Using Your Calendar to Change Your Beliefs

Every day, how you use your time is confirming beliefs you have about yourself. And the beliefs that you have about yourself are shaping your self-image. And as you know, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, your self-image is creating your entire life. Which is why, in this episode, I want to talk with you about how to use your calendar to change your beliefs.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image, where personal development meets style. Here’s your hostess, master life coach Tonya Leigh.

Hello, my friends. I’m so excited because, by the time you listen to this, I will be in Miami for our first ever School of Self-Image event. I have had so much fun visualizing and planning and anticipating this event. When I thought about creating this experience, I didn’t want it to be just another, “You come, and you sit in a big boardroom and people speak and you take a lot of notes, and you consume a lot of information and then you go home.”

I focused on the energy of the event. I used the exact same three pillars that we teach in the School of Self-Image around our mindset and our style and our surroundings to change us. I used that same concept in creating this event.

So, it’s been so much fun for me, everything from thinking about the music we play and the food we serve and the décor that we use, and just the little details that can have a big impact. Because I am always thinking about creating the energy of our futures in the present. And that’s what I focused on in creating this event.

And so, I’m sharing this with you only because I want you to think about that same concept. When you think about your future, what is the energy of that future that you can begin to bring into your life today? Because that will change how you see yourself. And when you change how you see yourself, your life outside of you begins to change.

So, yeah, I’m really excited about this event and I’m sure I’ll be sharing more about it in future podcasts. But for today, I’m going to talk about how to use your calendar to change your beliefs.

How you spend your time is confirming beliefs about yourself. I mean, just look at your day and how you’ve spent your time thus far, and what beliefs has it confirmed about yourself?

I’ll give you an example. This morning, I woke up and I journaled. I had a cup of tea and I got to work. I have been doing some final touches on the content for the event. I am now recording this podcast. I had a meeting with my community manager. And so, when I look at just this portion of my day and the beliefs that it confirms about me, I need to ask myself, do I like what it’s saying? Do I like how I’m spending my time and what it says about me?

And for this small portion of my day, the answer is 100% yes. It’s confirming beliefs such as, “I am a woman who lives on purpose.” It’s confirming the belief of, “I am a successful businesswoman.” It’s confirming the belief of, “I am consistent. I show up for mu community.” It’s confirming the belief of, “I am a great CEO.” I like what that says.

Now, sometimes when I do this exercise on myself, I don’t like what it says. For example, if I’m in the middle of working and I decide that it’s a great time to go scrolling through Instagram, I don’t like what that says about me.

It says I’m not disciplined. It says that I procrastinate. It says that I don’t complete things. Not really good beliefs about myself. And the reason why this is so important is because your beliefs, what you think about yourself is shaping your self-image, how you see yourself.

So, what you think about yourself shapes how you see yourself. And your self-image is creating your entire life. You will always behave in harmony with how you see yourself. I have a friend who is a life coach, and yet, she doesn’t see herself as a life coach yet. She’s just getting started.

And so, I was talking to her recently and she was telling me how she’s really struggling in transitioning from being in corporate to owning that she is a life coach, believing that about herself.

And so, when I asked her what she’s doing in her day-to-day life around her business and being a life coach, how she’s using her time is not creating belief that she is a life coach.

She is spending a lot of time researching. Come on, we’ve all done that, right? She’s spending a lot of time doing busywork, like trying to figure out her niche, trying to figure out what she’s going to call her website.

And I told her, I’m like, “I want you to think about the version of you who has fully owned and truly and deeply believes that she is a life coach. What is she doing? She’s not sitting around researching, unless there’s a purpose, unless she’s producing content and she needs to find some research to support her thesis.” But that’s not the research that most people are doing.

They’re doing it to take what I call faux action. That’s action that doesn’t really lead to a result. But it makes you feel good in the moment. It makes you feel like you’re doing something. It’s just like when I used to read diet books. I would get a high. I was like, “Oh, this is fun. This is the next secret. This is going to be how I finally do it.”

But doing the diet, I didn’t do, or I would do it for a day or two and then I would, what we all say, fall off the wagon. Which, by the way, there is no wagon, just so you know.

However, when she really started to look at how she was using her time and she saw, “Wow, there’s an incongruence between me now and the version of me who believes that she’s a life coach and what she’s doing,” she started to realize how she could begin to use her calendar to produce belief that she is a life coach.

She started scheduling things that her life coach self would be doing, like making offers, writing content, doing Facebook Lives, doing what she needs to do to get new leads. Or she would be telling people that she’s a life coach, which she isn’t currently doing. Because she doesn’t believe she’s a life coach, she doesn’t tell people she’s a life coach, and therefore she never collects evidence that she’s a life coach.

And that’s really what this concept boils down to, using your calendar to change your belief. It’s using your calendar to collect evidence for what you want to believe about yourself. So, let’s say that you want to see yourself as an organized person.

Maybe you are seeing the effects of being disorganized and you don’t like the result and you’re like, “You know what? I want to be an organized person.” Well, first of all, you may not even have a calendar, which that is where I would start with you.

I’d be like, “Listen, let’s get your life organized on the calendar so you can see how you’re using your time and is it effective, is it producing the result that you want?” Then, the process would be putting time blocks with your desired result on your calendar. And you would want to create results on your calendar that would prove to yourself that you are an organized woman.

