Don't Believe Everything You Think. Challenging Irrational Beliefs

Don’t believe everything you think – about yourself – about others. Perception is our truth, but it isn’t THE truth.
Allow for the possibility that how you are thinking, feeling and responding internally and externally in your connections with others might be wrong. Very wrong.

1. Don’t believe everything you think about yourself.  Irrational beliefs are things we believe about ourselves that may not be true but we have held onto it believing it’s true as we form our self concept and self worth. They can create negative, rigid beliefs like  “I don’t deserve to be happy”, “I’m a terrible person”, “I’m not enough.” . These irrational beliefs are often formed in childhood or through other periods of development where we might have been vulnerable and received negative feedback. We all have them… to some degree or another.
Do you need to challenge your irrational beliefs? How do you talk to yourself? Be honest.
Are you kind, accepting, encouraging? Or have you become addicted to name calling, negative reinforcement, limiting potentials?
This is an area you need to get pissed about. I mean it. And if you’re not… What’s it going to take for you to get fired up about and challenge these irrational beliefs instead of continuing to let it define you and hold you back? It’s a sinking ship to keep going back to these phrases and negative limiting beliefs and ideas. You are enough. You are not a loser. You do deserve happiness, success, love. And you don’t need someone else to tell you that to make it true – in fact you need to hear it from yourself so you can make it true.
Would you allow someone to talk to your child the same way you talk to yourself? How would you defend a loved one being verbally abused? Start taking a different stance. You need to be bold, courageous, feisty in your life and start challenging these old patterns.
Create a new reality – you are not limited by the events of the past that have impacted you.
2. Don’t believe everything you think about others and your interactions with others. Your distorted and twisted perceptions are going to impact every other relationship in your life. Take a step back, take a different view – every time you feel wounded, offended, defensive and use it as an opportunity to check your perceptions.
Are you creating drama based on twisted perceptions of what’s happening in your relationships? Are you making decisions after manufacturing arguments to completion that actually never happen? Do you avoid having real conversations to confirm or deny the perceptions you’re adopting? Do you hide behind passive aggressive or manipulative tactics instead of healthy confrontation? Why not?
What are you afraid of? Truth? Depth? Intimacy? Being Wrong? Be ok with being wrong – it’s a chance to learn. This will grow your relationships and make them more authentic, more honest.
If you can’t find a different perspective to view things from, find someone you know that is grounded and rational and can help you out. Entertain alternatives – see which one might be more accurate and start offering people the benefit of the doubt instead of projecting your fears and irrational beliefs onto them. They don’t deserve to own them. You must.
3. Try 30 days of getting irate and challenging your irrational beliefs and distorted perceptions. Check yourself constantly – where are your patterns? Get tired with believing things that aren’t true.
Stand up for yourself like you would as a champion of someone else’s life. It doesn’t matter if you feel deserving -treat yourself as if you are anyway. Make choices over emotions realizing that the emotions might be a byproduct of your irrational beliefs in the first place.
Refuse to hold onto it any longer. You can’t fall back on the phrase “but this is just how I feel” – how you feel is not always how it is – it’s subjective. You need to dig deeper for this and not allow your emotions to rule you.
See what it’s like to choose a different perspective for yourself and others – how you’d like to be – and try it on for size. You can choose to feel that way. You can do the work to correct and heal your past experiences and believe new beliefs about yourself that are empowering, accurate, and true and I encourage you to do this with a professional if necessary.
You get to create yourself the way you want your future – but you have to be bold to do it. You have to stop believing everything you think – about yourself, and others.
Stop reacting without insight, stop allowing your triggers to distort your interactions.
Stop being addicted to old states that don’t serve you and learn how to make new ones.
This is going to change every area of your life. Be extra bold in this area – having the mental flexibility and insight to work through this area of your life and be able to adopt other perspectives will help you stop being reactive, defensive, and avoidant. This is key in building an accurate vision of your self worth, confidence, and ability to form healthy connections with any sort of longevity.
You can do this work. Challenge yourself to 30 days of checking yourself in this area. Let me know how it goes. [email protected]