Your Beliefs About Menopause Make Or Break Your Experience. Choose Wisely.
Most people I speak with think their beliefs are like their wardrobe. They’re basically stuck with what they’ve got. Every day they simply walk up to their closet, sift through what’s there, pick something out, wear it, and move on to the next set of clothes the next day. Rinse. Repeat.
If that’s your attitude when it comes to your beliefs, it’s no surprise you are not living your life to your fullest potential. Whether this means enjoying the best job, making the most money in your field, enjoying the best relationships, or looking physically fit, beliefs play a major role in your life. No matter how little awareness you have around the topic, beliefs will continue to remain important in your life.
Where Do Beliefs Draw Their Power?
Beliefs are like glasses. Depending on the grade of your glasses, the world may look crystal clear or it may look very fuzzy and you might even have a nasty headache when using glasses that have the wrong prescription.
Beliefs work the same way. When you perceive reality, and I’m talking about the things that you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, they have to be filtered by something in your head. This is called your belief system.
Take menopause.
What comes to mind when you think about your own experience or what you expect to experience?
Take that vision and filter it through the “easy” lens. In other words, ask yourself this, “What if menopause was easy?”
We’ve been hoodwinked into thinking menopause is going to be difficult, overly challenging… hellacious even. Every single movie or TV show I can think of has portrayed a woman in the throes of menopause having some sort of hot flash, emotional outburst, or looking wild-eyed as if she were just this side of a mental breakdown. This portrayal conditions us to think that menopause is an inevitable hell.
And for some women, it is.
Yet for others, their experience is much less dramatic and much less symptomatic.
When you filter this information, you give it meaning. You give it color. You give it a certain slant or angle.
What do you think happens next? Your analysis of the things that you choose to perceive about menopause impacts the things you say, the things you do, and the things you feel about yourself and the experience of menopause.
In other words, your beliefs are fundamental to your menopause experience. Problem is, a lot of people think that since they think a certain way, this is actually their reality. They confuse objective reality, which everyone could agree with, with their own subjective take on the things as they perceive them.
Also, other people excuse their own warped way of perceiving reality by saying that that’s just who they are. Or that it’s part of their personality. How dare people question them! (*Oh boy do feathers get ruffled.*)
Beliefs are chosen. Just as you can choose your clothes, you can choose your beliefs.
I’m not saying that it’s easy. After all, beliefs do become habitual after a while. You don’t hang onto a belief system because it is just flat-out wrong and harms you. There’s something about the belief system that you have chosen that gives you enough benefits for it to be worth hanging onto.
Comfortable Yet Dysfunctional
It’s like wearing really raggedy shoes. Like that pair you just can’t toss out no matter how many times it makes it to the “trash” pile during one of your Marie Kondo-inspired home organization-paloozas. They look nasty and they could even smell like a rat died in them but, for whatever reason, you like wearing those shoes because they’re comfortable. You know that they don’t look the best; they don’t perform all that well but you prefer their comfort. They do well enough and serve you well enough so you keep them around and you use them day to day.
The same applies to your beliefs. There are many belief systems that have simply outlived their purpose or usefulness. It’s important for us to take a long, hard look at our beliefs and ask ourselves some difficult questions. Otherwise, we will be living far below our true potential. We would continue to look at reality with tools that really don’t serve us. That’s a tragedy.
Amongst the top tier of women I look to for menopause support is Susan Willson, CNM. In her 2022 book, Making Sense Of Menopause, she sums the beliefs conversation up with, “What we expect heavily influences what we will experience.”
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To stack the deck in favor of reaching your true potential, you’ll need a heaping helping of grit and stick-to-it-ness. Along with support from those who get where you’re coming from, understand what you are seeking and why, and those women who seek the same level of transformation for themselves.
The best way I can recommend you set out on this quest is to join us in the Unraveling Together Community. It’s a free resource hosted off social media on a Mighty Network. You can pop in on the regular from both your desktop and our user-friendly app.
I am carefully curating this community to ensure it is a place for you to lean into during this powerful time of transition. As we lean in, we grow in ways we’ve not been able to do just yet. The alchemy of navigating life and business with others on a similar path, allows you to tap into this transition and come out the other side at peace with your body, your mind, and fully aware of what lights you up as a person.
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