What if you don’t even know you have a belief holding you back? How do you find it to change it?

‘It’s never going to be about what I DO.
It can ONLY be about who I AM.
And it STARTS with how I think!’ Kat Ruth

We have the beliefs we know about, the ones that support us and the ones that hold us back, those ones are usually known as our ‘limiting beliefs.’ But you also have beliefs you don’t even know you hold, something I call ‘stealth beliefs.’ The mentor I learned about this from, Morty Lefkoe called them ‘survival beliefs.’

Doesn’t matter what they’re called, it matters what they do and how they prop up a core belief and enable you to adapt to it and life. A life that’s okay, not great but not awful. A stealth belief creates a blind spot, so you aren’t aware of the original deep limiting belief it supports.

In some ways it seems to be benign because as I said, it enables you to get on with life, but here’s where its true malignancy comes into play. You only live an adapted life, there’s a part of you that never rests, you are doing great up to a point and only so long as you stay within the stealth belief’s guidelines.

Let me explain with a personal example, that would be me, again! Best way to learn is to teach what you need to know. 🙂

As a child I formed the belief ‘I’m not good enough,’ as I think many of us did. But in order to survive I adapted that belief,  I formed a supporting belief that allowed me to be good enough so long as I behaved in certain ways.

For me, ‘I’m not good enough’ is a foundational belief, I’m aware of that now, but it took me a long time to uncover it because when I was young, I formed the stealth belief ‘I’m good enough as long as I’m the smartest.’

And I was, I was a bookworm, more for the escape it offered than to increase my intelligence but luckily my desire to read all day every day translated into me being a star pupil in my primary school. So that stealth belief worked for a time, up until High School.

There, I was assaulted by unfamiliar subjects, unsupportive teachers and I had no friends to turn to, not having lived in the area very long before I transferred. English, History and simple maths I still excelled at because I could read everything in the syllabus, do all the research required and write great compositions.

But science subjects, chemistry, physics, were beyond my capability of learning by myself. And French and Latin, no. I needed teachers that took the time to explain the subjects, to educate me, to ignite my passion and enthusiasm, I did excel when I had teachers who invested in me but that happened rarely and I was failing.

That collapsed my stealth belief  ‘I’m good enough as long as I’m the smartest.’ I was back to not being good enough, but around the same time, I’d lost weight, had my braces taken off and I was now pretty, so my new stealth belief was ‘I’m good enough so long as I’m pretty.’ And that started an obsessive decade of always dieting, always having to have the perfect make-up, perfect clothes, being the perfect girlfriend.

I even pretended not to be smart to hold on to a boyfriend. I shake my head at that poor emotionally traumatised girl that I was, she was just trying to be ‘good enough.’

After school, I went to work in a local factory and ended up in the office and that’s where my next stealth belief came in, and this one stuck with me for decades. ‘I’m good enough when I have a good job.’

I know a lot of us have this one, we validate ourselves through our work, our income, our status, the car we drive, the house we live in. And what I know from my personal experience is that its a pretty empty way to live, not to mention stressful because you can never stop, you always have to go, go, go, do more, achieve better to stay on top of the often accompanying stealth belief, I’m good enough when I achieve.’

And the problem with this is, we never learn hope to cope with set-backs, with not achieving, failure. Even when its outside of our own control, as it was when I was made redundant, and so the world fell apart (again).

Being good at what you do, and working hard to achieve means you catch the bosses eye, you get promoted, higher up the ladder and then you end up in an alien role, with tasks and responsibilities you never learned how to perform, so you don’t know how to be good at it, how to achieve. What do you do when you can’t allow yourself to make a mistake, when you’re afraid you’ll be found out as an impostor and not good enough?

You’re stealth belief of being good enough only if you have a good job, being good enough only if you’re achieving creates a huge pit of fear around failing. So, how do you survive?

You do even more, you watch the high achievers and copy them, you read books and study online at home, if you’re like me you take pages and pages of notes to act as a bulwark against failure, against being found out. You hold yourself and everyone around you to a ridiculously high standard and you are on guard all the time.

Did I mention this was stressful?

You don’t have all the answers and you hate not having all the answers. And always, always deep inside that core belief is there festering, poisoning you with fear of being  judged and found ‘not good enough.’ So you feel like nothing you do is enough.

