5 Steps for Changing Your Story
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Did you know your subconscious brain cannot determine the difference between what is real and what is imagined? This means the story you repeat to yourself over and over again will become your reality. Crazy, right? So what story have you been continuously telling yourself?
In this episode of Embrace Your Real, I chat about the importance of changing your thoughts, in order to change your reality. So how do you change your story? Tune in for my five-step process to re-wire what your subconscious brain is telling you!
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey there, beautiful human. You're listening to Embrace Your Real with me, Julie Ledbetter. A podcast where I empower you to just be you. With each episode, I dish you a dose of real talk and actionable advice for building your confidence, honoring your body and unconditionally loving your authentic self. Stay tuned if you're ready to embrace your real. Let's get it. Let's go.
Hello, and welcome back to the Embrace Your Real Podcast. So grateful that you are tuning in wherever you are in this beautiful world. Whether you're walking, you're exercising, you're working out, you're cleaning, you're cooking, you're driving, all of the things. I just want to say thank you for spending some time with me today. Really excited about today's episode. I really think that you're going to find some value in it, and I hope that these practical tips will help you in this time of uncertainty, in this time of craziness.
I'm just going to dive right into it because I think it's really, really important. It's oftentimes the reason that we just cannot seem to get things done or we keep repeating the same things. The reason is because we have a story that we're telling ourselves. Whether we are aware of the story that we are telling ourselves, the narrative in which we live ... Whether we are aware of it or not, it is what it is. As a result, that is the reason why we're doing what we're doing or not doing what we're doing. So many people want to change. So many people want to see change in their lives, but they continue to tell themselves the same story. Again, most of us doing it subconsciously. Change will not happen if you don't first change or recognize the story that you're telling yourself.
So today I just want to dive into this topic deeper, give you some practical tips and tricks and just share my experience with this. Because in working with thousands of women over the last seven plus years, specifically in the health and wellness realm, it's so difficult for people to reach their goals because of the story that they're telling themselves. Oftentimes people want to live a healthy and sustainable lifestyle and they just find it so difficult. They don't know why, but it's because they're oftentimes looking in the wrong places for the answer.
I've said in previous episodes, the difference between you and the people that are living the life that you want to be living is their desire to make the story, the narrative in which they live a reality. Like I said, we want to accomplish these goals. We have so many goals and dreams, yes in health and wellness, but also in our life. Things that we want to do. You want to write a book, you want to start a podcast, you want to start a family, you want to get married, you want to move, you want to whatever it is. Run that race. Do the thing, but you have so many limiting beliefs that are holding you back.
I say this, and I think that this is so important because it's oftentimes it's the invisible that creates the visible. Now, let me break this down. Think about all seeds in the ground. Think about trees. It's the roots in the ground that allow the tree to come up out of the ground, out of the dirt and flourish. It's oftentimes the things underneath that are the foundation that allow the thing to be seen. That's the same thing with our subconscious brain. There's so many things that we want to do externally, whether it's lose the weight or get healthy or whatever. All the things that I just previously talked about.
But there has to be something that you do to help fix that invisible part of yourself. Being your subconscious brain. So many times you try to do an action, but it's the invisible thing that's stopping you or hindering you or telling you this narrative that keeps you in this vicious cycle of never actually achieving your goal. You're looking for that certain result, but without having known what is happening within you, that is why you are either seeing the result that you're seeing or you're not seeing the result that you're seeing. It all starts in your thoughts.
I want to dive into this deeper because we're all striving for results. We have to backtrack first because all results stem from something. What do they stem from? They typically stem from a thought. We're going to dive deeper into each one of these. But what is a thought? Whatever your thought is, that actually creates a feeling and once you have that feeling from that thought, it leads you to action or lack of action, which ultimately leads to results.
If you find yourself in this place where you're just not seeing results, then typically you have to backtrack into what is it that I'm thinking. It's very, very fascinating. There are so many studies that have been talking about the subconscious mind and the conscious mind. Some studies that I have seen is that 12% of your mind is conscious, leaving 88% of your mind being subconscious. That is things that you are thinking of that you're not even aware. Things that you believe that you don't even recognize because they've been so ingrained in you, whether it's been habitual, it's been something you've grown up with, which I'll dive deeper into later in this episode. But on average we have over 60,000 thoughts. If you think about that, if 88% of your mind is subconscious and you have 60,000 thoughts, 88% of that is subconscious thoughts that you don't even recognize that you're thinking. But your subconscious brain actually drives you into action or lack thereof, which is leading you to the road of seeing the results or not seeing the results.
