Overcome Negative Beliefs & Find True Happiness | Sarah Jakes Roberts

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

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1:19I was upset that every time I was trying to create this image of my life, it kept being ripped to shreds. What image? this image of not a girl who got pregnant at 13. Like whoever you think that girl is, that's not who I am. Like, look, I went to school. Look, I finally got married. I was trying to fix this image of myself. And so emotional tools for me came down to realizing that the marriage and even the pregnancy was the fruit, but it was not the root. It was the fruit of my insecurities. It was the fruit of my fear. It was the fruit of feeling like I didn't belong. but it wasn't the root. The root was that feeling like I didn't belong and needing someone to tell me you belong here, whether that was as a teenager or even as an adult woman, I want you.

2:08This is where you belong. This is where you're supposed to be. And I kept hoping someone would answer that question for me. Where do I belong? What if no one ever answers that for you? What if no one ever says you belong here? So for me, I found the answer in my faith because the whole premise of our faith for me as a Christian is that you belong here because God created you and placed you in this earth. And yet it's difficult to understand like, okay, well, there are millions and billions of people around me. Like, so why does that make me special? Why does anyone care? And still surrendering to it as truth and asking myself, well, if I decided, If I just chose to try and believe this one day it's truth, what would my life look like?

2:52What decisions would I make? How would I show up in the world? And it was really like me just trying it on, right? Like, I'm just going to try on this truth. See how it feels. Just see. Just see who I become. You know, like, and that to me is what happens in faith in general. Like, I'm trying it on. Like, I don't know if I fully believe it myself, but I'm going to step into a faith that I don't fully understand and see how it can fit in my life. So I'm going to pretend that I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. And I'm going to make decisions from this heart posture. I'm going to pretend that I am not random and my life has purpose.

3:26And I'm going to see how I show up in the world as a result of that. And I started loving the person who I was becoming when I believed that I was more than what just happened to me. How did you grow up in a community where your father is preaching certain things that maybe you felt like you weren't living up to. And then how do you, now that you're speaking the similar language that he is, how do you raise kids to live into that and not kind of make mistakes on their own? I don't know, how do you do that? Well, I think it's like expecting a dentist's child to never have a cavity. The removal of the pressure of you have to do this.

4:03Well, I mean, the idea that Christianity in general is about doing everything perfect, I think is why a lot of people struggle. It's too much pressure. And the whole premise of this is that we cannot live up to this expectation. So we need someone to come and help save us from this idea that we can live perfectly. Like we are never going to do it perfectly. So then it's like, how do I live with this thorn in my side? How do I strive to become better? How do I make peace with the fact that I am a work in progress? And I think somewhere lost in the translation of religion is this idea that you're never going to mess up.

4:37And that's where we end up losing a lot of people. So I don't have pressure for them to not mess up. I have pressure on them to learn how to get back on track when they've strayed away. Yeah, I think the judgment of like needing to be perfect from people is the thing that pushes people away. Yeah, because like who has time for that, right? And life is too hard and I have too many complications and in some cases too much trauma to think that I'm going to come into this space and do everything the right way. When do you feel the most valued and how have you learned to develop your own self-worth regardless of what your kids do or your parents, you know, how have you done that yourself?

5:11So I got divorced. I moved back home with my parents and I started rebuilding from there, really from the inside out. I fell in love with myself because I think I was so uninterested in who I'd become that when I finally got out of that marriage, I started confronting my own poison and I was so in love with myself and with my life and with my children. And I was able to get a house by myself. I ended up getting to that place I wanted to be where I was like a good mom and taking care of my children. And I was happy with myself and I was taking care of my health and my body. And so I felt so valued by myself then that when my husband came in, he really just echoed what I was already saying about myself.

5:55And so I think that me coming to that place on my own had a lot to do with self-forgiveness and then beginning to work towards a life that felt true to my potential and my dreams. How did you get the poison out? I think the first thing is acknowledging that it was there. Now, what did that process look like? I did a lot of journaling. I started blogging. I let the poison speak. I gave the poison a voice. What was the voice? You're worthless. You're nasty. You're never going to have purpose. No one will ever want you. No one will ever be proud of you. Like, I let the poison speak. These were my thoughts 24-7.

6:37From 13 to 23, that's 10 years of poison. You kept saying to yourself, I'm worthless. No one's ever going to lie to me. No one's going to love me. I never, this idea of like, oh, I'm proud of you. Like, I never had thoughts that were positive towards myself. My dad would say, you're smart. And I would instantly reject it. because I'm like, smart girls don't get pregnant. So when I finally started letting it speak, I came to this place where I had to ask myself, like, how long are we going to receive this as truth? And then I would blog it. I would put those words out. Like, no one knew that I was pregnant or that I'd gotten pregnant at the time.

7:12Of course, people know now, but I would just like write all of these things. And then at the end of this blog, I would kind of like talk to myself as if a friend was talking to me. And it was through that process that I had something to say back to the poison. And then it went from whispering it back to the poison to raising my voice and raising my voice until the poison had to shut up because faith was speaking. In scripture, it talks about being transformed by the renewing of your mind. The renewing of your mind is what took place in that moment. And so as my mind has been renewed, I have been transformed.

7:53And in that transformation, it's why the other day when I felt like valued and I initially rejected, I let my renewed mind say, instead, receive this. Allow it to penetrate the parts of your life that have never heard this before.

8:21Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple podcast right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

9:11Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.