Who’s Really Talking in Your Head? The Hidden Beliefs Shaping Your Life

Most of us believe we know how to think.

But what if many of the thoughts shaping your life aren’t actually yours?

From the moment we’re born, we start collecting words from the people around us — parents, teachers, coaches, and friends. Over time, those words become beliefs. And those beliefs quietly shape the way we see ourselves, the risks we take, the opportunities we pursue, and the limits we place on our potential.

In this episode of Better Beliefs, Brent Kocal sits down with mental performance coach Lauren Johnson, former mental performance coach for the New York Yankees, to explore how beliefs are formed, why they can be so difficult to change, and how our brains can trap us in patterns that hold us back.

Lauren explains why the brain is a threat detection machine, how our thoughts influence our emotions and performance, and why many high achievers unknowingly operate from beliefs they formed in childhood.

You’ll also learn Lauren’s practical framework for changing beliefs by shifting identity and behavior — and why the actions you take today can reshape the story your brain tells about who you are.

If you’ve ever felt like your mind is working against you… or wondered why intelligent, capable people still struggle with doubt, fear, and self-limiting beliefs — this episode will change the way you think about thinking.

Because the voice in your head might not be the truth.

It might just be an echo.

Topics covered:

• How beliefs about yourself are formed
 • Why your brain defaults to threat instead of growth
 • The psychology behind self-doubt and imposter syndrome
 • How thoughts influence emotions, physiology, and performance
 • The identity + action framework for changing beliefs
 • Why high achievers often feel stuck despite success

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Music Credits:

"Pearl" by EVOE

"Fractal_1" by Yotam Agam

"Altitude" by Muted

"No More Suffering" by Dear Gravity

"Hallow" by Stephen Keech

"Morning Light" by DJ Taz Rishid

"Contemplative Question" by The Tennessee Pistols

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

We've been listening all of our lives. Even before we figured out how to use our tongues to make specific sounds that formed words and sentences, we were listening. A parent says, You're so smart. A sixth-grade teacher says, You're not good at working in groups. Or a coach says, You've got a lot of potential. Without even realizing it, we start collecting these words like bricks. And brick by brick, we build a vision of who we are. Then one day we look at the vision and we start talking back to ourselves in the exact same language that built it in the first place. I'm not good at this. I always mess this up. I'm not worthy of being loved. But here's the question: whose voice is that? Because what if the opinion you have about yourself is just an echo of what you've heard, and that echo distorts the truth of the real you? When we hear that voice and don't question it, we end up living inside of it. We don't raise our hand, we overwork, we overachieve, and we underrest, and we don't put ourselves out there. We become adults dragging around the weight of beliefs we picked up when we were kids. They operate in the background of our minds, so we don't always notice them, but we do notice their symptoms, which might show up in the form of feeling like we're not living up to our potential.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

The way that you think impacts the way that you feel, which impacts your physiology, right? Your physical body. And then that impacts your performance. And so your thoughts are like if you think about it's like your brain's data set, and you're getting these pieces of data, and your brain is attempting to make sense of them in the world that you're in. And it's looking at your world around you through the lens of all of your past experiences, of all the things you want to achieve, of all the things you want to avoid, of the things that you fear. And that's where that interpretation comes from. And if we can tweak our interpretation, we can begin to tweak our experience and thus our performance.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

