You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 91.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

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Hi my strong friends, this episode is all about letting go of the past. Why would you even want to let go of the past? Seriously. Some of our stuff from the past can cause us so much suffering today that doesn't need to happen. It can also create a lot of blocks for you in your relationships and in your business.

In episode 90, I shared how I went to the Fearless Business Workshop in Texas for four days. I had a serious block that I was trying to let go of. I knew that this block was from something in the past. I had developed a thought or belief pattern way back when I was younger in kid age, and then throughout my life, like different things would come up. And it would reinforce this thought and belief pattern for me. That was starting to cause some serious blocks for me now.

Remembering The Clarity Steps

As part of the clarity steps that I taught to you guys. When you're going after your goal, you're breaking everything down into small incremental steps of what do you have to figure out in order to get to your goal. One of the important things is to write down - what are all of the obstacles that you have? Everything is either a process obstacle or a mindset obstacle. Once you have these things written down, then you start to prioritize because as much as we'd like to fix everything all at one time, there's only one of you.

There's only so much time in the day, but some of those things that are going to pop up are mindset obstacles that started from something in your past. That's why we're going to do this episode today.

How do you recognize when your mindset obstacles came up from something in your past? Well, oftentimes it's a thought that you have over and over that shows up and it impacts your life all the time. It can show up in your personal life. It can show up in your business life. It can show up anytime you're trying to even have friendships with people. When you start to notice that it shows up in multiple places, it's usually because it's linked to something in your past.

The Power Of Mindset

So let's talk about mindset for a second. So mindset is your collection of thoughts and beliefs that you have collected throughout your whole lifetime.

Some of these thoughts and beliefs have been donated to you. So other people in your family, as you were growing up, they gave them to you. They gifted them to you. You inherited them. When you're little, you don't know that you have the option to allow these thoughts and beliefs into your mindset. You think that if someone tells you this when you're little, that this is the truth and you take it in and you hold onto it for the rest of your life. Then as you go about the rest of your life, you're going to have different experiences. Those experiences will cause your brain to come up with a thought or a belief at that moment. And you'll put that into your mindset.

Then as you go about the rest of your life, your mindset is there and it helps your brain to be super efficient. A new thing happens. Your brain is like, I got to figure out like a meaning to this right away, goes to your mindset, pulls out something from the past assigns that thought or belief. And then you're off to the races on reacting to whatever it was that happened.

When you start to see a block show up multiple times, you see that theme happening throughout your life, that thought, or that belief keeps getting pulled up by your brain, out of your mindset and applied to the current thing. So if you find that you're suffering and you're having that same thought or belief pop-up for you, it's like, okay, hold on. Is this helpful?

Because the great thing with mindset, everything that's in there is optional. None of it has to be permanent. You can change all of it. Just because you believed something was true your whole life doesn't mean that it is now, your brain is this tricky thing.

It's going to go and look for evidence that your thought or your belief was true the whole time. And so it's going to collect all that evidence. It reinforces it to be true. But the thing is, is that your brain was never looking for the evidence that it wasn't true. And it was there the whole time, too. There's always evidence to support it, and evidence to not support it, because all thoughts and beliefs are optional.

Recognizing Mindset Obstacles

So if on your obstacle list, you find that you have a theme showing up. So I have people record data. Like how many times is this same mindset obstacle popping up? If something pops up lots of times, that priority is now going to rise to the top. And that's one that we're going to have to address. Now, some of them can be really easy.

We're going to run one mindset model on it. We're going to do a little experimenting. We might even do some thought shopping, and we can easily find a new thought and just like flip it over. Everything makes sense. You can immediately see all the evidence in your life that supports that new thought. And it easily gives you the feelings that you wanted. The actions will flow naturally. And you'll get the result that you want.

