Episode•March 25, 2024•32 min

EP159: The Truths We Tell Ourselves: How to Navigate Harmful Beliefs

If you've ever felt something holding you back but couldn't quite put your finger on it, this episode is for you. The idea of self-sabotage and how hidden views, which we often pick up as kids, can stop us from reaching our full potential. In this episode, Brad talks about: Harmful beliefs and how they can hold us back from reaching our full potential. The conversation with a client reveals how childhood experiences can shape our mindset and limit our success. The importance of becoming aware of these harmful beliefs to unlock our true potential. An exercise is shared to help listeners identify and challenge these false beliefs. Why a goal was not achieved, leading to a deeper understanding of limiting beliefs. Uncomfortable truths to break free from self-sabotage and achieve success. Links to Resources: Get the blueprint to create financial freedom & more free time before burnout or bankruptcy happens. A complete Done-With-You Program - Join the Profit Club Join the Free Facebook Group - The Contractor Profit Blueprint Get Paid for Estimates - Free Sales Guide Plan Your Profits - Profit Journal Help us get the word out to other contractors by leaving us a review or sharing our podcast! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Transcript

0:09

Contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Hey, what's up? Welcome back to the show. I'm excited to get to talk about today's topic, but I'm going to warn you right off the get-go, this is going to be a very heavy call. You're going to want to save this call, probably go back and listen to it maybe two to three times. Go to the website, get the transcription to see this. Like this is going to be a very heavy call, but it's so critical. It's so critical to be able to unlock our full potential. Because if you've listened to me for more than like two minutes or two episodes, you've probably heard me talk about mindset. You probably heard me talk about a lot of that, you know, how the mindset, your mindset and limiting beliefs and fear really hold us back. I had a conversation this morning with one of my clients in one of our one-to-one coaching calls, and this came about going to keep it somewhat vague to try to keep this as anonymous as possible because there was some powerful stuff. and very personal stuff that was shared. But this is just the perfect illustration of how we sabotage ourselves on a daily basis. And we are completely unaware of this happening right in front of our face. So I'm going to share some of that conversation and the topics that we talked about. And then I'm even going to share with you an exercise that you can do to actually kind of unlock some of these fears that we may have and are completely unaware of. So like I said, this is going to be a very deep episode. It's going to be a very powerful episode. So I hope you hang out with me to the very end. So I joined a mastermind group myself early at the beginning of the year. And it's a very high level, very intelligent people having very difficult and intelligent conversations. A lot of mindset conversations. It's really opened my eyes. even to myself, you know, as a business coach who like there's so much more potential and capability beyond what I'm currently doing and that I still have limiting beliefs. I still have fears that I need to unlock even for myself. So this isn't like this, you know, only applies the 10% of the population and I'm doing well and, you know, everything else. If you're one of those people that want to blame the economy, you want to blame the president, want to blame. bad customers want to blame, can't find good help, you're not going to like this episode. You probably should just go ahead and stop listening right now because this is a massive, a massive self-accountability podcast episode. Like I said, this is going to get deep, okay? But it may be the one episode that actually unlocks. a ton of baggage and garbage that you have in your head. So I'm having this conversation this morning with one of my clients. And again, this is a, this is a private one-on-one conversation. And this, this contractor is pretty smart. He's, he's pretty smart. He's a go-getter, right? Like he has all of the traits that you would expect someone who to do very well in life has. So this isn't like we're starting with a, you know, a limited. skill set or someone who's maybe not as quick or not as smart or whatever. Like this, this, this person has all of the traits and abilities to be someone extremely successful, but there's, but he's stuck. Like he's stuck in his business and we've worked on some things in the past, some mindset stuff. And I could just see there's still some things lingering there. And so I started asking him some questions about his past. And here's the thing. If you guys haven't read the book Mindset by Carol Westwick, highly, highly, highly recommend you read that book because what you'll understand is that most of the problems as adults actually come from things that happen to us as kids. Most of the things that we have to work through are actually trauma-related experiences as kids. And so you have to go back and unpack all that stuff. And for a lot of people, they don't like doing that. For a lot of people, it's easier to drink alcohol, to do drugs, to have addictive behaviors, to look at porn and do all of these bad, unhealthy things, because it's much easier to do that, even though we know it's destructive, than to actually look in the mirror and do some self-reflection. And so I was talking with this gentleman and I asked him, I was like, was there anything, is there anything that happened to you when you were a kid that stands out? And he said that there was this one little thing. And I, and I, I preface this with like, a lot of times we think that it has to be this major, major, major traumatic