In this second part of the Holistic Approach on How to Follow a Dream series I talk about the mind and our beliefs. Shifting these beliefs, or mindset, is just one of four essential steps to living a happier, more meaningful life. As explained in earlier episodes,

mindset is critical

but it’s not the only component to satisfying success. 

Our brain is a funny thing, it wants to keep us safe and it wants to conserve energy, so anything that is not familiar or usual it resists. Growing and doing or learning new things requires new pathways to be formed in the brain, but that takes energy, so our brain says No! That would require more energy! 

This leads us to stay comfortable in the stories we have learned over a lifetime that unconsciously run our life.

These stories, also called limiting or false beliefs, cover every aspect of our life –

money, career, health, relationships etc.

In every area of our life if we want something different, we need to actively tell our brain what the new familiar or usual is, making it the new normal that it defaults to. 

In this episode you’ll learn:

• How we come to have these stories that we live by 
• How to identify your personal stories 
• How to shift or change your stories 
• Why mindset alone isn’t enough  

 You may be interested in Episode Twelve "What Does Connectedness have to do with Mindset, Spiritual Practices, and Law of Attraction?" Check it out here https://revkarencleveland.com/what-does-connectedness-have-to-do-with-mindset-spiritual-practices-and-law-of-attraction/

I really hope to connect with you personally so please send me a message here or join me in my Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/connectednesswithrevkaren. And in the meantime, enjoy the show! 

. . Rev Karen: We're going to do everything

enough money at the end of the month.

Our brain, our mind is going to make us do that because that's what it knows.

That's what it likes.

That's the familiar, that's the comfortable

Hello and welcome to the Connectedness Podcast.

Just as you might have guessed, I talk about connection and connectedness

on this podcast, our connection with everything in the world around us.

Whether you see it or not, we're all connected.

And it doesn't matter if it's our dog, our cat, our God, our body.

And I'll also talk about some more abstract connections like our career or

our land, our community, our emotions.

Your body life is all about connection.

So the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can have an

easier, more meaningful life.

I will talk about these connections through different lenses.

Things like synchronicities and coincidences are just everyday

little bits of magic and miracles that we, we usually dismiss.

It's really important that we pay attention to all of this so we can

live an easier, more meaningful life.

So welcome to the show.

I'm your host, Karen Cleveland.

Today I'm talking about the Mind, and this is part of a series where I

talk about engaging the entire self.

When you want to achieve a dream, when you want to achieve a goal, to

live a happier, more content life.

So in the series I'm talking about how engaging your entire self is going

to help you create that life that you want, that better life, a successful

life, but that you're happy and that you're, you find meaning and purpose

and contentment and satisfaction.

Today I'm talking about one aspect of the mind.

There's, you know, multiple components to all of this because

we're very complex creature.

So what I wanna talk about is mind and what people have

been referring to as mindset.

It's a huge topic these days because mindset is basically what we believe

about ourselves and what we believe about the world as we relate to it.

Our brain, it just always wants to go to the familiar.

When we try to do something new, it doesn't wanna do that.

The job of our, our brain, our mind is to keep us safe.

and to conserve energy.

So it doesn't want to put any new energy out into learning something new into

going somewhere you've never been.

It doesn't wanna do anything new.

So anytime that you're trying to change something, you're

fighting against yourself.

And, and it's known.

I mean, there's studies that show how the, the brain goes back to the known pathway.

And in order to do something new, in order to have something new,

we have to change those pathways.

We have to break it out of the familiar, so the easiest path is comfortable, it's

safe, but it's not always what we want.

If you are perfectly happy where you are in life right now and there's

nothing you wanna change, then don't.

There's no reason to change anything.

But it's for those of you who are feeling like.

there's something more.

I'm uncomfortable.

I wanna do more of this.

I wanna do this instead.

You're the ones that want to look at, as I talked about in the last

episode, your mind, your body, and your soul, and all the parts that

compose us in pursuing these dreams.

So what is familiar for our brain?

I call them stories.

I.

Where our brain goes automatically stories, and they come from everywhere.

They come from our upbringing, but they also come to us later in life.

We can, we can have a story set in very recently, and that's good news

because that means we can change the story anytime we want to, but

we learn from the time we're born.

We learn things.

Let's, let's use the example of.

, but this applies across the board to everything in our life, relationships,

careers, housing, physical health.

It applies to everything.

So, but let's just take money as an example.

