“There’s something wrong with me”

“I should never fail”

“I need to be perfect”

“People are evil”

“It’s all about money”

“You have to work hard to have money”

“Being rich is evil”

“All men are pigs”

“All women are bitches”

“Sex is sinful”

“You have to strike before they do”

You have certainly already heard about limiting beliefs, haven’t you? Everybody is talking about them – for a good reason. But what are they actually?

Well, the name says it just right: beliefs that limit us.

They are statements about life that we are emotionally invested in. They color our thoughts, feelings and choices. They skew our perceptions and influence our actions – so that the consequences we get reinforce them. Even if we intellectually understand that a belief is false, it still has emotional power over us.

If you have a limiting belief, your life experience will seem to be a living proof for its legitimacy. You will absolutely buy into it, and questioning it will seem ridiculous. You will probably get angry and offended by any suggestions to test its validity.

That’s only natural. We develop limiting beliefs as a response to frustrating events in an effort to protect ourselves from future pain. Thus any suggestion to question them seems to us like:

a suggestion to leave our safety and get burned again;

the person suggesting it has no understanding of what we’ve gone through.

The sad part is, that by sticking to our limiting beliefs, we give up on any hope to live our lives fully. We also push away the people who would like to show us something better.

There are at least two ways in which limiting beliefs perpetuate themselves and dictate our life experience: Read more …