LEONOR HERRERA

Are you having trouble making progress on your goals? Do you feel “stuck” in your career or personal life? Does it seem like you don’t advance at all no matter what you do or how hard you try? If you’re having trouble figuring out what’s behind your lack of progress, it might be some limiting beliefs you didn’t know you had.

What’s a limiting belief? It’s an unconscious limit you place on yourself in childhood. You do it because your unconscious mind thinks something is dangerous (usually because you experienced some form of emotional harm) and your rational brain wasn’t developed enough to realize that wasn’t the case. Your brain puts the belief in place to keep the harm from happening again.

Your unconscious mind did its job to protect you when you couldn’t protect yourself. Except that now you’re an adult and you’re still dragging around that belief, and it’s keeping you stuck.

As an example, let’s say that you want to put in for a promotion at work. You’re qualified for...

You’ve recognized that you have limiting beliefs and decided to overcome them. You’ve identified your limiting beliefs. What now? The next step is to reframe your limiting beliefs into empowering beliefs. You don’t have to work on all of your limiting beliefs at once; if you have identified several, it’s better to start with only one or a handful of them. Select one or more before you move on.

The Framing of Limiting Beliefs

Limiting beliefs can be identified by their framing, that is, how the belief statement is constructed. The sentence structure tells you what type of belief it is. All limiting beliefs start with something like the following:

“I can’t…”

“I don’t…”

“I could never…”

“I’m not…”

“It’s always been this way.”

These statements are disempowering; they take away your agency and make it seem like things can’t be changed or made better. You need to look at the limiting beliefs you’re working on and reject them as untrue. Then you can change each one into an Empoweri...