That's Lauren Johnson. She's been the mental performance coach for the New York Yankees. And now her job is helping people see the real truth of themselves instead of clinging to the echoes of old comments. And that's what we're going to explore in this episode. Because it's not what was said to you. It's what you keep saying now. Welcome to better beliefs. What if the only thing standing in your way is what you believe about yourself, your life, or what's possible? Thousands of people have faced that same question and discovered the power to shift reality itself. I'm Brent Kokel, and on Better Beliefs, I tell the stories of real people who changed everything by first changing their minds. Lauren Johnson understands a lot about how our brains work.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Your brain is it's a threat detection machine. Its goal is to keep you safe. The biggest difference from, you know, 100 years ago to a hundred, or I shouldn't say hundred, thousands of years ago to today is the fact that like we're not worried about being eaten by like a T-Rex today. And so our brain will notice threats in your environment, whether it's socially, whether it's mentally, whether it's physically, it will notice it. And the thing about your brain is it's powerful, but it's not always predictive. And it's not always uh, it's not always um accurate. And so we have to ask the question, like, is this a challenge or is this a threat? Because your brain will automatically default to threat when you're maybe unprepared, or when you you have a mismatch and expectation. And so when that happens, we fall into the trap of instead of like playing to win, we start playing not to lose.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

What Lauren's talking about here is the type of interactions we have almost every day, like conversations with strangers, or maybe speaking up in a team meeting at work, which our brains can sometimes perceive as threats to our own status and our social circles. And wanting status is that's deeply embedded in our psyches from thousands of years ago when we lived in tribes. There, high status meant survival. And today, high status means more acceptance and more belonging, things we desperately want in our still tribal states of mind. We win status when others perceive us as smart or generous or successful or any other positive trait you can think of. We lose a status when other people perceive us as dumb or mean or maybe like we have a losing streak going. And that's what's at stake in our everyday interactions, and that's what Lauren is talking about, defaulting to seeing things as threats, then playing not to lose instead of playing to win.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

And the interesting thing about both those states is they both have the same goal, which is to win, but one performs from a place of power and the other from a place of fear. And so you kind of go into protection mode when you're in playing not to lose, versus when you're playing to win, like you know that mistakes are a part of the process. You're willing to take on challenge and risk. You're playing proactive, you're playing aggressive, where like the opposite is true if you're trying to protect the position you're currently in.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

But what if we're proactively working to protect a belief we currently have about ourselves? In researching this episode, I learned that we start to form some of our deeper beliefs when we're four years old. That's when we get the cognitive ability to attribute mental states like intentions, desires, and emotions to not just ourselves, but also notice those in other people too. So that's when they form, but how do we actually form beliefs?

SPEAKER_00 6:14

They can get planted in a couple of ways. There's one, it's something we can create ourselves. And when we're talking about beliefs that are maybe unproductive, they often stem from a fear of sorts, right? And it's an avoidance technique or a survival mechanism in some way. They can also be handed to us from somebody else, often someone of influence. Um, and then there's evidence or there's uh beliefs that we can have that are either evidence-based, like, oh, I didn't, I failed this time, and so we can use that evidence to say, oh, I'll I'll fail again. Or it can be just uh, it doesn't need evidence at all. And so it's more so like this like knowledge base where we are just coming up with reasoning.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

And sometimes beliefs are planted so deep that we don't even have a good way to describe them. They don't seem like they're separate from us. And instead of being something we carry, we start to use them as descriptions for our own identity.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

Like I've always been very driven. I have something in front of me, I won't stop till I get it. But what I learned, the limiting piece to that, is that every strength has a shadow side. And the shadow side of that strength was I would ignore everything else in my life to achieve it. Relationships, my own mental health. Um, you name it, I would, I can put my head down and really work.

SPEAKER_01 7:53

In talking with her more, it seems like that identity of being an achiever is a way to articulate one of the beliefs she formed as a child.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

I had to be successful to be loved.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

You might see yourself in that statement. You might empathize with it, but no matter what, you have a perception of it. Your brain wants to label her belief of needing to be successful to be loved as either positive or negative, but it's actually neither, which we'll get to a little later. For now, let's talk about how that belief affected her actions, even in the things she was already good at, like soccer, which she played in college.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

I mean, I would practice and then I'd go for a three-mile run afterwards. I would do two days on my own, like I was obsessed with it.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

That obsession led to a very successful stint through her first three years of college until she got to her fourth when everything came crashing down.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

My third game into my senior year, I received my fifth concussion and was told I could no longer play. And while I wasn't gonna like, you know, play for our national team or anything like that, um I did have offers overseas and I was looking to pursue them. So it was like pretty devastating to me. And I always identified as like Lauren the soccer player. And so I had this like huge identity crisis of like, who am I?

