Stop your Limiting Self Beliefs from holding you back with These 4 Techniques
What is the true limit on human potential?
There isn’t one. And this applies to you and me both.
Unfortunately though, we have an incredible knack for imposing limits on ourselves with a host of limiting self beliefs. We are so used to hauling these limiting self beliefs around that we barely notice they’re even there.
Too often, we mistake these beliefs for reality. Working through these self imposed restraints is possible though, especially when we get a little bit better at spotting them.
These limiting self beliefs tend to be flavoured by fear and doubt and a desire to avoid discomfort.
They tell us that they are there to keep us safe and prevent us from making fools of ourselves, and perhaps to some degree they do, but they come at a pretty big cost.
Due to them, we experience less, achieve less, enjoy less and live less.
They keep our lives small and horizons narrow, and because of this, we’d do well to start looking at these beliefs as guests who have outstayed their welcome. But where did they come from and how do we get them to go?
We place these limitations on ourselves out of habit and they are likely to have deep psychological and emotional roots.
The thought of getting stuff wrong, or doing it badly and stumbling along the way can keep us glued to the spot and scared to go forward.
All exploration comes with a degree of risk and there’s a strong part of our instinct to survive that urges us to just play it safe.
Sometimes we set impossibly high expectations for ourselves when we let perfectionism, a.k.a our inner control freak, fool us into thinking we should only get started with something when we know exactly how, to the letter, it is going to go and can guarantee it will go without a hitch.
We can talk ourselves out of things and we can talk ourselves down. The internal dialogue that goes on inside our minds is the product of everything that has ever happened to us and how we responded to those things.
It is a voice that lives in the past and falsely claims to be able to predict our future and this voice can continually convince us that we are incapable of success, if we let it.
Familiarity and certainty give us psychological comfort in the short term but sacrifice much bigger psychological rewards down the road: feelings of satisfaction, fulfilment, confidence and vitality. Feelings of loving being alive.
It's reminiscent of the old marshmallow test where they tell a group of children if they can resist eating the marshmallow in front of them for ten minutes, they’ll be rewarded with two marshmallows.
Success depends on whether we can resist the instant gratification that the comfort zone entices us with, knowing that it is a trick!
Have you ever heard the saying: “Compare and despair?” When we fall into the trap of sizing ourselves against other people it often stops us in our tracks.
Feelings of inadequacy can take all wind from our sails and we are so busy looking at others we become blind to our own potential.
Whatever form they take, working through limiting self beliefs becomes a priority when we consider the horrible consequences of allowing them to remain.
Think of a pond of inky, stinky stagnant water and compare it to the thought of a clear flowing stream.
One consequence is stagnation and of living a non-playful, non-creative life where tomorrow is the same as yesterday because we’re not adapting or learning or asking anything new of ourselves.
Another consequence is the pain of regret; one thing end-of-life carers reliably report is that it’s regret for the things that we did not do that weighs heaviest on us, in the end.
Something else to reflect on is that if we’re not actively seeking out ways to challenge ourselves, we don’t just stay as we are, we actually get weaker and more rigid as time goes by thanks to the universal law of entropy.
This puts us in a vulnerable position to deal with life’s inevitable catastrophes when they hit.
And maybe the biggest cost of all is our self-perception. Who do we see ourselves as being? A complicated and flawed individual who despite all the obstacles and setbacks keeps on putting their hat in the ring and giving their one life their best shot or….or…. Who?
So given the high stakes, what can we do about all this, in practical terms.
The recipe for working through limiting self beliefs is a simple one:
5% more self-awareness
1 daily measure of mindset maintenance
500g of deliberate actions
500ml of compassionate commitment to yourself
Promoting your Self-Awareness
You can begin this with a simple writing exercise to help you get a clearer view on what your limiting self beliefs actually are.
At the top of the paper write: ‘What is holding me back?’ Under this make three columns entitled:
Thoughts
Feelings
Behaviours
Fill the columns freely as you would with a brainstorm, without stopping to filter or edit what you write until it is all done.
Then scan across the columns and spot how these things interconnect.
Take some time to consider where these patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour originate from in your history.
