In the last few articles I’ve started talking about the concept of flow, and I introduced the concept of thought and how most of our thoughts are negative and programmed in our subconscious mind from early childhood. One of the ways in which negative thoughts manifest are in the form of limiting beliefs.
A limiting belief is any belief that keeps you from achieving your highest potential. If you scrutinize your thoughts, you will find that you probably suffer from several limiting beliefs, the most common of which is ‘I am not good enough.’ You see, the world we live in is not designed to empower us but designed to use us to fulfill its agenda, whether it is the education system creating followers, religions creating fear and separation, governments creating a sense of dependency or the healthcare system keeping people sick to make them dependent on pharmaceuticals
Few people remain unscathed by limiting beliefs, which is why we must all learn to identify them and eliminate them from our psyche. You know you have a limiting belief when you suffer from a recurrent pattern of negative thinking or have ongoing challenges in one area of your life. For example, if always find yourself in debt and cannot get financially ahead, you may have limiting beliefs around your ability to earn, save, invest and achieve financial freedom. Therefore, the first step is to identify an area of your life where you may have a limiting belief.
The next step is to ask yourself if your limiting belief has any validity and, in almost all cases, you will find that it does not have any validity. For example, regarding the limiting belief of always being stuck in debt, you can look to examples of other people, who you know, who have been successfully able to pay off their debts. If they can do it, so can you. The third step is to find evidence that your limiting belief is not true. This could be remembering a time when you were able to successfully pay off a debt or even a time when you were able to pay all of your monthly bills.
The fourth step to eliminating limiting beliefs is to find all alternate meaning to your limiting belief. Regarding the example we have been using of always being in debt, its deeper meaning could be that you have something yet to learn about financial literacy, such as how to save and invest a good portion of your income. The next step to eliminating limiting beliefs is to rephrase your limiting belief into an empowering belief. For example, regarding the limiting belief, I am always in debt and can never get ahead financially, you would rephrase that into, I always pay off my debts and am moving in the direction of become financially free.
The final step to eliminating limiting beliefs is to take action! Regarding being in debt, come up with a plan to start paying down your debt and start saving a portion of your monthly income to invest to grow your wealth over time. You see, we all have limiting beliefs but they won’t eliminate themselves unless we are willing to do the work to identify them and then take the steps to turn them around so they become empowering beliefs that fuel our life journey.
I encourage you right now to identify one of your limiting beliefs and then go through the exercises above to eliminate and reframe them into empowering beliefs. This will get you one step closer to living your life in the flow. Next week, I’ll dive deeper into how to use thought to get into the flow.
Dr. Nauman Naeem