Get clear on your core beliefs if you want to create change!
Kate Winslet has made me a little mad recently. I’m actually a massive fan of hers – I think she’s a wonderful actress and I think she’s done many things to help women understand that you don’t have to be thin to be successful.
However, a few weeks ago, I saw a post on the Kate Winslet FB page that I think summarises one of the main issues with women in health, fitness, food and life in general. She said “I know I’m chubby”
Here’s the post in question…
I literally was screaming at my Iphone when I read it… YOU ARE NOT CHUBBY KATE! And I know her post / quote was about inspiring women, but that statement ‘I am chubby’ made me so mad!
And then I stopped and thought about it. This woman (like many others and perhaps many of you reading this) obviously has a very strong core belief that she IS chubby. And later that day I was on the phone to psychologist and NLP practictioner Gill Harvey-Bush as we were prepping some final things for the Emotional Eating program and we were talking about the impact of core beliefs on women’s lives and the factors that influence them. With this ‘I am chubby’ statement, it’s pretty obvious that Kate has some core beliefs around the fact that she doesn’t have the perceived ‘right body’. And then I started to think perhaps it’s because in Hollywood, actresses’ sizes have become thinner and thinner over the last few decades. But also core beliefs usually stem from our early childhood, so I started to think about what her childhood might have been like.
And I remembered a statement Kate made a couple of years back about how she wanted to help her daughter Mia, have better body image. She was famously quoted as saying:
“As a child, I never heard anyone say to me ‘I love my body’. Not my mother, my elder sister, my best friend. No woman ever said; ‘I am so proud of my body’. So I make sure I say it to Mia, because a positive physical outlook has to start at an early age.”
Bit of a contradiction to her recent ‘I am chubby’ post or what?!
What we can see from the second quote here, there is a core belief that she took on as a child which probably was along the lines of ‘women don’t like their bodies’ or perhaps ‘ women can only be only proud of their bodies if they’re perfect or thin’ etc.
But the second part of my rant (which isn’t really a rant at all!) is that you can see the conscious and sub conscious mind in action here. BIG TIME.
Now the understanding of how your conscious / subconscious mind works is so powerful when it comes to creating change or in may cases nailing self-acceptance. And that is that the conscious part (the day to day decision making / what you say you want) is just 5%. Just five measly percent! Statements like ‘I’d like to lose weight’ or ‘I want better body image for me and my daughter’ or ‘I’m happy being a size 14 rather than busting my guts to be a size 10’ are the things we probably do really want, BUT it’s just 5% of the equation.
Conversely, the subconscious part of your brain (where your core beliefs, internal survival mechanisms, negative experiences, life-long messages built around fear, pain etc are stored) is 95% and this is where the difficulty lies. This part of your brain is extremely powerful, but is based on very different things to the conscious part. I refer to it as a David and Galliath battle in your head, every minute of the day. The subconscious part will bring out those core beliefs, help you look for evidence around you to back those beliefs up and just as you start making progress towards your goals (or your peace!), BANG! You’ll start saying, doing and feeling different things.
The great news is, David won against Galliath and your conscious part of your mind can win against the sub conscious one. But you need to know how. And you need to keep at it. And you need to do this until your new internal, subconscious, lifelong messages have adjusted to be better ones, or the right ones for you, now you’re older, wiser perhaps.
Core beliefs can be changed. But you need to know what your core beliefs are, where they came from, who or what influenced them and be really clear that there will things around you all the time that will try to take you back to those core beliefs. We teach this on the Emotional Eating program and when I’ve worked on core beliefs with my 1:1 clients, this is where you get those great AHA moments.
Here are some other examples or how core beliefs can affect your thinking and doing when it comes to your health, weight, eating and body:
Women who are obsessed with the scales. Usually when you break this down with someone, it’s because they watched their Mums go to Weight Watchers and celebrate pounds coming off the scales, maybe sisters or friends who made such a big things about losing x amount to pounds on the latest diet in a few weeks. Perhaps you’d been to a slimming club yourself at some point and you were ‘bad’ when you gained weight and ‘good’ when you lost it. Things like this mean you’ll have a core belief that scales matter and skinny is the ultimate success. Unless you work on changing that core belief, you’ll be stuck on the scales equaling success for life and won’t ever be happy unless you’re skinny.
Women influenced by the media. Let’s take Kate’s ‘I am chubby’ post. If you read things like that enough times, you’ll start having a core belief that women who are a healthy, shapely, fit, size 12 aren’t good enough. You’ll keep thinking you have to be a size 8 or 10 (or whatever you personally tell yourself) to be important / recognised / valued, which will probably lead to a life of yoyo dieting or negative body image or constantly trying to be a second rate unauthentic version of yourself instead of a first rate version of yourself. I know more and more women are depressed by images in the media, especially social media. It’s proven by various pieces of research that women’s body image has gone down since images of ‘smaller’ women’s bodies in the media has gone up. The core belies around this are a) I’m fat in comparison to her and b) the images we see in the media are the ‘right’ ones, thus making us wrong.
Women who use food to fix things. If you’re trying to lose weight or change shape and your core belief is food fixes things, you’ll have a lifelong uphill struggle to keep weight off. If you grew up where you got given a food-based reward on a Friday evening for doing well at school that week, or getting a good report, or behaving well etc, this creates a habit trail that leads into your adult life. Perhaps when things got tough for you, you were given a food-based treat to comfort you (think girls going to back to boarding school, maybe parents going through a divorce, being ill or coping with pain etc), guess what, you’ll ‘need’ the very same thing as an adult when things get tough at work or you’re in pain (usually emotionally rather than physically as a grown up). Rewiring the brain is the only thing women can really do to ‘re-teach’ themselves that they can use other things to ‘cope’.
Most women’s emotional eating issues, negative body image, self-sabotage patters, being tough on themselves, controlling their food and punishing themselves are based around self-limiting core beliefs.
Come and unravel yours with me and Gill with the emotional eating program if you’d like to make some long lasting changes! Our program is not about food at all, it’s about your mind and what we teach you will positively influence all areas of your lives too!
Women pass on those self-limiting beliefs to everyone around us, look at Kate’s post. And Kate if you want my advice, stop saying you’re chubby (because your daughter will read statements like this which still sets up the pattern for her you’ve got caught in) and start saying you’re beautiful, end of – especially in front of your daughter, but also to the millions of women who follow you! If people think you’re chubby that’s about their core beliefs (and also linked to the media as I mentioned above!), it’s not fact.
Think differently ladies and see the magic happen!
Janey x
