We Are What We Believe — And You Can Change What That Is
Here’s something I want you to sit with for a moment: your brain believes what you tell it.
Not what’s true. Not what’s objectively happening. What you tell it — repeatedly, consistently, over time.
That’s not wishful thinking. That’s neuroscience. And it’s also the foundation of nearly everything I teach and coach around, because once you understand it, everything changes. The way you talk to yourself, the way you interpret what happens to you, the stories you’ve been carrying since you were young — all of it is shaping your reality right now. The good news? You have more influence over that than you probably realize.
A Little Honest Truth About Where I Started
I wasn’t always someone who woke up feeling grateful and capable. Not even close.
My mid-teens through early twenties were tumultuous and, frankly, self-destructive. I made choices I’m not proud of. My mental health suffered in ways I didn’t have language for yet — because back then, depression wasn’t something people named or looked for, especially not in the “good girl” with decent grades, piano lessons, dance classes, and a few close friends. From the outside looking in, I had everything going for me.
What no one saw was that I was drowning.
I spent too many unsupervised summer hours drifting — smoking cigarettes, drinking with strangers at the beach, feeling untethered. I’d wake up, put my bathing suit on, and head straight to the water. Seven or eight hours of unstructured time with no one watching and no particular reason to make good choices. My close friends were stuck in summer school, or off visiting family. I wasn’t, so I went alone. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, but this kind of aloneness wasn’t peaceful — it was hollow.
Idle hands, as they say. An unmoored mind is a dangerous companion.
My mother must have gotten wise to it. Once I turned 14, she started bringing me to work with her at the veterinary office where she worked — teaching me front desk skills, back office animal care, how to show up and be responsible for something other than myself. By 16, I was on the payroll. Looking back, that simple act of giving me a place to be and something to contribute probably corrected the entire trajectory of my life.
Then, at nineteen, I ran away in the middle of the night and married a magician. Yes, a magician. In Las Vegas. At 4am. After knowing him for three weeks. (It’s a story best told over martinis — trust me on that one.) I had never been out past midnight. I drove us to the courthouse in my little Fiat X19, my best friend on his lap, and stood before a justice of the peace while the city sparkled outside like it was perfectly ordinary. It was not ordinary.
What followed was a frightening few years that I’m still a little amazed I survived. By 21, I was divorced. You can image the self-image and beliefs I formed in those years, and they all started with shame.
Here’s what I can see clearly now that I couldn’t see then: I had one core belief running the show — that bad things happen to me, and I have to figure it out alone. I didn’t yet understand that I was the thing that kept happening to me. My choices were expressions of that belief. My relationships reflected it back to me. My whole life was organized around a story I’d never consciously chosen.
That belief, unchecked and unexamined, was the invisible architect of my life.
That’s What I Call a Sneaky Stress Story
When I work with women now, we spend a lot of time uncovering what I call sneaky stress — the background noise of beliefs, thoughts, and old stories that quietly run our nervous systems without us ever realizing it.
The belief that bad things happen to me. That it’s too late. That I’m not the kind of person who gets to have that. That I’ll probably mess it up anyway. That I need to earn rest, earn joy, earn permission to want more.
These aren’t dramatic thoughts. They don’t announce themselves. They’re sneaky. They show up as a low hum of anxiety that you can’t quite explain, a vague sense of dread on a perfectly fine day, a pattern of self-sabotage that genuinely doesn’t make sense on the surface. They feel like facts because we’ve been thinking them for so long. We don’t even notice we’re thinking them anymore — they’ve just become the air we breathe.
But they are stories. And stories can be rewritten.
This is one of the most important distinctions I make in my coaching: a limiting belief isn’t the truth. It’s a thought you’ve practiced so long it feels like the truth. There’s a significant difference between those two things. One is fixed. The other is workable. And the moment a woman starts to see that difference, something shifts — a door opens that she didn’t know was there.
