How to Believe Harder: Overcoming Thought Work Mistakes

The Paris Confidence Challenge

• 🧠 The host shares an experience in Paris where speaking French, a language she has rusty proficiency in, triggered insecurity, unlike traveling to places where she speaks no language at all.
• 💡 This highlights that confidence is created by thoughts, not inherent personality traits, and can fluctuate based on the context and the thoughts one entertains.
• 🗣️ In French, her thoughts shifted to "I should be able to have this interaction," "People won't understand me," and "People will judge my French," leading to insecurity, whereas in languages she doesn't speak, her thought is simply about the need for the other person to speak English.

The Work of Believing New Thoughts

• 🎯 The core message is about believing harder and practicing new thoughts, especially when old, familiar thoughts resurface.
• 🚀 The process of adopting a new belief is compared to getting to know a new, stable person on a date, while old, negative thoughts are like a familiar, problematic ex that one might be tempted to return to.
• ⚠️ It's crucial not to resist old thoughts by fighting them, but rather to allow them to exist in the background while focusing on the new, more beneficial thought.

Three Common Mistakes in Thought Work

• 🦄 Mistake 1: Expecting a new thought to work like magic after thinking it only once, without acknowledging that old thoughts will persist and require effort to manage.
• 🤝 Mistake 2: "Making out with old thoughts" – when objections arise, instead of focusing on the new thought, one engages deeply with the negative objections, giving them undue attention.
• 🏋️ Mistake 3: Expecting the process to be easy, comfortable, or natural; thought work is hard, often awkward, and requires commitment and practice, similar to starting a new physical activity.

Nurturing New Beliefs

• 🌱 New beliefs are fragile, like a newborn deer, and require consistent nurturing and practice to strengthen them into a default way of thinking.
• ⏳ When a thought stops working, it's often because the individual has stopped working on believing it, rather than the thought itself failing.
• ✅ Believing harder is presented as the goal for 2019, emphasizing the willingness to embrace challenging beliefs and practice them until they become truly ingrained, which is ultimately life-changing.