#247: Belief Before Action

Hello, how are you today? Today we are talking about our dreams. This episode is really for the people who are dreaming about something new, something different. Maybe it's the way you run your law practice. Maybe it's the time you have to yourself, the time to travel. Maybe it is the ability to create something completely new for you, to change your identity, to be a new person.

And I really want to stress that the reason you may not be taking action right now is because you don't believe in yourself. And that's okay, but it hasn't always been that way. You used to have blind trust that you could do anything that you wanted, be anyone that you wanted. We were told we could do just about anything. And then the box started to close in. We started to spend time with people who didn't see far out into the future. They couldn't. And we started to adopt their beliefs as our own. We started to think that really all that was possible was what was in this little box that was offered to us. Whether that was law school, whether it was to create your own firm, to make a certain amount of money, to be a certain person in your community, what that looked like. But it has not always been that way. And in order to take action, the belief in yourself has to come first.

It is not impossible to create the life that you want. It is 100% possible. You may not be an all-star basketball player, but that is likely not what you have been called to do. You will know what you are called to do by this deep desire. You feel you have this desire. You can't even figure out why you have this desire. You just know that you feel called to do something. You may not even be able to name it, but you have this burning desire for something new maybe to go out on your own. That was what my burning desire was. It was to start a business. I didn't even know why I wanted to start a business. It actually seemed kind of ridiculous to me because as I was growing up, I watched my dad have a business and saw it close down and I saw his worry and his frustration and his stress levels.

And I told myself I never wanted to own a business. But strangely, that was something that kept nagging at me, that I needed to start my own business. And it didn't make any sense whatsoever, but I could not get over this feeling that I was supposed to be doing something more. And that is why I started taking steps to doing it because it clearly was going to, it wasn't gonna go away, it was just gonna keep nagging at me. And if I denied that desire, it was denying myself, it was denying that part of me, that higher part of me that knew I was placed on this planet for more. Maybe you have something like that. That desire to create something more than what you have right now. Don't deny that desire. It's there for a reason. It is there to put you in the next phase of your life, your next evolution of your life.

And if you deny that part of you, you're denying your evolution. And I believe we were placed on this planet to keep evolving ourselves, to keep creating a new identity for ourselves, to be bigger in our lives. And there are obstacles. There's fear, there's doubt, there's worry. There's all of the things in the box that have been shown to us as true right in that box. We cannot do more. We actually have to break through it. And when we give all of our power away to the people outside of us who tell us what's possible, then we cannot break through. We have to stop looking for possibility within that box and start breaking through and chipping away at it. And it starts with believing in yourself. And you may have lots of evidence that you can't do things. I I had this this call the other day with a lawyer and she did not have belief in herself in the ability to follow through.

She didn't think that once she got started in transforming her life, that she would keep going. And what that told me is that her brain was going to past events, right? That's part of the box. Past events where she hadn't followed through. Of course, there's tons of examples where she has followed through law school, right, having a family, right? She had followed through on these things, but she could not get her brain on board that way first. And the reason for that is because our brain has negativity bias. It goes there to the negative first. Telling us we can't do things, doesn't help us. That we're socialized to believe what's inside of that box. And that, that's all that we're capable of is what we've done before. And what we've seen before. Think about the guy who was the first one to break the four minute mile.

No one believed you could break a four minute mile. Everybody was living inside of the box. That is impossible. And then the guy who actually broke the four minute mile believed ahead of time he could break it. And he started thinking impossibility and training himself impossibility so that he could break the four minute mile. He was very intentional about it, but he had to believe in himself and his abilities to figure it out and to take action. And when he believed in himself first, he could take the actions that were going to help him break that four minute mile. And he did it. And after that, people were breaking the four minute mile left and right because once they saw possibility they could take action, their box had expanded just a little bit.

