How Your Beliefs Shape Your Behavior (And Why That's What I Coach through)

🎙 How Your Beliefs Shape Your Behavior (And Why That's What We Actually Coach)

Most people think coaching is about nutrition, training, and accountability.

Those things matter.

But after coaching for more than fifteen years, I've become convinced that behavior is rarely the real problem. Behavior is the visible expression of something much deeper.

Your worldview shapes your beliefs.

Your beliefs shape your identity.

And your identity shapes your behavior.

That's the chain.

In this episode, I explain why two people can be given the exact same nutrition plan, training program, and level of accountability, yet produce completely different results.

The difference isn't knowledge.

It's the lens they're interpreting their life through.

If someone believes they're the kind of person who always quits, they'll find evidence to support that belief. If they believe food is their only comfort, their behavior will continue to reinforce that story. If they believe they're capable of change, they'll begin making decisions that confirm a different identity.

This is why so much of my coaching is spent teaching people how to think, not simply what to think.

I'm not interested in creating clients who can memorize information.

I'm interested in helping people build a worldview that naturally produces healthier decisions.

That's why our conversations go beyond macros and workouts. We examine stories, assumptions, emotional patterns, relationships, stress, and the beliefs quietly driving every decision they make.

When beliefs change, behavior becomes easier.

When identity changes, consistency becomes natural.

The body simply follows.

What We Cover

• How worldview influences every decision you make
• Why beliefs become self fulfilling patterns
• The relationship between beliefs, identity, and behavior
• Why information alone rarely creates transformation
• How The Rebuild coaches the person beneath the behaviors
• Why lasting change starts with learning how to think differently, not just what to do

Key Takeaways

• Your behavior is usually the symptom, not the source
• Beliefs create identity, and identity drives behavior
• You cannot consistently outperform your self concept
• Teaching someone what to do creates compliance. Teaching them how to think creates autonomy.
• The deepest transformation happens when your worldview changes, because everything built on top of it changes too.

