Practical Tools For Dealing With Limiting Beliefs

As I mentioned last week, we can be held back from achieving our full potential by our beliefs.
If you haven’t done the exercise from last Saturday post, you could go back and do it now. Making that investment will help you get the best results from this session. Alternatively just work on whatever comes up for you and trust the process.

At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll re state that a belief is just a thought that you have ceased to question. So today we are going to be questioning one of our limiting beliefs.
But before we do this, let me give you a little background. Beliefs have a structure and one simple model is to think of a belief as being a bit like a table top. Stay with me on this!

In order for a table top to serve as a table top and not just a piece of wood or glass, lying on the floor it needs one vital ingredient – legs! Now if we accept for a moment that a belief is like a table top, what is the vital ingredient to keep our beliefs in place? (Assuming that is that our beliefs are true and not just some folk myth picked up from our parents, peers or the media!). What is equivalent to the table legs? Well I’m going to suggest that the vital element is supporting evidence.

It’s probably easiest if I give you an example. For most of you reading this, I’m probably safe in saying that you believed in Father Christmas when you were younger and now you probably don’t – yes?

So if your belief in father Christmas is like a table top the evidence that supported that belief was things like the fact that your parents told you he existed, and the presents appeared on Christmas morning and that you saw him in the shops and that the milk and cookies you put out for him were gone in the morning. So what happened to change it all? Did you wake up one day and suddenly realise that he didn’t exist after all?

No of course not, you went through a period where you the supporting evidence started to get a bit weak either because you discovered it was wrong or other people started to undermine it.

Well you can use this same process to start the process of undermining your current limiting beliefs.

1. Objectively assess how much evidence there really is for this limiting belief.
2. Scan through your memory banks for real examples which disprove the limiting belief – believe me there will be lots of examples if you are prepared to dig for them.
3. Ask yourself where does this belief really come from? You may well find that it is something you inherited from your parents or teachers or peers when you were young and impressionable and as a result it probably has no substance in reality and certainly doesn’t belong to you.
4. By now your limiting belief should be starting to look and feel a distinctly less credible than it was previously. Keep chipping away at those legs and the belief will inevitably fall.
5. You can accelerate this process by starting to consider what sort of empowering belief would you like to hold instead. Write it down and then look for real objective evidence to support the new belief. The more you look, the more you’ll find and as a result you will strengthen the new believe and its credibility will grow at the same time as your conviction for the old limiting one falls.

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