Most people never reach their potential, not because they aren’t capable, but because they believe the lie that their abilities are fixed and they can’t change them.
What if I told you your mindset could change everything about your success? Tune in to today’s episode. I’m Kim Strobel and this is She Finds Joy. In the last podcast episode, I talked to you about growth mindset and shifting from “I can’t do this, I don’t have the skill set to do this” to “I can’t do this, yet.” Today I want to take that conversation deeper because here’s the truth: Our mindset is only as strong as the beliefs that sit underneath it.
And folks, beliefs drive everything about how we show up in life. In fact, 95% of how we show up in our lives comes from our belief systems. And many times, those belief systems are housed in the subconscious part of our brains. Let me explain this a little bit more.
So in your brain, you have the prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain. That is the brain that we operate out of the most. It’s the executive functioning brain. It’s the brain that thinks, that rationalizes, that plans, that executes. But we have the subconscious part of the brain or the mind, which is kind of like the dark, dark room or the deep recesses of your mind.
And that part of your mind, the subconscious part, is the part that is running every facet of your life. You’re just not really aware of it. And so our beliefs, they are housed in our subconscious mind. Here’s the crazy thing: most of our beliefs were formed by the time we were six years old. They were formed from our caretakers, our mothers, our fathers, our teachers, people who were close to us, who were constantly downloading belief systems into us.
Our belief systems are what we think is true about ourselves, what we think is true about the world, and what we think is possible or not possible for our lives. So they either expand us or they limit us. Studies show that when people are taught to embrace a growth mindset in life—which means they are working with old belief systems that no longer serve them and start to download new belief systems—they actually become higher achievers in school, in work, in relationships, in life.
Let’s talk a little bit today about the beliefs-driven mindset and how you can start to shift your beliefs that you’ve held inside of you. As I said, it’s shocking, but the research shows that most of those beliefs were formed in us from the time we were six years old. Many of us in today’s life are showing up as six-year-old versions of ourselves. It’s impacting how we show up in our health and fitness. It’s shaping how we are or are not feeling like we are succeeding in our relationships, in our lives. It shows up and is the driver of everything.
In fact, I want you to picture an iceberg. You know how an iceberg is usually huge underneath the water and there’s just the very tip of the iceberg showing at the top? Well, that very tip—that’s your prefrontal cortex, your conscious mind, the one that we operate out of most of the time, that we think is driving our life. But in fact, the conscious mind is only responsible for 5% of how you show up and do your life.
95% of how you show up and operate in life—from how you manage the people that you work with, to how you manage your day-to-day job, to how you’re parenting your children, to how you’re navigating your relationships, your marriage, your friendships—95% comes from that hidden iceberg that’s underneath the water. 95% of how we show up in life comes from the subconscious mind. A big part of the subconscious mind is the beliefs that we are holding about ourselves.
These beliefs—they are basically stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and what is possible for our life. Again, they come from your childhood, your culture, your experiences, your teachers, your parents. Maybe you grew up—let me give you an example. One of the belief systems that a lot of people hold is a scarcity mindset around money. Like, “I’m never going to have money. I don’t have a great skill set. I didn’t get a college degree. I’m bad with money. It’s never going to make a difference. I’m never going to have enough money. I’m never going to be able to save.” These are scarcity money mindsets that were probably formed in us by the time we were six years old, that are still driving our ability to attract or not attract abundance in our lives.
Or we tell ourselves, “I just don’t have what other people have to succeed. I’m never going to be the person who is successful in their career because I don’t have the skill set, I don’t have the talents.” And again, these belief systems are like operating systems. They’re kind of like the software that is downloaded in your computer that’s running everything, even though we don’t see the coding going on in the background because it’s hidden—it’s in the software. These operating systems are really kind of in the background of our mindsets.
Hello, friends, and thank you for letting me interrupt for just a moment. I want to be honest with you. So many people that I meet feel stuck or unhappy or maybe even a little disenfranchised in their work lives or home lives. They’re working hard, but many times the value they bring simply doesn’t match the paycheck they get. And when life feels overwhelming, it’s really easy to slip into toxicity, blame, and victimhood. But here’s what I know: We can acknowledge the hard of our lives, and still shift towards hope. We can take back our personal agency and start creating joy, meaning, and energy, no matter what’s happening around us.
When we do that, we start showing up as a different version of ourselves in our work lives and in our personal lives. That’s exactly what I do with people. Through my keynotes, I blend research, stories, and strategies that show audiences how you can move from burnout into breakthrough. Let me tell you, when you learn to reclaim your power, you take ownership of your life. I promise you—that is when you move the needle in every single area of your life. If you are a school or an educational conference, you can reach out at strobel education dot com. If you’re a business, a Fortune 500 company or organization, you can reach out at Kim Strobel dot com.
So what I want you to think about today is: how are those showing up in your life? Carol Dweck says the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. And what she’s talking about is your view—again, your belief system—and your belief systems are profoundly affecting how you experience every area of your life.
I want to give you a quick example of this. And by the way, a belief is simply a repeated thought that you hold to be true for yourself. You just hold that repeated thought over and over again until it becomes a belief.
