8 Limiting Beliefs That Cause Most Life Problems

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…

1. 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.
2. 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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!

http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/8-limiting-beliefs-cause-life-problems/

11 Signs You Have The Grit You Need To Succeed

There are a ton of qualities that can help you succeed, and the more carefully a quality has been studied, the more you know it’s worth your time and energy.

Angela Lee Duckworth was teaching seventh grade when she noticed that the material wasn’t too advanced for any of her students. They all had the ability to grasp the material if they put in the time and effort. Her highest performing students weren’t those who had the most natural talent; they were the students who had that extra something that motivated them to work harder than everyone else.

Angela grew fascinated by this “extra something” in her students and, since she had a fair amount of it herself, she quit her teaching job so that she could study the concept while obtaining a graduate degree in psychology at UPenn.

Her study, which is ongoing, has already yielded some interesting findings. She’s analyzed a bevy of people to whom success is important: students, military personnel, salespeople, and spelling bee contestants, to name a few. Over time, she has come to the conclusion that the majority of successful people all share one critical thing—grit.

Grit is that “extra something” that separates the most successful people from the rest. It’s the passion, perseverance, and stamina that we must channel in order to stick with our dreams until they become a reality.

Developing grit is all about habitually doing the things that no one else is willing to do. There are quite a few signs that you have grit, and if you aren’t doing the following on a regular basis, you should be.

1. You have to make mistakes, look like an idiot, and try again, without even flinching. In a recent study at the College of William and Mary, they interviewed over 800 entrepreneurs and found that the most successful among them tend to have two critical things in common: They’re terrible at imagining failure and they tend not to care what other people think of them. In other words, the most successful entrepreneurs put no time or energy into stressing about their failures as they see failure as a small and necessary step in the process of reaching their goals.

2. You have to fight when you already feel defeated. A reporter once asked Muhammad Ali how many sit-ups he does every day. He responded, “I don’t count my sit-ups, I only start counting when it starts hurting, when I feel pain, cause that’s when it really matters.” The same applies to success in the workplace. You always have two choices when things begin to get tough: you can either overcome an obstacle and grow in the process or let it beat you. Humans are creatures of habit. If you quit when things get tough, it gets that much easier to quit the next time. On the other hand, if you force yourself to push through it, the grit begins to grow in you.

3. You have to make the calls you’re afraid to make. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do because we know they’re for the best in the long-run: fire someone, cold call a stranger, pull an all-nighter to get the company server back up, or scrap a project and start over. It’s easy to let the looming challenge paralyze you, but the most successful people know that in these moments, the best thing they can do is to get started right away. Every moment spent dreading the task subtracts time and energy from actually getting it done. People that learn to habitually make the tough calls stand out like flamingos in a flock of seagulls.

4. You have to keep your emotions in check. Negative emotions will challenge your grit every step of the way. While it’s impossible not to feel your emotions, it’s completely under your power to manage them effectively and to keep yourself in a position of control. When you let your emotions overtake your ability to think clearly, it’s easy to lose your resolve. A bad mood can make you lash out or stray from your chosen direction just as easily as a good mood can make you overconfident and impulsive.

5. You have to trust your gut. There’s a fine line between trusting your gut and being impulsive. Trusting your gut is a matter of looking at decisions from every possible angle, and when the facts don’t present a clear alternative, you believe in your ability to choose; you go with what looks and feels right.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbradberry/2016/01/05/11-signs-you-have-the-grit-you-need-to-succeed/