Moving Beyond Self Limiting Beliefs

“What is my biggest problem?”

If you ask people what their number 1 problem is, most will not identify this question: “Why am I not more effective at getting what I want?” However, whatever their answer is, that’s what it will boil down to. So it’s worthwhile to consider what we want, as individuals and as societies, and what might stand in the way of manifesting our desires.

Most of us have been taught the methods and practices of rational analysis and problem-solving.  We’ve been practicing those techniques all our lives. And yet, there doesn’t seem to be a strong correlation between those practices and one’s quality of life.

Albert Einstein famously said that you can’t solve problems with the same kind of thinking that created those problems in the first place.  For creative beings such as ourselves, our thinking is inadequate only because of self limiting beliefs. 

The role of self limiting beliefs

I call those beliefs, the ones that hold us back, superstitions.  The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines superstitions as “beliefs or practices resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, … or a false conception of causation.”

Gerd Altmann/Pixabay

As an example of a self limiting belief, let’s consider that last part of this definition: a false conception of causation. In our popular culture, both Friday the 13th and black cats have been considered by some to cause bad luck. Most of us realize that’s a false conception of causation.

However, we know for sure that our rational analysis and problem solving skills are the best tools we have for getting more of what we want. We know this because everybody says it’s true. But what if that certainty turns out to be a superstition? What if we have more powerful tools at our disposal and our belief in the supremacy of rationality constitutes a self limiting belief?

Here’s how rationality shows up.

Who’s driving?

Photo by Jan Baborák on Unsplash

You consider one of your problems. You talk to yourself about it. You discuss the pros and cons of one or more possible solutions to it. You hear yourself talking about it, and the voice you hear is yours. That’s you speaking “inside your head,” isn’t it? It’s sometimes called the internal dialog, and all humans engage in it.

But what if that’s not actually you?

What if that internal dialog is not something you are actually engaged in? What if it’s playing out in your mind and you are just listening to it, just witnessing it? What if you allowed that dialog to die down, to simply be noise that you can disregard? And what if in the silence that remains you just know what to do? That’s called intuition. In our culture, intuition has been relegated to the back seat by the internal dialog that has been allowed to drive. That’s been the way it is since the Age of Reason, which began in the 17th and 18 centuries with Newton and Descartes.

How can I empower my intuition? How can I let go of self limiting beliefs?

As we uncover and confront this superstition about our identification with the internal dialog, our thinking expands to include new solutions to our problems, and it happens naturally.  I’ve been working on helping people approach their natural, authentic, creative selves by providing a roadmap to identifying those superstitions.  Moving beyond these self limiting beliefs allows us to more fully realize our potential to determine the quality of our own lives. That puts us firmly back in the driver’s seat where we belong. Read more about letting go of self-limiting beliefs in my book, Hoodwinked: Uncovering our Fundamental Superstitions.

For more similar content, take a look at my blog post titled “A Brief Conversation about Beliefs.”