experience. You know, we had an alcoholic father that beat us, or we lost our parents when we were a young age, or we lost a sibling, or you saw someone, you know, get murdered in front of you. Like these super crazy traumatic things. We think that that has to be like that level. But it doesn't. It can be one phrase that your parents said and they were having a bad day and you were being super annoying as a young kid and they just lost it. And they said one phrase one time that was hurtful and you latched on to that phrase and then it became your belief system. It was woven into your belief system now, who you are as a person. And it could have happened when you were like five years old and, you know, and don't realize it. You've forgotten about that comment or maybe you have remembered it. And I asked him and he said that there was a phrase one time when he was being taken to school, him and his sister, the parent said something to them about being basically about being worthless. Right. And that's it. Like that, that can be powerful. And I asked him, I said, okay, well, how often do you think about that saying? And he said something that like, was like the jackpot going off. He said, I think about that about once a week. And I'm like, my head's exploding. I'm like, what? You think about this once a week and you don't think it's affecting your daily life? 100% is 100% affecting your daily life. Because here's the thing that I just recently learned this in this mastermind group that I'm in. The subconscious does not remember things that are false. Okay. If I asked you, tell me a fact that you know, or tell me something that you know to be false. And I've asked several people this and I've heard one, you know, one thing is like, oh, the sky is, the sky is black or the grass is black, which was kind of interesting that both people picked. you know, nature, and they both described it as black or maybe a different color. Maybe it wasn't black. But anyways, like we know the sky is blue. We know that to be a truth. Okay. And so if we see something that's false, like if someone comes on and says the earth is flat, we laugh at them and say, you are, you know, okay, you're cuckoo. I don't want to talk to you anymore. And then we leave the conversation and we never think again about the earth being flat. We never think again about the sky being black or the grass being purple or whatever, because false things that we know are false do not require any more of our attention. Our brain cannot keep track of everything that happens in the world to us. And so anything that's false, it deletes it because it's not important. It's not important to our everyday life, right? It's like its own little purging system. The little, you know, the little waste can on your dashboard, like it has its own little, you know, purging system, but things that are true, i. e. I believe in God, i. e. I'm a, you know, I'm a certain political party. I identify with a certain political party, i. e. my sports team is the best. Now, whether or not it's actually true in real life, if we believe it's true. if our subconscious and our mind believes is true, it's therefore true to us. It's a truth to us. And so there we can rely on that. I can wake up every morning and rely on the idea that there is a God and that, you know, if I do, if I accept him in my heart and then I go, I'm going to go to heaven when I die. Like I can, I can have relief in that truth to me, even if it's not true in the real world. But here's the thing. When you have a belief like this contractor's parent said to them that they were worthless, that is a truth to him. And so every week, he is basically measuring himself against that belief, that truth, that he is indeed worthless. Right? And so anytime you do something that actually goes against... this idea or this belief or your truth of being worthless, your subconscious will sabotage it. A hundred percent. Your subconscious will sabotage you without even realizing it. You will, you know, if you have a run of, of a good sales and you're making good money and it looks like you're going to make a killing, all of a sudden you're going to stop making sales and you're going to be like, man, we're just having a drought right now. Something's going on. People don't want to buy. But really what's happening under the hood is that you're sabotaging yourself on these sales calls. If you've ever had the thought like, man, this is too good to be true, or I'm waiting any moment for this good thing to stop happening, right? Like I got to soak it up now because I know tomorrow it's not going to happen again. If you have any thoughts like that, you have a self-belief that is harmful. that you are not aware of. Let me say that again. If you believe, if you have thoughts about this isn't going to last, you know, I got to get it while it's good. This is not like me to have this kind of success. And you say those things and you think those things, then you have a truth to you that is harmful. You have a harmful belief system about yourself that you are completely unaware of. And the first thing you have to do is make these things aware. And that's the tool I'm going to give you here in a little bit is going to help you to make these things front and center. Because once you're aware of them, then you can start to address them and remove them. Because again, if something is false, we don't think about it again. If it's true, we think about it to reconfirm it, right? I go to church every Sunday to... essentially convince myself or reconfirm to myself that there is a God and that I need to learn more about him and so that I can be a better person. Because that's a value, that's a moral code, and it's a true belief to me, right? Some people don't believe in God and they don't go to church on Sunday because... That's not a truth to them. So you can start looking at areas of your life and realize that like, yeah, I do have