Using Positive Affirmations to Reprogram Limiting Beliefs

In this episode, we dive into how to reprogram our limiting beliefs with the power of positive affirmations. 

Have you tried positive affirmations in the past and they haven’t seemed to work for you? Do you feel like it’s been impossible to let go of your limiting beliefs?

In this episode, we discussed those questions and more. 

Discover how changing the way you think about yourself can heal your relationship with yourself and manifest the life you truly deserve. 

In this episode, I share personal insights, practical steps, and the neuroscience behind why positive affirmations work. 

Whether you're skeptical of positive affirmations or a firm believer, this episode will offer valuable tools to enhance your healing journey.

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Key Points:

• Positive affirmations can rewire core beliefs and transform lives.
• Importance of viewing positive affirmations as tools, not cure-alls.
• Seven steps to effective positive affirmations:
  1. Alignment with desired changes.
  2. Specificity of the belief you want to change.
  3. Believability and reasonable truth.
  4. Repetition mentally and verbally.
  5. Connecting emotions to affirmations.
  6. Visualizing the desired state.
  7. Consistency and patience.

Practical Tips:

• Start small if believing positive affirmations feels foreign.
• Use physical movement to help connect emotions to affirmations.
• Visualize your life as if the affirmations were already true.
• Record and celebrate small wins to stay motivated.

00:00 - Introduction to Positive Affirmations
01:14 - Debunking Misconceptions About Affirmations
02:19 - Understanding the True Nature of Positive Affirmations
03:11 - The Power of Negative vs. Positive Affirmations
03:54 - The Correct Application of Affirmations
06:51 - Personal Story of Transformation Through Affirmations
09:16 - Detailed Guide to Effective Affirmation Practices
10:27 - Steps to Crafting Powerful Affirmations
14:59 - Choosing and Using Your Affirmation Phrases
16:45 - Adding Intensity to Your Affirmations
20:07 - Connecting Emotions to Your Affirmations
23:01 - The Importance of Visualization
24:04 - Consistency in Affirmation Practice
27:00 - Commitment to Change: A Long-term Perspective
28:07 - Recognizing and Celebrating Small Wins
30:40 - Overcoming Resistance to Change

I am grateful you are here,
Jerry

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I knew I could heal all of that, if I could heal what I believed about myself. And I knew that the way I believed about myself in that moment was because of all the experiences that I was reinforcing in my life, the way I was thinking, the habits that I had and if I could shift that and I could change the fundamental way that I saw myself, everything in my life would change. If I could give myself the core belief that I was worthy of love, that I deserved good things, that I wasn't broken, that that would transform everything in my life. Hello friends, it's Jerry, and welcome to the Permission to Love podcast, a podcast that's dedicated to helping people understand how to heal their relationship with themselves, because when we heal our relationship with ourselves, everything in our life changes how we feel about ourselves changes, the relationships that we have changes and what we manifest in our life totally changes. You can live a life where you're at peace with yourself, you have healthy relationships in your life and that you're manifesting the things that you so deeply deserve and desire for your life. So I'm glad you're here and I hope you enjoy today's episode. Hello everybody, and welcome.

Speaker 1: 1:14

Today we're going to be talking about positive affirmations Do they work? You might have had some experience with positive affirmations and you feel like they haven't worked for you, but I found them to be a very effective tool in the clients that I work with, and I'm going to talk about why today. So, if your experience with positive affirmations has not been a positive one, I hope this episode can help you see how they can be a key part of your healing journey and how they can actually help rewire you rewire your core beliefs, rewire your system, rewire how you see yourself. So stick with me on this one, and I hope by the end of the episode, you'll begin to see how they could be a tool in your tool belt for healing. I want to start right away by saying that positive affirmations aren't going to solve everything, and I understand that people have used them as this, like holy grail of transformation, and while I think they really are up there as a key part of healing, I don't think that they're gonna solve everything for you, and so I want you to simply see them as a tool in your tool belt, and hopefully this episode will help you see how to use that tool in a more effective way.

