Limiting beliefs are easily formed but sometimes but hard to get rid of. Sometimes it isn’t good to take life too seriously and this applies especially to our negative and limiting beliefs. If this is something you can identify with, what can you do to break out of it? If you find yourself t
One way to think about any negative or limiting belief you have is what exactly it will do for you in the future, or what are some of the consequences that the belief could produce? In particular do you like what you see when the belief plays out in the future? For example - ‘I feel too lazy to implement any of my goals.’
Where exactly will you be in 3 months time with this attitude? It is fair to say with this attitude that in 3 months time you will be exactly where you are now. You would have produced absolutely nothing. In the long run this will get you nowhere, is this what you want? Is this really acceptable for yourself?
If you continue to have this belief just exactly where will you go in life? Would it be better if you didn’t have any goals, would you then feel less lazy?
If this is an embedded command to your nervous system then do you really want to feel lazy about your goals? Are your goals such that they cause you to be indifferent about achieving them?
Are your goals so lofty that the reason you say this is so you can develop a ‘I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it’ attitude? It sounds like you are prepared to not achieve any of your goals by way of you feeling lazy, is that what you want? Is where you are now your highest path, if so take a look around and congratulate yourself?
Well you obviously have goals and you do care about achieving them, Is this attitude really helping you achieve your objectives?
(Assume you are achieving some success)
When you keep telling yourself this, it seems that you are forgetting how many of your goals you have already achieved, if this is feeling lazy imagine what you could achieve if you were feeling motivated.
Negative and self limiting beliefs can and very often do hold us back in life. These beliefs can stop us from achieving what we most want and need in our lives. Our limiting beliefs more often than not have been learned as we have gone through life and very often we have bought them with us from childhood. While they don’t serve us well, they are still very personal to each of us. Many people form strong identities from their beliefs, limiting or not and so any negative beliefs can become a deeply ingrained part of their personality one that they carry around with them for years.
Beliefs are personal; they are important and have the ability to define our entire lives. Our beliefs have governed how we have lived in the past, they govern how we are living now and they will govern how we will live our life in the future.
Examples of some negative and limiting beliefs:
These negative and limiting beliefs ultimately serve no real purpose apart from to stop us from having what we want in our lives. They become so entrenched in our minds that we just accept them as normal, never really believing we can do anything about them.
Just one negative belief about yourself, your situation or anything else related to your life can dictate to you the action you take, the behavior you exhibit and the environment where you find yourself.
A negative belief can really make it difficult if you are looking to make a change in your life or accomplish some goal. It becomes your own personal roadblock that stops you dead in your tracks. You accept it and it becomes the way your life is.
Of course everyone is entitled to believe what they want. We have a choice, and we can choose to not accept our limiting beliefs any time we wish. Do you really want to continue creating mind made barriers for yourself?
You may want certain things in your life, you may want more for yourself, your family and even for the world around you, but yet your limiting beliefs never seem to go away, they have always been there and they will always be there in the future. They will remain a fundamental part of who you are unless you do something about it.
Remember that beliefs can be changed, and this is great news when we know we have beliefs that limit us. You probably used to believe in Santa Claus but I bet you don’t anymore. Rest assured that if you want to really change a negative belief you have, it can be done.
One useful strategy to use is to step forward into the future and envisage what will transpire (or not) as a result of the belief you hold.
When we do this we can see just exactly where our negative belief will lead us.
Types of question to ask yourself when taking the negative belief into the future include:
For example:
I’ll never be able to learn Portuguese.
With a belief like this, where will you be in 2 years time? Imagine instead if you start learning Portuguese now, how much of it would you be able to speak in 2 years time?
Do you realize the more you believe this the more this will prevent you from actually learning Portuguese. So eventually over time you will not be able to learn any new languages with a belief like this.
So I guess you can forget about conversing with any Brazilians in their own language when you visit Brazil then?
You could carry on asking similar questions based on what you will be able or not be able to do as a result. Try it with your own negative beliefs and see if your perspective changes.
When is your life going to be great? When is it all going to start happening for you, tomorrow, 3 weeks from now, 3 years, or what about in 10 years time? How much time do you spend living in the future? Constantly thinking about a time when your life will be preferable to what it is now, a time when you won’t worry as much or perhaps will have more money.
Is this time will spent? I have heard it said that people spend as much as 97% of their time living in either the past or the future. Does that mean that only 3% of the time is spent in the present?
What exactly is wrong with your now?
People always seem to be striving for something other than what they have at this very moment, the mortgage to be paid off, the money saved so they can buy a new car, the summer to arrive so they can enjoy their holiday. Doesn’t this way of always living for the future set you up to be unhappy for a fair amount of your life?
I am not talking about forgetting the future and not make any plans or anything like that, it is just that when you live too much for the future the current moment becomes just a means to an end.
