If you are like most people, you have limiting beliefs and it may be holding you back from reaching your goals. When you think about it, limiting beliefs are really just beliefs that are not helping you achieve your goals. What you tell yourself however is actually what you think. This can play a major role on how you view the world around you and how you feel about yourself. Open your mind to new possibilities and you may find a limiting belief that is keeping you from achieving the things that you desire.
For instance, let’s say that you have a belief that being successful means having a big house or a new car. This type of belief helps us with wanting those things. However, what you need to realize is that these things do not help us become successful. What really helps us is finding new ways to make our life easier through Neurolinguistic programming or NLP.
One of the biggest problems that people have when it comes to changing their limiting beliefs is that they won’t even open up to them. They will keep focusing on the problem instead of looking for the solution. Limiting beliefs are caused by conditioning, which is a learned response. For instance, if you were told by someone that you should not eat dessert because it makes you fat, you would probably resist eating it.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you should never eat dessert at all, but instead, look for other ways to enjoy your desserts. Limiting beliefs are caused by conditioning so if you learn to mentally replace the limiting belief with another belief, you can train yourself to overcome any problem that you face. You can condition yourself to believe that you don’t have to work at a job that you don’t enjoy, that you can eat as much cake as you like, that you don’t have to get a particular college to finish your degree, and so forth. As you learn more about NLP, you will find that these techniques are very powerful and useful.
Another thing that limits us is that we become stuck in our own minds, surrounded by our own little world of ideas and concepts. This means that we are not getting a clear picture of the big picture. For example, let’s say that you have been training for a bar exam and have failed several times. Instead of looking at the big picture and determining if you have done enough practice tests to prepare for the bar exam, you decide to focus on one tiny detail: how many times you scored higher on the previous exams. If you had used your limiting beliefs as the invisible force that was keeping you from completing your goal, you may have focused on this detail alone and not completed the necessary amount of studying to score higher marks.
This problem is actually very common. How many people do you know who focus on one particular aspect of their lives and completely neglects the overall importance? You may think that you are doing all you can to reach your goals, but are you really doing as much as possible to increase your knowledge and education? In many cases, these people would be better off spending some time researching and learning a new subject instead of obsessing over every single detail of their lives. However, they may also have used their limiting beliefs as a shield from having negative thoughts and feelings.
As you begin to use your new skills and abilities to become a more successful person, you can begin to see your life in a new light. You will notice that your thoughts are more positive and less negative. If you are someone who tends to be negative most of the time, you can begin to notice that your thoughts are much more upbeat. But, even if you already possess positive attitudes, you can begin to consciously change them. You simply have to discover what negative thoughts are floating around in your mind, and then you can work to eliminate those thoughts and replace them with positive thoughts.
When you begin to work on changing your limiting beliefs, you will find that it can be quite difficult. It is probably a good idea for you to not try to tackle everything at once. Just focus on one thing at a time, perhaps by reading a self-help book or finding some sort of educational DVD. Over time, you will become quite adept at eliminating your own self-limiting beliefs.