I wanna offer to you that you don't need to wait for somebody else to show you that it's possible. You can decide it's possible. You can decide that it's possible to go out on your own and build your own practice. You can decide that you want to leave your legal profession and do something completely different. I'm an example of that. I had to decide ahead of time that maybe, possibly I could do it. And I had to just believe that was it, that I had to just believe that maybe it was possible. And I had to take action from the belief it was possible. I had to invest in myself and learn the skills to build a website and, you know, create content. And like the stuff on Instagram that you see, the stuff that you see on my website, I created all of it. But I could not have started if I didn't just believe in myself and believe that I could figure it out.

And when you start believing ahead of time, the impossible becomes possible. This podcast was impossible until I decided it wasn't going out on my own. And building a coaching practice was impossible until it wasn't. I just had to believe I didn't see anybody else doing it at the time. Now I see lots of people doing it, but when I was doing it, I, I was like, is this even possible? And I just had to believe. And I saw some, maybe some little examples here and there and I thought, okay, well I can do that. Like my box got a little bit bigger. I want you to break through the box. I want you to just break through and start just believing, deciding to believe in yourself. When you decide to believe in yourself, then you can take the action that you need. I had a call with another lawyer the other day.

This is the, the perfect example of this. So she signed up for a strategy session with me and she said that she would have to think about it cuz she didn't like debt. That's okay. But we did some math and you know, with the time that she would get back from coaching with me, we estimated she would get in the course of a year, the time back with her billable hour, she'd get like a hundred thousand dollars at the end of the year. But let's pair that back. Let's just say that she would get $20,000. Say she would invest $6,000, would she do that to get $20,000? Like her brain couldn't get on board with, you know, charging it, which is fine, you don't have to do that. Lots of people have different beliefs about debt. But this is what was funny about it.

I asked her if she wanted some coaching on this cause I just thought it was kind of interesting. And she said Sure. So it turns out she is a big handbag collector. And what she would do is she would collect these beautiful handbags and she would sell them at a profit. And that was her hobby. That was like something fun she did on si on the side. That was her her fun. So I asked her, I said, so let's say you were buying a rare Louis Vuitton handbag, let's say. And it was let's say $6,000 and you knew at the end of the year you would get a hundred thousand dollars from a buyer. I'm curious what your decision would be. Then she said, I would charge it and I would just be uncomfortable. So that put bells off in my mind and I realized she did not believe in herself because if she can invest and use a credit card on a handbag and know that she has a buyer at the end of the year that's going to buy for a hundred thousand dollars, then it seemed very strange that she wouldn't invest in something that would do the same thing in her business.

And we did a little bit more coaching and it turned out she had had experiences in the past where she hadn't followed through and she was making decisions from a lack of possibilities. She was making decisions from the box. Because if you know that, you can figure it out. If you have the power inside of you to really know that you can do things, that you can figure things out, that you can find the help that you need, you can ask for the help that you need that you can go on Google and figure out like I did, how to build a website.

If you can believe ahead of time, then you can break through the box. But if you don't believe, then you fall back on all the old beliefs inside the box. That is how our brain works. But until we understand on a deep level how our brain works, that we can truly believe anything that we want and create it, we will not create the life that we want. We will choose to stay in the box because the box feels safe. One of the concepts that I really love that Brooke Castillo talks about is under feeling and under feeling is something I did for a long time. It kept me inside the box, deep in the box, deep in a hole, <laugh> in in the box. I didn't have access to my feelings. And one of the things we're gonna be talking about in my new masterclass, the How to Stop Procrastinating masterclass that's coming up.

You can sign up at dina cataldo.com/procrastination. One of the things we're gonna talk about are how to feel, because the reason we don't take action is because we don't understand what the feelings are happening in our body. Cause we're making feelings in our body mean things that they don't mean. We interpret how we feel from a place inside of the box. Okay, let me, let me explain what I mean by that. Let's say, you know, if you're like me, you know, I was in my law practice, I was making a lot of money and I was scared to leave the legal profession cause I was like, this is, I know how to do this. They give me money twice a month. It's very easy for me Now I've been here 15 years, so am I out of my mind to leave, right? My brain was like furiously trying to keep me in the box, but I kept talking to myself.

