Unpacking Your Baggage: Limiting Beliefs

While making new choices is often our intention, old habits can die hard. In fact, many men and women will tell the “world” they want to change, enthusiastically declaring each January 1st the resolutions they have made to create a new reality. Often, however, the past—thoughts, feelings and actions that are not in alignment with this new vision of change—becomes filled with roadblocks.

I often tell clients they can think of these patterns as baggage they carry around: baggage that is jam packed with the “Big 4” energy blocks they carry around from relationship to relationship. It is baggage that dictates how they see the world and that holds us back from reaching our unlimited potential, finding true intimacy, and creating the love of self that ultimately yields love of another.

The first suitcase contains Limiting Beliefs. Beliefs can either help you or hinder you; limiting beliefs are those that hold you back from success. If you do not believe something is possible, you’re not likely to attempt it. Even if you do attempt it, you won’t devote much energy toward achieving that goal.

Limiting beliefs are general beliefs about the world, your environment and situation, and the people around you who stand in your way. More often than not you accept a limiting belief as true because you’ve learned it from someone else or from an “authority” such as the media, a book or a movie. You assume that it’s “just the way it is.”

Here is a classic example of a limiting belief: Men who are over 40 years old want to date women who are 30. The media promotes this limiting belief, yet in my practice I consistently meet an array of emotionally mature men who are hoping to date and fall in love with a woman with whom they share common interests and life experiences—a woman with whom they do not have to explain what life was like before cell phones, email and the Internet!

Here are a couple of common limiting beliefs that hold many of us back in relationships and dating. How about, “Men always cheat”? Or “women always nag”? Or “women only want to date men with nice cars and big homes”?

There are several ways to challenge limiting beliefs. You can explore the effect the belief has had on your life, look for proof of its truth (or lack of proof), or modify the belief or aspects of the belief to better serve you. Simply examining the belief with questions like “How true do I believe that is?” and the rhetorical “Where did I get that idea?” can also work remarkably well. Once you overcome limiting beliefs, they can no longer hold you back.

This month, think about examining the contents of your limiting beliefs suitcase. Unpack it, and see how much lighter you feel.