014- Challenging and Changing your Core Beliefs with Sabrina Trobak

Have you ever felt like you're just not good enough?

Join Melissa Hinman as she chats with core beliefs and anxiety expert Sabrina Trobak about challenging and changing core beliefs, managing stress, and finding empowerment during perimenopause.

Sabrina emphasizes the importance of stepping out of our comfort zones and facing anxiety head-on to build confidence and transform these limiting beliefs. As we explore planning and addressing "what if" scenarios, Sabrina highlights how these steps can significantly reduce anxiety and boost self-confidence.

Key Takeaways:

1. Challenge Your Core Beliefs: Understand how your past experiences shape your present and take steps to reframe negative thoughts.
2. The Power of Micro-Habits: Small changes like mindful breathing and movement can significantly impact your anxiety levels.
3. Seek Support and Knowledge: Connect with others and explore resources like therapy and books to build resilience. GRAB A COPY OF SABRINA'S BOOK BELOW

PURCHASE SABRINA’S BOOK HERE:
https://amzn.to/3WpPghQ

WAYS TO CONNECT WITH SABRINA:
https://www.trobakholistic.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabrina-trobak-b-ed-m-a-c-p-r-c-c-ccs-99725127/
https://www.instagram.com/nge_trobak/
https://www.facebook.com/trobakholisticcounselling
https://www.youtube.com/@trobakholisticcounselling4407

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Disclaimer:  I am not a medical doctor. The information and recommendations provided during our coaching sessions are intended to support your overall health and wellness and are not a substitute for professional medical diagnosis or treatment. Always consult with your physician before making any changes to your medication, treatment plan, or if you have any concerns about your health. 

Transcript

Understanding Core Beliefs and Anxiety

Speaker 1 2:28

I am very excited to announce my first guest on my podcast and, before we dive into the interview with her, I just want to make sure that everyone has the contact information. So before you leave this show, please make sure you check out the show links. It has all of our guests' information and, most importantly, the link to order her book Not Good Enough Understanding your Core Belief and Anxiety a handbook by Sabrina Trobac. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Smash the Crash. We are diving in today with our numero uno guest speaker. I'm so excited to have Sabrina Trobac on the call with us today and we will be diving into some things that really, truly, I think, hit home for all of us, which is core beliefs and anxiety.

Speaker 1 3:26

So, without further ado, sabrina Trobac lives in Fort St John, british Columbia, canada. She's a registered counselor and is the author of Not Good Enough Understanding your Core Belief and Anxiety. She is also a clinical supervisor, a public speaker and has her master's in counseling psychology. Prior to becoming a counselor, sabrina was a teacher, a vice principal and a school counselor for over 20 years. Sabrina has extensive training in resolving past trauma and the impact that trauma has on a person, including anxiety and the core beliefs not good enough, not important and not valued, and those hit home hard. In fact, I was thinking this morning like, oh man, I hope this podcast is good enough and I was like what are you talking about, melissa? It will be good enough for the right people and they will need to hear it. So Correct.

Speaker 1 4:27

Thank you, sabrina, for being here. So, all right, I'll stop talking, just share with us. I know we went through, like your, your past there, but if you could share with us like more who you are, who you serve and how you serve them, okay.

Speaker 2 4:39

So, first of all, thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be your first guest on the podcast. Yeah, I mean, you kind of summed it up pretty well. When I was a school teacher and then a school counselor, I went to a workshop on suicide that was three days long, presented by a man named Tony Martins, and at the end of the three-day workshop I just thought this is what I need to do. So he put his contact information up at the end of the workshop. So I contacted him and, after going back and forth for about a year, he decided to teach me his model of therapy. So I quit teaching and moved back to Fort St John and started up my own business.

Speaker 2 5:17

Within about six months I had a waiting list with the model of therapy where we're going back and resolving past trauma. I don't see people for, you know, four, six, eight, 10 sessions. Most of my clients are with me for a year and a half or longer, and so I go through my waiting list very slow. So I've had a waiting list since I six months into starting, which was in 2010. So a few years ago I thought I hate having to tell people sorry, you know.

