I’ve been doing a lot of work on myself in the last two years.
In particular, I’ve really been working on my beliefs.
I’m not sure I ever really spent that much time thinking about my beliefs pre-divorce.
And I definitey didn’t really question too many of them. Or any of them.
It wasn’t until I started studying beliefs that I really had any awareness about them at all.
I’m not talking about religious beliefs.
I’m talking about ALL your beliefs: your beliefs about relationships and parenting and health and technology and kids and marriage and work and money and… everything.
What is a belief, anyway?
There are tons of definitions for beliefs, but for the sake of this blog post, I’m talking about a belief as in an opinion or conviction.
How are most of our beliefs formed?
When we are very young, we don’t know the difference between what is true and what isn’t. So we listen to the people we trust most, and we tend to adopt those beliefs.
For most of us, our earliest beliefs are formed by our parents’ beliefs and our experiences.
As we get older, school and friends also shape our beliefs, and then as time goes on, more influential people enter our lives and we have more and more experiences that may cause us to shift our beliefs about certain things.
But it’s also very likely that we have experiences that cement our beliefs about life and ourselves at a fairly young age.
These beliefs might help us live a super fulfilling life.
But they can also prevent us from living a super fulfilling life. They can keep us stuck. Trapped. And because of these beliefs, we never discover anything different. We never discover what we are truly capable of.
We simply survive and we never discover what it’s like to thrive.
I didn’t realize how much of my life I was living in survival mode until the last couple years.
I had so many beliefs that I was just automatically believing without questioning them at all.
Some of these beliefs are all encompassing beliefs about life in general, like if you want to be successful, you have to work hard.
But other beliefs are the ones I have about myself. Like:
- you’ll never be good at that
- you should have figured this out by now
- you aren’t strong enough to handle that
- she can do that, but you could never do that
I let these beliefs keep me in survival mode for many, many years.
These beliefs also kept me in really unhealthy relationships because I didn’t believe I deserved anything better.
It wasn’t until I started thinking about how my beliefs were likely becoming my kids beliefs that I had my first OH SHIT moment.
So I started taking a good, hard look at my beliefs.
If they weren’t helping me, if they weren’t serving me, if they weren’t enabling me to grow and thrive, then maybe it was time for me to challenge them.
One of my beliefs before filing for divorce was that I wouldn’t survive being without the kids for any length of time. I couldn’t go from being a stay-at-home mom 24/7/365 to all of the kids to potentially missing out on 50% of their lives.
No fucking way.
But there are lots of divorced moms out there. They are surviving.
Lots of them are even thriving.
So that belief was proven to be untrue.
I also believed that I wouldn’t survive leaving my house. That the kids would be devastated. That it would fuck them up and do irreversible damage. And also that they would hate me.
Guess what?
Every single one of those beliefs turned out to be untrue also.
In fact, moving out of that house was one of the best decisions I ever made, not only for me, but for the kids, too.
So many of my beliefs about what I could and couldn’t handle, about what would cause total devastation for me and the kids, about what just wasn’t possible were complete and total bullshit.
I’m just scratching the surface of how I’ve learned to question my beliefs, especially the ones I have about myself, in the last couple years.
But it’s this committment to examining my beliefs about the world, my beliefs about how life “should” be, my beliefs about what is best for me and my kids, my beliefs about my value as a human being and my beliefs about what I’m capable of accomplishing that has exponentially changed the quality of my life in the last two years.
If you are living a life of survival, if something feels off, if you aren’t fulfilled, if you know you need to make a change but you don’t think you are strong enough to do it, you might benefit from examining your beliefs.
Here’s something that might help you to start the process of thinking about things differently…
What color is the sky?
That’s an easy one, right?
It’s blue! Duh.
But is it?
Is the sky always blue?
What color is the sky at night? What color is the sky when it’s cloudy? What color is the sky in the middle of a massive thunderstorm? What color is the sky at dawn?
How about in this picture I took over the weekend when I was out for a drive?
The sky isn’t blue there.
Not even close.
And maybe it’s possible that some of your beliefs – especially the ones you’ve been clinging onto about yourself for years and years and years – aren’t even close to accurate either.
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