How to believe something new: in real time
Q: What do you want to believe next?
I just successfully worked on believing something new.
Want to know what that looks like in real time?
Let’s do it.
If you don’t think you can change what you believe, then just stop right here. None of the rest of this email even matters.
Still with me? Ok, here we go.
I do this all of the time by noticing a belief that limits me in some way.
This is why I hire my coach. I figure out a limiting belief every time we talk.
It’s part of my growth strategy.
I know that I have to uncover a limiting belief before I can change it.
In this case, I didn’t need my coach.
I have practiced believing new things so much that I was able to notice this particular limiting belief on my own.
The belief I recognized that I HAD but wanted TO CHANGE is this:
“A tonsillectomy is brutal to recover from.”
Where did I get this particular belief?
From Everyone.
EVERYONE but one person told me this before Coleman got his tonsils out.
Like, every single person who heard he was getting his tonsils out or knew that it had happened said this exact thing:
“The recovery is brutal.”
The evidence that I should believe this thought was overwhelmingly high.
The scabs. The pain. The bad breath
Recovery is brutal.
And I just took on that belief as something that was true.
So, if we’re looking at the steps of believing something new, Step Two is to notice what I was believing.
This didn’t happen right away. I definitely believed Everyone for a while. Everyone had the experience and I didn’t.
It made sense to think what Everyone experienced would be true for Coleman as well.
So we planned on the recovery being brutal.
We believed Everyone.
Until I wondered if this was a limiting belief…not the truth.
This is where belief work becomes an active-participation strategy.
About a week before the surgery, Coleman was letting his teachers know he would be out of school and I was clearing my calendar to stay close to home.
I said, “Hey Coleman, what if it’s not that bad? What if we keep our plan but just see how it goes?”
“It might not be brutal,” I said.
Do you see what happened there?
This is what it looks like to question the thing that seems totally true - in favor of what we WANT to be true.
We practiced the new belief.
We knew that maybe the brutal-ness of the recovery could be true and set ourselves up to handle it if needed…but we also gave a lot of airtime to believing that it MIGHT NOT be all that brutal.
We talked about how Coleman was going to do really well in recovery.
I said that our surgeon was awesome and would make it as simple as possible.
We had soft foods ready and I mentally prepared to happily do multiple Frazil runs to Maverick each day.
Coleman moved a TV monitor and the PlayStation into his room so he could convalesce upstairs.
And we cultivated the possibility that recovery might not be brutal.
Once we got home from surgery, we looked for evidence that recovery wasn’t brutal for Coleman.
I watched his pain level on a scale of 1-10. Days 1-6 he only needed Tylenol. The pain ended up not being very brutal.
On Day 7, when the scabs had formed and the pain moved to a 6 or 7, he started taking the prescribed pain meds. I could see the discomfort on his face.
It wasn’t fun.
But he still didn’t actually consider it “brutal.”
Friends came over to hang with him almost every day after school. He wasn’t feeling up to being AT school but friends were fun.
Why did I let friends come over?
Because we had decided that recovery isn’t all that brutal. In fact, it might even be kind of fun to be the house of endless Mac ‘n Cheese and milkshakes.
Coleman and I spent a lot of time together.
We lazily cuddled with Oreo on Coleman’s bed, watching YouTube videos.
We triumphed over my skills for getting Ramen to cool down at lightning speed so Coleman could eat it sooner.
We bonded over my quest for Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce content.
There were a lot of non-brutal things about his recovery.
But this belief shift works even if his pain had been higher.
We were deciding how we were going to experience the experience.
This is belief work.
By choosing to believe that recovery might not be that brutal created the chance for it to not be that brutal.
So, if you ask me how Coleman’s recovery was, here’s what I’ll cheerfully say:
It wasn’t that bad.
There were some days when the pain was worse than others but he managed it really well with his meds.
The scabs grossed me out but they didn’t seem to be a big deal to him.
It ended up being pretty fun for him to have a TV in his room for a week.
Getting his tonsils out wasn’t that bad.
That’s the new belief.
That’s what we actively pursued believing BEFORE the surgery even happened.
Just by considering that MAYBE, a limiting belief that you currently have MIGHT NOT be true is how we change our experience with that thing.
Coleman and I just questioned our belief.
We created some space for something different to be true.
We actively pursued the new thing.
We gave the belief a chance.
This is a simple example of the exact process that I use to change ANY limiting belief I have.
Give it a try.
You really can choose to believe anything you want.
It’s ok if you still believe that tonsillectomy recovery is brutal.
But what if you shifted that belief even a little bit? What would that sound like? Feel like?
How would your memories of your experience change?
Message me if you want to keep this conversation going.
You can even just tell me that you don’t believe me! 😂
I was skeptical at first about this stuff, too.
Then I started trying it for myself and my life will never be the same again.
I now say that belief work is the high-level action that paves the way for every other action we take.
Belief work comes first for me.
That’s how powerful it is.
Q: What do you want to believe next?
Sending love,
K
