How to train your brain for extreme belief (neuroscience-backed)

It is scientifically true that when you expect something to happen, it becomes more likely that it will happen. And this is because the brain doesn't just experience reality passively. The brain is sort of like a prediction machine. The brain actually uses something called predictive processing to construct your world. It uses your expectations, your beliefs, your memories, your programming, your conditioning, the way that you grew up, your environment, your current emotional state. Uses all of these things to predict your reality, to construct your world. So when you expect something to happen, good or bad, your brain actually begins to filter your reality and drive your behavior toward that expectation. Your brain loves to prove itself right. In this video, I'm going to share with you the neuroscience behind why expectation and belief are so important. And give you 5 of my favorite tools to wire in belief, positive expectation, and make you absolutely unstoppable. You are going to walk away from this video feeling absolutely hyped, and I cannot wait for it. And if you're new here, hi, I'm Emily McDonald. I'm a trained neuroscientist. I've got 2 degrees in neuroscience as well as many years of research experience in the lab, but I am now a creator, speaker, writer, and coach to people in over 55 countries all over the world, and I'm here to help you Rewire your brain, level up, and maximize your potential. So let's dive straight in because there are some really simple examples that I wanna share with you. You can relate to everyday life that are super science-backed. For example, the placebo effect. The placebo effect is an example of your expectation driving changes in your biology. The placebo effect is not just all in your head. The, the placebo effect is a perfect example of you having an expectation of something that is going to help you, something that may benefit you. You take this sugar pill that actually does nothing, but it is your expectation that causes your brain to send different signals to your body that triggers either healing or a decrease in pain, etc. Now, there is also something called the nocebo effect, which is the exact same thing as the placebo effect but in the opposite direction. This is where having a negative expectation can actually harm you, and this is really the harm of being pessimistic or realistic, as I used to call myself. I used to use the word realistic as a coverup because I was too afraid to be optimistic. I was too afraid to get my hopes up and believe that things were gonna work out and have a positive expectation because I was afraid that I might be let down. If that's you, it's not gonna be you by the end of this video. But the problem with that is, is that when we try to protect ourselves by having negative or no expectation for our life or for ourselves or for our goals, our brains don't drive us to work and ask and do more. We don't have that motivation. The brain needs perceived reward to motivate us up the mountain. This is a lot of the time why we lack motivation sometimes, and we don't want to go do certain work. Like, if you don't believe the thing that you're working toward is going to work out or benefit you, then of course your brain's not going to motivate you to go and do it, because the brain is always weighing two things: effort and reward. And if the effort outweighs the reward, your brain's not going to motivate you to go into it because it wants to preserve energy. But if the reward is bigger than the effort, well, now your brain's like, okay, the effort is worth it. And that is one of the ways that positive expectation and belief can be so, so amazing for working toward your goals, because it increases resilience, it increases motivation, increases drive and persistence. So with that being said, having a positive expectation actually does improve your ability. They've shown it in athletes that when athletes actually actually have a positive expectation or a positive belief in themselves, they perform better than when someone has a negative belief in themselves. They've shown it in job interviews when they primed one group of people to think positively about themselves, to think that— to remember a time when they felt powerful, and they went into the interview, they were more likely to get the job than someone who went into a job interview and thought about a time they felt powerless before they went into that interview. The interviewers had no idea what the experiment was about. They were completely unbiased, but they were more likely to the people who were primed for power to think positively about themselves. So your positive expectations, your mindset, your belief in yourself makes you more likely to achieve your goals. It improves your performance. Now, having a positive expectation, being optimistic, not only does it alter your performance, it can also alter your biology like we discussed. It also changes your perception of reality. Perception is so important. I was in Miami up until yesterday, and it was, it was really rainy the first 2 days that we were there. And I was on the phone with my assistant and I was talking to her and I was like, ah, yeah, it's really raining. And I