Your beliefs outlive the people who planted them

I was inspired to share this blog by something Brooke Bownes said on the "Mind Monkeys Welcome..." podcast this week.

Brooke is a trauma coach, a global bestselling author and what a couple of her clients have taken to calling 'The Breakthrough Queen'. She earned the title by helping other permanently move past their self-talk barriers and limiting beliefs.

Brooke didn't arrive at her work by accident. She arrived there through years of doing the hardest thing most of us resist: looking honestly at the story she had been handed, deciding it wasn't hers to keep, and choosing to rewrite it.

One line she shared is worth spending some extra time on.

Coming from a place of self-doubt and incredibly low self-value, she described the moment she started reading voraciously, changing her self-talk, doing the internal work. And then she paused:

"I realised I was still saying the things she used to say. She wasn't even there. And I was still doing it."

"She". Her mother. A narcissist who had spent years telling Brooke she was worthless, useless, and had "arrived in the world wrong".

A person (at the point of her story) Brooke hadn't spoken to properly in fourteen years. And yet, inside Brooke's head, she was still very much there.

Your beliefs outlive the people who planted them

Limiting beliefs don't need the person who planted them to survive They just need you to keep repeating them.

Research into the inner critic consistently finds that children raised in critical, controlling, or emotionally damaging environments internalise that critical voice and adopt it as their own inner dialogue, often as a way of creating a sense of safety and control.

The logic, at the time, is almost understandable: "If I say it to myself first, it hurts less when it comes from outside". The unintended consequence? The individual continues this behaviour long after the external voice has gone quiet, changed, or disappeared entirely.

Psychology professor Daniel Kopala-Sibley, who researches the relationship between childhood experience and mental health, has found that experiences of parents being critical, uncaring, or controlling are robustly associated with high levels of self-criticism in adulthood.

For some people, that voice was a parent. For others, a teacher, a partner, a peer group, a culture that taught them that ambition was arrogance or that needing help was weakness. Occasionally it's no single source at all, just an accumulation of throwaway comments that landed in the wrong order at the wrong moment.

"Children should be seen and not heard." "Stop showing off." "Don't be silly."

The origin almost doesn't matter. What matters is that that voice, that belief, stuck around and became a decision to live life by:

"Speaking up is wrong."

"You need to stay in your lane."

"Frivolity has no value."

For Brooke, the pivot came when she realised that SHE was the common factor. Not in a way that assigned her blame, but in a way that handed her the responsibility. And with it, the agency.

She found a famous line in a Jim Rohn book:

"If it is to be, it's up to me."

What made it land was the specific, uncomfortable truth behind it. That she had been carrying voices, beliefs, opinions that were never hers to carry. And no one but her could put them down.

That is an enormous thing to sit with

I want be honest here, because the coaching industry occasionally dresses this up in ways that do people a disservice or perpetuates a myth that 'change is easy' and a good coach will do most of the work for you.

No.

The work is yours to do.

Not entirely alone. Not without support, tools, direction, or someone willing to sit with you inside the harder conversations. That is exactly what a good coach provides.

A coach can help name and explain the belief. Trace it back to where it was formed. Show you what it is costing you and challenge the meaning you've attached to it.

But the work itself? That belongs to you.

The belief lives inside you

The voice is yours now, even if it started somewhere else. The decision to change what you say to yourself, to interrupt the pattern, to start building a different kind of evidence about who you are and what you're capable of… that decision is entirely yours.

Brooke's story is extraordinary in its detail and scale. But the mechanism she describes is not rare.

The creative professionals and small business owners I work with are, in most visible respects, doing well. Talented. Trusted. Some lead teams. And yet the voice that follows them into their working week sounds startlingly familiar.

"You're not good enough."


"Who are you to be doing this?"


"People will find out."


"You were just lucky."

Those messages may have arrived decades ago from a critical parent, a dismissive manager, a relationship that ground them down gradually. The person who said them might not even remember. They might be entirely unaware of the impact.

In order to thrive, those beliefs need somewhere to live.

What if you made them homeless?

Whose voice is actually running in your head when you hesitate?

When you nearly send the proposal but don't.

When you talk yourself out of the pitch.

When you tell yourself the timing isn't right yet.

The Four Fears (not ready, not good enough, no time, going to fail) are almost always borrowed. They came from somewhere. And the fact that they feel so automatic, so familiar, so obviously true… that's not evidence that they are accurate. That's evidence of how long you've been giving them a home.

Your beliefs outlive the people who planted them. What has been rehearsed can be unrehearsed. The work is not easy. But it is yours. And that means it is possible.

If you're ready to start looking at where your hesitations came from and what they're actually costing you, the first step is a conversation.


Book a free discovery call here.

Mark Franklin is The Four Fears® Guy: a transformational mindset coach, speaker and author working with creative professionals and small business owners who are ready to close the gap between the business they have and the one they actually deserve.

Whose voice have you been carrying that was never really yours to keep? Drop it in the comments if you're willing. You might be surprised how many people in this room are holding the same one.