So that's an intro. I'm really excited to dive in today's episode. I really think that it's going to be helpful for you, and I think that you're going to find something from it. But before we dive into the episode, I just want to make sure that you are subscribed to the podcast. If you are not already, be sure to do so. We release episodes every Monday and Thursday. Also, if you have a couple friends or girlfriends or sisters or coworkers that you think would benefit from this podcast, I just ask you to share it with them. I just want to spread this message even further. If you haven't rated and reviewed it, that's another amazing thing that you can do to help spread the message.
Okay, let's dive into today's episode. We're talking about changing the story, changing the narrative in which we live. The reason I prefaced with all of these things ... 12% of your mind is conscious leaving 88% of it being subconscious ... Is because you have to identify what it is that you're telling yourself. If you're listening to this and you're like, "Julie, that's great. So that means that 88% of my mind is subconscious. Now how do I figure that out?"
It's really, step one, going through and identifying the story that you're telling yourself. Because the story that you're telling yourself ultimately becomes your reality. It's the most important thing that you need to know, which is you have to know what is the story that you keep telling yourself or what's the narrative in which you're living. Maybe it's for you, "I'm never going to find the love of my life." Or, "I'm never going to make a certain amount of money." Or, "I'm never going to be able to speak in public." Or, "I'm never going to be able to reach this goal. I'm always going to live in this mindset of fearing food or thinking that certain food groups are bad," or whatever. Whatever narrative it is, you're living in that. That's the story that you've been telling yourself.
All of those stories have been on repeat in your subconscious brain. It's important that you sit down to identify these things because oftentimes we don't even know the story that we're telling ourselves until we really sit down and recognize it. The cool thing about our brain, about our subconscious brain, is that it can be reprogrammed, but it can only be reprogrammed if you identify what it is that you're constantly telling yourself.
I encourage you if you can, get to a place where you can write down ... Whether that's pen to paper, it's on your computer, whatever it is ... I want to ask yourself, I want you to sit with yourself for 10, 15, 30 minutes, sometimes an hour depending on really how deep you go into this exercise ... But I want you to write down what you are constantly telling yourself.
This might take some time for you to quiet your mind. We live in such a loud society where I feel like we're so distracted by so many things. For me, when I really try to sit down and have a conscious exercise like this, I like to turn on music that doesn't have words so that I'm not occupying my brain by singing something. Because oftentimes we just even sing it in our head, and that's occupying a piece of our brain. So having some music that is just like background music, really quieting yourself. This could be early in the morning, late at night if you have a busy schedule. If you're a mom, bless you, you're homeschooling right now, bless you seriously. But it's really important that you do this.
I think it's oftentimes I know for me, when I first sat down and asked myself, "What is the story that I'm telling myself?" Seven years ago when I really wanted to break free from this mindset of overexercising, hating my body, not feeling comfortable in it, I had to ask myself, "What are the things that I have allowed myself to believe?" You have to go back to the things that you grew up with. There's three types of conditioning from our brain. Three types of things that have shaped our subconscious brain. That is the things that you heard, so whether that's currently the things that you're allowing yourself to hear on a daily basis of things that you grew up with, you grew up hearing. Whether it was your parents telling you something, whether it was school friends telling you something, whether, I don't know, the things you were watching as a kid or your older brother or sister of whatever it is, you have been conditioned through hearing stuff.
You've also been conditioned to train your subconscious brain through seeing stuff. The things that you saw growing up. Let's say for example you feel like you're living in this narrative that you don't deserve love, whether that's self love or that's love in a relationship with a partner. Maybe the reason you think that is because you saw a broken relationship in your life growing up. You were conditioned to see hurt and pain, and you associated that with a relationship instead of associating love and acceptance and joy.
Or maybe it was someone in your family that showed that they didn't love their body. They were constantly dieting. They were constantly making remarks, whether it was your mom or your sister or friends or aunts or uncles or whoever it was that you were around growing up. Maybe they had said things and that's how you condition. You didn't even recognize that it was actually making an impact on your life as it was until you sit down. I know for me, when I first did this exercise, I was so amazed at all of the things that I allowed myself to believe and my fears and things like that. I had to reprogram my subconscious brain in a lot of different areas because I no longer wanted to believe the things that I did.
