why we are talking about how to challenge your limiting beliefs.
With the help of a transformative process, we will identify your inner critic, understand the narratives that are keeping you stuck, and replace them with a whole new set of shiny beliefs that will ease your stress and bring you joy.
This process will not only reshape your self-worth but also helped you respond differently to life's challenges, including your relationships.
This episode is for anyone who feels stuck, unworthy, or dependent on others for happiness. We dig deep into how to identify and dismantle limiting beliefs. You'll learn how to let go of the notion that you need to be perfect to be worthy and enough.
Plus, I'll share resources for connecting with me for additional coaching and support.
Ready to shift your perspective and live a more joyful life?
This episode is your starting point.
Show Notes:
Examples of limiting beliefs:
I’m not strong enough. I can't change my life. I will never be successful. I am not smart enough. I will never have enough experience. I don't have the support I need. I'm never appreciated or valued. I'm always stretched too thin. I'm always overlooked. I have to be the best at everything. I have to be strong for others.
I will always be in debt. I'll never have enough money to... I don't have enough time. I’m too tired. I’ll never be as good as them. I’ll be stuck here forever. I'll never meet the right person. I can never trust anyone. I'm not attractive enough. I'll be just like my parents. I'll never be like my parents. I'll never be a good parent.
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Full Transcript:
Hi, I'm Allesanda Tolomei-Hard, aka Mrs. Hard, and this is Hard Times no More, a podcast for people who are tired of struggling with boundaries, people-pleasing, and relationship problems. I have overcome some hard times. Within three years, I stopped drinking, my mom died of cancer and my house burnt down in a California wildfire, and those are just the highlights. I have a lot of reasons to be miserable, but I'm not. The truth is, life was more challenging before these events happened. If you are tired of waiting for your circumstances to change to find happiness and peace of mind, you are in the right place. Join me as I share the tools I use and love to transform challenges into assets and interview others about their relationship journeys. Together, let's learn how to have a happy life full of healthy, meaningful relationships and say goodbye to hard times for good. Hey everyone, welcome to the Hard Times no More Relationship Podcast. I'm Allesanda Tolomei-Hard, your host. Today, we're going to go through a process that will help you release limiting beliefs that are keeping you stuck, so you can live a more joyful life with more peace of mind. Let me ask you how much attention do you pay to your thoughts? Are they just there, rain or shine, making you feel a certain way, sometimes good, sometimes not so good or do you have negative self-talk and does it speak to you from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you go to bed, relentlessly telling you how worthless you are? We all have a range of thoughts and feelings constantly running through our minds daily. But what if you could choose your thoughts or have a little bit more control over what you believe? What I've experienced and what I've seen in my clients is that when there is an internal shift, when our insides are more peaceful, we approach challenging situations in a different way. We are able to let go more, connect with the ones we love and attract healthy relationships while pursuing the life we really want. When we change our thoughts and beliefs, it sets us up to respond differently to life. Some people call the beliefs that hold us back limiting beliefs because they limit us, and if our mind is full of limiting beliefs, it's holding us back far more than we realize. In the last episode, we talked about naming your inner critic, so you could separate it from yourself and not play into the relentless negative internal dialogue. It tells you this is the next step after naming your inner critic. So if you haven't heard it, go back to the last episode on loneliness and you can listen to the inner critic part and jump back on here for the next step. We all have different levels of awareness when it comes to our thought process, so let's get on the same page. Let's start with the basics. Just become aware of your internal narrative. Some people practice this by keeping a thought journal for a day or two, because you'll notice that your thoughts are on repeat, so you don't have to keep it for very long and notice what kind of narrative you have. Is it a stressful narrative? Is it a playful narrative? Does it pipe up when you're more anxious or stressed? If your internal narrative is not kind, we call that the inner critic. What is your inner critic saying to you? Is it telling you that you have to do everything? You can't trust others to get things done or do them right, and the family responsibilities always fall on you? You have to be the strong one for others, that you don't have enough time to care for yourself, but maybe someday, when everyone else is okay, then you can make the time? Is it telling you things like you aren't smart enough or attractive enough that if only you could follow through with your eating plan, then you would feel comfortable in your skin and you would feel comfortable dating again. Does it convince you that life is hard, will always be hard, and that's just how things are? That's what my inner critic told me for a long time, and that narrative was not serving me, like I've talked about before, believing this was a self-fulfilling prophecy for