certain truths. I have certain truths that I know there's a counter argument to this truth, but I still believe what I believe because it's an, it's part of my identity. It's who I built my, my identity around as a kid growing up. Right. And so I'm going to latch onto that and I'm going to, you know, it's, it's, it's part of me. I got to change that. If I asked you if there was ever anything that you changed positions on and you can recall something that you changed positions on, you could probably remember like how difficult it was for you to change that position. Like even though you ended up changing positions on something, that process of going through that required like a ton of evidence. It required, you know, facts and things that basically countered against your belief system. And it was so overwhelming that your belief system's like, wait a minute, I believe X, but I have all of this evidence that suggests that this is wrong. And the reason why I believe X is because when I was in the seventh grade, you know, Mrs. Johnson, my English teacher, would always have this phrase every time we walk in the room, this and this and this. And I just kind of adopted that as a belief. But really, it was just Mrs. Johnson pushing her belief onto me, and I adopted it. And now, I never really thought about it, but now that I see evidence against this, that doesn't make any sense. And so now I'm going to switch positions, right? And then you switch positions, and then you never think about what Mrs. Johnson said to you, because now it's false in your belief, and we don't think about false things. You see how that works? Again, this is very difficult to do. It requires a lot of introspective reflection, writing things down, going through the exercises. And, you know, usually when I talk about stuff like that, the first thing is, I don't have time for that. I don't have time for that. Well, that's BS that you do. Hey, just a quick timeout from the show. In the next 30 seconds, I'm going to tell you exactly how you can transform your contracting business.

14:18

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15:09

Right. That's just your subconscious saying, whoa, hold on a minute. I don't want you to know all my secrets. Like, I don't want you to come in here and start changing everything because I like being comfortable. You know, our Brad, remember our goal is to be comfortable in life. And so you start going in there and changing a bunch of stuff and we're going to get uncomfortable. And we don't like that. Remember? So like busy work, like we all do this in our contracting business. Like, oh, I have to go look at that job. I have to go get this material. I have to do this right now. It's like, well, what were you doing? Well, I was doing estimates and I hate doing estimates. But I really got to go out to the job site and check on the guys right now because they said they needed my help. Okay, so you couldn't just have them fix it? No, it's just better if I do it in person. What did you ask him? No, I didn't ask him. I just know it's better. That's you trying to avoid uncomfortable work. Okay, so you got to embrace the uncomfortableness of this. So when you have these fears that we don't know about, they're constantly sabotaging us. They're constantly sabotaging us. And then what happens on top of this is for like my client who, who, you know, whose parent told them that they were worthless. Now he has a backdrop to measure everything else. Right. And then when you ask these people like, well, what, what, what would, what would make you successful? And I don't, I asked him this, but in general, not just him, but in general, define success. What would make you successful? And it's usually a very vague. response. Well, I would be successful if I'm not working on the tools anymore. I would be successful if I could take three, you know, three months vacation every year, right? It's like sometimes this definition of success is not really measurable level of success. Okay. And so we end up having this horizon, if you will, of a success measurement. And so we're always constantly measuring against a horizon that you can't touch. There's a book called The Gap and the Gain. Highly recommend reading it. And it's about people that live in the gap versus the gain. This is something that I struggle with living in the gap because I'm always measuring against the horizon. And I'm like currently trying to work through, you know, figuring out what those childhood things are that are holding me back. Like this is an active. thing that I'm doing right now is, is I go see a therapist. I'm trying to like really figure out what these things are that are, you know, keeping me held back and reaching my full potential. Cause I don't even feel like I'm halfway there to my full potential, but it's frustrating at times because you know, you're capable of more, but you can't figure out why you can't get there. And if that's you, if you have that feeling, it's because you have unaddressed things, you know, beliefs, truths to you that are unhealthy and that are holding you back because your subconscious's job is to keep you safe. Let me say that again. The subconscious's job is to keep you safe. And if your belief system is that you are worthless. and you're trying to become worthy, the subconscious's job is to sabotage you to keep you from becoming worthy because our identity system says that we are not worthy. You see how that works? You have to unlock these things. You have to. Fear is what's holding everyone back. But the problem is we don't understand what fears. We can look at surface level fears like, oh, there's not, you know, can't find good help. I mean, maybe there's a tiny bit of truth in that, but for the most part, it's not true, right? It's just not true. It's more difficult. Sure. That's the truth part. But in all, that's not true because if you couldn't find good help, then no