Lessons from the Path - Week of Sept. 28, 2025

Limiting beliefs, naming your emotions, and taking the long view on life

Welcome to a new initiative I’m trying: a weekly journal where I share 3 things I learned this week that have helped me on this journey of greater peace and personal health. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.

This week:

• Finding Limiting Beliefs by Examining Your Goals

• Naming your Emotions to Quell and Understand Them

• Values & Taking the Long View on Life

Finding Limiting Beliefs by Examining Your Goals

I watched a video on YouTube about limiting beliefs. The author talked about how she wanted to be an Olympic athlete ever since she was a child. She eventually got there but realized that her motivation for getting there was not because she wanted to be an Olympic athlete per se, but because of what that achievement would make her feel.

She realized that for years she believed that if she could achieve this goal, then she would finally receive the love that she craved in her life.

The video points to a crucial question to ask yourself: What would achieving this goal make me feel?

By understanding your motivation for wanting a goal, you can understand why you want it and, most importantly, see that you can give yourself that feeling now—you don’t have to wait.

I encourage you to try this: Think of a big goal of yours and ask yourself, What would I feel like if I achieved this goal? What would I get? You might find that there’s a particular feeling you’d have if you achieved it. Now see if you can give yourself that feeling now.

When I did this, I found that the goal was really a smokescreen and that what I really wanted was to feel a certain way. When I tried giving myself this feeling, I realized that the goal wasn’t so important anymore and, in a way, I felt relief—my relationship to the goal shifted.

Some people, like the woman from the video (and myself, to be fair), can spend years pursuing a goal in search of a particular feeling or reward, when in fact, that feeling isn’t locked up in the goal. It’s accessible to us now.

Here’s the YouTube video if you want to check it out.

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Naming your Emotions to Quell and Understand Them

I’ve been struggling a lot with chronic emotional tension—pain and shame buried in my body. Sometimes these emotions get stuck in me.

However, I’ve recently found a relatively innocuous strategy for helping to move past these emotions and find some relief: naming the emotion.

Sounds kinda silly, doesn’t it?

But I’ve found that simply zeroing in on the emotion and asking myself, What am I feeling?, helps me confront and better understand these persistent emotions.

Here’s why this works: Typically, we humans want to ignore our pain, push it down, and power through—but this only serves to keep the emotion lurking under the surface.

The key is in acknowledging it, by giving it your full attention. Not in a complaining or “woe is me” way, but clear-eyed and neutral.

When we name our emotions (fear, shame, guilt, etc.), we shine a light on them and allow them to be seen. Once they are seen, they tend to dissolve and dissipate.

You’ve likely heard this advice before, but honestly—how often do you actually do it? If you’re like me, this isn’t a go-to in the arsenal, but I think it might start to be!

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Values & Taking the Long View on Life

Often we get so caught up in the day-to-day that we forget what we’re working toward. It behooves us to take a minute to raise our heads and check our bearings. This is where values come in.

It dawned on me that if I imagine myself at the end of my life, there are certain qualities or values that I’d like to be aligned with. For me, those include personal expression, authenticity, and connection, to name a few. And, if I’m being honest, I’m probably moving in that direction day to day, but oftentimes my decisions don’t align with those values.

I was reading a book called Be Your Future Self Now, and one of the exercises was to write a letter to your future self. This could be you 5, 10, or 20 years in the future (you can choose any timeframe you like), and I found it helpful to experiment with this.

You can write a letter to your future self or from your future self to your current self. It’s a neat experiment and can actually help you get clear on what your values are.

It’s not always easy to act in alignment with our values but, if I had to guess, that’s often a symptom of not fully knowing what your values are. And as people, we change, and so do our values. But knowing what you care about and how you’d like to look back on your life can define and shape the actions you take today.

There’s a quote I saw that said something like, “The old you is going to be taken care of by the young you.” I’m butchering it, but the point is this: The decisions you make today are either an investment in or a withdrawal from your future self.

When we clarify our values and take the long view of our life, we make better decisions today.

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I hope you found something useful in reading this. If you did, let me know in the comments!

Keep growing,
Dave