Limiting Beliefs Toolkit

What Are Limiting Beliefs?

A limiting belief is a thought or state of mind that you think is the absolute truth and stops you from doing certain things. These beliefs do not always have to be about yourself, either. They could be about how the world works, ideas, and how you interact with people.

Where Do Limiting Beliefs Come From?

Other people: Our main influencers are our parents and caregivers. Their internal pains, anguish, and anxiety transferred onto us by the means of their unending list of rules of what, why, and how we should be. As a result, we form our own limiting beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world around us based on their beliefs.
Negative experiences: Experiences are our best teachers. Negative experiences can form a belief that may limit us in life in some way. Many victims of abuse form a belief of being not good enough, unworthy or undeserving due to their past experiences, which strongly shape their life.

How Can Limiting Beliefs Affect Our Life?

These beliefs are a set of thoughts or ways of thinking that we hold that restrict or minimise your interactions. These limits close us off to a certain way of doing things or ways of living.

Your mindset fuels your actions, which create your reality. We all have limiting beliefs that stop us from achieving our dreams or our everyday goals. These beliefs often develop as our mind’s way of supposedly saving us from difficult situations, challenges or failures.

Limiting beliefs inhibit our progress.

How Do We Change Our Self-Limiting Beliefs?

Find your limiting beliefs: You almost certainly hold beliefs that stand in the way of your happiness and success, but do not expect it to be obvious what they are. They are often so much a part of us that we do not see them. Open your mind to discovering and challenging beliefs that you do not yet realise you hold.
Accept that you view the world through a filter: We do not see things ‘as they really are’. Our reality is shaped by what we believe. Getting comfortable with this idea helps open up the possibility of changing the filter that we place on reality.
Slow down and articulate it: The beliefs that hold us back often are not fully formed, and that prevents us from understanding and challenging them. Practise articulating your reluctance to make choices that would help you move forward. If you feel guilty about taking a break, or if you are convinced that you are lazy or not very smart – why, exactly? Write it down clearly. Explain it to a friend. Does it still make sense?
Try a different filter: If you cannot bring yourself to reject your limiting beliefs outright, perhaps you can practise imagining what it would be like if you had different, more positive beliefs. How would you live differently if you believed that you were smart, after all? Thinking this through helps show how your beliefs are standing in your way, and how things would be different without them.
Reject double standards: Those negative things that you say to yourself: would you say them to another person? If not, there is no justification for saying them to yourself.
Accept that you are not a rational robot: Our emotions change more slowly than our beliefs. Expect to feel the influence of your limiting beliefs even after, rationally, you have accepted that they are false. That will change eventually.