The Secret to Rock Solid Self Belief!

Hey Carly here, welcome back to my blog! This one is titled ‘How to Build rock solid self belief’.

This is a really special topic for me because I felt that once I got my head around this, I had a major, major breakthrough with it. This is where everything started to change, so I'm excited to share it with you.

The biggest misconception is that other things or other people dictate how you feel about yourself, or how much you believe in yourself, your level of self belief. And actually, it's all an inside job, it's all up to us.

I didn't realise this until two years ago. I went through a period of time in my life, which I'm going to tell you about and it taught me so much.  I felt my life was up to that point, and then after that point that's where everything started to kick into place and that's where I really started to make progress, achieving things and setting goals for myself that I thought I would never ever possibly be able to do. It was a real turning point for me that I'm really excited to share with you. 

So just to give you a little backstory, I haven't always felt this way. Right now I do have a high level of self belief. I really believe that anything I put my mind to, I can achieve. I haven't always felt like this. I don't feel like that every single day. I don't wake up every day and think ‘Yes!!, I'm going to run for president today, I can do anything’. I mean, I'd be a terrible president. I just say, ‘yes, love and joy to all, everyone can have everything’. I'd be a terrible president. It'd be a nice place to live though, I think, but yeah, everyday, I don't wake up feeling like that. I don't think anyone wakes up every day with the ultimate highest level of self belief.

Generally, I do believe that if there is something I want to achieve, I can achieve it if I put my mind to it, because I realised that I'm in control of all of it. I was not always this way, I actually really did not believe myself a lot at all when I started my business seven years ago, I really didn't and I had to get talked into starting my business and I had to have a few little nudges from Kurt saying, ‘come on, you can do this.’ I kind of thought back about all the stuff that's happened in my life and and why I really didn't believe in myself a lot because I had achieved a lot, as a dancer and doing shows in the West End, I had a really good career, but I still didn't believe in myself that much. 

So I was a starter, I only learned this term a couple of years ago, but I realised that you have starters and you have finishers and I was 100% a starter. I had so many ideas of things I wanted to do, I'm a really creative person so I get lots of ideas and there's loads that I want to achieve, I never really prepare for stuff very well, I never take time to make sure everything's perfect. I just throw myself in and I'll just figure it out, so I started loads of things. I would always quit, I would lose interest, or I'd lose momentum, I've got a pretty short attention span to be honest. I would quit everything and actually, it became a bit of a running joke with loads of my family and friends. If I hadn't caught up with them for a little while, every time I'd meet up with them, I'd be doing something else which would be dramatically different. I had a dress making company and then I was studying for a diploma in sports psychology. I mean I honestly got three weeks in, it was a home university course, it turns out home University and a short attention span just don't go hand in hand very well, at all to be honest with you. So I quit that really quickly, I’m just always quitting stuff. When I was dancing, I was always on some crazy diet, I did it for a bit and then I'd quit and do something else. At the time, I didn't really think anything of it, that was just my character and it was funny. People would ask, ‘Oh, god, what’re you doing now’ and I never really thought about what that was doing to me and the way I felt about myself. I think loads of people are the same, loads of people quit their gym membership, loads of people quit marriages, loads of people quit relationships, loads of people quit stuff all the time, but I really didn't think about how damaging this behaviour would be for me in the future. 

The turning point came to me about three years ago, I decided that I wasn't in a very good place. I really wasn't well, my skin was awful, I was getting awful stomach cramps all the time, I was so tired and exhausted and sluggish and I just felt awful. I decided that I really needed to kind of put my health first and instead of trying to be thin, I needed to actually try and be healthy. With my company, we do a 30 days to healthy living plan, I decided to really stick to it and really focus on getting healthy. After the 30 days, I felt amazing, my skin was clearing up and I had more energy, my hormones were balanced out, I was sleeping better, my mood was better and I really was starting to like what I saw in the mirror, my body was changing. It was going to the place that I'd always wanted to get to, even though I hadn't been focusing on losing weight as such. So I decided that I really liked this idea of focusing on health, instead of focusing on being thin, that was a whole revolutionary idea for me as a dancer. I decided that actually, I want to do a fitness competition and I decided I was going to do a bodybuilding competition. I wanted to do this plan basically for eight months for the entire prep period and see what results I could get with my body based on focusing on health as opposed to focusing on losing weight. So that's what I did. I didn’t know why I was doing this as well because I go from barely being able to stick to a 30 day plan to then doing this whole epic eight month thing and at this point, I'd never stepped foot in a gym either, I was so lazy. After I got injured from dancing, I just stopped working out completely. Every time I went to the gym, I just couldn't be bothered at all and I didn't know what to do. I just fumbled around picking up a 2kg weight here, trying to pull on a cable there and I just really had no direction at all. So, I decided over the course of the next year, I was going to commit myself and focus on being the healthiest I could possibly be and also showing people that you don't have to focus on losing weight, you can just focus on being healthy, so that's what I did. And that was my whole focus for the whole year, I had no idea that in the process of doing that I was actually going to learn one of the biggest lessons and most profound lessons in my own personal growth.

