190: Rewiring Limiting Beliefs, with Judy Kane

Your life can look fine on paper while your body and brain keep pulling you into the same loops: avoiding risks, overthinking every move, shrinking your boundaries, or feeling stress that doesn’t match the moment. 

We get into why that happens and how resilience is often less about willpower and more about the beliefs you learned early and never chose on purpose.

We’re joined by Judy Kane, speaker, coach, and author of Your4Truths: How Beliefs Impact Your Life. Judy shares a story that reshaped how she wanted to lead, then explains what subconscious beliefs are, how they’re built (often by age seven), and why they can drive so much of our behavior when we’re not consciously steering. We also talk about how these beliefs shape self-esteem, how we read other people’s intentions, and why stress can spike when we secretly doubt we can handle the consequences.

From there, we get practical. We walk through ways to spot limiting beliefs by looking for patterns in outcomes, self-talk, and boundaries. We connect resilience to risk tolerance and the experiment mindset some of us were taught, then share a simple at-home exercise: get clear on what you want to be true, imagine it going right in vivid detail, and notice any resistance that shows up. Those uncomfortable emotions aren’t proof you should stop, they’re data pointing to what needs attention.

What belief are you ready to question next?

Judy Kane, author of Your4Truths: How Beliefs Impact Your Life, is dedicated to helping individuals overcome barriers that keep them stuck or cause them discomfort. She helps people identify and change the limiting subconscious beliefs that hold them back. Through speaking engagements, workshops, and individual client work, Judy empowers others to achieve their goals.

• Website: https://www.alignedconsciousness.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/judykanepsychk/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alignedconsciousness
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alignedconsciousness/

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Transcript

Cold Open And Welcome

Judy Kane 0:01

Get very clear about what you want to be true in a situation like that. A lot of times people make decisions based on what they're trying to avoid.

Manya Chylinski 0:13

Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski. My guest today is Judy Kane. She is a speaker and a coach and the author of Your Four Truths: How Beliefs Impact Your Life. She's dedicated to helping people get past the barriers that are keeping them stuck. And today we talked about what are those limiting beliefs, when do we need to be paying attention to them? And a couple of hints about what we can do about them. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. Judy, I'm so excited to be talking to you today. Thank you so much for agreeing to be a guest. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation. To get us started, I ask everybody this question. What would the title of a book be about you if your worst enemy wrote it? You've got to be kidding. That's the title, or you're telling me I need to be kidding. That's the title.

Judy Kane 1:18

Why? Well, I've I've had a series of uh employments that don't look necessarily connected. And, you know, I was very corporate in my longest journey, and I'm not very corporate now. Plus, when I tell people what I do, they just frequently don't understand. So you gotta be kidding. Okay.

Manya Chylinski 1:44

I would pick up a book with that title. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Defining Resilience Nature And Nurture

Manya Chylinski 1:50

Well, we are here to talk about resilience and and a little bit digging into what you do and how you help clients. So to get us started, tell me, how do you think about resilience? How do you define that word?

Judy Kane 2:08

I think it's a person's ability to get past hard situations.

Manya Chylinski 2:14

Are you someone who thinks of that as an innate skill that we all have and we need to build on, or do you think of it as something different?

Judy Kane 2:25

That's an interesting question. I think some of us may come in with somewhat of a leaning towards that, but for the most part, I think it's uh something that we are gifted with by others depending on what the environment is when we're growing up. Right. I mean, okay. I I really do feel like the, you know, if a child knows that there are people there that love them and are there for them, that helps them be a more resilient person.

Manya Chylinski 2:59

Okay, so a little bit of nature, a little bit of nurture.

Judy Kane 3:02

Probably more nurture, but you know, you never can discount what nature brings in for you.

Manya Chylinski 3:07

Right. And it's also difficult to separate those things out sometimes to know which is which. Okay, oh, thank you for that. You

A Maternity Leave Review Wake Up

Manya Chylinski 3:18

know, a lot of people have had a moment in their life that changes how they think about being a leader or how they think about caring for other people. What was one of those moments for you?

Judy Kane 3:31

The one that comes immediately to mind, I was a programmer long, long ago in corporate, and I they had moved everybody to the same six-month periods for reviews. And there were steps there to make you qualify to go on to the next level. And I went out for three months on maternity leave, and I was prepared to take all the tests, but they said no, because I was out three months, they were going to stagger it and put me three months later.

Manya Chylinski 4:04

Okay.