Speaker 1: 2:19

So what is a positive affirmation. Well, many people see a positive affirmation as simply a set of words or a phrase that you use, that you repeat to yourself mentally and verbally, about something that you want to believe or a healing phrase. And while that's true, that that's what it is, that's a baseline for what it is, that's not all there is to it, and I hope to help you understand that there's more to positive affirmations than simply a phrase. There's a whole set of things that wrap around it, that make it effective, and I think that view that it's just simply a phrase or a set of words that you say is why positive affirmations don't work for a lot of people, because they're not putting all of the supporting things around that that actually make it effective, that make it so healing. So do positive affirmations work? Well, let me ask you this question Do negative affirmations work?

Speaker 1: 3:11

When you say something negative about yourself, or when you think a negative thought, do you start to feel emotions around it? Do you start to believe that thing about yourself? For example, if you're thinking that there's something wrong with you, like we've talked about in one of the last episodes, and you keep repeating that, you keep thinking that and you keep feeling that. Has that wired you to carry the belief that there's something wrong with you? I would say that, yes, negative affirmations work, and they work in pretty powerful ways. They wind up giving us these core limiting beliefs, and so if that can happen in the negative, I've got to believe that it can happen in the positive, because I believe that positive energy is so much more powerful than negative energy.

Speaker 1: 3:54

And so for people to say that positive affirmations don't work is a lot like saying that medication doesn't work and what's happening is you're taking the medication but you're not following the prescription. You maybe only take one of your antibiotics, you don't take the full prescription, and so you walk around saying that, well, antibiotics don't work. Well, if you follow the instructions and you follow the prescription and you take them all the way through, they are effective. Now, if you don't follow your prescription and you don't follow those antibiotics all the way through, you wind up actually causing the bacteria or the thing that you're trying to kill to actually get stronger in your system, right, because you're basically putting these little bit of doses and you're not following it all the way through, and so it builds up a resistance to the antibiotic. So when we're not using the tool of positive affirmations in the way that they can be used, our system winds up building a resistance to it. We start to think that it doesn't work and that it's just something that's hokey, and we don't believe it because we haven't seen it work for us. But could it be that we're not applying the correct principles to positive affirmations? And if we do apply the correct methods to the positive affirmations, it'll actually wind up working for us? So my opinion, as you can already see, is that 100% yes, positive affirmations work. Why do I believe that? Because positive affirmations changed my life, absolutely changed everything in my life, and I've seen it change the lives of the clients that I work with.

Speaker 1: 5:26

I want to take a quick moment and talk about my book Returning. It's a collection of meditations and reflections on self-love and healing. I designed this book to help you on your journey of moving from shame to self-love. It's divided in three sections. The first section is about seeing, seeing that you're not alone. The second section is about understanding that healing is possible. And the third section is designed to remind you and to show you that loving yourself is the path back to yourself. I've heard from a lot of people that they're using it as a daily reflection guide, where each day they're selecting a passage, reading it, meditating on it, journaling on it, and it's really helping them in their healing journey and helping them understand that they are worthy of love, that they can heal, that they're not alone, and I know it can do the same for you. So if you haven't picked up a copy yet, please take a moment to do that, and if you have picked up a copy already, it would mean a lot to me if you'd take a moment and review the book, because the more positive reviews the book gets, the more likely people are going to become aware of it and benefit from the work. So thank you, thank you for picking it up, thank you for reviewing it and thank you for passing it along. Maybe, when you're done with it, you can pass it along to somebody else or pick up a copy for somebody else that you know could benefit from the work. You can get it on Amazon or you can simply see the show notes in this episode to get your copy.

