Self-Awareness: Uncovering Assumptions, Beliefs & Conditioning for Personal Growth

What if the very assumptions that you think are benefiting you, are actually holding you back from reaching your full potential?  In this episode we demystify the whole “awareness” concept, exposing the underlying influences of our beliefs and conditioning.

We share an enlightening tool that aids in identifying and shifting your assumptions, beliefs, and conditioning - the iceberg model - allowing you to visualize how your assumptions, beliefs, and conditioning shape your worldview and ultimately affect your personal and professional growth.

With practical steps, personal anecdotes, and in-depth insights, this episode equips you to welcome change, redefine beliefs, and boost your own level of awareness allowing you to truly Stand Tall and Own It.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

You're listening to Stand Tall and Own it, the podcast for high performing female leaders who are ready to make an impact by discovering the safety that comes from understanding their own value and exercising their own authority. I'm your host, andrea Johnson, and I'm here to tell you it is time to just truly be you, my strong friend. It's time to Stand Tall and Own it. Hi there, welcome to Stand Tall and Own it. I am your host, andrea Johnson. On the last few episodes, I've referenced things like challenging your assumptions, beliefs and conditioning, or understanding the grief that comes with knowing you need to make a change in a certain area, and even last week, I talked about understanding and knowing what you need to charge your battery. Now, the one thing that all of these statements or ideas have in common is you have to have awareness. So today, that's what we're going to talk about. I think there's a lot of conversation out there about what awareness is and we talk about in the coaching sector especially. We talk about the first thing you need to change is awareness. If you don't have awareness, you can't change anything. Well, that's true, but who actually takes the time to define it? I'm going to do that today and I'm going to give you some examples and an illustration that I hope will be very helpful to you, and at the end I'm going to ask you for some feedback. So the first thing I need you to know is that, as we walk through this conversation and we talk about awareness, one of the things I say, probably once a week to someone usually a client is you can't work on what you don't see. That's why we need awareness. But here's the piece that I need you to hear very clearly before we start is that you need to be able to be gracious with yourself in what you know and when you know it, because the main point is you know what you know when you know it. Never before, not last year, not 10 years ago, not five minutes ago. If it dawned on you right now, that's when you know it, which is your opportunity to work on it. So I'm going to illustrate what I mean by awareness today by walking you through what it means to be aware of your ABCs, or your assumptions, beliefs and conditioning, and I've decided to use the iceberg illustration or model as a way to illustrate this, and if you haven't seen one, you can just look it up like an iceberg model for what you understand and what you don't understand, or any other topic. I will probably put one together.

Speaker 1: 2:45

This is a really good opportunity for me to put together a new framework. But if you think about it this way, especially like the Titanic, what you see above the waterline, if the waterline is right here, what you see above the waterline looks like quote unquote the tip of the iceberg, and what's below the waterline is usually much bigger. Sometimes it's a big pyramid in the description, sometimes it's jagged on the bottom and really deep and you just never know what's there. That's what hurts us, that's what we don't know and that's why I want to use that example and that illustration as a way to talk about awareness. So when we look at the iceberg model, the first thing that we see at the top is probably your assumptions. Those are things that are much easier to see, much easier to understand, and we'll talk about this. The easiest to change. But in the middle are your beliefs. Some of those are above the waterline and some of them are below the waterline, and we'll talk about that just in just a little bit as well. But the thing that you never see Is the stuff that's at the very bottom. That whole bottom section, the one that makes up all the dangerous stuff, could potentially be dangerous stuff in an iceberg. That's your conditioning, and so I want to be able to walk you through these things to help you understand why it's important number one to have awareness in these Areas, but also what it means and what it looks like to have awareness in these areas.

Speaker 1: 4:09

Alright, so let's talk about assumptions. I usually associate these with perspective. For instance, I see things from this lens, from this direction, and I don't necessarily see them from that direction, from my right or my left, but they show up and they're easiest to identify when our expectations are not met. Oh, I thought, or I assumed you meant this when you said that, or I assumed that when we, when we said we were gonna meet at this time, it meant this thing or whatever. Right, it's like it shows up in communication all the time. But here's the thing Assumptions hold you back. They hold you back in many areas.