The third type of conditioning is through experience. Going off of the, "I don't deserve love," or "I'm not worthy of love," whether it's in a partner relationship, your loving yourself. Maybe you were in a relationship whether that was in high school, in college, in your later years. Maybe you were in a former marriage. There's so many things that we've experienced and as a result, that has shaped our conditioning. That has shaped the story that we're telling ourselves. The deep down subconscious story, which is distorting your perception of your reality.
The three types of conditions. The things you've heard, the things you've seen, and the things you've experienced. All of those have created beliefs, whether consciously or subconsciously you recognize it. Those beliefs actually distort your perception of reality. For me, growing up I was always a little bit bigger than everybody in my class. I was always a little bit taller. I was bullied periodically throughout my years growing up. I had severe, severe asthma growing up.
I was never a really athletic person. I played sports, but I was never the best at what I did. I realized when I sat down about seven years ago, and I really wanted to dive into becoming the best version of myself athletically, I realized that I had so many stories that I was telling myself from my past experiences. The things that I saw.
What I saw when I was younger, I literally could not even run a mile without my mom being beside me. I remember it was third or fourth grade. My mom came to the school, bless her heart. She came to my school, and she ran the mile beside me because I had such bad asthma and I was so out of shape that I couldn't even run the mile. For years and years, I told myself this story that I was never going to be athletic or I could never be feeling my best or whatever it was.
It wasn't until I actually took time out of my day to do this exercise. Why am I thinking about this? Why is this even a thing? And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I didn't even realize that this was a story that I have allowed myself to believe."
I want to ask you. What is the story that you are telling yourself? Think about the different areas. There's so many things. It could be in your health and wellness. It could be in your relationships. It could be in your finances. Growing up in a house that maybe had a lot of money or didn't have a lot of money, that's going to impact the way that you look at your finances. The beliefs that you have about whether it's scarcity in money or the beliefs that you have around money. How much you should make. Is it bad to make money? All the things. There's so many different realms.
Relationships. The divorce rate is so high. It is inevitable that at least 50% of you listening to this either have experienced firsthand divorce with your own parents or you know somebody that has. That is definitely a thing that's going to affect your belief about marriage, your belief about relationships. I'm not saying that you should stay there, but step one of changing the story is identifying what it is and what the story is that you're telling yourself.
Step two is really shifting your story. Once you've sat down to identify what it is that you're telling yourself, it's time for you to shift your story. For me, I came up with, man, the story and the beliefs that I've allowed myself to believe through hearing, seeing and experiencing, I was not worthy. Or, "I would never be an athlete." Or, I would never be athletic," or I would never be able to achieve X, Y and Z physically because I'm still ... At the core of who I was ... I was still that 10-year-old girl who was overweight and had really bad asthma and couldn't do it. I was still living in that story until I decided to reprogram it. You have to start to shift your story. You have to let the new story that you want create your reality. You have to start changing the narrative.
For me, it was I decided that I deserve to be athletic and feel my best regardless of what my past was. In fact, I want to let my past be something that empowers other girls, maybe that are at 10, 12 years old and they're in the same shoes that I was in. They had really bad asthma. They were not the quickest or fastest or most athletic in their family or in their school. I told myself, "I am deserving of this." But it was first I had to identify what my limiting belief was, and then I had to change the story to make it empowering. It's really about shifting that story.
This is something too, when you shift your story it's going to feel weird. You're going to feel resistance because when you start to shift the narrative in which you've been living ... I'm going to give many examples. So let's say you don't believe that you're deserving of a prosperous, healthy, thriving marriage because the things that were modeled to you as a kid told you otherwise. Maybe it was that you don't believe that you can truly walk in confidence and that's because you have experienced things in your past. You have seen, maybe it was your mom or your sister or your friend not be confident, constantly making remarks. Maybe it was your father or your mother, whoever making remarks to you as a kid. You have to identify that and then you have to shift it. You're identifying, "I didn't think that I was worthy of this marriage" or a thriving marriage or, "I didn't think I was worthy of confidence, but I am."
You're going to feel resistance when you start to shift your story because your subconscious brain, the whole purpose of your subconscious brain is to try to keep you safe. It's to try to keep you in this, no, no, no, this is what we do. This habitual thing. It's a good thing if that habit is a healthy habit. It's a life giving thought. It's a bad thing if it's a negative habit. If it's something that holds you back.