Speaker 1: 6:51

So let me give you a little bit of a story about how this became so transformational for me, and I've shared this story on the podcast before, but I want to recap it really quick. You know, I was in rehab and I'd just come out of a group that was really powerful, that gave me a lot of inspiration about being able to get sober, stay sober and change my life. After the group, I decided to take a shower, and when I was in the shower I mean only minutes later, 10, 15 minutes later after the group I started telling myself all the reasons why I couldn't be sober, why I wouldn't stay sober, and how I was going to continue to just sabotage my life. Well, I realized something, thank goodness, in that moment I had a moment of disruption and I realized that my brain had become addicted to that way of thinking. And why had it become addicted to that way of thinking? Because that's the way I had been thinking for decades. And in that moment I realized that it was a habit that I had formed. And if it was a habit that I had formed, it was one that I could change. And I started really thinking about how did that habit get ingrained in me to think those thoughts about myself. Well, I had an experience. I then began to make some decisions about myself from those experiences, and then I began to say certain things about myself, what I believed about myself, and I was reinforcing that with my thoughts, my words, my actions and everything.

Speaker 1: 8:04

And then what I realized in that moment in the shower was when that negative thought came up, all of the negative emotions came with it, all of the feelings about how I wasn't ever going to change, simply from the way I was thinking about myself. And I decided that I needed to change the way that I thought about myself. And so how could I do that? Well, I needed to find something to replace that thinking pattern. I needed to find a positive way to think about myself, which then led me down the path of researching, understanding the neuroscience about how the brain gets wired with thoughts, with words, with emotions, with actions, and how all of that works together. And I began to understand that the first place that I could start to disrupt that was with a positive thought, which was reinforced with positive words, which was reinforced with positive emotions. We're going to get into all of that here in just a little bit, but the key takeaway from that moment was I began to see that it was something that was a habit that I was addicted to, and if it was a habit and something I was addicted to, I could change it. And the key way that I was going to change it was with positive thinking, and the way I was going to do positive thinking was with a positive affirmation.

Speaker 1: 9:16

So if you've really struggled with this, you've really struggled with having positive affirmations work for you. I want to give you exactly how it worked for me, how it's worked for others and exactly how you can use positive affirmations to transform your life. It really can transform your life, and you might be thinking how could a set of words or saying something positive about myself be so transformative? Well, hold on, we're going to get into that right now. All right, so how do we make this work for us? How do we make this tool of positive affirmations really go to work for us?

Speaker 1: 9:47

Well, I believe there's seven steps that a person needs to take, or seven things that you need to take into consideration when you start to use positive affirmations. You might think, wow, that's a lot and sounds complicated. It's really not. It breaks down into three categories, and the first category is around alignment that that positive affirmation is going to need to be in alignment with what you want to be and who you want to become. Number two is around the intensity of it, and then number three is around the consistency of it. So let's start with the area of alignment. What does it mean to have this positive affirmation be in alignment? Well, number one, you need to get specific about what you're trying to change.

Speaker 1: 10:27

What's the core belief that you're trying to change about yourself? Let me give you an example. For me, it was the belief that I was unworthy of love and that I was unworthy to give myself love. I was so wrapped up in self-loathing and shame and self-hatred and really believed that I was a terrible person and I didn't deserve love. So I decided to start with changing that core belief that I was unworthy of love and, more specifically, unworthy of my own love, that I didn't deserve for me to treat myself well. In my mind, I deserved for me to be terrible towards myself, and that all came from childhood trauma, right, the way that I got wired and the core beliefs and the decisions I made about myself. So I wanted to change that belief about myself. I wanted to change the belief that I was unworthy of my own love, and so the positive affirmation that I chose was I am worthy of my own love. That's why I close out every episode with that phrase for you, for you to hopefully begin to see that you're worthy of your own love. So it's a very specific and targeted affirmation.

Speaker 1: 11:34

So I want to encourage you to get as specific as you can about what it is that you're trying to change, what core belief, what feeling, what thought pattern. Right, we usually have a go-to feeling about ourself or thought about ourself. So you're going to want to get as specific as possible about what you want to change. Now, if you struggle with that in the beginning, that's okay. You're going to be able to get more specific over time. You know, the work of healing usually starts pretty broad and we start to think, well, I've got some challenges, I need to work on some things, I want to change. And then, as we begin to heal and we begin to see what's going on with us, we get more and more specific. We begin to see, oh, I've got this core belief and a lot of what I'm struggling with flows from this core belief. So just get as specific as you can. Don't judge yourself or shame yourself or give up if you can't get like, micro specific. Get as specific as you can. You'll get more clarity as you go.

