Self-Limited Mindset Hurdle

“Are you a fortune-teller? A clairvoyant? If not, why anticipate the worst for yourself? We predict events will turn out in a negative way because our self-beliefs are limiting.” —Maddy Malhotra

Good morning! Last week we wrapped up talking about how the subconscious mind works and how you can alter its effects through your conscious mind being positive-oriented - the glass-half-empty compared to the glass being half-full view of life. This week we continue the discussion on how the half-empty perspective can be self-limiting and a huge hurdle to your success.

In two streaming series that I have been watching; Star Trek's Strange New Worlds on Paramount and Manifest on Netflix, both of the main characters, Captain Pike and Ben Stone respectively, believe they know how and when they are going to die. This knowledge leads them to focus their activity in life on how they may counter this projected end-of-life and in most cases, each is self-limiting their power over their lives.

Let's say a friend tells you about a job opportunity in their company. They wanted you to apply for the post. But your self-limiting and you immediately responded without giving a single thought: "I don’t have enough experience, you say, and "I won't perform well there." or even worse, "I will fail the interview", so better not to apply.

If this is you, you've assumed that you would fail the interview without even trying; you proclaimed that you would not perform well before even finding out the details of the job; you told yourself that you don’t have enough experience when in reality it is not expertise in a job that counts but instead the ability to learn and adapt that is most important in any employee.

These self-proclaimed perceptions and assumptions about yourself are aggregated into what is called a self-limited mindset. I experienced this myself when I became interested in learning finance and building a self-managed investment portfolio. I thought I should join a firm that would train me in that knowledge first as a professional. But I let my negative thoughts get the best of me. I applied and did the interview well enough to go to the next level, a test of my conceptual understanding of investment and finance. Oh my, I thought I totally blew the exam, so much so I didn’t even call back to get the results and ask about the next steps. Of course, since I dropped the ball and moved on to another opportunity, the company never called me back.

One evening, I was at a happy hour meetup and ran into the hiring authority. The guy had liked me a lot and asked why I never called back. I was honest and told him my fear. He said that was too bad because he was ready to offer me the job at $20,000 more than I was already making with a very intense training program included to get me ramped up fast.

Only God knows where I would be today if I had much more confidence in myself back then. Later in life, I took my conscious failure as a lesson learned for myself and also an opportunity for me to pass it on to you. A self-limited mindset prevents us from achieving many of our goals. It is directly linked to our current environment and how well we were nurtured in youth by our parents, teachers, and bosses.

Right from birth, our parents instill their beliefs into our minds which heavily shape our early understanding of the world. As we grow older, we take that foundation, or lack thereof if that is the case, and develop a more complex set of beliefs about ourselves and the world around us.

If we grow up in a negative and abusive environment, we build a lot of self-limiting beliefs about ourselves. A self-limited mindset often leads to low self-esteem in the majority of people. Overcoming self-limiting beliefs is necessary to achieve any success in life. If you want to overcome these beliefs, you must first be honest with yourself. Try to figure out what your self-limiting behaviors may be.

For example, low esteem leads to statements such as, I can’t love someone wholeheartedly. I can never be successful in my life. I don’t like to interact with strangers.

The second step after analyzing the self-limiting beliefs is to find out the reason why and how they developed. Maybe you feel you can’t love someone because a past incident extremely hurt you. This incident was absorbed through your conscious and embedded into your subconscious mind hence it prevents you from loving others. You may fit all others into a single frame and see only negative attributes of their character in relation to you.

Similarly, your belief that you can never be successful in life might have been developed due to past failures. Trust me, I know this one well. Out of the multiple start-ups I have been involved with over the years, two were fantastic failures leading to a corporate and personal bankruptcy; others were at various levels of “okay”, and three were successful enough to classify as decidedly good exits (meaning we did well when we sold, merged, or went public).

Even with all that business and personal failure in my past, I still try new things all the time and work every day to deploy new ideas into projects and businesses. Nothing is ever holding me back. When you find yourself coming up with negative reasons to keep you from doing something, you must convince yourself that these beliefs are not true. A failure in the past is real, but that reality doesn’t mean that you can never succeed in your life again.

Our life is full of challenges, and they even make us better for it. Every day we encounter new trials and tribulations where the only thing that matters is our response to them. Your self-limiting behaviors, if unattended, can lead to all kinds of fears and phobias. These fears and phobias in return will develop anxiety and stress which then affect your overall life.

Fear of failure, fear of losing, fear of doing, and fear of communicating are common themes in our society today. People spend their entire life with these fears. But we should understand that overcoming these fears is not impossible.

My son is an example. he is quite fearless in trying new sports or outdoor activities except when it comes to picking up the occasional dead roach (because we do spray regularly) off the floor of our home. He will not even get close to it even though he knows it is dead. He is also fearful of bugs flying around outdoors.

If we as his parents, don’t help him nip this unnecessary fear in the bud while he is young, it could well turn into full-blown entomophobia — the fear of insects or arachnophobia — the fear of spiders of many kinds. Even though my wife and I are both healthcare professionals and realize that a true phobia should be treated by professional counselors, Jennifer and I did not feel our son was at that point yet.

So, what did we do? We introduced him to the roach. We pointed out that it was dead. We proved it was dead by spinning it around on its back on the floor. We taught him how to pick it up with a paper towel and talked about the different parts of the body and that even when alive it can’t harm a human. As a matter of fact, we talk about our family emergency plans all the time and if you’re stuck in the woods in a survival mood, the roach is a great source of protein. The next time we found one, we coached him through the same process.

Today, I can’t say he loves it when I ask him to pick up a dead roach and throw it away, but he does get it done! If we always avoid situations that scare us, we will never build up our path to success. If we continue to avoid the situations that frighten us, we miss the chance to work out our fears and reduce our anxiety. As I illustrated in the story about my son, learning more about your fears is a highly effective way to overcome them. Keep a record of your anxieties and fears in a journal to jot down when they happen and what happens to you mentally and physically.

Then set small active yet achievable goals for you to overcome each time you encounter the fear. This will also encourage you to get out because you have challenged yourself to achieve that smaller goal rather than trying to dismiss the whole issue at once. You can also list the activities that help you when you are likely to become frightened or anxious in the future.

Developing a Createyourself mindset is not an impossible task. Willingness and self-determination are the key factors that you can use to your advantage. Never let them go!

If you ever want to speak with me directly just reach out via LinkedIn or through our mobile community app, Createyourself.com

Have a great week, Gordon

PS - Feel free to buy our Kindle version of How to Createyourself

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