People will argue until they’re blue in the face about their beliefs. They’ll even fight and die defending their beliefs. But they are just that – beliefs, not facts. Unfortunately humans are really bad at distinguishing their own opinion and their beliefs from facts.
Beliefs are almost always unconscious which means that they’re influencing you without you even realising it. The first step in changing your limiting beliefs is to make them conscious. Start by spending a few moments answering each of the following questions:
- What is stopping you from getting the body that you want?
- What gets in your way?
- What or who makes that difficult, or hard, or impossible?
Write your answers on a piece of paper and answer these questions fully before reading any further.
In my work in health, fitness and physique transformation, there are certain limiting beliefs that seem to crop up time and again. Things like:
- I’ll always be fat/overweight
- I’m just not disciplined
- Exercise is too hard
- Eating healthily is boring
- It takes too long
- It doesn’t work
- It works for other people but it doesn’t work or it won’t work for me
- I just don’t have time
- It’s my genetics
- I can’t do it
- If I lose weight then I’ll never be able to enjoy the finer things in life
- If I lose weight my partner won’t love me anymore
- If I lose weight I’ll get all this attention from other people and I won’t trust myself to stay faithful to my partner and we’ll end up breaking up
- I don’t deserve it
You might notice that some of these reflect how you feel personally. If that’s the case, add them to your list, along with any others that may come to mind.
If you have an underlying belief that “I’ll always be fat!” you can imagine the type of impact that’s going to have on your results right?! It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the most expertly designed diet or exercise programme, at some point you’ll just think “what’s the point?” and give up or sabotage your progress in some way.
You can’t prove that something is impossible – you can only prove that it either is possible, or that it hasn’t been done YET. There are countless examples of this from the 4 minute mile, to the maximum speed that the human body could tolerate, to freediving world records. Most people put limiting beliefs on themselves that they don’t even know are true. They are just making very bad guesses by massively generalising a few attempts at reaching their goals.
Your past does not equal your future, but things won’t change for you until you change those limiting beliefs that are getting in your way. Start becoming good at distinguishing absolutely undeniable, quantifiable facts from your own opinion. For many people, simply identifying those limiting beliefs and making them conscious is enough to change them because they suddenly realise how ridiculous those beliefs are. Remember, the only thing standing between you and the body, the life and the success that you deserve is the story that you tell yourself about why you can’t have it. Let go of the story and a whole world of possibilities opens up to you.
You must log in to post a comment.