Others are very, very deep. Like we have thought that thought that belief so many times that it is just like holding on and it does not want to let go. So like, I think about weeds in a garden. So if you've ever pulled weeds, which most of us have at some point in our life, some of the weeds we pull up, and it's really easy. Like those roots are pretty shallow. There's others that, oh my gosh, the root seems to go to like the center of the earth and no matter how much tugging and pulling on that thing, it does not want to come out.

Oh my gosh, I had a tree plant itself this way at my previous house. I saw this little tiny weed and I didn't realize that it was a baby tree. I thought it was just a weed. So I pulled,, and I pulled, and I yanked that sucker did not want to come out. It was super thick root. I even tried sighing it at one point, and it just was not going to budge. Eventually, it grew into a huge, very hardy tree.

Now, if you actually want that thought and belief in your life like that tree, like if I actually wanted that tree, that's fantastic. It's sturdy. It's going to stay there. It's going to support you, right? Like a tree could provide shade. It could be a real benefit.

But if it's one of those trees, it's going to wreak havoc on your life. Like all of a sudden, it's breaking your sprinkler system. It's breaking up. Your sidewalks is causing people to trip and get hurt. You got to put in the effort to try to get rid of that thing at the root while it's small.

Like sometimes it's already a big tree, and you've got to pull in the big guns to try to get rid of it. So how do you get rid of these thoughts and beliefs that have these really deep root systems?

You need to go back to the source of when was it first planted in your mindset? Sometimes you can do this on your own. I've practiced this a lot on myself because over the last five years or so, I have been doing an overhaul of my mindset because I did not want to live with depression anymore. So I had a lot of these things for me to start shifting to something else that served me better.

Going Back

So trying to think back, when was the very first time that you had that thought, or if it's a belief system, is it a belief system your whole family has? Was it just one thought community? Maybe it was some friends that you had when you were in middle school, that they all have this one belief and everybody adopted it.

Try to think back to that exact incident and allow yourself to get very visual with this. And where were you? What did it look like? Were you in a specific incident? Like were you at school? Were you at home? Were you in your bedroom? Were there other people around? And if you can see the other people, what did they look like? Were they saying things or acting in a certain way, or performing an action?

Write these things out in detail. Now I'm going to tell you that you need to write these things out because you have to see it as something separate. When you keep it stuck in your mindset. It's dark in there, right? It's like, you can't actually look inside your brain while you're still alive. You actually have to write this stuff out on paper so that you can see it.

And even if you don't want to write words, just draw some pictures and don't get hung up on how great the pictures look like. Sometimes I would just draw blobs on a piece of paper, but I knew what those blobs were representing. So when you can draw it out on paper, you can get that extra objectivity at being able to see it.

So we want to get very specific on the circumstance. What was it? What's the noun and the verb of the thing that happened that caused you to have that original thought get planted into your mindset. If it is a belief system that someone has offered to you, what was that exact moment?

What happened that caused that person to offer that belief system to you? Now, I want you to get really specific on the words that they said. So they're offering the belief system by saying words to you, or maybe they pointed to a sign or something else. I want you to write that out. Exactly what that was.

Now, the thought that you had, what was that thought? So I want you to write that down too. And sometimes, it's just one sentence. Sometimes, it's a couple of sentences. Now, it makes sense that at that moment in time, your brain came up with that thought. Even if someone was offering you words at the time, your brain's probably thinking, oh yeah, that's true. Or, oh, that makes sense. Go ahead and write that down. Because in the moment that you had that it was serving you, well, you might've been 12 years old and someone told you don't act like that, or else nobody will like you. Write that down.

So your brain always wanted to just keep you safe. You're having these thoughts, these beliefs, because in some way, by your brain, keeping this in the mindset, it's keeping you safe. It's helping you to be successful, to take care of yourself in life.

For some people, they might have experienced some type of abuse as a kid, these thoughts that they were having that, although it was causing them pain at the time, might've also kept them safe from the person who was causing abuse to them. Have compassion for yourself for your past version of yourself. In that moment, your brain was doing exactly what it needed to do. Those thoughts, those beliefs, it was okay for you to have it back then. But what you've noticed as you've gone through in your life is that that thought or that belief was now not working for you. It's not helpful.

