Attack Your Limitations: Reassess Your Beliefs

One of my favorite bloggers, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, just wrote a great post entitled Attack Your Limitations: Turn Your Weaknesses into Strengths. Reading his words started me thinking about the psychology behind some of our limitations.

First of all, let me ask you what some of your weaknesses are. A couple of years ago I would have made a list that would have looked something like this:

Several months ago I read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, and here are three truths from the book that have become part of my strategy for dealing with with the subject of limitations:

Whenever we hear an opinion and believe it, we make an agreement, and it becomes part of our belief system.

Even the opinions you have about yourself are not necessarily true; therefore, you don’t need to take whatever you hear in your own mind personally.

If you have the awareness that the whole drama of your life is the result of what you believe, and what you believe is not real, then you can begin to change it.

That last quote is particularly significant to me. Beliefs are learned. They are essentially agreements we have made to believe something someone else has said or something our own mind has said. At that point, if we don’t revisit the belief, it defines us and how we act in the future.

Something about going through my medical crisis in 2007 started me wondering if I could create some new beliefs. I can’t point to exactly when it happened, but I do remember some of the intial thoughts. They came as observations and questions at first:

That writer is published. I’ve always believed that maybe I was missing some ingredient that separated myself from the wildly successful. What if maybe I’ve been wrong? We have all been born the same way. We eat, sleep, work, and have the same 24 hours a day. Don’t I have every ingredient necessary to be wildly successful, too?

I’ve always thought I was undisciplined, and I have been. But I’ve believed it was innate, a quality that couldn’t be changed. What if I’ve been wrong? What if I could choose to be a disciplined person? What would that feel like to believe that? What would it feel like to really know it? How much better would my life be?

I started having this internal dialogue with myself over a number of things, and I started about thinking about the fact that we create our beliefs. What would happen if I went from having a public speaking phobia to deciding to view myself as not only a comfortable speaker, but also one who is dynamic? What if I then began actually offering to give speeches in the form of webinars and presentations at conventions? Wouldn’t that be amazing? Could I actually do this?

Once you start letting your mind explore the playground of possibility, you open yourself to the potential for tremendous growth. You can paint any kind of picture you like. For me, it was something like this:

I am a published writer and a sought-after speaker on a number of topics. I speak regularly and enjoy giving information to my audience and receiving their feedback. I’m incredibly disciplined. I am a doer. I’m someone who lives fully and achieves her dreams. I work out regularly and eat healthy. I was different in the past. This is what I am now.

Now the changes didn’t happen overnight, but once I opened myself to the possibility of believing my weaknesses were actually my strengths, then my mind set about aligning myself with the new reality. Opportunities were endless. Since I had freed myself from some of the previous labels (beliefs), then I could do what used to seem preposterous:

Public speaking. Join Toastmasters, start offering to give presentations at work and for organizations, sign up to present at a national convention.

Exercise and Nutrition. Start working my body with the belief that I am an athlete and a body-sculptor who fuels her body wisely.

So some suggestions for you as you’re considering what your weaknesses are:

Ask yourself where this belief is coming from. Is this a label that you decided on because of some past event? Did someone perhaps tell you that you were weak, and you chose to believe it?

Ask yourself if you could possibly be different. If there’s some truth that you were weak in an area in the past (and the past is always what we’re talking about when we’re talking about weakness), is there a possibility that you could eliminate the weakness?

Visualize a different you. Tell your inner critic to go take a hike during this exercise. Close your eyes and just imagine if you not only no longer had the weaknesses, but were even strong in these areas. Imagine the ways it would impact your life. Would you hold a different job? How would it impact your relationships? Would you feel more excited getting out of bed every day? What dreams would you accomplish?

Keep visualizing the new version of yourself regularly, and take action in alignment with your new beliefs. You have been freed from your self-imposed shackles of the agreements you had made. You’ve made some new agreements. Now, as you take action, more opportunity presents itself. You start receiving both internal and external validation that your beliefs are, indeed, true. At this point, life holds limitless possibility for you. You are free.

Photo courtesy of danocamera.

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