Speaker 1: 12:28

Step two is to make sure that it has some sense of believability for you, that there's some sense of reasonable truth. So, for example, if you don't feel like you can get to the place right now where you are able to say I fully love and accept myself, okay, and that just feels really off to you. It just doesn't feel like it sits with your system, you can simply start with something about the way that you speak to yourself okay, that I speak to myself in a loving manner, okay, and you can begin to see that, yeah, I could obtain that, I could get there, and that may be the first place that you want to start. So step two is about selecting something, okay, that you feel like is realistic and that you can get to, because a lot of times people pick these positive affirmations that are so far out there that their system rejects it because it's so unrealistic, and that's why they're not seeing any of that show up in their life. We have to have something that at least feels like we can make movement towards it. Okay, and I do just want to take a moment and make a quick note about that.

Speaker 1: 13:30

For people who feel like there's something wrong with them, or dealing with shame or the results of trauma, it can be really hard for you to believe anything positive about yourself. Okay, so you're going to have to start on something small, and even that something small may feel so foreign to you. That's okay. But start small, begin to change some of the language that you have around that towards yourself and begin to make that micro progress. Okay, 10% better, 5% better is better than we are right now.

Speaker 1: 14:00

Okay, and a lot of times we fail because we're setting ourselves up for unrealistic goals that we're trying to meet. We'll say to ourselves you know what, in seven days, I'm going to totally love myself, totally accept myself. Maybe you might. That's beautiful if you do, but sometimes we need to start with right now, today. I'm not going to speak unkind to myself. So, whatever a positive affirmation is that you feel like is somewhat achievable yes, it still needs to stretch you, it needs to put you out there a little bit and it needs to feel uncomfortable. Okay, uncomfortable does not mean unrealistic. Okay, there's a difference there, and a lot of times we're setting goals or things that are unrealistic versus what's uncomfortable and realize it's the uncomfortableness that will get you to that thing that feels unrealistic right now. Okay, so you're moving towards it, because, a few months from now, what you once thought was unrealistic begins to seem more realistic, because you're moving closer to it with those micro wins.

Speaker 1: 14:59

Now step three choose your phrase. Okay, so you've said what you want to change. You feel like it's something that's at least achievable with some discomfort. And then number three is I'm going to choose. Choose the phrase, write it down, get it everywhere that you need it to be On your phone, on your fridge, in your car, everywhere. Okay, put that phrase all around you, because what we're trying to do here is give our brains a replacement phrase. Right, because our brains are defaulting towards a certain repetitive belief system or phrase or words about ourselves. Right, you get out of that meeting and all of a sudden, you feel like you didn't do so good. What's the default phrase that you go to? I'm so stupid, I'm always screwing things up, or whatever that is.

Speaker 1: 15:43

You want to give your brain a replacement, and what all of the reminders around you are going to do is it's going to give you some disruption. It's going to create enough space. It's going to create a pause to remind you oh yeah, I don't want to think that way, and then you're going to have that phrase to insert into that moment. So we want a pause and we want a replacement. Okay, it's really like you're inserting new code into your brain. Your brain right now knows the code of I did this, this is what I say about myself, this is how I feel about myself and that's how I've lived for years. Now we're now building new code for our brains to then be able to grab a hold of right and begin to change what we say, what we think and what we feel about ourselves. So those first three steps are all about alignment. What do I want to change? Does it feel realistic to my system? And number three, what is it that I'm going to say? What is it that I'm going to insert in the moment, and what is it that I actually want to feel about myself? What do I want to be in the future? And I've given myself some language to that that I can insert and change in the moment.

