Stop Only Focusing on Your Actions, Focus on Your Beliefs and Mindset
Cultivating empowering beliefs and letting go of limiting beliefs is crucial if you want to manifest your goals in life. In other words, it is necessary to reprogram your mind to align your beliefs with your goals. Very often, people falsely tend to focus only on their actions. How often have you set your new year goals and failed to achieve them? How often have you tried to cultivate a healthy habit, like working out regularly, or let go of a bad habit, like smoking, and gave up at one point? The reason why you didn't successfully achieve these goals is because you have been focusing on the symptoms (actions), while ignoring the cause (beliefs). Beliefs are the key to achieving any goal, because your beliefs determine your thoughts and emotions, and your thoughts and emotions together determine your actions. Whether you are able to do what it takes to successfully achieve your goals is largely dependent on your beliefs.
The truth is: Your limiting beliefs have been preventing you from achieving your goals. Limiting beliefs are beliefs you hold about yourself and the world that prevent you from achieving - and sometimes even from trying to achieve - your goals. They are not objectively true. There are different types of limiting beliefs.
Limiting Beliefs About the World
These are limiting beliefs about the world and how things work. Examples: I cannot control my circumstances. The world is unfair.
Limiting Beliefs About the Goal
These are limiting beliefs about the preconditions to achieve your goal. Examples: You must work at least 40 hours to become successful.
You can only find an 'attractive' partner if you are also 'attractive'.
Limiting Beliefs About Others
These are assumptions about what other people think of you and how they judge you. Examples:
Other people do not see me as a professional.
I need to please other in order to be liked.
Limiting Beliefs About Yourself
These are self-doubt and self-judgment. Examples: I am not good/smart enough to achieve my goal.
I don't deserve to be successful.
Understand Your Limiting Beliefs
The good news is: you can overcome your limiting beliefs and release them. First, you must identify and understand them. You internalized your limiting beliefs at one point in your life, usually at a young age. It is common to be particularly influenced by your parents when you are young, so we internalize many of our beliefs, whether limiting or positive, from them. Of course, you also internalize beliefs from other people, like relatives, friends, and larger society. These limiting beliefs are related to your conscious and subconscious fears. These trigger a self-protection mechanism in form of a pattern that you, most likely subconsciously, developed.
For example, someone who was judged a lot by their parents and compared to with other classmates or siblings who were 'better' than them, might end up having low confidence and suffering from self-doubt and self-judgment even as an adult. This can be related to the fear of failure. Therefore, this kind of person might struggle to try to achieve their goals as this fear of failure acts as a self-protection mechanism from future heartache and hurt if the goals aren't successfully achieved.
When these type of dynamics are repetitive, they are called patterns. The limiting beliefs you internalize are linked to patterns you develop. To go back to our example, this person who struggles with a lot of self-doubt may often have thoughts like 'I'm not good enough' even when this person does achieve great success. Such thoughts will trigger unpleasant emotions, e.g. sadness, frustration, low confidence, and the thoughts and emotions together trigger actions, like comparing, giving up, or having to spend a lot of time and energy to find the courage to take action.
Cultivate an Empowering Mindset & Manifest Your Goals
Once you understand your limiting beliefs, when and why you internalized them, and clearly see how they are not objectively true and sabotaging you, you can consciously release them.
However, rationally understanding this does not directly lead to embodying this. Letting go of your limiting beliefs is a process and takes time.
Since you will still be holding on to your limiting beliefs, consciously or subconsciously, for a while, it is important to focus on positive self-talk. Whenever you catch yourself thinking a limiting belief, label it as your inner critic trying to stop you from doing what you want. Then, think of why this is not true and why you actually can achieve your goal, and think of three reasons why this is true. Human beings are storytellers, so thinking of these reasons will enable you to more easily be convinced of your new empowering belief.
Repetition is key. You will need to reframe your limiting beliefs into positive empowering ones over and over again until you fully embody your new truth. You will need to literally form and strengthen new neural pathways in your brain, and this requires some time. Think of it as going to the gym. Just as it takes time, consistency and dedication to build your muscles, it also takes the same to develop and strengthen new neural pathways and cultivate new beliefs.
A weak mindset is focused on problems, whereas an empowering mindset is focused on solutions. So consciously limit your time and energy focusing on your problems, and instead turn your attention to your solutions. Be creative, open-minded and curious. Explore the different solutions and think about which ones can keep you inspired, energized, and motivated.
In conclusion, letting go of your limiting beliefs and cultivating an empowering mindset is crucial if you want to achieve your goals in life. It's not enough to only focus on actions and ignore the inner work that must be done. Your thoughts and emotions determine your actions, and your belief system determines your thoughts. Therefore, it's important to work on developing a positive, solution-oriented empowering mindset that will help you stay focused, motivated, and resilient in the face of obstacles. With an empowering mindset, you can achieve anything you set your mind to.
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