shifting a core belief

I can hear it clear as day in my mind "never have debt, especially on your credit cards" my mom would always say. Especially because she watched her one brother live beyond his means and stack up quite bit of debt before his life ended too quickly to ever reconcile it. But mostly my mom grew up living a very simple life and she wanted the same for us. She didn't want us to ever live beyond what we had or knew we could earn, and as a result never "owe" anyone.

This is just one of many beliefs that was instilled in me from childhood, and that's a long time to be carrying around a core belief. But we all have them, many that date back as early as childhood, like mine. And what I've come to realize through my coaching work is somewhere along the way we grow and evolve and change and sometimes those beliefs no longer serve us. And it's not until we're able to recognize our beliefs that we're able to shift our perspective, or belief, to be aligned to the person we are today.

So being 15 months into owning my own business (after having gone from a good income to literally zero), I've obviously accumulated a bit of debt. I'm proud to say that the majority is due to my coaching certification and that makes sense to me, instead of having college loans, I now have this program to pay off on my credit card. But given that I'm still very much in start-up mode, income fluctuates quite a bit leaving me sometimes in a position of adding to my debt vs subtracting and that's caused me to feel very anxious. Until this week when I had an "ah-ha moment."

I realized that my fear and anxiety around debt is driven by my beliefs from early on in my life. And while mom taught me well to not encourage debt, today I'm in a different place. Today I'm building something that I have every bit of confidence will grow to something that will exceed my debt, it's just not at that point yet. And so in order for me to grow my business to where I need and want it to be, I have to stop being blocked by the fear and anxiety of "debt" and my current means to my ultimate end. Now don't get me wrong, this comes still with rules and boundaries that I set, i.e., I can't start "living the life" and spending money carelessly but I can borrow money that contributes toward me surviving and furthering my business in order to be able to grow it to a point where I have enough money to sustain a living. And just in making that subtle shift in perspective, in re-defining my belief to be more inline with who I am today, I feel so much better -- I feel free.

What are some of your beliefs? Make a list and then step back and ask yourself: "which ones still serve me well and which ones do I need to let go of or re-write to be more aligned with the person I am today?"