Are your beliefs holding you back?

January 12th, 2012 by Gary Hales - MBA

Are your beliefs holding you back?

If you want to have the life you dream of and achieve your goals then you must identify and remove your biggest obstacle – your limiting beliefs.

Your beliefs determine and drive your behavior so you need to understand what they are.  Firstly you need to know that a belief can be described as a strongly held opinion that you may have about yourself or the world around you.  Your beliefs create a recurring thought pattern that will continually run in your mind.  So if you believe that you’re not good enough, then you’ll continually self-sabotage yourself.  When you find yourself continuously having the sane thought then that indicates that you have an underlying belief that is creating those thoughts.

As we grow older we create our own beliefs and these often lead to us gaining fears, developing low self-esteem, become lacking in self-confidence, engaging in negative self-talk (running ourselves down) and we often then become frustrated and overwhelmed.  It is now recognized that our body and mind is linked so beliefs and thoughts such as these, often lead to illness, disease and depression.

If you say to yourself that you aren’t good enough, you’ll never be successful, you don’t deserve wealth/ happiness, that life is hard, then that’s a strong sign that you have a/ some/ many limiting beliefs.  None of us want to live a life that’s less than we have the potential to achieve, so how do you identify the limiting beliefs that you have? 

The first step is to recognize that your beliefs become your reality.  You won’t/ can’t accept anything that doesn’t match up to your beliefs so look around you and see what is happening in your life.  What do you lack?  How are your relationships with others?  What habits do you have?  Who do you surround yourself with?  What limiting beliefs do you have about yourself that are attracting the unhealthy things in your environment?  To help yourself identify a limiting belief in a specific situation, then ask yourself the following question, “What belief must I currently be holding onto in order to react in this way?”

Also be aware of how you respond to situations emotionally.  Again ask yourself the question,  “What belief must I currently be holding onto in order to react in this way?” when you find you react negatively to an event.  How did you react emotionally when you read the statements above about  “you aren’t good enough, you’ll never be successful, you don’t deserve wealth/ happiness, that life is hard”?  Did you feel negative emotions when you read those and attributed them to yourself?  If you did then this relates to a limiting belief that you have about yourself.

Finally listen to the words you use.  Do you use phrases that disempower you?  Phrases like “I just don’t feel happy”, “I can’t make that kind of money” or “I wish I could make more money”.  These are the limiting beliefs that you hold.  When you recognize that you have these beliefs ask yourself, “When did you decide to believe that?”.  At some stage in your life you made a decision to have that belief.

Once you’ve identified the beliefs that you hold, that cause you to live a restricted life, then the next step is to remove those limiting beliefs.  This is where a coach really proves his/ her worth as they will work through the process with you of helping to identify your limiting beliefs, eliminating them and assisting you to acquire new, empowering beliefs that will help you to live an unrestricted life!

Remember that beliefs are extremely powerful and that you will never outperform your own belief system.