How I changed my self-limiting beliefs
No positive affirmations required
Hi, I'm Nat and I write "Dear Self," documenting the emotional journey of peeling back the layers to become who we are. I share my journey with hopes that it can inspire you to grow more connected, confident, and in love with yourself.
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to see solutions to other people's problems, while our own challenges seem far more challenging to figure out?
I believe that most often than not, we stand on our own way to get the things we want.
Last year, I found myself stuck: I wanted to connect with more people, make more friends, create new things, and communicate more on social media. However, for reasons I couldn't pinpoint, I couldn’t get myself to do it.
Until one day when I decided to write down what was holding me back, and the answer was simple: the beliefs I was holding about myself.
Then one day, I started noticing these things I kept repeating to others in conversations and to myself to justify certain situations in my life. Things like:
“I’m not a doer.”
“I’m not good at socializing and making friends.”
“People are paying close attention to me and judging me by what I say or do.”
But in the moment that I really became of aware of it (when I wrote it down), I had a weird feeling. Deep down I suspected that they weren't totally true. So, I decided to search for evidences.
And what I discovered was that, for each evidence I could point that those were true beliefs, I had 10 others evidences that showed me that they weren’t. For example:
How come I’m not a doer, if I have been running my own practice for over 7 years?
How come I’m not good at making friends, if I moved to a new country and created new relationships from scratch to a point I do feel I have a community around me?
How come I think people are judging me, if I never received a critique or hate for anything I put out there? Quite the opposite really?
I felt conflicted. After all, are these things I was thinking about myself, true or not?
Limiting beliefs
When I reflect on this, I think the most important question to look at is:
If I had more evidence that these beliefs were not true than evidence that they were, why does my mind routinely accept them as valid?
The answer is simple: the weight of emotions.
Beliefs are not just thoughts, they are thoughts attached to strong emotions that make our sense of identity.
If we find ourselves in one situation that cause us a strong emotion, this bad situation will overweight 100 good ones that didn't have as a strong impact.
When I look back, I know exactly which single situation that caused me a strong negative emotion that led me to repeat these beliefs in my mind over years, even though they are not really true to who I am on a daily basis.
Real evidences or interpretation of reality?
Committed to reshape these beliefs, I decided to dive and study more deeply about how what we think about ourselves can impact the results we get in life.
I learned that the reason why many of us get stuck in negative beliefs is because we see them as inherent to us, in other words, that they are the reality of how things are (or how we are), independent of our perception.
But the real truth that neuroscience reveals is that much of the reality we experience depends on the way we perceive things (and I will prove it to you below).
Vanessa Van Edwards, a specialist on the science of people, explains that people who believe they are disliked often interpret neutral facial expressions as angry ones, creating a negative cycle. When we think others dislike us, we tend to shut down and become less approachable.
She shares a study done by Dr. Van Sloan that investigated "What makes popular kids popular?" They studied thousands of high school students across many schools, looking for patterns. They discovered that what made popular kids popular was not that they were more athletic, attractive, funnier, or smarter. They found out that the most popular kids had the longest list of people whom they liked.
Think about it, if you like more people, you’re naturally more open to others, nicer to others, leading you to create multiple moments of small connections throughout your day - which in turn makes you more likeable.
The way we feel about ourselves dictates how we expect others to act towards us.
Verifying our evidences
Beliefs are sustained by evidence. The problem is that we are biased to interpret situations based on how we feel about ourselves (just like interpreting resting neutral faces as angry faces, as I mentioned before).
This is what psychologists call confirmation bias, the tendency of people to find ways to confirm their own beliefs. Self-verification is when we use this bias to confirm what we believe about ourselves.
Like when we focus on that one piece of evidence that confirms what we believe about ourselves, and ignore the other 99 pieces of evidence that show us that the opposite is actually true.
It’s the unseen biased perceptions that leads us to repeat old patterns that we keep complaining about in our lives. When we start to question our biases we start opening up the possibility of change.
The more we recognise our bias, the more we begin to open up to and search out to a more objective perspective.
Self-verification done in the right way
When I decided to write down my limiting beliefs and study them more closely, it became the turning point where I began gathering the right evidence and taking action to change them.
I did an exercise of writing down evidence in my own life that disproved those beliefs and created a consistent practice to generate more evidence to override those specific beliefs.
It looked like this:
“I’m not good at socializing and making friends.”
Evidence: Almost all new friends I did living abroad started because I INVITED THEM FOR A COFFEE after crossing with them somewhere and thinking that they looked like a cool person.
Practice: I started using the Breakfast app, an app that connect modern creatives over breakfast (or coffee) - it’s not dating not networking - just coffee. And I committed to go for a coffee with a new person at least 2x a month.
“I’m not a doer.”
Evidence: I created products, started businesses, engaged in multiple creative projects, and said yes to opportunities that I didn’t feel completely ready for it but very eager to learn and grow in the process.
Practice: At the time, the practice was to create and launch a day retreat project with a friend in a topic I was not too familiar with yet. (Today, It turned this practice into creating a max window of 48h between having an idea and starting executing it.)
“People are paying close attention to me and judging me by what I say or do.”
Evidence: In this case the lack of evidence was the evidence. People are too busy thinking what people think of them to think something about me.
Practice: Join a public speaking club, and publishing at least once a week a piece on social media - from a creative place instead of based on what I thought others would like.
It's true that practice helps us grow, and practice with direction (new knowledge) helps us develop with more confidence and faster.
For example, when I was going to meet new strangers through the breakfast app, beforehand I'd prepare questions I could ask based on their profile, or study on YouTube ways I could have better small talk and move faster into meaningful conversations.
How to change your self-limiting beliefs
Start with writing down the beliefs you have about yourself, just like I showed you.
Then try to identify the emotion around that belief.
Look for real evidences in your life around that belief and note them down.
Commit to a practice to create new evidences around that belief.
I'm still working on some personal limiting beliefs, and I think this is a work of a lifetime as we are constantly becoming aware of new parts of ourselves, but I've been reflecting on how powerful and amazing it is to know that these are not rigid facts but more of perceptions that we can shape in the direction that serves us best.
Our beliefs guide the way we approach life and relationships. When we change how we see ourselves, we change the results we get in life.
With Love,
Nat
I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with on this. Have you ever notice self-limiting beliefs? What have you done about it?
I'm currently unraveling the belief that my value as a person is based on my output. I went through a layer of this when I became a mother and for the first time, learned that my value was inherent to me as a human. Now, there's a thread tied to the idea that if I didn't work hard or it wasn't a struggle, it wasn't really earned. I'm letting myself lean into ease, enjoyment, and rest and it's amazing at the creativity that flows from that place!
Hi Nathalia! Thank you for the reply 🤗✨
Indeed taking conscious of these beliefs and which part of us holds down to them, while our adult self has the proof of us being much more than what we do, is the first step to change these wired beliefs in us. 💜✨
Sending much light across ✨✨
Thank you for your posts and experiences sharing 🫶🏼✨