How to Master Your Mindset: A Simple Strategy to Challenge and Change Your Limiting Beliefs
Our minds are full of thoughts and ideas that shape our self-image based on our past experiences. But sometimes, we act on these thoughts without being fully aware of them or their consequences.
Some of these thoughts might be limiting beliefs that hold us back from achieving our goals and growing as individuals.
How can we overcome these limiting beliefs and free ourselves from their influence?
In this article, I will share with you a four-step guide by Byron Katie, a renowned author and speaker, that can help you question and transform your limiting beliefs.
Step One:
Challenge your belief: How certain are you that it is true? Do you have solid evidence to back it up? Is there any other possible explanation for the data besides belief? (You might admit at this point: “Well, it’s not absolutely true without a shadow of a doubt but...")
Step Two:
Ask yourself: How does this belief affect your emotions? What actions and reactions does it trigger?
Step Three:
Now imagine a world where this belief never existed in your mind. How do you feel in this scenario? What actions or reactions do you have in this new state?
Step Four:
Explore the opposite of that belief. Think of three reasons why the opposite is true.
I don’t recall the exact questions that she suggested, but I have been using similar questions to examine and challenge my limiting beliefs for quite some time. Here is an example:
Limiting Belief: “I won’t be able to grow in my writing as I do not have the time for the practice to be done regularly as I have so much to be doing in my businesses, and my side projects and writing need a lot of time and practice to be able to produce content that people would read and benefit from.”
Step One: Is this really true? Did I consider all the evidence and arrive at this conclusion? Is it really true that I don’t have the time to write consistently?
Answer: No. If I had 24 chips and each chip represented an hour of the day, I would spend 7 chips sleeping, and now I have 17 chips to spend on things that matter the most to me, and writing is one thing I want to be able to do daily.
If I say that managing my business takes all my time, that is not true. I do have the time, and I could have more time by building better systems and hiring the right talented people who would take the business to the next level and, most importantly, free my time.
Lately, I have been spending too much time on the Threads app, where I write and interact with other users. I have gained a lot of followers there — over 6,000 — and you can follow me too at @peterabdaal.
However, writing on Threads is only a short form of content creation, and I also want to explore long-form writing, where I can express my thoughts and experiences more fully with more ground to cover about a certain topic.
Writing on Threads is addictive because I get instant validation from the short content I create with my mobile. For something new for me I like to answer every comment and interact in the conversation. But I know I have to limit the time I spend there to focus on other things I want to be doing, like writing long content.
Those are only two aspects; I could write many on how to free more of my time to do more writing.
So the belief that I don’t have time to write daily because I don’t have the time is not 100% true now that I really stop to question it.
Step Two: How does this belief affect your emotions? What actions and reactions does it trigger?
Answer: It makes me feel like I am in conflict. There is a part of me that wants to write about every experience and issue that I have and how I solved and overcame challenges to reach more people and positively impact their lives.
But there‘s another part that is holding me back and telling me that you don’t have the time for this practice and that you have more important things to be doing that would have an instant impact on your life.
As a result, whenever it comes to thinking about that, I have to sit down and write. I find my mind drifting to other stuff in the business, and all my thinking goes to that particular issue, and I end the writing session to go do other stuff.
Which isn’t actually doing me any favor as deep down I know how this habit of writing is going to help me in all sorts of business and in life to reach more people, expand my circle, and affect other lives positively.
Step Three: Imagine the belief never existed. And there is enough time for me to do my writing. How do you feel in this scenario? What actions or reactions do you have in this new state?
Answer: I would be writing a lot in all forms of writing, from journaling to short-form content to long-form content. I won’t stop at a point.
I would feel that I am helping myself and others grow through the experiences I am having in my business and personal life.
I would write about how we gathered the perfect teams for development and how we approached those engineers.
I would write about marketing in many articles and how marketing is so valuable to any business.
I don’t know when I will stop, as my feeling that I am not using my time efficiently is now gone. I will be writing in many slots throughout the day.
As a result, my network of people would grow, my business would grow, and I would have a greater impact on a greater number of people.
Step Four: Explore the opposite of that belief. Think of three reasons why the opposite is true.
Answer: The opposite belief is that “I would grow in writing as I have the time to spend doing the practice, and spending time doing it would help me grow in my business and personal life.”
Reasons:
- As I have mentioned, the more I build good systems in my business and hire talented people, the more time I have to practice, and I have those talented people and so far good systems.
- Writing helps me in my business and personal life, as the more I write, the more I reflect on what we have done or what has gone wrong with us, and that would help us grow.
- By writing consistently, I would produce more content that would attract more people and expand my network, and who knows, maybe an investor would read it and would like to invest with us.
Obviously, I don’t claim to have the absolute truth. These are just my hypotheses.
I’m not writing this to prove myself right or wrong. I’m writing this because I’ve discovered a limiting belief that I’ve been holding without questioning: “I won’t be good at writing because I don’t have the time to practice consistently”. This belief makes me feel uncertain and anxious about growing my writing skills.
But what if I could challenge this belief and see things differently? What if I could choose a more empowering belief that supports my writing goals?
By following the 4-step process to systematically question the belief and realize that there’s another way of seeing things ( there always is ), I can choose a more empowering belief to adopt
If you liked this article, don’t forget to clap, comment, and follow my profile!