Judy Kane 4:04

Well, that's what I said. Okay. So I got a very good rating. And that was you always ask in reviews, how can I do better, or what you know. And so I said, Well, what did I do to get this great re rating? I want to be able to keep doing that for next time. And they they told me it was the the rating that was left over after everybody else got theirs three months earlier. Oh my gosh. And I'm going, yeah, exactly. Just speechless, really. Like seriously. Wow. So that gave me a lot of insight into how I did not want to be a leader once I ended where I did, and I was in management most of my career. It was a really good thing to learn early.

Manya Chylinski 4:54

Yes. Oh, I hate those forced distributions for ratings. That's so artificial and so inhuman.

Judy Kane 5:05

Right. Well, I mean, it just totally disconnects performance and value.

Manya Chylinski 5:10

Right. And the point is supposed to be we're evaluating your performance.

Judy Kane 5:14

Right, right.

Manya Chylinski 5:16

Wow. Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, so

From Corporate Life To Belief Work

Manya Chylinski 5:20

you're not in corporate anymore. We know that you are now working with people, kind of helping them understand their subconscious beliefs. How did you move from programming and management in corporate to what you're doing now?

Judy Kane 5:37

I saw this process work, and it was my first clue about the real impact of subconscious beliefs. I think I, like most people, have heard had heard the term subconscious, knew it was something in the background, but never really gave it a whole lot of thought, basically. It was just a concept I thought I understood. Uh, and I saw this work. Somebody had a pain, a person offered to help. The pain was gone in five minutes. And um, the pain was due to a subconscious belief that got changed in this process of less than five minutes. So that truly got my attention. I was fascinated with the potential. Uh, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn, and that was where I went.

Manya Chylinski 6:28

Yes. Well, that sounds like a very powerful moment as well. Um, as someone myself who has uh was at one point diagnosed with chronic pain as a result of my PTSD, I did a lot of work on beliefs and sort of thinking about the this pain is not actually, in my case, the pain was not caused by anything physical, an illness or an injury. So it was very much working on my beliefs and um saw it work in myself, experienced it directly, um, wouldn't would say I'm no longer someone who would be diagnosed with chronic pain. So it's such a fascinating area and so little understood by most of us. So can you just walk us through a little bit what what are we talking about when we say these um subconscious beliefs and how is it that they impact us in this way that we don't even know?

Judy Kane 7:31

Sure.

How Subconscious Beliefs Shape Reality

Judy Kane 7:32

Well, we come in, we're little sponges up until about seven years old. And we are just building our subconscious, one belief at a time. We get it mostly from immediate family, but you can get it from anywhere in your environment. It can be a one-time thing or something that you're experiencing on a regular basis, right? It's like, but you're putting together all these beliefs, and what those beliefs do are create your whole perception of the world. It's how you interpret events, what you think other people's intentions are, how you value yourself. They're powerful, they control about 95% of our behavior. Uh, because when you're not thinking about it, that's what's running the show, is your subconscious. If you think that somebody is out to hurt you, that's your reality. So you're living in fear. If you think it's not okay to take a risk to try something because it's not safe, um, you'll limit yourself because you you won't be able to get past, or it'd be very difficult to get past the limits those subconscious beliefs are putting on you.

Manya Chylinski 8:46

Wow, okay. And so many of us want to think that we're in control.

Judy Kane 8:52

That's the 5%. That's when you're consciously doing something. Wow. And so much of it apparently is happening without us even really realizing it. Yes, absolutely. And most of it was there by the time you're seven. Not that you can't get new ones later, but the the bulk of it's there by then.

Manya Chylinski 9:12

Wow. Okay. So by the time any of us are even thinking about this, it is largely set, although not completely set in in stone. Okay, so someone's listening to this episode and they hear you say this and think, okay, well, how do I, well, I guess do we need to understand our subconscious beliefs?

Judy Kane 9:36

I have found it immensely helpful for me personally to understand to know that there's a reason that I'm reacting to things the way I do. Okay. And it also helps me be give more grace to people around me, right?

Manya Chylinski 9:52

Yes. Absolutely. When you can understand that perhaps their intention wasn't specifically to hurt you. It was a it was a nope, I accidentally just rolled over you with my bicycle tire. Um, so what can someone do to start to understand their own subconscious beliefs?

