💚 How to Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs

🤼‍♂️ Me vs. My Limiting Beliefs

One of the biggest unlocks in my burnout recovery has been uncovering and dismantling my limiting beliefs. 

Limiting beliefs are our views of the world that lurk in our subconscious mind, holding us back from our full potential and keeping us stuck in unhealthy patterns.

Here’s a peek into some of my own subconscious:

• I need to be perfect in all areas of my life in order to be worthy of belonging, acceptance, love. 

• My value equates to my productivity and the hours I work. 

• My worth is based on my achievements, and my identity as a startup co-founder.

• Financial success comes as a result of hard work. If something feels easy I must be doing it wrong.

• I need to prioritize the needs and happiness of others in order to be liked.

• I’m not a creative person. I should just stick to my spreadsheets. It’s not possible for me to have financial success in a creative career.

• It’s more important to achieve and be seen as credible, capable, and successful than to do the work I most love.

• As a girl/woman, I need to be agreeable and to make those around me feel comfortable.

• I must be humble, modest and look like I’m not seeking praise. Celebrating my gifts and achievements is not a good look.

• Negative emotions like anger and sadness are “bad”. Better to repress my emotions than possibly be seen as mean, selfish or unhinged.

• There’s not enough money and opportunities to go around (especially for women).

• Maybe if I do enough, I will be enough.

As you can imagine, these limiting beliefs were really keeping me from living my best life. I thought that in order to be loved and accepted, I needed to hold myself to this impossible standard. I needed to show up to the world as this perfect co-founder, leader, businessperson, CPA, fiancé, sister, daughter and friend (and I know being a mother will open a whole other can of worms!). I had to be smart and impressive, but also modest and never self-promoting. I had to be assertive and direct as a businessperson but also deeply caring and kind as a female leader and manager.

(If this is starting to sound a little like America Ferrera’s iconic Barbie monologue, it’s because limiting beliefs are universal, and many women hold similar ones thanks largely to the patriarchy.)

Many of my own decisions — big and small — have been based on trying to fit within these rigid boundaries I’d internalized. But the crazy thing is, until I started to learn about limiting beliefs and reflect on mine, I didn’t even realize they were there and impacting me in the way that they were.

✍️Say More About Limiting Beliefs 

Okay, so here’s the stat that blew my mind: 95% of our cognition, the thinking that drives our decisions and behaviors, occurs unconsciously. 

And our subconscious is shaped very significantly from our early years. Between the ages of 0-7, people download beliefs from their community and those close to them. Just like a computer being installed with an operating system, our subconscious minds are ‘programmed’ by our early life experiences and societal conditioning. Our subconscious minds store our values, beliefs and attitudes that shape our worldview and affect how we interpret and respond to the environment  around us. Once programmed into the database of the unconscious, they control much of our lives. 

Unless, that is, an effort is made to reprogram them. 

Wild right?! I was floored to learn that so much of my thinking and decision-making was being run by my subconscious mind, 95% of the time. And while I certainly had a lot of very positive and healthy beliefs programmed into my subconscious mind in my early years, there were also limiting beliefs that contributed to a lot of discontent and ultimately, my burnout. Those beliefs were holding me back from living in alignment with my true self.

Consequently, I felt incredibly motivated to make a change to no longer be incapacitated by my limiting beliefs. To do that, I’ve needed to intentionally reprogram my subconscious — something I’m still actively working on every single day.

👀 Why Should You Care?

From my own experience and observations, personal and spiritual growth are directly correlated with the growth in your business, career, relationships, health and all areas of your life. If an area of your life isn’t unfolding in the way you’d hoped, there’s likely a limiting belief (or multiple) at play. 

For instance, how can you build a hugely impactful business if you don’t think you’re worthy of that level of success and hence can’t even imagine what it would look like? Because your limiting beliefs are whispering ‘that’s just not possible for you’ just beyond your conscious awareness?

How can you build a beautiful, deeply connected, supportive relationship if that wasn’t modeled to you and your limiting beliefs tell you you’re not actually deserving of that kind of love. 

The same goes for health, friendships, creativity. 

