Episode 20 - Identifying Your Limiting Beliefs

Transcript

Announcer: This program is brought to you by personallifemedia.com.

Renee Stephens:  Welcome to inside-out weight loss. I’m your host, Renee Stephens, and together we are accessing the control panel of your mind-body system, bringing ease and joy to your weight-loss journey and fullness to the rest of your life.

When you change limiting belief: here’s the good news. It doesn’t just benefit the area of weight, or slimness or being naturally slender, these positive empowering beliefs tend to trickle out and  benefit all sorts of areas in your life.

I’m constantly amazed when I read the posts on the yahoo group, inside-out weight loss yahoo group, at how much wonderful support is there, available to you. How sharing, warm and open the people on the group are. Connect, support and be supported.

Today on the show five great questions to find your core limiting beliefs. Plus, why a client said: “Thank you, big burrito.” So go ahead and set your intention for this episode. Drop inside for a moment and become present, with you. You’ve come to this show for a reason, there’s something here for you. This time is for you. So wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, open yourself up to get exactly what you need. And as you do this, I invite you to open up energetically and connect with all the other listeners of this show, across time and space.

Feel their presence, and send them your support, and feel there as it comes back to you, magnified many many times over. We’re a community of people on the same journey. There’s a power of group intent that’s much greater than the sum of the parts. Connect to this support field, that spans across time and space, as you listen to this show. I’m constantly amazed when I read the posts on the yahoo group, inside-out weight loss yahoo group, at how much wonderful support is there, available to you. How sharing, warm and open the people on the group are. Connect, support and be supported.

And if you want to know who some of these fellow journeyers are, then join the yahoo group, and share your journey. Support and be supported. Remember, you’ll get double or more out of this journey what you put in, but you must put in, to get out. So, what’s my intent? You know, to dissolve what’s been holding you back, and help you move clearly into living your dream, because I know that it’s possible, I know you deserve it, and I know that you can.

I learnt that many of you are listening to this show while you’re working out. And if that’s you, if you’re pumping away on the elliptical, or jogging, or walking or stair climbing, bravo. You’re getting a double benefit from this show. And I also want to encourage you, if you’d like to listen again in a quiet setting, to soak in the content in a quiet setting, then go ahead and do that.

There may be something in today’s episode that you say “hey, that’s worth a second listen.” Or a third. Many people listen to these episodes again and again and again. So, if there is something that rings true for you, then schedule some time, take some time out and listen in a place that’s calm and quiet, where you really can drop inside and soak it all in.

Did I tell you about the listener who wrote to tell me that she was listening on a plane, and semi dozed off to my voice? Was it me? When she awoke she felt somehow transformed, and proceeded to loose weight!

Today I want to tell you a story, about why a client of mine ended up saying “thank you big burrito!” How about that? She came in, she’d been doing really wonderfully, making some massive changes. She started as a binger, but ended her binging. Her binge became less frequent, and they were only sporadic binges at this point, and she was following a very sensible eating plan that we had agreed together.

And one day she came in to her session, and she said, y’know, “Renee, everything’s been going great, I’ve been following the plan…except for last Thursday.”

I said, “Oh, well, what about last Thursday? What happened?”
She said “Oh well, we all went to the beach, that’s one the things that we set to do, living here in California, we all went to the beach.” She said. “And we didn’t know what to get for lunch, we’ll just get something easy, we’ll get burritos.” Well, I don’t know if you’ve had some of these Mexican burritos, but they can be pretty darn big, all that guacamole, sour cream, my goodness, they can be pretty…substantial, we’ll say that.

So, she’s eating that burrito, and she’s getting full. Really really full. One things that’s interesting about this, is that she never used to get full. She’d eat a burrito, and a bag of chips, and some ice cream and who the heck knows what else. She’d go way beyond the burrito, and just not feel, choose not to feel how that felt to her.

And now she felt it, and it didn’t feel good. So she got most of the way through the burrito, she finally just couldn’t eat any more, and left a little bit of the burrito. And she felt stuffed. Really really uncomfortable and stuffed. And she felt bad about feeling stuffed.

Has this ever happened to you? It’s not just how you feel physically that’s upsetting, but even more so it’s the guilt. It’s the ‘oh my God’, I wish I hadn’t done that, oooh. So she was feeling bad. And in fact, the next day, she was still feeling bad. She could still feel the effects of that burrito in her body, it was really uncomfortable for her.

So, she came in feeling bad about having done this, and explained to me what happened. And I said: “oh well, that’s really interesting. This is a great opportunity, isn’t it?” And she looked at me a little sideways. And I said: “Yes, because that episode. That big burrito eating episode, is an invitation. It’s a pointer. A big ole pointer to a trigger that we haven’t yet resolved. I said “thank you burrito! For pointing us to where work needs to be done. You’re giving me a shortcut, you’re making my job easier.”

