Where to Start
I want to talk about beginning your personal growth journey. Let’s say you’re here because you’re intrigued, but overwhelmed, and you’re just trying to figure out where the heck to even start. Well, any Sound of Music fans in the house? 🎵 “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. When you read, you begin with A,B,C. When you sing, you begin with Do, Re, Mi.” And when you coach you begin with limiting beliefs, limiting beliefs, the first right things just happen to be, limiting beliefs. 🎵
See what I did there. Who doesn’t love a good lyric? Anyhow, about our beliefs. Our beliefs aren’t always consciously held. Trust me, I’ve excavated many of my own that I didn’t realize were even there. We often wonder why we can’t just x, y, z, why we get in our own way. And it’s for good reason, because our beliefs about a situation are often carefully hidden in our subconscious, underneath our logical, conscious, higher-functioning minds.
Before we begin we have to decide we’re willing to confront these hellraisers, no matter how scary and hairy they may appear. The choice to be free from our limiting beliefs is no small feat. It takes a lot of courage to go dragon-slaying in the dark places inside ourselves. Doing so will often shake up our lives, often in magical, beautiful ways, but get you shook nonetheless. Some people don’t want to get shook. It might bother them a bit that they can never do the thing they imagine is between them and happiness, but the threat on their life as they know it, the familiar, however tedious, is comforting and the change is too much to bear. Know it is human nature to dread change. Though it is the only constant in life, our primitive brains like to be able to anticipate any and all threats, so the unknown is absolutely terrifying to our monkey minds. If you are committed to freeing yourself from these lurking, long-held thoughts, I commend your courage. Yay you! You are my hero. That shit is brave as hell.
After stepping forward to battle these dragons (your limiting beliefs), you have to actually find one to slay. So, how do you do that? How do we make the invisible visible? One method is to work backwards, which I describe in my first blog post on the Four Categories of Human Experience. Check it out, it may be super helpful in understanding why our thoughts are the crux of the problem.
I’d also like to share a tip I learned from my master coach mentor, Natalie Miller. When someone says “I just feel like…”, listen closely, for there is almost always a thought behind those words. So maybe try it out with a situation where you feel like you get in your own way, and start an “I just feel like” statement, then see what rises up.
Something I’ve noticed about myself is that I often use this preface when I believe things are ‘hard’. I will say, I want to lose weight, but it’s just so hard. Parenting is so hard. Battling creative resistance or writer’s block is so hard. Life is so hard. You see what I mean. So, not only do I have beliefs that these things are hard, but what the heck does that even mean? What does hard mean to me?
My next questions to myself are, “So? What’s wrong with hard? What is it about hard that makes you not want to do the thing?” If you feel like there’s another layer to your own belief, try this out or a similar line of questioning that gets deeper, to the why, the “Ok…so?” For me, hard is defined by the effort required. And I realize I also have the belief that effort must be rewarded, with a payback, with something that’s ‘worth it’. So, I also realized that these things I define as hard are things that require daily, if not constant effort, of which I have no clue what the payoff will look like or if it will ever come.
Let’s use parenting as an example, the messiest, most exhausting one that takes every damn ounce of willpower I have daily. The one that in order to know if you’ve done a ‘good job’ requires a whole lifetime to assess, that’s both held to impossible standards and the most loosely defined. Most of the parents I know would nod their heads ferociously in agreement that yes, parenting is hard. But, does it have to be? Aha, here’s where the juicy, delicious good stuff comes in…in questioning those beliefs. IS IT TRUE? Is parenting hard? For me, it’s not when I’m taking good care of myself and showing up fulfilled and rested, when I’m focused on quality time and not terrified of how my actions in the present will affect the rest of my children’s lives. When I lower the stakes and am able to be present with them, it’s actually pretty easy, and heck, enjoyable. Now, am I able to maintain this state of presence and ease? Hah, no, I battle with it daily. But, every time I think those doomsday thoughts about the struggle and is it worth it, a surge of recognition pulses through me, and I go, ah, yes, that limiting belief again. It doesn’t have to be hard…I’m making it hard. And often, I’m able to lighten up a bit.
I hope this example helps illustrate the basic idea of inquiry into your beliefs. I could go even deeper, into why I’m inclined to make things into my definition of hard (highly effortful and fruitful). The reason I equate my productivity with my worth, while somewhat mysterious, seems to be a pretty universal limiting belief that women of not only my generation, but several before me, have adopted. Again, I come back to, doing this work is hella brave. It can help you uncover generational trauma and experiences from your childhood you thought you’d released. But as you can only sing one note at a time, so you can only slay one limiting belief dragon at a time. One by one, day by day, that’s the journey. As a coach, it’s my job to help people hunt down those beliefs and cheer them on. You don’t have to go it alone. In my own journey, it’s been so helpful to have the support of a coach. If that feels like the next right thing for you, let’s talk, and start slaying some damn dragons!
