When it comes to achieving health goals your mindset is everything. If you’ve beat yourself up over not doing what you know you “should be” doing, if you’ve thought that you just don’t have any willpower, or if you’ve called yourself lazy. .. listen up: achieving your goals may be as simple as shifting your mindset.

What you believe dictates how you think, and how you think determines how you feel. Your feelings are the fuel to your actions, and your actions determine your results. If you want to achieve your goals, it’s important to have the right mindset in place. In order to do that, you need to understand the power of faith and your beliefs.

When it comes to faith and our beliefs, it’s important to remember that they often work hand-in-hand. Faith is believing in something that we can’t see, while belief is knowing that something is true – even if it’s not true but our mind believes that it is. When it comes to achieving our goals, we need faith to help our beliefs in order for things to begin to shift. We need to believe that we can achieve our goals, and then put our faith in God to help us make them a reality.

The power of your beliefs is often underrated. People often think that in order to achieve their goals, they need to take massive action and just go for it. They think it’s just a matter of willpower and desire and when they don’t hit their goals they think they didn’t have enough willpower or enough desire. However, the truth is that your mindset is just as important as your actions – or maybe even more important.

Our beliefs – whether they’re right or wrong – determine our thoughts, our thoughts dictate our feelings, our feelings are the fuel to our actions, and our actions determine our results. Read that again.

Let’s look at an example. If you believe that eating a healthy diet doesn’t work for your, that will lead to the thought “why should I bother? I am just going to deprive myself and then get the same results I’ve always gotten. I am just going to work really hard and then won’t lose weight or I will lose weight and then I will just gain in all back. This is a waste of time.” These thoughts lead to feelings of shame, unworthiness, sadness, or maybe even self-hatred. This may even lead to you believing that you are a failure….especially if you have tried many diets in the past and “failed.” This thought process to leads to either inaction – not eating healthy and not exercising because you believe it’s not going to do any good anyway and/or action – eating foods that aren’t nourishing, emotional eating, etc. And then your results will be staying the same weight or possibly even gaining weight….giving your mind evidence that your belief must be correct.

How can you change your beliefs? You challenge them. You ask yourself if what you are believing is true and you can ask God to help reveal to you what is true. It may be as simple as shifting the thought to “Diets may have failed me in the past but eating nourishing foods will nourish my body and moving every day will give my body strength.” Once this thought is proven (you being to feel good, you have more energy to take action and you begin to see results) your mind will being to believe it.

Until we begin to challenge our beliefs, they will be automatic and will have full reign rule our lives – our brains don’t need much time at all to process past evidence. In a split second, you can go from “Today is the day I am going to stop eating sugar” to “Yes, I would love a latte!” when your co-worker offers to buy drinks on the way into the office. It’s not a lack of willpower – it is your brain remembering how in the past, lattes have made you feel happy, and have given you energy and focus (even though you may crash before lunch – our brains like to focus on the positive in the moment and blame the negative on whatever we can make past connections too rather than the blood sugar crash that’s actually happening – 12pm: “I’m so tired, I must not have gotten enough sleep last night.”).

When we challenge our thoughts and our beliefs, we open up the possibility to not only change our thinking (therefore also change our feelings, actions, and results) but also for God to work through us and help us achieve our goals. This is where faith comes in. We can ask Him to renew the transformation of our mind, and we can ask where our beliefs are wrong, not quite accurate, or maybe even where we have unbelief – one of my favorite prayers is from Mark 9:23 is, “Lord, help my unbelief.”

Challenging our beliefs can be a powerful tool in achieving our goals. When we challenge our beliefs, we open up the possibility for God to work through us and help us achieve what may seem impossible. Let God work through you and watch as He helps you achieve things you never thought possible.

Once we see that our beliefs are affecting our thoughts, feelings, actions, and results, we can start digging a little deeper and look at our feelings.

Everything we do is to feel a certain way. God created us to feel. Feelings are a good thing. In fact, God hardwired certain feelings into us so that we would look to Him to meet our needs. For example, the feeling of loneliness reminds us that we need Gods companionship. The feeling of frustration reminds us that we need Gods help to accomplish His purposes. The feeling of worry alerts us to areas in our lives where we need Gods peace.

Many of us learned to avoid or to stuff our “negative” feelings our feelings are telling us something important. One tip to help when you’re feeling something that doesn’t feel “good,” is to ask yourself “what am I feeling right now?” And let that feeling be felt…sit with it. Journal about it. It’s okay to feel sad, angry, anxious, apathetic, sorrowful, and worry just as much as it’s okay to feel happiness and excitement. It’s also okay to feel all of those things all at once. We’re human… and very complex.

We always say we just want to be happy. But what does that mean? I think we all know we won’t always be happy and that’s an unrealistic desire. In my opinion, what we really want is to feel content… even if we’re also sad or happy or whatever else.

Joy is one emotion we can have no matter what we may be facing because joy is a gift from God – and “…the joy of the Lord is your strength,” (Neh 8:10). We can have joy despite our circumstances… and it can help us face difficult circumstances. The Word says “Joy comes in the morning.” Ps 30:5. It’s our choice whether or not we receive the gift of joy.

God can be trusted with our feelings because He created them. And when we surrender our feelings to Him, He can use them to draw us closer to Himself. So dont be afraid to feel. God will use your emotions to lead you into a deeper relationship with Him.

So many women I know are on the brink of burnout right now and are often feeling frustrated and overwhelmed with their health and faith. For women who are struggling to find balance in their lives, challenging their beliefs can be an important step in finding a renewed sense of purpose. When we open up our minds to God’s transformative power, anything is possible. With faith and new beliefs that are set in Truth, we can achieve anything we set our minds to and when we begin to allow ourselves to feel all the feelings, we can begin the true journey to healing.

Instead, focus on the future you want and commit to taking the necessary steps to get there.

Your health will shift when your mind shifts.

Here are three things you can do today to start shifting your mindset:

1. Ask yourself “what am I believing at this moment” each time you are not taking action, you are taking an unwanted action or if you are getting results you’re unhappy with.
2. Journal about your feelings every day for a week. You may want to keep a notes tab and every time you notice a feeling write it down as a reminder to yourself of what was happening at the moment. For example: feeling worried, got a voicemail from the school. Then later that evening write about what you were worried about when the school called. Allow yourself to feel the feelings as you journal about them.
3. Pray. Ask God what beliefs you have that aren’t true.

Want some help with your mindset? Book a call with me today!