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Breaking Through Your Limiting Beliefs with Julia Arndt (Ep. #50)

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Building Better Managers Podcast Episode 50 - Julia Arndt

Building Better Managers Podcast Episode #50: Breaking Through Your Limiting Beliefs! with Julia Arndt

Imposter Syndrome is just one extremely common example of the kinds of limiting beliefs that all too often hold us back. Joining us today is Julia Arndt, founder of the Peak Performance Method and an expert in combining productivity, mindfulness and other leadership tools in ways to combat these limiting beliefs and develop your personal workplace superpowers.

Julia will share how to breakthrough old mental habits and become more aware of the thought patterns holding you back, and create new and productive pathways. When done on a conscious level, and reinforced in the right ways over time, we can build better highways that do support our goals and dreams.

In this episode:

Meet Julia Arndt

  • Julia Arndt is the founder of the Peak Performance Method (PPM), a unique model combining critical productivity, mindfulness and leadership tools to help forward thinking individuals and organizations develop the next workplace superpower through scalable programs.
  • Julia originally hails from Germany, has lived in 5 countries over the last 14 years and speaks three languages fluently. After working at Google in Silicon Valley for seven and a half years while the company grew from 30.000 to 100.000 employees, Julia has been running her own consulting and coaching business, helping over 7000 employees at innovative companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Swisscom and many more understand the effects of stress on body and mind, move beyond burnout and build a mindful lifestyle that delivers focus, high energy and productivity.

Understanding Limiting Beliefs

  • We all have limiting beliefs that are holding us back from being our best selves and performing at our peak levels.
  • There are automated processes in our mind to help us function on a very high level; the brain is constantly scanning the environment for threats. It doesn't matter if it's a perceived threat or real threat, it's the same signal. This releases the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol in order to pay more attention of what is happening.
  • If the reaction happens enough times, you may have these "grooves" in the brain, they're almost like highways. When you are having a belief, maybe it's triggered through an experience, you simply react the same way and will probably have the same experience again text time.
  • The question around how long does it take to build these new habits has a lot of cultural mythology built in, but there's actually no right or wrong answer! The truth is that it really depends on you, on how often you are repeating the new pattern successfully. It is really about how consistent you can be working with this new habit.
  • The book Atomic Habits by James Clear talks a lot about visual cues. Visual cues are important reminders, so keep them in plain sight.
  • We have four different modes to address: thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and actions.
  • To create a new belief, it doesn't actually matter where you start, you can actually break that cycle through any or all of these four different entry points. And there's no right or wrong on how many days it takes to break the limiting belief. It's all about repetition and creating as much support around the new beliefs as you can.
  • It's also important to accept that some failure is part of this process - you will fail probably over and over and over again. But every time try to examine what you can learn from each experience. Each new test will help you to build your confidence levels and your momentum to go in a better direction.
  • Limiting beliefs that are a result of traumatic experiences in the past that might take longer to break, but in the end are just another belief.

Next Steps

  • The first step is always awareness. It's about understanding that there is something that's actually holding you back.
  • It's helpful to talk with other people and have them help you identify any limiting beliefs.
  • Then taking time to just reflect on what any possible limiting beliefs and writing that down, defining them - that can be really powerful.
  • The second step is to redefine. An example might be with time management or calendaring. A lot of people believe that they do not have power over their calendar, so could be a limiting belief. A healthier belief would be, "I do have the power to manage my own time." One positive step could be to create a visual cue, to have this new belief on a piece of paper, where you can see it. When any resistance pops up, this can help to really change the narrative.
  • Third is to think about and change the behaviors connected to that limiting belief, what kind of behaviors are you performing on a day to day basis that that supports this limiting belief that you can change.
  • Maybe you're always angry that you are always working late at night. In order to change that belief you could think about maybe one or two ways of how you can take action in order to better take control of your time. You could create time blocks on your calendar where you really manage your own time, where you create the space in order to work on your projects. Really build new actions and behaviors around that support the new belief instead of the old one.
  • Other tools for helping us to break limiting beliefs are meditation, because it helps us actually access the subconscious mind. A  book that I can highly recommend, is from Dr. Joe Dispenza, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, which talks about neuroscience and what's happening in your brain, how meditation helps you to get into lower brain frequencies in order to shift that behavior.
  • Hypnosis is another way to do this. When people are trying to break the break the habit of smoking, or a fear of flying, they're really accessing the subconscious mind where those limiting beliefs are stored, then helping to redefine them. Starting with hypnosis, then moving to conscious ways to take action and to be very mindful about the steps that you're taking.
  • Therapy and coaching, having somebody to help you through the process, is important because working with professionals is a big advantage.

Downloads & Resources

Follow Julia on LinkedIn here, on Facebook, and on her website PeakPerformanceMethod.com.

Find Julia's podcast Stressd here.

Subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform!

Check out our blog articles on Leadership here.

Julia Arndt

Julia Arndt is the founder of the Peak Performance Method (PPM), a unique model combining critical productivity, mindfulness and leadership tools to help forward thinking individuals and organizations develop the next workplace superpower through scalable programs.

Julia originally hails from Germany, has lived in 5 countries over the last 14 years and speaks three languages fluently. After working at Google in Silicon Valley for seven and a half years while the company grew from 30.000 to 100.000 employees, Julia has been running her own consulting and coaching business, helping over 7000 employees at innovative companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Swisscom and many more understand the effects of stress on body and mind, move beyond burnout and build a mindful lifestyle that delivers focus, high energy and productivity.

Episode Transcript
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