Uncovering your limiting beliefs and reprogramming your brain with more empowering ones is like updating your personal operating system to enable you to make choices everyday that get you closer and closer to the life you desire.

If we choose to do nothing, we’re accepting that we’re perfectly happy with our existing software and that we’re fine to keep blaming the reason we’re not where we want to be on outside circumstances, people and events.

But that’s not a very empowering way to live. 

For me, burning out made me wake up to this realization and I decided I was no longer willing to play that game.

🧠✨How I Reprogrammed by Brain

The good news is that you don’t have to keep living with a non-optimal operating system. You can reprogram your brain with conscious effort.

I’m going to share the three important steps I took to do so: 

1. Identify limiting beliefs and bring them into conscious awareness, where they can be worked on. 

2. Question limiting beliefs, disprove them, and replace them with more empowering ones.

3. Start taking action in line with these more empowered beliefs. 

1. Identifying Your Limiting Beliefs

Educating Yourself on Limiting Beliefs

What I found most useful at the very initial stages of detecting my own limiting beliefs was consuming content about limiting beliefs and noticing what resonated with me. Many of us share limiting beliefs so hearing other people talk about theirs helped me learn where I might hold similar ones. A few key resources for me were:

1. Elise Loehnen’s On Our Best Behavior is a great book for learning about limiting beliefs many of us women collectively hold. She talks about how the Seven Deadly Sins have been used to control women through shame, and how we keep ourselves from happiness and success because of the limiting beliefs we have around how women should behave.

2. Vienna Pharaon’s The Origins of You dives into how our family patterns and wounds from our life experiences shape our beliefs and behaviors. And how we can break those patterns.

3. To Be Magnetic’s Expanded Podcast frequently discusses limiting beliefs and tactical ways of dismantling them. They have many guests who talk about their own journeys of dismantling limiting beliefs in order to step into more aligned lives.

Journaling 

I’ve found it’s usually not enough to simply read or listen to the content. We also need to deeply reflect on how these things are showing up in our own lives. Personally, I’ve found the best way to do that is through journaling. I’ve found that limiting beliefs have less power when I pull them out of my head and put them on a page. You can try simply acknowledging in writing that you have a limiting belief. And then you could try writing about any of the ways you’re aware of how it’s holding you back. 

Discussing with a Coach, Therapist or Friend

 A coach or a therapist (or even a good friend who’s great at listening) can be very helpful in spotting limiting beliefs. They can listen deeply as we talk about our goals and challenges and spot disempowering stories, thought patterns and beliefs that may be holding us back. 

2. Shifting your limiting beliefs

Once you’re aware of your limiting beliefs and have an understanding of how they’re showing up in your life, it’s time to shift them. 

Journaling 

Powerful Questions

Once I had a list of some of my limiting beliefs, I made a table like the one shown below. The first column holds the limiting belief we’ve identified. The second column holds powerful questions we can ask to learn more about these limiting beliefs and start to poke holes in them. The third provides the answers to those questions and any evidence from our lives to support those answers. The last column provides space for healthy behavior changes. 

Here’s an example of one of mine: 

_{* I should mention this is an exercise I did with the help of my burnout coach and it was very valuable to have someone help me come up with some of the questions and provide encouraging feedback, poke a little deeper, and provide additional suggestions. If you have the means, working with a coach on this exercise would be great, but also a good friend that’s also interested in this work could be great to get a second opinion as well.} 

The Work

Another great journaling resource is Byron Katie’s The Work. Her inquiry method helps us dissolve limiting beliefs and other stressful thoughts through running them through these five questions and steps: 

1. Is the thought true?

2. Can you absolutely know it’s true?

3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?

4. Who would you be without that thought?

5. Turn the thought around (i.e. what are some opposite statements of the thought). Contemplate how each turnaround is as true or truer in that situation.

This method, while it seems almost too simple, has been incredibly impactful for me in dismantling limiting, stressful or painful beliefs. I highly recommend giving it a try. If you’d like to go deeper on this method and see some examples, you can check out Katie’s book, Loving What Is, and her website which offers downloadable worksheets. 