You’re not working hard enough

You haven’t accumulated enough stuff

You should be further along than this

You should be earning more

You should be getting more recognition from your bosses

you should…you should….you should

And whilst all of that may or may not be true, you keep pushing yourself harder and harder, in a toxic stew of fear hormones as that poison spreads, and the voice that you had managed to ignore gets louder and more insistent ‘you’re not enough, you’ll never be enough, you’re going to mess up, this is all going to go away.’ And you just can’t anymore, you can’t do more, you can’t push any harder, you’re coming up empty.

And something happens, something cracks the wall you’ve built to keep it all inside and it starts to fall apart. Maybe slowly at first, maybe it implodes, but you’re not achieving any more, not like you once were and the need to succeed, the desperation to achieve drives you on because only then are you good enough.

For me, my implosion took a long time, little by little I fell off the good job ladder and my subterfuge to hide my core belief was stripped away. I couldn’t avoid it, deny it, suppress it any longer, ‘I’m not good enough.’ I was no longer blind to this core belief and I thought it was true.

Everything I tried after that, I failed at; new business, jobs, nothing worked out and I didn’t even attempt a personal relationship, I already knew it would be a disaster just waiting to happen to me.

These were dark days for me and I had no clue how to turn it around. But there was a small trickle of light. When I had set up my first business, I had joined a networking organisation and through it I met several of the most inspiring people I have ever known.

They recommended books, took me to seminars, introduced me to new ideas, new ways of thinking and I started to challenge my thinking, I started to rebuild.

I spent almost fifteen years looking for ways to fix myself, to heal the wound of my childhood. Longer if you count the therapy I attended in my early thirties. Really you could say I was looking for a solution to my inner problems my whole life.

Same with my clients who come in with ‘anxiety’ or ‘procrastination’, ‘feeling stuck’ and you know what they’re not seeing? The belief that is making them feel that way. What is the fear they are avoiding, hiding from?

No-body want to go back to the root but that where the healing is.

HeldByAngels1-2-Katie-m.-Berggren

I thought I’d found the answer in traditional hypnotherapy but while it felt good, it didn’t offer lasting solutions. Hypnosis is all about the mind, but trauma also resides in the body. This is when I realised that some of the techniques I’d used in my healing journey could be mixed with hypnotic trance to not only heal trauma in the mind but also to move it through and out of the body.

With RPET and Dreamscaping, I was getting close to finding the pathway to real transformation for myself and my clients, combining these tools with my energy healing techniques to create a truly effective, efficient method that works every time.

And even with all I know, I still get days when I wobble, when that old root belief of ‘I’n not good enough’ makes itself felt. Sometimes even the stealth belief of needing to achieve to be good enough echoes through me.

Now though, I don’t collapse into a heap, I don’t retreat or isolate myself, because I recognise what is happening. I know these beliefs, I am no longer blind to them and I do the daily inner work of meditation, RWID mantra, practising self love, writing in my journal and knowing I am enough, always was, always will be.

Just because I believed it once doesn’t mean I have to give it any more of my time or energy.

What makes me good enough?

To have lots of money. Nice but no.

To have a big demanding job. Been there and no.

To be recognised as successful. Needy much? And no, this doesn’t make you good enough.

To be smart/pretty/successful/rich? No

Do I even need a reason to be good enough? NO!

I am enough just as I am.

I am good enough and I don’t have to do anything to be good enough. I am. Purely by being here on the planet and by being myself. That’s all I have to do, show up and be myself.

That’s all you have to do too.

And if you need some help getting to this stage, get in touch. Sign up for the ‘Change for Life’ programme. All I’ve learned and the new things I’m learning are in this programme, and in it you are guided to the resolution of your false beliefs whether root, stealth or survival. Replace them with beliefs that support you in living your best life, being the best version of yourself. You know that you is inside of you. Don’t let fear crowd them out.

Love,

Cynthia xx

Don’t be afraid of losing all the lies that need to be lost. Be more afraid of not finding the naked truth that, in the depths of you, screams to be found. You can’t lose what you no longer are. And what is really yours will never leave you.  ~ Andrea Balt