Beliefs are one of the five key areas of MindWork (link to 5 key areas) and plays a major role in whether or not you’ll not you’ll succeed at losing weight, sticking to a diet or exercise routine, or just maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

What are your beliefs

In order for your mind to feel safe, the world needs to make sense.

You see, your mind HATES the unknown. The unknown makes you feel scared, insecure and a little bit unsafe.

To keep you feeling good, your mind wants predictability. It doesn’t want risk. It wants routine.

Now, obviously your mind can’t know everything. Otherwise, we would all know our futures.

So your mind deals with the unknown the best way it can. It creates beliefs.

The strange thing about beliefs is that they are not based on facts. Your mind makes them up in order to feel safe.

A great example is that we don’t know what happens when we die – and that can be a scary thought.

However, many turn to their faith as a way of addressing this unknown…

Does heaven exist? No one knows for sure. However, the belief that it is real can lead to a feeling of safety.

Your mind no longer has to deal with this unknown. Now it feels safe, and doesn’t have to worry about it.

Beliefs don’t have to be logical or rational. They just have to make your mind feel safe.

It might surprise you to learn that your mind has put together thousands of beliefs like this one.

You didn’t create these beliefs. Your mind did that for you. In fact, your mind has been creating beliefs for you since you were a baby.

While you might not have consciously created these beliefs, you certainly believe them.
These beliefs influence how you act, without you even thinking about them.

Often, these beliefs are harmless, or even good.

• You must say sorry if your actions accidentally hurt someone.
• It’s dangerous to go out at night alone, in the darkness.

However, when your beliefs start working against you, you have a problem.

Using the same examples above…

You must say sorry becomes…
Saying sorry when you should stand up for yourself.

Your belief that going out at night is dangerous becomes….
Not going out at night to put the rubbish out.

These beliefs that you blindly follow are now working against you – stopping you from leading a normal life.

Now, these beliefs are fairly obvious, and easy to catch. But food beliefs?

Well, they are much more subtle.

You probably have negative food beliefs and are not even aware of it. And even though these beliefs are subtle, they are often the reason why you can’t reach your diet and weight loss goals.

In the same way that your mind uses beliefs to keep you safe, they can also be used to stop you from improving yourself.

How?

Well, your mind uses these beliefs as an excuse to give up. Or worse, to not even try in the first place.

Examples of beliefs that affect your ability to achieve your healthy lifestyle or lose weight include:

• I must eat everything on my plate
• I don’t have the time to prepare healthy meals
• If it’s in the house, I have to eat it
• Certain unhealthy foods are essential to your day
• Healthy food is boring
• Exercise makes me feel worse
• I’m not strong enough to give up treats




• I can’t cook.
• This is my life, I’ll always be fat

Read them out loud. They sound silly, right?

Of course they do. Because you are thinking about them.

But these beliefs happen automatically, without thought. Your mind is on auto-pilot. You can’t catch these thoughts in the moment – which makes it impossible to beat them.

And if you can catch them? You still may not be able to overcome them.

Because trying to beat your beliefs is taking a step into the unfamiliar – and to the mind that’s possibly dangerous.

Even though you and I know that sticking to a healthy diet is actually good for you, your mind believes your actions may be harmful.

So what does your mind do?

It uses your beliefs to come up with excuses, to justify why you should give up. It does this, because your mind believes it is keeping you safe. I cover this concept in more detail here.

You cannot stick to a healthy diet, stick to an exercise routine, lose weight, or lead a healthy lifestyle while your beliefs are working against you.

The Belief Scale

Rose colored glasses – realistic – cynical

Think of your beliefs as being on a scale.

 On the one end of the scale you have:

Rose Colored Glasses
You naively believe that everything is or will be perfectly ok, regardless of the outcome – to the point of ignoring any signs or signals that say otherwise.

For Example: Those chocolate chip muffins taste so good that they can’t possibly be bad for you. Your doctor warns you that you need to improve your diet, but you ignore it because you don’t believe the muffins are the problem.

Cynical
Your beliefs are so strong, that anything that goes against them is immediately met with thoughts of negativity.

For Example: You know someone who fractured their ankle while exercising. Now you refuse to exercise because you believe it causes injuries.

As you can see, at either extreme of the scale, your beliefs are working against you.

The more the scale tips in one direction or the other, the more your beliefs will work against you. Your mind is using these beliefs to come up with excuses to give up – no matter how silly they may seem.

In order for you to achieve your healthy lifestyle, you want to balance this scale.

The more balanced your beliefs are, the more likely it is that you will succeed.
Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose where you sit on the belief scale. Your mind has done this on its own, since you were born.

These beliefs become so deeply ingrained in your life, that you don’t even know they are there – much less how you can overcome them.

Your beliefs are specific to you. They were shaped by your upbringing and your environment. No one else will have the exact same beliefs as you.

To put it simply, your beliefs are unique to you. And to overcome them, you need a unique solution, one that is tailored just for you.


That’s where MindWork comes in.

MindWork focuses on identifying and balancing the beliefs that are impacting your life.

Through one-on-one support, advice and strategies, you can balance your beliefs once and for all.

Never again will your beliefs:



• Cause you to give up losing weight
• Skip your diet
• Choose netflix over exercise

Are you ready to stop your beliefs getting in the way of your goals?

MindWork is the first step to living the healthy lifestyle you always dreamed of.