Speaker 1: 4:51

But I had a conversation with a client yesterday. It was actually a steering committee for a group that I will be presenting my core values workshop to in magnetic leadership, and one of the things that I always check with whenever I'm doing a in-person or a group program is I want to know what is your greatest need. And their Immediate response was I need the people to understand that critical thinking is all part of the job and it's okay for them to do. What's happening is this is a group of people that is kind of they're all like individual contributors and so they're not the people at the top making all the decisions. But even though they're individual contributors, they have multiple customers on every level. They're also the most technically Involved and advanced people in this whole team situation. So what's happening is they're assuming the people above them, or the people that make the rules or the people that make the regulations no best, and so they're not actually using their own brains to do it. So this is where assuming actually holds them back from productivity. It holds them back from progress. It holds some people back from actually doing their jobs.

Speaker 1: 6:01

Well, here's the good news about assumptions they are the easiest of all three of these things to do something about. Why? Well, there's usually a lot less emotion involved, depending on the topic, right, if it's a Communication piece, where I assume you meant this, there may be some emotion involved, but most of the time, when we're presented with facts, when we're presented with this is the actual fact of the situation, rather than what you assumed most of us are willing to say, oh okay, these assumptions are not usually based solely on belief or conditioning there. They're usually something that has to do with our perspective. So they're at the top of this iceberg model, they're the easiest thing to see and they're the easiest thing to change. So let's go down one level and let's talk about beliefs. How do we need to be aware of our beliefs and why right?

Speaker 1: 6:57

Beliefs, I think, fall in a continuum of everything from really benign and very positive all the way down to things that Are foundational to who you are, things that people will go to war over, things that they will. You know, people say I am gonna die on this hill for that particular belief. So when I say the belief, part of the iceberg, some of it is above the waterline and some of it is below the waterline. That's what I mean. The good beliefs, the benign beliefs, are things like I believe that I will win right, or I believe in you, or I believe in our Ability to get these things done. Those are really positive and even some benign beliefs. But then, when you get down below the waterline and you get to the things that people are willing to Literally die over, we're talking about beliefs that are foundational to your faith, to how you fit into the community Beliefs about family structure, beliefs about politics oh my goodness beliefs about money.

Speaker 1: 7:59

These are huge, foundational beliefs in our lives and even though Some of them are above the waterline that we can see and they're very clear, some of them we don't even realize. We have these belief systems, but I need you to understand this about beliefs Just like assumptions are the easiest to change, beliefs are 100% changeable, every single one. Ask anybody who's changed political parties, ask anybody who has changed a religion. Soon, as you decide, I am going to change this belief. You can get to work on it. If you decide, this belief no longer serves you like, for instance, in a weight loss journey for me, believing that I could never lose weight, believing that I would always be fat, believing that I was ugly, believing that I was too much, those beliefs did not serve me. And I'm talking. Those are very internal beliefs, right, some of these beliefs affect how we interact with other people. But as soon as you decide, you can develop new beliefs and you can choose new beliefs. That's all up to you.

Speaker 1: 9:08

The ones that are below the waterline are the ones that we're really not aware of, right, anything that we cannot see, we just don't even know it's there. But here's the other piece is that I think that most of the beliefs that are foundational to us and that are below that waterline are things that have come from outside of you. Now, that's a very broad statement, and you might say, no, andrea, I have decided what I'm going to believe, but I'm going to challenge you on that, because 100% of the work that I've done on myself and 100% of the work that I've done with my clients proves that most of the beliefs that we end up with at a place whether we're 20, 30, 40 or 50 years down the road in our lives if we're finally starting to do personal growth work, most of those beliefs are things that have come to us from outside of ourselves, and I'll get to that. What I really mean by that, but it's the ability to do the personal growth work means that you have to be willing to dive down and you have to be willing to go under the water and look at those things. But here's the other thing about beliefs. While they are 100% changeable, these are the ones that involve the grief. What if you have held a belief for 20, 30 or 40 years? I've shared in the past that this is stuff that I work on. This is where the grief comes in. It's hard but it's good.