So, if you have been in total disorganization and your house, your computer files, all of that is in disarray, you would start by having a time block of, “You know what? I’m going to clean up my Google Drive during this time.” Or “I’m going to clean out my closet during another time.” These activities and the results, or better yet the evidence that they would provide to you would be feeling your new self-image of being an organized woman.

If you want to be an amazing spouse or partner, do you have time on your schedule devoted to that? If you want to see yourself as a wealthy woman, is how you’re using your time confirming that belief about yourself? Is it producing wealthy results? And is it producing an energy of, like, “Listen, this is where I’m heading. This is what I’m creating. I’m creating more wealth in my life.”

That kind of woman will have very specific things on her calendar depending on her unique circumstance. For example, every single Monday, I have a money date. It is on my calendar. It is a time when I look at my finances and I make decisions. I meet with my bookkeeper on that day. We have a channel in Slack called Money Love. It’s all money stuff.

And doing that, having it on my calendar and being that intentional confirms the belief of, “I am a wealthy woman.” And that energy of feeling wealth drives me to put other things on my calendar to produce more wealth.

Maybe you want to see yourself as fit and healthy. Well, take a look at your calendar. Does it represent a fit and healthy woman? Do you have time on there to go grocery shopping, for your workouts, for whatever your routine is, is it scheduled? And more importantly, are you showing up for that schedule? That’s a whole different podcast.

Because the moment we put things on our calendar, then we need to have the discipline to show up for what we have decided ahead of time we were going to do two, three, four days ago, maybe weeks ago, maybe months ago. And that requires that you feel the discomfort of change.

Changing your identity, changing your beliefs about you is uncomfortable because the brain likes to stay in the familiar. So, once something’s on your calendar and you start showing up for it, just expect it to be uncomfortable and know nothing has gone wrong. You are on the right track. Just keep walking through that discomfort and show up for yourself.

I think no matter what we decide we want to think about ourselves, no matter what our self-image is that we are creating, the one thing that we all have in common is that she is a person that shows up for herself.

I want you all just to start with noticing the incongruence of who you want to be and what you’re doing today. Don’t judge, but be fascinated with what you discover. Because with awareness, my friends, things can begin to change just by being aware of, “Wow, if I continue to do this, I’m going to just keep reconfirming beliefs about myself that are holding me back.”

So, if I want to have different beliefs about myself, I need to go out there and start collecting evidence for it. And you can use your calendar to do that.

For example, I believe in the concept of leisurely hustling, and I’ve done previous podcast episodes on the topic, so if you want to go check those out, please do. But when I thought about that concept, what it really means is you creating a life full of ambition and ease.

It's about working smarter, not harder. And so, when I’m creating my calendar, I want to confirm that belief about myself, of, “I am a woman who leisurely hustles. I’m not going to burn myself out. I’m not going to work crazy hours. I’m not going to have no time for family and friends. It’s just a nonnegotiable.”

And what happens is it requires your brain to work at a higher level. And so, I decided, I’m only going to work a maximum of four days a week. Most weeks, it’s three days. But for example, right now, I’m doing this event. I have more things than usual to do, and so I have an extra day to get those things done.

So, when I’m creating my calendar, I want it to reflect back to me that I am a woman who leisurely hustles. So, what that looks like on my calendar is I have time blocks and I have learned how to shrink them, which demands that I work at a higher level.

So, for example, I used to give myself two hours to do a podcast. Now I give myself one hour to get in here, get it recorded, and be done. And because I’m working at such a higher level productivity-wise, I’m able to achieve more in a smaller amount of time. And that leaves time on my calendar for leisure.

Now, when I’m scheduling my calendar, I usually schedule the leisure first. Because I know my brain, and my brain is going to tell me, “You need to work more. You need to work harder.” And if I put the leisure on my calendar first, then I have to work around it and be like, “Okay, here’s the time I’m going to go to lunch with my friends. Here’s the night I’m going to host a dinner party. Here’s the time I’m going to be on my day off. This is my journal time. This is my leisure time.”

And then, with the time that’s remaining, I get to work. I’m like, “okay, what needs to happen this week?” Head down, make it happen. I teach this process in the Dream Atelier for those of you who are within the School of Self-Image. It is a powerful process that teaches you how to turn your dreams into reality 30 days at a time. That’s the process I use.

But what I’m really doing, subconsciously, is I’m changing my self-image. I’m reconfirming, with my calendar, how I want to see myself. For all of us who are wanting to live an extraordinary life and are doing this work of changing our self-image in order to create that for ourselves, what we all need to have on our calendar is time to believe, to practice believing.

Yes, the things on our calendar can provide evidence for our new beliefs, but we need to have time where we sit down just to practice new beliefs. That’s why I journal every single morning. I sit down and I sell myself on myself. I’ve done a podcast on that too. You may want to go check that out. But I sell myself on my ideas. I sell myself on the future that I want. I practice believing new things on purpose.

And so, putting that on your calendar can provide evidence of, “I am a woman who believes in herself.” How do I know this? Because every day, I have time carved out to sit down and practice it. So, what do you want to believe about yourself? And how can you start aligning your calendar to provide evidence for that belief?

Have a great week, everyone, and I will see you in next week’s episode. Cheers.

Hey, have you grabbed your free copy of the School of Self-Image Manifesto? If not, what in the world? Head over to schoolofselfimage.com/manifesto and get a copy that teaches you how to think and show up in the areas of mindset, style, and surroundings so that you can transform your self-image.