But the cool thing about our subconscious brain is when you're shifting your story, you actually have the ability to reprogram it. It's through repetition. Repetition is the mother of skill. If you're willing to repeat it over and over and over again, eventually it will become a reality in your life and in your subconscious brain.
Another way that you can shift your story, an easy way to do this is, so step one you've identified it. Step two, you're shifting your story, so you're taking your previous story or your previous beliefs that you've been allowing yourself to believe and you're starting to shift them into something positive. Or something that you're striving for.
You can use what's called incantation. So incantation is something that repeated over and over again with power and energy and belief. When you first start this, it's going to feel crazy. It's going to feel like a little woo-woo, but it's amazing at what our subconscious brain can do. If you are on a confidence journey and you're really, really trying to embrace your real ... You're listening to the Embrace Your Real Podcast, you're really trying to embrace your real, you're really trying to live in confidence.
You have to create an incantation. This is something that you're going to want to do daily when you're in this. When you're really trying to be intentional about shifting your story, you want to tell yourself over and over again, "I am beautiful. I do walk in confidence. I can overcome this.' You're constantly telling yourself subconscious brain over and over again. This is something that I do on a daily basis throughout the day. When I feel a fear coming on, when I feel a negative thought coming on, I immediately rebuke it with incantations. I speak truth. Sometimes it's scripture. Sometimes I'm just speaking scripture over that fear or that doubt. Other times, I am doing an incantation over and over and over again until I drive it into my subconscious brain that it is a belief that I am choosing to replace. That's a practical way to shift your story.
Another one too, is if you're really on this health and wellness journey and you just feel like you're falling back into your old habits of not fueling your body optimally, an incantation could be, "I choose to fuel my body with foods that nourish me. To drive me and to motivate me and to allow me to live my life with confidence and with energy and all of the things." So creating an incantation for that and speaking it out. I can tell you that I do this out loud on a daily basis. Granted, I do have a deaf husband so he does not hear that. But I've done it around friends before. I've done it in public places. It might sound a little hokey, but at the end of the day I know that it works because our subconscious brain is reprogrammable. If we are conscious of that, we can actually reprogram our subconscious, which is amazing.
Going into step three. Once you have identified your story, the next step is shifting your story. Step three is supporting that new story. Once you have that new belief, you have to go back and you have to give your subconscious brain a reason to believe that. For example, I know for me when I was telling myself that I wanted to become more athletic and I really wanted to strive to be my strongest self, I had to remind myself that I've done hard things.
The thing that you're trying to support your new story with, it might not always relate to that exact thing, but it relates to the foundation of you being strong. You have endured strong things. Every single one of you listening to this, you have gone through something where in the middle of it you were like, "There is no way out of this." You are here listening to this attesting that, "Wow. I got through it, and I'm stronger." Yeah, it probably sucked.
It might be a very, very touchy subject. It might be a very, very hard thing to think back on. Heck, we are in the middle of a global pandemic right now. Right now, some of you are in the middle of this and you are just like, "I can't see through this. I don't know how I'm going to get to the end of the tunnel." If that's something even that you're wanting to change the narrative of your story, you have to support your new story. You're shifting your story. You have to support that with something. Remind yourself that you are strong. If you need to sit down and write down a list of things, of all the things that you have gone through to remind yourself that you are strong and you can do this and surely you can go through another one, I encourage you to do that. Because truly you can absolutely get through this. You just have to remind yourself of how strong you truly are.
So, step three is supporting your story. Going back and reminding yourselves, looking for evidence in your life for all the things that you've gone through. Even if you're on a confidence journey and you are trying to look for evidence to support your new belief that you want to have of you being more confident, one thing that you could remind yourself of is, "Wow, my body has carried my through so many seasons of me hating it, of me despising it, of me just looking at it in the mirror going yuck. And yet my body every single day has shown up for me. It is time for me to show up for my body." Even that, that is enough evidence in my books to say that can support my new story of wanting to be more confident.
