Live Your Best Life By Overcoming Your Limiting Beliefs

Are limiting beliefs stopping you from living your best life?

Are you where you want to be in all areas of your life? If not, you might want to take a long hard look at your beliefs.

You might be surprised, or not so surprised, to find that your mindset is stopping you from living your best life.

Good news, though, those limiting beliefs that have cultivated over your lifetime are all in your head.

Why is this good news? Because this means you can change them. You can replace them with new beliefs that benefit you and empower you to live your best life.

What are Belief Systems?

Beliefs are conditioned perceptions that form from your childhood through your experiences. How you interpret and emotionalise those experiences over time building the foundations of your belief system.

Your experiences come from those around you, such as your family and friends. This can be how they behaved, the language they used, and how they spoke about their view on the world, forming “ideas” or the beginning of your beliefs.

Throughout your life, you will collect evidence and references that prove these “ideas” to be true. You will repeatedly think of these ideas and act according to them, over and over until you accept these “ideas” to be the truths that shape your life.

Your beliefs will determine how you process thoughts, how you act towards others, how you deal with situations, and how you view the world as a whole. Your beliefs make up your mindset which cultivates your truth and perception of your reality.

Beliefs also form your expectations which better help you understand yourself, those around you and the world around you. Your beliefs are so powerful that they influence your level of intelligence and impact of the decisions you make.

Your beliefs form your core values and will determine the “flow of your questions” you will ask yourself, helpful and unhelpful. Solving problems or creating problems, influencing your ability to think creatively, constructively and critically.

Side Note: If you would like to learn more about beliefs and what type of beliefs there are check out this article from IQMatrix which goes into much more detail.

What are Limiting Beliefs?

Limiting beliefs are the labels you give yourself, the limitations you put on yourself and even the expectations you have of yourself. These labels, limitations, and expectations hold you back from achieving your goals and living your best life.

Possible limiting believes could be:

• “I am not good enough to do this…”
• “I don’t deserve to be successful…”
• “I am a failure…”  
• “I can’t be my real self, or I’ll be judged.”
• “I can’t ask for what I want because I may get rejected.”
• “I can’t pursue my dreams because I may fail.”

How limiting are they! You are not going to live your best life with these thoughts rolling around upstairs!

How to Identify Your Limiting Beliefs

Identifying your limiting beliefs won’t be an easy task; it will take a little insight and self-development.

Your limiting beliefs usually appear when you confront a difficult situation or a challenging task and will be the reason why you don’t achieve your goal.

Potential limiting belief manifestations:

• Indulging in perfectionism
• Negative self-talk
• Worrying about making mistakes
• Worrying about failure
• Unhelpful habits
• Procrastination
• Complaining
• Making excuses

Reflect & Identify

Take a moment to sit down and really think about the above limiting belief manifestations. Make a list of all the limiting beliefs that come to mind when you think about the goals you want to achieve. What is STOPPING you from creating your best life? Now write them down!

Questions to ask yourself:

• Why do I think this task or goal is hard or too difficult?
• What is stopping me? Why?
• What unhelpful habits am I indulging?
• Why can’t I overcome certain challenges to achieve my goal?
• How are these limiting beliefs preventing me from achieving my goals and stopping me from living my best life?

Then ask yourself:

• How did this limiting belief manifest?
• Why am I holding on to this belief?
• How does this belief benefit me?

Side note: Your brain is amazing and wants to stop you from feeling emotional pain, and sometimes this means forming limiting beliefs that prevent you from taking risks that could result in the opposite!

Tip: A great way to brain dump your thoughts is by using a mind map. I am obsessed with mind maps!

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For example:

My biggest goal is to become a Mindset Coach. I love helping people, especially people who do not have knowledge of self-development. The very thought of what it will take to achieve this goal is terrifying. The classic “what if I fail?” “I have no right helping people achieve their goals” “I have no right being successful” “I don’t deserve people to see me as an expert in mindset” “I’m not an expert!”.

All these limiting beliefs are just thoughts and stories I tell myself because of my life experience up to this point.