Speaker 1: 16:45

So now let's move on to talking about the intensity part, which is about that real rewiring. Remember, you're trying to carve new pathways, you're trying to develop new belief systems. So you're going to want to do it with the same intensity that you've been doing the negative right A lot of times. Our negative thinking is going on 24-7 and we're really feeling it. We're really feeling that shame and we're really talking about how terrible we are and we're really visualizing how the world's going to fall apart or whatever, or visualizing our past and thinking and remembering about the things that we did that we feel so bad about. And so there's a ton of intensity that's going into that negative belief system, those negative affirmations, because, remember, what we're trying to do with an affirmation is to affirm what we believe or want to believe about ourselves, and so everything that you're doing to reinforce that negative is affirming to your system that that's what you believe about yourself, that's who you think you're going to be. So we have to apply the same level of intensity for the positive. We have to get to a point where we're thinking about it all the time, we're feeling it, we're connecting with it, we're visualizing it. Okay, so, in that intensity, so let's talk about that. The first thing that we need to be thinking about is step four, which is about mentally and verbally saying it, putting the two together, because a positive affirmation doesn't just have to be spoken, it can also be thought right, because you're talking to yourself 24-7.

Speaker 1: 18:19

So what I did in the beginning is, anytime that negative thought came up the thoughts of shame I would then kick in that positive affirmation and I would just spin it over and over and over in my mind, just keep repeating it, and repeating it, and repeating it, and some people will call that a mantra, which it is, and so I don't think there's a ton of difference between a positive affirmation and a mantra. Sometimes it's language We'll talk about here in just a second where some people make the difference in mantra and positive affirmation, but for me they can be one in the same. It's really about language, and so I just kept repeating that over and over and over in my mind. Right, I gave my mind a phrase to say that when it defaulted to the language of why I was such a terrible person, I was replacing it and I just kept the pattern right Because, think about it, when you get into the loop of thinking about how terrible of a person you are, you can kick into that for 15 minutes, 20 minutes an hour, all day long. So we're going to have to really work at and force, in some sense, that new language, that new thought pattern, and repeating it over and over and over is going to be a part of doing that Now.

Speaker 1: 19:25

The other part of it is the words right, so that we then start to say those words about ourselves I am worthy of my own love. I am worthy of my own love. And you start to put some intensity to it and you look in the mirror and you begin to see yourself saying that, and you begin to hear yourself saying it, and you start to really connect the thoughts and the words together, which is going to add some intensity to this. Let's go ahead and move on to step five, around this area of intensity, which is connecting emotion to it. And this is the part where many people leave out. This is the part where most people will fall down because they don't connect emotion to the words that they say. And this is where most people will fall down because they don't connect emotion to the words that they say.

Speaker 1: 20:07

And this is where some people will note the difference between a positive affirmation and a mantra. They'll say that when you put emotion to it and I've said it in the past as well. When you put emotion to it, it really then becomes a mantra. Well, I think that it's really just about language right, that it is the ability to connect an emotion to the words, to the thoughts. But I do just think it's language right, because it can be a positive affirmation or it can be a mantra, but the key is to put some emotion to it, to really begin to feel it.

Speaker 1: 20:37

Now, what do you do if you can't find the emotion right? You're saying the words but your body doesn't believe it. There's a few things that you can do to help with that. One get your body moving right. Physical movement changes energy and so, if you can get up, do some jumping jacks, go for a walk, get yourself going, shake your body out or whatever it is, jump up and down a little bit. That will then begin to reset your body's energy a little bit and pull you out of that slump and it'll begin to move that energy around you. And while you're doing that, you can start saying your affirmation, you can begin to put the words to it and that's going to trigger something in you, that's going to begin to trigger emotion, because your body's moving, your words are being spoken and then, all of a sudden, you're finding some emotion beginning to rise within you. Now the second thing you can do is you can begin to visualize, you can begin to think about a person that you love or a place or an experience that you've had that brings up positive emotions. And as those positive emotions begin to rise, then you start to say the words, then you start to say your affirmation okay, because now your body is connecting and your brain's connecting those words with positive experience and it's going to be able to find that emotion more quickly in the future.