It created additional pain for you, or it just kept you stuck from moving forward towards whatever goal you're working on or whatever new activities or habits that you wanted to have. Oftentimes you'll think back to that past moment and you'll have feelings about it today. In fact, you might ruminate on it quite a bit and cycle on that a lot.

The thing is, that circumstance is not happening anymore. It happened in the past. It might have been yesterday that it happened. It might've been last week. It might've been 30 years ago. You're still causing some extra distress for yourself. By having thoughts about that event today, that already happened. It's the thoughts that are causing your feelings. So you get that opportunity to rewire your brain. You don't want to have that distress today. You don't want to have that block going forward.

Your future is that big, beautiful blank slate. You can create anything you want to. You could even wipe out your mindset if you really wanted to and plant it with all of the best thoughts and beliefs going forward. Now, I don't recommend that you go with completely spotless. If you ever saw the movie Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, I think that's what it was called with Jim Carrey. He actually ended up having a lot of sadness because he wiped out all of his memories. You don't want to do that.

Reprogramming Your Mindset

This is just picking here and there, which are the ones that are causing you distress now or some severe blockages. And how can you reprogram this so that you can think different thoughts or different beliefs so that you can move forward? You can have a life of ease or peace or to have that motivation to do these things that you want to do in life.

Acknowledging The Old Thought

So, first thing, you're going to acknowledge that the old thought that it was okay, that you had it back then. Have compassion for yourself. Then you're going to make the decision that you're not going to continue having that thought or belief going forward. That you want to intentionally change it, that you are willing to change how you thought about that original thought and event so that your future can have a lot different outcome than what it's currently having.

This is definitely a conscious choice, right? Because some people might resist this going well, but wait, I really liked that thought or belief like, especially if it was about a certain person that yeah, you feel so justified in thinking that about that person, but it's causing you distress now. It's causing you a blockage right now. So this is you having compassion for yourself. This has nothing to do with the other person.

This is about you finding a different thought or belief that you can believe about that original event that is then going to give you relief going forward. Once you've made that decision, since this is one of those thoughts or beliefs that is so deep, you're not going to be able to go immediately to thought shopping. You're not going to be able to try on other ones. You have to first disprove that original thought. So your brain had been looking for evidence your whole life on why that thought or belief was true.

Exploring The Evidence

Now, instead, you're going to look for all of the evidence on why it wasn't true. So allow yourself to explore this. Now, sometimes this is going to take some time for you to do. In fact, you might have to get other people's opinions or find other people that had a similar circumstance and ask them what evidence have they found that supported a different thought or belief about it. And stay open to what they have to say, because remember your brain is going to want to hold onto the old one feels so justified in having that old thought or belief, but this is for your future.

This is for you so that you can have the future that you want. So opening yourself up to other ways of thinking about it, finding that evidence that disproves, that old way of thinking. What are all of the other pieces of evidence that could support that your thought or belief was not true?

This can take you some time. This can take a lot of journal writing, too. To help you to see all of those pieces of evidence. If that root of that thought or belief is super deep. Like if it feels like it goes down to the core of the earth, you might need to collect lots of pieces of evidence. Get creative with your evidence sources. If it did involve someone else, go talk to other that knew them at that time, find out other things that were going on for that person. It might really open up your eyes because we often only see things from our own perspective, but when we can see it from other people's perspectives, all of a sudden, it looks totally different.

I shared an image with one of my clients that was really simple, easy, like comic strip cartoony, kind of picture of the number six written on the ground. And there was a person on one side of the six and a person on the opposite side of the six. One person says that's a six. The other person says that's a nine. Well, the person that's standing on that one side, when they look at it, it clearly is a nine. So when they get the other person to walk around and look at it from their perspective, all of a sudden, it's like, oh my gosh, dude, that was a nine the whole time. Even though when you stood on the other side, it definitely was a six. All of the evidence was there that it was a six. But if you're trying to disprove that original thought or belief, you have to be open to going and looking at it from all of the different perspectives.

