What Are Limiting Beliefs and Are They Holding You Back?

Back when I was finishing college and trying to make a decision about what I was going to do next, I met with my advisor. I was terrified in that meeting. I was always a bit timid in the English department at my university, where as saw myself as the bottom of the barrel, the least dedicated or intelligent of a group of incredibly dedicated and intelligent students.

So in that meeting, when she asked me what I was planning to do after graduation, I hemmed and hawed.

What do you want to do? She asked, hoping that would make things easier.

Again, I stammered and stuttered and told her I didn’t really know.

I was working as a bartender at the time to help pay my way through college. It was great money, honestly, and for the most part it felt easy. When I pictured life after college, I figured I could just sort of keep doing what I was doing. I mean, it was close to my house. I wouldn’t have to learn anything new. I could walk out with cash in my pocket every night.

I guess that was what I “wanted” to do…? How were you supposed to know?

“You can’t really do much with an English degree,” I told her, reciting the words so many had said to me before I chose my major.

“Have you considered graduate school?” She asked.

“It’s crossed my mind but I don’t really think I’m cut out for it.”

I thought about how I’d have to fill out an application and get a letter of recommendation from a professor, and none of my professors would probably write one for me. Then I’d have to pay an application fee and, well, money was already tight, and what if I didn’t even get in? That would be a huge waste of 40 bucks.

At the end of our meeting, I got up and walked toward the door. She stopped me for a moment and looked straight in my eyes and said:

“If you want to go to graduate school go to graduate school. You can do what you want.”

Of course I left her office muttering to myself about how that wasn’t totally true. What if I wanted to be in the WNBA? Did she think I could do that? What I couldn’t see at the time were the many dozens of limiting beliefs at play there and how profoundly we can hold ourselves back.

Are you holding yourself back?

Do you ever get the sense that you are holding yourself back? That there is more you have to offer to this world, more buried deep inside of you, but it feels like there is some invisible force getting in your way?

Do you get the sense that you are playing small?

I read a quote once by Marianne Williamson. You’ve may have read it at some point, too. It goes like this:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” —Marianne Williamson

And when I first found this quote, it all sounded so unreasonable to me. Who would be scared of being powerful? But the more I began to zoom out from my life, and look at myself as if I were not myself, the more I began to see how the person most at fault for holding me back was… me.

Can you relate? Have there been times in your life when you could have made a move toward a better job, or a healthier relationship, or even toward a more challenging, happier existence, and you just didn’t?

What are we so afraid of?

What is a limiting belief?

A limiting belief is simply something you believe to be true about yourself, about others, or about the world that limits you in some way. These beliefs may hold you back from taking chances, keep you blind to opportunities in your path, prevent you from accepting gifts offered to you; or simply keep you stuck focusing on the negative aspect of your circumstances, rather than seeing the positive.

The challenge with limiting beliefs is most of us don’t think we have them and they can be really hard to spot.

The first time I heard the phrase “liming belief” I wasn’t sure. I mean, were my beliefs really that powerful? Did the have the power to limit me? Did beliefs come from what I experienced in the world—or did what I experienced in the world reflect what I believed about it?

Honestly the first one sounded far more plausible.

And even if limiting beliefs were powerful enough to impact the reality of my circumstances, did I have any limiting beliefs? If you would have asked me then, I would have said “no”. But consider the beliefs dictating the conversation with my advisor that day:

You can’t make money with an English Degree.
I’m not the “kind of person” who would do well in graduate school
It would be better to stick with what was easiest than challenge myself with my work.

Can you think of some limiting beliefs that might be getting in your way? Here are a few common ones.

I’m not very smart (or pretty, or interesting, or funny).
My brother (or sister) is the successful one.
Money is hard to come by and easy to lose.
I’m not cut out for that job.
That activity is really more of a guy thing (or a girl thing).
Men (or women) are liars and they will always be unfaithful to me.
Relationships always end in heartbreak.
Nobody loves their job. Work is supposed to be boring at best, miserable at worst.
Women (or men) are manipulative and they can’t be trusted.
I am not worthy of being loved
Only the lucky people succeed at what they care about
Nobody is really all that happy.
The only way to get what you want is to be dishonest
Life is pretty much meaningless

The most challenging thing with limiting beliefs is that they are often buried deep in our consciousness, so that we don’t realize they’re there and we can’t see what they’re doing to us. From our perspective, life is just “happening” to us and it isn’t until we begin to see the negative patterns play out, again and again, that we stop and say:

How did I get here?

Could my beliefs about myself or the world have something to do with it?

How do limiting beliefs work?

The problem with limiting beliefs is that most of us do not consciously decide what to believe, nor do we recognize the many ways these beliefs are limiting us. It happens quietly, behind the scenes and beneath the surface. Not to mention, it can be difficult, if not impossible without serious help, to admit we have played a role in the very pain that has so devastated us.

It’s terrifying to consider that we have, all along, had the power to release ourselves from the painful cycle that has been torturing us.

When I turned 22, a year and a half after I graduated with my degree, I decided to take a major step of faith and quit the bartending job I was bored with in hopes of finding something better. The problem was I hadn’t addressed my limiting beliefs. And what can often happen when we take action without addressing our limiting beliefs is we just recreate our old scenario somewhere new.

So yes, I quit my bartending job and moved away from the town where I was living, back to Portland, Oregon where I had grown up. But months passed, and surprise surprise, no one came to knock on my door to offer me a new, better job (I didn’t even know what kind of job I wanted). So eventually I ran out of money, and can you guess what happened next?

