Odds are, you have a few beliefs that are holding you back form being as successful as possible. I certainly do. The good news is that you can identify and change these beliefs. As part of my self-therapy, I recently started writing down every negative belief that floats through my head. In theory, this will help me recognize them as the limiting beliefs that they are, and allow me to dispel them.
What was surprising to me about this was how many there are, and how long I’ve had them without seeing them for what they are. I thought these were just a normal part of a normal person’s view of the world, rather than something that could be holding me back from a life of happiness and success. But I thought wrong, and now I’m working on eradicating each of these from my brain similar to how I rewired my brain to be less depressive in the years following college.
Here goes, and boy are there a lot of them:
- I’m not good at anything people will pay me for
- I’m basically lazy
- I’m not lucky
- You have to be greedy to make money
- If I work hard, I’ll eventually get sucked in, work too hard, and make myself unhappy like I did in college studying to get good grades for Pre-Med
- I don’t have the hunger needed to succeed
- If I make mistakes, I’ll let my parents and family down
- Mistakes are inherently bad
- I’m not good at speaking at length and with confidence, I don’t have the gift of gab
- I’ll never be successful
- I don’t care about money enough to be successful
- If I get too stressed, I’ll get depressed, and want to kill myself like I wanted to in college
- Ambition prevents happiness
- Failure is an objective thing, not in the eye of the beholder
- I’m not a capable, or effective person. I’m not the sort of person who gets shit down
- Being quiet and polite is how you get people to like you
- If I assert myself, people will like me less
- If I am confident, I will annoy people
- Annoying people is very bad
- I need the approval of others to be happy
- I should play by the rules
- “the rules” exist and apply to me. There is a right and wrong way to do most things
- Everyone agrees on the same rules for life
- What others think of me matters
- Events have objective meaning beyond what I ascribe to them
- I will be successful once I’m old, not before then
- If I become successful it will be taken away
- Sex is inappropriate
- My opinion of myself is unimportant
- I can change how other people feel and am responsible for how they feel
- The biggest determinant of how I feel is what happens to me
- I don’t have very much energy and do not have the ability to get more over time
- If I wait long enough, everything I want will eventually come to me without work
Thirty three. Thirty-fucking-three. Think you can beat my record? Email me your list so I can post it.
I encourage you to share yours, because it actually is kind of fun seeing all of them listed out like that. Almost comical. It legitimately makes me wonder how the heck I’m even functioning as a human being. I mean, JEEEEEEZ. Talk about baggage. And yet here I am still trucking along. Go me, probably.
On a more serious, therapeutic note, it feels good to have them all outside my head and explicitly identified. Listed out in the light of day, they actually seem kind of ridiculous. Literally, ridicule-able. Like, who the fuck thinks that way? How is that possibly a reasonable expectation for a person to have?
My ultimate goal is to keep expanding the list, and develop my skill in identifying and dismissing these beliefs as my shitty brain produces them. Specifically, I will 1) Identify them 2) Celebrate my noticing (a la Brad Pendergraft) 3) Laugh at how ridiculous it is that my brain would try to sabotage its own happiness and success in this way 4) Dismiss that belief as something I don’t want in my head, and 5) Replace it with a more positive thought (replace “I’m basically lazy” with “I am actually a get-shit-done kind of person”)