How Beliefs Hold Us Back & How To Change That (Subconscious Programming) E167

October 15, 2024

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Welcome to today’s episode, where we’re diving into one of the most powerful tools for personal transformation: your beliefs. If you’ve been trying to change something in your life—whether it’s a habit, mindset, or your entire reality—but still feel stuck, this episode is for you.

We’ll explore how your beliefs shape your life and why they might be the reason you’re struggling to make lasting changes. Your subconscious mind holds the key, and once you unlock it, you can change anything.

I’ll share why beliefs are so powerful and practical steps to identify and change the limiting ones holding you back. If you’re ready to break free from old patterns and create the life you’ve always wanted, stay tuned. Let’s get started.

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If you have something in your life that you wanted to change for a long time and have just not been able to do it, then you want to find out what I am sharing with you today. If you feel stuck and have no clue how to change your current situation or circumstances, then the knowledge from this video can set you free. Or like me, if you have just discovered an area in your life where you do want to change your subconscious beliefs and you just don’t know how to do it, you are in the right place.

Our beliefs are the building blocks of our reality

Everything starts with our beliefs. They influence the life that we are living every second of the day. But it’s not like we are taught this at school. It would be great if we would have been told this already as children. But hey, we are where we are. Let’s not dwell on that. The important bit is that we are ready to become aware, so we can leverage this knowledge to change whatever we want to change.

Even if you were already aware that beliefs are the foundation for the reality that you are experiencing that doesn’t mean you know how to change them to create a different reality. I have knowledge of this now for years and still, I come across areas in my life where I find it very hard to change certain beliefs so my reality can shift.

Once you get this, you never want to forget it

That’s why I love talking about this with you. I have created many episodes about this topic before, but that doesn’t mean that it landed with you yet. Change management studies have shown that we have to listen to a message 7-10 times before we get it. To truly integrate it into your life and make it an automated process, will need even more repetition. It’s the same as going to the gym. You don’t expect to have a six-pack after having gone to the gym 4 or 5 times and then stop. The same principles apply here. It’s a new skill to learn and for you to truly learn it, you need to study and repeat the information and the process.

But once you start applying this knowledge and the tools and you witness changes happening in your life, you never want to go back. Why would you? You have finally learned how to change anything and everything in your life with little effort. Why would you suddenly go back to being stuck and struggling? You wouldn’t! Exactly. Before we dive into how to change our beliefs, let’s take a step back and start to understand what beliefs actually are.

What is a belief and how is it created?

A belief is just a thought that you keep having. It’s nothing more than a thought you had so many times and so intensely that it became a belief. And all your beliefs are stored in your subconscious mind for you to use as a foundation for your personality, your identity and ultimately everything in your life. Let’s have a look at some beliefs.

Neutral Beliefs:

The earth is round and it rotates around the sun, not the other way around.
I need oxygen to breathe and stay alive.
Two plus two equals four.

Helpful Beliefs:

When I meditate in the morning, I feel better and have a better day.
The more I move my body, the stronger it gets.
I have great friends in my life.

Unhelpful beliefs:

I don’t think I can stand up in front of people and talk to them.
I am not good enough to get this new job.
Trust must be earned, I cannot just give it to people.

These are the kind of thoughts that you either had so many times or heard so many times, that a belief was created and stored in your subconscious mind. And now let me share with you how these beliefs run your life.

How Beliefs Create Your Reality

All of the beliefs that you have stored in your subconscious mind make up the grounds on which your life is built on. And how does that work? All of the beliefs that you have collected throughout your life are stored in the memory bank of your subconscious mind. Everything you ever experienced is stored in there, too, along with your perceptions, attitudes, and all the emotional reactions you ever had. And that creates the set of data for the filtering system in your brain, called the Reticular Activating System or RAS.

I explained the RAS in Episode 161 not that long ago. Check that one out if you want to learn more. In a nutshell, the RAS is the filtering system for all the bits of information that we receive through our senses to bring it down from 2.3 million bits per second to 128 bits per second. And how these filters are set is based on what is stored in your subconscious mind.

It allows you to perceive a small part of reality but through the lens of only what you believe. Only what is in alignment with your beliefs gets let through the filtering system. Everything else does not get into your awareness and consciousness. You can see now how that restricts you from experiencing a reality that is moulded to your beliefs and not a reflection of the actual reality. That’s why we all experience reality so differently from each other.

Believe, Behave, Become

So the RAS uses your beliefs as the settings for the filtering system. Depending then on the information that comes to your awareness through the RAS, you will decide on how to act and behave next. However, your behaviours and actions are only going to be a reaction to the restricted amount of information that is brought to your awareness. This means if you have certain beliefs, you are going to act and behave in a certain way. And your actions and behaviours result in a particular experience and those experiences have certain emotions as a result.

And all of this creates a neverending loop of the same beliefs allowing the same information to come into your awareness which makes you behave and act in the same way which creates the same experiences and the same feelings. And the same feelings allow the same beliefs to become an even stronger program in your subconscious mind. And then people ask themselves why change is so hard. Now you know!

If you feel stuck, it’s because you are stuck in this loop of creating over and over and over the same reality that you don’t even want. If you have failed so far to change, then you know now why – because you have not changed in the place where you actually have to change: in the belief system of your subconscious mind.

Where True Change Must Happen

Changing something in your actions, your behaviour or in your experiences is only treating the symptom. I had the best example of this for a very long time. I changed jobs and companies so many times because I never found myself fulfilled. It didn’t matter where I went and worked, in the end, I always ended up in the same place of feeling bored, undervalued and unfulfilled. I treated the symptom by changing jobs and thought that would fix it. But it never did. I recreated the same situation wherever I worked because I never changed my belief system. I never made the changes where it truly matters.