The future along with the past doesn’t actually exist except in your mind.
All that you ever have or ever will have is this very moment. Nothing you have done or will ever do will occur outside of your current reality (now).
“Did you know that you will always be able to cope with the now, but you can never cope with the future, nor do you have to?”
Eckhart Tolle ‘The power of Now’
Wise words, and reassuring to. For somebody like me who lives a great deal of his life in his own thoughts, either worrying about the future or re-living the past. It is nice to know that I never actually have to worry about the future, because of course it never arrives.
All I and anyone else has to do is concentrate on the ‘Now’ and make it as enjoyable and pleasant as it possibly can be.
You see it is all about living this moment right now and not constantly living in your mind, be it past or future.
So are you living in another point in time other than right now? Never mind your life 5 days ago or in 5 weeks time, get back to your life right now! What is wrong right now?
Life really is about the journey and not the destination, if your goal is to be wealthy that’s great, but if every day that you remain poor you are miserable and unhappy then what is the point of it all. Are you really prepared to let your life pass by in misery until sometime in the future when all will be well and you can start to live and be happy?
That point will never come, remember the future actually never arrives.
It really doesn’t make much sense to put all of your focus on something in the future at the expense of the present moment. I am not saying don’t have goals but the point is to realize that more effort should go into making your current reality better or more enjoyable than to think about, theorize or just plain wonder what the future will bring or indeed how you wished the past could have been different.
All that you, I or anyone has or will ever have is the present moment. Anything we ever do or achieve will always come from the present moment.
Nobody has anything to worry about at this very moment, that is the beauty of it. Most people are constantly somewhere else, always thinking about stuff, forever carrying thoughts around with them, baggage, you can see it everywhere around you, most people are miles away, head down completely lost in their own thoughts. I think it was Mark Twain that said ‘I have had many problems in my life, none of them real’, or something similar. Does that ring a bell? I know it does for me.
People spend a lot of money to get away from it either by going on holiday or something similar but unless you learn to be more present you will never be able to escape from your thoughts, no matter how far you travel.
Don’t always be at the mercy of your thoughts, when they start to run riot don’t let them take over your life. Learn to silence them so you can become more aware of your present moment.
If you are suddenly consumed by your thoughts, start focusing on your breathing, look around, observe your thoughts understand that the thoughts are not you they are separate.
Don’t always try to be somewhere else, if it starts to happen learn to bring yourself into the present moment, the more your mind attempts to take you somewhere else (into the future, or back to the past) take this as a signal to focus your attention into the present.
Affirmations can be very useful when you need to give yourself a pep talk occasionally, it doesn’t hurt to remind yourself from time to time what you can do or are capable of by way of some positive self talk. However don’t fall into the trap of contradicting yourself (saying something and then never carrying out the appropriate action). For example saying you feel great then immediately saying you feel terrible. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Examples:
Why is it that all the negative, unproductive and sometimes hostile thoughts we have are always easier to believe than the positive, life enhancing and encouraging? You know the voices that say ‘this won’t work’ or ‘that will never happen’, the images of future events not turning out the way you would like them to, or possibly not happening at all. They all seem so believable and real!
The reality is of course much different, theoretically (at least) it is just as easy to believe that your future will be filled with everything you so desire. But it sometimes appears that we are a little bit more certain that our future won’t develop as we would like or contain the things we want to have.
This doesn’t happen for everybody but it probably happens to a lot of people. Reluctance to believe you will have what you want, that you can have what you want or that you even deserve what you want can be a real road block to achieving anything.
Now there could be many reasons why we ‘choose’ to believe what we believe, but it may be worth spending time to find out why YOU are choosing to believe the negative stuff.
Are any of the following applicable for you?
If I believe negative stuff it means I won’t be surprised when I fail I have a poor self image so it’s impossible to believe good things I have no choice in the matter, this is what I tell myself and that is all there is to it
If I look back on my life it is only bad things that have happened to me, so that is probably what will happen in the future. Believing I will be successful means I will have to work at making them happen and I’m lazy
Of course all of these might be true and then none of them may be true, it depends on your own circumstances, but whether you believe them or not, do they answer the question of why it seems easier to believe negative rather than positive things about yourself? Even if they did provide answers would you they satisfy you?
A lot of the time it depends on mood, generally if you are upbeat and feeling good you tend to gravitate towards a more optimistic and healthy view of the world, and in particular your role in it. Whereas when you are feeling low or depressed a cloud of doom can dampen your entire world and thus cause you to feel down and negative.
But does it really depend on mood or is there more to it?
I think that if you are feeling down then you have to address those reasons why you are feeling low which in turn should help with removing your negativity.
If you are continually believing that nothing good will ever happen to you, then it could be an indication of a more serious issue, (depression) and worthy of more attention.
