How safe is your future from your beliefs

I have talked before about your fears, or aligning your life to your values, but one obstacle that you may be struggling is hidden within yourself, your beliefs may or may not be helping you and you should take time to analyze them.

I’m not talking about your spiritual or religious beliefs, but you may want to test those too, just to see if they truly hold as powerful as they should be. Otherwise this post focus on more mundane beliefs that have to do with your success.

When your beliefs are empowering, the sky is the only limit, and maybe not even that. Photo by Nicola Centenaro.

What is a belief?

A belief is something that you just hold as true but may or may not be real. It’s usually not associated with a fact, or information that could really hold it as true.

Our fist task is to be able to differentiate facts from beliefs. And this is far easier with a couple of examples.

• “I am good with money” is a belief, but “I have $3,000 saved in the bank” is a fact.
• “My brother is a great illustrator” is a belief, but “My brother has been published in a book edited by UDON“ is a fact.

As you can see in both examples, both the fact and the belief are similar in their meaning, but they use very different words. You may also note that the fact seems far more real than the beliefs. Why? Simple, because $3,000 in the bank is something that can easily be proved with a simple bank statement.

That’s the key difference, beliefs are harder to prove, while facts are truly easy to prove many times.

So how does your beliefs work against you?

Just as the beliefs in the above, there are some that actually work against us. The sooner you find them the better, because they can be holding you back without you even noticing.

Again a example can illustrate things a lot better. I’m the example on this case. Last year, before I left my job at the bank, I used to believe that you had to work real hard to earn money, it’s a belief that runs deeply in my family. The problem with this train of thought is that it kept me down.

I thought that by working very little time on my side projects I would never be able to make them real. So I kept working for hours on end without rest, this led me to fall to bed, ill and exhausted really often. Stress was tearing me apart.

Back in October of the last year I found the work of Michael Nobbs, and upon reading and testing his ideas on working a little but often. I decided to try to go that route instead. I signed for his course.

This challenged my belief. How can someone (in this case Michael) be able to earn money to live without working super hard? This doesn’t mean that Michael doesn’t make an effort, it means that he found his own way to work, one that was mindful of his energy and his well being.

Our upcoming book The Enso Journey’s Warrior Manual (hint: it will be free for subscriber) is the proof I needed. I wrote it by just working on it 20 minutes every day for over a month. This achievement was possible because I broke a limiting belief.

How can you discover your limiting beliefs?

This takes time and effort and a lot of honesty. Take a piece of paper or open a simple text document and start listing all the things that you hold true. It doesn’t matter if they are positive or not, just write away. It’s truly important that you don’t judge at this point.

If you need a couple of prompts, try this ones:

• What do you believe about money?
• What do you believe about success?
• What do you believe about happiness?
• What do you believe about life?
• What do you believe about work?

You can add more or less, feel free to take as much time as you need, and please do this exercise while you are alone and relaxed. There is no need to involve the ideas from your family and friends.

Now that you have a list of what you hold true. It’s time to classify them. If the belief is empowering and positive, you can keep it. Things like:

• I’m good with money.
• I can succeed if I work in a focused way.
• I can learn new things.

You can keep those if you life, those are good and open to growth. But if in your list you find stuff like:

• I’m not good at drawing.
• I can’t manage my money in the right way.
• I never achieve anything.

Those things need to go away really fast. Unfortunately they won’t go away by just erasing them or throwing away the piece of paper (but it’s a good anchor so if you wish you can do that too).

Destroying your limiting beliefs

It’s time to test those limiting beliefs and see if they hold true or not. In fact the idea is to crush them beneath the power of facts. So we are in for some researching.

In my example above, my limiting belief was that I had to work really hard if I wanted to make money. To destroy that belief i had to find ways to prove it wrong. First, a word of caution, you need to use real facts to prove a belief wrong or else it won’t work.

So I started researching, and found great people like Michael Nobbs and Pat Flynn. They do wok, and work a lot, but they do it in smarter ways, not in harder ways. They try to create money opportunities by being smart with their energy and time, not exhausting themselves to death.

After reading their work and blogs, I started looking for some examples in my own life. And I came up with several moments where a little bit of work, or a smart implementation of my knowledge could bring me money. Some of my examples came from my time as a student.

Now that I had the power of facts by my side, each time I thought of the belief, I answered myself by citing examples from both other people and myself that just made the belief silly, and at the end I added an empowering belief such as: “I don’t have to work until exhaustion, I have to work in smart, focused and meaningful ways”.

You can do the same, take one of your limiting beliefs and start searching for facts to prove it wrong. Here are a couple of examples to get you going:

• If you believe “you can’t save money and clear your debt”, Let me introduce you to the powerful blog Man Vs Debt, that truly proves you wrong.
• If you believe “you can’t learn to draw”, Michael Nobbs can truly help you with his free book. Also the awesome book of Betty Edwards that helped me to learn how to draw.
• If you think “You just can’t travel the world”, let me introduce you to my friend Niahl Doherty from Disrupting the Rabblement, he travels all the time and is able to manage his business from the road. Also the great Chris Guillebeau, who is about to complete his dream of visiting every country in the world.

Reclaim your future

Now that you can crush your limiting beliefs, it’s time for you to start adding some new empowering ones, those that can really help you achieve what you want.

Just as you can break limiting beliefs, you can start adding empowering beliefs. Using the power of the facts above, you can start creating some powerful replacements. Here are some ideas:

• Countering the idea of not being able to save money, we could craft this simple one “I have not been able to save money before, but I’m ready to start saving money and paying my debt”. It pushes your limiting belief out to the realms of the past and it opens you to being able to grow.
• If you believe you can’t draw, you can change it to “I am not able to draw yet”. Notice how just a couple of words can open it to a myriad of possibilities.
• If you believe that you can’t travel the world, again one simple worked can open it up for possibility like “I can’t travel the world yet”.

Forge your warrior beliefs

Now, with all this weapons, you are able to reclaim your future and use your beliefs to your advantage. Your task now is to start forming powerful beliefs that can truly help you to achieve your glory.

Form powerful warrior beliefs and you won’t be a leaf in the wind. Now as a way to seal the contract, to destroy your old limiting beliefs, share this post and help others destroy the beliefs that are holding them back.