You Are Who You Think You Are

Who do you think you are? No, I'm not trying to pick a fight with you. It's actually a very important question to ask because the truth is you are who you think you are and who you think you are is everything.
It affects your mood, your outlook, your actions, and everything that you do all day, every day. It is also the biggest determining factor of what you will do with your life, what you achieve, what you accomplish, and the experiences that you have.
Let me say it another way. The biggest limiting factor for you in life is your psychology.
So in today's conversation, I'm going to help make sure that you are not holding yourself back so that you can get anything that you want, even if it seems impossible. And that will help you make 2025 your best year yet.
Hi, it's Hillary. Welcome to the Hillary Silver podcast.
Thanks for tuning into the conversation today. If you haven't already, it would mean so much to me if you'd take a minute to just click that five-star rating on your podcast app, leave a review, and subscribe so you never miss one of my episodes.
And if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider sharing it with a friend because if you like it, they will probably like it too. Okay, let's talk about thinking.
I get that it seems weird to talk about learning how to think, but it is very important that we learn to do so because not only do we not stop to consider what we say to ourselves about ourselves all day and every day, we're not taught this. We don't ever learn how thinking works.
We don't learn how to think the thoughts that we want to think about ourselves or anything else. We just think the thoughts that we think and accept them as true.
And they are often the thoughts that we've always thought, especially about ourselves. This is true for all the things that we think, but it's especially true for how we think about ourselves.
And the thoughts that we think influence everything that we do and experience and create in our outer world. In brief, this is how it works.
Your thoughts create your feelings, your feelings drive your actions, and your actions create your results. So your inner world is responsible for creating your outer world, period.
Take that in for just a minute. Something this vital to our mental and our emotional health, our well-being and our relationships and our success in life, and we aren't taught about it.
It's kind of crazy. Learning how to take charge of our thinking is actually the most important skill that we can learn in this life.
Because if we don't take charge of our thinking, it is in charge of us, often leaving us thinking things that are not only not good for us, but that often aren't even true sometimes and end up limiting us in every way and holding us back. So let's get into how this all works and stay with me here because all of these key factors build on each other and I want you to have all the pieces.
I'm sharing something super freaking cool with you at the very end. It's going to give you a visceral reaction in your body just by hearing it.
The first thing I want to tell you about is about narrative identity. You think about yourself a certain way and you see yourself a certain way, so you keep telling yourself the same certain things about who you are and who you've always been over and over.
You are basically reminding yourself and reinforcing yourself to yourself who you are based on who you've always been and who you know yourself to be. You know what's true about you.
So these are daily statements about what has happened to you and what you've experienced and where you've come from and how you are and who you are and your way of being. This is your narrative, the stories that you tell yourself about you, basically your inner commentary and your own narration.
You are narrating your story to yourself. The longer you tell yourself these things and these statements about yourself and the stories that you tell, the more they become your identity, which is how you think about yourself and perceive yourself and what you conceive of yourself, your self-image.
So it's your narrative identity. Make sense? So here's a very oversimplified example, but maybe you made a poor

financial decision or you made some kind of decision that didn't work out well for you with

money. Maybe you got yourself into debt or maybe you make great money, but you always end up spending

beyond your means and you can't hold on to it. So you end up with nothing to show for it.
And the

