Identifying Limiting Beliefs

There are plenty of ways to discover your limiting beliefs.

And it matters! The POSITIVE and the NEGATIVE things you learned as a child are very definitely going to be affecting your behavior even now, unless you’ve taken some action to root them out and change them.

They’re certainly going to stop the process of manifestation!

And you’re not just dealing with the things you know you believe right now – you’re dealing with the things you don’t know you believe, the things you picked up in childhood.

In my early working life, I’m sure I had a limiting belief that to succeed in my job, I had to spend more time and effort to get greater productivity, and indeed to get the job done. I was the one who spent hours in the office when everybody else had gone home. I was the one who went in at weekends to “finish the job off”.

(Come to think of it, I still have this belief. Time to change it…)

What I realize now, looking back, is that I really believed that to succeed you had to try hard, you have to work hard, and this was all underpinned by a belief that “the more hours you work the more you can get done” – even though this was obviously not true as my productivity declined at about 9 PM in the evening (I kid you not!)

But gloriously unaware of these limiting beliefs, I soldiered on. It was a different life, one I’m glad to have given up, I have to say!

Manifestation: find and destroy limiting beliefs

But just how do we stop limiting beliefs running our lives?

What an interesting question!

Well, start here: Limiting beliefs are assumptions about reality that are not true.

Even though you believe them to be true, in reality they are not true. You can see how this kind of thought process is going to throw you off course when you’re trying to achieve anything, or manifest anything.

You’re not working in a frame of reference based on reality.

Your perception of the world and what’s really going on in the world are fundamentally different things .

However, you won’t be able to eliminate every limiting belief you have. Good job you don’t need to, then! The important thing is to eliminate the beliefs that stop you manifesting whatever you desire.

The Power Of Observation

One way to find your limiting beliefs is by observation. Another is to be mindful. When you’re mindful, you tend to notice flaws in your reality or logic more readily. You tend to notice where your beliefs do not connect with the objective reality around you.

Of course to do this you have to overcome your own prejudice and your own tendency to remain stuck in the comfort zone which your beliefs create for you.

The idea behind observation is to spot how your way of looking at the world takes some situation or reality or event and distorts it in some way to fit in with what you believe about yourself and the world around you.

So if you want to manifest money, but you’re convinced you come from a poor background, and you haven’t dealt with how that affects you – well, good luck with your manifestation! (You’ll need it!)

Manifestation Success: Be Open To New Information 

A closed-minded attitude leaves us stuck where we are in life.

Being willing to consider the idea that other people might have a share of the true reality of what’s going on in the world is a great step to identifying your own limiting beliefs.

What you’re effectively doing is using the experience and beliefs of others to test how your own beliefs stand up. If you’re open to the possibility that others might be right and you might be wrong, you might also make a massive leap forward towards identifying your own limiting beliefs.

Tony Robbins is a man who’s spoken many times of the power of adopting other outstanding people’s successful behaviors and attitudes to eliminate your own. And the advantage is – it’s QUICK!

He goes so far as to say that you can simply put more successful patterns in as overlays, over the top of your own unsuccessful patterns.

And remember that being open to new attitudes and beliefs doesn’t mean just being open to the ones you like or approve of.

It means being open to absolutely anything, including the ideas you don’t like. Yes – it’s challenging!!!

To be curious about ideas that seem uncomfortable, as well as the ones that seem comfortable, is a great step forward in terms of your personal development.

And that’s because it’s the ideas and experiences which make you feel uncomfortable that offer you the greatest possibility for growth. (Changing beliefs.)

However, you don’t have to accept every new idea – you can always reject them if you choose. And so you should, because being selective about the beliefs you take on means you’re in control of your life.

Try Out New Ideas and Information

The only way to genuinely test a new belief systems is to try it out.

Suppose that you’ve identified some area of your belief system where you sense you might be inhibiting or limiting yourself, and you’re going to try and change it. You might simply want to eliminate a belief, or you might want to change a behavior, or try something new.

Whatever it is, the bad news is that you need to try it out for at least 30 days – doing it for a limited time will not help you embed it as a new behavior pattern, and it won’t help you discover if it’s right for you.

Probably all that will happen is that you’ll feel uncomfortable and then stop trying! It takes time to change these beliefs and feel comfortable with them.