What I learned was, as the time was going on, I was sticking to what I said I was going to do, and I was getting more and more disciplined with my food and with my training. I wasn't missing my training sessions and sometimes I was doing two weight sessions a day, I was working out six times a week at this point, six days a week and I was on it! I was absolutely smashing it and I had the reason why I think I was smashing it because I had a real clear purpose of what I was trying to achieve. I was documenting it on all my social media and I really wanted to show people what happens when you focus on gut health and really sorting your body out but also the fact that you can really learn to love your body, despite having been in a pretty terrible place with your body, so I was doing this and I was so focused, I was doing everything I said I was going to do.

Day by day, I was starting to believe in myself a little bit more, I was setting new goals for myself and I was setting new things that I wanted to achieve. I was starting to change the chat in my head, and instead of my chat, saying, “you're not going to do it blah, blah” all this rubbish which your subconscious mind normally pipes up with, I could hear myself starting to say, “yeah, you can do it, of course, you can do it.” I realised that this is the secret to self belief. The secret to having a rock solid self belief... is to not break your own promises. Now, all those times where I said, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this diploma or I'm going to start this company or I'm going to do this 30 day plan and I quit every single time, I removed a layer of self belief. What actually happens is when you set yourself a goal, you have your conscious mind which is your everyday mind that you think with, but then you also have your subconscious mind, and your subconscious mind is often the most powerful one, it's the one that rules so much of our decisions. It's also the one that's based on a lot of emotion and it's also based on what's happened in our past and our past actions. So what actually happens is, when we decide to go for something, we set a goal for ourselves, and we say, right, I'm going to do a bodybuilding competition, our subconscious mind goes back and looks through our past. It flicks through the archives of what's happened, imagine a whole row of folders and that's the archives of your past experience. It'll flick through and it's thumbing its way through and it's going “Hmm, okay, so Carly said that she wants to do this bodybuilding competition last January, so she was going to do this 30 day plan and she didn't stick to it, so she's probably not going to do it.” Or “ahhh Carly said that she was going to do a couch to 5K, but nope. Yeah, she just did day 3. She's probably not gonna stick to it.” What happens is that your mind goes through those archives, and it decides how it feels about your new goal based on what's happened before.

What I realised was, when you make a decision to not break your own promises, you actually start to really write those archives, you start to create new evidence for your subconscious mind to feed off. So what was happening was, I was sticking to what I said I was going to do, I was sticking to my food, I was sticking to my fitness and everything like that and I was doing everything that I was setting myself. I was doing it and I was finishing it, I had become a finisher!! What that meant then was that anything I said after that, such as, if I was going for a big goal in my business, my subconscious mind went through my recent archives and it was thinking, “Oh, yeah, Carly said that she was going to do this bodybuilding thing and she's doing it. Yeah, she's smashing it. Yeah, yeah, you can do that.” And I really started to rewrite my story. That's what I want to talk to you about in the sense that you have a story up until now. So all your past experiences are deciding how you feel about yourself, and you've kind of created a character of what you are. 

My character back in the day was that I was flaky, I quit things, I had no direction, I had no attention span and I really couldn't stick anything out, I just had no stability. That was my character. Now, I’ve rewritten my character to be disciplined, focused, I set big visions for myself, I set big goals, I can achieve anything that I want to do, because I proved to myself that that's what I do. So if your character right now is someone that you're not proud of, or someone that you don't believe in, or someone that you don't think can achieve all the things that you want to achieve, you need to rewrite that character, you need to rewrite that story. You need to replace those archives with new archives that prove that what you want to do, you can absolutely do, but it's up to you to do that. You have to do that by your actions and what you do from now on. 

This shows up in my life all the time. Not every day do I feel 100%, full belief in myself like I can take on the world. There are always going to be times where you doubt yourself and actually, being a mum, I found myself doubting myself more. I don't know if that's just a natural part of being a mum, you always question yourself more. It's really got me thinking more about what I do and who I am and everything like that, and what example I'm setting. Not even that long ago, I set myself massive goals for the next couple of years. I really set myself some big, audacious goals and for a fleeting moment, I started to doubt myself and I was thinking, “Okay, what can I do now that i’m a mum, I don't know if i’ll have as much time, can I do that and can I actually achieve that? I really caught myself and caught those feelings and I look back at what I'd been doing, it's just so black and white to see why I was feeling that way. It was because I'd said I was going to do my 30 day plan and I’d quit after 10 days because we were in lockdown and the sun was out, then I wanted to have a little cider, then maybe a little takeaway. I just got caught up in it, I broke that promise to myself and other things were happening. I said that I was going to go for a run every day then I didn't go for a run every day, I'd sack it off, because Selling Sunset was on. I realised that I kept breaking promises to myself. This is why that little layer of limiting belief or that little layer of self doubt had crept in because I broke the promises to myself. 

