Overcoming Limiting Beliefs
original recording: August 26, 2021 (below is a transcription of the video)
Hello and welcome to this Coaching Moment Conversation!
(transcription) If you are here live, I'd love for you to pop in a comment and say Hi. And if you're here on the replay, welcome to you as well! It's good to have you here.
Today we are talking about overcoming limiting beliefs. It is one of my favorite topics. I will tell you more about why shortly. If this is your first time catching the Coaching Moment Conversation, my name is Angie Robinson, and I am a leadership and a life coach. I help individuals, teams and organizations maximize their confidence and their performance by helping to remove barriers, set goals, and really elevate self-awareness.
I have over 20 years of leadership experience myself. I do focus mostly on leadership coaching and development, but everything I talk about with my approach really applies to everything in life. I have been in a leadership position for pretty much my entire career in the area of Human Resources. I have coached leaders and I've helped organizations grow their cultures and their leadership development. So that is what I bring to the table. I also bring to the table my love of Disney. If you know me at all, you know that I am a huge Disney fan. I use that for inspiration for the work that I do.
I do these Coaching Moment Conversations because the self-awareness work that I do, I use in my coaching. I think it's beautiful stuff.
I want to bring some of those concepts and tools to you in these bite size pieces. I do a lot of teaching in here, and hopefully you can apply some of this. Coaching is when we really go deep in these topics. If you haven't seen the other Coaching Moment Conversations (we are on the fifth one), you can check those out on my Facebook page under videos or head over to my website.
So, grab a notebook, this is a good one. We are talking about overcoming limiting beliefs. As we are talking today, I want you to be thinking in your head about limiting beliefs you might have. My hope is after we have this conversation, you will go and do the work for yourself.
I'm going to give you some thoughts and some prompts around that. But that's the intention here. As we're going along, if you have comments or questions, please pop them in here. We all learn from each other.
As I say - self-awareness is pixie dust for making the most of our lives.
And in particular, if you are a leader or an entrepreneur. Self-awareness is what elevates you as a leader and as an entrepreneur.
Why do I say this is a big one? Because I honestly do spend a lot of my time with clients on this topic. So much of what holds us back is really in our mind. We spend a lot of time on it. That's why I feel like this is one of those topics that is a game changer.
Research shows that we have about 50,000 - 70,000 thoughts a day.
That's a lot going on in our brains. And I found a study that says that about 95% of those thoughts are negative. Now, we aren't aware of all those thoughts. There's a lot of things happening that we aren't aware of, but that is a lot for our brains to take. When we have those thoughts, when we hold one of those thoughts as true, then that's a belief. Our thoughts are beliefs.
Where do those beliefs come from?
There are a lot of different places that we get our beliefs. It might be our childhood, how we were raised, where we were raised or societal norms. It can even be things that people say. A comment that someone says can get stuck in your brain and become a belief that we hold as true. Also – beliefs can also come from our life experiences and our education. You might have additional thoughts about where beliefs come from, but those are some of the things that I think about.
So, we know what a belief is. A belief is a thought that we hold as true.
A limiting belief is when that thought or that conviction that we hold as true and absolute is holding us back. That's where the word limiting comes in.
The limiting belief is typically a barrier that causes us to miss out on the things that we want.
You might have heard it referred to as the stories we tell ourselves or the tapes we play in our heads. Again - it's a thought or belief that holds us back.
The thing with limiting beliefs is that nobody is exempt from them. We can have the most successful leader in the world who has limiting beliefs. We're all on the same playing field with that. Which might be good news, I'm not sure. But the magic is when we can bring awareness to that and what do we do with them. That is a total game-changer. We all have them and we can all change them and do something about them. Here are some common limiting beliefs you might hear from leaders:
Leaders have all the answers.
Good leaders never show signs of weakness.
Other common ones I'll hear are:
I'm too old to…
I'm too young to…
Others can do it better.
I don’t have enough experience.
I was told X, therefore I can't do y. (You can insert all the words).
Oftentimes (but not always) the limiting belief will have words in it such as: always, never, can't, won't, should or don't.
From the Facebook comments: “It's more than just self-doubt.” Response: Yes, for sure. The limiting belief is the thought. The self-doubt is a feeling or an action that comes from the thought. So, the self-doubt comes from the limiting belief.
I want to show you this image. I am not going to spend much time on it. This could be a whole other session or teaching on its own. This is called The Model and this is what I used in a lot of my coaching. You may have heard this concept before in in different terms, but basically what I want to show you is what is called the “T line” or thoughts. That is where our beliefs go. All of our thoughts create our feelings. What we think about something creates a feeling within us. It’s from that feeling that drives our actions or inaction, what we do or we don't do, which creates our results. It is quite amazing.
