3 Steps to Eliminate Barriers to Your Dream Life
Your beliefs about yourself, your relationships and your status in the world can prevent you from living your successful life.
Defining Success
How do you define success? Most people would include work/life balance, a career they love, a romantic partner, family and friends, and the health and wealth to enjoy their life. You may emphasize some areas more than others. You get to choose what is important to achieving your definition of success.
How Do You Define Success
Imagine your perfect life, including career, relationships, and abundant health and wealth:
Your career and/or philanthropic mission in which you make a worldwide impact
Perfect relationships with your soulmate, supportive family and friends, and your business partners and associates
Your dream home in your dream location
A vibrantly healthy body
Amazing vacations throughout the world
A schedule in which you to do everything you want
All the material resources needed to create your dream
Success includes career accomplishments, developing deep personal and professional relationships, an efficient and effective schedule, and a very comfortable level of money and other resources, while achieving and maintaining mental, emotional and physical health.
What Prevents Your Success?
Compare your current life with your perfect life. Notice where the gaps are and how wide those gaps are. Who or what is preventing you from living your perfect life?
Typical answers include:
My boss is holding me back.
The competition is unfair. It’s a dog-eat-dog world.
I just don’t have what it takes to be successful in my career.
I don’t have enough money for the education I need.
Or I have too much debt because of my education.
My spouse is upset that I don’t spend time with them.
What social life?
I can’t afford a house, let alone my dream home.
I don’t have enough hours in a day to do everything I want.
I don’t have enough money to buy everything I want.
I grew up poor, so I started at a disadvantage.
Who has time to exercise?
I don’t have time to prepare healthy food.
I need to win the lottery to be able to live my perfect life.
You may have endless variations of reasons why you haven’t achieved your perfect life, and all point back to one underlying reason.
You don’t BELIEVE you can achieve your perfect life.
When I asked some of my clients this question, the ones who had been with me the longest pointed to their head. They all knew it was their limiting beliefs that were preventing them from moving toward their vision of their perfect life.
3 Success Barriers
All of the reasons we list for not achieving our perfect life can be summarized into the 3 common limiting beliefs that are barriers to your success: Shame, Isolation and Lack.
Shame - Believing you’re not good enough or that you’re “too much” (too loud, too quiet, too eccentric, too standoffish, too big, too small, too much of any opposite traits) is based on the underlying belief that something is inherently wrong with you. This leads to fears that you’ll never be good enough or you don’t deserve to be successful in your career or you’re going to be stuck at your current level indefinitely.
Isolation - Believing you don’t belong in the successful group or deserve the love of family and friends is based on the underlying belief that love and acceptance is conditional on your behavior, and you are inherently unlovable. This leads to fears that you’re not as good as other people and will never be accepted in the “successful” group or feeling like an imposter if you have entered the group. You don’t feel lovable, so you isolate yourself and don’t let others see the real you. You don’t take chances on having deep meaningful relationships, because they would never last..
Lack - Believing you don’t have enough time, money, energy and other resources is based on the underlying belief that there are not enough resources for everyone and you don’t deserve to have your needs fulfilled. Much of this belief is based on comparisons and trying to be like everyone else whether or not those choices resonate with you. If you or your parents or their parents grew up poor, then no matter how many resources you have, you probably have a fear of not having enough or that it might disappear at any moment, because of your family’s beliefs.
Whether or not any of these limiting beliefs hold any truth, claiming these beliefs as your own turns them into self-imposed limitations preventing you from living your vision. The only way to shift these limiting beliefs is to release their power over you and claim your powerful Truth.
People “often become what they believe themselves to be.
If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it.
When I believe I can, I acquire the ability to do it,
even if I didn’t have it in the beginning.”
- Ghandi
How to Eliminate Limiting Beliefs
Origin of Limiting Beliefs
Your beliefs are based on the values and norms instilled in you by your family of origin, your teachers, other authority figures and even your peers through age 7-8. Beyond those years, you spent most of your time reinforcing those beliefs. You have a natural confirmation bias toward those beliefs and cultural norms. This constant reinforcement of your beliefs can make it difficult to change them; you have a natural resistance to change. However, you also have the ability to learn and grow, so change is possible.
Some of your beliefs have served you well and will continue to serve you well long into the future. Others served you well in your youth but have no value to you as an adult. Still others never served you and have prevented you from living life to its fullest.
Affirm and treasure the beliefs that support you and resonate with you. Healthy habits and fun family traditions that are still meaningful for you support beliefs you want to affirm and treasure. You might believe that attending large family gatherings are important for your relationships, because you value family and traditions.
Those you’ve outgrown should be relatively easy to thank them for their service and then release them. Staying close to home and following basic rules for children for safety reasons make sense when you’re young. But you don’t have to believe that if you leave your parents’ home as an adult that you won’t be safe. So you can release that safety belief. Yet it’s still okay to call your parents during times when you don’t feel safe. You can shift your belief to knowing they will always be there for you in times of need. Or any other belief that you want to instill as a healthy happy adult.
Some beliefs have never served you. Any beliefs that reinforce shame, isolation or lack are not and never have been good for you. Unfortunately, many parents, teachers, religious leaders and politicians instill many of these beliefs to protect you and to control you, requiring you to conform to their social norms. Whether intentionally or accidentally, they instill some good beliefs and some that reinforce shame, isolation or lack. Those must be eliminated to live life fully.
Eliminating Limiting Beliefs
Denials and affirmations are the best method for eliminating limiting, negative, harmful beliefs. Deny the belief any power over you. People often “make a mountain out of a molehill,” making their problems bigger than they are. Instead of a mountain, treat those negative limiting beliefs like a tiny ant hill that you barely even notice. Step over them and move forward. Focus instead on affirming the truth. If you think you’re not good enough to deserve what you want in life, then tell that belief it is an insignificant ant hill, step over it, and affirm that you deserve to live a happy, healthy life, by the mere fact that you are alive and breathing!
Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about pruning the neurological branches in the brain by replacing the old beliefs with new beliefs. He literally showed a branch being pruned in the brain, and new branches growing. Release the old thoughts and beliefs. Plant new successful beliefs. When an old belief comes up, challenge it as false and prune it like dead branches. Then affirm the truth several times to plant the seeds and grow the branches of the new thoughts and beliefs. You deserve to be happy, healthy, wealthy and wise.
Being Is Believing
How would a person who is happy, healthy, wealthy and wise behave? What thoughts would they think? What emotions would they feel? What actions would they take? Every time you have a decision to make about your beliefs, your relationships and your actions, ask yourself, “What would the person in the life of your dreams think, feel and do?” You are the person in your vision already, so be that person in every possible step on the way to fulfilling your vision. The more you think, feel and act like the person in your vision, the more you will believe that you are, and the more successful you will be. Being is believing.
Mindset Shifts
I will discuss each of the common limiting beliefs and what the process of shifting them looks like in next several blogs posts:
3 Levels of Self Belief - Shifting from Shame to Shine
Your ability to succeed is impacted by your beliefs about yourself.
3 Level of Relational Beliefs - Shifting from Isolation to Interdependence
Your ability to succeed is impacted by your beliefs about other people.
3 Levels of Abundance Beliefs - Shifting from Lack to Limitless
Your ability to succeed is impacted by your beliefs about the world.