Mondays of Meaning: Meme-Splaining…Limiting Beliefs - and what they really mean.

Limiting Beliefs

You know the phrase, you’ve heard it sooo many times.

The individual words make sense – something you believe, and something that limits. But what do they actually mean together, and what, beyond the soundbite, does it mean for you?

It may sound obvious; it’s a belief that limits.   But, limits what? What you do? Say? Feel? ‘Goals’? What goals?

Is that all?

Take this meme from Asana. It means well, but…

Is it really that simple?

A few days ago I had a realisation about what this phrase means for me.  It wasn’t a thunderbolt realisation, more like a little electric zap – a recognition of something that made me take more notice than usual.  You know, that little ‘Oh!’ moment, - a “Why did this not occur to me before?” moment.

Ever heard people give the : “Whatever your limiting beliefs are, fix them, overcome them, you can do anything” advice, and found yourself rolling your eyes or feeling even more incapable or useless?

I don’t know about you but when I’d hear that kind of standard, surface-level wisdom, it would a) make me feel like I was somehow broken, and b) think the ‘adviser’ just didn’t get what it meant to live inside my head.

Because for some of us, this simplified advice shared by many coaches simply doesn’t fly.

Why?  Well, because there are deeper things going on that we’re struggling to overcome.

Firstly, these limiting beliefs didn’t get there for no reason – there is ALWAYS a reason. You are not a defective human being, you are complicated, you’ve been hurt, changed, and unaware of what’s going on under the surface much of the time: things have happened in your young life that crept in quietly, gradually wearing away your ability to believe you could do anything and everything.

We’re not actually fully conscious beings until we’re between 5 and 7. Until then, we’re programmable – our beliefs, habits and reactions are silently inserted into our subconscious minds.  So you didn’t notice when being an astronaut or superhero stopped feeling possible and faded into the story of ‘can’t’.  If you did notice something was off, you didn’t understand how it was happening, – let alone know how to stop it taking hold of you, or how to stop something slipping away?  Because what child has the understanding of such a thing?  Most adults don’t.

And secondly, it’s this unconsciousness that keeps us stuck. How can you fix an underlying block, a self-sabotaging behaviour, if you don’t know what your limiting belief is, or why it’s firmly entrenched in your image of yourself?  What’s that deeper thing that’s stopping you from ‘just doing it’ or ‘simply believing in yourself’? It’s a real thing: self-sabotage, unconscious behaviour, lack of belief, even lack of creativity and imagination – it all gets, metaphorically, beaten down, and taken away.

So back to my brain-fizz moment. What was it that made the difference?

It was a word.  Just one word. And you know what a big deal words are to me…

Life.

Not just my limiting belief, but my Life-Limiting Belief. 

Not just a belief that’s stopping me believing in myself, but a belief that was actually making my life less than I wanted it to be.

Limiting. My. L i f e. 

This might sound obvious to some of you, I know. But that’s the power of words isn’t it? Some hit you right where it hurts.  And some miss – inch or mile, but they miss, making them meaningless.  Words tap into our psyche, our subconscious, and yes, our intuition about what we want (whether we’re fully aware of it or not).  So when I heard the ‘Life’ part, an image flew into my mind of all the things I’d miss out on in this one short, awful, and beautiful life if nothing changed.

One of my Core Values is adventure. I feel I missed out so much in my youth. And I’ve had this insatiable wanderlust for as long as I can remember.  Every few years I want, NEED, something to change. Move house, move job, go away, new hobby. I just seem to need new things to feel like I’m thriving. I NEED experiences.

Maybe that’s why when ‘Life’ was added to Limiting Beliefs in my head, it really struck a chord. My actual life, the one I’d look back on, was being limited. Because those experiences = Life.

I want more Life.

You’ve no doubt seen the stories of nurses talking to end-of-life patients about regrets, and how to avoid them. The thread was always regretting the things they didn’t do. The dreams they left behind, using the business of getting on with life as their reason (excuse).

It’s fear that does that to us – robs us of the courage we have in our fantasies, robs us of the experiences we dream about, the ones we claim to ‘want’.  Yes, life does get in the way of some things – kids, parents, money. But can we do something to keep the dream alive ‘til things change? Can we keep the plan real, so we don’t get to the end of our time with all those regrets piled up under our fear, fatigue, tiredness, old bones and illness? Can we make some of those dreams real?

So, it comes down to what you want. Really want. Reeeaally.

But want, how?  Wish for? Hope for? Pretend we want it, so we don’t feel so boring and bored? There’s a world – literally – of difference between ‘wanting’ and ‘being prepared to do the work for’. 

Wishing and hoping are other words for ‘maybe’.  What they actually mean is, “Well, I’ll see if events conspire to make it happen for me without very much effort from me because deep down I don’t actually know if I do want this, but I’ve been pretending it’s what I want for so long I don’t know what else to dream about now anyway”.

Just like ‘try’ is another word for ‘no’, just slowly. Pretending you’ll go to / do / be the thing, but really you can do nothing and no one can prove you didn’t intend to do the thing.

SO, where is your Life (with a capital L) being limited? Could you do something about it if you really wanted to? DO you really want to?  That’s a massive distinction that needs attention: there’s nothing wrong with changing your wants and dreams, you know.  Life happens, we change – we just forget we’re allowed to sometimes.

Life is full of choices.

You get to choose more than you r e a l i s e.

What belief do you have about yourself that’s outdated and needs to go in the bin? Which ones are limiting the joy, the adventure, the peace that you really truly want in your Life? And how are you going to work them out?

That’s my parting question: What are YOU going to do to pick out and change the thing that’s limiting your life?

If you need help, you know where I am.  Just hit reply.