Speaker 1: 21:51

Because here's, one of the challenges that happen with people is that they'll say their positive affirmation with such defeated energy or with the type of energy that really is telling themselves and showing themselves that they don't believe it. They'll say things like, yeah, I love myself, or yeah, I believe that you know I'm lovable, or you know, I believe that I can change, and so that energy is just reinforcing to you that you don't believe it. Listen, we're human beings, right, and we have certain ways that we're wired and it's just biology and it's just patterns, and it's just patterns and it's chemicals and things that begin to happen inside of us and when we get stuck in certain ways and in certain patterns, we have to figure out how to disrupt that. And the way we disrupt it is often the same way that it got wired in us Experiences, beliefs, words, thoughts, emotions, actions, all of that right. So the rewiring process to let go of what you don't want to believe about yourself requires a lot of the same things that got that wired into your system. All right, so let's go ahead and move on to step six, which is a part of that intensity still, which is adding visualization to that statement.

Speaker 1: 23:01

Okay, so now we're moving it beyond just thinking the thought I'm worthy of my own love, or saying the words I'm worthy of my own love, to actually visualizing what it would be like. What would my life be like if that affirmation was happening? What would I feel like? We've added the emotion Now. What would I look like? How would I be acting? What kind of person would I be? What would be showing up in my life if I was loving towards myself, or whatever your affirmation is that you're using Now, as you're sitting there or walking, or whatever your environment is, you're visualizing that state, you're connecting emotion to that state and you're using the words. And so you've got all of your system working together to start to believe that thing and get it wired in your system. And what we're doing is we're taking the brain's power to imagine, to create, to visualize, and we're using it to our advantage. So I hope you can see, when you start getting all that working together, it's just gonna be a matter of time until some real changes begin to happen.

Speaker 1: 24:04

Now let's move on to the third area of consistency and step seven, which is time. You have to give it time. You have to be patient with yourself. How many years have you been carrying that false, limiting belief? Okay, you're going to need time to make this work and you're probably not going to believe it in the beginning. You're going to say it. It's going to feel foreign to you. Your system's going to reject it. You're going to feel like you're just full of crap, right. You're going to feel like the whole thing's just nonsense and you're going to default back to no, I knew it wouldn't work for me. I'm uniquely broken, or there's something wrong with me, or I've always been this way. I'll always be that way. Well, yeah, you will be that way always if you continue that type of thought pattern.

Speaker 1: 24:48

But if you want a different life and you want a relationship with yourself that's healthy, that transforms into other healthy relationships in your life, that transforms into you manifesting the things that you want in your life, to having the life that you deserve and that you desire, then you're going to have to break that thought pattern. And breaking that thought pattern is going to take some time. And, yes, it's going to feel foreign to you and it should feel foreign to you because you haven't been living in that place. You're moving into a new home and you're having to get used to that new home, the home of loving yourself. You've been living in a home that's been hateful towards yourself, mean towards yourself, shaming towards yourself, and so you, moving into that new place, you're going to have to get used to that environment. Everything's going to be different for you, and that's okay. That doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you. It doesn't mean that you're the one person on the planet that this isn't going to work for.

Speaker 1: 25:38

And just as a word of encouragement, when I started it I didn't believe it. It felt foreign, but I knew, I had the knowledge in my head that if I could just treat myself in a way that I was retraining the habit, changing something about myself that if I stuck with it long enough, it was going to change my brain. It was going to change the neural pathways, and that's why it was so important for me when I was diving into understanding how the brain works, the chemistry of the brain, how all of that begins to happen, how we form new habits, and I began to apply all of that to this belief system that I had about myself, the belief system that was limiting me, that was destroying relationships, that was keeping me addicted to drinking, all of the things the self-sabotaging, the imposter syndrome, I mean, you name it, I was dealing with it. And so all of that I knew I could heal all of that if I could heal what I believed about myself. And I knew that the way I'd believed about myself in that moment was because of all the experiences that I was reinforcing in my life. The way I believed about myself in that moment was because of all the experiences that I was reinforcing in my life, the way I was thinking, the habits that I had. And if I could shift that and I could change the fundamental way that I saw myself, everything in my life would change If I could give myself the core belief that I was worthy of love, that I deserved good things, that I wasn't broken, that that would transform everything in my life.

