
Naturally, as a middle aged person living in a weird country (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic), I am constantly striving towards becoming a better me. I am healing my inner child. I must be the captain of my ship. I must never, ever stop learning. I invest smartly. My body is my temple. I am comfortable outside my comfort zone. While I am making this world a better place, I radiate joy at all times, because I allow for the good kind of stress only!
And yet, when I finished my morning routine recently - meditated, exercised, journaled, hydrated and as usually started working at 5:30 AM, I caught myself thinking:Â
I am so incredibly tired.
But why was I tired? I had slept the recommended 7.5 hours and the quality of this resting phase had been fantastic as my smart watch told me. It dawned on me: This was something more severe. I was tired of becoming the best version of myself.
Do I really need to do what I am doing?
I know you do get my point by now. Forgive me for misleading you. Of course, very little of the above is true. And don’t get me wrong, I am sure there is value in most of the practices and routines described.Â
Still, the true part is that I was tired of my own aspiration to constantly improve myself and that I perceive the amount of recommendations for personal development as overwhelming. I was looking for a way out of the dilemma.Â
So I took a good look at my motivation behind all this: What did I think that I had to do in order to be a good and successful person? Who was I? Where did I see my talents and my shortcomings? What was important to me in life and how did life treat me so far?
I soon realised the answers to these questions weighed pretty heavy. They were pointing me towards my core beliefs! Assumptions about me and the world I had created myself and considered to be 100%, unshakably true.
Core beliefs are mental energy savers
Diving deeper into the rabbit hole of beliefs we carry, I learnt how our brains are wired to constantly scan our environments for potential threats to keep us comfortable and safe. Comfort zones mean safety and safety means survival - it is that simple.
In their daily hustle to keep us safe, our brains try to save energy by finding generalised explanations and universal truths on how the world works - the core beliefs we then carry through our lives. In a nutshell, they prevent us from having to reconsider and decide on how to navigate our world over and over again.
A very useful mechanism which probably made a huge contribution to the continued existence of humans on this planet. Our prehistoric ancestor, who almost drowned in a river once, most likely did not have to find out about the danger of deep waters again in a lake or the sea. They pretty quickly formed a pretty good assumption.Â
Many of our core beliefs guide us through life in a very helpful way. They provide roots and safety when important decisions need to be made. Often they become part of our identity.
Think of the baby, who again and again gets to experience the loving arms of its parents when it is crying and thereby receives the first puzzle piece for a rather soothing core belief: I am safe in this world and there will be support when I need it.Â
Sometimes though, among our core beliefs, false friends are born and settle deep in our minds. These limiting beliefs are incorrect conclusions and judgements we form at some point in our lives and then treat them as bulletproof truths.
And here it gets tricky: Limiting beliefs also make the human mind feel safe and therefore good but they are actually harmful.
"We should not believe everything we think."
Thomas Kida, Author
Limiting beliefs will limit how far left, right, above and beyond from our comfort zones we are willing to look. They prevent us from evaluating new information objectively. They stop us before we even dare to dream and try out new ways. Even worse, sometimes they make it seem completely impossible that anything different to how we see things could be true.
Just a few out of many more examples of my limiting beliefs in my own little dilemma:
Not spending every wake moment of my day improving, creating, serving equals laziness.
Laziness is bad and needs to be avoided at all costs.
No pain, no gain. If achievements come easy, they are not achievements.
I had to apply the exact same methods that had supposedly worked for people I looked up to because this was the only way to be successful for me, too.
Do you see what tight mental corset I had built upon? I had been driven by assumptions, which surely contained a little bit of truth but surely were no universal rules. All this time they had been wearing me out while I was treating them as 100% accurate, black-and-white type of facts.
I was baffled when I realized.Â
Limiting beliefs kill your motivation for change
Sadly, if we fail to identify and overcome our limiting beliefs, they will keep doors closed and kill our motivation for change. They will keep us short-sighted and stuck beyond our potential in all thinkable areas of our lives. One could argue, they thereby limit our quality of life.
This again made me think of how often we come across limiting beliefs in the organisation we work with as consultants at Tektit. We frequently hear things like:
We don't have time for... (Innovation, refactoring, working on our processes, talking to our users, etc.)
That's just the way things are done here.
It's been like this for 20 years, too late to change it now.
We just don't have enough... (Experience, money, people, expertise ...)
It is not okay to make mistakes. Failure is not an option.
We're too small / too big to …
XY is out of our hands.
My co-workers are my competitors.
We need a bulletproof plan, before we take any step.
At Tektit I had seen before how impactful the identification of these limiting beliefs could become. On multiple occasions this had been the most valuable groundwork preventing us from building our change project on false assumptions and thereby from energy wasting, misdirected actionism.
💬 How about you? Did any of the limiting beliefs I mentioned sound familiar? Have you found ways of overcoming them? Please leave a comment.
And if you care to know more about my attempt to solve my limiting beliefs dilemma, read on here.
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