me. When life was challenging, I was wired to focus on the difficulties instead of the opportunities for growth. For a long time, I had a doomed outlook on life and I used the hardships I experienced as proof that the world was against me. These beliefs kept me overworking and never taking time for myself. This created a ton of anxiety in my life that I felt was completely inescapable. This way of thinking also attracted more challenging interactions into my life, because I felt like I had to be controlled of everything and everyone, otherwise it would all fall apart. When you have constant thoughts like this, life becomes heavy and the internal struggle is real. And if you still aren't sure what a limiting belief is, I'll attach a list of examples to the show notes. But limiting beliefs are negative thoughts or beliefs that are putting you down and keeping you stuck. A little tip here if your thought includes the word always, never everyone or everything, it is most likely a limiting belief. Or if the thought you're having comes with negative feelings, negative emotions, depression and anxiety, that's also a key indicator that it's a limiting belief. So let's use the example I always have to do everything and we're going to break down this limiting belief. I've heard many clients say this about their relationships with their significant other. One client felt like she was in charge of planning the chores, the vacations and the household to-dos and if she didn't plan these things, her family would just sit around, the house would be messy and they'd never do anything fun. When she broke down her limiting belief and changed her mindset, her relationship with her significant other was full of so much more joy. She was able to let go instead of feeling stressed in the relationship. So how do you let go of these limiting beliefs? First question why do you believe this thought? With the example, I always have to do everything? Why? Maybe you think because if I don't, things won't get done or they won't get done on time, the right way, and everything will fall apart. Or, like my client thought, the house will be a mess, no one will do anything fun and will just be this messy, boring family. Next, I want you to consider if this belief is true and I mean, is it really true? At first you may think, yes, it's true and I can prove it because I've seen it over and over again. And maybe you believe it is true because you're always the one doing everything for others. But if you stopped this behavior, if you stopped participating in these actions, would everything really fall apart? Would everyone really be messy and boring? Maybe you have someone in your life that you're caring for and you don't believe they could survive without your care. I've talked about this before in previous episodes, but for a long time I believed my father couldn't survive without me. I was one of his caretakers for many years I'm talking like 10 years. Then he moved into an assisted living facility and I would visit him every other day. I would do his laundry, I would bring him things he needed or that he wanted, and I thought his health and well-being absolutely depended on me. Then he met a woman on Facebook. Side note, my father is a very determined man and he was determined to leave the assisted living facility for many years. I mean, who could blame him? But our family didn't have enough money to care for him at home and he needed 24 hour care and he qualified to live in assisted living for a really inexpensive rate where he could get full-time care and people could watch him and help him with his memory care and he would fall in different things. So, bottom line, he needed to be there and it seemed like him leaving was absolutely impossible. So back to the story. He met a woman on Facebook and he decided to move in with her and she lived three hours away. There's way more to the story, but I was frozen in fear when I heard this because I thought I was necessary for his care and that this adventure was going to completely fall apart and the responsibility was going to land on me. And guess what? He followed through, moved in with this woman and it didn't fall apart. He actually began to thrive. Since living with this woman and it's been four years now his health has been better than it has been in 15 years. So my whole point of the story is sometimes, when we believe something's impossible or that it is true, it really isn't. And I had to take a little three month break from my father when he made this decision to separate myself from him and separate myself from any potential fallout that may have occurred, and I was in a really dark place when this was happening. I did not have the resources or the emotional bandwidth to take care of him if this didn't work out. So if you're caring for someone in your life, is it absolutely true that you have to be the one holding it all together? Maybe if you backed off a little, someone else would step up, which means it wouldn't be true that you have to do everything. Next question to consider when breaking down a limiting belief can you prove it wrong? Because if you can prove your limiting belief wrong, you take the power out of it and it turns to dust, and I want you to approach this question with an open mind. What action can you take to prove it wrong? Be creative. Maybe it's a small action, like letting go of a few commitments. If your limiting belief is a different genre than what we've been discussing like, maybe it's a belief that you're not worthy unless you have service to others, or that you're not enough For your small action to prove it wrong. Make a list of positive attributes you have or things that bring you joy, without a dual purpose of bringing