Self-Sabotage Thinking
Do Limiting Beliefs Undermine Your Progress?
Too many well-motivated, talented and dedicated individuals let doubts and limiting beliefs about themselves and the world stop them from accomplishing their goals. When they run up against a limiting belief, especially if others they respect affirm the limitations, they stop in their tracks and rationalize why they should abandon their goal in favor of another.
What is a Limiting Belief?
A limiting belief is an opinion or assumption you make about yourself or the world that keeps you from taking constructive action in support of your goals and dreams. Examples of some common limiting beliefs that might be derail you:
- “Things never work out for me!”
- “I’m always the last one chosen.”
- “I’m not smart enough to go to a four-year college.”
- “I’ve never been able to figure it out, so why try now?”
- “I’ll never find the right partner, so I’m destined to be alone.”
How Do Limiting Beliefs Shape Your Behavior?
If you easily cave in to limiting beliefs, you may be your own worst enemy. You likely hold limiting beliefs about yourself and the world at the subconscious level, if not consciously as well. Maybe you don’t engage consistently, if at all, in the constructive actions you know are required because you believe you don’t deserve the rewards and respect that succeeding would bring you. You’re like Hans Christian Andersen’s “the Little Match Girl” who stood outside in the cold, looking longingly through the dining room window of some happy family sharing a delicious New Year’s Eve meal.
Do you use a your sense of injustice, shame, guilt, people-pleasing, or previous failures to rationalize giving up on your dreams?
For example do you skip the audition for the school play you want to star in and rationalize that telling yourself “it wouldn’t be fair if I got the starring role, when others clearly deserve it more. ”
[Hm? Could there be an underlying core belief of not being good enough coupled with an underlying fear of failure.]
Despite your desire to get the starring role in the school play, would your limiting beliefs about not being right for the role and not being a good enough actor trigger your fear of blowing lines and not delivering a fantastic performance? And as a result, would you skip the audition?
It’s important to note that not everyone who has limiting beliefs about what they deserve let those beliefs stop them. In their head, someone could be thinking ” I may not deserve it, but I really want to reach that goal and reap the rewards, so I’m gonna continue pursuing it.” How, you might ask, do they overcome their limiting beliefs to continue pursuing the goal?
Using hypnosis to stay in pursuit of their goal and defend against the negative self-talk is one way. When negative self-talk about why they can’t achieve their goal comes up, they go into hypnosis to connect with their Authentic Self to provide good reasons for believing that they can achieve it and inspire them with encouragement and support. (For details, see the section “How to Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs” below.
Clearly acting on your limiting beliefs is a form of self-sabotage. So unless you overcome your limiting beliefs, you will continue to sabotage your desires, goals, and dreams, and live an unfulfilled life. And it doesn’t stop there. You will likely become depressed, unmotivated, and beat yourself up for not achieving what you are truly qualified to do. You might turn to drugs, alcohol, and other addictions such as overeating, overspending, and indiscriminate sexual practices to numb the pain–trading short-term relief for greater long-term suffering.
How to Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs
You can overcome your limiting beliefs. You are not destined to suffer with them for the rest of your life. As with bad habits, like biting your nails, smoking cigarettes, eating late at night, watching too much television, endlessly playing video games, oversleeping, skipping work-outs, you can break those habits if you are willing to do what it takes, and be willing to get out of your comfort zone where the old habits and limiting beliefs reside.
To rid yourself of the limiting beliefs that are holding you back and sabotaging your good, you need to take the following steps.
- Identify the problem (issue or challenge) that you have been unable to solve.
- Describe the negative effects that continue as long as this problem persists.
- Explain how your life would improve if you solved this problem.
- Figure out which limiting belief prevents your resolution of this problem.
- Discover when, how, and why you accepted that limiting belief.
- Ask yourself if accepting the limiting belief now makes sense and serves you.
- Consciously decide whether to keep the limiting belief or rid yourself of it for good.
- Describe a new empowering belief to replace the limiting belief and resolve the problem.
- Use hypnosis to resolve the problem by replacing the limiting belief with the empowering belief.
- Reinforce and strengthen the resolution of the problem by repeatedly using hypnosis.
For details on implementing these ten steps, see the blog post “How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs to Achieve Your Goals”.
