3 Steps to Rewiring Your Negative Beliefs

For over a decade, everything I built came from the same place of proving to the world and the people around me that “I’m enough.”

I was so focused on accomplishing goals, succeeding, building bigger and bigger things. I didn’t feel I was good enough without them.

And it worked. The results came.

And yet, I still had the feeling in my chest that “I was not enough.”

The awareness finally hit me. It doesn’t matter how much money or success I have because I still don’t feel good enough.

Why?

I put that question to Peter Crone on the podcast this week.

He’s spent decades coaching elite athletes, top executives, and high performers, and his entire body of work is about helping people create less suffering and more freedom.

His answer was that I had been using force.

“Willpower is an aspect of the ego based in survival.”

Force is not a renewable energy system. You can only push forward for so long until you collapse.

It’s why people join the gym in January and cancel in February.

“You can use force to temporarily override habits, but you can never violate your identity.”

Peter says most of us call this self-sabotage, and he wants us to consider that it’s the opposite.

You’re not sabotaging anything. You’re fulfilling your own code.

“You pick up a pen that’s got red ink in it, it’s going to write in red. It doesn’t matter how hard you try.”

That’s why I could achieve everything I ever dreamed of and end up in the same spot emotionally.

I had made “I’m not enough” part of my identity.

I know I’m not alone in having a negative belief tied to my identity. What I wish I knew earlier was that you can rewire this part of your mind.

Peter has a three-step framework for freeing yourself from it. I want you to try it this week.

Step 1. Find the sentence.

Sit quietly with whatever you’re struggling with in your health, your finances, or your relationships, and look for the fear underneath it.

It’s almost always something like, “I’m not lovable. I’m not safe. I’m not worthy. I’m not going to be okay.”

Write yours down. Get it out of your head and onto a piece of paper.

As Carl Jung says, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will drive your life, and you’ll call it fate.”

Step 2. Ask if it’s actually true.

Peter asked me to visualize this… “If someone cut you open, would they find a manufacturing label that says Lewis, born in Ohio. Not good enough.”?

“Of course not. You’d find bones, tissue, and blood. There’s no label.”

We often collect evidence to support these negative beliefs, but is it an undeniable truth about who you are as a being?

Or is it a belief you adopted as a kid and have been defending ever since?

Step 3. Ask who you’d be without it.

If this negative belief about yourself isn’t true, who could you be in the absence of that constraint?

Peter says this is where he watches people’s breathing change in real time.

Answer that question honestly.

Take notice of how it changes the tension in your body.

I didn’t feel like I was enough for so many years, and all I tried to do was earn my way out of a belief that I had never once stopped to question.

You cannot out-work what you believe about yourself. But you can rewire your mind once you realize your negative beliefs haven’t been true all along.

If you’re ready to find more freedom in your life, listen to the full episode with Peter Crone here.​

Thanks for reading,

Lewis