Speaker 2 5:43

You know there's a waiting list a year and a half waiting list there's nothing I can do, so I decided to write a book. So that's how not good enough, kind of came to fruition. I never, ever, ever thought of being a writer ever in my life, but I could see that there was a need. There was a lot of people who are wanting to work on their mental health, having to wait for counseling or couldn't afford counseling, and so I thought well, this way I can write a book, give people some information that allows them to at least start to get a better understanding of what's going on and what their mental health is, is looking like and feeling more empowered and being able to do something about it. The more you know, the more confident you're going to feel in being able to manage it.

Speaker 1 6:25

Yeah, absolutely. The more you know, you know anything, then you can at least do something with that knowledge, right, Right?

Speaker 2 6:31

And for so many people. They don't know, they don't understand, so they feel like there's nothing they can do to it. A lot of people feel like anxiety is this kind of cloud that comes over their head and they have no control over it. It's just not true. Once you understand how anxiety works, that you're creating it and there's things you can do to manage it, it becomes significantly less because you just feel more empowered in being able to handle it.

Speaker 1 6:56

Yeah, and in everyday life too, things come up. Right, we can have the best laid plans for a day or a week or whatever Things come up either at work or in personal life that you're least expecting it, and then that's when those triggers kind of happen. Right, for the anxiety sets in, and then how are we going to acknowledge it and and address it? So that's what you work on with your clients, right, right, one of the aspects.

Speaker 2 7:23

Yeah. So the you know the model I practice kind of believes that everything comes back to our core belief. And for a lot of people who have a lot of anxiety, who experienced trauma growing up, their core belief is often not good enough, not important, not valued. That core belief drives everything that we do. So it draws us to people, places, events. Our perception is all fed and reinforced by that core belief. So if my core belief is not good enough, not important, not valued, I'm going to not believe in myself as much that I can handle things.

Speaker 2 7:54

And a lot of people say, kind of like you said, there's these triggers that come up and so what we do is we try to address the triggers. But the triggers aren't actually what's creating the anxiety. You know, triggers like flying heights, busyness, change in schedule, those are not the trigger. That's not what's creating the anxiety. What creates the anxiety is me not believing in myself. I can handle those things, because what might be a trigger for you isn't for me, because I feel like I can handle it, you don't, and vice versa. So the better we get at becoming more aware and realizing I can handle these things, then the anxiety goes down. Anxiety is actually the opposite of confidence. That's powerful.

Speaker 1 8:40

That's really powerful. That's really powerful. All right, so, diving into core beliefs for our listeners tuning in, who are in the midst of their midlife transition, be it specifically perimenopause or menopause, but everything that comes with midlife right? How can they discover their identity and find their purpose after spending years focused on caring for others?

Speaker 2 9:03

Right. So if we look at someone who has that core belief not good enough, not important, not valued a big part of that is often because they are caring for everyone else. When I'm spending my whole life taking care of my kids, taking care of my partners, giving at work, volunteering, all these things where I'm trying to make everybody else happy, that's all time where I'm not focusing on me and making myself figure out who I am, figure out my own identity, and so that feeds into that core belief not good enough, not important, not valued and makes it even more and more and more significant. So once we get a bit older and kids have kind of grown out of the house and we often can kind of just sit back, it's scary because we don't even know who we are, because we've never really taken the time to figure out who we are, because we've been so busy trying to make everybody else happy, so a big thing. What we want to do is actually that to stop, take some time and think about what are the things that I like? You know I enjoy my job.

Empowering Change

Speaker 2 10:02

Okay, well, break that down. What is it about your job that you enjoy? Is it the busyness of it? Is it the, you know, connecting with people? Is it the organization? What are the things that you really enjoy and what are the things that you don't really like? And start to create and figure out what your identity is. What are your values, what are your beliefs? What do you believe in family? What do you believe in family? What do you believe in work ethic? What do you believe in honesty, in loyalty, in respect? You got to go back and figure all these things out, because they really are the foundation of our identity, of who we are yeah, that's powerful.

