In this guide, I will explain the simple 6-step process that I use to help myself and my coaching clients overcome limiting beliefs.
This guide will help you to build more self-awareness, uncover those limiting beliefs that are sabotaging your success and replace them with more empowering beliefs that will bring your vision to fruition.
It’s essential to see a limiting belief in the context of what you want to achieve or who you want to be. Only then will it become clear that you must change that belief at any cost.
A crucial component of the process of how I overcome limiting beliefs is self-compassion. You must understand that if you’ve held a limiting belief for a long time, it’s because that belief was there to protect you. You may now have built more awareness to see the limiting aspect of that belief in your life but it was not always like that.
Understanding the purpose that your old belief has served, appreciating the emotional comfort that it has provided you with, and showing compassion to yourself for choosing to believe that old belief, are all contributing to a successful transition towards the new belief.
Table of Contents
My 4 Axioms On Limiting Beliefs
Here are four things that I choose to believe 🙂 when it comes to identifying and changing limiting beliefs for myself and my coaching clients.
- There are no universal limiting beliefs. A belief can be limiting for a person A and empowering for a person B.
- The beliefs are totally dynamic even in the context of the same person! You may consider a belief to be empowering today and that same belief to be limiting five years down the line.
- Limiting beliefs need context. A belief is a limiting one because it limits your capacity, it stops you from achieving your vision or becoming the person you want to be.
- You may find that you prefer not to change a limiting belief for your own reasons. A limiting belief can limit you in one area and empower you in another. It comes down to each one of us to decide what we want to believe and why it serves to do so.
- When we have a limiting belief about the world, we have a limiting belief about ourselves. My experience shows that we move closer to our vision when we choose to believe that other people and our environment want us to succeed. Failing to believe so creates unnecessary friction.
Let’s get started!
Step #1: Identify the Belief
Here are some key questions for identifying a limiting belief:
- What is the belief that you think is holding you back?
- Why do you think you need to change it?
- Why and how is it sabotaging your vision?
- Are you sure it makes sense to change it?
- Is that the core belief or there is a deeper belief that’s hidden behind?
The challenge with the first step is to make sure you have uncovered the core limiting belief that lives in your subconscious mind rather than a by-product thought of that belief.
For example, you may think that your limiting belief is ‘I hate challenges’. But when you go deeper you see that the reason you don’t take challenges on is that you fear failure. And the reason you fear failure is that you fear rejection. And, what you fear most, is rejection from your family. So, you may find that the real belief is that your parents and family don’t love you unconditionally, ie. whether you succeed or not.
Beliefs are hidden in your self-talk.
You play back those limiting beliefs to yourself every single day in your self-talk and you don’t even notice it! We all do!
Exercise: I want you to pay attention to everything you say to yourself. Observe your thoughts. Are those thoughts limiting or empowering? If you catch a limiting thought, write it down, work with it, challenge it. Can you replace it with an empowering one? Repeat this process.
Pay particular attention to cues such as: ‘I’m always …’, ‘I never …’, ‘I always …’ What comes after those always might be a limiting belief!
Step #2: How would it be like to doubt the belief?
Once you’ve identified the core limiting belief, try to experience what it feels to doubt that belief.
Doubt is medicine when it comes to removing limiting beliefs.
Let’s take the belief of the first step as an example, ie. My parents don’t love me unconditionally.
For someone who holds that belief, initially, it may feel really weird to doubt it.
So, imagine I put all this money on this new business and it doesn’t work in the end. Will my parents still love me and support me and encourage me to try something else? I can’t even think about it. It’s dreadful. I can see the disappointment on my mother’s face. I can see my father screaming. I can’t take that!
If you persist you will see that you will get more familiar that feeling of doubting the belief.
You may remember times when your parents were supportive when you suffered a setback. You may think of times when they were the ones who encouraged you to try something risky and worthwhile.
Byron Katie would ask this powerful question: ‘Is it absolutely true that your parents don’t love you unconditionally?’
People often react with a no to a question like that and start finding evidence for the opposite.
When you get familiar with the feeling of doubt, confusion may come and you may not know what to believe any more!
That’s a great thing to happen to you because it means you can now start believing something more empowering which takes us to Step #3.
Step #3: What would you like to believe that’s better than the old belief?
The new belief has to be better and you need to see why it serves you better.
That’s a loophole of our minds that we should take advantage of here. Because our minds simply can’t resist wanting to believe something that’s better.
Remember that the reason you held a belief of the type ‘My parents don’t love me unconditionally’ once looked better than ‘My parents love me unconditionally’. Why? Because carrying the old belief you’d do things just to look good to your parents in order to receive more love and acceptance rather than doing things that would contribute to your own growth.
You may now see the possibility of adopting the belief ‘My parents love me unconditionally’.
Step #4: How is it to firmly believe the new belief?
How is your life different if you choose to believe the new belief? What would you do differently?
You may be more open to taking on more business challenges, experiment more, try things and accepting that success is a journey that will involve setbacks along the way.
During this journey, you may see that your parents are always there to support you, to hug you, to motivate you when you feel like giving up.
Here we’re trying the new belief on as if it was a pair of trousers!
Step #5: How does this belief fit into your identity?
We often find that the new belief that we choose to believe doesn’t fit into our identity.
You can see your identity as the sum of all your beliefs.
‘My parents love me unconditionally’ might not fit into who we really are.
In that case, we might have to tweak that new belief in order to remove resistance and make it easier to believe it!
In any case, even after we’ve tweaked it, the new belief will be definitely better than the old belief.
In our case, we may want to believe something like ‘My parents love me unconditionally and will be always there to support me when I try ethical business ideas that serve the world’.
That may be all you need in order to move towards your vision. Of course, your parents will not be pleased if you become rich selling drugs.
More often than not, the mathematical negation of the old belief is not what we want or should believe to get ahead in our lives.
Here’s another example. For someone who doesn’t feel confident, wanting to believe that they will always be super confident may not serve them either. Because first of all, it would be unrealistic and would bring more frustration if you tried to believe it. Also, feeling super confident may prevent someone from hard work, necessary preparation, considering somebody else’s view, etc.
Step #6: Test your new belief
Once you’ve come up with a new empowering belief that also fits your identity you can go ahead and test it out.
Testing it means experiencing how you feel when you think about this belief.
Does it sound exciting? Does it motivate you to take those actions that you couldn’t take before?
Start collecting evidence from the outside world that supports your new belief.
Observe how your life is different now.
You may decide to be more open with your parents and discuss your life and business plans.
You can journal about it and support it with more empowering thoughts.
Believing in Yourself and the World
I mentioned earlier that those who believe that others have their back tend to move faster and more effortlessly to their vision. I can’t prove this to you but I have found it to be true for myself and the people I work with.
I’d like to quote Hashi Mohamed, one of my mentors and friends here. Hashi, a Somali who was born in Kenya, was sent to England as a refugee when he was a kid along with his three siblings. He used to live in various low-renting and rat-infested housing as a kid but managed to get a scholarship to study at Oxford and became a successful barrister. This is what he says in his book People Like Us:
The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definition of confidence: 1) The feeling or belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something. 2) A feeling of self-assurance arising from an appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities.
What we can take from this is that confidence is both internal and external: confident individuals believe they are good enough and they believe or trust that other people and institutions will recognise this. Partly, confidence is a responsibility you must take on yourself: to believe in your strengths and talents and keep faith with them. But you also need to have a certain amount of trust in the world around you, and that it will treat you fairly.