Let’s pick a thought: “I'll never be as good as [insert name] at presenting.” Let's use that as my limiting belief.
In this example, I believe it's true. I'm holding it to my core. That thought of “I will never be as good as [insert name] at presenting” might make me feel defeated or deflated. If I'm that feeling of defeated, what actions or inactions will I take? I might kind of stall out. I might spend way too much time searching online on how to be a better presenter. I might get caught up in a hamster wheel. I might decide not to do any presenting at all anymore because I'm never going to be as good as [insert name].
When I take the actions and inactions – that will create what is going to happen as a result, which might be that I will never be as good as because I'm not doing anything to get better. Our results always give us evidence for the thought. My result is that I'm not taking action to be better. Therefore, I am giving evidence to the thought.
When we allow our limiting beliefs to drive our actions or our inactions, the world is missing out on the best version of you. When I say the world, I mean the world. Your team, your clients, your customers, your family, your friends.
When we allow limiting beliefs to drive our actions or in action, the world is missing out on the best version of you.
How do you identify your limiting beliefs?
We want to bring awareness to them.
The first thing is to be open to examining limiting beliefs. There are a few ways to identify within yourself where there's probably a limiting belief that you should explore:
If there is something that you've been wanting to do or there is something that you want to say or there's a certain way you want to show up, but something is holding you back. You're not quite sure what that thing is, but you're not doing the thing. Most likely there is some sort of limiting belief there worth exploring.
There could be a situation where you just feel uncomfortable. You get that queasy feeling or a little uncomfortable. There's probably a limiting belief underneath that.
There is a statement or a comment that someone has said to you recently or back in your past. Whenever that sticks with you, that kind of keeps bubbling up. There is a limiting belief tied to that.
From the Facebook comments: “I think it's so important to be comfortable acknowledging that we all have them, owning them and finding out how to overcome them.” Response: Absolutely. Like I said, no one is exempt from this. We are all humans. We have a human brain and acknowledging and doing something is where it's at.
Okay, so you've got the uncomfortable feeling - you know that there's something probably there. Here's what you do next (this is what I do). It’s what I call a thought download.
Basically, that is getting all the stuff out of your brain onto paper. Or you can talk into your phone using the Voice Memo app – or try dictating on your computer – but somehow getting them out of here (head) onto paper. You just brain dump every thought you’re having about it. It doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn't have to be neat. It's just getting it all out there. Once you do that, you can go back and read it, and you can pick out the thought that you've written down that are probably limiting beliefs. That is what I suggest as a way to identify what is a limiting belief.
You might have a lot of them. I do suggest that you pick out the one or two that are rising to the top because you don't want to get overwhelmed or judge yourself. You want to just pick out the one or two.
When I do this in coaching, oftentimes my client will be telling me things, and I am able pull out the ones that really are limiting beliefs.
I'm going to give you a couple of personal examples.
I have been doing workshops and facilitating for over 20 years at this point – and I get nervous all the time. And when I identified what my limiting beliefs were or what they are (because it's an evolution), it has been things like: people don't want to hear what I have to say or other people do this better.
Here's another example of a statement that somebody told me that I then made mean something and held it as true. I was the Vice President of Human Resources, helping to grow an organization. I was told by my boss (and this wasn't intended to be bad or anything), that I was too emotional. That was the statement. Now what he actually meant? I could make assumptions. What I made that mean was that I'm a weak leader. And I held that to be a belief. What would happen? I did not show up the way I wanted to because I was so worried about appearing or being too emotional and then appearing weak. I was probably either appearing weak or feeling weak because I wasn't living up to my best leadership self.
Now you've identified your limiting beliefs. What do you do from here?
Let me share you with my thoughts. Here are the things that I think will help you overcome the limiting beliefs.
Get curious.
Curiosity is amazing for so many things. Ask yourself questions. Ask: is this really true? What would somebody else think about the statement? Do I think it's true? What if I'm wrong? Just start asking those challenging questions.
What will start to happen? Most likely is it will start to deflate the belief a little bit. When we start to challenge a little bit, and it kind of minimizes the magnitude a bit. It doesn't erase it, but it starts to deflate the enormity of it.
Edit the belief.
We get to write our stories. This is true. We all get to decide where we go and what the end looks like for us. We are the editors of our story. Literally write down your limiting belief and then write a new one.
