You deserve it. And you can!
Sign up for weekly tools to communicate better, connect deeper, and create more trust and love in every relationship.
Your guide to understanding yourself and the people you love on a whole new level.
Sign up here:‍
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the Stable Living Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you if you're taking your time to be here with me today. Talking about horses and humans.
Speaking for companies and individuals and organizations, and helping organizations and companies develop their people so that they spend less time on people issues and more time getting stuff done, like making money.
Anyway, so yeah, today we've got a today we're talking about belief creation. This is the next in the series on belief creation. Quick recap about that. And that is this.
What we believe. Okay, now specifically value beliefs, okay? And I'm gonna differentiate between value beliefs and behavior beliefs.
So, we believe certain things about ourselves. And if we're not really too sure about what they are, it's happening anyway. Your brain has provided you beliefs over the course of your lifetime that you just got. Now, some of them no longer helping us. They're not helping us get to the place where we want to go.
So we're going to take a look and decide if we want to intentionally change some of these beliefs that we have in order to get a better result in the future.
Our value beliefs are the foundation, the very bottom of what all of our life is built on. How we relate to ourselves, meaning what we believe to be true about our own value, is how we relate to the world.
If we can change, if we can improve our value beliefs, then we've made a substantial improvement in everything. I mean, your entire world changes. It's pretty incredible to watch.
And so what we're talking about today is value beliefs. So what does that mean? What do mean value versus behavior? Let's just get a quick recap on that.
Behavior beliefs, my self-beliefs about my behavior could be, well, I'm always late. Or I look in the mirror and I say, I think I'm ugly. And so eventually I have a belief that I'm ugly, right? Or I can't remember names. Or I'll never make that much money. Or that's too much for me. Or, you know, I'm too old for that. Or I, know, blah, blah, blah.
These are things that have to do with behavior that I believe to be true about myself.
Underneath those, okay, at the root, at the core of why I have even those behavior beliefs, are how my value beliefs, or what I believe to be true about my own value.
That means, what, how much does a person like me deserve? What am I really worthy of in this lifetime? What do I deserve? What can a person like me be able to have?
What it really is my value, you know, am I as good as everybody else? Am I as good as you? Am I as good as that guy? Am I as good as the president of United States? I, you know, am I good enough to have that?
Do I, it's a deserving, it's worthy, it's value. It's like, what do I think as far as my own personal value in relationship to value or even in comparison relationship to the rest of the world, other people.
Okay, if you were to do a comparison, where do I fit? This is what I believe about my own personal value, okay, about my own worth. That, a lot of times we haven't thought about.
And it does this good to think about it because here's the thing. Naturally, your default brain is going to give you some beliefs that are going to say that you're just not quite good enough. You're just a little bit deficient here. Can't you see those other people can do that? You can't do that. You're just not quite as good.
And if you don't, you can start to uncover that and think about where they came from and why your brain would guide you to think something like that in order to protect you from failing, in order to protect you from danger.
There's thousands of reasons why and it's okay that we have those beliefs. Beliefs, it's just that when we recognize them, most of the time you can see at this point in your life, they are not helping you.
They're not helping you get the result that you want because what we believe or our thoughts about ourselves causes to feel certain ways.
And then when we feel certain ways, our emotions and our feelings and what are causes to do our actions, and then our actions are what determine the results that we get in our lifetime.
It's a big deal. I mean, it's why we do what we do comes down to what we believe to be true about our own values. So that's why it's so important.
And so this is the next step. And a lot of times when you recognize, you know what? I just don't think I'm good enough. And I just don't think, you know, I don't, I'd like to think that I'm, my value is better. I'd like to think that I'm worth more. I'd like to think that I'm more significant. I'd like to think that I'm more important. I'd like to think that I'm, as that everybody has perfect value and I have perfect value. I really want to believe that.
You know why I want to believe that? Because when I believe that, then I don't need to be proving it. I don't need to be proving it to you or to myself.
And I don't spend my whole life trying to prove that I'm worthy, trying to prove that I'm good enough, trying to prove that I deserve it to myself and to the world.
When I know that I'm, I'm less reliant on other people and all the circumstances that happened to me to determine my worth. And guess what happens because of that? A lot of good things happen because now I don't have to spend my life trying to, spinning trying to prove something that was already true according to me just to start with.