The sneaky stress that lives in our belief systems isn’t just emotionally exhausting. It keeps our nervous systems in a state of low-level alarm, which means our bodies are running on cortisol and reactivity instead of clarity and ease. We make decisions from that stressed-out place. We interpret neutral events as threatening. We shrink. We stay small. We tell ourselves the story is just who we are.
It isn’t. I promise you — it isn’t.
The 25-Year Attitude Adjustment (And What It Taught Me)
After those hard years, I spent the better part of two and a half decades doing the work — intentionally, steadily. I found mentors, one professional and one personal, who reflected something back to me that I hadn’t been able to see in myself. They showed me how my actions were creating my results — not just in abstract, philosophical terms, but concretely, practically, in real time.
I got into work that rewarded effort over tenure, and I moved up quickly. Not because I was the smartest person in the room, but because I started showing up with a different belief: I am capable of creating good results. That one shift — practiced over and over — changed everything about how I moved through my career and my life.
I learned that our brains believe what we tell them, and they respond chemically to those beliefs. This is not woo. Sustained negative thinking and chronic stress alter your brain chemistry in measurable ways. They keep your nervous system in a low-level fight-or-flight state that makes calm, clear, creative thinking nearly impossible. You’re too busy scanning for threats — even imaginary ones — to access the best parts of yourself.
And the reverse is equally true. New thoughts, practiced consistently, create new neural pathways. This is neuroplasticity — your brain’s capacity to literally rewire itself in response to repeated experience. When you consistently practice a new thought, you are, over time, building new architecture in your brain. You’re not pretending. You’re constructing.
This is why I take belief work so seriously. It’s not about repeating pretty words until you feel better. It’s about systematically interrupting old patterns and replacing them with new ones — until the new ones start to feel just as automatic as the old ones used to.
Mental Rehearsal Is Real
One of my favorite examples of this principle in action is the story of Liu Chi Kun, a Chinese pianist who placed second at the Van Cliburn piano competition — a remarkable achievement — and then disappeared. He was imprisoned during China’s Cultural Revolution and denied access to any musical instrument for years.
When he was finally released and embarked on a world concert tour, audiences were stunned. He played brilliantly. How? How could someone maintain that level of mastery without touching a piano for years?
His answer was simple: he practiced every single day. In his mind. Note by note, measure by measure, he mentally rehearsed every piece in his repertoire — and his brain could not tell the difference between the rehearsal and the real thing.
That is how powerful the mind is. Our bodies may need physical practice to maintain agility and muscle memory, but our minds can do something extraordinary: they can experience something that isn’t happening yet, and respond to it as though it is.
Which means this: if you practice believing something new, your brain begins to build the experience of that belief — the neural pathways, the emotional responses, the behavioral patterns that go along with it — before the external evidence even shows up.
The question isn’t whether this works. It does. The question is whether we’re using that power for us or against us.
Owning the Story You’re Telling
Here’s a hard truth I share with every client eventually: we are not victims of our thoughts. We are, whether we know it or not, their authors.
I used to tell managers I coached that using excuses or blame to justify mistakes was abdicating their responsibility. The same is true for all of us when it comes to our internal narratives. When we say “I’ve always been like this” or “that’s just how my family was” or “nothing ever works out for me,” we are not describing reality. We are making a choice — often an unconscious one — to hand our power over to a story.
You cannot control everything that happens to you. But you are in control of how you interpret it, what you tell yourself about it, and what you decide it means for your future. That is not a small thing. That is everything.
I also want to say this gently but clearly: complaining about things beyond your control is one of the most insidious ways we give our power away. It feels justified. Sometimes it even feels good in the moment — like a release valve. But it reinforces the story that you are subject to your circumstances rather than the author of your response to them. Every time we complain without moving toward action or acceptance, we’re practicing helplessness.
And we are always practicing something.
New Thoughts to Practice
If you’re ready to start shifting the story, here’s where I always begin with clients: look for evidence.
You can’t just decide to believe something new. Your brain is too smart for that — it will immediately surface all the counter-evidence, all the memories and experiences that seem to prove the old story right. What you can do is start deliberately collecting proof for the new story. Small, real, undeniable proof.
