Whether you are dealing with a personal or professional problem, limiting beliefs can prevent you from acting on what you really desire. These ideas can become part of your mind and prevent you from finding the best possible solution. They can also hold you back in the development of your career, relationship, family, or other areas of your life. There is nothing that quite exposes these misconceptions more than living with them yourself.
Limiting beliefs can be very harmful if they are completely out of line with your goals and personal values. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, you may have limiting beliefs that say you won’t succeed anyway, you don’t have the energy, or the motivation to do so. If you have a limiting belief like this, there is really only one way for you to go: Forward. You must have as strong of a belief as you can muster in your mind that you will achieve your goal and then act on it. Otherwise, you must return to square one, and continue to chase your dreams only to fail time again.
In order for limiting beliefs to become part of your world and keep us from taking action, we must first understand how they actually work. Limiting beliefs often come to us from a combination of three sources. Our culture encourages us to keep our heads down, to be quiet, to keep our heads down, to be our most submissive partner, to avoid conflict and drama. All of these things actually work against us and limit us, but because these things are so deeply rooted in our beliefs about the world, they are also very hard to get beyond.
What we need to do first is to break down each of these limiting beliefs until they are reduced to their most basic form, then eliminate them outright. For instance, when you have a belief that says “the more I worry, the more worried I am,” what you are really doing is stressing yourself out over nothing. You have created an unbalanced behavior pattern where your thoughts are constantly worried about something. This means that you are not receiving the message that the more you stress, the worse things will turn out.
When you remove this unbalanced behavior and replace it with an improved one, you will soon notice a significant change in how you feel and in how you respond to certain situations. One of the most common ways that people are broken down is by focusing on their limiting beliefs about themselves and the world in general. Because these things are so deeply seated in your subconscious, by breaking them down and replacing them with more positive ones, you can free yourself from a never-ending emotional treadmill that traps you forever. If you are someone who consistently stresses about not having enough money, instead of focusing on ways to find more money, you might notice that by changing your focus you will begin to notice a shift in your finances. You might even see a sudden increase in your income!
Another way to get rid of your self-limiting beliefs is to replace them with healthy self-esteem and confidence. If you don’t like who you are, you have plenty of self-inflicted self-doubt and you aren’t receiving the messages that would allow you to feel good about who you are. By focusing on the fact that you are a valuable person, you can make your limitations (and the perceptions that go along with them) less important. This will give you a great new perception of yourself, and you may even choose to change your limiting beliefs to match your new feeling of worth.
Here’s a neat trick that will help you get rid of your self-limiting beliefs about yourself and others: Replace your negative limiting beliefs about yourself and others with positive affirmations. When you are thinking about someone else, negative self-talk such as, “She doesn’t have enough confidence,” or “He is no good to me because he is insecure,” or any other variation of these thoughts, are replaced with positive affirmations that encourage you to think positively about someone else. For example, if you believe that you are not competent enough to make money for yourself, you could fill in this belief with positive words, such as “I am a financial genius!” Or, if you believe that you do not have enough time to socialize, you could fill in this belief with positive words such as “I love spending time with friends!” Keep replacing your negative thoughts with positive affirmations one after another.
You now have many ways to deal with the problem of limiting beliefs. You simply have to apply one or more to each issue you face in your life. Be patient with yourself, and over time, your limiting beliefs will disappear. It is entirely up to you!