And she laughed at this, we both laughed at this. It was so funny. But really, it was wonderful, because, with the gift of that episode, and her awareness of the episode, and her honesty and awareness to bring it to the table, so to speak, excuse the pun. Willing to bring it to the session, it does make my job easier.

Because I can say: “well ok, what was the trigger here? What is it that we haven’t yet addressed that we need to address?” And so, we went right to it. We found what the trigger was. It had something to do, as I recall, with not wanting to put her friends out, with wanting it to be easy. And she was able to do a re-do, remember the ro-do on that one? We were able to do some processes on it, and she left feeling like “yeah, that kind of situation, I can handle. That kind of thing is no problem for me.” So I say: “thank you big burrito!”

It’s a gift, it’s a blessing, it’s a pointer. It makes my job easier, and yours too. So, the next time that you have an eating episode that make you feel a little bit bad, or maybe even a lot bad,  you feel like you’ve really blown it, thank that episode. Because it’s a big pointer, it’s a big opportunity to resolve the situation that you haven’t yet resolved. To find a trigger that you haven’t yet healed. Thank you.

With that, let’s take a break now, to support our sponsors, who make this show possible. This is Renee Stephens, and you’re listening to inside-out weight loss on Personal Life Media.

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Renee Stephens: We’re back now. Before the break, I told you the story of ‘thank you big burrito!’ and let’s review for a moment what we did last episode. We introduced the concept of limiting beliefs. We talked about how they really are running the show. I call it ‘the alchemy of beliefs.’

Let me ask you this: if there were a drug which had zero side-effects, cost nothing, never went off, and that worked across all illnesses at a statistically significant level, would you want to use it? Would you think that we should use it? Zero side effects. Nothing. No side effects. And it’s free.

Well, you know what? Every doctor on the planet, knows about this drug They all know about it. Scientists study it all the time. This drug exists, and you have access to it, right now. It’s called “the placebo effect.” And it’s such a consistent and reliable effect that every reliable drug trial out there controls for it. And yet, we toss it out, we dismiss it, it distorts our results, we say. Is this another elephant in the closet? Are we overlooking a gold mine? Just like science overlooked antibiotics, until they were rediscovered, staring them in the face?

Antibiotics were discovered by an observation by Sir Alexander Fleming. He looked at a plate of blue-green mould and noticed a halo around it where bacteria did not grow. That’s all they saw. And scores of others had seen the same thing, many many times. Yet he asked the question: “what’s keeping the bacteria away?”

Well, it was the antibiotic that was keeping the bacteria away. It was the substance that was later developed into penicillin. And it was staring him in the face. And I love that it was a halo. It was a halo, what halos are we wearing that we’ve forgotten to notice? (I couldn’t resist that one.)

So my question is: aren’t we doing the same thing that people did when they overlooked antibiotics when we ignore the placebo effect? It’s curing people. It costs nothing. It has zero side effects, and yet we ignore it. It’s estimated to be about 30% effective, across studies! All over the place! And what is the placebo effect? The placebo effect is belief. It’s the belief that something will work. The belief that we can change, that healing is possible, and in many ways that’s what inside-out weight loss is all about. It’s about changing our beliefs, it’s about the alchemy that happens when we change what we believe, when we realize that we can change, that it is possible.

And so, let’s look directly at the beliefs that have been holding us back, that have been preventing us from having the body of our dreams, the life of our dreams, the relationship with food of our dreams, the relationship with other people of our dreams. I call these “empowering beliefs.”

So let’s go ahead and do some re-engineering of our beliefs, some reprogramming of our beliefs structures to achieve our dreams. You may be asking: “how can we get ourselves to believe in something, when we know that it’s the belief, not the something that will work?” That’s a really good question, and the answer is that the first step, the answer is that the first step, is to know what you want.

You’ve heard this from me before. We start with knowing what we want. Imagining it, describing it, dreaming it, write about it. You may have done this in an earlier episode, if not it’s time to do it now, and if you have done it, do it again, Post it to the yahoo group, share it with your support partners, great. Now that you know what you want, let’s have an example here.

Imagine that what you want is being naturally slender. Ask yourself these questions. There are five powerful questions that will illicit your limiting beliefs, that will help you uncover what’s been holding you back at the belief level. What is it that’s been preventing you from having the placebo effect? The transformative effect.

So here are the five questions. Number one: is this goal desirable and worthwhile? So with this example is it desirable and worthwhile to be naturally slender for you? Do you want it, and is it worthwhile? Notice the effect that hearing that question and answering it inside has on you. You might even, as we go through these questions, make a note in your journal, or take some time to write the questions down, and think about them when you have the time to journal about them, to discover if there are any objects that you might have, inside.

The next question is: is it possible for others? Do you believe that it’s possible for others? Now, having listened to this show for a while, I’m betting that you do believe it’s possible for others. You’ve been hearing me tell the story of how I transformed myself back into a naturally slender person, and how my clients have done the same. And how so many people who have been listening to this show, are doing the same. I hear from them all the time, and please, keep sending me your emails, because I love to read them.