SPEAKER_01 9:18

This put her on shaky ground because if soccer is what made her successful and she couldn't do that anymore, what would she do to be loved? She had to find a way to redirect her focus.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

So the teacher's like, no offense, I'm not coming to class for just you. Uh, here's the books. We'll like meet what's a quarter or something. And I completely fell in love with it because finally I had an explanation as to why I struggled at times. And I started to realize I had more in my control than I once thought. I was like a victim to my thoughts.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Most of us, we like to think we're in control of our own minds, that our thoughts are something that we choose, something we direct. But the truth is, a lot of the time, we don't notice how much our thinking is just happening to us. Our brains are constantly interpreting what's around us, trying to make sense of the world we see, using everything we've experienced up to that point to fill in the gaps. The problem is, those interpretations, they're not always accurate. They're shaped by old memories and fears we picked up along the way, and beliefs we formed years ago that we may not even remember learning. So when something doesn't go the way that we expect, or we start doubting ourselves, it can feel like those thoughts are just the truth. Like we don't have a say in them. And when that happens, it's easy to start feeling like we're just along for the ride. Like our thoughts are running the show and we're just reacting to whatever they tell us, which is exactly how Lauren used to experience her own mind.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

It's like if I felt good that day, I was gonna have a good day. If I felt bad that day, probably not gonna be great. And I realized I had so much more control than I gave myself credit for. And I had this moment where I like started, I started to feel bad for myself. I was like, God, like who would I have been if I would have known these things? Like, what kind of player would I would I have been able to go further than I than I once had? And then I had this moment where I thought, how many people can I help now that I do?

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Lauren applied to a master's program, got in, got the degree, and in true high achiever fashion, got a job as the mental performance coach for the New York Yankees.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

You know, I I think that when you're working with a pro sports team of any kind, it's like it's really sexy, right? You're like, oh yeah, I work I get to work for them, and it's like a really cool thing. And I a lot of people that aren't in that industry um may fail to realize that you have the exact same schedule as the players. Sometimes it can be even more difficult because you're balancing between several teams, not just one. And I was I was balancing a lot. And um I had this moment where I thought to myself, like, I I have nothing outside of my work.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

She realized that on a good month, she'd get two days off, and that's including the weekends. And sometimes one hour of sleep was the most she could get in a night.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

I started to look around, and a lot of the people I worked with were doing the same, like had the exact same problem I did. And I thought to myself, well, I'm recognizing that climbing the ladder isn't gonna make it any better. If anything, it's gonna make it worse. And I'm not certain I want to live that life when I start a family, and honestly, for for a sustained amount of time.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

But that belief she carried from childhood, the one where she had to be successful to be loved, that was still heavy. And in her field, you can't get any more successful than being the mental performance coach for the Yankees. But here we are at the same time, she's dealing with this inner conflict because she's aware of what the demands of the job are doing to her.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

It took two years longer to do anything about it. So essentially, like, I my gut knew it a lot earlier than I was willing to act on it. Um, it was this weird, like, I don't know if anybody's been in the position where there's this belief of like you need this, this requirement, this is needed or required for love. You start to identify with the very thing that you do. Um, and I started to get have my identity was like infused with being uh a mental, you know, performance coach with the Yankees. And the the thought of leaving that was really hard. And so even though I started to get this thought of, man, I'm not certain this is for me long term, I'm starting to, and my gut's starting to talk to me about this, I pushed it down. And I just was like, no, no, no, no, that can't be real.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

And that's one of the things about beliefs and why it can be so hard to change them. Because when our beliefs represent our reality, anything outside of our beliefs isn't.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

And it gets to the point where if you if you ignore that like voice in your head, it just gets louder. It doesn't go away. And so it just got louder and louder and louder to the point where I like I couldn't ignore it anymore. Like it was screaming at me. Like, this is like this is such an amazing opportunity, and there's gonna be more. Maybe this isn't the opportunity for me beyond the time I've already spent here. And so that's when I really started to think through what's possible outside of it. But it it took me lying to myself for probably another two years before I was willing to sit down and listen.