All false, untrue and can be reprogrammed. For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to own my own business, had this ambitious need to be more and make my mark on this world, but due to my limiting beliefs, I never took action.

Until I came across the concept of limiting beliefs, it never even crossed my mind that I had “limiting beliefs” stopping me from creating the life I desired or that it was even possible. Following these steps got me to start The Wellness Blogger and take action to turn my dreams into goals into reality.

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Understand How Your Limiting Beliefs Came Into Existence

Understand how your limiting beliefs came into existence can help you overcome and work through them.

Your limiting beliefs most likely stem from your childhood memories and experiences. WARNING: this could get painful. Sit in a quiet place with your list of limiting beliefs and dig deep into their “history”. What experience made you belief you don’t deserve to be loved? To be successful? To own your own business? To live your life the way you want to.

One of my most significant limiting beliefs was that I did not believe I deserve a happy and loving relationship. I grew up around broken families and broken relationships. I had no idea that it was even possible to have a partner who loved me for me. I had no idea that I could be with someone who appreciated my uniqueness. This limiting belief stemmed from my childhood memories that no longer serve me.

I am happy to say that after some personal growth, digging deep into why this limiting belief stopped me from living my best life, that I am now in a very loving relationship with an amazing man.

How to Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs

Look for Evidence Against Your Limiting Beliefs

You and you only have the power to overcome your limiting beliefs by looking for evidence that throws doubt upon them. As you know, these beliefs started as just ideas that over time formed into your beliefs after years of collecting evidence and references. Find evidence and references that put doubt on these beliefs; after all, they are not real just your perception.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Is this belief helping me get what I want most in life?
• Will it help me reach my goals
• What famous quotes throw doubt upon this limiting belief?
• Is this belief that accurate?
• What’s the exact opposite way of thinking about this belief?
• How is this helpful?

Adopt a New Empowering Belief

Your new empowering belief must be believable, or you will fail to cultivate enough evidence and references to make it stick.

The more evidence and references you collect over time, the stronger your new empowering belief will become and the weaker your limiting beliefs will be.

It will be a lengthy process, but the result is your mindset permanently shifting once the evidence you have collected becomes so overwhelmingly supported.

Questions to ask yourself:

• How will this new empowering belief help me to attain my goals?
• How will all this make me feel about myself?
• To what extent is this belief likely to empower me moving forward?
• What are the benefits of using this new empowering belief?

Evidence and Reference Ideas:

• Are there any stories that support the philosophy behind this new empowering belief?
• Are there any role models I could turn to that could help me strengthen this belief?
• What famous quotes could help me strengthen this belief?
• What kinds of behaviours, decisions and actions could help me strengthen this belief?

Visualise Yourself Living Your New Empowering Belief

Visualise yourself using your new empowering belief in your day-to-day life, this will help cultivate the belief into your nervous system, becoming a part of your reality.

Visualise the actions you will take, how you make your decisions, even how you will talk to yourself and others. What kind of attitude do you have? How has this new empowering belief manifested in your life?

Aligning with Your New Empowering Belief

Now that you have visualised yourself with your new empowering belief, everything else needs to be in align with your new belief.

Your lifestyle, values, thoughts, environment, and language patterns.

Questions to ask yourself:

• How must I alter my language to match this new belief?
• How must I change my environment to match this new belief?
• Do I need to develop new healthy habits that will help support this new belief?
• How must my thoughts and perspectives change to match this new belief?
• Are there any other aspects of my life that need adjusting to integrate this new belief successfully into my life?

Live Your New Empowering Belief

You did it! You identified your limiting beliefs, learned how they came into existence, found evidence against them, adopted a new empowering belief, visualised living your new belief and aligned yourself to live your best life.

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Overcoming limiting beliefs and reprogramming your reality can be challenging, but with a growth mindset and a little effort, you can transform your limiting beliefs into new empowering beliefs and live your best life.

Is it time for you to make a few changes and live your best life with your new empowering beliefs?

What are your limiting beliefs? Do you have limiting beliefs that you have overcome? What is your best take away from this post? Please leave a comment below, I love hearing from you x