You wouldn't want to break promises to other people. If you promised your little boy that you were going to take him to the shop tomorrow and he was going to get his favourite chocolate bar, you wouldn't break that promise, there's no way you would do it. If you promised your loved ones something, you would never break it. But the promises that we make to ourselves are always the first ones that we break and they're the most important because that's exactly what controls how you feel about yourself.

For years of my life, I said that a relationship that I was in years ago, was the reason why I didn't believe in myself, yes admittedly he was a dick (excuse my language), he used to say, really undermining stuff, he used to say that I was thick, and I wasn't very smart, I had no intelligence at all and just would always always put down my intelligence. Then I used to say he's the reason why I have no self belief but when I look back at that time, it's not what he said that made me feel that way it's what I was doing at that time. At that time, I was in the height of my dance career. I kept saying that I was going to get up early and go to dance class, so I could be a better dancer, I never got up early and went to dance class. I would keep saying I was going to get some more singing lessons, I never got singing lessons, I would keep saying that I was going to stop the fad diet and actually get healthy. I never did any of that stuff and also, the most important thing is that I tolerated the crap that he was telling me. That is such an important thing as well, your level of self belief and self worth is also based on what you tolerate and I put up with what he was telling me and those stupid comments that he was making. I stuck around for far too long just accepting it and that played a massive toll on my self belief. But it's not because of what he was saying to me it was because of what I was tolerating, it’s the fact that I kept standing there and taking it when I shouldn't have done. So, this is what I mean in that you are in control of your own self belief, if right now you feel rubbish about yourself. That's fine. That's absolutely okay, I've been there. I know it's painful. I know it's a rubbish place to be but I've told you the secret. Now, I've told you the secret to turning that around. This time next year, you can be in a dramatically different place smashing goals that you never thought you could even dream of smashing because of the actions that you take today. If you decide today that every promise you make yourself, you're not going to break, day by day, you are going to start to believe in yourself a little bit more. Don't set yourself massive promises, I actually don't recommend going from never setting foot in the gym, never eating healthy at all to doing a bodybuilding competition, it's not the most ideal way of doing it to be honest with you. Although, I did learn a lot about self belief, it also literally nearly broke me it was just a crazy, crazy time. But set yourself goals that you know, you can keep and set yourself promises that you know you can keep. If it's that you want to quit smoking, then decide that, if you can't quit smoking straight away, decide that you're going to cut down to one a day, and then see how you get on. Or say it's drinking, say you've got into a bit of a lockdown habit of having a glass, or a couple of glasses of wine every night. Stop it just stop it, at some point you have to break the cycle and you are in control of that cycle, you have to stop the things that aren't serving you anymore. If any of the things that you're doing make you feel rubbish about yourself or make you feel like you can't achieve anything, then you need to break that cycle, you need to put a stop to it. 

Look at the things in your life right now. Where you feel like you're not being 100% committed to them and think of the promises that you've made yourself up until now. I mean, New Year's resolutions are always the perfect place to look at because we set such big resolutions and intentions for ourselves on the 1st January. So many people give up on them straight away. What did you set yourself on the 1st January, but also, what are the things that aren't serving you now? Put a plan in place to change that and then stick to that. Just remember, every single time you break a promise to yourself, you add another archive to that file and one day, your subconscious mind is going to go back to that point and say, “Ah, well you said that you're going to give up the wine every night, and you didn't, you’re still there smashing a bottle of blossom Hill. So no, you're not gonna achieve the goals.” Don't underestimate how powerful those tiny decisions are, those tiny promises that you make to yourself, they are so damaging for how you feel about yourself in the future. So when you're faced with that thing, you're thinking, ‘Oh, I really want a glass of wine, though.’ Just think, how would I feel about myself? If I do this, how would I feel about myself if I had this glass of wine and that changes everything. Rewrite the archives in your mind, rewrite a new story, have that story, say that whatever you set your mind to, you will 100% do. Then you will honestly, honestly achieve anything. The goals that I set myself now are so audacious and so huge. Honestly, I have no doubt I'm going to achieve every single one of them (you may see me as a New York Times bestselling author, just to let you know). That is all because of those tiny decisions, all because i’m sticking to that 30 day plan, or getting to the gym when I don't want to do it, or all of those tiny things.

I really hope you have found this blog post helpful and it's going to help to change your story and change this cycle. Like I said, You are in control of all of it and do not ever think that where you're at right now is where you're going to be forever. You have absolutely everything inside you to change it, you just need to want to change it. I hope that resonated with you please if you loved any of this or if you know anyone else that struggles with self belief, please please share this with them. Reach out on my Instagram @carlymeyerslifestyle, let me know how you're getting on, let me know what you thought, let me know your feedback. I'm so excited to hear how you're getting on and let me know where you're at in your business as well and what it is that you really want to read from this blog because I want to give you exactly what you need to take it to the next level because I truly honestly, without a doubt believe that every single one of you reading this blog right now is made for so soo much more than you can even imagine. Now is the time to take it to the next level. Thank you so much for reading. I can't wait to see you over on my next blog post.

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Enjoy 

Carly xxx