Speaker 1 10:40

And you're really talking about getting granular. We're getting down to the micro things right, like everything else is kind of surface level. You got to chop away at that onion right. We got to spread the layers and really get to the base of the core belief.

Speaker 2 10:55

That's correct. Yeah, you know, the deeper we go, the more we break it apart into smaller steps, the more we're challenging that core belief. So it's going to become more good enough, important and valued, and the more likely it's going to last. If we just scratch the surface, those are often behaviors that don't really last that long within you know, a couple of weeks a month, two or three months at the most. That will behavior comes back again. Part of that is because we're scratching the surface. We're not really challenging the core belief that's underneath it, so that core belief is going to continue to drive that behavior. When we dig deeper and really try to kind of break things down into really small steps, we're better challenging that core belief. Then we're going to see more lifelong changes.

Speaker 1 11:39

Yeah. So this is a question that just kind of spurred up in my head and I know not identifying any patient information, but out of the women of your client list, what would you say is the biggest area of focus that these women are? I don't want to say dealing with, but focusing on and working on. Is there a theme?

Speaker 2 11:58

Well, the theme, honestly, is that core belief not good enough, not important, not valued? And where it comes from? So some it comes from, you know, very significant, very severe abuse. Other ones it comes from just a volatile and instability, moving to you know 15, 20 different homes before they're 12. For others it's just neglect, where the home was just silent, there was nothing, there was no, no real connection there. For some the home seemed okay, but then they had these experiences where they lost people they loved and cared about. It can vary significantly, but all those experiences kind of funnel down into developing and creating that core belief not good enough, not important, not valued. So what we're doing is really looking at how did that core belief develop over time? Not important, not valued? So what we're doing is really looking at how did that core belief develop over time and then what do we need to do to challenge and resolve that core belief so it's more good enough, important and valued. And for each person that's going to look a bit different because we all have very different life experiences.

Speaker 1 12:58

Yeah, that was actually gonna go into my next question of how does one challenge and change their core beliefs.

Speaker 2 13:04

Yeah. So I think you know, even if you're listening to this podcast and going, huh, that makes sense. You're starting to challenge that core belief because you're looking at something in a bit of a different way, you're seeing things different. Every time we challenge ourselves, we kind of step outside of that comfort zone. There's going to be a bit more anxiety because every time we try something new, we shouldn't be as confident in it. So there's going to be a bit more anxiety because every time we try something new we shouldn't be as confident in it. So there's going to be a bit more anxiety. So we're challenging that anxiety. Every time we do, we are changing and challenging that core belief to become more good enough, important and valued. The more we stay in our little comfort zone and don't move out of it, the stronger that core belief not good enough, not important, not valued becomes. We generally say nothing stays the same. It either gets better or it gets worse, and so if we're not consciously working on making something better, it's probably getting worse over time.

Speaker 1 13:56

Getting out of the comfort zone, right. Okay, so you're in this bubble of what's comfortable and what outside is not comfortable, and it doesn't necessarily mean the outside is bad, it's just not what you're used to or not what you know of, you know, right. There's like that, that fear that you have to get over. So the anxiety that's coming up really is also kind of out of that fear too, right. And so going through anxiety is not always necessarily a bad thing if you're challenging yourself to become a better person or get over whatever it is you're dealing with, it's actually exactly what you have to do to overcome anxiety is you have to challenge it.

Speaker 2 14:37

The number one strategy people use to deal with anxiety is avoidance. But the number one strategy thing or thing you can do to increase anxiety is avoidance. The more we put it off, the bigger the anxiety gets. So challenging that anxiety because, remember, anxiety is about I'm not believing in myself. I can handle something. So if I challenge myself, then I start thinking I can handle that.

