We are a product of our beliefs. Everything flows from your belief system, how you perceive the world, who you think you are, what you think you can or cannot do, what you believe is possible or impossible. In each of our minds, we experience our own version of reality. A reality that is filtered by our own beliefs. What do we do then when our beliefs limit us? When they hold us back from
accessing our full potential? How then are we able to change
those beliefs and overcome them? Hi, my loves. Welcome back to Lavendaire. My name is Aileen. And on this channel, we talk about personal growth & lifestyle design. And today, I'm super excited to share this new exercise on how to overcome your limiting beliefs. If you have any negative thought patterns or negative habits, negative cycles that you find yourself going into that are holding you back, this is an exercise to help you get
to the roots of that problem— that belief that you have deep down— and start to change that belief and overcome that belief so that you're not held back by that negative pattern anymore. This is something that I started doing for myself, and it's been incredibly powerful in a short amount of time. So, there's the exercise and then there's the follow-up strategies
or techniques that you do after you finish the exercise, and I'll share that all today. Before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel. Click that bell down below so you're notified of all my new videos. All right, so for this exercise, I personally use Notion to create this
table and a template for myself, but you can also do this in your own notebook if you don’t use Notion. Or, I've created this worksheet that you can download and fill in either on your computer or print it out and fill it out on paper. The first step of this exercise is to start to become aware of
those negative habits. What are those negative patterns? What are these negative things
that are holding you back? For example, you find yourself going down the rabbit hole on social media, where you spend too much time scrolling, or you find yourself comparing
yourself to other people too often. Just think of the things that you do that are patterns that bring out a negative emotion in you. What triggers your anxiety, what triggers stress, what triggers frustration, and what triggers anger. Start to make a list of all the things that you do, that kind of trigger these negative emotions. And that's the first step—is to have this list. Essentially, it's a list of negative patterns, things that you are continually doing in your life that are not serving you, that are holding you back. Things that you hopefully want to change. The next step is going into this
worksheet or this template, which are basically questions that will help you get to the root of this pattern. What is the limiting belief that
is underlying this pattern? And then, how do you resolve that
and create a new belief? I'll run you through the template, but the way this works on my Notion, for example, is I made this list of all these negative patterns or habits or triggers. And then, I'm just gonna like go one at a time. I'm gonna pick the most important one. The one that I feel like is the one
holding me back the most, and then I'm gonna do this worksheet on. So here are the five questions in this exercise. The first question is “What is holding me back?” You would then go into detail of what it is that's holding you back. For example, I find myself scrolling
on social media too long. I turn to social media when I procrastinate and it always ends up like I'm scrolling
on TikTok for two hours or longer, and then I feel bad about it and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just go into detail about what it is that you do that you feel is holding you back. The second question is “What is the underlying belief
causing this behavior?” This is where you're gonna have to dig deep and get honest with yourself and ask what must be the belief that is making me act this way. For example, with procrastination, as I was analyzing why I turn to
social media to procrastinate and go down a rabbit hole sometimes is the underlying belief is “I'm running away from what is hard." "I'm choosing to do what is easy
versus what is hard.” And I think a lot of the times, that's what we're doing when we procrastinate, because the work is too difficult or challenging. It requires effort. And sometimes we're scared to take effort. Maybe that is something you can relate to. You're fearing the effort. You're afraid to do something hard, so you choose to do what's easy, which is opening up your social media app. In that scenario, your underlying belief could be “I'm running away from responsibility,” or “I choose to do what's easy versus what's hard.” And then you can also go deeper and ask yourself, “Why do I choose what's easy versus what's hard?” And then you'll find that the deep belief and the deep emotion that's limiting you is “I'm afraid.” “I fear what is difficult or challenging.” All right, so now that you've gotten to your underlying belief, the next question is to ask yourself, “Why am I like this? Where did this come from?” And this is going even deeper because this is where you're gonna
dig into your childhood and try to think of like the first memory or the first experience that might have caused you to have this belief. And you might find that the
first answer that comes up isn't the most deep answer. So whatever comes up, ask yourself, “Okay, why?” And then do the seven layers of "why", like continue asking "why", "why", "why" until you feel like you've got to a really good reason like, “Oh, this is why I'm like this." "This is where it must have come from.” This requires going back into early memories and things like that. To continue on with my example of a core memory of why I fear what's difficult/challenging is there was this big project that