business on earth would have good help. And so we can ask ourselves, is it possible in the world, in the entire world, is it possible that someone has a good employee? And most people should say yes. And then I say, well, is it possible for someone else? You know, is it possible for someone else to have a good employee? And most people would say, yes, I know a guy who's got a really good employee. If I could just get his employee, everything would be fixed. Okay. Hold on tight. If it's possible for someone else, then it has to be possible for you. Right. And so there's, there's a, there's something blocking you there. Okay. And that's what we're trying to figure out is what is it that's blocking us, right? What is keeping us from reaching our full potential? And so once we understand that we've created truths for us that aren't real truths and they're harmful to us, and then we understand the idea of this, now we can start the process of discovering or making ourselves aware of this. harmful truth to us. That's really not true. Okay. Now here's, what's crazy. When you are unaware of something, can you control it? If you had cancer, a friend of mine told me last week that he has a prostate cancer, but it's, you know, it's going to be curable and taken care of, but he just became aware of it. So if you were, if you had cancer, but you were completely unaware of the fact that you had it, can you control The outcome of that, right? It's slowly eating away on the inside. You're unaware of it. Are you able to control or stop the spreading or to eliminate it or get rid of it if you're unaware? No, you can't. So you have to have awareness first before you have control. If you feel like your life is out of control. If you feel like your life, your, I'm sorry, your job sites and your business is out of control, it's because you don't have awareness of what it is that's causing you to be out of control, right? You ever got to the end of a job, thought you sold it well, and you had all this money. You get to the end, it's all done. You look at the statements in your account and job costing. You're like, where did all the money go? Where'd all the profit go? The reason why that happened is because you were unaware of your profit leaks. You see, you can't control the profit leaks because you're unaware of them. If you're in a boat and it's sinking and you're trying to figure out why it's sinking and you're not aware of the big hole in the side, right? And you may try to go faster or whatever to solve it and you can't figure out why the boat's sinking. It's because you're unaware of the hole in the side. The moment you become aware of the hole in the side, what can you do? You can now take control of the situation and, you know, patch the hole or start bailing water out or a combination of both. You become aware. Now you can control it and solve the problem. For 99.9% of us that are stuck, that are on the crazy cycle, that can't understand what's holding us back, it's because you're unaware of what's holding you back. You're unaware of the hole in your ship. You're unaware of the cancer in your body. You're unaware of the harmful truths that you believe. So once you become aware of this, now you can control it. Now you can control the belief, okay? Like I said, this is deep-rooted stuff. This is deep-rooted stuff. Take some time. So here's an exercise you can do to try and help you become aware of these harmful truths that we believe. Okay? You're going to have to write this down. You're going to get a piece of paper out, and you're going to write this down. But basically what you want to do is you're going to explain to your future. Your future self is going to explain to your current self what's going on. So you're going to pick something that you, a goal that you have. Okay? Let's just say you have a goal of building a $5 million revenue business. That's just a goal. Whatever reason you want to build your business to be the $5 million revenue business. You're going to write this down just like this. And then you insert whatever your goal is. But this is what it's going to look like. I wanted to build a $5 million business, comma, and I failed because... of blank, blank, and blank, or blank, and blank, or blank, or six blanks. I wanted to build a $5 million business, and I failed because of blank, blank, and blank. Now, this is your 70-year-old self, future self, telling your current self why you failed at achieving your goal, okay? When you do this, You basically have an older version of yourself, you know, asking, you know, asking you this question or telling you. And then once your answers, like once you have these answers, you then ask yourself, well, why? Why did that happen? Why was that the problem that you failed? So let's, as an example, let's just say, you know, going back to my clients, he's like, well, I failed because I didn't think I was worthy. I wanted to build a $5 million business and I failed because I was not worthy of. that level of success. And then you ask yourself, well, why? Why did you feel like you weren't worthy? And you keep asking this down and down and down. You keep going and asking these questions until you get to the root of the problem. Now, this may unlock other problems. This is why this is a process, because you have to really dig deep and start unlocking a lot of these dark places that you've locked away and don't want to go back into again. You may have to cut the locks off. You know, the door may be rusted shut because it's been it's been down and deep for a long period of time. But you got to figure out what that is. And you can ask questions like, why did you do that? What could you have done differently? You know, what else could you have done that you didn't do? What were you afraid of? Like you ask these questions to go into your past self and answer these questions. Now, here's a here's a part of this that you can do if you're having