Speaker 2 15:03

You know, anxiety is often about happens before the event happens. So you know you're you're anxious about something and then it happens and you go. That wasn't so bad, what was I even worried about? Because anxiety is about our confidence and our ability to handle it. And so every time we challenge that, we feel a little bit more confident, not just in doing the activity, but in challenging the anxiety, in challenging the fear, the vulnerability, the insecurity, all of those things. Every time we challenge that, we become more confident in our ability to challenge that. So not even so much about the task, it's about our belief in ourselves that I can handle that, and we generally don't give ourselves enough credit. We are way more resilient than we give ourselves credit for and most of the things that people worry about or have these anxious thoughts. If they really stopped and think, okay, what would I do if that happened, they'd handle it. Might not be graceful, but they would handle it. But it was. So we're worrying about these things that if they actually happened, we would, we'd, and they probably deal with it like powerful. Yeah, you know, in the book that book we talk about different strategies to manage anxiety and that's one of them is making a plan.

Speaker 2 16:15

Again, anxiety is lack of confidence. If I make a plan on how I'm going to do something, I'm going to feel more confident. But we can do that even with those anxious thoughts. So if I have a what if thought, we often just let that what if thought? Spin and spin and spin and spin and spin. If I actually take that, what if thought, put it on a piece of paper and say, okay, if this happens, what am I going to do? And we make a plan for how we do it. That what if thought? Almost always stops. If it doesn't stop, it's going to lessen significantly to the point we're able to go. No, I know what I would do if that would happen and you can challenge those thoughts. That's what anxiety. Anxiety gradually becomes more and more significant over time, so a lot of people don't really even realize it's there and it just becomes a normal thought process. Once you realize, oh wait, I can challenge these thoughts and start to work on doing things differently, then it becomes more manageable.

Speaker 1 17:09

Yeah, taking the power away. You're taking its power away, right, right Giving yourself the power.

Speaker 1 17:16

Yes, taking the power back, that's okay. Thank you so much for explaining that more in detail. My last question that I had for you was here on the podcast Smash the Crash. We're all about implementing small micro habit changes, getting granular, which I think speaks exactly to what you're saying with. You know, getting to the foundation of the core beliefs that you know, these micro habit changes eventually really add up to big results and positive results. So what would you say would be the first one or two things that our midlife listeners could start to do today change or challenge their core beliefs and feel more energized and empowered.

Speaker 2 17:56

I think one of the first things is just becoming more aware of what your anxiety looks like, so that you can manage it at a quicker level. A lot of times we know what our anxiety looks like when it's like a 10 out of 10. But what does it look like at a three, four, five, six? We don't necessarily know. So starting to become more aware of what my anxiety actually looks like at a lower level, putting strategies in place, then then I don't have to go to that higher level, but we have to become aware of what it looks like first. So there's a lot of symptoms of anxiety that we don't even realize are symptoms of anxiety, Because if you search symptoms of anxiety on internet, it's going to tell you what it is when it's 10 out of 10. It's not going to give you a lot of those more subtle ones like sighing, picking at your fingernails, biting your lip, can't sit still, You're always kind of fidgeting and moving around, can't focus. These are smaller symptoms of anxiety, but if we can use them as cues to help us realize I'm biting on my lip, okay, my anxiety is going up, what strategy am I going to put in place to bring it down can be really, really, really helpful. And then the number one strategy we always start with with clients is breathing. So when you go into anxiety, you get cortisol that gets dumped into your brain, shuts your brain off so you can't think properly.

Speaker 2 19:19

Breathing there's research that shows that breathing actually stops that cortisol dump from happening. So taking some nice deep breaths I think we've known for a long time, you know, just breathe, just breathe. There's actually research that shows that it's actually calming your brain and settling your brain down. So taking some really deep breaths two, three, four, same thing, you know, don't breathe for five minutes if you've never breathed before. It's way too much. Start with a couple breaths when you exhale, relax your shoulders.

Speaker 2 19:48

Often what we do when we feel anxious is over the day. We end up going like this Well, now I'm squishing my lungs, so I'm not breathing as much, so my anxiety is going up even higher. So just taking some nice deep breaths relaxing our shoulders can help us feel more settled. Don't wait until you're a 10 out of 10 to do that. Do that when you're a 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 out of 10, then that anxiety doesn't have to go that high. So doing those small little breathing breaks. You know, every time you look at your phone, every time you go to the bathroom, every time you have a sip of water, take a couple breaths. You will definitely notice a difference by the end of the day. I love that.

