Latest / MIDDLE GROUND - Real Conversations on Faith, Identity & Becoming — Through Brynne's LDS Lens of Curiosity, Love and Doubt / Limiting Beliefs Aren't Enough: The Hidden Bias Keeping You Stuck
Transcript
- OPEN I am recording this episode from my garage today, because it is summer vacation, the baby is napping, my older kids are on screens — one downstairs on the TV, one upstairs on the iPad — and the garage was the quietest place in the house. This is entrepreneurship in action, my friends. Making dreams happen, taking care of my family, showing up anyway. That’s the whole thing right there. Okay. I have been working on a lesson that I am genuinely excited to share, and it is about biases and beliefs. And here’s why I keep coming back to this topic: the last couple of years, as I’ve been doing the work — working with coaches and mentors, getting counseling — it keeps coming back to what is going on inside of us. In our heads, in our hearts, in our nervous systems. You’ve probably heard the term limiting beliefs. Those thoughts, those conclusions that keep us stuck, that hold us back. But what I want to talk about today is the layer underneath that. The biases. Because if you’ve been doing the belief work and still feel like nothing is really shifting — this might be why. WHAT IS A BELIEF? A belief is a conclusion. It’s a statement you’ve made — consciously or over time — about yourself, about other people, or about how the world works. Beliefs feel like facts, even when they’re not. And that’s what makes them so powerful and so sticky and so hard to deconstruct. Some beliefs are empowering. I can do hard things. Relationships can be safe. Change is possible. Those beliefs open doors. They get you moving. And some beliefs close doors. I’m not smart enough. I always mess things up when it really counts. I’m not the kind of person who gets to have that. Those are the limiting beliefs. They keep you stuck, they keep you small. And they’re built over time — you are not born with them. They come from experiences, from things that were said to you or about you or around you, from patterns you lived through and drew conclusions from. Here’s a framework I really like. Imagine your belief is a tabletop. And the legs holding it up are the pieces of evidence — the proof — you’ve gathered over your lifetime that support that belief. You had a few experiences, you drew a conclusion, and that conclusion became something you now just know to be true. Think about watching a movie with a group of people. Some catch certain moments, some miss others. You draw different conclusions. You’re making assumptions, making inferences the whole way through. Same thing when you witness an accident — every person who pulls over to give a statement will describe it differently, based on their own perspective. All of that feeds our beliefs. But here’s the good news: beliefs can be changed. If the tabletop is held up by legs of evidence, you can knock out the legs. You can find contradicting evidence. You can question whether the evidence you’ve been using is actually accurate, or complete, or the only way to interpret what happened. Beliefs are workable. You can change your mind. It takes some work — but it is absolutely possible. Beliefs feel like facts, even when they’re not. That’s what makes them so powerful — and so workable. WHAT IS A BIAS? Biases are different. A bias is a filter — an automatic, often unconscious preference or assumption your brain uses to sort the world more quickly. It’s a mental shortcut. And your brain loves shortcuts because processing every single piece of information consciously would be completely exhausting. Your brain is just trying to conserve energy and take care of you. Our bodies do incredible things, and a huge part of that is the brain managing all of it behind the scenes. Here’s the important thing: you usually cannot state a bias as a clear sentence, the way you can state a belief. Because a bias is operating before you even get to the belief-forming stage. It’s shaping what information you let in, what you notice, what you conclude — before you’ve even had a chance to think. Biases are absorbed. From culture. From family. From the environments we grew up in. They get installed quietly, over years, through what got praised and what got ignored. Through what was held up as desirable and what was treated as less than. Through the messaging in the air that nobody said out loud, but everybody understood. And then we build beliefs on top of those biases. The bias becomes the foundation. The belief is just the structure sitting on it. Which is why you can do a lot of work on the structure and still feel like nothing is shifting — because the foundation is untouched. The same beliefs keep getting rebuilt. You can argue yourself out of a belief. A bias is harder to catch — because you’re often not even aware it’s running. THE KEY DIFFERENCE Here’s the simplest way I can put it. Beliefs live in your mind. You can name them, examine them, and choose to replace them with practice and intention. Biases live deeper. In your conditioning. In your nervous system. In the part of you that was shaped before you had language for any of