Speaker 1: 27:00

Let me ask you a question Is it worth the work to do that for a month, six months, a year, however long it takes to change that, or do you want to live another 10 years in that environment? It really is a choice. Okay, and it's not an easy choice. I know that because we've been so wired to feel a certain way but it is a choice and it's going to take time and I want you to think about it like exercise. When you want to lose weight, you want to carve off 10 pounds, 50 pounds, or you want to carve off 100 pounds, whatever it is, and you feel like you need to get in shape, you need to lose weight, and so you start doing exercise right. You go to the gym, you go for a walk, you do whatever you need to do, and you're not expecting, after the first day of exercise, to carve off that weight, right? You're not expecting that if your goal was to lose 20 pounds, that you exercised one day and 20 pounds dropped off. Okay, if you are expecting that, then you, then you might need to reset your expectations. But what we realize in exercise is that we're going to have to stick with it right, and it's the little gains that get us where we ultimately want to go.

Speaker 1: 28:07

It's no different in this work, and a lot of times what happens with exercise is that we're doing the work and we're looking in the mirror and we're not feeling like we're doing any better, and all of a sudden we run into somebody who hadn't seen us in a little while and they look at us and they go man, have you lost weight? And then all of a sudden, you know, our entire posture changes and we start to go well, yeah, maybe I have. I don't know. But see, because we're so close to ourselves, sometimes we don't see the changes that are happening, and other people will see it and they'll point it out to us. It's the same thing in this type of work. You'll be working on changing a core belief about yourself, working on how you talk to yourself, and all of a sudden you get around somebody who hasn't been around you for a while and they'll say ah, there's something different about you. You don't talk about yourself the same way anymore. You're not beating yourself up, you're not putting yourself down all the time and the time.

Speaker 1: 28:59

And you see, what's happening is we're making gains and we are changing. But because we're so close to it, we don't always see it. So stick with it, because this is a law. This is a law of how we work as humans. We can't stay the same when we put that type of energy around ourselves, when we put that type of effort, that type of alignment, that type of intensity and that type of consistency. You put all that together, you are going to change. How fast, I don't know. How long is it going to take, I don't know. But here's what I do want to encourage you with. You're going to be on this journey and you're going to find small wins.

Speaker 1: 29:34

All of a sudden, you're going to say that phrase or that affirmation and it's going to feel different to you that time. You're going to have this moment where, all of a sudden, it's like wow, and it may not be that you totally believe it in that point, but maybe you've reached a place of neutral. You're not rejecting it, you're not all of a sudden feeling like, no, that's just garbage. I don't believe that, but you may not be at a place where you totally have your entire energy wrapped around believing it, but you found a place of less resistance or you found a place of being in a neutral state. When you say it, I want to encourage you. That is a win, that is a huge win. You've made tremendous progress by moving to that point. So when that happens, celebrate it, acknowledge it, write it down that on this date this happened, something shifted. Write it down that on this date this happened, something shifted, something different. I don't know what it was, but I felt different that time when I said it, because what you need is you need to see those small wins, you need to not discount those small wins and you need to see the fact that you're making progress, which will then give you hope, will give you the encouragement and the fire to continue on the path.

Speaker 1: 30:40

Now, as a last practical thought, I want to encourage you that if you find a tremendous amount of resistance and you can't figure out how to get around that resistance or that blockage, I want you to ask two really important questions of yourself. The first question is this how is that belief keeping me safe? How is the belief that there's something wrong with me. How is the belief that I'm broken? How is the belief that there's something wrong with me? How is the belief that I'm broken? How is the belief I'm unworthy of love? How is the belief that I'll never have the life that I want? How is that belief serving you? How is that belief keeping you safe?