In my example, the beliefs in my subconscious mind were:

I get quickly bored with my job as I like to do new things. If I have to repeat tasks in my job, I get bored.
I am not valued enough by my boss or my coworkers.
If I put my job and my career as my priority in life, it should better make me feel fulfilled. But so far that never happened.

These were the kind of beliefs stored in my subconscious mind that did not allow me to have a different kind of experience. Can you see that it doesn’t matter if I change my job, my company, or my location, I will always create the same situation that I am bored in my job, that I feel undervalued and unfulfilled. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. But until you don’t know how this all works, you do what you can. Which in my case was changing jobs or companies every 1.5 to 2 years to experience a different outcome which obviously never happened.

Making excuses for YOUR version of reality

And here is the tricky thing with the beliefs that are subconsciously programmed and influence your RAS. I was easily in quite a few jobs where I had a lot of variety, where I was valued and could have been fulfilled. But my beliefs and therefore my RAS did not allow me to even see it.

Another person looking at my job, the company I work for and what I do every single day would have seen all the opportunities for variety in my job, would see how my boss and colleagues showed their appreciation for me and how they would feel very fulfilled in doing my job if they would work there. But if this person would walk up to me and tell me all that, I would not even believe it. I would start to make excuses why they might see it like that – but why it doesn’t apply to me. My beliefs would not allow me to see something else than what my RAS shows me every single day. It’s a vicious cycle that is nearly impossible to exit unless you learn how.

I hope you get the message I am trying to give you in this episode: It has nothing to do with the actual reality but everything with your beliefs and the lens that it creates. Reality is very neutral. It has only the meaning that we give it. And the meaning we give it is restricted to the set of beliefs that are programmed in our operating system aka the subconscious mind.

So, now that you know how beliefs are being created and how they literally create the life you experience, let’s understand how to change beliefs. That is the only change that truly matters and will make a lasting difference for you in your life.

How To Change Your Beliefs

The first step is to find these beliefs that are holding us back and keeping us stuck in the loop of Believe, Behave, Become. We can’t change our subconscious programming if we don’t know what needs changing. So how can you find the right beliefs that need changing for you to create a new reality?

What works usually well for me is to sit down with a piece of paper and write down all of the thoughts that come to me on a certain topic. If you want to change your belief system around money, write down all the thoughts you can think of about money. Ask yourself as well what your parents said about money when you grew up. You will hopefully come up with the ones that are not aligned to the future that you desire. If you want to be a wealthy person but have the belief that people with money are evil because that’s what your granddad told you when you were a kid, this belief has to be changed. Clearly.

The other way is to ask yourself directly what kind of beliefs and thoughts you have that are holding you back from experiencing a different reality. Let’s say you are looking for a new partner and nothing has been happening for a long time. Try to find the thought that is keeping you from finding a new partner. Ask yourself what kind of beliefs you have that don’t allow you to find a new partner. Look at what you are currently experiencing and try to find the limiting beliefs connected to what you don’t have. Or look at what you actually want to experience and try to find the limiting beliefs that hinder you from experiencing it.

Replace the limiting beliefs with helpful beliefs

Once you find a limiting belief that is not aligned with your dream or desire, write down what a better belief would be, a helpful belief that you want to replace the limiting belief with. The version of you that is already living your dream life, what do they believe given that they reached their goal? Write down as many new beliefs that you can think of that is supporting your desire.

It’s much easier to deprogram a belief when you replace it with a new one. Your mind has something to focus on instead of just avoiding thinking about the old thought that you want to deinstall from your subconscious mind. Make sure that the new beliefs ring true for you. If they are too far outside of your zone of possibility, your subconscious mind won’t accept them. If a new belief feels too far away or unrealistic, you can use certain phrases to build a bridge between the belief and your subconscious mind.

For example:

“I am now in the process of believing that my million-dollar dream home is on its way to me.”

“I am choosing to believe that I will soon get promoted to my dream job and a great salary.”

“I am open to meeting my new partner who makes me feel supported and has an amazing humour.”

Reprogram your Subconscious Mind with the New Beliefs

Now you are ready to reprogram your subconscious mind with the new beliefs and deprogram the old beliefs. There are different tools that you can use for it. My preferred one is meditation. Through meditation, you are able to move past the analytical mind and open the doors to your subconscious mind. You want to get there to be able to create new programs most effectively and quickly.

To guide you in the best possible way, I created a guided meditation to install new beliefs in your subconscious mind. We said it before, repetition is key. Just imagine how many times you will have had the old thought for it to become a programmed belief. It will take your intention and attention to deinstall the old beliefs and create synaptic connections in your brain for your new beliefs. That’s what the meditation is for. For you to create a daily practice of being the new you that is then experiencing a new reality.

You can find the meditation on my YouTube Channel: Change A Belief

This is your invitation to create a new reality and a new life. Will you say yes? I hope so! And with that, I love you and wish you a beautiful rest of your day!

Two easy ways to show your appreciation!

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So whether you choose to donate, leave a rating and review, or both, know that you’re an integral part of my vision. You are helping everyone who struggles with burnout or high-stress levels to experience how awesome their life can be. So, thank you for your support!

Awaken Your Inner Guide: How the Reticular Activating System Shapes Your Reality Episode 161
Find out how you stop yourself from feeling better Episode 157
Who is really controlling your life? Episode 140

USE this free meditation to master your beliefs

This meditation will help you release tension, connect with the universal energy around you, and step into a new version of yourself. As you relax and expand your awareness, you will have the opportunity to let go of old beliefs and patterns that no longer serve you, allowing you to consciously create a new reality.