I’M NOT PRETTY

I’ve created an eight week course called The Empowered Women Project, and my current group of women is absolutely blowing my mind with their insights, breakthroughs, and willingness to get vulnerable. I am frequently moved to tears by the posts in our facebook group as they share their struggles, apply my material, and arrive in powerful new places.

One of the practices I teach is how to rewrite a disempowering narrative or belief.

The idea behind this practice is that everyone has deep-seated beliefs (both conscious and unconscious!) that inform our choices and behavior. Our beliefs feel “true” to us based on our unique life experience and mindset, but in reality we can really never know the objective and universal Truth about most things. Therefore many of our beliefs are just stories we tell ourselves based on own biased interpretation of the world, and often those stories hold us back.

Re-writing your narrative is about challenging those beliefs and stories by naming them, examining them, discovering how they’ve served you, deciding that you no longer need them, and then letting them go.

Anywhere you feel stuck, struggling, or frustrated, there is probably a limiting belief or disempowering narrative standing in your way.

When I teach people how to break apart and rewrite disempowering narratives, a big part of the process is understanding that the old stories served a valuable purpose. We don’t hold onto stuff for no reason. While it may not seem that way at first, all of our limiting beliefs offered us a gift at some point.

For example, if someone believes that she’ll never find true love, she might never put herself out there, and end up feeling depressed and lonely. If she decided to examine and rewrite that story, she might acknowledge that the old belief actually protected her from trying and being rejected. What a gift that was! But now she might decide she no longer needs that protection, because she’s finally brave and strong enough to face potential rejections in service of finding true love.