story is all about the bad choices or the problems that you have, and you're ruminating about it and reliving it and telling yourself about it all the time. And it can lead you to say things like, well, I'm terrible with money or I have money problems.
And now you identify as somebody who is bad with money. Then because you believe this and you think this about yourself and you say this to yourself, then you continue to act in ways that reinforce it, avoiding financial planning or overspending or putting your head in the sand and not dealing with it at all.
And this creates a self-fulfilling loop, locking you into the cycle of struggle with money. And it's quite possible that this goes back as far as what was modeled for you when you were growing up.
Maybe you learned these ways of being and thinking and talking to yourself from childhood. Okay.
Same could be true for weight loss. People who have a lifetime struggle with weight.
Identify as a person who has weight trouble. Okay.
Their whole lives. That is how deeply defining these stories can be.
They are embedded into your subconscious, which is one of the reasons it's very hard to recognize this is even happening and then how to change it, of course. So now we're going to talk about the predictability loop, what we've been thinking and telling ourselves and then doing all these years we've been doing for so very long that it's become predictable.
We become predictable to ourselves and we become predictable to all the people in our lives. And predictability has a certain comfort to it, right? We all need some sense of control and reliability and certainty.
In this realm of predictability, we have safety because everything makes sense. It's like math.
Two plus two equals four. It's black and white.
Nothing fuzzy or confusing here. You can't refute it.
It's simplicity and it's easy. There's also no risk in predictable, which is partly the reason why this persists.
We wake up every day knowing who we are, what we're going to think about, how we're going to feel, and what we're going to do. All of that that is consistent with who we think we are.
And people who have a greater need for certainty and predictability like it here, and they can get stuck here in this place, never really changing, never really growing, and always being the same they've always been. And predictability is the enemy of growth and progress because predictability isn't expansive or innovative or evolving.
There's no risk involved in predictability. And ultimately, anything that isn't growing is slowly dying.
Humans need variety and growth to thrive. Without it, we fail to thrive.
Next, what no one ever tells us is that our thoughts are a choice. We have not learned that our thoughts are not who we are, that they are something we can actually choose.
They are optional and we have the ability to decide what we want to think and how we want to think. And that changing our thoughts and the stories that we tell ourselves and then therefore our identity is actually how to create real lasting change.
Changing the inner world is how we then change the outer world. So if the narrative is, I'm great with money, money comes easily to me, I'm great at making money and growing money, I'm smart with my money, then the feelings change.
It's like the shame dissolves and it's replaced with optimism and hope and freedom and opportunity. And then the actions change in a more effortless way, like it's easier to make sound financial decisions because you trust yourself.
And then your outer world begins to change. In order to consciously choose our thoughts, we first have to learn how to tune in and hear our thoughts and notice them.
This is what I call becoming a master observer of self. There is so much power and peace in being able to be with yourself, to witness, observe, and watch yourself being you as if you're watching yourself through the window.
I've been doing this with myself my whole life from the time that I was 19, really, even though I didn't realize I was doing it. But this is being conscious of your own consciousness, being aware of your thoughts and your feelings and your inclinations.
This is called meta-consciousness, being conscious of what you are conscious of. And metacognition is thinking about the thoughts that you are thinking.
How cool is that? So taking the time to notice how you have created your outer world experiences, because what you are aware of that is going on in your inner world is powerful. It is some seriously high level self-awareness.
And we all have the ability to learn to do this. It starts by noticing and paying attention to what you are saying to yourself, to really start tuning in instead of turning away.
Now, here is where we begin reaching our infinite potential because this is where we're talking about expanding our identity. This is when we begin the process to redefine our identity, deciding on purpose who you want to be, how you want to be, the kind of person you want to be, and deciding on purpose what you want to think and what you want to believe and how you want to feel, and then being more intentional about your choices and