don't remember what she said, but I was like, no, I'm actually really happy about it because if it was, if it wasn't raining and it was just this beautiful day outside, I would actually be upset that I wasn't laying on the beach. So I'm glad that it's raining because I have to go do these things, or not I have to, but I, I wanna go do these other things and it's making me, you know, more happy with it. And she said to me in that moment, she was like, and that's on perspective. And it's just these little ways that your perception really shows up that is so important. But when your brain is primed for a positive expectation, one of my favorite affirmations is, "Today I am prepared to be surprised by the unexpected blessings and opportunities coming my way." I'm prepared to be surprised. I'm not, I'm not, you know, I'm open. I'm prepared to be surprised by unexpected blessings and opportunities. You know what that does? That primes the brain to scan and filter your reality for unexpected great things. And every Every single time I use that affirmation, something beautiful happens. And if not, if I'm not aware throughout the day, later that night I'm like, yeah, I said that affirmation this morning. What great thing happened today? And I promise you, if you lay in bed at night, you can think of one positive thing that happened to you today. That is how you begin to train your brain to have a more positive perspective, which, like I said, is extremely important. And lastly, having positive expectations and believing in yourself inspires and uplifts those around you. It does doesn't just benefit you. And believing in your goals and believing in, in life and believing in the possibility and expecting great things, it doesn't just benefit you. I promise you, it benefits you. My life completely changed when I started rewiring my beliefs and believing in myself, believing in my goals, and honestly kind of shifting into what felt delusional at the time and what looked it to other people. When I started shifting my mindset, my life completely shifted, and my life looks nothing like it did 5 years ago. Absolutely nothing like it. But it doesn't just benefit you, it benefits the people around you. And so many people that I work with, so many of my clients and students, they are always kind of asking me about, you know, dealing with certain relationships or family members or friends and how they can, you know, change their mindset, etc., etc. And my answer is always the same: unless they want you to be their coach, You don't try to change them. You lead by example. You become a leader of your own mind and your own life. And I promise you, those that are meant to join you on that path will, in divine timing. So let's talk about 5 ways to absolutely skyrocket your level of belief. Number 1 is to start your day with faith, not doubt. If you want to have extreme confidence, you want to believe in yourself, and you want to believe in your goals, how you start your day is going to be so crucial. It is not common for people to have delusional-level belief in themselves and in their goals. And it's not the common thing unless you are, you know, waking up and immediately going to a group chat with all these people just being like, hell yeah, let's get— unless you're doing that, I would stray from social media, stray from your phone, and have some sort of ritual to build confidence, to build belief, whether it be prayer, whether it be meditation, intention setting, journaling, whatever it is. Start your day, prime your brain with belief and faith, not fear. My life completely changed when I replaced faith with fear. It is really, really easy to live in fear and be afraid of what might happen and what if, and what if this bad thing happens? What if I make the wrong choice? What if, what if, what if? It's really easy to sit and think what if all the time, but faith and belief is a choice, and I need you to hear that. I need you to know that it is a choice that you have to make. It starts with a choice and choosing that this is something that you want and then working toward that. Again, how you start your day is how you spend your day, and how you spend your day is how you spend your life. I just did a video or an episode on my science-backed morning routine a few weeks ago. So definitely go and check that out if that's something that you are wanting to work on and wanting inspiration to kind of update your morning routine. I highly recommend that video. I have used the same framework for literally 5 years and it's been absolutely incredible. It's very customizable, so there's no one-size-fits-all with that. All of my clients use it. It's really the best. So I highly recommend going and checking that one out if that's something that calls to you. But starting your day with faith instead of fear and instead of doubt is so, so, so important because again, it primes your brain. It sets a positive expectation and that determines how your brain filters your reality. It determines the energy you start your day with. It, it, it really does set the tone. Number 2 is going to be a surprise because it's sort of unheard of when it comes to like belief and confidence. You don't really hear this specific. It, but it is to look for the good in everyone