We learn from a very young age what our caregivers believe about money.

And if we're 2, 3, 4 years, and we're in a house where they argue about money

a lot, where they worry about money.

Then we grow up with that.

We start to believe that we internalize it and we believe that is the truth

about money, but it's not just our families or our households.

It's also the education system where we learn things.

It's TV and movies.

It's religion where we learn things.

It's the society in general.

All these messages come to us.

Especially at a young age, and we think they're the truth.

We think they're the absolute truth.

So that's where we start to develop these stories that we live by.

Some people call them limiting beliefs or false beliefs.

Like I said, I'm calling them stories.

And how they affect you is you usually don't even know this

story is running your life.

Wherever you get the story from, it doesn't have to be from your caregivers,

but if you grow up believing that money is is hard to come by and.

There's never enough at the end of the month and that you have

to work hard for what you do get.

You might even have to work two or three jobs.

So if you've grown up seeing that as your experience and you believe

it, it's part of your story, but you don't even know it's part of your

story, you're going to wonder why.

You just can't seem to get.

, you don't really know why you're always broke.

You have to work two jobs and you still can't get ahead, and it's because

that's what you believe money is.

So first we have to become aware of our stories before we

can even look at changing them.

Because if you don't know what a story is running.

, running your system, running your life, then you can't change it.

You'll never change it.

One of the things about the mind aspect of body, mind, spirit, or

soul, is that if you don't adjust your mind or your mindset, you're

going to end up self sabotaging.

Tell me if this sounds familiar to.

You have a plan to finally get ahead.

You might be up for a new job and it's going to make enough money

so you can only work one job and it's gonna cover all your.

and you're finally gonna be able to get ahead and start putting money in savings.

So you have this plan and you get the job, and what happens?

You quit your other job and all of a sudden you start having all these

bills come up, or you start spending more money or something comes.

and you still don't have enough money at the end of the month and you think,

okay, well next month, that's okay.

Next month, and you get your paycheck again next month and you decide,

well, I can blow a little bit.

So you go out to blow a little bit and you blow a lot, and then you don't have

enough money at the end of the month.

Again, if we believe, if we strongly believe, even though we don't know

it, it's unconscious okay, we don't know that we believe that yet.

. We're going to do everything we can to make sure we don't have enough

money at the end of the month.

Our brain, our mind is going to make us do that because that's what it knows.

That's what it likes.

That's the familiar, that's the comfortable.

Don't grow, don't change anything.

Just stay right here and we're not gonna have enough money because that's what I.

. That's how I live.

That's in my body.

That's how I live.

Okay, so you're going to sabotage yourself.

And again, it's not only money, it's everything out there.

Now our stories, our beliefs, we can eradicate them or we think

we can, sometimes they shift and change into something else.

Let me tell you a little story about myself.

About 15 years ago when I was married to my ex-husband, we went to a

workshop a about money, specifically about a financial workshop, about

money and our money stories.

by the end of the workshop.

The money story that I came up with that I realized, , through all these

series of exercises and looking at my life and looking at my family,

looking at a whole bunch of things that they led us through in the workshop.

At the end, I discovered my money story at that time was money is, women

have to really work hard for money.

We have to do everything, and men are lazy and they're unreliable.

And so it's up to the woman to take care of everything.

my husband didn't like that.

And yeah, he got divorced.

That's, he's an ex.

, but that was essentially the lesson my mom taught to me without words.

She didn't say it in words, but that was the lesson I learned from her.

And that's what I had been living for many, many years, that it was up to

the woman to make money and that it was hard to make money, but we had to do it.

We had to rely on ourselves, and we couldn't rely on any man.

I

ditched the husband and started working on that story.

And eventually what started happening is I discovered my jobs that I was doing,

the positions that I was, being hired for we're getting easier and easier,

and the pay was going higher and higher.

And I was realizing I was coming to believe.

. The more money you got, the easier the job was, which was fantastic, right?

That's just the opposite of what I believed before.

But here's the other thing that came up with it.

So I get more money, the job is easier, but I'm a fraud.

They're going to find out I'm not working hard enough.

They're going to fire me as soon as they look at what work I've done.

When I quit, they're going to discover I didn't do anything.

All right.

Now, of course I was working, of course I was doing stuff, but my belief

had shifted from I have to work hard from my money to, if making money is

easy, I must be a fraud as I'm doing something wrong and I'm going to be.

