From Limiting Beliefs to Empowering Beliefs

Agents of change

First off, it’s important to make the point that properly trained life coaches would never ‘meddle’ with their clients’ belief systems.

That would be improper and unethical. Life coaches are not advisers to their clients. Neither do they act on their clients’ behalf. They are facilitators, or agents of change, meaning that they act as a catalyst to help their clients make needed changes to their lives.

We’ll return to this at the end, but for now, it’s important to get clarity on what beliefs are, how they develop and why – surprisingly – they don’t all serve our best interests.

What is a belief?

The Cambridge dictionary defines a belief as:

“The feeling of being certain that something exists or is true.”

Of course, feeling, or mentally accepting, that something is ‘true’ does not render that something a fact.

Even though we may treat our beliefs as if they are facts, they remain personal convictions, not scientifically proven facts. The distinction is really important.

Thoughts – the genesis of beliefs

The genesis of every belief we hold, is a simple thought.

As we chart our way across the metaphorically ‘rugged terrain’ that represents our journey through life, we naturally spend a lot of our time thinking.

In the early days of our lives, the nature of our thoughts, still largely untainted by the experiences and interactions we have with the external world, is more open, imaginative and visionary.

Children, with their boundless imaginations, see anything and everything as possible in a life that seems to have magical qualities.

As we grow older, our thoughts become more and more heavily influenced by what others think and believe. The media, celebrities, politicians, religious leaders, schoolteachers, parents, and, of course, our peers, have a growing influence on how and what we think about life.

Hypotheses develop

Our imaginations become constrained as we digest the teachings fed to us by the outside world. Our thinking about most issues becomes more funnelled, more stereotyped and less open-minded.

We start to develop various hypotheses about ourselves, others, how life works and our place in the world. Human nature being what it is (we want to be ‘right’) we then begin to search, very selectively, for information that corroborates with our hypotheses.

As these hypotheses start to take shape and solidify, we scour our growing array of past life experiences for further evidence that will bear out the hypotheses we are carefully nurturing.

Hypotheses become convictions

With our steady gathering of various forms of ‘proof’ to support these hypotheses, they progress towards becoming convictions and, ultimately, strongly held convictions, or beliefs.

These new beliefs, once formed, become part of our personal identities.

As anyone who has studied the concept of the ego will know, its role is to protect the integrity of one’s personal identity, that has been grown, developed and nurtured over many years.

The ego sets about its task by seeking to close one’s mind to any further information and/or stimuli that might contradict the newly installed beliefs.

The result is that our beliefs become steadily more entrenched.

Beliefs that limit or constrain

If you consider how beliefs develop, you may begin to appreciate that not every belief serves us well. In today’s world, we place a great deal more emphasis on what others think, believe and impart to us, than we do on our very own intuitions or inner voices.

This has the effect of ensuring that many of our beliefs will be limiting in nature. In other words, they disempower us, or diminish our capacity to be all that we can be.

As we suppress our intuitions, in favour of the external world teachings, we inhibit our imaginations and  ability to visualise what is truly possible for us in the world.

Some will argue – and to a certain extent they have a point – that this process is necessary to help us keep our feet on the ground and survive in what is a challenging and perhaps even dangerous world.

But there is much more to life than ‘keeping one’s feet on the ground’ (or simply surviving). Limiting beliefs can have a debilitating effect on one’s ability to achieve one’s goals and dreams and enjoy life to the full.

Let me illustrate what I mean with a simple example:

The story of Caitlin

Caitlin is a young girl, blessed with the gift of musicality and an incredibly beautiful singing voice.

She harbours dreams of becoming a celebrity singer one day. She visualises, in vivid detail, seeing herself in the future, standing on stage, singing with great passion and power to an audience of thousands of people who have travelled from all over to hear her.

When Caitlin reaches her teenage years, her friends – jealous of her vocal talents – taunt her about her shy disposition. They scoff at the idea of someone like her having the courage to sing in front of an audience of thousands.

Caitlin’s parents, worried about her chances of earning a living from a career in singing, try to push her towards studying to become an accountant, as she has some ability with numbers.

Caitlin’s passion for singing remains but her dream begins to fade. With those around her constantly demanding she ‘get real’, she slowly becomes more resigned to the fact that her gentle, quiet and unassuming nature could prevent her from cutting it big-time in singing and entertaining.

Her doubts are steadily reinforced with every music video she watches. Celebrity singers all seem so confident, outgoing and self assured on the stage.

Her parents try to assure her that her somewhat reserved manner is an attractive characteristic that will stand her in good stead in a different career. But their comments simply underpin her growing conviction that she lacks sufficient confidence.

On her sixteenth birthday, Caitlin is given a present. It’s a book written about one of her favourite singers. As she pages through it, she is drawn to certain words used by the author to describe her idol:

“The ultimate extrovert, never afraid to shy away from the bright lights.”

Caitlin becomes so focused on this new information that she puts the book down. (Sadly, she  never gets to read a later chapter that describes how the star singer was shy and reserved as a teenager and how she found confidence through living her purpose and passion).

With this new revelation, the limiting belief that Caitlin had been slowly cultivating over the years becomes firmly cemented into place in her mind:

”I’ll never become a celebrity singer because I’m too shy and lacking in self-confidence.”

A common problem and good news

Caitlin’s story, though hypothetical, is similar to the one that plays out for a great many people, who harbour limiting beliefs that render them unable to achieve their goals and live their dreams.

The good news, as any life coach knows, is that even the most entrenched limiting beliefs can be deconstructed, eradicated and replaced by more empowering beliefs. And the process is much easier than most would think.

The secret lies in a little reverse engineering – chipping away at the questionable or even downright false evidence that has been gathered to support a limiting belief. Undermine the pillars, or ‘reference legs’ that prop up the belief, and it will disintegrate.

Help for Caitlin

A good life coach would quickly appreciate the potentially tragic situation facing Caitlin, and would work with her to accomplish three simple things to get her back on track to achieving her dreams:

• Identify clear evidence from Caitlin’s past that contradicts, undermines and ultimately destroys her limiting belief that she lacks the self-confidence to perform on stage,
• Find some great examples of celebrities that perceived that they were introverted and lacking in confidence when they started out on their singing or acting careers.
• Help Caitlin to install one or more shiny new empowering beliefs that will support her in achieving the life she dreams of .

Exhilaration

It’s a simple process. New Insights trained coaches have some very powerful and effective tools and techniques that they use to achieve this.

The clarity of vision that results once a limiting belief has been eradicated and replaced with one or more empowering beliefs that promote the consideration of exciting new possibilities, brings a feeling of relief, freedom and, ultimately, exhilaration!