Judy Kane 10:17

I

Finding Limiting Beliefs In Patterns

Judy Kane 10:18

always encourage people to look at patterns, right? Because one reaction to a situation or one outcome doesn't necessarily mean that was due to your subconscious beliefs. But so look at the patterns uh for clues. If there's something, and and you don't need to inspect your whole life. It's the things that are not going the way you want them to that you would pay attention, you know, that you could be looking at, um, and see if if you can notice where the patterns are, and then you can start being a little analytical about okay, well, every time I sit down to write a check, I feel nauseous. Well, maybe I've got some beliefs about money that aren't serving me well, right? You can kind of go at it backwards that way. You know, if you get a headache every time you are supposed to go do something or a backache, you know, it could be the thing that you're trying to get out of is creating that pain. Look at your boundaries. If your priorities always go to the bottom of the list when your day is in process, maybe you don't have as high a self of sense of self as you do of the importance of the other people. So taking a look at the self-esteem beliefs, uh, fact check your self-talk.

Manya Chylinski 11:36

Oh, that is a good one. Yes. And I have recently gotten into the habit of doing that for all sorts of reasons, and it is shocking how often my brain seems to lie to me.

Judy Kane 11:55

Yes, right, it's so cruel, can be, right? So you would never say that to somebody you liked or even somebody you didn't like, probably, right?

Manya Chylinski 12:05

Yes. And in in fact, that's one of my sort of checkpoints. I think to myself, well, would I say that to my best friend? Heavens no, I would never have said something like that to my best friend. So then I shouldn't say it to me.

Judy Kane 12:22

Right.

Manya Chylinski 12:24

Because we should like ourselves. Are you able to say what you're good at? That's a clue. That can be hard. And I I don't want to distill all this down into gender, but I do think that can often be harder for women to talk about what we're good at.

Judy Kane 12:41

Typically we're raised differently, like you know, like I have read, and I don't I don't study this intensely, but I have read where when people are going for a new job, that men are more likely to apply for jobs that they don't have all the qualifications for. Whereas women wait and don't apply until they are certain they've got all the qualifications that are listed.

Manya Chylinski 13:08

And I mean, that is one form of a limiting belief that that perhaps a lot of women tend to grow up with because of the way that we're raised. Um oh, so interesting. So, you know, after something difficult happens, um, some people seem to find their footing faster than others.

Risk Tolerance Stress And Recovery

Manya Chylinski 13:30

How does that tie in with these subconscious beliefs, those limiting beliefs that we don't necessarily know we have?

Judy Kane 13:38

Well, if you look at our risk tolerance, some children grow up in families where they approach every new event as an experiment. Let's try this and see what happens. What did yeah, what did we learn from that? Okay, let's try this other thing. Some grow up in families where it's just common sense, you need to practice things to get good at them. So failing immediately is not a bad thing. It's just this this is where you start and you get better over time. And other families, um, they're not good consequences if you don't do things well. So that can carry over into all taking all sorts of risks out there in the world. It it impacts your choices, uh, who you choose to be with, who what teams you try out for, what jobs you try out for, uh, what special um assignments you'd raise your hand for. Because if you feel like you aren't going to be successful at stuff, you're not going to try to do it. Whereas if you think, well, let me see if I can do this. It sounds interesting. It might be a growth opportunity. Um, you got a whole different approach to it, and the outcome has a different meaning to you.

Manya Chylinski 14:59

Yes. So I can see how that would carry over if you were dealing with something difficult or a trauma in your life. You just would believe that it's something you can get over, or you would think it's a personal failure or whatever um sort of that you brought to that moment.

Judy Kane 15:18

That, yeah, exactly. And that the that that self-confidence is the other aspect of that, right? The ability to take risks and their confidence that you're able to deal with whatever happens with the consequences, right? I one of my sometimes when I define talk about stress with people, it's it's really not any event or situation. It's your belief that you're going to be able to get through it, that whether you've got it or not determines the amount of stress you feel.

Manya Chylinski 15:48

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, you know, and I I think about that in my own case, um, you know, surviving a particular trauma at a moment in time, and think about how do we support people? How do we just generally as a society and as institutions, how do we help people understand that they will be okay? So things are difficult now, but you will be okay. And in this conversation, I'm thinking for some people, that's already innate, that's built in. For other people, it's an education process.

Judy Kane 16:28

It's a combination of education and support, you know, from my viewpoint, there's subconscious beliefs there that also are contributing to it, that are making it more difficult.

Manya Chylinski 16:40

And then that's an individual thing that we each need to work on. So somebody has figured out a particular subconscious belief, say, you know, not willing to take risks, realize, oh, this is this has been a pattern, this is a thing. So now I've recognized that I've done that in self-analysis. What do we do about it?