So you really need to stay on top of this mindset work these beliefs, because

they will show up in a different way.

There's always a new level of growth to go through.

Okay, so how do we find out these stories?

How do I know what my stories are?

I must have some kind of story.

Like I said, it's not always money.

Let me just tell you one, a health story.

My mother always said, her family has soft teeth.

Okay?

So she's like, oh, we have soft teeth in our family.

So guess what?

Guess who had a lot of dental problems growing up?

Starting at a very young age because I had soft teeth, because everyone

in my family had soft teeth.

And they would get cavities and, you know, need fillings or whatever.

when I started to realize that was a story that I was being told, I started

to shift the story for my kids, for my family, and I used to say that to.

We are a family that heals fast.

Whenever we get injured, we heal really fast.

You're lucky you belong to this family because we heal really fast.

one thing about these stories is they probably were true at one time.

Alright?

There are people that had to work.

Hard for their money.

So a lot of these things, these stories come to us, you know, from the depression

era, from immigrants, from times where life was harder or different, but

they don't have to be our story today.

So we have a choice to change that story.

Now, how do we identify what our stories are?

Good question.

First, you have to become aware that there is something there.

Again, if you're perfectly happy and.

You don't need to do this work.

All right.

So imagine for a minute, what's something you want?

What's a goal you want to achieve?

How do you want your life to be?

What's a trip you wanna take?

What's one of your goals?

And when you bring that to mind, go ahead and say it.

Just like, I can't wait to go to Paris.

When, when you say it out loud, you need to pay attention to what comes after.

. So let your critical mind come on after that.

It's okay for this particular exercise to have a critical mind.

So I am going to go to Paris next year.

Well, how am I going to get the time off work?

I don't think I have enough money.

Is my passport up to date?

Who would take care of my animals?

What if my husband can't get off work?

Okay.

There's all kinds of reasons.

We can't do whatever our goal is.

Another personal story is I wanted to buy a house.

I was divorced from my husband.

I was a firm believer that as a single woman living in Seattle, there was no

way I could ever buy a house on my own.

I would need a partner to buy a house.

. That was one of my beliefs.

I don't actually know where that one came from, but um, somewhere it got in

my head that that's what the rule was.

I was never gonna have enough money.

I didn't have a down payment.

My credit score was bad.

I couldn't afford a house near Seattle.

I wouldn't be able to keep it up once I got a house.

So I had all these beliefs about,

Again, I don't know where it came from, but it doesn't really

matter where it came from.

I just needed to shift it so I could buy a house.

Okay, you say what you want and then you look at every single reason

why, why you think you can't have it, and every single one of those

reasons you might think is true.

It's like, well, no, this is the truth.

I can't get the time off work.

Okay.

The universe has a million ways to work things out, and if you

think you are in control of everything, I have news for you.

I have so many examples of how things have happened that

couldn't possibly have happened.

Well, including buying my house because I had a crappy credit score and I

had zero money for a down payment.

That was a fact There was no doubt about it.

That was a fact.

I didn't wanna borrow any money from anyone, but the.

but the universe had ways around that.

So I was working under the assumption I had to have a good credit score and

I had to have a down payment, and I had to make a certain amount of income.

I had these assumptions and it turns out that, that wasn't true or some.

Spirit worked around him to create miracles.

So what you believe to be true?

I can't get the time off work.

Well, what if you had a new job?

There's so many ideas.

I don't even want to to say them all because there's so many other

ways around it that are just as good or better in outcome.

If you're open to the idea of a miracle or magic or something working out for your

good, and I promise you, when you change your mindset, these ways of coming to.

that seemed impossible at the time happened.

so we've identified one way to get at your story.

here's some action steps for you to get some other ways.

Because we got lots of reasons.

Usually it's layers and layers and layers of reasons we can't accomplish something.

If we didn't have these layers and layers of things, you

would've achieved it by now.

So if you have not achieved your dream or your dream life or whatever

it is, there's things there.

So you need to look at all of 'em.

So get a paper and across the top you're going to write.

, why can't I take a trip to Paris next year?

Okay.

And you're going to write down all those things.

And then the next question is, what are the benefits to

not taking a trip to Europe?

What are the benefits to not achieving your goal?

And you're gonna write down all the benefits to not achieving your goal.

And again, your brain likes the familiar, it likes the safety.

It's going to give you so many benefits to not achieve your.