Because at some point, you're going to see it. You're going to see that that event meant something totally different than what you've been carrying with you for your whole life. When you find that right collection of evidence, all of a sudden, your old thought or belief is going to be disproven. And it's like that taproot; it has now been freed up. You can now pull it out of the dirt. It doesn't exist anymore.

Thought Shopping

It's now time to put something else in there. Let something else grow that's going to be a lot healthier for you: a new thought, a new belief. So now go back and think about what feeling it is that you do want to have for yourself. If you do want to have new actions or new habits that you're doing, what feeling would fuel those actions and make it natural for you.

If you're trying to go for a new result, what actions would you have to take in order to get those results in order to do those actions? What feelings would you need to feel? Once you know these things, now you can do your thought shopping. You can go out; you can find other people that have thought about this new thing in your future in a different way. And you can now borrow their thoughts. You can try it on. You can see if it works for you. See if it feels good.

Sources for that could be books. I love to read books on someone who is willing to share all of the trials that they went through in their lives, all of their experiments, all of their failures, all of their hard stuff they got through. And then where they got to at the end. Because I learned so much, there's so many different thoughts swaps that happened. They started thinking with one way; they experienced something. They came up with a new empowering thought, and they were able to go forward.

That's what I'm looking for. If I go out and I see people speaking. So this workshop that I went to, I wanted to hear what every single one of those people was sharing. And I wanted to hear the backstory. I don't want to just hear about their gloriousness of where they are now. I want to know what were all of those different thoughts that they have along the way. Because somewhere in there is that new thought or belief that I can now plant in that hole where I have taken out and disproved that old thought and belief. I can now replace it with this new thought and belief in you can do that too.

Challenging Deep Mindsets

Does this sound like a lot of effort?

Honestly, at times it can be a lot of effort. You know, me, I never want to lie to you guys. There are going to be some mindset shifts that you get that are going to just take like 10-15 minutes. There are some of mine that I've worked on, that it took me six months. There's even one that took like a year. The one that I just experienced, and I'm not quite ready to talk about it just yet. I had to not only do everything that I talked to you about just now, I had to try out some different modalities, too. Because just journaling all of it out, it wasn't quite getting to it.

Turns out that there was a different event that I needed to go back to that I had never even considered, or I had seen that event, but I didn't see the whole picture of the event. So I try out different modalities.

So sometimes I try out meditation tried that I've tried books. I had a client that decided that she wanted to go into being a mindset coach, but she wanted to learn what are all of the different techniques that you could do. And she loves helping people to resolve trauma because we've all had it at some point in our life. Some of us have experienced more trauma than others. Some it just takes one event that someone else may not have seen as a traumatic event, but for that individual, it really was.

Rapid Transformational Therapy

So she went, and she learned rapid transformational therapy. It uses a combination of the mindset work that I've just described to you, but it also uses hypnosis. So hypnosis allows your brain to get in a more relaxed state. It doesn't put you completely under. It helps you to tap into your subconscious. It allows your nervous system to just relax and go with the flow. And you can be a little bit more suggestible, or it helps you to drop your resistance some.

So with this, we explored a lot of things. We were able to get back to one particular incident that I had never even considered, never saw the whole perspective of it. And then, she provided some additional hypnosis to help me to replace it with a new set of thoughts and beliefs. And at first, I was pretty resistant to it. It's like, no, I really believe this about this one thing. And I didn't know if I really believed in hypnosis.

At this four-day workshop that I went to, one of the activities at the end was a hypnotist. Now I've always seen these at like fairs and stuff. And it was just for entertainment purposes, but I'm all about the entertainment. Let's have fun. So I decided, okay, I'm going to volunteer. I'm going to go do this thing.

