Episode 76: Optional Beliefs

Here's something most people don't realize: Your thoughts are optional. Everything you think inside of your mind, even if it FEELS like a fact, is actually just a story you tell from your own point of view.  Which is great news, actually, because when you're feeling hurt, frustrated, unappreciated, or stuck, you can examine your story and decide if you want to believe something new. I think you'll be surprised how freeing this can feel.  :)

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Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 76, Optional Beliefs.

I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way, so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hello, how are you today? So I want to start this episode by telling you about the stop sign that is really close to my house. It's not the one right at my cul-de-sac, but it's right as you turn left onto the street.

The stop sign that's right there at the four-way stop. So somebody about three years ago took some stickers or vinyl lettering or something and added two words, don't and believing, and they like stuck them on the stop sign. So when you drive by, it says, don't stop believing.

And it must have been about three years ago. And I thought the HOA or some other entity would like take it away, but it's still there. Like the stickers are still there.

And so every time I drive by, I read the sign and it says, don't stop believing. And then I usually get that song by Journey stuck in my head, you know, don't stop believing. And it's just kind of fun.

I actually, you know, it's kind of like vandalism. I don't endorse it, but at the same time, I actually like kind of enjoy seeing it every time I'm driving out of our neighborhood. So, so I think that's kind of an inspiring idea, right? Don't stop believing in whatever it is.

And also I think it can be an inspiring idea to purposely choose to stop believing certain things. Did you know you can do that? You can stop believing an idea. You can stop interpreting any situation in a way that brings you pain.

If you want to, you can stop believing something you were taught when you were young, you can stop believing an idea you picked up from a book or the internet or a commercial or a movie or a friend. So here's the thing. We all walk around believing stories all day long.

We think they're facts. Some of them are, most of them aren't. They're just how we choose to view and interpret our circumstances.

You have around 40,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day about yourself, about other people, about the world, about God. And most of those thoughts are some sort of a story. So you might think or believe something like she's selfish or I'm not very pretty.

Maybe my parents did a terrible job raising me. My husband doesn't love me. My life is harder than other people's.

No one understands me. It's not fair what I've had to go through. And these feel like facts, but they're not.

They're optional beliefs. And you might have all sorts of evidence for why you believe your life is hard or why you think something isn't fair or why you think no one understands you, but it's all just a story. It's your interpretation of your life experiences so far.

And all of the beliefs that I just listed happened to be ones that will create pain when you attach to them. A belief will shape how you feel, what you look for, what you focus on, what you do and don't do in your life. It will color how you interpret and respond to situations that you come across.

You can keep any belief that you want to. Lots of them are worth hanging on to. But what I want to share with you today is that every belief is optional and you can stop believing a painful story anytime you choose to.

So to really oversimplify this, there's basically two ways that you can choose to be a human in this world when it comes to what you do when you feel pain. Okay. So when you feel pain, there's essentially two options.

Let's call it door. Number one and door. Number two, door.

Number one, when you feel pain is you can try to press the pain down. You could blame it on somebody else. You can complain about how it shouldn't be happening.

You can try to distract yourself from the pain by eating or scrolling or shopping or watching or any other kind of pleasure seeking that numbs your pain, but doesn't heal it. You can try to control other people and try to get them to change. Thinking that them changing is going to be the solution to your pain.

All of this is door. Number one, basically try to find any way you can to not confront the pain. Always believing that the cause of the pain is the unfair circumstance, the rude boss, the ungrateful child, this awful economy, everything outside of you.

That's one option of how you can be in the world. There's also another option. Let's call this door.

Number two, when you feel pain, instead of doing all those other things, instead of pressing it down, blaming it on someone else, resisting it, complaining about it, or avoiding it, you can go into inquiry. What is this painful story that I'm believing? Why am I choosing to think this? And you can embrace the idea that thoughts are optional and you can use pain as a very helpful indicator light on your dashboard that something is off inside of your mind. Now there's clean pain, like grief when someone passes away or disappointment when you work hard for something and don't succeed at it.

The feeling of loss when a season of any kind is coming to an end. And I believe that clean pain is meant to be felt fully embraced, honored, acknowledged, and processed. It will move through us, but there's also a whole lot of dirty pain that's available.

And this is what we create in our minds when we choose door number one, and we decide to blame and complain and resist and avoid. We don't take responsibility for the way our beliefs shape our view of everything in dirty pain, which manifests as anger, resentment, anxiety, hatred, self-pity. I believe dirty pain is meant to be examined.

It actually has so much to teach us. If we're willing to honestly take a look and go into inquiry and find out it has so much to teach us. If we're willing to honestly take a look and go into inquiry and find out what am I believing here? What is the story I've made up in my mind about this? Why am I choosing to think in this way? What is this creating for me in my life? And eventually what other options do I have of how I want to interpret what has happened or what is happening? I think taking time to really understand the story you're telling about anything that happens in your life is so incredibly valuable, such a great use of time and energy.

Ultimately, it's the linchpin for whether the challenges of life will make you better or just make you better. The decision of whether you want to live always opening door number one and trying to escape your pain or choosing to open door number two, where you intentionally decide to face your pain and come to understand it. That's the fork in the road that can either propel you into an addiction or bring you to your knees.

