Hey, hey, bold leaders. Welcome to this episode the Bold Leadership Revolution podcast. And I’m really excited to be here talking about one of my favorite things, and that is beliefs. I like to think I have a slightly different perspective on beliefs than most people, which I’m going to share with you here today, as well as giving you the lowdown on what I call my five-belief habit.
As you know, we are here to show you how to optimize your performance as a leader without the buttoned-up stuffiness of corporate leadership and the drivel of the personal development industry. We promise, in a world that swings wildly between serious business and woo-woo bullshit, we will be firmly planted in the middle. And today’s episode is a really great example of how we do this and how we give you the practical side of business strategy, the necessary skills to build your mental strength, and the woo-ish principles to effectively manage your most precious resource: your energy.
So today I’m sharing with you a monthly habit that I have. Since we’re almost at the beginning of a new month, I thought it incredibly timely. Everything we do is a habit, and unlike most people, I don’t group habits into bad or good. I like to look at the result I get from my habits. Does the result move me closer to who I want to become, the goal I want to achieve, my vision, my purpose, or does it move me further away?
When we reflect and collect these data points on our habits, it creates awareness around where we may need to make some changes. Habits are critical to performance because these habit behaviors become our default behaviors during difficult times of stress, uncertainty, and change. Anyone running a business that doesn’t experience stress, uncertainty, or change on a regular basis? Anyone? Anyone out there that’s running a business, do you not ever experience stress, uncertainty, and change on a regular basis? Didn’t think so. Right?
My habits that yield positive results become the cornerstone in my resiliency practice. My habits are a key component of my resiliency. This is what helps me get back up again. I can rely on them, trust them to show up for me, even when I can’t always show up for myself, and see me through during times of not only success but also failure. That’s what I mean by resiliency and how these habits really help pick me up again and again.
The five-belief habit, which is a monthly habit, has resulted in some truly incredibly results in my business. This habit is here to remind me that nothing transformational happens overnight, behavior change is hard, and the change we want to see the most takes intention, practice, and focus.
One of the reasons the five-belief habit works, in my opinion, is because it’s repetitive. When we are creating new beliefs, we have to be persistent. It can take time. It can take painfully long amounts of time to really understand why we believe what we believe, what are the feelings that are causing these beliefs, because I believe that these beliefs come from feelings, and really processing through is this our belief? Is this somebody else’s belief? Is this a societal belief? Is this a generational belief? And this habit is about making the daily and monthly commitment to behavior change and practicing learning how to lean into your growth edge.
As I share this habit, I want you to watch your resistance pop up. You might hear things like “Yeah, but this is too simple,” “Yeah, but this works for you, but it’s not going to work for me,” “Yeah, but if it were that easy, I would’ve figured it out by now,” “Yeah, but I don’t believe these things.” So just tune in and get present to what happens when I start to talk about this habit because it’s really simple.
SO HERE’S THE HABIT:
At the beginning of the month, I write down five beliefs that I want to work on, five beliefs that I want to believe, five beliefs that I’m struggling to believe, five beliefs that might be holding me back a little bit from stepping into that woman that I want to become. And these beliefs that I write down, they’re here to support my growth and the direction that I want to move in.
So, to get started for the very first time, you might need to look at your current beliefs. Which ones are holding you back or not getting you a positive result? You see, it’s common to talk about beliefs as limiting beliefs. I used to do that too. It’s somewhat how you’re trained in coach training school, that we know that there are these things called limiting beliefs or that we have these negative, looping thoughts.
And I would ask the typical coach question of my clients: How is this belief serving you? And my client would immediately say that it’s not. “Oh, it’s not serving me.” But, when we would dig deeper, the belief was serving them. It was protecting them. It was shielding them. It was keeping them safe. It was ultimately keeping them hidden and small but maybe for good reason, maybe for really good reason. Maybe it was protecting them from a past trauma that was lying underneath the surface.
