Getting Rid of Limiting Beliefs – Weekly Challenge #37

New week, New challenge – and this week we are all about changing our mind-set and the handicapping story we are telling ourselves. The challenge is divided in two parts, where the first two days is about taking notice of our thoughts, what we tell ourselves and how it’s affecting us and the actions we take. Having an active radar turned on to pick up on the limiting things we say. The second part of the week is focused on changing these believes, but I’ll be posting a new video for that on Wednesday.

The objectives: Start with observing all the liming believes you have, turn on the radar for negative self-talk and take note of how much it affects your way of living, choices and opportunities. That’s all I want you to do for the first two days before we actually start changing it. Building up a deep understanding of how it affects us will make for a greater why to motivate us to do something about it. Then on Wednesday I will post the next video for how we will deal with this.

How much would you pay for a pill that would make all those things you tell yourself you can’t do possible; whether it’s dancing, controlling your urges, being comfortable in a social high stake environment – 1 000 $? 10 000 $ ? How about a couple of hours of your week to condition your mind for some long-term change? Just like when Roger Banister ran 1 mile (~1,6km) under 4 minutes, something that up until that day was said to be humanly impossible, all of the suddenly changed the mind-set of thousands of people, because someone proved them wrong. Because after that historic happening loads of people has done what was said to be undoable. However, Roger never thought it was impossible, he believed, he visualised, he was determined & he did it. He embraced a growth mind-set and refused to put up any limiting believes.

The concept of limiting beliefs is nothing new for most of us, yet we keep letting it affect our life to the tremendous extent it has. I got reminded of this last week when I was reading up on memorization techniques, and Jim Kwik, a memorizing guru, said “our brain keeps eavesdropping on you, if you tell it you can’t remember names, you won’t be able to”. In other words, what you tell yourself becomes a self-fulfilling prophetia. I got even more into this topic when I a couple of days ago started reading Kelly McGonigal’s book the upside of stress ( http://kellymcgonigal.com/books/), where she in the first chapters of the book talks about the potential of changing mind-sets in the areas that have potential to fundamentally change our lives. Her research shows how most people let the negative idea of stress make it way worse than it has to be, because when instead a positive mind-set of stress is embraced there is a whole lot of upside to it! And this change in mind-set doesn’t always need huge interventions and actions, it could actually happen by just watching a GOOD informative video on the positive effect that stress can have – sometimes insights that gives us a whole new perspective have the potential to snowball into tremendous change in the lives we live and the actions we take.

In her book, she highlights this phenomenon by referencing to a bunch of studies on aging, and how people that has a positive association to the aging process in terms of getting wiser and becoming happier, in different studies has shown to have a profound effect, for instance one study showed that these people live 8 years longer, another showed that there was an 80% chance of decreased risk of heart attack, another that the recovery after an accident was significantly better, etc. Now, again, it’s not magic dust that makes this happen, but it has to do with how we change the filter with how we look at life which in turns translates to the actions we take and how we live our lives.

If you have a mind-set of “I can’t dance” when someone asks you if you want to come dance with them, you’re properly going to say no. But if you with the same coordination and mind got that exact question, but you just somehow had “forgotten” about that mind-set of yours, the likelihood of you joining that activity would be much greater, and in turn you would practice dancing which could lead to you actually developing that skill and getting better and better at it. You see, when we buy into a mind-set it does not only affect your state; “…It’s the mind-set effect, alters your present experience, but it also influences your future behaviour”. It’s the snowball effect, when you believe that growing older is going to benefit you, it will shape the actions you take daily and how your take care of yourself. When we buy in to a mind-set that has the ability to change the course of our lives, the snowball effect can be tremendous.

• Enough with the why; how are we going to do this challenge; what’s the objectives?

The first part of this challenge is about scanning our thoughts and realizing where we have these limiting believes. This is a very important process to go through, so we can grasp the full extent of how much this affect us. It will build up that deep rooted cause for change, making it a must, motivating us to the core. So really turn on that radar and observe how your thoughts are going, listen to yourself talk when you interact with people, often it’s something we share openly, as a part of us, who we are and what we identify ourselves with. “Oh I’m so bad with math, oh I can’t dance.”

• OF COURSE YOU CAN’t WHEN YOU KEEP TELLING YORSELF AND OTHERS THAT THAT IS WHO YOU ARE! It’s you and no one else that determine what you can and can’t do!

The second part of this challenge is to actually do something about it, but you can start right now by firstly stop telling yourself and others out loud that you are permanently limited somehow. Just ad YET! I can’t dance, YET now that’s the easy part, controlling our impulsive thoughts can be trickier, but when we start to become aware, it’s absolutely possible. I won’t go more into details for how we will try to make this change more permanent, that’ll come on Wednesday. But in brief, it’s a simple process of adopting a growth mind-set and abandoning our limiting believes for good. But don’t neglect the power of this first step and scanning your thoughts. However, if you can’t contain yourself, here’s how you adopt a growth mind-set:

“..recognize that the growth mind-set is not only beneficial but it is also supported by science. Neuroscience shows that the brain changes and becomes more capable when we work hard to improve ourselves. Second, learn and teach others about how to develop our abilities. Learn about deliberate practice and what makes for effective effort. When we understand how to develop our abilities, we strengthen our conviction that we are in charge of them. And third, listen for your fixed mind-set voice, and when you hear it, talk back with a growth mind-set voice. If you hear, “I can’t do it,” add, “Yet.” ( source: https://youtu.be/pN34FNbOKXc )

I wish you the best of luck, commit to me and the comments if you like to, and make sure to tune in on Wednesday for the next video! Best of luck guys, see you on the other side.

/Alexander

Playlist I put together on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tqq66zwa7g&list=PLxw2jMXwRfsliFby2voOcma8QFVGKSQhe