I will elaborate in a way so you gain a clear understanding to what’s key to releasing and letting them go. Limiting beliefs are your mind’s way of saving you in dangerous or difficult situations when you were little. More precisely, when you experienced an EMOTIONALLY overwhelming situation that caused you to feel overwhelmed when you were a child, your mind looked for a way to help you and save you. Since the mind was on a developmental level of let’s say a 3-year old or a 6-year old, the way it protected you is it created an interpretation of the events happening to you, so you could cope and adapt to them in the best possible way.
The interpretation it created helped you survive, and that is a very important aspect of limiting beliefs that doesn’t get talked about as much. For this reason, limiting beliefs were good for you at one point in time, in fact they were life-saving. It’s important to understand and accept this so you can also feel a level of gratitude for them, parallel to the current frustration and desire to release them. This is key so that the Law of Attraction doesn’t react to your resistance to them, but to your gratitude for them.
So, the INTERPRETATION your mind gave to a particular painful experience in your life IS YOUR LIMITING BELIEF. It could have been: I am not good enough so X happened to me, I need to not express my feelings in order to be loved and accepted, I need to be quiet in order to survive, I need to do everything I am told in order to be safe, life is too hard so better just keep safe, money is the root of conflict between people, appearances are more important than how I feel, I need to be useful instead of having fun, I am only loved when I accomplish things. So, you adopted a belief that told you how best to survive in a given situation and how best to adapt to your caretakers so they would not abandon you, hurt you or shame you.
As you expand and grow, your beliefs that saved you become a burden and are now stopping your growth. They are insistent and annoying, and keep showing up as symptoms in your business and personal life such as fears, obstacles, or challenges you can’t overcome no matter what you do practically. This is an invitation from your consciousness and your soul to expand by looking at your limiting beliefs, and healing and transforming them, so you can move to the next level of your business and life. They have done a good job of protecting you until now, and since you want to expand, you do want to let them go. This internal motivation to expand is crucial for this process, it is actually what initiates it.
Many mindset practices focus on changing limiting beliefs with your rational mind through becoming aware of them, and then deciding to change your beliefs while doing actions that align with new beliefs. This approach although it can yield short term results, depending on your level of persistence, is not sustainable, and you might experience or have already experienced the fall that follows. After a certain amount of time of doing a mindset practice and having some success in breaking through limiting beliefs with some symptoms even disappearing completely from your business, the limiting beliefs and the symptoms unfortunately return, sometimes even with stronger energy then before. Why is that? You could attribute it to you not doing the practice diligently enough or something happening in the outside world to influence it, but the cause is different from what it appears on the surface.
I will tell you the biggest secret or a discovery I made and many coaches don’t share or sometimes don’t know about, or don’t have courage or skills to face. The ESSENCE OF A LIMITING BELIEF IS EMOTION. It is not a thought, it is an emotion. Going back to what I said at the beginning, the reason you developed a limiting belief was that you were experiencing overwhelming EMOTION. And as a child you absorbed that emotion – BECAUSE AS CHILDREN UNTIL THE AGE OF 8 WE ONLY ABSORB EMOTIONS, WE DON’T LOGICALLY UNDERSTAND THEM – and then you created the interpretation which is your limiting belief.
And that core emotion is still within you, stored, waiting for a time you will be able to feel it, while also rearing its ugly head through tension, anxiety or challenges at work. It is telling you loud and clear, time and again, that it wants your attention. Like a little child, it pleads to be heard, accepted and felt. Now is that time for you to do that. Now that you are motivated by a natural desire to expand, you can be courageous enough to feel the feelings you experienced overwhelming as a child, and this act alone, RELEASES YOU OF LIMITING BELIEFS. This is the missing piece of most mindset strategies and practices – emotions, my friends.
Emotion is energy and you can’t destroy or eliminate energy. It’s a law in physics. Energy can only change forms, which means that by feeling the painful emotion you felt as a child, you will be transforming that energy into something else – into your truth. When you are able to feel your past emotions, and hold them to light with a help of a trusted friend, coach or mentor, they become your biggest inspiration. What’s masking your inspiration and vision is the pain. Pain has always been the biggest deterrent to growth. This is why tribal life, in the past and even nowadays, involves initiations where people choose to face a certain level of pain, either physical or emotional, in order to step into the next stage of their life. They consciously invite pain into their life so they can breakthrough to the next level.
We are not that different from our tribal brothers and sisters, and so I invite you to summon the courage to choose to feel your past pain, so that tremendous new inspiration and vision can become available to you. By choosing to feel the pain YOU IMMEDIATELY LET GO OF YOUR LIMITING BELIEFS. This is the modern day initiation that an entrepreneur needs to go through in order to thrive and step into their desired life. Embracing and transforming your emotions and receiving incredible insight for success is the final step of an entrepreneur’s journey.