Limiting Beliefs — How to Finally Push Through What’s Holding You Back
By: Paula Gardner
Tags: Goal Setting, Self Improvement, Limiting Beliefs, Goals, Self-awareness

Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash

Busting Limiting Beliefs by Setting Goals

I am currently doing some psychotherapy training, and what’s intriguing me is the idea of limiting beliefs. If you’ve done any type of personal development work you must have come across limiting beliefs. These are beliefs, ingrained in you from family and caregivers, that have been with you from childhood. They can often knit together to provide a family schema — the way your family looks at life.

You may have grown up to to think that rich people are conniving and exploitative for instance, which rather puts a damper on your desires to earn more money. Another common one is that you’re not good enough. I see this with my clients a lot, and it can be debilitating.

The problem is that we tend to notice the evidence that supports these beliefs (not getting into my desired University means that I’m not good enough). At the same time, we disregard the evidence that could counter this (the promotion that we see as a result of someone leaving and there being no one else to fill the position, the high exam grades that we look upon as a fluke).

What would life look like without these beliefs?

Photo by Ran Berkovich on Unsplash

In a way, that’s a scary thought. Many of these beliefs have been absorbed so deeply as they protect us. If we don’t think we are good enough, we can’t really get too disappointed with anything. If we think that rich people are evil, being poor seems quite attractive really. Nevertheless, they keep us stuck

Examining my own limiting beliefs

I’ve take a good look at my own belief over the years. Apart from acknowledging them, I haven’t really done anything about them. I just consider them to be part of me: a sort of heavy backpack I carry around and occasionally take off and examine. My own limiting beliefs include thinking that I can ever get past a certain level of fitness: or indeed past a certain level of fluency in Italian. I believe I don’t have the time to spend on something so “frivolous.”

So, how can I change that?

Using goal setting to remove limiting beliefs

I began to wonder how I could use my usual end of year goal setting and planning process to help me get past these limiting beliefs. I started by coming up with my list of beliefs that are holding me back. There are six of them in total, which cover health and fitness, work and money.

I want to make sure that my overall goals for 2021 are going to blast those limiting beliefs out of the water!

Destroying limiting beliefs, month by month

My plan is to set targets in each of my target areas for each month. Each month I will earn over a certain level, do a set amount of fitness training, creative writing and studying Italian. The goals will increase month by month, all adding together to provide evidence that what I believe is simply not true.

Let me show you what I mean with my fitness goals for the first quarter:

January — I know it’s always a struggle after the excesses of Christmas, so my aim in January is to get back into my pre Christmas routine and feeling comfortable with it.

February — I will be upping my fitness training. So, each day I will wither add in another exercise session (I currently choose from walking, weighs, yoga or the exercise bike), so that at least 5 days a week I am doing two sessions a day.

March — I will add another type of exercise to the tool box. This could be running or swimming, or, if I have had the vaccine, back in the gym.

Sustainability

How am I feeling about this? Interestingly, sustainability is one of my limiting beliefs: that I can come up with great ideas, but find it hard to sustain the work that goes into making them come to life. I can set myself exercise goals but never quite manage to make them happen on a regular basis. Setting myself gentle and obtainable goals that accrue will help prove to myself that yes, I can sustain these levels of work, training and studying.

Putting these goals at the top of my agenda means that I will priorities those actions that tie in with these, and then destroy those limiting beliefs by default. Think of all the evidence I will have by the end of the year!

Do you have some limiting beliefs that you’d finally like to put behind you, whatever the date? Visit Scarlet Thinking to find out if we’d make a good fit to work together.

Originally published at https://www.scarletthinking.com on December 15, 2020.