I had to do in fifth grade— the animal project where we had to draw and write a summary of each animal for every alphabet letter. And it was such a big project to me at that age that I just didn't do it. The teacher gave us time to do it in class, and I just didn't. I spent that time like hanging out and talking to friends and in the end I didn't finish it. And that I got a F on that project, which lowered my grade and I got in trouble for that. And it was so traumatizing. It was difficult and I just wasn't given the tools or I just didn't feel like I knew how to handle it. So that is one of the core memories of like “Oh, that's why I fear what's difficult.” Because that experience was really
difficult and traumatizing as a child. So even though it sounds a little silly, there are memories like that— that we carry with us and the emotion stays with us and the fear stays with us. The next question then is “What is the new belief that I want to adopt?” This is where you take your limiting belief— that underlying limiting belief
that you came up with— and you turn it on its head and you kind of write the opposite of it. For example, if the limiting belief is “I fear what's difficult or hard and so I avoid it,” the new belief would be, “I can handle anything that's
difficult or challenging." "I can confidently handle any challenging
task because I have the tools” or “I welcome challenges— I embrace challenges because
I know they help me grow.” Feel free to write down a few different versions of what could be the new belief. And there will be one that sticks out to you that you're like, “Hmm, that's the one." "That's the one that I want to instill in." This new identity with this new belief. And then the last step in this exercise is “What is my plan for manifesting this reality?” I'm gonna give you a lot of techniques that you can use to manifest and instill/ingrain this new belief in you. Before I get into those techniques is, as you're doing this exercise, remember we made a table, we made a list of all of these
things we wanna work on and I just walked you through how we would work through one thing. So once you have this new belief that you've decided to pick up for yourself, I would put that new belief onto a list, whether it's on Notion, on your phone, write it in your notebook, on your wall, in your mirror. You basically wanna have a place where you're collecting these new beliefs and going through them one at a time. I wouldn't try to work on too
many new beliefs at once. I really do believe working on
one to three at a time. And once you feel like you've ingrained them, then you can start working on some new ones. That's why I kind of have a list where I kind of like check 'em off if I'm done with it or reorganize them based on priority. All right, moving on to the last part of this video, I wanna quickly share some techniques on how to reprogram your mind effectively. Now that you have like these new beliefs that you want to instill, like I said, I work on one to three at a time, there are ways to do it more efficiently/effectively. Affirmations is one thing that
I'm sure you've heard of, but when you do these affirmations is important, it's really key. You want to instill these beliefs in your brain when your brain is more
susceptible to new beliefs. And that is when your brain is in
either alpha state or theta state. There are different brainwave states— I'll have a graphic on screen. Beta state is the state where you are conscious, you're living your life and you're aware of what's happening. Our conscious mind is the mind that kind of holds the belief system. So it's hard to change your conscious mind when you're in that state because it's kind of hard and set in its ways. But the way you can more easily change and shift your conscious mind is
through your subconscious. It's through when your brain is in that in-between stage between waking and sleeping. Think about when you're about to fall asleep or right when you wake up, you're kind of groggy, you're not fully awake or conscious yet. That is the perfect time to manifest, to kind of repeat affirmations of these new beliefs you wanna ingrain in your head. Also during meditation is when
you're in that calmer brain state. And that is a really amazing time to repeat these affirmations so that you start to change your mind. To give you some examples of the best times that you can use to repeat these
new beliefs as affirmations— repeat them again and again
until they're in your brain— one is right before falling asleep
and right upon waking when your brain is in that loopy state. Another one is during meditation,
which I already mentioned. Another one is listening to these
affirmations while you're driving. So maybe record yourself saying these new beliefs and listen to it on repeat while you're driving. Because when you're driving, your brain is relaxed. You know how sometimes you feel like you are on autopilot when you're driving, you don't even realize you're driving. That's because your brain has entered that state. You can also repeat these affirmations
while you're running. Because as you're running, it's kind of a repetitive thing. Sometimes I repeat positive
affirmations as I'm running and there's kind of a rhythm to it. It's kind of like I'm singing a song or like wrapping it in a way. Just anything that is repetitive, where your brain is not fully using its brain power. Think like doing chores, like folding clothes or washing dishes. Those are also great times to repeat
these affirmations or listen to them. All right. Let me know if you give this exercise a try and what you think of it. Comment down below. Also don't forget we have a downloadable
worksheet that you can download there. And we have some really exciting
launches coming up very soon. If you like journaling and exercises like this, I have a whole shop where we have products that are basically guided journaling. We're launching a new product next week. I won't say what it is. You'll find out next week in my new video and you'll see it on my Instagram. Just follow us at @shoplavendaire. Lot of exciting stuff coming up. Sending you lots of love. I'll see you in the next one. Bye~