One thing is certain, it is very hard to make any progress on goals, aspirations or anything else when you are wallowing in a sea of negativity. Nothing gets done, predominately because too much of your time is spent feeling down and thinking unhelpful, unconstructive thoughts.
When you get into a spiral of feeling low sometimes it is hard to break out of it. Time can sometimes be a great healer but unfortunately time is a commodity that we don’t have a lot of, especially when you are working towards goals you have already set yourself.
So when you wake up each morning, whilst eating breakfast and getting dressed, also spend some time thinking a few positive thoughts about your life and the day ahead. After all it takes just as much time and energy to think negative thoughts as it does positive ones.
Henry Ford once said, ‘if you think you can or if you think you can’t, you’re right’, and he of course correct because whatever we say in our own life ultimately is the way things will be. Saying the words ‘I am’ has a powerful effect on your life and the way you live it. When looking at logical levels of change, your identity is at the top of the tree. Whoever you identify with will affect your beliefs, your capabilities, your behavior and finally your environment.
Levels of change:
1. Identity
2. Beliefs
3. Capabilities
4. Behavior
5. Environment
Depending on what you identify with, it can be good or bad.
Let’s say you want to start writing, until you start identifying yourself as ‘a writer’ as opposed to somebody who just writes, there will be in congruencies in your behavior, you will not really believe you are a writer. You may find you get stuck and are unable to move forward. You may even stop writing altogether, not quite believing you have what it takes to become a writer.
If you say you are ‘a writer’ then you will already believe it, you are already saying you have the capabilities to write, and your behavior will indicate this. While you don’t have to say you are a writer to write every day it won’t hurt, and there are many people who if they knew you were writing daily would call you a writer. You don’t necessarily need to have a book published to call yourself a writer. As long as you identify with being a writer your actions and beliefs will follow suit. If you say that you aren’t a writer than you may find you lack the self belief to take steps to get your work published.
While there is power in saying something positive ‘I am a writer, I am kind, I am successful in my job’ (the power comes from the way you actions and beliefs change as a result of what you say), the negatives can be just as powerful.
‘I am an idiot’, ‘I am a failure’, ‘I am lacking in confidence’, ‘I am lacking in ideas’, ‘I am lazy’. Can you think of any others you say to yourself?
1. Identity
2. Beliefs
3. Capabilities
4. Behavior
5. Environment
If you identity with ‘I am lazy’, what do you think will transpire in your life when you say that? Let’s say you want to start a business, great! You see the future, working for yourself, the money coming in, the feeling of satisfaction that you created your own destiny, you believe you can do it, and that you have the necessary capabilities, but wait, you have always seen yourself as somebody who is lazy, how are you going to make it all happen knowing you are lazy?
Of course you would like to run your own business but you’re lazy so it is equally important to sit around wasting hours not doing very much? After all isn’t that what being lazy is all about? Good luck with getting the business started lazy bones.
A slightly more useful identity would be of someone who is proactive in taking action. For example instead of ‘I am lazy’, say ‘I am pro-active in getting work done on a daily basis’.
See how your behavior and capabilities change when you say that?
You do realize you chose what to say to yourself, don’t you? If you aren’t getting or haven’t been getting the results you want for yourself maybe you need to change something? And perhaps you need to change what you say to yourself each day before you get out of bed? While you travel to work or while you are walking to the shops etc.
If you are happy with the way things are in your life, carry on doing what you are doing, if you’re not, then change what you do. Or at least understand that your life will not change until you do alter your behavior and for the purpose of this article in particular your identity.
Listen out for when you say ‘I am’, I am this or I am that. If it is not constructive, immediately change it.
Change ‘I am not confident’ into ‘I am confident of myself and my abilities to get things done and handle everything that comes my way’.
Instead of ‘I am a failure’, say ‘I am a success, I have achieved much in my life and I have what it takes to achieve a lot more’.
Unfortunately the mind will always dwell on the negative, it takes effort sometimes to be positive but the long term benefits will be there for all to see.
The images you make, the sounds you hear in your head have a direct impact on your productivity, and indeed your life, make sure you have all yours working for you rather than against you.
Beliefs about your identity
We all have negative beliefs about ourselves and what we are capable of, yet how many of us have actually asked ourselves what exactly we are identifying with when we speak about our capabilities? How exactly have we managed to believe this and why? Has the belief you hold served you well up to now, will it serve you well in the future. Does it empower you in any way at all?
Here are some example negative beliefs and ways you can reframe them.
I won’t be able to get out of debt; I’ll probably be paying off my credit card forever.
Do you really want to be labeled as somebody who never managed to get out of debt and was al
Do you know what happens when you think about bad negative things? It leads to an unhappy life. If you find yourself doing this, ask yourself just how bad is your life right now? For a lot of people (me included), even when their life isn’t that bad, they still chose to think that it is. Why do you think bad thoughts if there is nothing really bad about your life? Do you realize that you will get what you think about most.