So you never really know logically, in the mind, where these beliefs are coming from, and it takes a great amount of excavating to understand where these things come from. However, we know that we can develop new neural pathways, and that’s what this habit is about. It’s about helping you develop a new neural pathway.
So don’t think of them as bad or limiting. I want you think of them as an opportunity. I want you to think of these beliefs as an exciting opportunity for growth and change because beliefs are hard enough to look at without adding the stigma of bad or limiting, and that’s just my opinion here. Maybe it’s an unpopular one. Maybe some of you disagree with me, but that’s just the take that I have on this.
So look at what you believe. Now, for a long time, I believed that “it,” maybe success, the success that I specifically wanted, was possible for everyone else, but it wasn’t possible for me. Or the only way I could have what I wanted was to join the thousands of others building their business in a way that didn’t feel authentic to me, that didn’t feel like the way I wanted to build a business.
I am very against-the-grain, so when you have a course that turns out 40,000 people who are all going to go follow a formula to go build their business a certain way, I had the other direction. I’m like, “Nope, not for me, I’m just going to do this differently. I’m going to do it my way.” And for better or worse, but that’s kind of the choice that I make, so for a long time, I would look out in the world and see everybody doing it this way, and I would have this belief that it wasn’t going to work for me because I wasn’t doing it that way, even though I innately knew that wasn’t the way for me.
I know you’re probably still a little stuck on what beliefs to work on, so I did some heavy lifting for you, and I dug through my journals to find some beliefs that I’ve worked on in the past. So here are some of these beliefs, and they can be as long … You can write them as long and as flowery and poetically as you want, or they can be short.
I take action every day to manifest my vision into reality. Abundance is all around me. I am a millionaire. Each and every day is full of exciting new opportunities. Every day, serious and committed business owners find my platform and can’t get enough of our content. I love paying my coach.
Now, this is one of my favorite beliefs because I am a coach, and if I want people to love paying me, and I truly do want them to love paying me. That makes me feel so good when my clients tell me how much they love paying me. I want them to feel like they’re really getting a great value and that this is a tremendous joy, having this experience and this relationship. So I really need to look into and have these beliefs around when I pay for my coach and my coaching and my programs.
Here’s another one: Each and every day, I wake up excited to help micro-business owners create more profit and experience personal and professional growth while working less than ever before. That’s my brand promise, so you know what, I better damn well believe that. That is my brand promise. So do you believe what your brand promise is? Do you really embody that?
Money flows to me easily. I generate profit like it’s nobody’s business. Everything I want is already here. Everything always works out in my favor. I get what I need when I need it. This is my most favorite one when I’m feeling insecure or maybe a little bit in scarcity. Maybe I’ve made a big leap financially. This usually comes up for me around money worry. That’s a go-to one for me. I get what I need when I need it.
I love paying my team. As I move to bring my vision into reality, the resources show up. Every day, people reach out and let me know how my content helps them. I output, and I receive. So for a lot of us, we output, and then we feel like we’re not receiving, and that’s usually untrue. We’re usually not capturing the data and the evidence of all that we are receiving. So creating this belief that I output and I receive is important.
I have more than enough money to employ the best size team for me. I get results faster than ever before. My vision is so bold and big, I effortlessly attract the people I need to hold it.
All of these beliefs are written like they are here now, which becomes tricky for people who are entrenched in their current worldview or perspective. I understand how difficult this is. I remember … oh my goodness, it has to be almost 15 years ago, that I read the book, “You Can Heal Your Life” by Louise Hay, and this book, for a very long time, probably for close to a decade, was my bible. It was the catalyst to so much of my own personal growth.
I found it during a very difficult time in my life. I found it during the time when we were really financially struggling. I had two … probably at this point, I had one small child. I was working full-time, and I was just under so much stress in my life. In the book, she has a mantra that says “Everything is well …” I’m going to misquote it, but you’re going to get the gist. “All is well, everything is as it should be.” That’s what it is. “All is well, everything is as it should be.”