Step four is creating a powerful visualization. Now, I have talked about visualization before on a couple of my podcasts. I am a huge firm believer in visualization. I think it's so powerful. I think that it's something that is very underutilized but is something so incredibly powerful that you can practice in your life on a daily basis. Your subconscious brain can truly not determine what is real and what is vividly imagined. When I heard that, I was like, "No way. There's no way." I'm going to actually take you through a visualization practice that will hopefully show that this is real because when I first went through this practice you guys, my jaw hit the floor. I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is real. This is real, and it's actually something that works." But the reason visualization is so important is because it supports your new story with facts, and it anchors it to associating it with positive emotion.
I want you to close your eyes if you can. If you're driving, obviously just try to get deep into this visualization. Don't get distracted by other things. But I'm going to take you through a quick visualization practice that will just show you that your subconscious brain does not actually know what is real and what is just vividly imagined. As a result, our body actually acts on it. Take a moment. Breathe. Clear your mind. Close your eyes. If you can get to a place where you are quieted, you don't have distractions.
I want you to imagine that it is a hot, hot summery day. The sun is beaming down. You are not in a house with AC. Hoo, boy. You are not in a house with AC and you are standing in your kitchen right now, and you're just thinking about how hot you are and how thirsty you are. When you look around, you're hearing the birds chirping. You're feeling the warmth on your skin, and you are just feeling so thirsty.
When you look around you kitchen, you see three lemons. When you look at those lemons, you remind yourself that you can actually make some squeezed lemonade. But first, you have to go to your cupboard and you have to get your cutting board and a knife. You're looking at these three lemons, and they're just super ripe. They're going to be perfect for lemonade. You take one of the lemons. You're looking at it, you're feeling it, you're kind of smelling it a little bit. You can kind of smell a lemon before you cut it. You're going to put it down on the cutting board, and you're going to slice it open. Remember, you are so hot. It such a hot, sunny day and you are just so thirsty.
You have that lemon. You start cutting it down the center so that you can use it for fresh squeezed lemonade. But as you cut just in half, you're looking at one side of that lemon, and you are just so thirsty you can't even wait until you make the full lemonade. So you decide to take one-half of that lemon, and you squeeze that lemon in your mouth and it's touching your tongue right now, the lemon juice. You are feeling the sourness of it, the sweetness of the lemon, and it's quenching a thirst really quickly because you're so thirsty and you're squeezing that lemon until there's no more lemon juice left in that one-half of the lemon.
Now I want you to open your eyes. I know it's a weird analogy, but most of you if you truly did this right, you should have felt a little bit of this soury, tingly feeling or maybe your face made a ugh type of feeling. I know for me, whenever I do that visualization, I get watery. My tongue starts watering. It's so crazy. It's just a powerful reminder that our subconscious brain cannot determine what is real or what is just vividly imagined.
What I encourage you to do now that you have identified the story that you've been telling yourself, you decided to shift your story and then you found evidence to support your story, you now need to create powerful visualizations within that story. For me, when I first was getting into weightlifting and really wanting to craft and build the strongest version of my body, I had to visualize myself. I had to visualize myself going into the weight room and feeling strong and confident and doing exactly what I just took you through but in the sense of me actually creating a new story in my mind.
That could even be for those of you who, just going back to the love example, you don't feel like you're worthy of love ... You decided, "Yes, I am." You have proven to yourself that you're gone through hard things and you've endured hard things. You are worthy of being loved. Now I want you to visualize what it would feel like in that relationship. You just feel so happy. You feel like you have a partner in life that understands you and is there for you. Of course, it's not perfect, but it's yours. And it's your love, and no one can take that away from you. And really going through that visualization.
Or maybe you are struggling with confidence, and that's the new story that you want to tell yourself. You've decided to shift your story. You've told yourself that your body has carried you through so many hard days where you did not love it back, so it's your time to show your body that it's beautiful and love it. You are creating a visualization of you looking at yourself in the mirror. When I say a visualization, this is not just a quick thought. It's in detail I want you to think about even what mirror you're looking at. Are you wearing a certain outfit of clothes? What does the day look like? Where are you going? What are you thinking? How are you feeling really going through this visualization? It's so powerful. It's such a powerful thing.
If you can do this over and over and over again, especially when you first start to want to change the story, start to change the narrative in which you want to live your life and achieve your goals, it's powerful. You talk to anybody in professional sports. Sports players, they do visualization. You wonder why they spend hours and hours and hours watching back video and then also going through play by play by play by play. That is a form of visualization that they are doing. You wonder why those athletes are the way that they are. They're at the top of their game. It's because they've taken time to reprogram their subconscious brain, to create these powerful visualizations so that it really anchors something in your subconscious brain. Your brain ultimately starts to think that that's actually what it's doing.
