Alright now, welcome, welcome back, welcome back to the sweet spot, beautiful souls. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. Wherever this finds you, I want you to have a good one. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm a board certified psychiatrist, and I've told you this a thousand times, but I'll tell you again. I love working with you. I know I work with a lot of high-powered individuals and I work in high-pressured environments. Yeah, that's all good. But what I really enjoy is talking to you on a daily basis about this thing we call life, making sense of the mystery we call life, making a pathway forward that allows us to live a life we love, to accomplish the dream, to live with purpose, with integrity, and to not be afraid to be ourselves, our authentic selves. So, sweet spotters, this week we've been looking at a series called The Ceiling You Don't See. We're tackling beliefs. We're tackling beliefs, and this episode on Tuesday, Take Action Tuesday is called Effort Doesn't Break Ceilings. Action inside a limit or a limiting belief just costs you more energy. It doesn't do anything. So we have to tackle it. We have to figure out how do we not let the ceiling we don't see stop us from accomplishing the things we want to in life. Yesterday, yesterday on Making Moves Monday, we named something important. We said that most ceilings don't announce themselves, right? You don't see them when life is easy. You never see a ceiling when life is easy. You see them when the pressure shows up, when the stress mounts, when the fears arrive, pain, fatigue, disappointment, resistance. That's when the belief reveals itself. And that's when the belief sets up the ceiling. This is as far as I can go. This is all I can do. Something bad is going to happen. Nothing ever works out for me. These are ceilings. There are beliefs that form invisible ceilings. And that's why we're calling this series basically the ceiling you don't see. Because these are not necessarily visible ceilings. If you're inside and you look up, you'll probably see a ceiling. That's easy. That's in the physical world. What I'm talking about is not technically in the physical world. Pain, fatigue, disappointment, fears, anxieties, they're not always visible. So today, Take Action Tuesday is where a lot of us are getting stuck because the actions we're taking are inside our beliefs that are limited. Because once people feel that ceiling, the instinct they have is simple. They either give up and go do something else, or sometimes what they do is they try harder. And the effort does matter, and the discipline matters and the action matters. But here's the truth. And I want to be clear about this one the effort doesn't break the ceiling. Think about somebody who's struggling at work, right? They're behind, they're under scrutiny, they're trying to prove themselves. What do they do? They stay later, they skip lunch, they answer all the emails, they do everything harder, faster, they're really working hard. And from the outside, it looks pretty good. It looks admirable. But from the inside, they're exhausted, they're tired, they're stressed, they're not happy. But here's what hasn't changed. They're still operating under a ceiling. The belief that if I slow down, I'll fall behind. If I say no, I'll be exposed, I'll be fired. If I don't push harder, nothing's gonna work out for me. And all that extra effort is happening inside of their belief. And they're not really moving forward half the time. They're just spending more energy inside the ceiling. Have you ever seen that? Where a person is working harder and harder, but they're not getting anything done. This happens with athletes too. Miss a shot, make a mistake, lose your rhythm. And instead of adjusting your belief or your approach, you tense up and you try even harder, and then you force the next play. More effort, and you know what that means? Less flow. Same ceiling. That's a ceiling, that's a pattern that I have to be perfect, and if I don't do this perfectly, everything is gonna go down the tubes, and then everything that happens after my mess up follows that pattern. That's the pattern. Effort doesn't fail because effort is bad. I'm not saying that. Effort fails because the belief hasn't shifted. You know, artists and thinkers have dealt with this for a long time. The writer Henry David Thoreau once wrote, It is not enough to be busy, ants are busy. The question is, what are you busy doing? What are you busy about? And the scriptures say it more plainly in Proverbs 21. Careful planning puts you ahead in the long run. Hurried and careless moves put you further behind. That's in the message Bible. I love it, it's plain. You can be careful all you want, right? It puts you ahead, but listen, if you end up being so hurried and careless along the way, you're actually not making progress. You might think you're doing well and it may feel that way, but if the beliefs haven't changed, if they're not positive, then if they're not uplifting, if they're not moving in the direction of your best highest self, there'll be problems. When the brain believes an outcome is unlikely or unsafe, you know what it does? It narrows the focus, it reduces flexibility, it increases fatigue. Your effort goes up, but your effectiveness goes down because the brain's just not believing it, it's not buying it. And that's not a character flaw, that's just your neurobiology. So when somebody tells me or they say to me, hey, I'm doing everything I can, sometimes the truer statement, what they're really saying, is I'm doing everything I can inside what I believe is possible. And my job is to help them see what they're believing. Help them to see the ceiling that's limiting them. That's the ceiling that's doing the quiet work of telling you you can't do this, telling you that there is no hope, telling you that nothing is going to work out, telling you that you're not going to get better, telling you that this situation can't change. That's all belief. And your biology is going to follow your belief. Do you know that people who have limiting beliefs or negative beliefs tend to have higher blood pressures, tend to have more susceptibility to sickness? It makes sense. If I'm going around believing something is wrong, or I'm going around with an angry belief or an unforgiveness belief or believing something is completely negative, that's playing out in my physiology, that's playing out on my brain, that's playing out on my blood vessels, that's playing out on my heart. So, yeah, it's invisible, but it becomes visible in the emergency room with chest pain. I'm not saying that everybody who has a heart problem or any kind of illness is a belief problem. What I'm saying is that negative beliefs can really amplify symptoms, they can really set us up for unnecessary stress. And negative beliefs, when they cause unnecessary stress, can create tightness in the body. And when you have tightness in the body, we're talking vascular tightness, we're talking a raising of blood pressure, and when that blood pressure rises, we're talking damage to vessels. When vessels are damaged, they can have they have to form scars. Those scars can narrow the vessels even more. And boy, we are in a cycle of disrepair based on belief. Think about whenever you are happy or you're sad or whatever you believe, and how your physical state changes. So that's why I am saying if you're pushing hard right now and seeing not seeing traction, I want you to ask yourself what belief is the effort serving here? Because effort amplifies whatever you believe, it doesn't replace it. Do you get that? All right now. So tomorrow on the sweet spot is Windows Wednesday, and we're going to talk about why confidence comes and goes, but belief quietly determines how far you perform when the pressure is on. This thing on belief is very important because it's quietly operating in the background. So today is Take Action Tuesday. If you're putting a lot of effort on things and it's not working, take a step back and ask yourself, what do I believe? You know, in the word, in the ancient wisdom, there were places that God could not really do miracles. Major miracles, because there was just so much unbelief. Unbelief is an issue. Alright now, I know you're feeling this, I know you're getting this, I know you're gonna look at your beliefs today, and you're gonna take a second to just sort of step back and think about what you're believing and what beliefs you can change so that you don't have to work so hard. Love and blessings. This is after suite. I'll see you tomorrow for Windows Wednesday. Take care.