struggles to like figure this out. Close your eyes, pretend like you're sitting in a movie theater and images of your past life are coming into the screen. And you're watching yourself in a movie theater and you're watching these things that happened in your past. But you have to close your eyes and imagine them, right? And so you're seeing this movie theater. It's like you're watching someone else's story or life, but it's really you. This will help to unlock some of these things because it's not, you're not really asking your subconscious directly. You're like watching a video of someone else. It's like tricking your subconscious to show these images. And you can see these images and be like, oh, yes, when I was a kid, my parents said to me and my sister on the way to school that we were worthless and never were going to amount to anything. I can see it. Like it's a picture right in front of me. I see it. Like it's a third party, right? And really, if you have those thoughts, that's how it plays in your head is like a movie theater, like a movie in a movie theater. So if you're having trouble trying to unlock these things, do that exercise. So you have to go into your past and you have to start seeing the evidence that allowed you to create this belief system that we know is not true, but we think it's true. And whatever that is. Whatever you have resistance towards is exactly the thing that's holding you back. And once you understand and have awareness of this, then you can start the process of, you know, changing that belief system. So one of the things that I had him do, because he told me this and I said, well, have you, are you successful now? He's like, no, not really. I was like, what do you mean? You started your own business. He's like, well, I took over a business. I'm like, yeah, but you still run it, right? Well, yeah. I was like, okay. Have you ever sold a job before? Yeah. Have you ever produced the job? Yeah. Were the customers happy whenever you got done? Yeah. Okay. Well, there's three evidences of being success right there, of being successful. So now we understand like this truth that you believe that you're not successful, that you're not going to be worthy is not true. Because I just gave you three evidences, three pieces of evidence that you are successful, right? Or that you are worthy. And you can go down this exercise and ask yourself this. And basically what you're going to do at the end is start to build the case in your own life as to why this true statement that we believe is actually not true. It's a false statement. And once we can make it a false statement, then we no longer have to think about it again. Once we remove this limitation, then we can move on. Now, you may have 20 of these things that you have to go through. You may only have one major one. I don't know. But this process, you have to go through over and over and over again. And like I said at the beginning of this podcast, is that it's not a fun thing to do. It may bring up a ton of emotion. But I promise you, if you go through this exercise and you make yourself aware of these, harmful truths about your belief, and then you remove that, like it's going to be night and day difference. Like you're, you will not be amazed of the outcome on the other side of that. For some people, it's like literally changes their life. You know, for others, it just gives them a pretty good boost. If you've already done some of these types of things with therapists or whatever, you know, that you may not have a major, a major breakthrough. But if you go through this and you remove every single one of these harmful beliefs, untrue beliefs, it's just I can't even explain to you the potential that you'll have on the other side of that. I mean, I just I can't I literally can't even put in the words. The sad thing about this whole thing is that the majority of you listening to this will not do this exercise. And the simple reason is because you don't want to be uncomfortable. And this is literally this is the untruth. you know, the true belief that we have that's, that's harmful. It's your, it's really your subconscious telling you not to even open this door because it's going to be harmful. And so when you think this isn't really going to be helpful, you know, I don't really like all that foo-foo stuff, Brad, I'm not into that. You know, I just work hard. I'll just work harder. I'll just work an extra 20 hours a week and then I'll be successful. I'll have it, you know, that's what a lot of people will say. But hopefully if you're listening to this now, you will go through this process and you will realize the power of it. If you do this, please, and you have results on the back end, please let me know. Even if you don't have results. If you go through this exercise, please let me know the results. Smoke signal, email, text, I don't care. Let me know if this exercise helped you or it didn't help you. I truly want to know. you know, what it's doing for you. So if you go through this exercise, you make yourself aware of this untruth. You overwhelm that untruth with evidence as to why that's not true. You make that true now a false statement, and then you can forget about it. And no longer will it hold you back. Like I said, this is a super powerful exercise and a very important you know, thing to do in your, in your life, which will affect your business. So I hope you take this serious. I hope you go through it and let me know your results. Guys, that's the end of this episode. Thanks for hanging out for me during this little more serious episode. And, and I hope you get a lot out of it. I hope it helps unlock you to achieve your full potential. You know where to find me on the socials. Just search for the hammer and grind podcast, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. And shoot me a message. Let me know what happened. And until next time, guys, remember, profit is not a dirty word.