The coolest thing about a visualization is once you do it enough times ... Repetition is the mother of skill ... If you're willing to repeat it over and over and over again, it will eventually become a reality. When you repeat it so many times, it's like the next time you go to look in the mirror, your subconscious brain is going to literally help you in that. Your subconscious brain is going to be like, "Oh yeah. I remember. I already went through this." Because you had such a vivid visualization that your subconscious brain literally thinks that what you just went through in a visualization is real.
This might sound crazy if you've never done it, but once you start visualizing, it is incredible what can happen once you truly start to see things play out in your life. I even do visualization on a day-to-day basis in my morning routine. I talked about this in my morning routine episode and how important it is to have a visualization to remind my subconscious brain how I want to show up in the world. If something stressful comes up, what is my first response? I go through even visualizing a stressful situation and really allowing myself to feel how I'd feel. I feel like starting to get white knuckle. I'm starting to feel something's in my throat because I'm anxious or nervous. And then I allow myself in that visualization to feel that. Then I allow myself to say, "But I refuse to hold onto this. I refuse to have this feeling for longer than five, 10 seconds." In the visualization I will tell myself, as a result, I'm going to do X, Y and Z. That's a common thing that I do on a daily basis, and it's super easy for you. It's something that you can implement. Literally you can turn this off right now and you can implement it. It's a beautiful thing.
Be extremely concrete with your visualizations. The more detailed and specific you are, the better it is. Begin to feel the emotions that are tied to your new story. That's the beautiful thing about visualization. Again, your subconscious brain does not know the difference between what is vividly imagined and what is real. If you can truly allow yourself to start feeling it ... In my visualization that I just did with you, I was reminding you how hot you were, and how thirsty you were constantly. As a result, as you were listening to that ... If you did that properly ... You probably felt like, "Oh man. I am a little thirsty. Oh I am a little hot," regardless of where you're at. Because you were allowing yourself to feel that. I think that this is just a cool practice because it just reminds us how powerful our brain is, and it also shows us that our brain can be reprogrammed simply. So that was step four, is creating a powerful visualization.
The step five to ultimately creating a new story, a new narrative is taking action. But what I said earlier, actions that you take are stemmed from the feelings that you're feeling, and your feelings that you're feeling are stemmed from your thoughts. That's why I had you go back to your thoughts. Your thoughts, ultimately what you're thinking subconscious or consciously, go back to those three things that I just told you about. The things that you have allowed yourself to hear, the things that you saw and the things that you've experienced. So those three types of conditioning.
When you think about actions, you have to first go back to what are the current things, current habits or things that you need to X out. Identifying those things in your life, and maybe it's an old habit. Maybe it's every single time you look in the mirror you are just disgusted. That's just something that naturally is a natural response, you need to immediately identify that. Go back to the thought. Go back to why am I thinking this, and remember that everything that is visible typically starts with something that's invisible. Meaning all of the actions that you're taking, there's a reason that those actions are being taken ... Whether it's actions in a positive way or actions in a negative way that are negatively supporting your goal or they're positively supporting your goal ... It all goes back to your thoughts. Really allowing yourself to think about the things that you have allowed yourself to believe, so what habits or actions you need to let go of to adopt the new story in which you want to live. The new narrative in which you want to live.
Ultimately, the story in our head is what creates the reality. It's the actions we take based on our stories that create our reality so you have to change your story and you have to align your actions to that new story because that's when you'll ultimately change your life. It is so, so powerful. You can absolutely do this. I believe that you can.
I know for me there's so many areas of my life that I need to go back and do this exercise with. That's a beautiful thing about human growth and just being on this journey of personal development is you'll always get to a next level. It's like you have prioritized something so much in your life and you've achieved a level of success in that area, whatever you define success to be, then you have a new problem or a new thing or a new story that you have allowed yourself to believe about breaking through that next level.
I never want you to think that this is over, and I don't want you to think that I have successfully completed this and I'm never going to do this again. This is something that I'm constantly going through, constantly evaluating and constantly trying to get better at. The beautiful thing about it is if you can pick one area of your life right now to do this in ... So whether it's your health and wellness, whether it's your relationships, finances, career, whatever it is that you just feel like you have a negative story. You're living in a negative narrative, and it's hindering you.