Speaker 1: 10:38

When you can raise your beliefs above the waterline and know why you believe what you believe, no matter what topic we're talking about, then everybody else knows why you believe what you believe. There's nothing that's going to hinder you from having some kind of really good relationship with another person, because when you understand what you believe and why you believe, you're no longer defensive about it. You don't feel like you have to persuade other people of your belief. It can just be something that you hold. This is where a lot of space is taken up in the coaching and the self-help and the personal growth spectrum or community. This is where a lot of that resides. It's in systems and habits and hacks and figuring things out to get those beliefs up to where you can see them.

Speaker 1: 11:26

But here's the thing If we don't actually go all the way down to the bottom of this iceberg, for many of us it's very deep and very jagged. Look at our conditioning. There's only so much awareness you can have. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this episode Now, whether you're a longtime listener or if you've just discovered us. If this episode inspires you, it would mean so much to me If you would scroll down in your Apple app, tap the five star review and write a simple sentence or two. No, you don't need to write an essay, just let me know what resonates with you. When you do this, you're letting me and my team know that this is the kind of content that is valuable to you and what we can offer you in the future. It also lets other listeners know that this show is valuable and worth their time to listen. You can stand tall and own the impact you have by taking just a few seconds to leave us a review. Who knew it could be that simple?

Speaker 1: 12:26

And now back to the show With conditioning. You're going to get a glimpse of conditioning and what it is when you start looking at your assumptions, because some of our assumptions come from the conditioning that we have from our family, or from our religion, or from our political background or from our schools, but when you really start doing some of the condition, the belief work. That's when you actually start the conditioning work as well, because when you start saying, why do I believe what I believe? You're working on your conditioning? You're actually looking to say what is below this and where did that come from? I even had some beliefs that I attributed to my family. Turns out, my family didn't really believe those, but one or two things were said over and over in my younger years, like maybe even in elementary and junior high school, where I interpreted them through my assumptions and my lens and they became a belief system for me that didn't really have anything to do with reality. So this is where the hard work comes in and this is where we start talking about our self talk, because it's the self talk comes from the conditioning and is fueled by a belief. But if you can't get to the conditioning, you're never going to change your self talk right. You can say, oh, I'm talking to myself like I'm a millionaire, I'm a millionaire. And if your conditioning says I'm poor, I'm poor and your brain says that self talk you got trying to go on there makes no sense. Your conditioning is going to trump it every single time.

Speaker 1: 14:01

When we start looking at conditioning, one of the first things that's going to pop up and you just need to be aware of this, and it involves a lot of it is anger, because we start realizing this was something I was taught and I didn't even I wasn't even aware of it. Right, it's like I didn't have that awareness to know how to think about things differently. There's a lot of blame that happens. I see this, I saw this in myself and I see this in a lot of women when we start to understand the effect on not just us but the entire culture of the patriarchal paradigm, how women are held back in many areas, if it's earning, or the way we can lead, or the way we show up, or even just our own beliefs about ourselves. This is, I mean, for me. I had what I would call rage for about a year. My husband would sit across the living room for me on Saturday morning as we would talk over our coffee and he'd be like you're really angry about this. I'm like I am. I'll get past it and I have. That is something that we have to work through.

Speaker 1: 15:06

But once you start getting down into your conditioning, this is the really hard work. But here's the beauty, even though this conditioning holds you back and women have been held back, even though there's grief that stems from changing all of this stuff in order to change your beliefs. As soon as you start changing and challenging and looking at your conditioning and even just understanding where it's from, you can't actually change what you've been conditioned to believe or understand about yourself for the last 20, 30, for me it was over 50 years. It gives you the awareness of your conditioning, gives you the opportunities to change your beliefs and your assumptions, which then gives you this opportunity to change the entire course of your life. So when people say, in order to start a personal growth journey, you must first have awareness, this is what they mean.