Because I believe what I would ask you to consider believing about yourself, and that is is that hey partner, no matter what you've done or what you haven't done or what has been done to you, you are 100 % as you are because what you've done, behavior has nothing to do with your value.
Your perfect value is perfect no matter what you've done, no matter what you're going to do, no matter what happened to you. It doesn't excuse the behavior, doesn't make it right. Some of the things you've done you didn't want to do.
It doesn't absolve you of responsibility. It doesn't mean you shouldn't fix it. It doesn't mean you shouldn't make it better and do restitution for the things that you want to make well and ask for free. It doesn't mean any of that.
All it means is, is regardless, it means that people do things that they wish they wouldn't have, number one, because you're a human being and that's the way it works. That's just part of this life experience.
What it means is, is those things that you've done that you wish you wouldn't have, don't have anything to do with your value.
They just don't.
When you can separate that and see that you have perfect value, then you have solid footing to really make, you know what you're going to get? There's a few things you're going to get.
You're going to get more loving, solid connection. You're going to have better relationships. And I mean, think about what else you're here for. You're going to have better relationships.
You can get those underlying beliefs about what you deserve so you can earn more money because now that you know that it's okay for you to participate and enjoy and have and achieve all of the abundance that's available on this planet.
Wow, and so you can really make, make more strides in your in your lifetime because you've eliminated the things that have been subconsciously blocking you, basically.
That's what we're talking about.
Okay, but you can't just go, I recognize that I have a little chink in my value belief and I'm gonna try to change it and here you go. And it's done. It takes a little bit of effort. Okay.
So one of the things that can backfire, can sabotage our new belief, there's a couple things. That's what we want to talk about today.
There's an exercise that we're going to go through. The exercise, just let me say this. It's not about judging your old belief and saying that what you used to think or what you think now sucks.
What we want to do though is assess if it's helping you and recognize if it's holding you back. Okay.
Because the belief that you had or have now, if you want to change it, if you think you're not quite as good as you could be, as far as your value beliefs, there was a reason that you were given that your brain fed you or handed you or provided you subconsciously or not a belief that said that. Okay.
Most of the time your brain gives you ideas in order to help you predict people to protect you, to protect yourself, or to cope with at the time.
For example, trying to think, I can't think of his name, but if I said it, you would recognize it. I was listening to, it'll come to me.
I was listening to a man that I listened to from time to time tell a story, and it was about when he was a young kid, okay? And he had to be very aware of his surroundings because his dad was an alcoholic.
And so he was very keen on what was happening and he'd measure and see how drunk he was in order to protect himself. And sometimes he'd get beat up when his dad would come home drunk.
And so he was always trying to protect himself, but when he'd get beat up, he would take on meaning about what that meant about himself.
And so as his brain gave him these ideas about himself, it changed how he behaved. He started to hide in the world more and more in order to protect himself.
The reason I'm telling you this story is his brain provided him ideas about his own value in order to physically protect him.
The reason I tell you this story is whatever you believe to be true about yourself. And if you haven't thought about it yet, think about it. This is part three. Go back and check out the other two podcasts, part one and two.
But it's important to, first of all, just to have the awareness of what you really believe about yourself and to really uncover that and to become as much aware of it as possible. And then you can begin to think what you, if it doesn't look like something that is working for you, you can think about what you'd like to change it to.
And then before we take the next step, this is where we're at now, to make sure that we don't have any internal blockers. Okay. There's nothing that's going to sabotage the thing.
So right now, we'll just say that your brain's still operating on the old belief. Your brain still thinks that the old belief is necessary.
So before change can happen, your brain needs to see that continuing to live in the same way that you have is gonna cost you more than to try something new.
So we have to make some kind of logical sense about the idea that it's a good idea to change so that our brain will kind of be on our side with us and go for the change.
Okay, because otherwise we can sometimes have these little internal blockers and it's like we're not making progress. We really still don't believe it. We don't believe that we have perfect value yet.
Why? So this is why. So we're going to try to clean that up. Okay.
So it's not that you're trying to prove to yourself or to your brain that the new belief is true. We're not doing that right now.
Right now we're only deciding whether it's worth going for. Is it worth it to practice and develop this new belief? Okay, that's where we're at right now.
Because doubt and some amount of resistance are totally normal when we try to reprogram our supercomputer. It's the way it rolls.
