Uncover your beliefs and change your life.

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Lovely to see you all. I hope you're having a great day. If you don't already know me, my name is Pam. I am the CEO and founder of Pampour Life Coaching. I run a program called Authentically You. I'm not only a certified life coach, but I’m also qualified as an Equine Assisted Learning/Therapy practitioner.

I explain that most easily as coaching with horses. It’s not about horses, it's got nothing to do with equestrianism or riding. It is all about self-discovery work, life coaching and relationships. It's Self-discovery coaching facilitated in relationship with horses.

So that's enough about me, if you did want to find out any more about me, or what I offer you can go to www.pampoole.co.nz there’s some good stuff there and it might be worth a look if you find yourself with some time.

Today I wanted to talk about what are you believing? Why is it important to know? The one thing I think that's really stands out as important to share is that most of us have hundreds, possibly thousands of beliefs that direct and cause our thoughts, feelings, actions, and results in our everyday life.

They affect our relationships, our choices, the way we respond to everything, and yet very few of us actually take the time to uncover what they are. I know, right! They have such a huge effect and yet, it's just not something that we take the time to look at despite the importance of it and the huge benefits that result from doing that work.

You might say, why? Why my life's... good, it's you know, I'm pretty happy or whatever or maybe not. The thing is though is that when we don't know what beliefs or thought processes or patterns we've learned throughout our childhood or early years, from society, from community, from family, teachers, peers etc.

We can learn our beliefs from anywhere and as children we don't question them, we just believe them. You know, particularly from primary caregivers and then we're designed to survive within whatever context of environment we've grown up in, but we apply the same learnings to environments and circumstances or situations that don’t need them.

By that I mean we learn the beliefs we learn from those around us and then if it's not pleasant or it's not working for us, we try and adapt from a child's perspective our behaviour. to change how someone treats us or how we feel, especially if our basic needs weren’t met. Now obviously as children we don't do this consciously, this is just a survival mechanism, we all do it, and you know, it works at the end of the day within that moment or time that we used that adjustment. But a lot of that adaption that we do, and a lot of the beliefs that we learn, although they may have been helpful in some way or form back when we were younger, often by the time we hit adulthood, they actually no longer serve us, and in fact, to be honest with you, often they can cause us more problems, they become unhelpful.

I think, personally, that regardless of whether we actually have any desire for change or any reason to change, I think it's worth every single one of us understanding how the brain works and having a look, you know, uncovering what our current belief systems are. So, like, do you do you even know what you believe in relation to marriage for example, what rules or manuals you've been taught as you've grown up. Many of our parents are taught that a wife's role is in the kitchen, for other people it could be that the husband's role is to provide money, like they're very traditional beliefs, but it could literally be anything. It could be someone, for example, who believes that no matter what, a wife's role is to stand by her husband, even if her husband is perhaps, you know, being abusive to their children or... treating her badly. Or it could be that violence or unkindness has been normalized or in some way we've been desensitized to it growing up, and as a result, when we go into our own adult relationships, we allow ourselves to be treated poorly because we are operating from a learned belief and we don’t realise it is not a fact, that we have just taken on someone else’s thoughts/beliefs, we don’t even question if it’s really ok for this person to treat us this way.

What we believe about things vary, like it's not like we have one belief, and we apply that belief to everything, I mean, we might do, but it's just as likely that we would learn a belief and it might be applied in some areas and not others. So, for example, you might have a belief whereby you expect people to treat you the way you treat them, but if that is not something they believe then this expectation/rule will cause conflict, a more helpful belief might be I expect me to treat other people like I want to be treated, but other people will always treat me according to their rules not mine, this change reduces, possibly even eliminates unnecessary conflict.

So, it is important to acknowledge that if another person doesn’t share your belief, then they're not going to follow that belief/rule. The other thing that happens with our beliefs is that they create or cause our feelings, so, if we have thoughts like, you know, “that person should or I should…”, then we're going to activate feelings within our bodies that align with that kind of thinking, usually they're not particularly great feelings.

My point here is that it's worth uncovering what you believe in all areas of your life and obviously it can't all be done in one go so this is one of those slow and steady processes. Take the time, it's worthwhile doing that with someone who understands the brain, knows how it works and can help you uncover the beliefs that are currently impacting you, and then we have to remember that as we go through that process, we want to decide what we want to replace that belief with, so what belief do we want to operate from? This process requires knowledge and skill as some thoughts will present as helpful, but when you look at the actions and results, they actually aren’t.  As an example, we might think “I should always help if I can”, or something similar, however this thought in action causes feelings of obligation and pressure, leading to us putting our own needs below that of others, causing unnecessary stress and unhappiness. This also leads to an unsatisfactory or neglectful relationship with ourselves. So, the belief seems kinds or nice but actually it is not helpful at all and could be moderated to something such as “I always help others when it is not detrimental to myself or what is important in my life. These are just possible options.

So that's a bit simplistic, but that's kind of what it's like. You get to decide as an adult, firstly, you get to decide to even look, to gain awareness, to decide whether or not those beliefs or thought processes, etc. are serving you or are helpful to you in any way or form, and then you get to decide, if you do think that they're not as helpful as you'd like, you get to decide what you would like to think instead, what you would like to believe instead.

It is through this process that we begin to create a life that is really authentic to us, that is about what matters to us because we are actively and intentionally choosing, what and how we want to think and therefore how we want to show up, how we want to respond, who we want to be within whatever particular area of our life we are currently giving our attention to.

I hope this is making sense to you because I often find when I'm doing podcasts and I'm talking, I'm so in it, so focused on trying to share the information that I sometimes feel like, oh crikey did that make sense? So hopefully it does and honestly if it doesn't or if you have any questions, again just go to my website, www.pampoole.co.nz send me an email or you may even find that the information on my website answers those questions for you.

Thanks for listening. I really just wanted to share that with you and hopefully provoke or encourage a little bit of thought into the value of really getting to know yourself and offering yourself the best possible life that you can have.

All right, my friends. Enjoy the rest of your week, and, I'm as I do more podcasts I believe it can only get better from here.

Bye for now. 😊