Believe: the middle step of Ask, Believe, Receive
This is the second in a three part series working through Ask, Believe, Receive, one of the most reached for frameworks for manifesting a result. This guide sits inside the Believe episode, and it walks through where a belief comes from in the first place, how your brain decides whether to keep it or update it, and two ways to work with the beliefs running underneath your own business right now.
Five doors every belief walks through
Environment, repetition, emotion, authority and rationalisation, and none of them need proof.
The gap your brain won't ignore
Credition, and why a belief only comes up for review once the evidence is impossible to miss.
Reverse engineer your last half hour
A way to surface a subconscious belief when a thought log won't catch it.
What your brain won't notice unless you track it
Why visible evidence is what finally lets a belief change.
Would you like to manifest results faster?
If working with your beliefs sparked something while you listened, this free resource picks up exactly where the episode leaves off, with the tools to find and shift the belief sitting underneath a result you're after.
Free Tool to Accelerate Your ManifestationA belief is something your brain accepts as true, and it forms through five distinct doors
None of them require a shred of evidence to stick.
- Early environment shapes most of what settles in before you turn seven, then keeps forming until about twenty four, through family, school and whoever had influence over you at the time.
- Repetition and exposure can plant something with no evidence behind it at all. Think about everything you heard about COVID that later turned out to be wrong. It stuck because you heard it constantly, with no other voice saying otherwise.
- An intense emotional response, whether that's fear, trauma or pure joy, anchors a belief fast, because your brain links the feeling to the event and locks the two together.
- Authority and social proof do the same work. Testimonials, case studies, Google reviews. They build trust in a situation, and trust is a doorway a belief walks straight through.
- Active validation is when you rationalise what's happening in your business or your life until it fits a belief you already hold, which makes that belief feel even more solid.
Every belief you're carrying walked in through one of five doors, and not one of them required proof.
Your brain runs on a shortcut called credition, and it only updates a belief when the gap gets too big to ignore
Somewhere between three hundred thousand and two hundred billion bits of information hit you every second.
- Credition comes out of neuroscience, and it describes the physical process your brain runs every time it turns incoming information into a belief.
- Your brain filters that avalanche of sensory information by grouping bits together into beliefs, assumptions and core beliefs, purely to conserve energy.
- A belief only comes up for review when there's a glaringly obvious difference between what you believe and what's now sitting in front of you.
- In business this shows up the moment a client says "I've got a website, where are my clients?", and I have to point out the website converts traffic, it doesn't create it.
- It shows up again when someone has posted daily on Facebook and Instagram, done the reels, the hashtags, everything by the book, and it still hasn't worked, because the belief that social media is the way is stronger than the evidence in front of them.
- That confrontation feels uncomfortable on purpose. Your brain works hardest to evaluate a belief exactly when the gap feels the widest.
A small gap between belief and evidence gets waved through. A wide one is what finally forces the update.
Look at what you did in the last half hour, then ask what you had to believe to do it
Most of your beliefs live in your subconscious mind, so a thought log rarely catches them in the act.
- A thought record asks you to catch your thinking as it happens, and that's hard when most of what you do runs on autopilot.
- Working backward is easier. Look at the last half hour and ask what you were probably thinking that led you to do exactly that.
- I did this on myself the morning I recorded this episode. Quick shower, fed the dog, quick makeup, notes scribbled down fast because I had a nine o'clock appointment closing in.
- What that told me is I overestimate what I can fit into the time I have and underestimate how long things take, and that rushing was showing up as pressure in my voice on the recording.
- Do this over a day, a week or a month, and voice it into a project in Claude or ChatGPT as a daily reflection so you build a body of evidence rather than one snapshot.
- Once you can see the belief sitting there, you can ask whether you still agree with it and whether it's helping you get where you're trying to go.
Your last half hour of behaviour is a shortcut to the belief that was running it.
Your brain needs to see evidence, or it will keep repeating the belief that nothing is working
Progress that stays invisible doesn't count toward changing a belief.
- Being neurodivergent, I can finish something and dismiss it in the same breath, because my brain has already moved on to the next thing.
- I use giant poster sized sticky note charts from Officeworks, one colour per client or activity, moved across columns so I can see the movement rather than trust my memory for it.
- I built dashboards with AI that show me charts on revenue and marketing, but also on my energy across tasks, because some tasks take forever and cost me nothing, and others are quick and drain me completely.
- I track safety too. My safety after recording a podcast episode sits high because I know it compounds. Clients booking with me now heard an episode twelve, eighteen, even twenty four months ago.
- I track time, because "I'll just reply quickly" to an email can turn into drafting, redrafting and checking every link three times over.
- Without a visual cue in front of me, I focus on the wrong things, like sign ups and waitlists, and I miss every other piece of evidence that things are moving.
If your brain can't see the progress, it will keep the belief that there isn't any.