Creating Lasting Transformation: Recognize Limiting Beliefs (part V)
This is part 5 of 6 in a series about the process for making lasting transformation through intentional exploration and conscious choice-making. Read part 4 here.
With clarity on the values that underlie your current behaviors, it’s time to uncover and address the biggest roadblock for lasting transformation — limiting beliefs. With a limiting belief, you’re in a mindset that you have to choose between two opposing forces.
What makes a limiting belief particularly restrictive is that you assume that it is true — that what you believe is, in fact, a fact. Limiting beliefs aren’t just doubts about your abilities (though they can be).
The limiting beliefs that often stand in the way of change tend to be unsupported conflations such as “creativity can’t happen on a schedule” or self-created and -imposed rules like “I couldn’t ask for more time off, I just got back from vacation.”
As a leadership coach, when I hear clients express either/or thinking, it's a red flag for me that a limiting belief might be present. By asking questions and fully uncovering the belief, it gives the client the opportunity to fully examine it and determine “do I really believe this?” or “is this really true?” It’s so common that we’re operating according to an assumed set of rules or facts, and being invited to uncover them and even question them can be liberating.
As you sit with your goal for change and knowledge of the values underlying your current behavior, imagine making the behavior changes that would enable your goal. What fears arise? From there, continue to peel the onion to identify the limiting beliefs baked into those fears. Here are different signals that indicate you might have stumbled on a limiting belief:
Use of language like "I can't" or "I shouldn't" (or a sense of the impossible)
A sense of resignation (“that’s just how it is”)
Conflated either/or thinking (“either I can have flexibility or discipline”)
Hard rules for how things should be (“I can only be creative when I have hours of free time”)
The key takeaway here is that what we believe to be true can create conflict with the change we want to make. By identifying our limiting beliefs and big assumptions, we can start to challenge them in a way that makes space for our new goal.
In the next installment, I’ll share the fifth and final step in the process, which is to create experiments to challenge your limiting beliefs. Testing your assumptions will allow you to change your mindset, clearing the block that previously prevented lasting transformation.