and everything. Try to specify something good in everyone and everything. I had a friend a while back. Things were a little bit rocky, and she— this person was in my life for so long. They were really quite a great friend, but they were honestly just kind of starting to annoy me a little bit. And I remember just thinking to myself, like, this person's so great, like, I don't want to be looking at them and just getting annoyed. Like, I don't want that. And I made the conscious decision that I wanted to see the good in them. Like, I wanted to see more I want to see more of the good in this person. And rather than just, you know, letting that be the intention and just moving on with my life, I said, no, if I want to see more of the good in this person, then I need to train my brain to see more of the good in this person. And so I sat down for just, you know, a couple of days and made it a habit. Every morning during my morning journaling sessions, I would just write down the good things about this person. And trust, there were plenty of beautiful things, but it shifted my mind out of this cycle of noticing the little things that maybe weren't the best, maybe they needed to work on, and noticing those little things into noticing the beauty in this person and really getting back into like appreciation for this person, which was where I wanted to be. This is true for— really do this for relationships. If you're in a relationship with someone, especially a romantic relationship, find this is— it is very easy to slip into cycles of just being annoyed, or if you are in a rough patch in a relationship, it's very easy to slip into those cycles. But if you want to get out of the cycle, it starts with you. It starts with rewiring your perspective, and that starts with training new perception. So noticing those little things in the person that you are with romantically, or friends, or things around you— where you live, your job, your, you know, the coffee shop that you regularly go to, the gym that you go to. If you want your life to be more beautiful, you need to train your brain to notice more of the beauty in what is already around you. One of my favorite quotes is, if you want a blessed life, you should be blessing everything around you. If you want a more beautiful life, you need, you need to be noticing the beauty in what is already around you. Things turn out best for those who make the best out of the way that things turn out. And when you start to actively train your perception to notice more of the good and beauty in the people and the things around you, you will start to notice more of the good and the beauty in yourself. And this overall will just train your brain for a more positive, optimistic sort of perspective and mindset, and you'll be just seeing the good and seeing opportunities, and you'll be happier. Your energy will be higher. You'll be feeling better. This gets you in alignment with more of the things that you want. All of a sudden now you're attracting more beautiful things into your life. It's amazing. Number 3 is to watch your words. The words that you use to describe yourself, to describe others, to describe things, your words absolutely train your brain and update that model that your brain uses to predict and construct your current reality and predict your future reality. This is something that I have sort of known for a long time, a lot of my life, thanks to advice that I was given when I was younger to not talk badly about other people. And I was given advice when I was younger and someone told me, they said, if you have friends that are talking badly about other people they hang out with to you, then it's pretty safe to assume they're talking badly about you to other people. And in my experience, that's pretty true. And you know, especially when I was younger, it was very common for like people to be talking badly about someone, then they go and they hang out with them. And it's like, if they're going and hanging out with someone they talk badly about, I would bet that they're talking about you too. And so for me, it was always something that I just didn't really like to do was gossip or talk badly about others. Now, I wasn't the best at uplifting myself with my self-talk. That was something that I actually learned later on. Um, but really only using and speaking about other people in a positive way. And it's like, if you don't have anything nice to say, you truly shouldn't be saying anything at all. It does not matter whether the person that you are talking badly about deserves it, whether it's right, whether you think that, you know, they deserve to be talked negatively about. Like, it, it, it actually doesn't matter. What matters is that you are talking negatively. You are cultivating that energy inside of you. When you are talking negatively about someone, you are cultivating that negative energy inside of you. And if you're going to choose to do that, and that's something that's, that's your prerogative, that's your choice completely. But the words that you use and the energy that you cultivate within your own mind absolutely manifests in your reality. The traits that you focus on, right? Where focus goes, energy flows. Where whatever you are focused on, whether it be hate or love, That is