Beliefs are ideas and thoughts that we accept as truth. What we think about ourselves and the world becomes true for us. What we choose to believe can expand and enrich our world. Each day can be an exciting, joyous, hopeful experience, or a sorrowful, limiting, and painful one. Two people living in the same world, with the same set of circumstances, can experience life so differently. What can transport us from one world to another? I am convinced that it is our beliefs that do so. When we are willing to change our primary belief structures, then we may experience a true change in our lives.

This is what Louise Hay writes about creating change from the inside out. She writes about the inner space that we need to cultivate in order for real change to happen. She writes about our beliefs because it is our thoughts that ultimate create our feelings, which ultimately create our experience of our lives.

In this week’s blogpost, I want to shift your attention to how you can begin to create the inner space for real change to happen AND stick. This is a fundamental piece when it comes to creating lives we truly want to live now as well as in the future.

Creating space in the physical world (what I talked about in last week’s blog) as well as in the internal world is key in order to create sustainable happiness for ourselves.

In order to inspire this inner shift for you and eventually align positive and supportive beliefs with the changes you want to see happen in your life, I would like to invite you try an exercise with me.

This exercise is inspired by Louise Hay herself and it will help you understand in which areas you have positive beliefs and which areas are primarily dominated by negative or limiting beliefs.

Unless you know what your negative beliefs are, you cannot work on them, -not to mention- release them, so let's explore a little bit together.

Take out a piece of paper and a pen and quick-fire associations you have to the following words (to see an example, click here):

Family…

Success…

Failure...

Happiness…

Love…

Money...

Femininity/ Masculinity..

And lastly:

Do you believe that good things are meant to happen to you or do you spend the majority of your time expecting the next “bad thing”?

Make these lists as long as you want. Really let it all out and then take some time to look back at it and mark each negative or limiting belief that is keeping you smaller and less confident than you want to be.

Can you see how these beliefs are holding you back? Which ones do you want to release in particular? What might be a new message that you can replace this negative belief with?

It doesn’t have to be the complete opposite or something that sounds totally unbelievable to you, but something that lightens up your negative belief. For example, if you believe that “Success is out of my reach” you might want to change it to something “Success is something I invite into my life.”

Swapping our old beliefs with new ones is one of the most powerful gifts we can give to ourselves. This is how we take care of our inner world and bring it into alignment with what we desire in our real lives. It is also not an easy gift to give to ourselves, because many (if not most) of our old beliefs have been lingering around for many years; often since we were children. It takes patience and a loving commitment to yourself, so be gentle with yourself while you are learning this new way of believing in yourself.

I would love to hear any thoughts you might have or realizations you have made in the comments below. This is a tricky subject and I would love to offer you some guidance and support.

With love,