Number one, you have to remember that everything is all interconnected. But if you can pick one specific area of your life and go through these five steps of identifying your current state in which what the story that you're telling yourself in and then you're shifting your story ... Then you're supporting that new story and then you're creating that powerful visualization which ultimately will lead you to action ... I think you'll find it to be a lot easier to implement this in other areas of your life as well. As a result, you'll just get tremendously better, and you'll feel more fulfilled.
In the certain areas of your life you'll actually be able to achieve things that you literally never thought that you could achieve. That's something that we hear all the time. When you hear Walt Disney or anybody, really anybody now with social media, who's achieved some level of success, most times they say, when they start if someone asked them, "Did you ever think that you would get here?" Most of the time, they were like, "No." But you have to remember that those people that have achieved that level of success or they've gotten to that goal, they've had to do this. Whether they've identified that this is what they've done or not, they've ultimately had to change the narrative in which they are living in in order for them to get to where they are.
I hope that this helped you. I hope that this encouraged you, this sparked something. I just want to remind you that when you are in this process of changing your story, I want you to be kind to yourself. I want you to give yourself grace. I know for me a lot of feelings came up and you could easily go down this rabbit hole of, "Man, I allowed myself to believe this for so long and it was so simple to get out of it," or, "All I need to do is just identify and shift my story." It's an easy place for us to shame ourselves or feel guilty or feel frustrated. I just want you to extend yourself grace. I want you to be kind to yourself.
We are all growing. We are all evolving, and you are listening to this podcast on this day in this season of your life for a reason. I don't believe that it's coincidence. I don't believe that you just happened to stumble upon this and here you are 40 minutes later still listening. There's a reason for that. Extend yourself grace. I also just want you to be consistent. Remember that consistency is key. Repetition is key when it comes to reprogramming your brain and really changing that story, changing that narrative inside of your head.
To wrap it up, I just want to again, remind you of those five steps to changing the story. Step one we have is identifying the story that you've been telling yourself and remembering that the three types of conditioning that you've had typically linked to the story that you're telling yourself are the things that you've heard, the things that you've seen and the things that you've experienced. All of those as a result have created beliefs, and the beliefs distort your perception of reality.
Step two is shifting your story. Once you've identified that, it's time for you to shift your story. What is the new story? What is the new narrative that you want to live in?
Step three is supporting your story. Looking for evidence in your life. Like in the body confidence one, remembering how much your body has done for you and it's carried you through and you still have lungs that are breathing and you're still able to laugh and all the things. Your body has not given up on you. It's time that you give back your body what it's given you for years and years.
Step four is creating that powerful visualization. Really creating emotions with pictures and allowing that to drive your subconscious brain into actually seeing it because your subconscious brain does not know what is real or what is vividly imagined.
And then step five is taking action. Once you trace back to that story, you've got to take action in the new narrative, in the new story and be consistent with it. It takes time. It takes repetition, and it just takes you being consistent. Having a consistent action in this.
I hope that this episode sparks something. I would actually love to know what came from it, your Aha moments. If this was something that was helpful, shoot me over a DM, screenshot this, post it up on your story, tag me, juliealedbetter. Send this to some friends if you feel like this episode would help them in any way. Remember, that we are all here together, and we are all supposed to be in this together. I never want you to feel alone. The more that you can post it up on your story, you can spark a conversation. You literally never know what someone else is going through or how much you have impacted somebody until you continue to speak up and show up for yourself and for other people. I know for me there's so many times that I just feel defeated. I don't want to post something or the struggle seems silly, but the moment I do, I'm reminded, "I am not alone." We are all humans. We all have real emotions and it's so important that we remind ourselves of that. I love you, and I will talk to you guys in the next episode.
All right sister. That's all I got for you today. But I have two things that I need you to do. First thing, if you are not already following on the gram, be sure to do so, juliealedbetter. Yes, it's with an A in the middle for that daily post workout real talk, healthy tips and tricks and honest accountability to keep your mind and heart in check. The second thing. Be sure to subscribe to Apple Podcasts to never miss an episode.
Thank you so much for joining me. It means the absolute world. I'm going to leave you with one last thought. The most beautiful women that I have met in my life are the ones who are completely confident and secure in being authentically themselves. Remember that beauty goes so much deeper than the surface. So go out there and embrace your real because you're worth it.