And then you're going to flip it over and write, what's the

downside of achieving my goal?

Again, you're gonna get lots of ideas.

Now, some of them are gonna be similar as some of the other

reasons, and that's okay.

I will tell you, when I was doing this work to buy a house,

I had at least 30 reasons.

At least 30.

Might have been more.

So after you write down all these things, then you're going to rank

them with how true they feel to you.

So you need to really feel it in your body when you say this story,

I have a crappy credit score.

It's like, yeah, that's true.

10 . So you're gonna rank them all from one to 10, 10 being the most.

You're gonna rank every single one of them, and the ones with

the highest numbers are the ones you're going to start with.

Once you get rid of one of those stories or beliefs that's out of 10 or a nine,

you'll discover some of the other ones might fall away or might get less intense.

And that's just the nature of the intricacies of how everything

kind of weaves together.

So you won't necessarily have to work on 30 items because some of them will take

care of some of the other ones, start at the strongest and work your way down that

list and that will change your mindset.

That will allow you to believe it is possible for you.

And once you're allowed to believe it is possible for you, then it can happen.

And until.

, you will continue to self sabotage.

So once you get the brain used to knowing it can happen, this is the new reality.

I'm going to Paris next year.

I'm going.

Once you get used to that new reality, your brain gets, gets used to it.

Then the ways it can actually happen start falling.

, and that's part of what the other two things are.

Your, your soul and your body, getting those in alignment with this, again, I'm

just talking about the mind right now.

Now here's what I want to warn you against is that, you wanna make

sure it is something your soul wants.

and you're going to want to make sure your body is in alignment with it,

because otherwise you might get that new job that's gonna cover all your bills

every month and you've done your mindset work so it covers your bills and you do

still have money, but you hate the job.

You didn't know you were gonna hate the job, but if you had

engaged all the parts, mind, body.

, you would've known that wasn't the appropriate job for you.

You would've known that's not the appropriate job for you.

this is one aspect of the mind in engaging your whole self.

Once you have all these things,

what do you do with them?

Well, you need to start shifting your belief system.

that's not what this podcast episode is for.

I'm not going into details, but here's a few ways you can do it.

You can use emotional freedom technique tapping to get rid of where that

story is stuck in your nervous system.

That's my favorite.

Well, I have two favorites.

That's one of my favorites.

I did that every day to buy my.

, and I will tell you, I started in December.

I put an offer in September, but I started looking in April.

That's how fast the turnaround was.

I believed I could do it in April, and then it was just a

matter of finding the right one.

Tapping is one way to do it.

Affirmations are another really good way.

Also, one of my favorite things, the thing about affirmations is they have

to be completely personal and completely aligned with you, your soul, because

if they're not, they're not gonna land well and they're not gonna work for you.

So if you've been doing affirmations and they just don't feel that

good and you feel like it's dumb, then it might be dumb.

But when you get an affirmation that actually sinks into your soul

and you feel it, those are the one that's going to work for you.

And it's not because you affirm something that it becomes true, it's because it's

the truth of you and you're affirming it.

So then it's just convincing the mind, yes, this is the truth.

and another way to play the lawyer challenge your belief.

When I started to look around, I, I intentionally looked.

There must be other single women in Seattle that have bought their own house.

There must be, why can they do it and I can't do it.

So challenge the belief and find out why it can't be.

because if it's not true of everyone, it doesn't have to be true of you.

And it doesn't matter what your past story is.

If it's true for just one other person out there, it can absolutely

be true for you, but you don't even have to find that example.

If you believe there's something that should be different, then there

is something that can be different.

All right.

Well, I look forward to hearing.

Feedback about how you're putting this to use and what kind of

stories you have come up with, because it's really important work.

It's stuff that never changes.

Again, like I said, with my own mindset, it's like, Ugh, I'm a fraud.

I'm an imposter.

You know, work is too easy.

They're going to find out I'm not working hard enough.

So there's always work to do.

I look forward to connecting later.

Bye-bye.

If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to head over to rev karen podcast.com.

That's R E V K A R E N podcast.com.

There you're gonna find the tools for finding more meaning

and happiness in your own life.

Plus, if you have a story that you want to share with me, either on or

off the air, be sure to look for that.

Make sure you follow me so you get notified when new episodes drop.

And also I'd love to connect with you and my Facebook group

Connectedness with Rev, Karen.

So head over to rev karen podcast.com.