Speaker 1: 16:00

So the goal of awareness is to get this iceberg of all of your assumptions, your beliefs and your conditioning up above the waterline as much as possible so that you can see it and do something with it. That's awareness. Now, if you think about that, imagine the weight that can be lifted. An iceberg is not small. An iceberg is not light. Imagine as well the clarity that you get when you can see it all above the waterline. I mean, if you close your eyes and think about it, you can just see the water dripping off of it. Maybe there's barnacles on it, maybe there's fish falling off that got caught on the jagged edges of it, but what clarity to be able to see it.

Speaker 1: 16:41

But the most important thing is to have an understanding of who you are and what you need to change and how you need to change and how you can grow. Because you have that clarity now, with that lifted weight, where do you start with this awareness process? I promise you, if you start with your core values, you cannot go wrong. To me, this is foundational. When you start taking a really good look at you, at who you are, at what is important and why. That's where your awareness journey begins. When you start saying, gosh, it is important for me to be respected. Why? Why is it important for me to be respected?

Speaker 1: 17:18

When I started saying it is important to have my freedom and I realized it really didn't have anything to do with not being allowed to go places, it had, or even patriotic freedom. It had everything to do with the freedom of how I think, my ability to believe what I want to believe, my ability to change what I want to change all of that. That's where my awareness truly began. I had been working on my assumptions and my beliefs for a really long time. But when I really dove deep and I'd been working on core values for over 30 years, I just didn't realize it. But when I really dove deep I realized that's where my awareness work began. How can you work on your core values? There's a lot out there, but I personally this is my thing. I was telling a coach friend the other day. I said I think I've resisted being called the core values lady and maybe it's because it's a lady thing. But that is my passion is helping you understand your core values.

Speaker 1: 18:17

I have three basic ways that you can work with me. If you're a self-starter, if you're somebody who's pretty good at taking the instructions and doing the work on your own, I have a free download. It's like a couple of pages. It gives you the instructions, it walks you through the exercises. It's in the show notes. The link to that is in the show notes. But if you're somebody who needs a little more guidance, maybe a little more specificity, I also have a digital course that you can walk through. That's also in the show notes. It is a four-module course and it includes videos and the exercises are included in there. You can also if you do the free download. There's a link to it on that PDF.

Speaker 1: 18:54

The third way you can work with me is, for example, if you've never done this kind of work before, if you need somebody to help walk you through the steps, or maybe you're somebody who needs a good person to bounce things off of, to help you gain clarity, to look at your, or if you need a relationship in the work that you do. I currently and I'm recording this and this will air at the end of September 2023, I'm actually developing a hybrid group coaching program. So I'm looking for and working with alpha testers to work one-on-one with me to actually do this work. It includes the digital course and then it includes some Zoom calls with me where we work through some things and potentially some texting or Marco- Polo-ing back and forth to give you a little bit more clarity or to give you the kind of information you need, but it also provides me with the information I need to develop that group program that I would like to have go live early in 2024. If January at possible, that's great, but here's what I want to know from you. I'd like to hear from you Please respond in one of these, in about one of these things.

Speaker 1: 20:07

You can DM me on social media I'm on all of them at the intentional optimist, you can email me at Andrea at the intentional optimist, or you could just hit reply on my newsletter. If you're not on my newsletter, that's also in the show notes. Or at the links the links page. That's in the show notes and you can get on my newsletter. Because it may be that you're somebody who needs things in writing, you hear me on this podcast or you watch me on YouTube and you say I really I have some more questions about that.

Speaker 1: 20:34

The newsletter will go a little deeper and we'll put all of this in writing. So once you receive the newsletter, you can just hit reply. And I'd like to know from you are you already becoming aware of your ABCs, your assumptions, beliefs and conditioning? And was there a topic that I touched on as part of the examples or the illustration that is really kind of resonating for you, a topic that you really would love some coaching on or you would love my take on it? I'd like to know so I can go into that topic in more detail. My goal is to equip you to define a completely new culture and if we do this together, we will define a whole new culture by trusting your own ability to think critically, to create imaginatively and lead effectively and ultimately to stand tall and own all of it, my friend.