One of the most transformative steps you can take toward exploring your full potential in any area of performance is identifying and overcoming your limiting beliefs. These subconscious narratives often show up as cognitive distortions via our inner critic. By identifying these limiting beliefs, you open the door to being able to go out of your comfort zone and accelerate your growth.
What Are Limiting Beliefs?
Limiting beliefs are convictions you hold about yourself, others, or the world that constrain your actions and possibilities. They are shaped early in life by our past experiences and influences. Common examples include thoughts like “I don’t measure up,” “I don’t have what it takes,” or “Success is easier for others.” We may not even be aware that these beliefs are triggering our mental and emotional state and that’s why they can be so disempowering.
How to Identify Limiting Beliefs?
Increasing self-awareness is always the first step in overcoming limiting beliefs. We can’t fix what we don’t know is there. Without awareness, our beliefs continue to operate in the background, influencing our decisions and behaviors on autopilot. The goal is to bring these subconscious narratives into conscious awareness, so you can challenge and reframe them. One of the best ways to increase your self-awareness is to pay attention to when you experience a red flag emotion such as anger, fear, anxiety, frustration, sadness or resentment. Use emotions as feedback signals to pause and take a few moments to reflect. What am I thinking that is causing my emotional state? Your internal dialogue reveals a lot about your beliefs. When you can unpack the thinking that’s going on in your mind you can start to investigate whether you have supportive thoughts or self sabotaging thoughts.
Examples of Limiting Beliefs in Different Areas of Life
- Career: I’m not skilled enough to get a promotion.
- Wealth: I’ll always have a hard time making enough money.
- Personal Relationships: People won’t like the real me, so I should keep my distance.
- Relationship with Self: I’m not good enough as I am.
- Personal Growth: It’s too late for me to change or learn new things.
- Leadership: I don’t have what it takes to lead others.
How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs
The first step to overcoming limiting beliefs is awareness. That takes some work. We need to cultivate the ability to be mindful of how you are feeling in and around our daily experiences both at work and in our personal lives. Often we stay stuck with thoughts bouncing around in our minds, which is unproductive. We need the ability to stop and look at what’s going on inside ourselves and get interested in why am I thinking this way and doing things this way? This is how we use curiosity and reflection to break out of our automatic ways of being and doing. We can start to see where we get triggered and hooked into reactive self-sabotaging and limiting beliefs.
This type of discipline around checking in and bringing awareness to our internal experience teaches us to understand our emotions as feedback signals. When we tune into a process of investigation and reflection we can process and gain insight into where our limiting beliefs are impacting us the most and start to change the automatic mode of reactivity towards proactively managing a belief system that helps us go after the results that we want.
Ready to Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs?
If you’re ready to understand what’s holding you back, this guided meditation can help. It will help you uncover beliefs that may be limiting your potential. Click here to get the meditation
Ready to take the next step in your high-performance journey? Work with a coach to uncover what’s holding you back and move past your limiting beliefs. Book a free consultation with us to get started
Liane Wansbrough | High-Performance Leadership Coach
Liane Wansbrough is a High Performance Leadership Coach who empowers clients with an inside-out approach to leadership. Specializing in mindset strategy, she helps high achievers enhance performance, self-leadership, and team dynamics through sustainable, feedback-driven growth.