If you've ever wondered why lasting change feels so difficult, this episode explains why the real work isn't simply changing your habits. It's rebuilding the beliefs that created them in the first place.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to another rebuild episode. Okay, today I'm gonna try to dive into a pretty complex thing that I talk about quite a bit inside my coaching container. And it's something that I wish people understood a little bit more, which is that your belief systems will drive behavior. And this is why when I'm working with folks, I really try to understand the way they see the world and their belief systems, both philosophically, spiritually, and mentally, because under that actually explains the behavior a lot, right? And so, as an example, and I always try to reference things back to fitness, but a lot of the times when I'm helping people break through self-limiting beliefs or what I call cope excuses or just needing some inner child reparenting, anything that causes like maladaptive behaviors that we don't want as an adult manifesting in our life. The second I start to talk to someone, I'm like, oh, they have this underlying belief that's actually draw driving this behavior. So, as an example, if I say to someone like, Oh, you're really busy, why don't we hit some morning workouts? It seems like your schedule would suit really well for you to get up, you know, before this happens. And that's just an example. Let's say that is a great solution for that person structurally, systemically, then they might come back and say, Well, I'm just really not a morning person. Well, not with that attitude, you're not. And that's going to become self-fulfilling a hundred percent. And then if every solution is brought up, or every potential solution, and we have an identity issue or a world belief issue as to why that can't happen, that's exactly what's going to happen. And, you know, those self-fulfilling prophecies is what I call them, right? And it's like, oh, I just have no willpower, it's just that darn sugar. I have this sugar addiction. No, you don't. No humans have a sugar addiction. It's not cocaine, it's not heroin. What you have is a comfort problem mixed in with some chemical reward emotions like dopamine, serotonin, and things that make you feel good when you're comforting yourself with food. That that's not a sugar addiction. They're not the same thing. And so, again, the stories we tell ourselves will manifest almost all the time, right? And so those beliefs about food um, you know, being reward or comfort start to manifest themselves in the life, right? Identity statements that limit potential. I've always been big, and I did this a lot because identity, what your identity is will shape your path, right? And so when I was big, I was in this I've never really talked about this too much because I I don't if I'm being can I just get real with you? It's because it actually makes people mad, I think, or at least that's how I've viewed it. And uh this is how I know I was destined to help people with their health. I tried to lose weight one time, uh, and now I'm here now. Like 15 years later, only having made a living from fitness or fitness-based products while trying to help people live the healthiest lives they can. And that's because growing up, my whole family's super obese. I've talked about that in depth. You know, and I went to a small, small First Nations school where kind of my my dad and my uncles were all taught by my same 65-year-old teachers, you know, 30 years earlier, 20 years earlier. And they would just kind of, these little repeat statements, you know, people in the community, my teachers, it's like, oh, you're just one of those big boys. That's how you finuff scar. FNUFs, you guys waddle when you walk. It's like, yeah, we waddle when we walk because we're fat. And uh, but I just heard all that, right? And then growing up in a uh Roman Catholic household, it was kind of like I just and I've always been very good at just accepting hard things. I think it's because uh my dad was very interesting in his parenting style, but it was like, oh, well, I'm fat. That's it, like the end. And I wasn't like, oh, I'm not fat, you know, like I didn't have this delusion. Even in grade schools, like, okay, we're gonna have a play day, everyone's gonna do a potato sack race. Well, my potato sack's moving a lot slower than a lot of the other kids, and yeah, that kind of hurts and it does shape, but I didn't really struggle with it. I think going to a small school did help. There's you can't really alienate people because there's no friends to have if you alienate more than two people. But it also just gave me this advantage because it was like, okay, well, then if I'm gonna be slower and kind of weaker than everyone else as far as like my physical abilities, that means I have to be smarter. And so by the time I was 10 years old, I was reading pretty in-depth philosophy from people like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, and that shaped the brain that you know you're here listening to. Right. And so with every dark, there's a light, and with every light, there's a dark. But that belief I carried all the way into my 20s. And I remember I've always been blessed with curiosity. I was sitting at my desk one day, I was selling uh power sports equipment, so like ATVs and snowmobiles, and you know, long story short, the whole dealership, there's a lot of fat people that work in sales, especially automotive sales, because it's like this, you know, you don't really have like proper breaks and lunch breaks. A lot of people are just drive-throughing it and coffeeing all day and you know, drinking and cigarettes and wings after work, anyway. All of a sudden, we decide to put a challenge on, and I've always be honest with you, I've always been very money motivated. And so, you know, we put a challenge on. I think everyone threw a thousand bucks in, and there was like, you know, in 20 I don't know, 2017, something like this, 2016. Uh no, this was quite a bit before that. Um see, that's how old I am. Sorry, this would have been like 2012. So like 2012. There's like six or eight thousand bucks in this plot, and I'm like, oh man, I'm gonna win this. It was October. And uh I thought, man, I'm I'm for sure we were gonna go till the new year, till kind of Christmas time. And whoever had lost the most weight, uh percentage-wise, was gonna get this um gonna get this this this bounty. And so I I I kind of start researching. Luckily, we had the internet a little bit more. It's not certainly not what it what it is, but it was better than you know 10 years prior. And I came across one of uh one of Lane Norton's earliest articles out of his PhD paper, which was about calorie balance and protein metabolism. And then that's when I learned about basically thermodynamics. So calories in, calories out. How much am I eating versus how much my body burns versus how much I'm using in activity, how much I'm using at rest, how does this work for the average person? And I kind of went like, well, if this is true, let me try it. Let's just see what happens. And I went like, because I could easily figure out, you know, it's like, I don't remember what I what it gave me. I I I found some calculator from there and it was like, okay, Dylan, you should be eating 2,300 calories based on your goal. Which that's kind of irrelevant. Um, starting calories, people get way too concerned about. It's like, well, just do it, watch what happens to your body, do it like a cyborg, watch what happens to your body, make adjustments off that. And uh I did that. And for me, like again, if I'm curious about something, even though I was like super addicted to food and I was drinking beer like pretty much every day after work, I just decided this is where decisions are very important. When you make a decision, that's what's happening now, and that's what's happening now. I've always been that way. Seven days, I'm not gonna drink these beers after work. I'm not going, I'm gonna order one Subway sandwich for lunch instead of getting like a Wendy's bacon eater meal with an extra fry and uh and a frosty on the side for lunch, and then going out for dinner. Anyway, lo and behold, in the first week, I think I lost like eight pounds. And now, as soon as I saw that on the scale, this belief broke. Poop. I remember it Legos yesterday, bang, like a sledgehammer hitting a hitting a hitting a hitting a mallet. And I went like, oh man, this is actually possible. What have I been doing this whole time? That day started. Guess who won the challenge? Me. Guess who got the money? Me. Uh much later on, you know, I went on to lose 150 pounds, compete in my first bodybuilding show, blah, blah, blah. Who cares about Dylan? The point is, is that I broke that belief and I used my own story to kind of show you that there was a belief underlying that I couldn't do it anyway because I was just made like that. So why would I act up behaviors to even try? And everyone has their own story about what behaviors and beliefs they have. And a lot of those are just worldview beliefs. And uh that's why I try to get much deeper than just calories and training, and I try to really bring the mindset into it and and the the belief system because they're all linked. You can't separate one piece of the human experience from the other. They're all touching each other at all times. And so I think this is going to be a good one. I want you to analyze your own language. Some questions to leave you with is like, what do I believe that's limiting me around my best health, my best income, my best relationship, you know, my best life, etc. And I bet you you'll find some stuff. Okay. And so if you have any questions, concerns, just let me know. And uh, you know, I would love to help you with this. And if you're a client of mine, you already know that we're working through this. It's like literally what we do. And if you're not and you want some help kind of cultivating one of the most important steps to a physical and mental transformation in my help, you want some one to one help? I would love to. And so thanks for being here. I know the belief systems is deep and it can be uncomfortable because a lot of the voices in our head are not ours. They're usually one person, usually an ex, a parent, a teacher, someone with some authority, someone who had some influence in your life, told you some stupid shit, and then you carried that identity for the rest of your life.