So, what we're going to do is we're going to give ourselves permission, okay, to test a different way of thinking, a different belief system, okay, instead of just automatically thinking what we've always thought and getting the same result that we've always got.
So one thing that we want to do for sure is do a cost versus benefit analysis.
Now that sounded like a lot, but it's not. We're just going to, it's just a short practical exercise and it's designed to help yourself and your brain see why change is a reasonable idea and it's worth the effort.
Okay. And it's, this is not a big thing. Analysis sounds like a big word, but all we're going to do is write down one to three ways, okay, that your old or existing beliefs that had a purpose that helped you predict, protect or cope in the world, okay?
Just write down one to three ways that your old beliefs helped you, helped protect you, that was good for you at the time, that made sense at the time, okay?
Just think about why would I have thought this based on my life experience?
Because what we need to see that it's okay that you thought that, okay?
We're not going to try to just say that it had no purpose and you're messed up and you shouldn't think that there was a reason and it's okay that you think what you're thinking. You just going to want to change it probably.
So what this does when you write down why your old belief was protecting you or helping you to cope or helping you to predict outcomes in the future, we just want to acknowledge that you're not defective for having the belief that you currently do, okay?
Given what you've lived through.
So given what you've lived through, it would make sense that you would believe what you do, okay? And it's important to acknowledge that, okay?
That's number one. Number two, okay, is to write down one to three ways, okay? Not a big long exercise.
One to three ways that you can see that the belief that you currently have no longer serves you.
Can you see where it's blocking you? Can you see where it's holding you back? Can you see what you want to do that you're not able to get because you're believing this thought about your own value?
And you might be thinking, you're not as good as somebody else, or you don't deserve this, or you don't deserve this much money, or you don't deserve to be that happy, or you need to suffer a little bit because of what you've done and all the things.
Whatever those things are.
Just list one to three ways why this, what you're currently believe isn't helping you, why it no longer serves you. Just consider how it's limiting your future. It's restricting your connection and your relationships and it's slowing down your progress. Okay. Just one to three. Okay.
Then number three is to, to write down one to three ways where what you would like to believe, which is what we've already talked about in, I think, the podcast before this one.
Write down one to one to three ways that your intentional belief, the one that you want to come to believe, will improve your life. Just write down one to three ways that will improve your life.
And then the last step, step four in this exercise, is just to spend 10 minutes. 10 minutes. Partner, we're transforming your life. Okay. You're going to unlock so much power and connection and love and it's going to be different. And you need to give it 10 minutes. Okay. Not just once, but right in this exercise, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 uninterrupted minutes, get the damn phone off and shut the door, quiet time, 10 minutes. Okay.
And reflect on the costs versus the benefit and just have it, see if you can get to a place where it makes total sense that it's time to move on and try on a new belief. Okay.
Now, if you're feeling a lot of confusion and overwhelm and it seems too much and all of that in this, which sometimes happens, you might not have the right new belief.
Your new belief might be too much for you to be able to accept it in one step at one time. You might have to back it down to a little bit lesser belief until you can believe that and then do what they call the ladder method and take it piece by piece until you can get back to the beliefs that you wanted.
Because here, let me tell you secret. They don't tell you this. Nobody really tells you this. You can believe whatever you want to about yourself, okay? Bar none. I mean, you get a pick, could be anything. No restrictions, nobody can tell you, no laws, no natural laws and no civil laws. I mean nobody it's totally up to you. You can believe whatever you want to about yourself.
Okay, so that's part one.
If, if you, if part of you feels blamed If you feel like you're defective or you feel like you're forcing this new belief We got to get that cleaned up because if you try to move forward it won't work.
We got to get rid of the resistance that can slow you down in the future so we can be done with the old belief and solidify the new one.
So one other way to do this, and this is important, is to recognize that the past is what made you as good as you are right now.
The beliefs that you formed, they weren't mistakes, like we said, they were reasonable responses to what you've lived through.
And so the next part is to acknowledge that you're not going to excuse anything. But what we want to do is we want to really solidify that it was okay. It had value. It was protective, your old belief, and it actually was, it made you all the goodness that you are now.
Okay.
Let me tell you more about what I mean. Basically what this kind of next step is, we're just giving the brain permission to try a new belief and we're just making sure that there's no resistance.