Here is the key: It has to be believable. It can't be something where you've gone from zero to 100 and this new belief is so out there that you don't believe it. That is not going to be sustainable and work. It has to be believable.
Let’s go back to my example of “you are too emotional”. I could replace that with “too emotional isn't a thing.” or “I'm a human. Humans have emotions.” I could be pretty matter of fact like that. Or I could say “my emotions help me be a stronger leader.” A t the time, I might not have believe that. I do now, but at the time, I didn’t believe that. Then you can do what we call a ladder thought. Something like “I am becoming a person who believes that my emotions will make me stronger.” Something believable is key here.
Make it visible.
Something like sticky notes (I have sticky notes everywhere). You could do a reminder on your phone where pops up a reminder once an hour that has that new belief on it. You do create a picture and make it your screensaver. There are so many ways that you can make it visible. Making it visible really is helpful to get it kind of ingrained in your brain.
Comment from the Facebook comments: “It (they) can be overwhelming to the point of paralysis.” Meaning that the belief itself can be overwhelming to the point of paralysis.
Practice.
When our brain believes something, those beliefs create their own neural pathways that can get very, very deep, especially depending how long you've had this belief. Your neural pathways can be very, very deep.
We have the ability to create a new neural pathway with our new belief. It's not just at the snap of a finger. We have to retrain our brain. Practicing the belief is important. When you know that that limiting belief comes up in your brain, you just say, “thank you very much brain, but not today.” Just keep practicing.
The more practice that you do, the more the belief will happen.
Believe.
If you don't actually believe that new belief at some point, it's all for not. So how do you know when you are in belief? Your actions will reflect it and your results will reflect it as well.
From the Facebook comments: “Once you identify it (the limiting belief), it's easy to obsess over it. And the fear is paralyzing.” Response: This is where you need a coach to help with that, because it's a very good point. Right now, we're spending 30 minutes and I'm spewing all the stuff at you. The work, however, takes time, and you can obsess or get overwhelmed. if you really start to think “I have all these limiting beliefs”, that's not going to be helpful at all. Pick the one that is holding you back from something, and that's where the work begins.
Look for evidence.
So again, when you start to practice this new belief and you actually are believing it, you will start to see evidence for it to be true. It might take you looking for the evidence to start with, but you will start to see it. We always find evidence for the thoughts that we're thinking. Test it. It is true.
Question from Facebook comments: “Is it better to focus on the “easiest” one to overcome to “check it off the list”, or the BIGGEST one to overcome?” Response: I can't answer that question. Here's what I would say. Only you can answer that question. That's a really good question. I say focus on the one that is bubbling up the most. So, whether that's easiest or biggest, who knows? It could be either. It could be neither. But I say the one that's bubbling up the most. Now, if you want to just “test the waters” a little bit, sure, you could pick an easy one.
From the Facebook comments: “I feel like doing the little ones will help you gain confidence and build momentum.” Response: It is individual. That's why I don't want to say what to do, because it has to feel right for you.
Always know you don't have to go it alone. There are people, coaches and friends that are here to partner with you and help you.
Here are a couple of reminders as we do this:
All thoughts are optional.
Do you believe that to be true? It is true. We often have thoughts that we hold as true. We believe them. But they're all optional. And that is where the true work comes in.
Give yourself grace.
This addresses how you can get overwhelmed and get paralyzed through this. Give yourself grace. Here's what our brains like to do. “Oh, my gosh. Why was I thinking that? I am such a loser! How could I even ever have thought that?” We judge ourselves so much. Don't do that. It's not helpful. It doesn't serve you at all. So, give yourself grace and watch the judgment.
Practice patience.
Like I've already said, doing this limiting belief work does take time. It is worth every second, but it takes time. So just practice patience.
Get comfortable with the uncomfortable.
And I always say this. Anytime we're doing self-awareness work, it can get uncomfortable. You’ve got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It's where the magic happens - outside of your comfort zone.
I'm going to close with this quote. “The only limits in your life are the ones you create with your mind.” I believe it to be true.
Hopefully this gets your brain thinking a little bit. You will hopefully start to notice. You might think “I just had one of those limiting beliefs I heard Angie talking about.” It just gives you something to think about and work on.
I am here for you. I would love to help you with this work. Reach out to me if you want to stay connected, You can go to my website at www.angie-robinson.com.
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Connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. Shoot me a DM anytime if you want to just talk through some of the stuff. I am here for it. I am here for you.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for all of your participation as well. Have a great day. Thanks!