Speaker 1: 31:08

First question because if you're really struggling with letting it go, it's because you feel unsafe in letting it go. When you feel safe to let go of something, your body and your system will begin to allow it to go. But as long as you're wrapped up in fear, as long as you're wrapped up in a sense that you're not going to be safe, if you let go of that belief, you're going to hold on to it a little bit longer. And yes, you're still going to be able to get there by doing this work, but it might just take more time. So, to help accelerate it or to do some investigation, ask the question how is it keeping me safe? Because you're holding onto it pretty tightly for some reason? And when you get to the reason as to why you're holding onto it, as to why you don't feel safe, you can put a positive affirmation around that.

Speaker 1: 31:54

The second question to ask yourself is what would happen if I let go of that belief? What would happen if I changed that core belief about myself? And that'll likely bring up a couple of responses. It might bring up a response of fear, but it also might bring up a response of hopefulness, and so it's important to understand why we feel like we can't let go of it and if it is a response of fear, investigate that and if it is a hopeful thought, really latch onto that, really grab onto it and then begin to work with that and have that as a part of your visualization. And having that as a part of your visualization will help accelerate that process.

Speaker 1: 32:36

And so it's really important to ask yourself if you're struggling to let go of it because you don't feel safe, do you really want to change it? Right? Because if the answer is no to that, you're going to stay stuck. And if the answer is no, because you feel safer where you're at right now and it feels too scary to move into that new place, then you might start using an affirmation about how it is safe to be to that new place. It is safe for me to have the life that I want. It is safe for me to let go of those limiting beliefs. Okay, so that'll give you some space to work with those affirmations around the core belief that you're starting to dig into, which goes back to that first step, which is trying to get as specific as possible about what you want to change.

Speaker 1: 33:19

Now I want to take a quick moment and remind you that if you need something to help you track how you're thinking about yourself, how you're talking about yourself, you can go to my website at jerryhendersonorg, or you can simply go to the show notes in this episode and you'll find a link to a self-assessment guide that helps you go on a 30-day journey about having a healthier relationship with yourself. It really is designed to help you monitor how you're doing, setting some goals and figuring out how to make progress in exactly areas like this about how you're speaking to yourself and how you're treating yourself. And if you need some help or you want somebody to journey with you over those 30 days and you really feel like you need some accountability and some structure to it, I do want to remind you that I have a coaching program designed to get you to have a healthier relationship with yourself in 30 days and we work one-on-one to get you to a place where you start to have the tools that you need to heal yourself and to transform your own life. I want to take a quick moment and remind you that if you've not had a chance yet to subscribe or to follow this podcast, please take a moment to do that, as well as turn on notifications, because that's going to remind you when new episodes come out and it'll help you stay consistent in your healing journey. You know, a lot of times we make decisions that we're going to heal, that we're going to move forward, and then we just let it kind of die off. And so listening to this podcast each week can help. You can keep you in a rhythm of working on your relationship with yourself. So if you haven't subscribed yet, if you haven't followed, if you haven't set those notifications yet, do that because that's going to make sure that you're staying consistent on this journey of healing your relationship with yourself.

Speaker 1: 34:52

The second thing is, if you're finding a lot of value in this podcast and it's helping you get healthier, I want to encourage you to share it with others. I want to encourage you to share it on your social media. I want to encourage you to send an email or a text to somebody with the link to these episodes, because that's going to help them learn how to heal their relationship with themselves. And when people learn how to have healthy relationships with themselves, everything in this world changes. The entire energy of this planet begins to elevate because we're becoming more loving towards ourselves, which means we're more loving towards others, and we're walking around with a whole different set of energy on this planet. So please share it with somebody else as we're working to build this community of people who are learning to give themselves the permission to love themselves. Well, thank you for being here, for being a part of another episode of the Permission to Love podcast, and I want to remind you as always, you are worthy of your own love.