Online Course

One of the most transformative tools for me in this phase was taking To Be Magnetic’s manifestation course. It’s based on the principle that you can’t manifest anything you don’t deem yourself to be worthy of and that you need to identify and unblock your limiting beliefs in order to do so. It offers multiple workshops from inner child and shadow work to courses on love and money, all of which support your understanding of where your limiting beliefs came from, and then shifting those beliefs through journaling and hypnotism. It’s not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, so definitely do what works best for you, but I found it to be very eye-opening and effective for me, so if this appeals to you, it could be worth checking out. 

Coaching

Again, if you have the means, a coach can work with you to dissolve and shift your limiting beliefs and figure out how you want to show up in the world in new ways.

It’s absolutely possible to do this work individually through the above methods, but sometimes an unbiased third-party can help you identify and shift limiting beliefs a bit faster than when you’re feeling around your subconscious on your own.

3. Taking Action

Once you have awareness and have started to shift your limiting beliefs, the biggest thing you can do to fully dismantle them is to take actions that are not held back by those limiting beliefs. That will ultimately prove to yourself that the limiting beliefs are not true because you’re literally transcending them.

I’m not saying you have to go out and take the scariest action in the face of your most significant limiting belief. In fact I wouldn’t recommend that. But you can start to take baby steps and build your trust muscle over time. As you build your confidence in your new set of beliefs and the person you are when you believe them, you can incrementally start to take steps in the direction of your best life.

For example, if you hold the limiting belief (like I do) that your value equals your productivity, could you experiment with setting some boundaries around your work hours? Or taking a longer break during the day to enjoy lunch, go for a walk or run outside, or do whatever feels restorative or fun to you? Could you observe what work is energy giving vs. energy draining and work on delegating, minimizing or eliminating energy draining work, little by little?

Notice how these small changes impact the rest of your day and the quality of your work. Perhaps as you build this trust muscle and learn that you’re working better and having more fun as a result of these small changes, you start to trust in yourself to make even bigger changes. Like switching roles in your company to one that’s more aligned, or starting a side hustle you hope to eventually pursue full-time. It can be overwhelming to jump straight to the big changes before we start to prove to ourselves the limiting beliefs are not true through the smaller ones. So start out small, be gentle, and build up to it.

I’d strongly encourage journaling about the actions you’re taking and what you’re noticing, so that you can process the positive changes you’re seeing as a result. As you notice more and more positive things, this will serve as the motivation to keep at this work. 

💚 Impact

I certainly have not reprogrammed my brain in its entirety because these limiting beliefs are so deeply ingrained. I know this is a lifelong journey. But I’ve made some great progress and can see how my life is starting to take a turn for the positive as a result. 

Some of the positive changes I’ve personally been noticing include:

• Feeling so much joy from being able to write and self-express, to share my learnings and help others with the struggles I’ve encountered, and be seen as this more authentic and vulnerable version of myself. (Before my limiting beliefs were that I was not creative, I’m not a writer, and that it wasn’t safe for me to be so vulnerable and a beginner at something). 

• Developing a more healthy relationship with rest and stillness. Feeling less guilty when I sit still, thereby opening up the opportunity to be more present or to invite in more things I enjoy. (Previously I held the negative belief that my value = my productivity so it was not safe for me to rest.)

• Allowing negative feelings to come up and be deeply felt and expressed, which has paradoxically created the opportunity to feel more peace. (Previously I held the belief that negative emotions were bad and that it was “strong” to repress them and act “fine”.)

🪞Self Reflection

If you’re ready to take the next steps to dismantle your own limiting beliefs, feel free to explore any of the steps above that resonate with you. Here are a few journal prompts you can start with today.

1. What’s one area in my life where I’m feeling less than satisfied? What limiting belief(s) might be holding me back?

2. Is this limiting belief true? Where did it come from? How is it affecting my actions?

3. What small change in behavior can I make this week to prove to myself that this limiting belief does not control me? 

Thank you so much for reading. I’d love to hear your feedback so I can improve and serve you better. Feel free to email me any feedback you have or you can fill out my anonymous two-minute survey here. 

Appreciate you!

With love,
Roslyn 💚