Journaling While Exhausted Reveals Limiting Belief

There was a day, back when I was working full-time as a family physician, when I sat at the water’s edge on a beautiful, rugged beach in Maine, trying to enjoy the view and the sound of the waves, despite my exhaustion. As it turned out, that was the only day I got to the beach that summer.

As I sat there, writing in my journal, I thought I knew what I wanted. I’d been reading life coaching books and Cheryl Richardson recommended that you write down what you want 15 times. At that time I saw patients

four full days a week, took a LOT of call, and I was married with two stepchildren, so the 110 hour work weeks were no longer “working” for me.

I was feeling overwhelmed and defeated. I believed I had to keep working this way until I was either out of debt or dead-and dead was starting to seem more likely.

I wrote in my journal:

“I work three days a week and I’m still paying down my debt.
I work three days a week and I’m still paying down my debt.”

After I’d written this statement 15 times, I looked at it. Somewhere around the 4th or 5th time I’d written my statement, it had changed. So I ended up writing this statement 10 times:

“I work three days a week and I’m not increasing my debt.”

That’s when I realized I didn’t really believe I could work less and still get out of debt. I could have cried. I probably did cry. Then I took a deep breath and decided to work on that (extremely) limiting belief. The first thing I did was consciously, carefully, write:

“I work three days a week and I’m still paying down my debt,”

15 times.

I kept checking to make sure I hadn’t unconsciously changed it again!

Then I put my journal away and forgot about it.

Or did I?

A year later I was flipping through my journal and found the list. By that time, I was working at a different practice, seeing patients three days a week and taking half the call I’d been taking before. My salary? Exactly the same as it had been before I changed jobs. So I “worked three days a week and still paid down my debt.”

Of course, many things changed in the year in-between, but I believe that statement, clarified and written 15 times, was the beginning.

That’s when I brought to my conscious awareness the fact that I needed to change jobs. That I needed to change something. That I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing.

That’s also when I realized the power of my brain-to help me, or to keep me stuck.

The brain is very concrete. It doesn’t know about time. So when I changed my thinking, from “I have to keep working this way,” to “I work three days a week and I’m still paying off my debt,” and reinforced it through writing, and through repetition, my new thought started to sink in.

I am of the opinion that “believing is seeing,” so when I started believing this new thought, my brain started looking for ways to make it happen. And it did. Not quickly, or easily, but it did happen.

There are many ways to expose and eliminate the beliefs that hold us back, this is just one simple way.

What’s one of your limiting beliefs and how might you rewrite it-15 times-to better serve you?

Originally published at http://dianemackinnon.com.