We all want someone else to be kind to us, to believe in us, to support us, and encourage us, and tell us we are doing a good job. To include us and make us feel good about ourselves. And that is great if we have it. But I want to ask you, are you believing in you? Do you support you and encourage you and tell yourself you are doing a good job? Do you speak kindly to yourself, like you would someone you cared about?

Too often we treat ourselves worse than we would ever treat someone else. We have high expectations of what we should or shouldn’t do or be. Then we often say mean things to ourselves in our head when we don’t meet those expectations.

We must practice believing in ourselves. We must practice being kind to ourselves. We must practice have compassion for ourselves.

I encourage you to 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! Believe in God working in you and through you. Believe in God equipping and enabling and empowering you in all that you do. Believe that you are loved that you are enough.

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 practice believing these thoughts all the time. And then I practice believing some more because I am an easily forgetful person. I can get easily distracted by the “noise” of the world if I am not careful and forget who I am and who’s I am.

I have had to learn to be onto my brain and the thoughts my brain offers me. 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 automates: she thinks this thought, I create this feeling. 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.

We must choose to think on Truth. We must practice believing in God’s love for us. We must practice receiving His love for us. And we must practice agreeing with God about what He says about us. We have to practice believing and receiving and agreeing until it is automatic for us.

For me, this has not been a once and done thing. This is an on-going process of practicing believing and receiving and agreeing with God, of renewing my mind on Truth. And some days I am better at it than other days.

As I rest in God’s love for me and practicing believing that what He says about me is true, regardless of what people say or the world says, I still experience trouble in this world. Things don’t work out, tragedies happen, unexpected challenging circumstances arise, people still say hurtful things and let me down.

I gave a speech recently for my company and I said, “We all have our individual stories. We all are dealing with changes possibly with our health or the health of a loved one. We all have losses and griefs. There are accidents and tragedies. There are also joys and wins. We all have highs and lows. We all have failures and successes. We all have celebrations and disappointments. They look different in each of our lives, but it is all there. We get to choose what we make it all mean with the thoughts that we think!

We are all so similar even though we live in different parts of the United States and live very different lives. We all experience similar things the situations, circumstances, and people involved are just different.

Life is hard sometimes. And the people, situations, circumstances, all the stuff, can be overwhelming.

Whether it is a workday where the material comes in wrong, deliveries mysteriously disappear, and contacts do not reply to our multiple email requests for confirmation or information.

Or a day where you receive a phone call that changes everything you are doing for the next several weeks because your child has been in an accident, or your parent has died, or the test results came back positive.”

Over the past few years, I have read and listened to books, watched videos listening to experts, learning about how our brains work and how we form habits. Then I have been trying to take the knowledge I have received and implement it into my life. I have been surprised by the power we have to change if we are willing to be open, to think some new thoughts, and to practice believing something different.

Belief is powerful!

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

Our beliefs are the thoughts that we have practiced thinking over and over again. We have to practice believing a new thought in order to begin to act a different way. This takes time and effort. Our brains go towards the negatives. Our brains assume the worst in an effort to keep us safe. In this effort to keep us safe, our brains often offer us unhelpful thoughts. We must redirect our brains to the positives. We must be intentional about choosing what we think. We must continually renew our minds on Truth.

For example, something happens, someone does something, and our body creates the feelings of rejection, overwhelm, stress, or disappointment for us based on the thoughts we think about whatever happened or was said. And then we feel the rejection, overwhelm, or disappointment not the person who did the thing.

We have the power to choose what we make the “thing” mean with our thoughts.

I am not saying this is easy!

I have been working on my mind-management for 4-5 years now and I still have moments/days/weeks even when my emotions seem to get the best of me especially if I am tired, hungry, and/or stressed. When I feel overwhelmed or stressed, I want to quit (escape) which is a flight response to the shame and blame cycle I experience, put on myself, because of mine or others’ expectations of me to perform and please and be perfect. It can feel like so much pressure to be a certain way and like I’m not loved as I am. 

When I am in a shame/blame cycle or a negative stress cycle, I start to think I’m crazy, doubt myself, overthink everything, and apologize a lot. I feel like I’m wrong. I want to be someone different. I don’t like me. 

I have been working so hard to move past all of this and when it all comes back, I think maybe I’m not improving. Maybe all the work I am doing is not working. I wonder if the work is worth the effort. Too often I feel I should be “better.” Happy all the time. Not struggle with emotions. Other people do not seem to struggle as much as I do. When I struggle, I feel there is something wrong with me. I am too emotional. Maybe I have a hormone imbalance. Maybe I am not seeking God correctly or I am missing something.

These days in these moments I am trying to get curious and ask myself questions about what is causing my emotions. What thoughts am I thinking that are generating these feelings for me? What could I learn from the feelings I am having? How could I lean more into God’s love for me in this moment of high emotions?

I also try to remind myself of Truth with some questions like, what if sadness and emotions are just part of the way God made some of us? What if sometimes I am just struggling a little more and nothing has gone wrong?

I realize maybe our culture does not readily allow for our full range of emotions, so we judge ourselves and doubt when we feel we do not measure up. But when we do this, we are listening to the wrong voice.

Just recently events in my life seemed to stack up and lead to some volatile emotions for me. There was travel, getting off my routine, health issues of a family member, expectations of others, concern for my children, my company’s National Sales Meeting, my expectations of myself, all of life, which all combined to me feeling very emotional easily saddened, overwhelmed, struggling with doubt.

All these things lead to me thinking about the “ebb and flow” of life. I tried to remind myself that this is all part of it. I tried to practice self-compassion, acknowledge where I was, not beat myself up for being there. I practiced allowing the emotions, but they just were not processing as quickly as I would like.

I had to work against not getting down on myself. And be kind to myself when I totally overreacted to what felt like other people’s rejection, of not being included, and choosing not to spiral into self-doubt and fears. I had to be onto my brain and the unhelpful negative thoughts it was offering me. I had to realize my own addiction to high emotions of stress and overwhelm and not fall into my old way of being. I had to choose not to justify my emotional state with thoughts of what to blame my emotions on. I was in a battle for my mind. In seemingly all areas of my life. It felt overwhelming. My brain tried to offer me unhelpful solutions to bring relief. 

I had to choose to intentionally redirect my thoughts to the Truth that I am a child of God. “I am loved by The King. I am filled with the Holy Spirit. I am filled with grace and power. I am loved by my husband and sons.” I just kept redirecting my thoughts with a good, positive, Truth thought every time my brain offered me an unhelpful negative self-sabotaging thought. Over and over and over again. Moment by moment until the shame storm past. Until I broke the negative cycle. I choose to assign new meaning to the circumstance by thinking new thought which helped me to generate the feelings I wanted to feel.

We must believe that we can change our thinking about our lives. We can tell ourselves a new Truth story. We can believe in the power of the Holy Spirit helping us through whatever emotions we encounter that come up in varying situations realizing that we trained ourselves to have these emotions and that we can train ourselves to acknowledge them, process them, and move through them. We can remember that our emotions were given to us by God. We remind ourselves that nothing has gone wrong. This is all part of it. We practice kindness and self-compassion.

We practice believing in ourselves. Practice believing in God’s love for us. Practice receiving His love for us. And practice agreeing with God about what He says about us.

Keep seeking and discovering!