No matter what goal you want to achieve, no matter what you think your blocks might be, or what problems you might be experiencing in your life and circumstances, everything comes back to your mind.
If you want to overcome an obstacle, you start with your mindset. If you want more success, you start with your mindset. This is because…
- What is within your control stems directly from your mind. It begins in your beliefs, which drive most of your thought patterns, giving rise to the majority of your feelings, which incline your choices and actions (or inaction), and therefore create results in your life.
- What is not within your control is still perceived and interpreted by you through the filter of your beliefs, which again drive your thought patterns, giving rise to your feelings, inclining your choices and action, therefore producing results in response to whatever is going on around you.
Your mindset is therefore key to the proactive creation of what you want in your life, and your reactive response to life happening around you.
Most people have some type of limitation in their mindset, which either shows up as problems in their life or a cap on the extent of success they experience – be it in love, relationships, health, body, money, lifestyle or career/business.
Why is My Mindset Limited?
Your mindset is simply a result of the way you have been conditioned over your lifetime. For example, from the day that you were born your mind observed the world around you. You absorbed information, conversations, experiences and outcomes, doing your best to interpret and formulate what you believed to be true about yourself, other people and life. Your current beliefs, fears and expectations were all conditioned in some way by your parents, family, teachers, peers, relationships, bosses, colleagues, friends, advertising, social media, news media and more. The broader environment of your generation, country, culture and society has had an influence on your mindset.
Throughout your life to date, your mind has always been busy making sense of all of this, to formulate the best way to get by, to be good and successful, and to avoid pain. This is true for everyone. As your mind automatically formulates beliefs in this process, some of those beliefs end up being useful and liberating, but others can be harmful and limiting.
This mindset is your unique paradigm, your “model of reality”. It is like a pair of coloured glasse you wear, which tint what you see and believe to be true, based on the unique path your life has taken and the conditioning you have experienced. As you go about your life, your mind perceives what is happening around you with your senses, filtering it all through your beliefs, and interpreting everything according to that. This then drives most of your thought patterns, feelings, communication and action, and therefore produces the results of your life.
Most issues can easily be traced back to a blocked mindset in this way – either because it is in your control and you are generating issues directly THROUGH your mindset or because of how you are perceiving something outside of your control FROM your mindset.
People become stuck in their conditioning, and like a scratched CD they keep replaying the same message, behavior, patterns and results on a loop until something or someone comes along to bump them out of it, to interrupt the pattern and to introduce a whole new mindset.
It is definitely not your fault if you have limitation in your mindset from unconscious conditioning that has taken place before you became aware of it, but once aware, it is your responsibility to do something about it – to help yourself.
Here are 8 common root-cause limiting beliefs that exist below most problems. While limiting beliefs can show up in all sorts of costumes, other versions of limiting beliefs often boil down to one or more of these…
- I am not good enough / I am not enough
- I am not loved / I am unlovable
- I am undeserving / I am not worthy
- I am incomplete
- I am unsupported
- I am not safe
- I am alone / I don’t belong
- I am nothing
How to Know What You Believe
As you glance over this list you may initially think on a conscious level that they don’t apply to you. To go beyond the surface level of your mind and what you “think”, to instead delve deeper to what you really believe:
- focus on any problems you have in your life/circumstances at present and then ask yourself if you believe any of these 8 things
- focus on any negative habits/patterns you have and then ask yourself if you believe any of these 8 things
- focus on any goals/aspirations you want to achieve but are struggling to get traction with or are not acting upon at all, and then ask yourself if you believe any of these 8 things
Being specifically focused on particular areas of your life when you consider these 8 limiting beliefs, helps you to see them at play in your life.
Finally, always remember that your actions attest to what you truly believe. So look at your actions or inaction as a footprint to trace back to what you believe to be true and real about yourself, other people and life, helping to pinpoint limitations in your mindset that need resolution in order for you to be fully happy and successful.
The Good News
While your mind may have been conditioned to believe one or more of these limiting things, the good news is that your mind can also be reconditioned to believe the exact opposite. Your mind can be trained, shaped and led to a healthy, accurate paradigm that serves you, so you can get results in all areas of your life without limitation.
As a prescription for a limiting paradigm, to rewire your mind to full health, you want to embed:
- I am good enough
- I am enough
- I am loved/lovable
- I am deserving/worthy
- I am whole/complete
- I am supported
- I am safe
- I am connected / I belong
- I am valid, valued and valuable
Important Keys for Embedding Healthy New Beliefs
- Know those limiting beliefs your mind has taken on board do not belong to you. They are accidental baggage you picked up because your mind absorbed messages from those around you, from your upbringing, education, exposure and experiences throughout life, and did it’s best to make sense of life.
- Logically see that those limiting beliefs are not true. This might feel like a push for you at first. The key is to understand that everyone is born clean and clear of limiting beliefs about themselves, others and life. No baby is born with a limiting mindset. Limiting mindsets are created. Therefore if you were born clear, and the only thing different about you now is that you got bigger as you grew into an adult, then fundamentally at your core you are still as you were born – clean and clear. Your mind is the only place that got led into a foggy and confusing paradigm of illusion, and your mind can be changed.
- Understand that your mind will absorb whatever you feed it consistently and repetitively, or with a level of intensity/conviction. That is how limiting beliefs were formed in the first place – because you heard/saw/felt something enough that you began to believe it, or because something intense/traumatic/memorable occurred and you took on a new belief as a result of how you interpreted that. Therefore, the same goes for retraining your mind, you maximise your understanding of this process and use it to your benefit now. As a grown adult with awareness and free will, your point of power is to now own your mind, to use it as a tool and to lead it, lest it owns you!
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