So I went up, and he starts doing the hypnotism stuff, helping us to let go of our nervous system to relax. And I didn't go all the way under, but what it did was it helped me to remember all of the recordings that I was listening to that had been provided to me by my client, and I relaxed.

And there were things that got suggested to me during this hypnotism show that, at first, I didn't want to do; I had resistance to it. I did not want to believe these things about me. I wanted to believe other things about me. What was amazing is that because I had been getting used to the hypnotism, my nervous system just relaxed. Like that resistance to believing something different about myself was more open. I became suggestible to what he said.

Now, I was still conscious enough that it was still a decision on my part if I wanted to do it or not. So everything's always within our control. So I went ahead, and I thought this new thing, I did these new actions, and the result was just fine. In fact, it was pretty darn good.

The breakthrough that I had was that I realized that I could be suggestible to new beliefs and new thoughts because it's going to help me to move forward. There was a benefit and that it was actually possible for me.

And we think you can't teach an old dog new tricks. You can't stop believing things that you've believed your whole life, but that's just not true. Sometimes you might just need an extra modality that helps you to get more relaxed and to be more open to receiving these new things.

I was completely inspired by doing this hypnotism show. So I went back, and I listened to more of the recordings from my rapid transformational therapy session. And I listened to those over and over and over again. And what she provided to me were thoughts and beliefs that I chose. It wasn't what somebody else chose for me. It's what I wanted to believe.

But now, I believed that I could believe new things. That I could do things that I didn't necessarily want to do, just to try it out. So all of a sudden, all of these things that she's suggesting to me in these hypnosis recordings, I was open to believing them. I relaxed. My resistance went down. All of a sudden, the next day after I had experienced all of this, I woke up, and it was like the new belief was there. It was planted; it had taken root.

And it was, life-changing all eventually share this with you guys, but it's still something for me to process.

Nurturing New Mindsets

When you have planted something new, it's kind of fragile in the beginning; you have to nurture it. You have to practice it. You have to let it take root so that it doesn't go anywhere. It's kind of like when people plant fresh grass, and they put the barriers around it because they know that it's taken root, they know that it's growing, but it's not super hardy yet. And that if anybody walks on it, that it can crush it pretty quick.

The same happens with new thoughts and beliefs that you're putting into your mindset. They're kind of tender in the beginning. You have to nurture them. You have to protect them. Eventually, these things grow so strong that it's permanent, and there's no getting rid of it. And your life is going to be so much better.

Are you experiencing any of these really tough mindset obstacles? If you are, let's get together. Let's try some stuff because I have all sorts of tools that can help you with changing these things in your mindset, and getting you that relief, getting you into those actions that you need, getting you the results that you want, helping you to paint that bright future for yourself, and to get into the action to do that and live that new life. To become that person. But if you are having somewhere, those roots are super, super deep. I would love to introduce you to the person that helped me. I am eventually going to have her come, and I will interview her because I think that you should meet her.

Either way. I want you to be inspired, know that you don't have to suffer.

And those in goals that you have for yourself, they are completely achievable for you. There's all sorts of ways that you can get there. Everything is either just a process obstacle or a mindset obstacle.

Mindset obstacles can definitely be resolved no matter how deep they go. It can be resolved. You can have a much better life. You can feel great. You can have the outcomes that you want. Feel free to reach out to me. Let's talk about what's possible for you.

Head on over to MyFreedomGrove.com. Go to the contact me tab right there; there’s a schedule. You can plan some time. We can sit down, and we can talk about it and tell next week, my friends go out, live inspired. I bet you're never going to look at weeds and trees the same. And even some of that fresh grass that's starting to pop up cause it's been raining.

Have a wonderful week. I will talk with you soon. Bye-bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove podcast.  I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out Unshakable Men and Unshakable Women. The Unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, the coaching and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to my freedom grove.com/workwithme. I can't wait to see you there.