How to Understand Your Limiting Beliefs?

How to understand your limiting beliefs? What are limiting beliefs? Well, a belief is simply something we have thought and said repeatedly for whatever reason and it has become a part of our subconscious programming. Something we think and repeat repeatedly becomes our belief and things shift in our lives to confirm to our beliefs.

So why bother about them? Most of our beliefs served us for a period of our life. Say that during your final year of school, you had to believe that anything that takes you away from your ideal Academic results is not good for you. So you study more and go out less. This belief will serve you well during that period of your life. But, after achieving your academic goals if you continue to be a loner despite your many achievements something might seem off. Humans are social creatures and relationships and connections are required to fulfill us.

So every new stage of our life will require for us to reorganize and reassess our limiting beliefs. Why are they called Limiting beliefs? The beliefs that stop you from living your most abundant and fulfilling lives are called limiting beliefs as they simply limit you from achieving your highest potential.

How to Understand what your limiting beliefs are?

1. Take a piece of paper and write down every belief you have about yourself.

2. Then write down every belief you have about the matter you are currently struggling with.

3. Now write new beliefs in place of the old ones. Eg: If you are struggling with friendships, instead of saying that I can not trust people and friends cheat etc. come up with a neutral statement that I am open to genuine friendships and I am a genuine friend.

4. Sometimes going from extreme negative to extreme positive can seem a bit jarring and that is where the magic of neutral statements comes in handy.

5. Once you covered what your new beliefs are and written down how you show up take massive action to show up as your new improved version while still holding the vision for your ideal situation.

6. Affirming your new beliefs daily can be beneficial for reprogramming your mind.

Reframe

Based on what you have written down so far you have an idea of what beliefs and corresponding actions of yours are disempowering. This is a huge part of the self-awareness journey. What part am I playing in this dynamic and what can I change to shift the dynamic are all important discoveries at this stage. Reframing can look like this:

“This task is impossible to do!” becomes “I am going to start this task and fill in my knowledge and skill gaps as I go through it”.

Reframing is something you start doing in your journal and then it becomes second nature to you.

Hope this post was helpful and I would love to hear from you in the comments.