fulfillment to someone else as an action. Can you sit with yourself and find moments of happiness? Can you take yourself on a day date or a night date to your favorite restaurant or on an adventure to someplace new? Can you feel that you're worthy of your time, your energy and you're enough as you are, just being you exactly as you are right now, not when you're smarter, have a better job, are thinner, more capable, have the perfect relationship? Whatever it is right now you are worthy, not when everyone else is okay. That's another one, because I always thought I would be enough or be able to take care of myself once everyone was okay. Next, what positive belief can you replace it with? I want you to come up with not just one, but a few thoughts and beliefs that you can replace the negative ones with, because just pushing that negative thought aside and thinking I just won't think that anymore doesn't usually work, because that thought and that belief will be like a boomerang you can push it away, but then it's going to come right back. But if you have something positive to replace it with, you have something positive to focus on and that helps that limiting belief. Leave your mind. So, in the example we've been using, I always have to do everything. You can think I don't have to do everything. Simple right, just use the opposite. Or you can think I can let go. Or everything doesn't have to be perfect. Or, if you're using the example that we touched on, I'm not enough, replace it with I am enough. Right now, I am worthy of love, I have peace of mind. You can keep your replacements very simple, but come up with a few and have them on hand and circle back to when you proved your limiting belief wrong and think of some small action you can do to prove it to yourself, proving that this limiting belief isn't true, taking the power out of it and then last. A fun bonus thing to consider is where did this belief come from? I remember for a long time, when something fun was on the horizon, I would tell myself to not get my hopes up because it most likely wouldn't work out. This is a type of limiting belief Don't get your hopes up, it's not going to work out. When examining this belief, I realized that it came from my childhood. My parents were super busy, especially before my dad was completely disabled and when we were going to go on a fun trip that we had planned as a family, it would usually get canceled. I remember being maybe 10 or 11 years old and deciding, after a very disappointing incident like this, that I would never get my hopes up again. This played into my later, much larger and darker, doomed future perspective. It can take a while to realize the origin of our beliefs and behaviors, but it's worth it, because when we see that our belief came from a time long ago, we can let it go. We can realize that our belief was a coping mechanism from the past and we can question whether it's really serving us now or not. When you understand the why of why you have these thoughts and beliefs, it can be so much easier to really let them go. So that's why we're doing all this work. And when you do this sort of work, you're rewiring your brain on a physiological level. That's what I love about this. When you've been stuck in a negative thought perspective, your brain actually has neural pathways. It follows because your body is familiar with those routes and it takes effort to create new pathways. So when you have a positive thought, you're creating a new route for your brain to travel on. So that's why it's really important to have those positive replacement beliefs on hand and to question, then prove your belief wrong. Repetition is what's gonna make your brain change. Writing these questions out will have an even stronger impact on your brain. Rewistening to this episode will have a greater impact on your brain and when you change your internal world, your thoughts and your beliefs, your actions change. Your relationships change. How you interact with others changes. How others respond to you might change, and if it doesn't, their behavior won't bother you as much. So, to recap, get familiar with your inner critic. Go back to the last episode on loneliness if you wanna do the first step in releasing your inner critic. Then identify your limiting beliefs. These are the things your inner critic is telling you. It's what your ego is telling you. You can identify them by using a thought journal or paying attention to what thoughts are coming up through your day, especially when you're stressed or feeling anxious or putting yourself down. Next, once you have this belief, you wanna get rid of. Question why you have this belief. Ask yourself if it's true, can you prove it? What can you do to prove it wrong? What positive belief can you replace it with? And, as a bonus, can you discover where this belief came from, where it started? All right, that's your homework. I expect it to be due by next week. Break down at least three limiting beliefs and see what comes up. Aw, just kidding. But if you have any questions or you want to connect, you can find me on Instagram at MrsMRSHARD underscore times, no more. I'll add that to the show notes along with my Facebook Messenger link. I'll add that to the show notes too, or you can schedule a free 30 minute coaching call with me. If you're thinking about working together, you can find that on my website at MrsHARDcom, or you can find it in the show notes. All right, everyone. That's all I have for today. Thank you so much for listening. Your support really does mean the world to me, and I hope you have a wonderful day, a wonderful week, and that you're able to rewire your brain and create the life you really want for yourself. Take care.