A Limiting Beliefs List – Find Out What’s Holding Your Back
Do you have limiting beliefs that are deeply ingrained in your mind and that are stopping you from grabbing new opportunities? Many people are unaware of their problematic thought mechanisms but hopefully, my limiting beliefs list will help you to identify some of the negative thoughts that might be preventing you from success.
Self-limiting beliefs can often hide in plain sight. This is because they will have been present in your mind for so many years you believe they are true. However just because we think something doesn’t mean it is correct. With professional help, many of my clients have been able to overcome their limiting beliefs and forge a new life for themselves free from their unhelpful thoughts.
So let me help you identify limiting beliefs that could be causing you problems so that you can think and feel differently.
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A Limiting Beliefs Definition
Before I begin it is worth giving you a brief overview of what limiting beliefs actually mean.
Limiting beliefs are negative internal thoughts that we believe to be true that prevent us from achieving our goals and dreams. This negative internalized dialogue and opinion of ourselves impact our self-esteem, our relationships, and our work life and prevent us from moving out of our comfort zone.
What is scary about limiting beliefs is that our negative self-talk and thoughts about ourselves will have been with us since childhood in many cases. These will have been created because of failure, rejection, life experiences, and comments from family and friends.
These incidents and negative experiences stay with us into adulthood and seep into our current lives.
The problem is that what may have happened to us when we were a child in most cases is no longer relevant to us as adults but our minds haven’t differentiated between the two causing a problem.
Limiting Beliefs Examples
I’m going to give you a couple of examples of some common limiting beliefs and you can see if these are relevant to you. These limiting beliefs are incredibly common and can stop you from having a growth mindset.
One example is the belief that tells you “I’m not a lucky person”. This is a prime example of someone who has filtered out all the positive things that may have happened to them in their lives and focused on the negatives. The more the negative experiences are magnified the more it appears that you don’t have luck.
The reality is that nobody has everything go their way all the time. Most of us have had good experiences and bad ones. If we are resilient however we can overcome negative experiences and keep on pushing through until positive things come our way.
Another limiting belief example is “I’m not good at X”. I’ve put X because you can replace that with whatever you tell yourself you can’t do. However, what you haven’t probably thought through is why? Did you spend long enough learning how to do X? Did you have the right teacher? Did you invest time in doing X differently? Often things we tell ourselves we can’t do are actually easy when we take the time to practice and find the right people to help us learn.
My limiting beliefs list will give you many examples of these unhelpful thoughts so you can start to see if any of them sound familiar to you. You can also read Confidence: How to Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs and Achieve Your Goals By Martin Meadows to learn how to create different thought processes.
Limiting Beliefs Psychology
Limiting beliefs seep into your everyday life and cause problems. Often you may not even be aware that they are responsible for your low self-esteem or inability to reach your potential.
Self-awareness and challenging these unhelpful thoughts can assist you to change things and alter your mindset. This work can be done as a self-help program or with the assistance of a therapist.
When you start to overcome your limiting beliefs it can be interesting to see how that can alter your life. Many of my clients have created successes in areas that previously felt closed off to them.
This increased success was not because of luck but because changing the way you think can change your life.
What Are The Top Ten Limiting Beliefs?
When I looked at creating a limiting beliefs list I started by looking at the ten most common areas where my clients experienced difficulties. Are you involved in negative self-talk around one of these categories?
Beliefs About Work
Feeling that business and your work life are never going to amount to much. Perhaps how you are destined to work in a job that you dislike or how you don’t deserve success or promotion.
Limiting Beliefs About Love and Relationships
Perhaps you feel that your friends are all more successful than you or that you’ll never meet a partner because there are so many better-looking people out there.
Fears of Failure
Fear of failure often stops us from doing something in the first instance. A thought process might tell you that you will never pass your driving test so you don’t even bother to take lessons. Alternatively, you won’t apply for a new job because you fear you’ll be rejected at the interview.
Your Inability to Master Something
If I had a dollar for every client who told me they were no good at doing a particular task I would be a very rich woman. I’ve had people telling me they can’t do everything from public speaking to passing interviews. The fact is with some positive thinking and practice I have proved to many of my clients that they were totally wrong about themselves.
Success Happens to Others
Some of the most common limiting beliefs are linked to the thought that success only happens to others. So that their dream job, pay rise or romantic relationship are not going to happen in their life. This stops them from even trying to make it happen because the dreams feel so out of reach.
Health Beliefs
Do you believe that you are always ill or that you are never going to lose weight? These examples of limiting beliefs are incredibly common and stop us from improving our health and well-being.
Limiting Beliefs About Money
Do you believe you don’t deserve that pay rise at work? Or perhaps you think you are destined to always be worried about money. These unhelpful thoughts stop you from having enough money and leading a comfortable lifestyle. Building a money mindset however, can help you to overcome negative preconceptions about growing your wealth.
Perceptions of Others
Have you ever thought to yourself that people don’t like you or that people don’t think you are pretty, intelligent or good enough? Our minds love to play tricks on us and tell us things that aren’t true and we believe them often without question.
Time
Time is an interesting one as it does feed into the other areas. Perhaps we say we have no time to go to the gym to get healthy or that we don’t have time to do a course that would get us additional qualifications. Yet people who want something badly enough usually find the time for self-improvement which means that you can as well.
Beliefs About Success
Finally the last of the big ten beliefs is about issues relating to success. It always amazes me how many people think they are not worth achieving success in their life which keeps them firmly in their comfort zone leading a mediocre life.
Limiting Beliefs List PDF
These are obviously just a few areas where self-limiting beliefs can hamper your life, well-being, and your mental health. There are however so many more that I thought I would create a limiting beliefs list PDF for you to print off and use at home to examine what might be impacting your ability to improve your life.
This limiting beliefs list PDF is perfect for helping you to identify problematic thought processes so that you can start to work on yourself to change the way you think. Used as a self-improvement tool it can give you insight into old thought patterns and help you to stop them from having any power over you in the future.
Clearing Limiting Beliefs Techniques
There are plenty of ways in which you can help yourself to overcome limiting beliefs and one of my favorites uses hypnosis. Self-hypnosis to change subliminal thinking can be an easy way to help you improve internal self-talk and mental health.
I have many self-hypnosis downloads that I give to my clients to assist them in creating new beliefs. For example, my positive thinking self-hypnosis download can be used to help you look on the bright side of life instead of focusing on the negative. You can buy this in my online store along with other downloads to help with everything from self-esteem to motivation.
Positive affirmations are also useful if they are used regularly as they can help you to change ingrained beliefs and thought processes. My website has plenty of free positive affirmations that you can use. Here are some of my most popular ones:
Positive Affirmations for Work
Love Affirmations For a Specific Person
Affirmations for Career Success
A self-reflection journal is also a brilliant way of helping you to draw attention to any self-limiting beliefs you may have so that you can take action to do things differently. Use this journal daily as a tool for self-improvement and change and start to create new beliefs that are more helpful for the life you want.
Use my limiting beliefs list to help you think about unhelpful thoughts which may be impacting your life and then start to chip away at each one replacing it with something more positive. As you do this you should feel more empowered, confident and in control of your life and that can help you create amazing positive change.
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