Ask yourself:
- What is one thing that worked out well this week?
- Where did I show up in a way I’m proud of, even a little?
- What’s one time a hard thing turned out okay — or even led somewhere good?
- What’s one quality I have that has genuinely served me?
You’re not looking for a highlight reel, or trying to convince yourself your life is perfect. You’re looking for evidence that a different story is possible. Because it is. It always is.
This is exactly where belief work earns its place — not as toxic positivity, not as a way of pretending your struggles aren’t real, but as new thoughts to practice. You’re training your brain to tune into a different frequency. You’re interrupting the old loop and introducing a new one.
Here are some I use and share with clients. Read them slowly. Notice which ones feel like a stretch — those are usually the ones you need most:
I am capable of figuring things out. I have gotten through hard things before, and I will again. I am in the process of becoming who I want to be. Good things are available to me. I choose what I believe about myself. I am allowed to take up space and want more. My past does not determine what’s possible for me now. I am someone who keeps going.
Say them like you mean them — even on the days you don’t. Especially on those days. The “yet” is the whole point. You are practicing a thought until it becomes a belief. And then you live from that belief instead of the old one. It doesn’t happen overnight. But it does happen. I am living proof of that.
Look for the Helpers — and the Evidence
Fred Rogers’ mother used to tell him, when he saw something scary on the news, to look for the helpers. There are always helpers, she’d say. Look for them.
I think about that often — not just in terms of crisis or tragedy, but in terms of the daily practice of building a more generous worldview. If you look for evidence that the world is hard and people can’t be trusted and nothing works out, you will find it. There’s plenty to confirm that story. But if you deliberately look for evidence that good things happen, that people show up, that you are more capable than you thought — you will find that too.
What we look for, we find. What we practice, we become. What we believe, we live.
I’m not asking you to be naively optimistic or to pretend that hard things aren’t hard. I’ve lived through enough hard things to know that pretending doesn’t help. What I am asking is that you get curious about the stories you’re carrying — especially the ones running so quietly in the background that you’ve forgotten they’re even stories. Those are the sneaky ones. Those are the ones worth examining.
A lead rabbi once said in an interview I happened to catch while stuck in Los Angeles traffic that miracles happen around us all the time — the sad thing is that people either deny their existence or simply fail to see them. That landed for me in a big way, because I believe it. Not in a passive, waiting-for-lightning kind of way, but in the sense that when you’re oriented toward possibility, you notice it. You recognize it when it shows up. You don’t explain it away.
Your orientation — the lens you look through — is shaped by what you believe. And what you believe is something you can change.
You’re Not Stuck. You’re Between Stories.
Here’s what I know after my own long journey and years of walking alongside other women in this season of life: the old story was never the whole truth. It was just the loudest voice in the room.
When we release old stories — not by pretending they didn’t happen, or by bypassing the real pain they caused, but by choosing not to let them write the next chapter — something opens up. A lightness. A second wind. A sense of possibility that didn’t feel available before.
That’s what I call Sweet Freedom.
It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in small moments of noticing. In the decision to try a new thought on, just to see how it fits. In the willingness to collect evidence for a better story, even when the old one is still loud. In the courage to say: that was then, and this is now, and I get to decide what I believe about what comes next.
If you’re in a season of life where things feel uncertain — where the identity you built over the last few decades is shifting, where the kids are grown and the career is winding down and you’re wondering who you are outside of the roles you’ve played — I want you to hear this: that disorientation is not a sign that something is wrong. It’s a sign that you’re standing at a threshold. The old story is ending. A new one is waiting to be written.
And you get to decide what it says.
Your beliefs are a choice. They may not feel like one right now. That’s okay — it didn’t feel like one to me for a long time either. But they are. And you can start making a different choice today — one small, intentional thought at a time.
Want help identifying the sneaky stress stories running quietly in the background of your life? Grab the free Sneaky Stress Decoder — it’s the perfect place to start.
