What are your beliefs that play in the background – that soundtrack that is always running and becomes louder when you are in a stressful or unfavourable situation? Our beliefs distinguish us from each other, determine where we go in life and the results we create. Some of the beliefs we have are awesome and have gotten us this far, but many need to be re-looked at and re-assessed to see just how empowering and supportive they are to us getting where we want to go.
As we have all read Mark Twain’s quote: “If you do what you did, then you will get what you got.” Or as Marshall Goldsmith so aptly puts it, “What got you here won’t get you there!”
So, take a few moments and jot down what your childhood belief statements are around these four points.
- The role of men in Indian Society
- The role of women in Indian Society
- Work & Money
- Sex
So, what I am asking you to reflect on in this exercise is the belief that you had formed even before you knew how to think about these things. These beliefs were developed from witnessing your family and the people in your life and through what was implied around the house.
Looking at the first statement, many of you may come up with belief statements like: “To work and be the provider and protector for the family.”
For the second belief, “The role of women in Indian Society” the most common one is “to look after the home and children and cook”, or perhaps, “To look beautiful and keep the home beautiful for her husband”. Though well meaning at the time, and though these beliefs may have served us till now, can you see how some of them could actually be putting undue stress and pressure on us and how some of them could actually be contradictory to the life we want to have today?
These are just some of the more common ones and yours could be different. For example, when I was a kid, I grew up in a pretty comfortable home and my mum didn’t need to work. She drove us around, and dressed well, was always impeccably groomed. In fact I believed that only women who were widowed or had “drunks for husbands” needed to work, and so I grew up feeling sorry for women who worked.
Can you see how many of these beliefs that we formed back then do not support us anymore in getting where we want to go? In my latest best-seller, Don’t Think of a Blue Ball, a personal development book with exercises designed to help the reader live the life they desire instead of one by default, I share as the book title implies, how you cannot eliminate a negative belief or thoughts, but instead you need to REPLACE them with one that is desirable. So if I told you now, whatever you do, please do not think of a blue ball, you will do just that, right?
So in order for you to not think of a blue ball, or to not hold on to your disempowering and futile beliefs that could be holding you back, you need to replace them with a belief that will support you.
Unfortunately as well, many of us have disempowering beliefs around being Indian. I have coached many many men and women who formed the belief that they can’t get the job, career, success, fame they so desire, because they are Indian. Then there is the opposite extreme of individuals who have very strong entitlement issues and this false sense of invincibility. Either can have undesirable impacts on our lives.
Again the belief tagged to “because I am Indian” needs to be looked at to see if it is working for you or not. A counsellor or therapist would sit with you to analyse where some of your beliefs come from and help you to work through them logically. The professional coach, is more forward focused and says, “OK, fine, now what?” What do you really really want to create in your life now? You got some lemons? Let’s make lemonade using what we have!
In my 13 years of experience as a life coach, and gathering from all walks of life, from professionals and senior managers in corporations internationally to bankers and professionals who work in Private Equity, to artists, other coaches and practitioners, to housewives and musicians, designers and students, the same empowering belief works like magic in helping to replace almost any negative one and is the quickest and most effective way to change the way you feel, act, speak and hence, do what needs to be done to have the life you desire.
As an ontological coach, I believe that it is more about WHO you are BEING, than what you are doing to help you move forward and feel good. This is cohesion between our body, emotion and language and it is my firm belief that when you change one, the others follow and this way of BEING then affects what action we take and hence, the results we have in our lives.
In this article, I want to remind you of this beautiful gem you have inside, and invite you to wear it on your head and stand tall. Your body will realign: with your posture straight, your feet planted into the ground and your head reaching up for the skies, your chin parallel to the ground, shoulders back, tummy in, imagine this gorgeous bejewelled crown or tiara on your head and the new soundtrack that plays is “I AM GOOD ENOUGH”.
I can write a few thousand more words or you could attend an entire workshop on how to ride a bicycle, but until you sit on it and ride it yourself, practise it several times daily, your body won’t learn it. So my invitation to you is to practise this body position with the new belief several times a day and then let me know how you feel and how it helped you move forward.
Image courtesy: © Thinkstock Photos/ Getty Images
More On >> Work & Life