Speaker 1 20:23

Thank you, thank you so much. And are those tips that can be found in your book? They are, you bet, awesome. So I definitely have all of Sabrina's contact information and the link to her book in the show notes. Is there anything else that you would like to share or that's on the tip of your mind that you want to make sure you get out here before Just?

Speaker 2 20:44

I think you know, I said, once you start talking about it or start working on anxiety, it feels very empowering. It's true it does, but when you first start doing it it can be scary, because now you're more aware of what's really going on, you're starting to recognize things that before you weren't there. If that happens for you, just keep at it, give it a few days and you will start to become more comfortable and more confident in yourself. So getting healthy isn't easy. It's scary.

Travel Dreams and Family Milestones

Speaker 2 21:12

It takes a lot of thought, a lot of awareness, a lot of willingness to be vulnerable, to put yourself out there and try to do things different. We generally don't like to feel vulnerable. So slow, small steps allows that to kind of become a bit less. If there is anxiety or fear, just stay where you're at, keep it for a couple of days and that will likely go down and then you can take that next step. I agree what you said Micro, small, small, tiny, tiny steps are much more sustainable. I would say to my clients we want evolution, not revolution. Small, gradual changes over a long period of time is much more sustainable for sure, I love that.

Speaker 1 21:52

That's fantastic. Thank you so much. That that's fantastic. Thank you so much, sabrina. Before we close, I do have a couple question blitz questions for you, and this is really just so listeners can get to know you a little bit better outside of your profession. All right, so what are you currently binge watching?

Speaker 2 22:11

Well, my son is home from university and him and I are watching Dexter.

Speaker 1 22:15

Oh, that's a good one. Is this the original or the newest series? The original, awesome, that's great. And what is your morning routine?

Speaker 2 22:25

I get up at about 610 and I go to the pool every morning. Our pool has an activity called hydro riders, so it's like spin class in the water, and I love it. It is just amazing. You get a really good workout, but you're in the water. It feels calm. That's how I start my day Come home, have a bit of breakfast, get a coffee and then get ready for my clients, because I see clients Monday to Friday, virtually.

Speaker 1 22:53

Yes, yes, Awesome, awesome, that's awesome. Okay, so the hydro riders. Just really quick. Are you fully submersed in the water or is the bike on top of the water?

Speaker 2 23:03

No, no, it's all in the water. The water goes up to you know, just below your armpits.

Speaker 1 23:08

Yeah, that sounds really interesting. I'm going to have to look and see if that's around here.

Speaker 2 23:12

There's not a lot of them. The bikes are extremely expensive. We're really lucky They've got. We've got the bikes here. You don't see it very often, but man, it's such a good workout. I love it.

Speaker 1 23:22

Yeah, that would be like right up my alley, cause I love spin class, but I think doing it in the water cool off and that sweat would be awesome.

Speaker 2 23:29

And it's good. I don't my knee, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 23:34

Yeah, all right. And one more question. So if you could drop everything right now, where would you go or what would you do?

Speaker 2 23:48

Well, I would travel for sure. I don't know where I go first. There's so many places I'd like to. I was in Europe once with my son for a school trip, so I'd like to go back to Europe. I'd like to go to Brazil. I'd like to go to Asia. I'd like to go to Africa. Yeah, pretty much, travel the world.

Speaker 1 23:59

How about that one? Awesome, I love that answer. Do you have anything scheduled, even if it's not those areas?

Speaker 2 24:06

Yeah, my son is going into his last year university and he's actually in university down in Wisconsin. So he has he has a senior night that will be happening, so he's playing hockey at a university down there and so I will be going for seniors night and then for grad. So my next trips in the next year are two trips to go and see him at school.

Speaker 1 24:29

That's awesome. Well, congratulations in advance to your son for graduating and best wishes in his hockey, and I really truly appreciate you being my guest on my podcast. Numero uno will always hold a special place in my heart, so thank you. Sabrina.