Limiting Beliefs
How to break limiting beliefs, and How to interrupt the cycle of limiting beliefs.
One of the things I found out was that a lot of people do not understand truly what a limiting belief is and how it develops. So, let us start at the beginning. Let us start with what is a limiting belief. A limiting belief is merely a belief that you have accepted something that is a negative in your life. In other words, a limiting belief is a moment you have a belief where there is a statement like I cannot, I’m not capable of, or there’s a negative, I’m too young, I’m too old, I’m too skinny, I’m too fat, I’m too smart, I’m too stupid, I’m too this or that. I cannot be loved, I cannot give love, I cannot be light, I haven’t got the capability, I haven’t got the skills, I cannot do this, I cannot do that, that’s a limiting belief. It is when there is a belief inside of your mind of something negative about your skills, your capabilities and who you are.
So where does a limiting belief come from? The first thing we need to understand is that a limiting belief is not natural. Let me explain. Let us assume that you are a child and you know you have just been born. Now you are about, one and a half years old and if you understood the concept of limiting beliefs, you would be looking around at the people. Around you, you notice that everybody can walk, but you cannot, so there’s a possibility that the thought of everybody can walk but I cannot enter your brain. That could then become a limiting belief. Now the limiting belief will hinder you to attempt to walk because the belief says I cannot walk. Everybody else is walking, I cannot walk, so why try. If a child was born with limiting beliefs they would not have the courage, they will not have the tenacity, they will not have the ability to develop and grow, learn to walk, learn to talk, learn to communicate, learn to interact, learn to be creative. Limiting beliefs hinder us to act on things in our lives that we need to take action on.
Limiting believes are usually some kind of an external event that happens. Someone says something about you, someone shows you or responds in a certain way. So, in reality a limiting belief is an external lie about you, that you attach an emotion and a belief to and then accept. So, the moment you accept it, see that limiting belief has a very small seed, sometimes a limiting belief starts very small, it’s a minor little thing but like anything in life, if we repeat the same behaviour over and over it becomes a habit.
So, a limiting belief is a belief almost like a seed that gets planted in your brain, which you then entertain, in other words you think about it, you remember it, you attach an emotion to it. That repeats the cycle of an emotional experience inside of you, so what you are doing is you are cultivating the seed. You are feeding it; you are giving it fertile soil to grow in and develop and this limiting belief because you do it over and over and you’re repeating it becomes an unconscious habit. It becomes so strong eventually that the human brain and the body struggle to resist it.
It becomes an internal truth to be who we are as humans and it becomes part of our belief system. The moment it becomes a solid ingrained part of our belief system, that is when it becomes a limiting belief. Because now intellectually you might want to do something but the limiting belief is part of the subconscious brain that controls most of your decision-making processes, so even though intellectually you want to do something, the limiting beliefs are saying you can’t and it starts creating a potential fear of a future outcome in your brain and the moment that potential fear of the future outcome is in your brain, we resist, we hold back. We say this is dangerous, maybe I can get hurt, I should not do this.
A limiting belief in its simplest form is a belief that prevents you to take action in an area of your life that can most probably bring you joy, success, love, health, and wealth. Listen to your limiting beliefs. Unpack them and realize every single one of them is the external lie that on a certain level in your mind, you’ve cultivated and allowed to become a magnificent, beautiful tree-bearing fruit but that’s false fruit, it’s a weed, get it out. Replace it with the empowering belief. Take that limiting belief and turn it upside down and ask yourself what the opposite of it is. Get that opposite. Find the behaviour that you need to take the action, you need to take back courage, tenacity, discipline and start acting it out. The moment you start acting it out against the limiting belief and you start realizing the fruits of it, the positives you gaining because you’ve overcome the limiting belief, you start to starve the limiting belief and you start feeding the new empowering belief. That is how we change. That is how we go from zero to hero, from mediocrity to greatness. Challenge your own limiting beliefs. Take the opposite behaviour, apply it in your life and start realizing the fruits and the benefits of it.