Every single day I watch clients struggle with limiting beliefs – and I’ve battled them myself. I don’t think anyone grows up without a few limiting beliefs.
What are limiting beliefs and how do you know if they’re holding you back?
Limiting beliefs are essentially a subconscious thought that frames how you see the world. Our subconscious thoughts and beliefs have a major impact on our lives – they can even hold you back from reaching your dreams.
And the saddest thing about this is you may not even know that you have limiting beliefs or that they’re getting in your way.
Have you ever caught yourself thinking things like:
I never follow through.
I’m not good enough.
I could never do that.
I always procrastinate.
I’m always going to be addicted to junk food.
I’m too shy.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
I don’t deserve it.
…And sadly the list goes on and on and on.
These are all examples of limiting beliefs. Things our subconscious says to keep us from achieving the things we want in life.
How do we form limiting beliefs?
In many cases, we end up with these beliefs because when we were kids our parents, teachers or loved ones wanted to keep us safe and tried to warn us away from danger.
But children are smart. Sometimes their active minds can internalize a warning about a real danger as a flaw within themselves.
They come to believe they aren’t worthy of something or not capable of achieving certain goals.
So a common sense warning like ‘don’t play in the street’ can become ‘the world is dangerous’ and ‘I could get hurt if I go too far from home’. Over time, you might cut back on your adventurousness and then it just becomes a fact of your life.
When you heard ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’ as a child, it might have made you think you’re not worthy of abundance or capable of earning a substantial income.
If you had older brothers and sisters who liked to tease you when you tried new things and failed to master the skills needed, you might believe you aren’t coordinated. So as an adult, you avoid anything new that makes you feel the same way.
These examples are not to cast the blame at all! We all have limiting beliefs. Every single one of us, but as an adult, it’s up to us to confront them, get rid of our imposter syndrome, and shed the limiting beliefs.
Because you owe that to yourself.
And you can totally do it.
How to get rid of limiting beliefs and achieve your potential
Here’s one way to look at limiting beliefs that puts them in perspective and can help you shut them down.
Think of your mind as a computer.
Have you ever been using your laptop and noticed it’s getting really slow and it makes it really hard to get anything done?
It’s really frustrating, to say the least.
Then you realize that you’ve got 30 browser tabs open and you haven’t restarted your computer in a while.
Limiting beliefs are the things that are bogging you down and holding you back.
How do you fix it?
You reboot your thinking.
Shut down those limiting beliefs that are robbing you from reaching your potential.
‘But I don’t have the willpower’
The truth is, you may have spent years proving limiting beliefs as facts to yourself. But they’re not facts.
You might think you aren’t athletic or you aren’t attractive or you aren’t lovable. These aren’t facts, they’re limiting beliefs.
I encourage you to spend a little time reflecting on what thoughts are holding you back from achieving what you want. Once you’ve identified the biggest limiting belief holding you back, it’s time to get to work to shut it down.
How to Break Limiting Beliefs
Every time you feel yourself slipping into those familiar thought patterns, you’ve got to stop yourself.
Shut it down before it takes hold.
That’s an old program that you don’t need any more and it’s time to delete it.
You control your thoughts, your thoughts create your feelings, your feelings create your actions, and your actions are what gets you results.
If you do that enough, you replace the old limiting thoughts with thoughts that serve you and will eventually get you to your goal.
It’s vital to acknowledge that thought, to recognize it as false and then move on.
For many of my clients, they have struggled to lose weight for years. One of the techniques I recommend is battling those limiting thought patterns with a list of the things that you’ve achieved before.
Sound scary? It is! We don’t give ourselves the power to talk nice to ourselves.
This plays such a huge role in your wellness and in your health journey and taking control over the quality of your life.
Whether that is personal or whether it is professional, this is really serious work.
We have the opportunity to make these new thought tracks, reboot, rewire and change our life.
It’s up to you to take action and make it happen. Stop thinking you aren’t worth it. Show up for yourself and take control of your life.
If you want to hop on a life changing call to talk about your specific situation, schedule a Weight Wellness™ Breakthrough call today.