So that's really what I want to share with you today. Stories can be very painful. The things we believe about ourselves, about our past, about our mistakes, about the actions of others, about our worthiness as humans.

These beliefs can bring us so much pain and the pain is real. It's not imagined pain. It's real.

We feel it in our bodies, but we create it in our minds with our stories. So what I want you to know is that you have the option to stop believing a painful story. You can unlearn any way of thinking.

You can form a new pathway in your brain. In the Christian world, we call this repentance, a fresh view about God, oneself, or the world. The word repentance comes from the Greek word metanoia, which means a change of mind.

And the choice to stop believing a painful story, the choice to see your life in a new way, to unlearn an old belief, to embrace a story that's more true or more joyful or more full of love and possibility. My phrase for that choice that you can make anytime you want to is to think new thoughts. So let's look at one optional belief today.

There are millions. Every belief is optional, but let's just look at one, one belief that a lot of people view as true that you can believe, or that you could choose to stop believing if you want to is this. She hurt my feelings.

This is a super common phrase. It's culturally accepted. Like we can say this and people validate it.

Like it's a fact. Yeah. Oh, she hurt your feelings.

And if you're like me, well-meaning people taught this concept to you when you were little at school, at church, at home. Oh, you hurt her feelings. See how she's so sad.

You need to go apologize for hurting her feelings. And I like the part of this belief that encourages us as humans to be aware of other people and how they feel. And it encourages us maybe to be kind and to not seek to harm another person, right? All of that's beautiful.

But since I found life coaching, I have chosen to unlearn the idea that someone else can hurt my feelings. I've chosen to stop believing that I believe other people are not powerful enough to hurt my feelings. It's like Eleanor Roosevelt said, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent, right? They can't reach inside your body and implant an emotion into your heart.

Your thoughts create how you feel, how you interpret what someone else said or did, what you make it mean about you determines how you feel. If someone says something unkind to you or about you, you can make it mean that you're inferior and worthless, and you can get upset and you can say, they hurt my feelings. And you can go try to find someone who agrees with you.

And who thinks this person was out of line in what they said. And you can find that. But I don't like the result of living in that model.

So I choose to take responsibility for my own feelings. And I choose to not believe anymore that I can hurt someone else's feelings. I know a lot of people who do believe this and that's fine.

You can believe anything you want to. I just know for me that when I get in the business of trying to make sure no one gets their feelings hurt, I actually show up in ways that aren't totally honest. Sometimes I pretend or worry or placate in order to not hurt someone else's feelings.

And I feel very anxious and out of control when I'm trying to turn the dial on how someone else feels. And I actually remember being afraid to let go of this idea. I worried that if I stopped believing that I could hurt someone else's feelings, that I would somehow give myself permission to start being mean or hurtful or insensitive.

And so part of the reason I held on to the belief as long as I had was this idea like, oh, I need to be kind so I don't hurt her feelings. And I remember feeling uneasy. That if I really fully embraced the idea that my thoughts create my feelings, it's not external circumstances.

I can't hurt someone else's feelings. They can't hurt mine. I remember worrying that this would be dangerous.

But that has not been my experience. I have found that when I take responsibility for my thoughts, creating my feelings, and I choose to believe that whatever else anyone else feels is also created by their thoughts, I actually show up with more love. And if someone is upset with me, I can examine my own motives and actions.

And I can apologize if I was out of alignment with what I value in that situation. And if I wasn't out of alignment, if I examine my own motives and my own actions, and I know that I was aligned with what I believe and who I want to be, I can fully allow that person to feel upset. And it's totally fine.

Their thoughts about me are creating a feeling of frustration. It doesn't necessarily have to mean that I did anything wrong for me. Once I started making CTFAR models and examining my beliefs, I realized that the fear and the anxiety and the craziness of trying to titrate everything I do in order to not hurt someone else's feelings, or trying to feel hurt and sad that somebody else did something that hurt my feelings just created so much chaos and anxiety in my life.

So I decided to stop believing that. It's the same thing with he makes me so mad. That's a belief.

That's a story. I can find evidence for it. If I want to try to prove that it's true, it's just that all that evidence still leaves me feeling super angry.

And with the only solution to my anger, being trying to get him not to have done the thing he did. That's me telling a miserable, powerless victim story that will keep me angry and trapped. And that's not what I want in my life.

That's not the result I want to create. So I take the option of not believing that someone else can make me mad. If I am mad, I know it's because of my own thoughts about whatever anyone else did.

And then I can examine my own story. Find out what am I believing that's creating this anger. And when I'm ready, I can let go of that story and I can trade my anger that I created with the story that I was telling.

I can trade that anger for acceptance or compassion or humility or patience. When I choose to think about the whole thing in a new way. All right.

So that's one example of an optional belief. Let's do some more next week. On the next episode, I'll share a few more beliefs that you could choose to stop believing if you want.

Or sometimes we call it unlearning or editing or updating a belief. It's truly exhilarating to realize that a story is just a story. It's just sentences in your mind.

And if you want to, and when you're ready, you have the option to stop believing a story anytime you want to. Thanks so much for joining me today.