How to Change Your Brain & Beliefs: Key Skill & Brain Blocks

The Core Skill for Belief Change

• 🧠 The most crucial skill for changing beliefs is not stopping old thoughts, but actively practicing a new thought.
• 💡 Your brain creates neuropathways; changing a belief requires building and reinforcing new pathways, not just trying to erase old ones.
• 🚀 This process involves consciously picking and repeatedly practicing a new thought until the new neural road becomes dominant.

Understanding Your Brain's Prediction Machine

• 🎯 Your brain is primarily a prediction-making machine, not a truth-finding one, aiming for certainty to feel safe.
• ⚠️ This predisposition can lead to focusing on negative imagined futures or ingrained beliefs, even if they are unhelpful.
• 🧩 The brain constructs a curated version of reality, filtering information to maintain its existing predictions and beliefs.

Societal Conditioning as a Brain Block

• 🧱 Societal conditioning significantly constrains the types of new thoughts we can even imagine, based on learned norms and limitations.
• 🎭 Messages about what is possible for us, especially regarding gender roles, can create subconscious blocks to adopting new beliefs.
• 📚 Awareness of absorbed social messages is essential to identify and overcome these limitations when attempting belief change.

Overcoming Evidence Bias

• 📈 Your brain collects evidence to support existing beliefs, making it resistant to new ones due to a perceived abundance of contrary data.
• 🌸 The key is to start with small, incremental belief shifts, like accepting the possibility of just one 'green flower' (a new belief), rather than attempting a massive change.
• ✅ Practicing '10% less shitty' thoughts helps build new neural connections step-by-step, making larger belief changes more achievable.

Resources for Deeper Work

• 📚 Pre-ordering the book "Take Back Your Brain" offers in-depth guidance on uncovering societal messages and practicing step-by-step belief change.
• 🤝 A bonus conversation with relationship experts is available for pre-orders, focusing on how socialization impacts friendships and romantic relationships.
• 💬 The "Feminist Self-Help Society" community provides a space for applying these concepts, receiving coaching, and connecting with others on thought work.
• 🗣️ A free training, "How to Stop Caring What Other People Think," is available to help retrain the brain to focus on confidence rather than external validation.