I kept reinforcing my belief. I had to believe in myself and what was possible before I left my job. And then I could take action to leave my job, right? I had to believe I could start a business and I could make money at it. I had to believe that before I started taking action for the business and making money at it. You've done this before. You've done this before when you went to law school and you were like, okay, well I believe ahead of time that in three years I'm gonna get a job and I will invest a hundred thousand dollars, $200,000 in my education because I see that at the end of three years I will have a job. You chose to believe that you had no evidence of it. I mean you did actually have evidence of it. You looked around and you saw lots of lawyers, lots of people being employed.

And so you took that leap of faith in yourself. It wasn't even that big of a leap. You knew you were smart, you knew you were a hard worker, but you had to tell yourself self that the whole time you were in law school so you could get to the other side of the three years, you had to keep talking to yourself and be in belief. Or you never would've done it if you would, if someone came up to you and you'd never met a lawyer before, you'd never seen anyone in this profession. And they said, look, if you go to law school for three years and you drop a hundred thousand dollars, $150,000 on law school in three years, you'll have a job and you'll get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. You'd be like, you're outta your freaking mind. I have no reason to believe you. I don't see any lawyers walking around here. I don't understand what you're talking about. I'm not dropping $150,000 on that. But when you are in a society where you have evidence, you have proof, then you just decide to believe, right? That you've decided to believe what has been offered to you. That's what's inside the box. You have been dec, you have decided that you are going to believe what has already been given to you and told to you. That is normal.

What would it take for you to believe you can do something outside of the box, something you've never seen before, something you've never seen anybody else. Do something that sounds crazy to other people. Something that really lights you up but scares the heck outta you at the same time. What is that? Maybe it's making a million dollars in your practice. Maybe it is becoming an artist on the side and carving out that time for yourself. Maybe it's writing a book and selling it if you're not taking action on whatever it is that you feel this need to take action on. But you're not, you're procrastinating and it's only because you haven't learned how to believe without evidence. That is something I'm teaching in my masterclass. That's something that I teach my clients. They learn to believe without evidence and then they start making things happen for themselves.

And it's not by working harder. Like one of the things that our society, that box has really drilled into us is that when you work really, really, really, really hard things become possible, I wanna offer to you that you are already working hard and that there's another answer. And this, I was reading this book, it's called You Squared. And one of the examples that it gave is that you know, you ever see a fly who keeps knocking his head against a window pane trying to get out of your house and then it just ends up dying on the windowsill. It never reaches its potential, it never gets outside. But five feet away, there's a door that's wide open to the yard and it just won't go there. It cannot get perspective to pull back and say, oh there's a door. Let me fly out that way. One of the things that we do that has been reinforced by our society, and I certainly fell victim to this, is the belief that we need to keep working harder. And if we haven't achieved what we wanted, if we're not making the hours that we want, if we're not creating the life we want is because a fault of our own, that we are not working hard enough, that we're bad, that we should feel ashamed of ourselves.

This is ridiculous. But we're not taught. It's ridiculous. We're taught it's fact. What I want to share with you in this episode is that you can get perspective, but you've got to take a step back because pounding your head through the glass is not going to get you where you wanna go. It's not going to help you see what you need to see so that you can take action in an easier way and get a better result. You've gotta believe you can do that first though. You've gotta believe in yourself that you can figure it out, that you can get that perspective. You gotta believe that you can believe and it's okay, it's safe.

We're told over and over again that it's not safe to believe things outside of the box. We have people around us we don't even wanna share those dreams with because we don't wanna hear what they have to say cuz what they have to say is gonna be something from the box. And we're still in this nascent like baby stage where we're just trying to believe enough so that we can take some action, any action towards our dream. So if you find yourself not taking action towards your dream, it's not your fault. We haven't been taught how to use our mind in order to see further ahead than we are right now.

