Your Subconscious Beliefs Are Holding You Back (Here's How To Change Them)

Your beliefs create your experience of reality. If you want different results in life, whether that's overcoming anxiety, improving your relationships, your health or your money, you need to change your beliefs first.

I've worked with over 300 anxious business professionals to help them overcome anxiety by changing their beliefs, and in this post I'll tell you exactly how it works.

Key Takeaways

• Your beliefs sit at the top of a hierarchy: beliefs, thoughts, feelings, actions, results
• The belief "I have anxiety, so I'm broken" is one of the biggest things keeping people stuck
• Your current results are evidence of your current beliefs
• Exposure and experience build new beliefs, and you can do this deliberately
• A Belief Audit is the fastest way to find the beliefs limiting you
  

Robert Irwin Snake Test

Imagine you're sitting in a room alone with Robert Irwin, and someone throws a snake into the room. If you're like me, you're probably going to get scared. You'd go into the fight or flight mode of the nervous system. Robert would be calm and relaxed.

Now imagine sitting on the side of a cliff. If you're someone who's scared of heights, that would probably scare you. It doesn't scare me, because I don't believe I'm going to fall. Someone with a fear of heights believes they will.

With the snake, I believe the snake is going to bite me and that's going to be a problem. Robert Irwin believes he can handle snakes. Same room, same snake, same cliff. Completely different experience.

This is how your beliefs, the thoughts in your head and your fears impact your experience of reality.

The Belief That Keeps You Anxious

One of the biggest things you've got to change in your mindset if you're experiencing anxiety is the belief that there is something wrong with anxiety, or "because I have anxiety, I'm broken."

Because if you believe you're broken, then you're obviously going to believe something needs to be fixed. And if something needs to be fixed, that suggests something is wrong. So every time you get a symptom, you're going to freak out.

This applies to every area of life:

• If you have a belief that says "I'm always going to be alone," what kind of impact do you think that's going to have?
• If you have a belief around money that says "I never have enough money," what do you think that's going to do?
  
• If you have a belief that says "I'm just not a healthy person," what do you think that's going to do?

Take relationships. If you feel like you're not good enough and someone rejects you, you're going to have this experience in your body of rejection and abandonment. That triggers a whole experience which leads you to being needy or desperate, which leads to them probably moving away from you. The same applies to money and health.

The Hierarchy: Beliefs, Thoughts, Feelings, Actions, Results

Your thoughts and beliefs impact the experience you have in your body. There's actually a field of study called psychoneuroimmunology which has proven this.

Your thoughts and beliefs impact your feelings and the experiences in your body. The feelings in your body impact your actions, and your actions impact your results.

That's the hierarchy: Beliefs > Thoughts > Feelings > Actions > Results.

So if you want different results in life, you need to change your beliefs. If you want to overcome your anxiety, stop believing that anxiety means you're broken.

The Belief Audit: How to Find Your Limiting Beliefs

One of the things I do with my clients is help them change their beliefs using what I call the Belief Audit tool.

You literally go and audit your beliefs. You look at them and ask, "Which beliefs are limiting me?" Then you change those beliefs.

The tool covers a bunch of different categories: confidence, people pleasing, relationships, health, money, business, career, shame, emotional avoidance and a few others. You can print it out and go through it to audit your own beliefs.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE BELIEF AUDIT TOOL.

Not many people do this. For a lot of us, we're too proud to even admit that some of our beliefs might not be serving us. We don't want to admit that what we think might not be the best way to do things. But if you take the time to actually question your own belief systems, it can be extremely helpful and profound.

Change the Filter, Change Your Reality

You experience your reality through the filter of your beliefs. When you change the filter, which is to change the belief, you literally perceive a different reality.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

This is why two people can have the same experience but a completely different experience of it. Two people might get fired from their job. One goes into a deep, dark depression. The other goes, "That's awesome, it's an opportunity to find a new job. I didn't really like that job anyway."

Real Client Examples

I had a client who had grown his business and made a lot of money, but he believed he had to sacrifice his health to be successful in business. So his health suffered, his relationships suffered, and he sacrificed a lot of his life just for business growth.

We changed the belief to: you can have the business, the money, the relationships and the health. Now he's making progress in all of these areas.

Another client was running a business but felt bored and unfulfilled. He believed he just had to keep showing up and doing the same thing every day. When I asked him, "What would you really love to do? What would you feel fulfilled by doing?" he told me exactly what it was. So I asked, "Why don't you do them?" He said, "I never really thought about that."

When you take the time to address your beliefs and your thoughts, you change them, and you transform your life.

Your Results Are Evidence of Your Beliefs

Here's another layer: your results are evidence. The results you're seeing in your life right now are proof of the beliefs you're holding. If you don't like what you're seeing, you've got to create new evidence.

How do you create new evidence? You create new beliefs. New beliefs create new thoughts, new thoughts create new feelings, new feelings create new actions, and new actions create new results. It's a process.

Skeptics will say, "Robert Irwin has been practicing handling snakes his whole life." That actually proves my point. He has experience and exposure that helped him build belief. Someone who's scared of heights probably hasn't exposed themselves to heights, which is why they're so scared. I climb trees and mountains all the time because I like doing it, and that exposure and experience has changed my belief about my own capability.

You can do that as well. You can change your beliefs. You can change the evidence you have about your own capabilities, your fears, your desires, and what you want in your life. All it takes is a little bit of self-awareness.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a limiting belief? A limiting belief is a belief that restricts what you think is possible for you, like "I'm broken because I have anxiety" or "I never have enough money." These beliefs shape your thoughts, feelings, actions and ultimately your results.

Can you really change your beliefs? Yes. Beliefs are built through experience and exposure, which means they can be rebuilt the same way. Auditing your beliefs, questioning them and creating new evidence through action is how you change them.

How do beliefs affect anxiety? If you believe anxiety means you're broken, every symptom becomes proof that something is wrong, which fuels more anxiety. Changing the belief changes the way your nervous system responds.

Next Steps

If you want a more calm, present, peaceful experience of life without so much anxiety, it's worth addressing the beliefs you have about yourself and your anxiety in the first place.

Grab the free Belief Audit tool and go through it yourself.

And if you want to see how I've helped over 300 people transform their mindset and start living with limitless confidence, watch the free 10-minute video explaining the Mind Launch Method here.

The Mind Launch Method is a three-step system I've developed to help hundreds of people: Regulate, Reprogram, Reset.

You regulate the nervous system to make calm your baseline, reprogram the mind to change your belief systems, and reset your identity to get into alignment with the version of yourself you actually want to be living as.

Watch it here: mindlaunch.com.au

Josh

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