And I remember reading that line, “All is as it should be,” and losing my shit. I went into a complete tantrum about how, no, no, this is not how it should be, so my controller, my inner control freak, was really … had a grasp on my at this time in my life, and this was absolutely … my life was absolutely not as it should be, let me tell you. And it took me a bit, it took me a bit, and then I remember this moment. I had been chewing on this, “Everything is as it should be,” and I’d been writing in my journal, “Everything is as it should be, everything is as it should be, all is well in my life, everything is as it should be” over and over and over again, and I remember finally getting it.
I remember the moment where it was no longer just a logical experience, that it was an emotional and it was an embodied experience. I was like, “Oh, okay.” So I understand how tricky this can be for people, if you’re entrenched in your current worldview or perspective.
So you can use this trick that I learned from the book, “The Secret,” and that’s to start off with the phrase, “I’m so happy and grateful now that.” “I’m so happy and grateful now that.” And I believe this was a tip from Jack Canfield in the book. Using this phrase seems to help people who struggle to believe things that might not have happened yet.
So these beliefs, this five-belief habit, you can review these beliefs after you’ve written them every morning and/or before you go to bed throughout the month. When the next month comes, I want you to see how many of these beliefs you feel are true for you now. The reason why some of these beliefs are exaggerated, everything always works out in my favor, is because, when I exaggerate on a belief, it helps me feel, so it’s no longer a thought because that’s not where this happens. This happens through our feelings, and so, when I can exaggerate it, it helps me feel it in my body. Everything always works out in my favor. I can feel that in my body.
I remember doing this when we first got our dog, and I said, “I will have the most obedient dog anyone has ever seen.” And trust me, he’s not. But it helped me connect to the essence of what I was looking to accomplish. And even if I got 80% there, that would be success. So, when you go back and when you look at these beliefs, I want you to put emotion behind them. I want you to use words that incite feeling for you, that incite feeling. I get results faster than ever before, like what would that feel like? Gosh, that would feel so exciting. I feel kind of tingly thinking about it, right?
And so, when you go back in the next month and review them, check in. Check in. I want you to see how many of these beliefs you feel are true for you now. And this doesn’t happen in the mind. This happens in the body. Are you making decisions and operating from these beliefs? Do you know them both logically and emotionally?
So, if you’re working on abundance is all around me, are you making decisions from a place of abundance, or are you making decisions from a place of lack? Can you feel in your body the abundance that is all around you? That’s how you know. And if you still have work to do, maybe you’re not making all of your decisions from a place of abundance or you don’t feel it in your body, keep that belief for the next month. Keep working on it. There are beliefs that took me months, months to assimilate into my being and to embody.
So guess what your action is today? You got it. Go write your five beliefs, and if you’re feeling like a bold leader, share them with me on Instagram. I’m @thetaranewman.
I often share lessons learned on this podcast. It’s one of my favorite things to be able to do. And I’m able to do this because of a strong commitment I have to radical self-reflection. This commitment means that, every week, I’m looking at what’s happening in my business and in my life: the good, the bad, and, yes, occasionally the ugly.
Doing this work allows me to look at my months and even my years with real data, even for the less tangible parts of my business and life. I call these weekly meetings CEO Debriefs, and I do them twice per month inside The BRAVE Society. We do them together. I have pulled together some of the highlights from CEO Debriefs that I’ve done inside of BRAVE, and I’m sharing the best of the best with you.
You might have heard a couple of these on the podcast, but I want you to take it a step further and feel what it’s like to do these with us inside of The BRAVE Society. So head on over to my show notes and sign up now to receive 10 CEO Debrief questions you will want to ask yourself, plus listen in on some of the most popular shares that I’ve made. Listening to someone else’s debrief is a great way to find the language for what you’re experiencing, get a concrete example of radical self-reflection, and learn how to grow your business because it’s oftentimes not what we think.
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