what is strengthened in the brain. If you wanted to, you could spend all day long focusing on things that you don't like and talking about things that you don't like, or you could make the choice to shift your perspective, to shift your focus and focus on the things that you want, focus on the things that you wanna work toward, the things that you wanna grow, the things that you wanna build. The, the direction of your focus is so important. The words that you use and the thoughts that you think are so important. So be intentional with where you direct your thoughts, your words, and your focus. When you begin to play the what-if game, or when you begin to doubt yourself, criticize yourself, shame yourself, catch yourself in those moments and have some sort of mantra or affirmation for what, how you're gonna rewrite the story in real time. Having patterns, having mental patterns, having negative thought patterns, that is normal. You don't need to shame yourself for having those. You can't hate yourself out of those things. In fact, when you do that, again, that's what gets magnified in your brain. You have to love love yourself through those situations and have some sort of loving way to bring yourself out of that. Personally, I really like the 5 Put Ups method. Like, if you find yourself judging yourself, criticizing yourself, shaming yourself, give yourself 5 put ups. Like, say 5 positive things about yourself. Why? Because we tend to have a negativity bias where the brain weighs the negative things more than the positive. So you need to, like, way outdo the negative thoughts by supplementing many positive thoughts. And then also retelling the story, like when the what-if game— what, what if I make the wrong choice? What if the bad thing happens? Like, okay, what if it doesn't? What if, what if, what if you're guided and protected? What if following your heart leads to a life and a reality that's better than you could have ever imagined? What if you just locked in and fully sent it and took that leap of faith and ended up in a reality completely beyond your wildest dreams? We tend to play the what-if game in the negative direction, but recognize that it is just as likely for it to happen in the positive direction as well. So if you're going to sit around and play the what-if game, balance out your ifs. But I prefer not to play that game. Number 4 is to associate with positive people. Avoid negative people, doubters, complainers. Avoid those people at all costs. In the brain, in the nervous system, there is something called social contagion. There's also automatic goal contagion, where we subconsciously the goals and dreams of other people, or lack thereof. But also, our nervous systems co-regulate. We can feel other people's nervous systems. Our brainwaves sync up with the people that we are in communication with. There are so many different ways that the people around you, the— and the energy of them impact you. And yes, you can absolutely make your dream come true and be positive and be optimistic and build a positive expectation while around negative people. You can swim upstream. But if it is within your choosing and it can be a choice, like, why would you choose that? Like, why would you choose to make it harder for yourself? Like, you don't get an award for making the job harder for you. So make it easier on yourself and remove yourself from those crowds and those situations. I know it can be easier said than done. I spent in the beginning of my journey a lot of the time alone. I spent a lot of time alone. It wasn't necessarily in a negative way at all, but it was to, one, get to know myself really deeply, and two, get to know what my nervous system feels like, get to know what my beliefs are, what my goals are. It is really difficult to make decisions and have that sort of very clear and distinct knowing of what you want and where you want to go and cultivate that belief when you have voices and just chatter all around you. It just makes it so much more difficult. But on the contrary, it is so much better, so much more fun, and so much easier when you are surrounded by people that are uplifting, that are believing in themselves, that are on the same journey as you or ahead of you. Even better ahead of you. This is one of the reasons why I love my program, my community, MindCraft. I, when I started my coaching program, community, and online courses and all of that, I did it so that I could create this, you know, like this program that held everything that I'd ever done to get to this point of where I am in one place to like help people rewire their brains, regulate their nervous systems, update their beliefs, habits, all of that. But what actually surprised me was how great of an impact the community was going to have on everyone in it, including me. When I was interviewing some of my students after going through the program, you know, I would ask them like, what What are your favorite things about Minecraft? And multiple of them said in their top 3 favorite things about the program, the community, and that was, that was the thing that they were going to miss the most. Community is so important. Having the right people around you is so important. When I first decided to go onto this entrepreneurial journey, I