Surrendering to God was not the end of the work. It is the beginning of the journey on the right path.I think people expect that once you hand your life over to God, the hard part is done. That is not what I found. Surrender opens the gate, and then you still have to walk the field. And my field was full of things that were not of God and had been growing in me for decades.There were weeds. There were boulders. The soil was hard.Before anything good could take root, I had to unearth and plough the things that were false about who I am and how I am. That is the part of the journey I avoided the longest, so it is the part I want to describe most honestly.<h2 id="254d2e12-65b3-4dc6-bfac-1cb87ca89350" data-toc-id="254d2e12-65b3-4dc6-bfac-1cb87ca89350" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">I Was Afraid of This Work for Three Years</h2>I knew from around July of 2019 that I had to face my limiting beliefs. I knew it the way you know a tooth needs pulling. And I avoided it for three years, for three very specific reasons.The first was that I was afraid it would make things worse. I was already carrying self-hatred and bitterness, and I thought that turning toward the source of it would only deepen what I felt.The second was that I was afraid it would alter my identity. That if I actually dismantled the beliefs I was operating from, I would become someone the people who knew me could no longer accept.The third followed from the second. If the people who knew me could not accept the new version, and nobody else wanted her either, I would be completely alone.So I did what many of us do. I consumed. Countless videos, countless articles. Gabor Mate on how these patterns form in the body as adaptations rather than defects. Dr Ramani on the dynamics that reinforce them and keep you inside them. I learned an enormous amount and applied very little of it, because learning about the wound is not the same as touching it.It took three years before I was brave enough to sit down and do it.<h2 id="12404469-0233-4eda-8e0f-a2258c96359c" data-toc-id="12404469-0233-4eda-8e0f-a2258c96359c" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Method Was Simple and Brutal</h2>When I finally did it, in June of 2022, I did it in three passes.The first pass was origin stories. I listed the events, acute or chronic, that had generated stress or trauma or genuinely intense discomfort, and that had made me feel powerless. I did not filter for whether they seemed significant enough. I just wrote them.Failing to finish a windmill project in primary school and being mocked in front of the whole class. A teacher calling me an exceptional child, not as praise but as a jab at my constant questioning. A nickname I was given on interhouse sports day that my parents then picked up and teased me with well into adulthood, despite having much better names available to them.Being mocked at school assembly for not bringing good enough things to share on my birthday, and mocked again the next day for the cabin biscuits and sweets my mother had scraped together, because they did not compare with what the other children brought. Washing my father's socks, torn and caked with mud, because there were no extras. Being told to shut up when I cried, when I asked questions, when I spoke about things that mattered to me.And then the adult ones, which land differently but no less hard. A senior telling me I did not have executive presence and would never be taken seriously as a leader even if I was qualified. Another telling me repeatedly that I used too many words, until I became self conscious about my own voice. Being passed over for opportunity after opportunity and never given usable feedback on what to improve, while watching people with no better strategic thinking than mine be handed the exposure.The second pass was the beliefs themselves. Every self perception I had attached to myself and to the world. I wrote more than sixty. They were repetitive, contradictory, and ugly to look at on a page.The third pass was grouping. When I grouped them, six sentences emerged.<h2 id="72ffca4e-f173-486a-bbed-07af6cdf8bd1" data-toc-id="72ffca4e-f173-486a-bbed-07af6cdf8bd1" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Six Sentences I Had Been Living By</h2>Who I am is not enough or worthy to be successful and fulfilled. There is no space in the world for the full expression of who I am and who I am becoming.Failure is bad, painful and permanent. Only the unworthy fail. And learning is fixed, so past a certain age you cannot acquire anything new anyway.My worth is tied to my output and to how useful I can be to other people. Kindness and love must be earned by doing, and even then they are not guaranteed, so harden up and learn to live without them.All men hate women and are dangerous and only want to use them.My very existence must be earned by blood, sweat and tears. Favour and abundance are not for me, because nobody around me seems to enjoy them either.God only loves and uses the worthy, who are perfect and ready for him always, and who never question.That last one is the one that undid me. Because I had built an entire spiritual life on top of a belief that made closeness with God conditional on a performance I could never sustain.