Once you give your brain permission, it doesn't mean that you're automatically or suddenly you're going to feel different and act different and you're, you know, you already have the new belief.
We're just talking about, it's still going to be a little bit, a little bit awkward, a little bit uncomfortable.
And we're not trying to prove the new belief to be true yet. Again, we're just cleaning, clearing up the resistance.
We're just trying to be able to move forward without any internal conflict.
And so when we give our brain further permission to proceed, here's how we're going to go about that.
What we're going to do, this is a next exercise. You know, we'll write this down, another little 15 minute exercise.
You're going to want to write down one to three positive traits that you gained as living your life as it has been with the belief that you currently have.
For example, okay, here's an example. Here's one of my examples and I have lots, okay, because I have lived through and done some things that are, I don't know, are horrendous.
And I've lived through some stuff and you have too. You've lived through some stuff, okay?
Some of the things I've done are pretty egregious, pretty extreme. And maybe you have too.
But certainly we've all been through some stuff. We've all done some stuff. We've all done some stuff that we're ashamed of. We've all done some things that we wish we wouldn't, that we regret.
And so here's one of mine, okay? But let me just come back.
Those things that I did, my life experience, it made me who I am today and I like who I am today.
Don't really, there's a couple things that if I could undo, I'd undo, but I can't undo them.
But all of the rest of it, all of those hard times and all the things that I did, they made me what I am today, which is a good thing.
And it's a good thing, it's been a good thing for a lot of people.
So here's my for example.
For example, believing that I wasn't good enough, okay, that I wasn't good enough, that I just didn't measure up, that I was deficient, defective in some way, just thinking that, that was my belief.
And that drove me to become addicted to alcohol so I could feel better.
But since I went through that, and since I went through decades of alcoholism and all the pain and suffering and destruction and unhappiness and misery and all the just all the suffering. Okay.
Since I have lived that, that has helped me understand people who feel stuck, who feel ashamed.
And it's increased my ability to relate to people, to have compassion to people and to be empathetic to people, okay?
To all people and especially people that I can closely relate to, because I can see how they got to where they got to. I've lived it, I know it.
And so, and I can list thing after thing after thing after thing that my, what me and my wife call the broken road that got us to where we are, that my broken past got, provided me to be able to have the strengths and the gifts that I do now.
That's what I'm asking you to go through.
I'm asking you to list one to three things, just one to three things that you have gained even with the positive traits, positive attributes that you've gained, even with the belief system that you weren't, your value wasn't up to where you want it to be.
Okay. Just write that down one to three.
And then the last thing is just to spend another 10 minutes, 10 minutes, not 10 hours, not 10 months, not 10 years, 10 minutes.
Just visualizing yourself with your new intentional belief.
Okay.
Just visualize if I believed what I want to believe about me and my value right now.
If I believed that I was 100%.
If that stuff I did was still there that I'm ashamed of or those things that have been done to me and those things that were said to me and done to me and all that ugly stuff that those people did that was still there and I was 100% even with all that stuff that I've done was done to me.
If I was 100% okay what would that what would that feel like feel like.
Just focus on what it would feel like.
Notice what your thoughts are, but really notice what that feels like.
If you were to pretend for a minute that your new belief that you selected was true, okay?
What it would feel like when you do accept it as a true belief, when you fully internalize that new belief and you know it's a fact.
Just imagine life with your new belief.
Now, if in this exercise, this new belief genuinely feels just completely overwhelming, that is probably a signal, okay? This is important. This is probably a signal that you took on a little bit too much, okay? It's too much to believe. You might want to back it down a little bit and ladder your way up to it. So you'd want to go back, select a new belief, and then come through the steps again.
For example, I'm gonna use a behavior belief. This exercise is not for behavior, well, you can use it for belief, but we're talking about value beliefs right now. My example is gonna be for a behavior belief. For instance, if I said, I'm a billionaire, okay, and I want to believe that I'm a billionaire, now, today, I will tell you that if I say to myself, I want to believe I'm a billionaire, I can't accept that. I'm not sure what a billion dollars even would look like. I can't see myself being worth a billion dollars right now. I just can't accept that I could do that. Okay?
