People often say you have beliefs about yourself. In the next sentence, they say you should change those beliefs because they are limiting.
This is like being in LA and reading a map of London.

OK, this is from the olden days of paper maps and travel guides. Google doesn’t make that kind of mistake.

If you’ve got the wrong map, no amount of effort or expense will get you to your destination. Even if you’ve got a Lambo, you won’t get to Big Ben by driving around LA.

????’? ????? ???? ??? ????

When you see patterns repeating in your life, when there are things you can’t seem to do that you really want to do, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that this is a ‘limiting belief’ at work.

For example,

? I don’t take time off.

? When I get a great job, I sabotage myself.

? When someone really likes me, I have to get away from them.

These are memories of the future. When we say we have ‘limiting beliefs’ what we really mean is that we don’t like the way we’re predicting the future.

As neuroscientist, psychologist and writer Lisa Feldman Barrett says,

“Memories and predictions are the same thing.”

“Memory is something your brain does, not something you have. Memories, predictions, and simulations are all words for the same phenomenon.”

“A brain doesn’t store memories like files in a computer​—​it reconstructs them on demand with electricity and swirling chemicals. We call this process remembering but it’s really assembling.”

There aren’t any brain files with titles like ‘the time when I was not good enough,’ or ‘the time when I knew I didn’t deserve wealth,’ so how could there be any beliefs about you?

Each time these scenarios appear, they are not being retrieved, they are being constructed.

If you don’t like the predictions your brain makes, what can you do about it?

Lisa suggests you create new experiences that don’t comply with your habitual predictions. This means doing things differently, actively seeking out novelty and trying on other people’s points of view.

“Every experience you construct is an investment, so invest wisely. Cultivate the experiences you want to construct again in the future.”

What you do today will create tomorrow’s predictions.

For me at least, this sounds like a lot more fun than working out what you believe about yourself and then trying to change it.

On a peak performance course from one of the world’s top trading coaches, we were set an exercise to list 200 beliefs about ourselves. We then used a version of Byron Katie’s The Work to do some analysis on them.

What a depressing and futile exercise.

This is the opposite of what Feldman-Barratt suggests.

With an exercise like this, you will come up with mostly negative beliefs. And then you will scare yourself half to death over something that doesn’t exist.

So how about we get ourselves a better map and free ourselves of the onerous (and futile) task of removing our limiting beliefs.
#beliefs #limitingbeliefs