<h2 id="8a174095-8012-452f-81ff-d4fd512522ab" data-toc-id="8a174095-8012-452f-81ff-d4fd512522ab" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Rules I Never Agreed To</h2>There was a second layer underneath the beliefs, and it was made of identity statements. Sentences that begin with I am, and then carry a whole list of inherited rules behind them.I am a woman, so I must never raise my voice, never show anger, must be nurturing to everyone around me, and should not expect men to listen to me or treat me with respect.I am a Yoruba woman, so I must respect elders even the ones who do not respect themselves, must go out of my way for every family member regardless of what their request costs me, and must know how to pound yam.I am intelligent, so I must have all the answers, can never ask for help, and must never be seen struggling to learn, because struggling would mean I am not actually smart.I am a responsible person, so I must step in every time even when someone else made the mess, and must always have paid employment, even if the job is killing me.I had never said most of these out loud. They were running anyway. That is the thing about inherited rules. They do not need your agreement to govern you.<h2 id="175bfdef-b77d-4846-a950-add1c8be069e" data-toc-id="175bfdef-b77d-4846-a950-add1c8be069e" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Meeting Madam Sabi – My Inner Critic</h2>Somewhere in the middle of all this, I realised that the voice narrating these beliefs to me was a distinct and consistent character. She had a tone. She had opinions. She was certain about everything.So I named her Madam Sabi.For those who do not speak Nigerian pidgin, sabi means to know. Madam Sabi is the woman who knows it all, who always has a comment, who has been running commentary on my life since I was small.Naming her was the single most useful thing I did in that entire process. You cannot negotiate with a voice you experience as your own thoughts. The moment you name it, you create distance, and in that distance you can ask questions.So I stopped fighting her and started asking her things. Oya, madam, what now? So what?And what I discovered is that Madam Sabi is not lying to me maliciously. She is quoting. Every single thing she says to me, she heard somewhere first. She is repeating a teacher, a parent, a manager, a schoolmate. She is a very loyal archive of everything that ever hurt me, and she replays it because somewhere in her logic, remembering the injury is how you avoid the next one.That is what befriending the inner critic actually means. Not silencing her. Not arguing her down. Asking her what she is trying to protect me from, and then dealing with the fear underneath rather than the accusation on top.<h2 id="f352fe57-c2fd-4bf7-ad07-aeac4a334966" data-toc-id="f352fe57-c2fd-4bf7-ad07-aeac4a334966" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">What I Put in the Ground Instead</h2>You cannot only remove. Something has to grow in the cleared soil, or the old things come back. So I wrote the replacements out deliberately.My value is complete and immutable. It was divinely given, and it has nothing to do with my state of mind or my productivity.God loves me wholly and completely as I was, as I am, and as I can be.Hard and uncomfortable things and emotions are temporary. They are pieces of information. Listen to the discomfort, take what it is telling you, and learn from it.I can take the discomfort of failing at something if I decide it is worth learning, and continue until it improves. And if I stop, I stop because I learned something about the thing or about myself, not because it was uncomfortable.Adults are people too. Play does not have to damage your pocket, your relationships or your self esteem.I can work with clarity of intention. I can let myself love what I love. I can choose what to say yes to and what to say no to.And energy exchange matters. If a situation no longer fulfils, improves or engages me, I can walk away, no matter how frightening it is and no matter who is involved.<h2 id="92bd77cd-ca45-488b-94b4-7c86e96c562e" data-toc-id="92bd77cd-ca45-488b-94b4-7c86e96c562e" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">This Never Finishes, and That Is Fine</h2>By my own assessment, about seventy percent of those old beliefs have been materially altered. Not gone. Altered. And the remaining thirty percent still surfaces, usually when I am tired or afraid.But here is how I know it is working.My relationship with my father has always been the hardest one. He ruled our house with anger and a mercurial temper when I was growing up, and my inner child still holds her breath around him. He is older now, calmer, more considerate and more supportive. And on a recent check in call, I noticed myself over explaining a situation to him so that he would not get upset.For years, I only ever caught that pattern afterwards, in reflection, hours or days later. This time I caught it while it was happening.That is what progress actually looks like. Not the absence of the pattern. The shrinking gap between the pattern and your awareness of it.If you are afraid to start this work because you think it will make things worse, or change who you are, or leave you alone, I understand. I was afraid of exactly those three things for three years. What I can tell you from the other side is that the version of me who emerged is not a stranger. She is the one who was underneath all of it the whole time.Go and plough the ground, endure the raised dust; it is temporary. Tilling that earth will make it fertile for the best seeds to be planted.

I avoided my limiting beliefs for three years. Naming the voice that carried them is what finally let me answer back.

Unearth, Face, and Release Your Limiting beliefs 

I Was Afraid of This Work for Three Years

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Unearth, Face, and Release Your Limiting beliefs

Unearth, Face, and Release Your Limiting beliefs

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