Did you know that most people give up on their dreams because of a voice in their head telling them they can’t achieve them? These voices are self-limiting beliefs, and uncovering them is the first step to unlocking your true potential.
My self-limiting belief
I know in my early career, I had a chronic lack of self-belief, because I had been brought up in trying circumstances, was bullied at school and told by my teachers that I would not amount to much. You can imagine that I held a very low opinion of myself and that fed into my self-limiting belief that I would never be good enough.
Of course, over the years when positive experiences outweighed the negative and I found the support I needed to start believing in myself, that changed. Yet my self-limiting belief is still there in the background and I have to listen hard to not let it take over.
Self-limiting beliefs that we acquire through our childhood, education and lived experiences that somehow hamper our efforts or make us pull our punches when it really matters. They become the negative thoughts we hold about ourselves that hold us back from reaching our full potential.
The difficulty with self-limiting beliefs is that they can be so ingrained, that it can be hard to even recognise them. Yet it is only by recognising them that we can identify the behaviour that might be getting in the way of our own success.
Imagine a promotion you deserve opens up, but you hesitate to apply because you have a self-limiting belief that ‘I’m not good enough to lead a team’.
We have many fears, but there are four what we see as ‘core’ fears. These are the one’s that many others are built on. These might include a fear of:
- Not being good enough
- Not being loveable enough
- Failing
- Abandonment
There are others of course, but these are the one’s that often have the deepest roots in our psyche.
What you can do
If you are not sure of what your self-limiting belief, here’s a simple checklist for you:
- When you hit a challenging situation – what do you find yourself saying about it?
- What does the language and words you use really say about how your are feeling and thinking?
- Could you relate it back to one of those ordinal fears?
- If you reflect on it, can you find the event in your life that sparked this belief?
- After identifying your limiting belief, write down a new empowering belief to replace it. For example, instead of ‘I’m not good enough,’ you could reframe it to ‘I am capable and I am always learning.'”