SPEAKER_01 15:12

But when she sat down to listen, an emotion she hadn't felt in a while bubbled up to the surface. Doubt.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

I think I was afraid no one would want me outside of it. Like, it's kind of that, a little bit of that, like, am I as good as I think I am? Um, and you know, I I I don't have to prove that here, because if you're here, people assume it. But outside of it, I now had to, you know, prove it. I had to, I didn't know if I could make my same salary. I didn't know if I could pay my bills. Like I had no idea what I was capable of outside of it, and so my fear was I leave here and I regret every bit of it.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

I want to go back to why beliefs can be so hard to change for a minute, using what Lauren just said as a leverage point. She logically knew she wasn't going to stay with the Yankees, and her mind was made up. But the beliefs she held about herself and her own worth were trying to hold her back from what she knew she had to do. The reason beliefs can be so hard to change isn't just because they're ideas, it's because they created a sense of uncertainty. Even if the story we're telling ourselves isn't completely true, it's familiar. And the familiar feel to say when you've spent years or sometimes decades building a life around a certain belief about who you are, that belief starts to act like a gravity field. It pulls your decisions, your risks, and even your ambitions back towards what fits the story. So when something new comes along that doesn't match that story, like a new opportunity, a different path, or even a quiet voice inside saying this isn't it anymore, your mind doesn't always treat that as a possibility. It treats it as a threat. Not because it's dangerous, but because it doesn't fit the identity you've been living inside of. And that's why people can feel stuck in their lives for years or even decades. It's not because they lack the ability to change, but because they don't know how to change the belief that's holding them in place. And that's exactly the process Lauren started to figure out through her work. For example, she had a player on the Yankees who wouldn't talk in team meetings. Turns out it was a belief he formed in elementary school because he had a stuttering problem, and a teacher told him that he just wasn't that good at speaking.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

I came up with this formula which is your identity equals your belief plus actions. And so his belief was I'm not very good at speaking. Every time he acted in support of it, it solidified this identity. I am not a good speaker.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

And as I talked about a little earlier in the episode, it can be pretty tough for us to tell the difference between our beliefs and our identity. And this leaves us with a kind of chicken in the egg thing for people who want to change how they see themselves.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

And in order to decide what the identity is, you have to finish the sentence.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

So I want to play with this for a minute. Let's say you want to be the type of person who isn't afraid to speak up at team meetings while you're at work.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

Well, then now we have to decide what actions we're going to do to support those things. Because as you begin to provide your brain evidence, you will begin to believe it. It may not be today, it may not be tomorrow, it may not be next week, but at some point, your brain will start to believe it when you continue to act in support of who you want to be.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Easy to say, but a lot harder to do if you're the kind of person who currently doesn't want to speak up at a team meeting because it's scary to face the possibility of losing status, like I talked about earlier in the episode.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

And it's the fear of what if this comes true? The second you face it, it starts to it becomes powerless. Because when you realize the impact of a failure is survivable, and not only survivable, but you can grow from it. You start to change your relationship with fear. And so it's kind of that idea of exposure therapy. And so as you begin to expose yourself and as you begin to change the way that you relate to fear, aka the way that you respond to that very fear, that's when things begin to shift. And the reason is because if you think about it from a brain perspective, we have these neuropathways, and if you've avoided, avoided, avoided, you've built a very strong neuropathway, which is what your brain defaults to when it feels that fear. When you start acting different, you lay down a new set of neuropathways. And every time you act in that belief and you act in that way, you start to strengthen it. And as you strengthen it and you keep going and you keep putting in those reps, at some point your brain will start to favor the stronger pathway.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