Now, if I wanted to accept that I could do that, I could, because remember, I can believe anything. Behavior belief, today we're talking about value, but this example is a behavior because that means that I would earn that much money. I'd be worthy of earning that. Maybe I could just say I'm worthy of a billion dollars. But it's tied to my value belief, and I'm giving you an example of a behavior belief.
So what I would do if I started to practice this, saying, "I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire," my brain would just keep going, no, you're not. No, you're not. No, you're not. Who are you kidding? And I would totally be sabotaged until I just quit. I would give up because it wasn't going to happen.
However, if I recognize that it's too much for me to accept right now, which is what this podcast is about, I would back it down. I would say, "You know, I can earn a million dollars a year." Now, when I say I earn a million dollars a year, I can do that one. Okay, because I can see that one. I know I'm capable. That one I can believe. Once I get that one and I completely firm it up and I believe it, then I can step to the next step, and then the next step. And then if I want to, I can eventually think, "I believe I'm a billionaire." Okay, so that’s what I’m talking about.
I just thought of another good value one. This is Brooke Castillo. She used to think, I've heard her tell this story many times, that she was totally ugly, overweight, and couldn't stand herself. I mean, she was just disgusted with herself. She couldn't stand to look in the mirror. And she'd say, "You are beautiful," and her brain would go, "The hell you are. No way, man. You're overweight. You suck. You're just disgusting." She just thought she was ugly, and she could not accept it. She wanted to believe that she was beautiful in every way, but she couldn't accept that.
So she had to begin with, "I have a body. I have a healthy body. Sometimes I like my body. Sometimes I like my body more than others." And then she stepped and stepped and stepped. Eventually it was like, "Well, I look pretty good today," and then, "Some days I look beautiful." Over a period of time, and this doesn't take a lifetime; it just takes some effort, she got to where she fully believes that she is beautiful. She loves her body regardless.
And so that is how laddering works, or belief stair stepping. The point is, if you take on too much at one time, your brain is going to subconsciously sabotage you, and you're going to be wasting a bunch of time. You're not going to be happy, and you might be saying, "Call me up, Shane. I liked your idea, but it didn't work." This is one of the reasons why laddering is so important.
If you do the steps I just listed, the only reason you would go back and reduce it or ladder it down a little is if, when you visualize yourself accepting it as true, it just feels like total chaos, fully overwhelmed. That’s a signal you need to choose a different belief and come through the steps again.
Remember, at the same time, a little discomfort is normal. If it was perfect, you'd already believe it. There will always be some resistance. But if you cannot get it done, back it down a little. Knowing when to back it down is not failure; it is good judgment.
The next step after that is to begin thinking the new thought. Once we know we've moved away from resistance, we can see that it makes sense to it. We've done the cost versus the benefit analysis. We’ve thought about the cost and the minus. We can see that it’s a good idea to try it on.
We've realized of all the goodness that our past lives brought us even, even notwithstanding that our current belief is doesn't that we can improve on it. Okay. And we can see this. We've basically proven to our brain it's a good idea to go for it. Not proven to our brain that the new idea is that the new belief is solid. That's, that's next.
Then we're going to help our brain. We're going to give it evidence that the new belief is true.
Now, let me just say this about that. You don't, your brain, you're not going to prove that it's true. You don't have to give your brain evidence that it's true. You’re already, your values are already 100 % whether your brain accepts it or not. We're going to provide your brain evidence. However, that the belief is true so that you can believe that your value is 100%. That's the next steps.
Right now, go through those exercise. Take the minutes. Take the minutes. Remember, it's only two 10-minute times of thinking and writing down one to three things a couple of times. Spend a total thing 30, 40 minutes on this entire thing we've talked about today to make sure that you don't waste time in the future. That's called time well spent, good judgment. And you, my friends, are on your way to a whole new life.
And so for now, after you get that done, you're just going to practice thinking the new thought. Remember, a belief is a thought that you hold in your mind and you continue to prove it to be true. Okay. And that solidifies and becomes a new belief that you have. And that is the foundation for your behavior, and the behavior and which equals the actions that you do equals the results. And that's the sum total of your life. The results of why you do everything, do and don't do everything that you do.
All right, my friends, stay with me. Thank you for being with me. Remember, nothing that you have done, nothing that you haven't done, and nothing that has been done to you has anything to do with your value as a human being. Never has, never will. You are 100%. Stay with me.
