Let’s just roleplay for a second, shall we? 

You and me, let’s do a little roleplay. What if I was to sit here and be like: “I just want to let you know that you have the most disgusting green nose that I’ve ever seen in my life.” 

What would you do? You’d be like, Okay, thanks. And you would just walk away and live your life. Why? Because you know deep in your soul, you know deep in your heart, you look at yourself in the mirror, and you know that you do not have a green nose, that that is not a part of your experience. That would roll off you like water off a duck’s back. 

However, if you were someone who struggled with a limiting belief, or a fear, or a self-image that you were unintelligent, you know, maybe you had experiences as a child where you were told that you were unintelligent. And someone came up to you and said, “Who do you think you are posting these YouTube videos, you don’t know what you’re talking about?” 

Even if you had all of the degrees in the world, even if you’ve done all the study, that would still cut deep because there is a part of you that still sees yourself as unintelligent, no matter how much your outward accolades change, there is still going to be a part of you, until you heal that part of you, that struggles with the self-image of unintelligence. You’re always going to be afraid of people seeing you that way. Because that’s how you see yourself or that is a part of you that you haven’t accepted within yourself. 

And so us being able to progress towards taking action in life. Yes, a big part of that is overcoming the fear of judgment, but it really is changing our self-image because we will always act in accordance to who we believe we are. 

And in the study of Psycho-Cybernetics, essentially, what this means is that no matter what outward results you get, you essentially have a thought thermostat, which will always bring you back to who you believe you are on the inside. 

So changing your self-image, working on your self-image, and working on your relationship with yourself will not only help you overcome the fear of judgment, allowing you to take more action, but it will allow you to actually sustain the results that you get when you get there.

Four Things That You Can Do to Change Your Self-Image 

SELF-TRUST

Self-trust is so important. Think about this, even if somebody did judge you, and you have this belief that if somebody judged you, the world is over, we over catastrophize, oh my god, someone’s gonna hate me, somebody’s gonna judge me, and I’m not going to survive. That is a lack of self-trust. 

Even if somebody judged you on the internet, you have a positive sense of self-trust will mean that you know, regardless of challenges that happen or negative situations that arise, that you will be okay regardless.

So a big part of how you see yourself is building a sense of self-trust. And there are two things that you need to consider when it comes to self-trust: 

The first is self-respect – self-respect means that you are keeping the promises that you make to yourself. It is so important for you to work on this, we often prioritize keeping the promises we make to other people over the promises that we make to ourselves. Why? Because it doesn’t matter. If I said I was gonna go to the gym or didn’t go, who’s gonna know? You know. The more often that we break promises to ourselves, the more often that we are chipping away at our self-respect and, therefore, our self-esteem and our self-image. 

Now, I’m not going to say that you need more discipline, you need more willpower. What I’m saying is, why not focus on improving ourselves by 1% every day? I think one of the biggest hindrances to our self-trust is that we set these big outlandish goals you’re setting ourselves up by failing to fail. Yes, you will feel so much better about yourself. When you are progressing towards something, you will surprise yourself and build a better sense of self-image when you actually are achieving things. But those things need to be attainable. 

Make sure you can actually achieve it. Why? Because as you progress towards that goal, as you actually stick to the things that you said you were going to do, you will build so much more respect for yourself, and that is almost like rocket fuel for getting you further and further and further along. And that is what builds momentum. 

And the other part of self-trust is self-efficacy. You need to know that you can solve problems, you need to know that you are able to handle challenges every single time you are able to get yourself out of a challenging situation that you’re able to survive a negative time you build self-efficacy, which ultimately builds self-trust. So the way to actually work on this is to embrace challenges. 

You know, so many people want to shy away from challenges. My friend, life is full of challenges, full of beautiful challenges, our life is half positive, half negative, and that’s for a reason there is a duality to everything, including our life, every situation has good and bad to it. But the more that you can prove to yourself that you can actually handle the bad situations, the better your self-image is going to be. You have to be able to trust yourself that you can survive no matter what.

REPROGRAM YOUR INNER DIALOGUE 

Honestly, there is so much gorgeous research out there on the study of reprogramming your brain. There’s so much research out there on the fact that we can actually reprogram our brains. Have you ever heard the quote, “the thoughts you have become the house that you live in?” I love this quote, but it’s so true. 

The tricky part is how do you actually control your thoughts? You know, you’re having like 80,000 thoughts every single day, and most of them are repeated from the day before. So where do you intervene? Well, you have to start trying to retrain some of those negative thoughts that you have about yourself that tell you that you’re not good enough or that are reinforcing these limiting beliefs that you have. 

You have the power to reprogram, the secret to it is repetition. You’re not going to tell yourself a positive incantation once and then be like unto it. Yes, there are some techniques, like NLP that do have rapid transformations. But for many of us, it does take a lot of anchoring and a lot of repetition. 

One of the best practices that I believe that you should be doing regularly to reprogram your brain is hypnosis. I think hypnosis is an incredible tool. Andrew Huberman, who is one of my absolute favourite neuroscientists, has talked about this quite regularly. 

Hypnosis is a really great way to reprogram your brain. But you have to be consistent with it. It’s all about repetition when it comes to reprogramming the brain. But the things that you say to yourself on a regular basis are ultimately going to becom
e your reality and the beliefs that you hold.

SELF-REFLECTION

Number three is actually an exercise that I’ve pulled from one of my signature programs, Influencer Vibes. Engaging in regular positive self-reflection. 

I think that a lot of personal development is always about who you are going to become. It’s awesome. It’s awesome to be inspired and motivated toward whatever version of yourself you want to become in the future. However, what that quite often does is take away from what you become from the past. 

And what a lot of people do is they’re measuring the gap between where they are and where they want to be. And they’re not sitting in self-reflection on where they are from where they’ve actually come. So something that you should be doing regularly is sitting down in self-reflection and just reflecting on a bunch of the amazing stuff that you have done in your life. Because, again, it helps to build that self-efficacy. And it helps to prove to you that you are actually an incredible human being who’s had incredible experiences in the past and, therefore, will continue to have incredible experiences in the future. 

When you’re regularly reflecting on all the things that you’ve done, when you actually retrain yourself to have a positive bias instead of a negative bias, you anchor yourself into your strengths every single day. 

BECOME YOUR FAVOURITE SUBJECT TO STUDY

Spend time getting to know yourself. So many of us are absolutely enthralled by other people on the internet. I mean, how much time do you spend stalking someone on Instagram and watching their YouTube and listening to their podcast? 

Imagine if you put that effort into getting to know yourself. So many of us don’t have a positive self-image because we don’t actually spend time with ourselves, getting to know ourselves. Why? Because it’s freaking uncomfortable. Because a lot of the time, what comes up is things that we also need to work on, things that we also need to face. But that is the challenge that is going to help you build that self-efficacy and help you to build a positive self-image. 

So spend time with yourself, take yourself on a date, study yourself, use journaling prompts from Pinterest. The more that you get to know yourself, the more that you’re actually going to have that great relationship with yourself and build a good self-image, and when you have a good self-image, that is when you change that internal thermostat of success, and you can finally achieve the things that you want in life.