How to Break Out from a Limiting Belief

What is holding you back from your own dreams and aspirations?

• Do you want to improve your finances? 
• Would you like to have better relationships? 
• How about expanding your creativity?
• Making a greater contribution to the world? 

Whatever you want, begin with what you believe. Your individual version of reality influences every choice you make. It colors and shapes every goal you reach for or turn away from, even what dreams you dare to have.

Changing limiting beliefs about your lot in life can open doors you may not have known you closed.

In the midst of beauty and abundance, you can spend your entire life wrestling with circumstances and situations without ever discovering the fixed ideas that keep you stuck in them. Beyond self-defeating beliefs, the possibilities are infinite!

The Top 10 Big Ideas

1 | Don't Just Do Something; Stand There

Before you embark on a new journey or make an important life decision, stop!  It's easy to make these choices unconsciously. Often they aren't even decisions so much as knee-jerk reactions from hidden self-defeating beliefs. When you can be present and feel good where you are, you free yourself to take inspired action instead of just bouncing off the walls of events and circumstances.

2 | Discern and Use the Difference Between Acceptance and Resignation

To accept means to receive with consent. It bears no resemblance to resignation. Imagine someone throws you a ball. If you catch it, you can do whatever you like with it. Life is like that. If you accept a moment as it is, you can do whatever you like in the next moment. You can reach for anything you want, move in any direction you choose. Acceptance is actually the foundation for empowered change.

Resignation is the state of giving up. Another big difference is that acceptance feels pretty good. Resignation, giving up your own heart's desire, really hurts.

3 | Uncover Your Limiting Beliefs

 A belief is anything you accept as real or true. It may be your own perception or something you heard or read. A limiting belief is something that seems true too but blocks your happiness and success. It cannot be true if it is limiting. It cannot be limiting if it is true.

We harbor all sorts of beliefs. I cannot imagine the size of the database. You can't challenge them all. But if you eliminate the ones that cause emotional pain or crush your heart's desire you will be a very successful, happy camper.

4 | Follow that Feeling

Painful emotions provide strong clues to help you find limiting beliefs. Pay attention to them. Emotions are the rocket fuel of manifestation. They have a profound influence on what happens in your life. For example, the choices you make and the actions you take when you are angry or afraid lead down a very different road from the choices and actions you take when you are happy.

Feelings give our lives color. Like a kaleidoscope, they change rapidly. No problem—unless they are painful and they come and stick like glue. Then they disrupt your life. Sometimes it seems as if an emotion like anger or guilt has actually taken over like some kind of demon feeling.

5 | Explore and Dismantle Misery-Making Beliefs

What do you do when you discover one? When you see that you are operating under the influence of a limiting belief it's tempting to spin it into a better belief. Don't do that. Even though  lots of experts recommend turning them into a positive beliefs or re-framing them, the problem is you will always know you did that.

Become  a seeker of truth instead; you never have to spin it!

It takes some courage. You've got to accept what you see as you go. You have to embrace confusion. It's a very high state in which you discover that what you believe is not so, before you know what is. Most of us did not grow up celebrating confusion, but if you allow it, even welcome it, you will move through the fog to new clarity.

Always question any form of unhappiness. Here are five good ones from Bruce Di Marsico, who originated the Option Method.

How are you feeling that you don't like feeling? Let's pick anger as our example, but it could be fear, guilt—any feeling you get stuck in.

• What are you angry about?
• Why are you angry about that? The answer to this question will be a belief.
• Do you believe that? If you answer 'yes' go to the next question.
• What are you concerned would happen if you did not believe that?

When you discover that something you have believed is simply not true, you dissolve feelings like fear and resentment that have seemed inevitable, often for years. The truth really does set you free.

 6 | Tap Into Desire

One of the most common, and severely limiting beliefs that I encounter in my work is the notion that we need to feel bad in order to motivate ourselves. Anyone ever tell you, If you feel bad enough, you'll do something about it?

It sort of works, but not very well and the toll is too high. Desire is much more powerful.  Desire, especially happy, curious desire is the strongest motivation there is.

Did you ever watch a baby learning how to walk? Desire in motion! They just want to walk. They don't sit around in their diapers feeling bad about not having mastered it yet. They don't feel guilty about not trying hard enough. They don't get angry with the world for making it so hard. They just get up and do it again. They fall down a lot, but over and over they rise up and do it again -- because they want to!

If you do not make your desire painful, you never have to give up on anything. That's good because there isn't anything much more painful than trying to crush the desire out of you own heart.  

7 | Take a Break from Judging Yourself and Others

 What if we were all doing the best we can with what we know and believe at the time? Except for the truly deranged, I have never seen an exception to this idea.

Even if we do things that harm ourselves or others, it's the best we can come up with at that moment. The good news is that that can change in a flash with new insight. When you stop judging yourself and everyone else you will release a vast amount of energy to use in a more productive way. If you seek to understand rather than judge, there's a bonus; understanding is even more powerful than forgiving.

8 | Authorize Yourself To Be the Expert in Your Own Life

No one knows more than you do about you. Even if you seek the advice of experts, like some of the knowledgeable teachers here, you have to be the one who decides which advice to follow and what to steer clear of. No amount of credentials, degrees, licenses or certificates will validate who you are. Sometimes you have to flat out claim the authority to be you. No one else can give that to you. You, you are the one!

9 | Lose the Faith

No faith is required in order to breakout from a limiting, self-defeating belief. The goal here is to believe less, not more.

Sometimes its hard to abandon your faith in something you always assumed was true. You may fear looking foolish. You may also resist that confusion part. We could come up with a bunch of reasons to cling to a false belief. There is one strong reason to break out from a limiting one though. In the vast, confusing unknown, you will enter the space of miracles!

10 | Don't Worry, Be Happy

I know of no greater limiting belief than the popular one that it is good to feel bad now so you can feel good later. At the end of all our desire is the hope for happiness. The miracle is that you can be happy now, even before you fix all of the things you believe are wrong with you and our world.

To Your Success and Happiness!