Let me give you kind of a funny example. There was this study done in Germany where they took ten men who all needed knee replacement surgery. They knew they were in a knee replacement study. All ten men went to the hospital and were put under anesthesia. All ten, when they woke up, had everything on their knee that looked like they’d had knee surgery. They had the incisions, they had the crutches, they had everything. So they left the hospital thinking they had the surgery done. That was part of the research study.
Now what’s fascinating is that five of these men never even had the knee surgery. They were just put under anesthesia, and they had the markings on their knee that made them feel like they had had the surgery. So five never had the surgery. Two had a full surgery and three had a partial surgery. But all ten men left the hospital on crutches, limping as if they had had the surgery. All ten at the four- and six-week post-op mark reported a substantial improvement in the way their knees felt. Only then were the five told, “Look, we didn’t even give you the surgery. We didn’t change anything about your physical mobility.”
But what happened is because their brain believed they had had this miracle surgery, their body actually responded to those beliefs. That’s how powerful beliefs are. You hear this all the time; this isn’t crazy. You hear this with the placebo effect. How many times are people given a little white pill, and they think it’s a real pill, but it’s just a sugar pill? They believe that pill is working, and because they believe it’s working, it actually changes and causes physical and emotional changes in their bodies and brains. This is how powerful our beliefs are.
The really cool thing is, even though kind of at six years old we’ve formed all of our beliefs about ourselves, what we know is that you can extract your beliefs. You can actually pull out old belief systems and download new belief systems. I want to give you one little tip that’s going to help. I’ve got fifty tips, and when I work with employees or I keynote people on the power of the growth mindset, especially how that fixed mindset is showing up in the workplace—I want to go there real quickly.
In a fixed mindset, when you believe your belief system is, “Intelligence is static. I can’t really change my skill set. I can’t change my intelligence level. I can’t change my talents.” What we know about fixed mindset people is they will always avoid a challenge. They never want to do anything hard, right? We see this in our students—they avoid a challenge at all cost, even if it means learning. People in a fixed mindset give up really easily when they encounter obstacles. They see effort as fruitless: “It’s never going to matter. It’s not going to change. I’m not going to learn it anyway. I’m never going to become better at this.” They don’t take feedback well.
I always knew as a curriculum director, when I worked with teachers, and we’d have to go over things they were doing well but areas they could improve upon, I understood it—I would see teachers completely melt in their chair when I had to give even good, kind feedback, because they could not handle any kind of useful feedback. They shut down immediately and could not handle the useful feedback. Whereas when you’re in a growth mindset, when you have this belief that “I might not be good at it yet, but I can get better,” the growth mindset people embrace a challenge. They embrace difficulty. Yes, they have setbacks, but they persist despite the obstacles. They understand it takes effort to gain mastery and they’re willing to put in the effort. They learn from criticism. They want to improve their life. That is a growth mindset.
So when we’re looking at this, you think: “If everything is driven by my beliefs, how do I start to create new belief systems?” Well, I will tell you: for me, one thing is reading. I have read so many books to improve myself. I have read books about how to get better in my marriage, my relationships. I have read books about how to become a better parent. I have read books about managing money, attracting money, using money for good things. I’ve read books about health and fitness and aging well.
One thing is: are you feeding your brain a different belief system? If you’re constantly feeding your brain a different belief system and actually acting on that new information, then all of a sudden you start to create a new belief system because you have new information downloaded in you and those downloads are overriding those other scripts.
I could keep talking about this forever. I’ll do more podcast episodes on it. One thing I want you to know is that you do have the ability to extract these old belief systems and download new ones. It means you have to feed and expose your brain to new and better pieces of information. And it means you have to actually act on it, because—what is that out of there? Warren Buffett has this great quote: “Knowledge is not power. It’s acting on the knowledge that is power.”
So you have the ability to create new belief systems, you have the ability to embrace challenges, and you have the ability to create a different mindset when you do get stuck—when you encounter these obstacles. Understanding that we want to honor effort and perseverance, we want to lean into the struggle because we’ve built the confidence that says, “I have what it takes to get through this.”
If you’re listening to this podcast episode and you work at an organization where you feel like people have very fixed mindsets—it could be employees, it could be teachers, it could be anybody—where they operate in these very fixed mindsets, where they won’t learn from criticism, where they’re threatened by other people’s success, where they don’t know how to lean in and embrace the challenge, the adversity, when they are shutting down rather than expanding themselves—reach out to me. I would love to come to your school or business and teach this idea of the power of the growth mindset. Also understanding that our belief systems are driving how we show up in our life. When we change our belief systems, we change our lives.
Thank you so much for joining me on the She Finds Joy show today. I’m truly honored that you chose to spend your time here with me, my dear friend. If this episode brought you encouragement or a fresh perspective, I would be so grateful if you took a moment to leave a review. Just head to KimStrobel.com/review. What it does is help more people find these important conversations.
Don’t forget, you can also subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode. Thank you again for listening in. I am so very grateful, my friend, to walk this journey with you. I also want to encourage you to share this episode with everybody in your life you care about. We all need encouragement and real talk.
Thank you for listening and watching. I believe in you—for being able to create a life that feels good from the inside out. Remember, you are deserving of joy and happiness.