The next question is, once you’ve answered is this goal desirable and worthwhile, number two is it possible for others, and number three: is it possible for you? Think about that. Do you believe that it’s possible for you. Because this is where the stories can come up. The stories, about “well I’ve been this way since I was a kid,” or “my mother is this way, and my father’s this way, and my aunt’s this way, and my uncle’s this way, and it’s in my genes. I have big bones, I have a slow metabolism.”

All of those are just ways of saying that you don’t believe that it’s possible for you. If you have a story in your mind about why you can’t lose weight, it’s quite possible that you have the belief that it’s not possible for you. And so you make up a story around it, or perhaps you truly believe this story, we’re talking about beliefs here, of course. That it’s not possible for you. So notice your answer to that question. Because if you don’t think it’s possible for you, it’s not going to happen.

Fourth question is: is what it takes to achieve this goal appropriate and reasonable? Is what it takes to achieve this goal appropriate and reasonable? What do you think? This relates back to that belief we were talking about last show. The one that’s rampant in our society and holding so many of us back. The belief that it’s hard work to loose weight.

And this is indeed a limiting belief. I had a client on the phone today who was saying “well if I could… I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, I’m at the point where I’m counting calories.” She said “well, you know, I can do 1500 pretty easily, but I think I need to do 1200 to loose weight, and I don’t know if I can do it, it’s so hard.”

And I said “well, what if you found it easy? What if you set your intent for it to be easy for you to eat 1200 calories a day. What if you found that you enjoyed it, that you felt better?”
She said “ah! That’s an idea. I could set my intent for that.” Go for it.

Question number five: do you deserve it? Do you deserve to loose weight? Do you deserve to be naturally slender? Do you deserve to have your dream? Think about it, feel the answer in your mind, and write it down. And if you answered no to any of these questions, and I suspect you did, if you’re listening to this show, then there’s a limiting belief swimming around somewhere inside your brain.

You may not believe that you deserve to lose weight. You may not believe that you deserve to be naturally slender. You may not think it’s possible. You may think it’s hard work. You may think it’s unsafe to be thin. Men or women will be all over me, maybe both, if I’m slim. Maybe that’s your limiting belief. There’ll be too much pressure on me if I’m slim. I had a client also today who said to me “you know, I’m really afraid that if I’m successful at losing weight then that will create expectations for me to continue, and that will put a lot of pressure on me, and I don’t want that pressure on me.”

So she has a limiting belief that weight loss, or success in weight loss, causes pressure. This is related to the one I was talking about the other day, the client who believed that success led to failure. It’s a similar sort of belief. Now that’s really going to hold you back. No wonder it’s a struggle if you have that belief operating. So these are the sorts of things that are limiting beliefs, that hold us back, that stymie our best efforts.

Now if you did your homework from the last episode and wrote down your limiting beliefs, then you’re ahead of the game. Now it’s time to do another task. Ask yourself these questions, write what comes up. And if you come up with a lot of limiting beliefs, don’t worry. I know it can seem daunting, it can seem overwhelming, but the good news is, that beliefs come in clusters, like grapes on a vine. And when you change that core beliefs, the others change with it. We’re almost out of time for today, but before we close, I’d like to share with you one more thing.

Go ahead and identify the belief that has the biggest charge for you, check inside, what really seems true to you? What really resonates with you is, yes, that is a belief that I hold quite strongly and it’s really been holding me back. You may get the answer in a flash, or it may take some reflection. And when you know, when you get that, the one that has the biggest charge, that’s the one to change first. Once we’ve changed that limiting belief, then we’ll reassess, to see what other beliefs have transformed with it.

Because, remember, that belief could be at the core of a cluster of beliefs. Once you change that, all sorts of other beliefs change too. And like the client with the success sabotage pattern, when you change limiting beliefs, here’s the good news, it doesn’t just benefit the area of weight, or slimness, or being naturally slender, these positive empowering beliefs tend to trickle out and benefit all sorts of areas in your life. I wonder, how many positive changes will result as you change your limiting beliefs into empowering beliefs?

That brings us to the end of our show today. Thank you, for being present. My blog is located at www.personallifemedia.com/renee. If you’re interested in some of my recorded journeys, you can go to personallifemedia/renee, click on the side bar, where it says products, it will take you to a link, to my downloadable mp3s. Have a question for me? Call 206 350 5333 and leave a message.

I may play your question or comment on the air. For other shows on the Personal Life Media network, please visit our website at personallifemedia.com. There’s loads of great content to feed your mind, body and spirit. This is your host Renee Stephens, and I’m on a mission to eradicate the weight struggle from the planet, replacing it with light and love. Join me, as we evolve the world by evolving ourselves. Take good care.

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