What they don't tell you about your limiting beliefs

I'm sick of hearing about limiting beliefs. Soooo over it. Even from the people who go so far as to say "no belief is true, all beliefs are limiting, but you can choose to limit yourself in ways that serve you." Like, "OK, thanks Lucky Girl Syndrome, now I just have to delude myself into believing things that are demonstrably untrue and then I'll win the lottery, buy an island, and marry Henry Cavill (along with every other person on Manifesting TikTok)."

And don't get me wrong, I have a great capacity for self-delusion. But I've also got a persistent pragmatic streak that keeps me, at the very least, aware of when I'm being delusional.

But I can't deny that I have discovered some core beliefs that have significantly undermined my ability to show up fully in my life and go after the things I truly desire. Some of them have been actively harmful to me and others. So despite giving some serious side-eye to the buzzwords, I still try to show up for myself and do the work that needs to be done.

The truth about actually getting rid of your (unhelpful) limiting beliefs -- not just on the surface but deep down where they began in the first place -- is that life gets messy. Real talk: the fallout can throw you into a period of chaos and upheaval.

But here's why I think it's worth it:

How much of your life is “yours?” Like, really yours? How much of who you are today has nothing to do with the way other people have shaped your life? How much has everything to do with a conclusion you came to after a period of deep introspection? If you get really honest, you might come to realize you haven't spent much time considering if what you believe about life has more than a vague, tangential relationship with who you are (or want to be) today.

And yet you’re the only one living your life. It’s paradoxical and if you're doing it properly, it's likely uncomfortable to consider.

As children, we come into this world as blank(ish) slates and our lives take shape in reference to the things around us. When it really comes down to it, few of us are the sole causes of our thoughts, our opinions, or our beliefs. Most of them were handed to us when we were young, either by life circumstances that we had to figure out how to manage (e.g. traumas) or directly given by the culture we live in and the people we trusted to have our best interests at heart.

The ways we’re conditioned to see the world become the lenses through which we live our whole lives. So much of “doing the work” of healing and finding our way back to our authenticity involves recognizing the lens for what it is. By definition, a lens is something that comes between us and the direct experience of life. Each one comes with its own tint of varying degrees of subtlety; there may be scratches and smudges, cracks or flaws in the material that all contribute to obscuring and distorting our perception of what is. And those distortions become the baseline for what we consider to be true about how the world works.

And everybody has them, which means none of us sees clearly. Acknowledging the full implications of this can give us an incredible capacity for empathy. When you start noticing the lenses through which you and other people perceive life, you realize they are no more aware of theirs than you are of yours and it can be easier to grant everyone a little more grace.

Recently, I was able to discover and discard a lens that had been foundational to my life and personality - one so old that I can barely remember a time before it was there. It was one of those beliefs that touch all aspects of life, as pervasive as the air I breathe. And it was such a damaged lens that adjusting to its absence has been a wildly disorienting experience and has altered my entire outlook on life.

The most bizarre part of the experience is trying to understand how I could have missed it. Just coming to terms with the fact that I couldn’t see it until one day, I could. Until something happened that was big enough for me to notice the distortion. And that for some reason, this time I didn’t distract myself from noticing. Instead, I sat myself down and investigated the source of the confusion. And no lens can survive intense scrutiny for long.

It’s an odd space to find yourself in when the circumstances of your life and relationships have been built on an old, distorted version of your worldview. Suddenly nothing makes sense. Or maybe it does but you’re not sure how it fits into your life anymore. And yet you have to keep moving. Your obligations haven’t disappeared and the relationships you’ve built are still there and come with their established sets of expectations and responsibilities.

The experience can only be described as akin to surfing – constantly adjusting your weight to balance in response to shifts in the waves rolling beneath you. And there is a certain degree of maneuverability - most things can be renegotiated on some level. But the basic experience is one of waking up in a life that has very little to do with this more authentic version of you and learning to navigate your way through (or out of) circumstances that are no longer in alignment with how you feel compelled to show up in the world. And trying to do so without causing harm to the people around you.

That’s not to say that you have to change anything. You can choose to fall in love all over again with exactly where you find yourself and bring your new sense of authenticity to that experience. But people will notice you’re not the same “you” who entered into the agreement or relationship. And that will naturally lead to some things falling away.

If the alteration is deep enough, there’s a good chance that people will feel hurt – you’ve become a stranger to them seemingly overnight. And many won’t understand or relate. Though there’s no doubt in your mind that you’ve just removed the layer of falseness that they identified with and related to. You may be sorry that they feel hurt but you can't – and don’t really desire to – go backward. You choose to commit to your growth and those who want to come along are welcome but for those who can’t keep up… you say a grateful farewell and continue on.

It can seem very callous to those who haven’t gone through it. But it’s only after you’ve removed the distorting lens that you discover how much energy you were expending by maintaining it, and how much work it took to make your limited perspective make sense in a world that didn’t buy into your perspective. How much it trapped you. And how much more freedom you feel without it.

And then one day, days or weeks or months later, someone approaches you and thanks you for giving them the inspiration or courage to look within and see their own lenses. And you finally understand that loving and healing yourself is truly the greatest service you do for the world. That choosing yourself isn't actually selfish at all. That limiting beliefs are their own sort of contagious disease and that maybe curing yourself of your own is the first and most crucial step toward a truly free society.