Where Limiting Beliefs Start

How limiting beliefs start might surprise you. They hatch from many sources.

Limiting beliefs are pervasive in our lives. You probably are aware of many of them, but many sneak into your thinking patterns.

Limiting beliefs come from a variety of sources. Some of these sources might surprise you. Many of these sources actually were trying to help us, so don’t blame them. They simply believed the wrong things, too.

Here are but a few:

#1 — Limiting Beliefs Start with Your Family. Most of our family means well, but many of our limiting beliefs come from familial sources, and our suggestibility to comments from our families can vary. Maybe your mom told you that you couldn’t run track in high school because you were too heavy, so now you believe that you could never be a runner.

Maybe your dad said that no one in his family ever went to college, so you believe it’s not a possibility for you. Maybe you grew up in a lifestyle that was economically challenged, so you decided that being wealthy was impossible for you.

#2 — Limiting Beliefs Start with Your Friends. Much like our families, friends can do and say things that lead us to believe we’re less capable than we are. Keep in mind that many of our “friends” don’t want to see others do a lot better than they themselves are doing. Also, other people tend to unintentionally push their limiting beliefs on others.

#3 — Limiting Beliefs Start with Your Teachers. Teachers can have a lot of influence over us. When we’re younger, they’re almost like parents. Most children spend six to eight hours per day for 12 years with their teachers. Teachers are people, too. Some of them have their stuff together, some do not.

#4 — Limiting Beliefs Start with Your Experiences. In many ways, this is probably the only real source of our limiting beliefs. For instance, it’s not really what your parents said to you, it’s your interpretation of what was said to you.

For example, if your parents said, “You’ll never be able to get into college,” you could believe that what they said is true, or you could believe, “They don’t know what they’re talking about. I can do it if I want to do it.”

#5 — Limiting Beliefs Start with Everything Else. Other people, books, the internet, the news, movies, and more all have the opportunity to give us pause and doubt. Consider all the sources of information and opinion in your life. They all have the opportunity to steer you in the wrong direction.

As you can see, you can’t completely escape from being infected and affected by limiting beliefs.

So is it pointless to try to be all we were created to be? No! You simply must understand how to use the right tools at the right time to create the life you want.

You must learn to systematically uncover your limiting beliefs and then let go of them.

We’ll start doing that in the next message.

In your corner,

Sean McCool
www.SeanMcCool.com