Generating bad depressing thoughts will not get you where you want to be. They will make yourself and your life miserable. What exactly is so bad about having a good time that you chose instead to fill your mind with lots of depressing thoughts?
If the future you are thinking about does not inspire you, motivate you or fill you with excitement, you are thinking the wrong thoughts. Stop this, right now!
If what you are doing isn’t working, stop and do something else.
Why do people waste what could be an amazing life for something that is far far less?
Everything in your life comes from what you think about it. So if you are thinking about things that make you feel unhappy you will lead an unhappy life.
Take a look at your life right now, what have you got to be thankful for? List 5 things that are personal to you that you can be grateful for.
Now how does that list make you feel?
Slightly happier perhaps
A little less grumpy or miserable
Has it put a smile on your face
When you do start feeling low, stop and look around for all the things you can be thankful for.
Don’t dwell on the things that make you unhappy, get up, take a walk. Focus on what you have got and the ways you are going to manifest what is currently missing in your life, if indeed anything is.
When push comes to shove and the reality of our life being in our own hands starts to sink in, how does it feel? Slightly scary, perhaps? When we are no longer relying on anybody else for our survival, by way of a standard 9-5 job that we have had for a while, or our salary that we have become accustomed to, or anything else for that matter, all of sudden we may begin to think slightly differently about everything?
We might find ourselves saying the following things; ‘Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea?’ ‘Maybe I’m better off working in my old job, at least I knew where I was each week, what to expect? etc’ ‘I seemed to have a much better grip on my reality, I felt slightly more confident about my life when I worked for somebody else.’
It all seemed like such a good idea, the opportunity to take control of your life, it appeared like it was the best thing for you to do. It all made sense not so long ago.’
Then all of sudden, things start to become a little less clear, maybe the grass isn’t always greener on the other side? ‘
What happens?
Self doubt creeps in and the voice of uncertainty speaks, or rather you give it centre stage with a microphone. The voice says ‘Are you sure you can do this?’ ‘Maybe it’s better if we carry on as we are for just a little while longer.’ ‘I am not sure this is really the right move?’ ‘You are risking a lot here?’ ‘Let’s come back to this in a few years time.’
In a bid to prevent yourself from any anguish, you suddenly take the step of not doing very much work towards making it all happen for yourself, so you can then prove to yourself that you were right and that it was all a bad decision. You should have just stayed where you were.
Is it possible that your mind really does work like that? That if you have any doubts at all, your behavior suddenly changes in a way to prove the doubts that you had to be correct?
The fact is if you don’t use your mind in a positive way, it will more often than not start thinking of ways of being negative.
When you are faced with having your own destiny very much in your own hands, it can suddenly change how you feel about things and yourself. Everybody’s fate is in their own hands, but how many people ever get to experience it first hand? (For example, working for themselves) Or even want to experience it? How many people are just going along with their accepted lives, accepted destinies, letting life dictate to them, instead of the other way around? Grateful that they have jobs. For some this may be a perfectly acceptable way to live, but for others it may not be. Instead they want to carve out their own reality, one that suits them and their own desires and wants.
Being the architect of your destiny is not an easy way out, it will not fall into your lap from you just wishing it come true, it will take work and effort on your part to manifest the parts of your life that aren’t there. But when you do and you see for yourself how it is possible and how it can be done you will be glad you did, and the rewards will more than make up for the effort you put in to get there.
It is potentially a powerful position to be in, but it should not be taken lightly, be serious about making something happen for yourself or don’t bother at all, instead go back to what you were doing before. Self doubt is natural, but don’t fall at the first hurdle, there will be obstacles coming up, you are just going to have to deal with them.
At some point previously you obviously thought that more than what you had was possible for yourself, so now with your fate in your own hands, go full tilt, head first and give it some effort. Keep the goal very much in focus, and when doubt creeps in don’t listen to it, instead do something to work towards your goal.
Deep down you want to do this, you really want this to be a success and you know that if the change you are working towards were a success it would change you and your life for the better. Sure nobody said it was easy but how much harder will it be later on in your life knowing that you didn’t at least have a go at creating something for yourself.
If you do find yourself in this position don’t worry because there will be plenty of people who also didn’t so you’ll be in good company. But imagine this; will it be harder to live with yourself knowing that you gave up at the first attempt? The going started getting a little tough so you thought ‘no this is not for me’, ‘time to look for a new job’, ‘time to re-think my strategy’, or whatever.
Once committed to the change and once you start working towards your goal you will be getting closer each and every day, when you do this you will always be closer to your goal than you have ever been in the past. So instead of listening to the self doubt in your head, stay positive and focused and always remember to keep moving forward in life.
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