Uncover Your Limiting Beliefs
Kids.
They are the most imaginative and can-do humans on the planet.
“Look how high I can jump! Listen how loud I can sing! Look how fast I can run!”
They can do anything, just ask them!
“I’m an Astronaut! I’m a jet pilot! I’m King Kong!”
...There is nothing they can’t be.
At some point though, we start to grow more insular, more tentative to grandly exclaim our achievements, more hesitant about stating what we want to do and be. At some point we quietly install an edit button on ourselves... sometimes instigated through narrow-minded views of others, of being teased, or told our supposed limits by teachers, or parents, high school counselors, or even our friends. At some point, we begin to hold these limitations as our actual truth—an addendum file to who we are as people.
It may seem small beans to say, “Sheila is just terrible at math,” but if you keep saying it, that version of the truth will begin to haunt her...Sheila will come to feel it isn’t that she just doesn't understand a certain problem, she will begin to own that she is just bad at math full-stop. More than that, she’s probably bad at anything “left-brained” people do. She’ll go along with the jokes made at her expense in class, while sweating bullets of frustration over her homework, too embarrassed to ask for further help—what’s the point if she is fundamentally incapable—she’ll attack (or ignore) her finals with impending doom, and often fail. Because that is what the energy and words surrounding Shiela have set her up to do.
If only we could rewind to that moment of paradigm shift—the version of us in childhood who was able to master all things—through self-confidence and determination alone. We can’t, of course go back and do that. But we can attempt to awaken ourselves and uncover the limiting beliefs we have carried on our shoulders for the past however-many-years.
We all have those haunting voices from our past telling us we can’t be or do a thing... that we were stupid to try, that we are too “this,” or not enough “that.” Everyone has at least one moment where they were handed a limiting self identity that they would do anything to go back to and change. It might have encouraged us to give up our dream job, or partner. We may have thought it cost too much, that our impending failure was inevitable, that owning our own business, or home, or going to college just wasn’t something a “person like you” could really do.
My friend tells the story about her grandmother, who was an elementary school Art Teacher for 20 years. It was surprising, even to her, how early those signs of self-limitation began to show up in her students.
“I’m not good at that. It doesn't look right. I can’t draw,” were lines she would hear perpetually. So she would turn back to the blackboard and her taped-up sheet of paper, and she would begin one stroke at a time--one line at a time, to tell a story. She would encourage the students not to worry about the finished product...just listen to the story, and follow along. First, we draw… One line. Then, one hill...to two hills...to a boulder...to a path...to—
“IT’S MICKEY MOUSE!,” would erupt from somewhere in the class...and sure enough, that is what they had drawn. All of them. Even the kid who claimed they couldn’t do it.
Sometimes, you just need someone to say: ”Don’t worry so much about the end; don’t worry if you don’t think you can do it; if you want to achieve, or be or do a thing, take it one hill, one step, one line at a time,” and then your focus and natural desire to achieve—and yes, your innate abilities—will begin to break down some of those barriers of limiting beliefs you’ve been carrying around with you. Because: you’re doing what you believed you could not do.
Dare to dream.
...And get to work.