It's not part of the norm. Like you listening to this podcast, you're not part of the norm. I hope you know that you're actually outside of the norm cuz most people are not even thinking about this. They're just living day to day, hoping that one day they'll retire with enough money to like stop working and then maybe go on some vacations in 20 years, 10 years. Why would anyone wait 10 years to start living their life beyond me? I could not make sense of it. I could not make sense of being in an office where people were saying, yeah, only another 30 years of this, only another 20 years of this, only another 10 years of this, only another five years of this. I'm like, are you nuts? You could die today. <Laugh>, right? I mean, let's go there because our society's afraid to go there.

It's afraid to talk about things that we're not accustomed to talking about that aren't within the inside. That little comfortable box, that box where people don't talk about things like death and money or anything that's uncomfortable or out of the norm. I want this episode to inspire you. I want this to inspire you to begin believing in yourself more, believing in possibility, more, believing that you don't have to listen to everything that your brain says. It will always spew out negative, negative garbage. That's how our brain works. It takes practice to start seeing it for what it is as just garbage. And that we get to choose what we believe.

This has been such a practice of love for myself, choosing to believe and choosing to feel instead of under feel, choosing to reconnect with myself and understand that the feelings that I have of shame for not working hard enough or of doubt that I can't do it. That those feelings don't mean that I'm not working hard enough or that I can't do it. They're just feelings that come from a thought. I don't have to believe those. And this morning I was I was waking up and I was thinking about today and I was thinking about, oh, got this podcast to do today. And I know it didn't quite work with my schedule yesterday and I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do it. And I said, girl, right? Because I'm starting to feel a little bit of dread. I could feel it.

And I just sat there and I said, girl, hold on. Feel the dread. Don't let your brain keep talking. Just feel the dread. Okay? I'm feeling dread. Dread doesn't mean I can't do the podcast. Dread doesn't mean anything. Dread doesn't mean that I can't get everything done on my calendar today. All it means is I'm feeling dread because I'm having this thought that I can't do everything today. And I was like, girl, you know better. That's okay though. I love you <laugh>. And so I was like, okay, well let's get up. Let's go. Oh, I got up, I got going. And then I was thinking about the podcast and this is a different podcast episode than I had planned, right? I had start, started writing something the night before and it wasn't fully formed. And then this morning I started just like thinking about this and I was like, no, the podcast needs to be about belief before action.

And I was like, all right, let's go. And so now I've saved myself like an hour of my day because I just got up and stopped believing that I couldn't do my calendar today and that it needed to look a certain way. I just stopped believing that I just believed ahead of time and then took action. It's crazy, right? But that's how everything works. Whether it's how we shape our calendar, how we shape our day, how we decide we want to move forward in our life, the belief becomes comes behe ahead of time. And we just have to practice that. And we have have to start noticing our thoughts. And if you wanna start noticing your thoughts more so that you can start taking action in your life, sign up for my masterclass. How to stop procrastinating and get a ridiculous amount done without dreading your workday or pulling all-nighters.

Sign up at dina cataldo.com/procrastination because this is something that is impacting your whole life. It's not a minor irritant, it's not a minor annoyance. It is impacting the trajectory of your life. And if you're not believing in yourself, if you're not seeing the thoughts you have about yourself and feeling what's happening and understanding that the thought created the feeling and that that has nothing to do with your potential or your ability or your future, if you're not doing that, you need to come to this masterclass cuz this is going to help you see how you can break outside of that box. Ugh. Okay, my friend who, and if you already know that you wanna do this work, that this is the work you need to propel you forward to create your transformation, book a strategy session with me, book a call with me. And in that session we're gonna break down how your brain works and what it's creating right now and why it's creating that and how to break through that box to begin believing ahead of time.

That's the work I do with my clients is to help them see their future and to start believing more and more. Cause you don't have to a hundred percent believe in yourself right now. Whatever it is you wanna do, you just have to have that kernel of desire, that little tiny speck of desire, and then you start fanning the flames. And I help my clients fan the flames of that desire of their belief in themselves, and then they start taking action. All right, my friend, I really enjoyed doing this podcast. My hope is is that it inspires you to take any action today towards what it is you feel called to do. All right, have a great week. Bye.