Limiting Beliefs & Owning Your Problems

Ok, so quick simple story. Nothing deep and meaningful. I was taking my daughter to skiing lessons while we were on holidays in Japan one day. On the way I realised I’d forgotten her helmet. Anyway, we rocked up to the school and I told the instructors I’d forgotten the helmet, can she just start the class without the helmet and I’ll come back with it. The head instructor was like “absolutely not, not helmet, no class”. Anyway, I yelled and carried on in their offices like a pork chop before finally heading off back home with my daughter, ranting and raving about what a pack of arseholes the ski school were. How they were such a pack of dicks for not budging on their rules for me.

Now, to give some context, at this point in my life I had only just started my journey of self-improvement. I was like a young padawan, and all this self-development stuff hadn’t sunk in properly and the things I know weren’t second nature yet.

So, anyway when I got home I started carrying on to my friends we were travelling with, and regaling them with the story of the massive injustice that had just occurred. Then, after listening for a while, one of my mates said “so, in other words, you fucked up”. What? No, I didn’t! They’re just being arseholes, I’d paid for the class and now they’re not letting my daughter attend! They’re stealing from me! “Yeah, but you forgot the helmet. And you can’t do the lesson without the helmet, which you knew. So, you fucked up. It’s ok dude.”

Suddenly I realised how much of a dick I was being and I almost instantly calmed down.

So, what’s my point here?

Well, I had a problem, I tried to blame others for it.

Now at this stage I was going to crap on for another 7 minutes about how owning your problems means you’re no longer giving your power to someone else, not blaming others for your own circumstances and that the one thing holding you back from getting what you want out of life is you. To be honest, that’s what this video was going to be about.

However, I remembered that learning to own your problems and shortcomings comes with a BIG road block. And telling you to just start owning your problems is like telling someone to just “get over their issues”.

Now as I was saying in my story, when I realised how much of a dick I was being I instantly calmed down. But that’s only half of what was going on here. In actuality my ego had jumped in to protect me because I was actually afraid of not being accepted by my friends because I’d made a mistake. Hence why I was blaming everyone one else. As soon as my mate said “it’s ok dude”, I realised I wasn’t going to be rejected, therefore my ego no longer needed to protect me, and I calmed down and could think straight again.

Therefore, deep down, and I mean deep deep down inside me, I had this fear that if I show vulnerability around my friends, they will reject me. This is a limiting belief. And limiting beliefs are at the core of not taking responsibility for your own actions, and giving your power away.

So, limiting beliefs are the voices in your head that are telling you that you’re not good enough.

It’s the story you tell yourself about yourself. And the story that you tell yourself will always be true for you. So, if you tell yourself that you’re not good enough, that you’re worthless, that girls don’t like you, that your too stupid to have the job you’ve always dreamed of, that will be totally true for you. However, if you tell yourself that you are good enough, that people do like you. You’ll naturally take the steps to make that a reality. Have you ever not gone to a party or social gathering because you thought that the people there don’t know you, so of course they’re not going to like you? But you bullshit yourself that you’re too tired anyway?

That’s your limiting belief taking the driving wheel and holding you back.

So, you can literally choose to be your own worst enemy or your own best friend.

Now these limiting beliefs were around when we were cavemen, to help keep us alive, to stop us doing shit that would get us killed. However, we live in an environment that is extremely safe, relatively speaking, but the same parts of our brain that stopped us from trying to strangle a sabre tooth tiger with our bare hands are now stopping us from going and talking to a pretty girl at a bar.

So anyway, there are ways to control and remove limiting beliefs. It’s basically a two-step process we run you through. It involves helping you identify what exactly is the belief that is holding you back, and making sure we get really focussed on what this is. Secondly, we run you through a separate process to disassociate yourself from the belief.

Now one thing to note regarding this process is that we’re not concerned about trying to dig up the past to find out what caused the limiting belief. Why? Because every time you bring the thing up that caused the limiting belief in the first place you make it easier for your brain to access the memory, which makes it easier to reinforce the old negative belief and behaviour.

Now this isn’t new age mumbo jumbo, this is literally just the way the brain works. For example, if I asked you to try and remember the first really bad nightmare you had when you were a kid, the first one that scared the shit out of you, and you’d never been asked that before, then it might take you a while to access that memory. However, once you’ve found that memory, you’ll find that you’ll have instant access to it whenever you want going forward.

It’s this instant access to a negative memory that we’re trying to avoid with this limiting belief process. If you’d like to know more about this process please feel free to get in contact with me.