moved across the country to Miami Beach and I met so many people. So many different types of people and interesting characters, but there were specifically people that I met and got to know that I refer to as expanders. People that were doing things with their lives that I had never seen in person before. People building things, people experiencing things and, and living realities that I had never experienced, like, in, in my personal life. And so when I got to know these people and see these people and see how they lived and see how they moved, like, for me, that was very expanding to my mind to see, like, whoa, like, this is normal. Like, this is a normal way of life to some people. And that is one of the biggest benefits to having the right people around you and having the right community around you, is that they normalize big goals and dreams. And what is normal to your brain is what your brain predicts, right? Like, your brain predicts what is normal and familiar. It likes to keep you in the normal and in the familiar. And so when you can update your normal and change what is normal to you, say goodbye to your current reality. Seriously, because everything changes. And number 5, When you pray, thank God in advance. True faith and belief is when you can be grateful for something before you've received it. This is how you unlock moving like it's already yours. And that is true belief. When I was in undergrad trying to get into the PhD program of my dreams to study neuroscience and research drug addiction, every single day I was like, I, I would write my affirmations and I would say, I am so grateful that I am in the PhD program of my dreams. I was already expressing gratitude for for the thing that I was trying to create, for the thing that I was trying to call in or ask for or work toward. I was already grateful for my dream coming true. And what happened? I ended up in the PhD program of my dreams. If you can move toward your goals with gratitude that it's already done, you will be unstoppable. You will be unstoppable. Whether that looks like thanking God in your prayers because that's what aligns with you, or writing your affirmations like, thank you, universe, or whatever it is. Whatever aligns with you, whatever, whatever it is that calls to you, whatever resonates. Be grateful for the thing having worked out right now. If you can move like it is already yours, I am telling you, you will be unstoppable. When things start going wrong, when it's not going your way, when it slows down, you're in a dip, you are in the dip, and you can have this mindset of, it's okay, like, it's, it's just the dip, or it's just, you know, one lost battle in the, in the war of my dreams. Like, it's okay because it's all gonna work out. I'm so grateful that it's all working out and my dream is coming true. I'm so grateful. I unlocked a different level of power and energy and motivation and real freedom. Honestly, I unlocked like a real level of freedom, mental and energetic and emotional freedom, when I realized that I did not have to move through life alone. And that doesn't just mean like relying on others. Like, yes, I have always been very like hyper-independent, like too independent to the point where like I struggled asking for help, and I would want to do things by myself, and something bad happened. I would go on a road trip by myself and be alone, like, yes. So I, I learned how to ask for help and rely and depend on other people, but also to recognize that I wasn't alone spiritually, to recognize that I was divinely guided and protected, and that I could just ask for things, that I could just ask for guidance, for inspiration, for excitement, ask for a new perspective, ask for clarity or wisdom. That's actually— these are things that I've asked for for years now. At the end of my meditations, I would set the intention like, like, thank you for guidance. And I, again, thank you in advance for the guidance, clarity, wisdom, and protection. So do not forget that you don't have to move toward your goals and dreams. There is a divine and infinite power waiting for you to align with it. If you are interested in reprogramming your subconscious mind, learning more about the neuroscience behind what that even is, the neuroscience of manifestation, and so much more, I highly recommend that you come to my live free virtual masterclass. It is completely free, and I break down every single step in reprogramming your subconscious mind and the neuroscience behind each of these individual steps, the parts of the brain, the parts of your nervous system, etc., so that you can actually know how to reprogram the different parts so you're not just like shooting darts with your eyes closed, that you actually know what you're doing. All right, if you're interested in doing that, come to my live free masterclass. It's completely free. The link is going to be in the description for you to sign up and save your seat. And I am also going on tour. This is going to be live in person. So if you're interested in coming and seeing me in person, definitely RSVP for your city by clicking the link. And finally, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching. I'm sending you so much love. I'm rooting for you, and I'll see you next time. Bye!