it. You cannot argue yourself out of a bias the way you can a belief, because a bias was never a conscious decision in the first place. Research tells us that about 45% of our daily behaviors are just automatic — repeated, happening without much conscious thought at all. We are, in a very real sense, running on programming we didn’t write. And most of us have never stopped to ask: who wrote this? Does it still apply? Is it even working for me? A PERSONAL EXAMPLE Okay. I want to give you a personal example, because I think this is where it really lands. And yes, I talk a lot about my health journey — because this is something I’ve had to deconstruct deeply. Not just the beliefs, but the biases underneath them. The underlayers that held those beliefs up for so long they just became a natural part of who I was. For most of my life, I carried the belief that to be truly loved, truly seen, truly beautiful — you had to be thin. I didn’t arrive at that in one single moment. I absorbed it slowly, over years. I noticed women who lost weight getting flooded with compliments. Dieting conversations everywhere — from peers, from family, on TV, in movies, in magazines. Weight loss was celebrated. And certain bodies were just quietly passed over. And I received thousands of tiny messages like that before I was old enough to question any of them. That is not a belief I formed. That is a bias I was marinated in. A filter that got installed so early and so thoroughly that it just felt like reality. So over time, I did the work. And I came to genuinely believe — in my mind — that anyone, in any body, of any shape or size, is worthy of love exactly as they are. I believe that now. Some days it’s harder than others. But I’ve been looking for evidence of it, because I’ve wanted to believe it. And I keep finding it. But here’s what I had to reckon with: I could hold that belief completely and still not feel it for myself. I could look at someone else and see their beauty, their wholeness, their worth — without question. And then turn around and not be able to extend that same love and compassion to my own body. For a long time I thought that gap meant I was failing at the belief work. That I needed more affirmations, more effort, more trying. But what I eventually understood is that the gap wasn’t a failure of belief. It was evidence of a bias that ran much deeper than the belief could reach. The belief lived in my mind. The bias lived in my body. In my gut. In the way I walked into a room and wondered what people were seeing when they looked at me. And you cannot think your way out of something that was never about thinking in the first place. I could hold the belief completely and still not feel it for myself. That gap wasn’t a failure. It was evidence of a bias the belief couldn’t reach. FOUR WAYS TO START WORKING ON YOUR BIASES Bias work is humbling. By definition, you can’t fully see your own biases — that’s what makes them biases. But here are four ways to start getting underneath them. One: Look for the gap. If you hold a belief for other people that you cannot apply to yourself, that gap is a signal. It’s pointing at a bias — not a character flaw, not a failure — but a filter that was installed before you had a say. Get curious about the gap instead of ashamed of it. Two: Trace it back. Where did the filter come from? What environment taught you to see the world this way? Who got praised, and for what? What was held up as worthy, and what was quietly dismissed or shamed? You’re not looking for someone to blame. You’re looking for the source. Because when you can see where a filter came from, it loses some of its authority over you. And you can step into compassion for the source too. Three: Expose yourself to contradiction. Not just intellectually — experientially. One of the most powerful ways to shift a bias is to encounter something that doesn’t fit the filter. A relationship where you feel loved as you are. A community that reflects a different story back to you. Maybe that means reading things that challenge the old narrative, or following people on social media who offer a different perspective. That’s what begins to loosen something that logic alone cannot touch. Four: Do this work with support. We cannot see our own filters clearly from inside them. A good coach, a therapist, a counselor, a trusted community — they reflect back what we ourselves cannot see. That is not weakness. That is just how awareness works. CLOSE Here’s what I want to leave you with. Is there something you believe is true for everyone else that you cannot quite make true for yourself? A kind of love, a sense of worth, a sense of belonging — a belief that you deserve rest, or joy, or good things? Sit with that. Because that gap — between what you know for others and what you can feel for yourself — that is not a personal failure. That is a bias worth getting curious about. What filter is running? Where did it come from? And what would it mean to gently, persistently start telling yourself a different story? You don’t have to answer that today. Just be willing to ask the question. Awareness is always the first move. You’ve got this. I believe in you. I’ll see you next time.