the deliberate actions that you're taking in the world to define for yourself your identity, who you want to be by choice rather than by default. And this is when it gets really exciting because you can break free from all the predictability and venture out into the world of not just what is possible, but even beyond that to the vast infinite potential, dreaming and doing bigger than you ever imagined.
And it begins with expanding your identity and changing your inner world, changing the way you talk to yourself and what you think about yourself. And when we make ourselves bigger and expand what we believe is possible for us on the inside, and we're thinking bigger things about ourselves and thinking new things about ourselves and talking to ourselves differently, now we are capable of so much more than we ever thought possible.
And now we're not just limited and confined to what it's always been and to what's predictable, but we begin to think different thoughts, which bring a different way of relating to ourselves and thinking about ourselves and what we're capable of. And now we are expanded.
This is how we expand our identity. So deciding for ourselves who we want to be every single day.
And then that's really where it all begins, to go beyond what is predictable and to achieve your greatest potential. We go first to create the outer world results that we desire, whether it's money, relationships, love, the kind of body we want, happiness, all of that, anything that even might seem impossible begins inside of ourselves.
We have that much power and control to change the inner world. And I know you're thinking, well, Hillary, how do I just change the thoughts that I've been thinking my whole life? Well, it's definitely not an easy thing to do, but nobody teaches us this.
So that's what I'm going to tell you about in just a minute. But first I want to play this clip for you because I want you to feel what it feels like to do this work.
This is Amanda, a client of mine, and she did my journal the very first day and left this audio message in our group with my other clients. So we're going to listen and then we're going to come back in a second.
Hey, ladies. I am bursting with such positivity right now.
My whole body feels like I'm vibrating. I just did my very first journal entry, listening to how to journal and then listen to the visualization.
I chose number three and it, that one worked for me so well. Um, I cannot get over how good I feel after just journaling in a different way once.
I just feel like in a position or in a world with infinite possibilities, all the ones that I want are going to come true. And I just feel it.
It feels so amazing. And I'm just, I needed to share this.
And I hope you all are having a wonderful day. I got a late start.
I don't have my daughter this weekend. So I slept in and journaled.
And God, it feels so good. And I just want to wish you all a wonderful day.
And I hope you feel as good as I do. Take care.
Oh, my God. I can just listen to that over and over again.
Her energy is infectious. I feel it in my body.
I too start feeling like I'm bursting with infinite potential just listening to her. And I have heard that so many times.
It never stops having that effect on me. And now I know you're thinking, well, what is that? And where can I get some of that? I want some, right? Do you remember that scene in When Harry Met Sally in the diner, the orgasm scene? The lady was like, I'll have what she's having.
Okay. So this is available to you.
That is what it feels like to reach out beyond the realm of predictability and tap into what is the infinite potential for you. It's not out there.
It is inside of you. This is what it feels like to change the thoughts that you've been thinking about yourself your entire life and to begin to see what is actually possible for you.
Even if you're doing great and you have a wonderful life, there's always that much more available to you. I've been doing this with my clients for 25 years and in the last seven in a very targeted way.
And it's absolutely nothing short of a miracle to be able to do this. It's literally an exercise in brain training to train yourself to think new things.
It's like going to the gym, you can build biceps and you'll lift and you'll lift and you'll lift, and then you'll look and you'll feel and you'll see the difference, you can build the same new muscle in your brain. The workout for the mind are the steps that are in my daily journal.
It's brain training, combining the powers of neuroscience and how our brain and our psychology actually works with guided visualization practices and the laws of the universe to help you really manifest anything that you want. And I'm excited to tell you about something that I'm offering right now.
It's super fun. We can all do this together.
Starting January 1st, I'm kicking off 2025 with a seven-day daily journal challenge. Now the journal is a 90-day journal, but we're kicking this all off together with a seven-day challenge to help you get started.
It's basically an accountability challenge. In just seven days, you will feel the shift in how you think about yourself and what is possible for you, setting the tone for 2025.
Amanda felt that in just one day. We're going to do it for seven days together.
So to join us, you just need to sign up for the journal at hillarysilver.com forward slash journal. The link is in the show notes and in the description.
It's also going to be in my newsletter if you're on my list. And if you already have the journal and you want to participate, just hit reply to any of our emails and we'll get you all signed up.
Whether you sign up for this or not, just know that you have the power to change the way you think. Yes, that is how powerful you are, the

way you talk to yourself, and that you can learn new things and you can learn to think new things

about yourself. And friends, that is the only way to achieve your fullest potential.
It all starts

with you in this life. We have one more episode before the end of 2025.
I'm super excited for

that show and I will see you then.