Limiting Beliefs, Your Enemies of Progress

Many people want to have more money, better relationships, in general, a better quality of life. How many of them are realizing that while striving to make true their desires, they also working against them?

How likely will you be to increase your comfort in life while having one or more of the following limiting beliefs?
“You have to work hard to make money. I’m not deserving. Money is a struggle. Life is difficult. I’m not good enough.”

By definition, beliefs are assumptions, explanations, conclusions and states of mind which we choose to help us make sense out of our experiences.

It is very easy to see that beliefs serve a purpose and help us make sense of our world.

As they are impacting our attitude and behavior, we need to be aware that some of them can also undermine, subconsciously, our actions and behavior, bringing down the quality of the life we could have.

They are two kinds of beliefs, the explicit ones, that we think about, and the implicit ones, the ones who lie below the surface, but, nonetheless, have the same impact on our behavior.

The general belief about beliefs is that they are hard to change. I thought this also until I watched the 30 minutes video of Morty Lefkoe. I’m not in any way affiliated with it, a reason why I will not put a link here.  It is very easy to find his site, select what is the belief you hold and would like to change and watch the video.

I’m not an easy convert or follower of too good to be true ideas, products, etc. I am, though, interested in personal development and I am reading a lot of things, keeping an open mind.

The process explained in the video worked for me and I will try to make sense of it in the following paragraphs. I haven’t absorbed everything in this video, I will need to see it few more times to understand all the steps in the process. Still, you can have a good idea and see if it is worthed for you to go through it.

The main idea is that events have no inherent meaning. You assign a meaning to them based on what makes sense to you at the moment.

I will talk about the belief “I’m not good enough”. You can think about something else and continue reading, as it the same process.

To know if you hold this belief is not enough what you think about it. You may think it’s silly or illogical. Say it out loud and see how it feels. If it’s not true for you, you will feel no negative emotion what so ever. You may well say “The world is flat.” or “I’m a woman” when you are a man.

If during your childhood, your parents had the habit of emphasizing the things you didn’t do good, the bad parts of a good thing you did, in general criticizing, you might had had the belief that you are not good enough, or that it must be something wrong with you.

Now, as an adult, you may be over this phase, have a good relationship with your parents, you might realize that this belief was childish and still, at some deep level, feel as this belief is the truth about you.

Not all beliefs originate in childhood. You might not even know where you picked it up.

Situations when you felt this way will come to mind and you can work with those. As you recall them, it may seem to you that it is obvious that your parents behavior meant this, that everybody will see it the same. It will seem like “I’m not good enough” meaning was as real as the facts.

The truth is your parents behavior could have a different meaning such:
- They were trying to push you to become better.
- They didn’t had better parenting skills.
- They had unreasonable expectations.
- They were not satisfied with your behavior.
and so on.

If I will tell you to pinpoint where you saw “I’m not good enough” in the real world, you could not because you didn’t see it. You saw the facts, your parents behavior and this could have a number of different valid meanings, there is no inherent, implicit meaning in a situation. All along the belief existed only in your mind.

Imagine that during childhood, you had a friend that had told you about all the different possible meanings. How would that have impacted your attitude?

Your belief is not unreasonable and all of the other interpretations are not more accurate; there are just many different meanings, each one of which can be logically consistent with the events you experienced.

The switching point is going from considering the belief “the truth” to “a truth”, dissociating the facts from what you extracted as their meaning.                            

In doing so you become free of a limiting acquired belief and can see the events that led to it with harmless new associations. You have just removed your tinted glasses and can start to have a better life.