Answer back
When your inner critic pipes up, re-imposing these limiting self beliefs on you, first recognise that it might mean well by trying to keep you sheltered and safe. Thank it for that good intention. Then start answering it back.
A very helpful word that you can use to help with this is ‘Yet’ and ‘Yes, and’... So, for example, when the internal fear and doubt says, “But you’re no good at networking! You know how awkward you can come across?” I can answer back by saying “Yes, I know I’m no good at networking YET.” Or, “Yes, and… the only way I’ll get better is by practising / doing it anyway / not being afraid of what others think etc.”
Our clients tend to find that this takes the power away from the inner critic more effectively than going into battle with it, head on.
Do Daily Mindset Maintenance
Maintain your mindset to stop it becoming fixed by reminding yourself daily of this:
FAIL = First Attempt In Learning
And also inwardly repeating this mantra when the going feels tough:
“Every setback I have is a chance for me to learn something and improve how I do things.”
Aswell as our mindset, it pays to keep an eye on our ‘heartset’ too.
Take a couple of minutes a day to do some version of swearing allegiance to yourself! Too many of us carry inside us the voices of people who have belittled us and not been on our side for their own screwy reasons.
Self-compassion is a phrase that can make people cringe, I know, so instead think of it as ‘Getting on your own side.’
‘Getting on your own side’ is not about being indulgent and narcissistic and always letting yourself off the hook, any more than it is about beating yourself up and telling yourself how crap you are.
It is behaving how a decent parent would towards their offspring: knowing how to love and knowing how to set boundaries, both.
So a bit of daily hygiene around this can include affirmation statements or vividly imagining someone who you love, whose side you are definitely on, and vividly imagining how committed you would feel to support them if they experienced bad times.
Notice in your body where you feel that committed sense of being on their side.
Maybe a slight frown, tensed hands, flexed jaw. Maybe a feeling around your chest. Fix your attention on that feeling however it manifests in you and continuing to hold on to that feeling, place an image of yourself as a kid in your mind’s eye, followed by an image of you now. Hold it for 30 seconds.
Go Against the Flow
As noxious as our limiting self beliefs are, they are OUR limiting self beliefs.
They are comfortable and familiar. The narrow set of behaviours they permit us to do don’t feel too challenging, and that feels nice! When we start to move beyond the bounds of what these limiting self beliefs think we are capable of, it can feel anxiety-provoking, uncomfortable and even overwhelming.
We have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable to some degree though, if we are serious about stopping our limiting self beliefs from holding us back.
But it pays to grade that discomfort. Think of the analogy of being in a pool where you are only just out of your depth and when you stretch your head up and stand on tip toes you can still feel the pool floor. That’s what we should be aiming for.
Hurling ourselves straight into the deep end, without enough support, can give fuel to those limiting self beliefs that we seek to vanquish. “See! I told you so. Who do you think you are trying to kid. Don’t bother humiliating yourself next time. Etc. etc.”
A graded approach to taking on new challenges and practising new skills that run contrary to our limiting self beliefs safeguards us against this.
When you’ve identified the goal or goals that your limiting self beliefs insist you are not up to, break them down into chunks and then break those chunks into smaller chunks until they are small enough to get on to your daily jobs to do list. (More info about this listing technique here: Freeing up Your Time: A Simple Guide)
These will be your small, achievable deliberate actions that keep you moving forward despite what the inner doubter says. If you stumble on any of them, it will not be from a great, bruising height. This incremental approach means you can dust off any setbacks and keep going.
Reducing the grip that these limiting self beliefs have over us is a process that takes time.
Though we can’t just switch off a lifetime of emotional learning in an instant we can definitely transform it over time.
It helps if we remember that even when we are really serious about making this change, there are going to be off-days where we forget to be on our own side, or we make unhelpful comparisons or don’t take the actions we’d planned to.
If we recognise and accept that, then we won’t make these stumbles into a reason to give up.
We all have the power to rewrite our story, to root out our limiting self beliefs over time, to expand our horizon and create the path that takes us to where we want to be.
Through the very process of creating that path we grow through our limiting self beliefs, because like weeds busting up through the concrete, our potential knows no bounds.