Let's switch back from Lauren the expert to Lauren the human being. When we left that part of the episode, she was struggling with doubt once she made the decision to leave the Yankees, which she eventually did, but she had to create a new belief in order to do it. And to build a new belief, she had to use her own formula and come up with a new identity by figuring out the type of person she wanted to become.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

I wanted to become the type of person who could stand on my own success instead of relying on the Yankee name. I it's like I needed to prove to myself that I could thrive without that need for external validation.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Then she had to take actions that matched that identity.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

Well, the first action I had to take after realizing this identity that in the person I wanted to become is I had to let go of the Yankees. And so that was a hard conversation to have. But I had full support from people at the Yankees, and so the first step was choosing to end my time there and announcing it to the world. It was starting my own company, opening my own LLC, building a website, taking on new clients, opening myself up outside of sport to the business world. And so I started taking on one on one clients. Uh I offered keynote speaking. I also offered program development and as I started kind of putting in these reps and I started really gaining momentum in my own business and my own company over time about six months later I remember looking up and going, holy crap, I have like this full-blown company and I had no idea I could build something as great as this in six months' time after you know being out and taking a chance on myself. And so I think what I was able to prove to myself is that I can be successful on my own merit. I didn't need the title. It certainly helped. And I proved to myself that I could stand on my own two feet.

SPEAKER_01 22:40

So if you follow this all the way back to the beginning of the episode, you might start to see something a little different about that voice in your head. You know, the one that tells you what you're good at and what you're not good at, what you're capable of, and what's way out of your league. For most of us, that voice feels like us. It feels like truth because we think it's coming from inside our own heads. But if you really slow down and listen closely, you might start to notice something. A lot of those words, they didn't start with you. They started with a teacher or a parent or a coach. A moment when something went wrong, or a moment when something went right and you decided what that meant about you. And over time, those moments they turned into beliefs. And those beliefs turned into identities. Until one day, the story you built about yourself started feeling like a fact. But the thing about beliefs is that they aren't permanent. They're just stories that our brains learn to repeat. And like Lauren said earlier, when we start to act like the person we want to become, our brains start collecting new evidence. We remember new experiences, and we gather new proof until eventually a different story starts to take shape. So the next time you hear that voice in your head telling you who you are, I want to encourage you to pause for a second and ask the same question we started with. Whose voice is that? Is it something you chose? Or is it something you've been carrying around for years? Because the voice in your head isn't just something you have to live with, it's something you can rewrite. But the trick is, you have to be open to it. And you know what we say around here the most dangerous thing is a made-up mind. Thank you so much for investing your time and listening to today's episode. As always, it is one of the joys of my life to put these things together for you. Please do me a favor and help me grow the audience for this show, which you can do by simply rating and reviewing the show on whatever platform you're listening to it on. And if you don't like writing and because you think your status might go down based on what we learned on this, somebody maybe not liking your words, all you've got to do is rate it. Five stars is what I'm looking for. If you would do that and you believe the show is worth that, please do rate that. Also, another thing you can do to help grow the listenership of this show is share it with somebody you think needs to hear the message that we talked about today. This one I think applies to everybody because we're really talking about the nature of where our beliefs come from and how we can change the beliefs about ourselves. Which in my life, when I think about it, that's one of the most powerful beliefs that we can have is our belief in ourselves. And as you've heard in this episode, a lot of times we built those based on what other people had to say to us. And we can definitely make those changes based on what we want them to be. We just have to be intentional about them. So this episode, while a little bit more tactical than uh some of our other episodes, it still I think is very, very relevant because it does kind of serve as a blueprint for how to change your own mind. All right, that's it for this episode. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you on the next one. Better Beliefs is owned by 6350 Ventures. It's written, produced, and edited by me, Brent Kokel. Yes, I do all the things. Original cover art for the Better Beliefs Podcast is by Jenny H. Designs. And original music for the opening that you hear in every Better Beliefs episode is by the Lonely Ramblers. All other music credits can be found in the show notes.