I ended up getting a job…working in a restaurant. Pretty much the exact same job I’d had before.

This is the power and danger of limiting beliefs. They can dominate our stories and dictate them, no matter where we go. That is, unless we make a conscious choice to change them.

Wherever you go, there you are.



Go back for a minute to the beliefs you acknowledged above. How might those beliefs be limiting you as we speak? How might the beliefs you have about yourself, others, or the world, be limiting your ability to take chances, seek opportunities, or see the gifts already sitting right in front of you?

How do you discover your limiting beliefs?

To discover limiting beliefs, we must pay attention to patterns.

In my life personally, I’ve had the most success uncovering my limiting beliefs by paying attention to the less-than-desirable patterns in my world and then tracing them back to a belief connected to them. So, for example, when I found myself working at another restaurant in my 20’s, feeling miserable, I started digging to see what beliefs might be limiting me.

I spent time writing, journaling, reading and driving—because those are the ways I process best, and what I found were the following thoughts:

I’m only good at waiting tables—I’m not sure if I can do something else.
I’m not sure if I even deserve to have a job that satisfies me more deeply than this one.
I’m not the “kind of person” who succeeds in life.
The economy is bad. There just aren’t that many jobs out there.

And just like that, I started to see how my negative beliefs about myself and about the world around me were keeping me from creating the life I desired and from having opportunities to bring my gifts to the world.

My own beliefs were keeping me small.

Are you starting to see how limiting beliefs can work to create the very negative realities we are hoping to avoid?

How can we overcome limiting beliefs?

Honestly, discovering you have a limiting belief is such a huge step forward, if you’ve gotten there, it’s time to celebrate! You know the saying, “knowing is half the battle”? It’s really true. When you know and acknowledge your limiting belief as just that—a belief you can choose to change that is limiting you—you are on the right track.

This is really the hope of this whole thing right here: we can choose to change these beliefs!

We have control over what we think.

1. Replace your beliefs



One thing I’ve done to help me overcome my own limiting beliefs is to create affirmations or little prayers for myself that help me to retrain or reroute the negative pattern that takes place in my head. There is a considerable about of research that shows how our neurological pathways can change as we choose to think differently about the world.

So I went through my own list of limiting beliefs—the ones I saw showing up in my life the most often—and wrote new thought patterns I wanted to form to replace those old, limiting beliefs.

Here are the affirmations I’m using right now:

I am safe and protected in the world.
The abundant resources of the universe are available to me.
I deserve to prosper.
Everything that happens to me is an opportunity to learn.
I release the need to identify as the victim.

I say these affirmations to myself every single morning. I try to say them multiple times each day. Anytime I’m in a situation where I think to myself, “This always happens to me!” I replace that thought with, “Everything that happens to me is an opportunity to learn.”

Each time I catch myself thinking, “that person doesn’t even give a crap about me!” I remind myself: “I release the need to be the victim.”

And every time I feel myself thinking that my life is such a bummer and it must be nice to be one of those “other people” who have everything handed to them, I tell myself: “I deserve to prosper.”

Slowly but surely, it is changing the way I think about myself and even more powerfully than that, it’s changing the way I experience my life.

2. Work with a therapist.



Sometimes you will need help—even professional help—to overcome your limiting beliefs. You’re working with neurological pathways here, and it’s like skiing in ruts that are 10 feet deep. You can try and try to change your path, but until you’re lifted out of the rut you’re in, you’ll have a hard time skiing a different way down the mountain.

And truly, even when you’re lifted out, you will have a tendency to slip back in.

So working with a therapist is a totally reasonable, logical, super helpful thing to do to help you overcome that invisible force that is keeping you anxious, frustrated, stuck and depressed.

For most people, limiting beliefs have been part of their internal world for so long that the beliefs feel ‘normal,’”…Working with a therapist can help. A clinician can help you uncover limiting beliefs, understand how they were formed, interrupt the limiting patterns and create new, adaptive ways of understanding yourself and your world. —Margarita Tartakovsky, Psych Central

I’ve been in and out of therapy for several years of my life and I truly don’t know how I would have survived without the people who have supported me through my darker times. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

3. Make Something



I read something recently by Brene Brown that caught my attention. A reader had reached out to thank her for her work on shame but this person had a question. He asked: how do you go about making positive changes in your life once you realize where you’ve been letting shame dictate your actions?

Her response was so simple and yet profound.

She said: create.

From all of her research and interactions with people over the years, she had come to the conclusion that one of the best ways to solidify new and positive changes in our life is to put our hands to something—grow a garden, write a book, journal, write poetry, paint, design, engineer something, invent, innovate.

There is something about the act of creation that helps us to see ourselves, that helps us carve those new neurological pathways, that helps us manifest the life we can see in our heads and feel in our hearts but we can’t seem to make make a reality in our lives.

I can’t help but agree with her.

The act of creating is not a frivolous activity. It is not something “extra” for the margins of our lives, if we have time. It is the very way we live our lives. It is a lifeline. Where would we be without it?

If you’re interested in reading more about limiting beliefs, I’ll share a few articles below that have been helpful for me.

The Backfire Effect: The Psychology of Why We Have A Hard Time Changing Our Minds (via Brain Pickings)
Where Belief Is Born (via The Guardian)
Overcome 8 Common Limiting Beliefs That May Be Keeping You Stuck (via Tiny Buddha)

Also, I’d love to hear from you. Do you have limiting beliefs that are holding you back? What are they? What are some steps you are taking (or can take) to help re-route those pathways?

The post What Are Limiting Beliefs and Are They Holding You Back? appeared first on Allison Vesterfelt.