The Fears and Shadow Beliefs we DON'T Face Become our Limits

Hate roller coasters? *raises hand

I’m going to get to my point that the fears and shadow beliefs we don’t deal with directly and thoroughly become our limits, but it’s just going to take me a minute. So, hold on for the ride.

First, fears. But let’s not talk about fears in the tired old way of “rational versus irrational” because fears feel rational in the moment.

Can I get an “Amen, sister!”?

Let’s talk about it in terms of fears worth enduring and not worth enduring. For example, you’ll never find me on a roller coaster. I don’t like ‘em. Never have. Never will. But it’s also not a fear I have to put myself through. As I see it, it’s just unnecessary cruelty toward myself, so I don’t, and my life is perfectly fine without roller coasters. 

Flying. Not a fan but certainly worth fighting through the fear of flying so that I can go on vacation with my husband, see my daughter, travel to coaching events, and see the world. I deal with that fear using breath work and mind exercises that allow me to envision a bright white light surrounding the plane for protection so that I can continue on with my adventures as desired with or without turbulence.

A different type of fear

But there are other fears, too, that are much more tricky to navigate because it’s not just a question of “Can I live with this experience or not?” but rather a question of “Why can’t I move past this block in my life?” 

I’m talking about fears with attendant shadow beliefs.

Shadow beliefs almost always stem from a dramatic event in our childhood that has left us afraid. Our childhood self attempts to deal with the event but ends up creating a belief or series of beliefs and negative thoughts that are fear-based and govern our lives moving forward. The fear with the attendant shadow beliefs limits our ability to grow and achieve our goals if it becomes a dominant force in our lives. They manifest as limiting thoughts and self-doubt, such as "I’m not loveable," "I’m never going to be successful," or–as I’ll share from my own life in a minute–“Life is hard.”

Their dominance in our lives can hold us back from pursuing our goals, trying new things, and taking the necessary risks that living fully demands. Shadow beliefs can also lead to self-sabotage, causing us to act in ways that reinforce our negative beliefs. It just snowballs over time. They’re often the reason why we find ourselves stuck in midlife, worn out, and exhausted. We have to deal with them directly and thoroughly to gain more control over our lives, reduce fear, and achieve greater happiness. This is the way to vibrant living and fulfillment, which is something that I’ve said a thing or two about before.

The fears and shadow beliefs we DON’T face become our limits.

The connection between fears and shadow beliefs

If your family celebrates Christmas with a tree and ornaments, you’ll know this analogy intimately, and if your family celebrates another holiday, you’ll be able to appreciate this frustration all the same. Here’s the setting. An evergreen tree has been purchased, hauled into the house, and set up in a corner of a room. Boxes of ornaments litter the room, open and waiting patiently for us to begin emptying them. Kids are excitedly jumping about and pitching in to help. 

But there’s a problem.

The ornament hooks. They are–like every year–waiting patiently in the bag where you put them at the end of the last holiday season. You’re now holding a brightly decorated ornament in one hand while the other fishes for a hook. You reach into the bag or box, grab a hook, and attempt to pull it out only to find that pulling one brings with it a birds-nest of ornament hooks. It can be quite the Christmas buzzkill depending on the severity of the tangle and the intensity of the kids jumping about with their own ornaments in hand. 

Fears and shadow beliefs are connected like these Christmas tree ornaments hooks. You attempt to deal with a fear because it’s an emotion right there on the surface, but you can’t seem to get past it. You feel stuck. There’s a tangled mess of shadow beliefs connected to this fear, which leaves you with a choice: do you sort out the mess or keep avoiding it? 

Dealing with one of my shadow beliefs

Okay, so here’s one of mine.

Losing my father at 4-years-old brought me a new kind of fear that caused me to develop a number of shadow beliefs around the “Life is hard” belief. Life certainly felt hard then. The comfort of sitting on my dad’s lap as he read the newspaper was gone, a seemingly small daily ritual ripped from me. As my mother struggled to make ends meet for the 5 of us children, I developed the belief that life really IS hard and that life should ALWAYS feel hard. Take out the difficulty, and something felt amiss and wrong.

Here’s how it played itself out later. If ever I encountered a season of life where things were clicking and felt too easy or too wonderful, I would usually feel that I should take on teaching another fitness class and fill life to capacity. If I wasn’t living on the edge–within reach of feeling overwhelmed with the amount of stuff I had piled on top of myself–something was wrong. Life was supposed to be hard, and if it wasn’t I made it hard. 

Fast forward to my 50s. I’ve spent half a century apparently successful: dancing, teaching fitness, traveling, and raising a family. I had no reason to think that I needed help living my life because my shadow belief of “Life is hard” still held water. Enter Lyme disease. Lyme disease turned my world upside down, and I wasn’t able to cope. I felt stuck, frustrated, and hopeless. There it was, proof that life WAS hard! But you see, I had been totally unaware that I held that belief all my life until I actually unraveled it all during a Reinvention coaching session. 

To say it more accurately, the belief system failed me.

This is why I don’t like talking about fears in terms of rational or irrational: my response of facing up to life being hard helped me survive. It was perfectly rational for a kid too young to know anything about shadow beliefs and simply wanted to play with friends, enjoy an ice cream on a hot summer day, and do well in school. Little did I know that my “life is hard” mindset was just getting cranked up and would run out of gas in another 40 years. It was a classic case of a human response to a dramatic event under the age of 10. I made my dad’s death mean something about myself in the world  and then tucked it away in my subconscious. Life was becoming smaller and smaller.

Overcoming shadow beliefs

The good news is that we can choose to face our fears and uncover our shadow beliefs. Midlife is a prime time for our shadow beliefs to emerge and fail us. And when we decide to ucover our shadow beliefs, we open up a whole world of possibilities. We find the courage to take risks, to seize opportunities, and to live the life we were meant to live. It’s challenging for sure, but it’s worth it. 

And it’s best done with a Reinvention coach. 

I could NEVER have effectively addressed my own shadow beliefs without the help of a reinvention coach. Couldn’t have touched it! I would have soldiered on dutifully while becoming more and more bitter. The tangled mess of living 50 years thinking that I was successfully navigating life would have pushed me to continue with “the same old, same old” because I wasn’t able to see the connection between my fear-based responses to life and the shadow belief that the bottom was always about to fall out–that life was hard and always needed to be hard. Overcoming my shadow belief was transformative, and it’s why I’m now a reinvention coach myself.

Again and again, I meet women who have spent the first half of life living with these shadow beliefs. Our work together is to uncover them and replace them with beliefs that enable greater resilience and more effective living. Because let’s face it: that whole VUCA thing is legit. Life is Volatile. It is Uncertain. It is Complex. And it is Ambiguous. The gap between where we are and where we want to be is only ever bridged by our willingness to courageously look at the beliefs holding us back and work to replace them with new beliefs unflinchingly. 

It’s never too late to learn. This is a journey we’re all on, and it’s okay if it takes time. 

And before I let you go, I want to say this. I know you’re out there. I know you’re afraid of change. I’ve been there. I don’t know the future, and I’m not here to tell you how your life is going to end. What I am here to say is that I know how the rest of your life can begin. I know that it can be without fear or shadow beliefs determining what you do, where you go, and who you are. It’s a world without rules and controls, without borders and boundaries. It’s a world that only sees solutions–where anything is possible. Whether or not we continue together–that is up to you. But if you want, you can book a free coaching call with me to find out.

Until later, 

Laura xxx