Visualizing What You Want True

Judy Kane 17:02

The first thing, and this is what I tell people they can do at home, right? I mean, obviously they could go find somebody who can help them with it, but but if you know, if if you want to, which most people would prefer to see what they can do about it at home first, right? Uh, get very clear about what you want to be true in a situation like that. A lot of times people make decisions based on what they're trying to avoid. Oh, yes. And that's not really helpful. I mean, it's good to recognize that, but you've got to then figure out what is it you really want to be true about this type of a situation. And then bring up examples of how that would look when it's going the way you want. Uh, at least three, uh, but it won't hurt to do more. And really immerse yourself in those examples. Like put yourself in there so that you're looking at visual details and hearing what people are saying to you and hearing what you're saying to yourself. And all these are the way you want them to be, right? I mean, it's not like this could happen. No, you you're you're imaging the way you really want it to be once it's true. Uh, and even down to like the emotions that you're feeling, like just really immerse yourself as as much as possible. I have seen that change subconscious beliefs.

Manya Chylinski 18:25

Yes. If you're often our minds go to the negative things and we imagine this bad thing could happen, and then this will happen, this will happen. And so essentially you're saying, well, let's let's flip that script, let's think of the good things that can happen, and then go down that rabbit hole of what would that be like?

Judy Kane 18:45

Because what you're doing is describing to your subconscious what you want to be true, right? So you got to stick with it now. If something comes up in the process, that's really good information. If you start feeling a little fear, you feel a little doubt, make a note of it, but don't focus on that. But but you can go back to that later and kind of well, what was that fear? Why, why would that be a bad thing? Like frequently when I'm working with uh people about money, uh, we talk about, well, what would be the downside of having money if that if the goal is to have money, right? And but they're like all of a sudden they think of these things that might be negatives to having the money. Well, those are probably the reasons they're not making the money they want, right? So paying attention, oh, I feel a little bit of I'm imagining myself with you know first class tickets to somewhere, and I'm feeling uncomfortable. You know, there's a little bit of fear or anxiety or pushback or whatever, resistance to it. What would that be about? And then kind of start thinking about that. I was working with this one man, gosh, it was a it was a long time ago, and he wanted to make more money. And and I and we were having this time, we don't it what I do isn't talk therapy, but he was feeling this resistance to it. So we had to explore what that was. And he said if he had money, everybody would want him to give some to him, and he didn't want the hassle of having to deal with people asking for money, right? And I'm I'm sure a lot of people that's one negative outcome. If they felt like they had money, that everybody would expect them to do things for them, and that might be enough of a reason to go, I just don't even want to deal with it. So making note of where you feel the resistance is always a good

Resistance And Emotions As Data

Judy Kane 20:36

thing.

Manya Chylinski 20:36

Yes. And I like that you referred to the emotions, like the fear or the confusion or anxiety as information. Also, I feel sometimes we get scared of emotions, especially the ones that don't feel good. And they are just giving us information.

Judy Kane 20:58

Yes, absolutely. Just like aches and pains, it's it's uh dashboard that your body gives you, right? There's something not the way it's supposed to be. Pay attention. Don't take an aspirin or whatever. You know, that's a symptom. You you know, get to what's causing it.

Manya Chylinski 21:15

Right. And like that dashboard, I think that's so many people today we can picture what that looks like of either a car dashboard or some sort of program, computer program that's giving us a dashboard of of health and system health. Um

Free Call And Where To Find Judy

Manya Chylinski 21:31

wow, Judy, thank you so much for this conversation. We're getting close to the end of our time. But before we go, please tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and how they can reach you. Sure.

Judy Kane 21:44

Well, I have a website that is the most reliable, easiest way of finding me. And it is aligned consciousness. That's past tense aligned. So L-I-G-N-E-Dconsciousness.com is my website. And people could book a 15-minute free phone call if they have questions. They can download FreeBresources. There's more information there with links to other places that can explain more about subconscious beliefs and the process that I use, which is Psyche K, a fast way of changing beliefs. You can usually change any one belief in less than five minutes.

Manya Chylinski 22:24

That's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. Judy, well, you are doing some really important work helping people understand something that many of us struggle with. So thank you for doing that.

Judy Kane 22:35

I really appreciated the opportunity. I love letting people know a little bit more about what's making them tick.

Manya Chylinski 22:41

Yes, I I love that too. Um, thank you so much for uh being here today. And thank you to our listeners for catching this episode, and we will see you next time.