Are you supportive, kind, and encouraging to yourself or are you more apt to be self-loathing, unkind, and berate yourself?

Do you Believe In You? In who you are. In how you are made. In what you are capable of. In your ability to get things done. In the power of the Holy Spirit in you, available to you for help at any moment!

What we believe determines how we behave. And what we accomplish.

I believe we are created by God. I believe that He made us in His image. I believe we are loved by our Creator. Not just that our Creator, God, is love, but that He loves each of us individually. I believe we must choose to receive His love. I believe God is working for our good. I believe life is a gift. I believe that as we TRUST God and live in His love, we bring heaven to earth.

I believe we are created with amazing brains but that often we let our brain do what it wants without really considering the power we have to choose what we think and how we feel and what we create in our life.

We usually just assume that the thoughts our brain offers us are true. The thoughts seem true because our brain likes to prove our thoughts true by causing us to see what we think about. The thoughts seem true because we have developed habits over the years to the point that they have become automatic. Our brain likes to make a habit automatic because then it doesn’t have to expend so much energy, but our brain does not care if the habit is good for us or not.

I have come to understand that our brain tends toward assuming the worst, trying to keep us safe, keep us from expending energy, and generally seeking pleasure. We must decide to intentionally choose what we think. We do not have to just go along with what our brain tells us. As I have mentioned in previous posts, we must first become aware of what our brain is offering us. We must begin to pay attention to our thinking so that we can replace the unhelpful thoughts with new beneficial truth thoughts.

For example, I can think “I am not doing a good job” or maybe that “I haven’t done anything this month” because I fail to meet one new routine I want to implement in my life. Like, I decide I want to eat healthier but then I do not eat healthier throughout the month. Maybe I start out good and eat healthy for a few days but then we have unexpected company and go out to dinner, and I eat whatever I want. Then instead of just going back to eating healthy the next day, I get some ice cream because it is summer and it’s hot, and I wanted some. Before I know it, the month has past, and I am still eating the way I’ve always eaten with no change which causes me to get mad at myself. I tell myself that I am a failure because I did not regularly do this one activity. I say, “see you didn’t make any change after all, you stayed exactly as you were.”

When I treat myself this way, one, I discount all the things I have done this month, and all I did accomplish on a daily basis. And two, no one gets to a better new place by beating themselves up. When I think, “you are a failure,” I feel bad about myself and will most likely go eat cookies. Therefore, if my goal for the month was to eat healthy, and I blew it again I feel even worse about myself.

If on the other hand I remember I am human, and it takes much effort to change and often that effort is two steps forward and one step back then I will more likely shake off the fact that I did not meet my goal this month but will continue in my persistence to get where I want to go with eating healthy. (We can apply this idea to any area of our life we want to change. Remembering that change takes time and effort.)

We tend to feel worthless about ourselves because of one thing that happened, or one mistake we made, or one thing we did not accomplish. We tend to tie all the things that are happening in our life together, even if they are not really connected. We make what other people say or do mean something about us. When we think we are not a good mom, or not a good wife, or whatever negative thought, then we feel depressed, sad, defeated, and usually either we react by procrastinating or we over-do. Brené Brown says some of us tend to over-function and others of us tend to under-function when we are in fight, flight, freeze mode. She says, “We all have patterned ways of managing our day-to-day anxiety, and these patterns often reflect the roles and expectations of our first families.” Being aware of how we respond is the first step in being able to recognize when it is happening and over time learn to respond differently. We can train ourselves to respond to anxiety or stress without going into the overwhelm – over response or overwhelm – under response cycle. We can train ourselves to cultivate calm and not be afraid to feel what we feel.

We think the thoughts we think are true. But our brain is offering us those thoughts because we are in a familiar cycle. A cycle we have become accustomed to being in. We have trained ourselves to be in this cycle. And often we attach our worth to it thinking, “I can’t get my act together,” but really it has nothing to do with that. When we make the cycle such a big deal, we just create more of the same thing we have always created, and we stay stuck.

Our brain likes to stay in the cycle because it is what we know. It is easier. It is comfortable. We must choose to pay attention to our thinking. We must choose to break the cycle. Our brain is always going to want to find the negative. We must choose intentionally to find the positives. We must intentionally choose to notice all we have done and not define ourselves by the one thing we didn’t do. We must learn to be on to our brains and not just blindly believe what it offers us.

We choose to be self-compassionate. We choose to love ourselves, support ourselves, encourage ourselves, and that starts to create a new pathway in our brain.

We have trained our body to live a certain way and then our body wants to look for reasons to stay in overwhelm to stay in the defeatism because this is what we are accustomed to. We must choose to train our brain and body to be a new way!

We must choose to believe in us! We must choose to believe we are capable! We practice living from love, joy, peace, and hope even if it feels uncomfortable at first, even if it takes a lot of work. We think, feel, and act until we become. And over time with lots of practice, and lots of two steps forward and one step back, we will begin to live from love, joy, peace, and hope automatically.

Keep going! Keep practicing! Be self-compassionate!

Believe in you!