By Brianna Bridges
Sometimes one simple thought can change the course of our whole lives.
If that sounds dramatic, I have an example. It surprised even me – and I am a life coach. It’s my job to help others understand the impact their beliefs are having on their everyday lives.
A client recently told me that if she could go back and change one thing, she would have gone to medical school like she’d always wanted.
”Why didn’t you?” I asked.
”Because I used to think I was terrible at math!” She replied with exasperation.
We were out to lunch during one of our environment curation days, wherein she chose to do some personal shopping to refresh her wardrobe and create some new looks. We were working on her current life’s goal: to find her a life partner (which we did, by the way, and they are so cute together!)
Anyway, I digress. She never went to medical school because she believed she was terrible at math. If she was terrible at math, she believed that she’d never get through medical school.
I was shocked. Like, truly shocked.
I wasn’t shocked by one thought carrying so much weight – that happens all the time. We let other people tell us we won’t be capable of something. When we choose to believe it too, our dreams fade from color to grayscale. We think that someone’s reaction to us means something it didn’t and can sever an entire relationship over it. Our brain serves up faulty ideas that come with big implications (and the smaller ones that add up to undesirable results) all the time.
But this time, it was the simplicity, the seeming innocence, of the belief that caught me off guard.
Even though she has moved well past this and has a great career now, I was a little sad that a resigned acceptance of something that wasn’t even true had derailed my client’s dream as a teenager.
Ironically, she proved that belief wrong later in life when she had to pass an advanced math class for a volunteer position she wanted to take.
The point is that even when we are aware of our default beliefs, simply accepting them as truths – no matter how seemingly innocuous they are – can put some pretty big limitations on us.
Sometimes those limitations are less noticeable, keeping us stuck in unhelpful thinking or from reaching smaller goals.
Sometimes they keep us from achieving great things, like pursuing our passions to become an incredible doctor.
We are all capable of so much more than we give permit ourselves to believe. We learn from such a young age how to interpret the world around us in a way that keeps us safe, and they become so ingrained they become true in our minds. The problem is, they’re not true, and many of them hold us back from our potential and our power
So the question is, what default beliefs are on repeat in your mind, and what could they be holding you back from? What possibilities could you unlock for yourself if you were to simply start asking yourself, “What if this isn’t true?”
Contact Brianna at: Brianna@BriannasBestLife.com. Please visit her website for more information: BriannasBestLife.com.
