How to Eliminate Your Limiting Beliefs

A last minute impulse to change my plans required me to catch a train within 45 minutes. From where I was, I needed at least 25 minutes to get there. And I would typically need at least 45 minutes to get out the door.

There’s no way, I thought. It’s virtually impossible, I said.

37 minutes later, I was standing at the track to the train, with six minutes to spare. I’ve made trains with 30 seconds to spare. Six minutes is an eternity.

How often do you discount your ability? How often do you underestimate your power to make things happen?

There’s no way. It’s virtually impossible.

And, yet, there I was. At the train with six whole minutes to spare.

I paused to acknowledge the moment. I inhaled it. I felt the truth of what I was able to do. I anchored the experience, so I can embody it and transform it into knowledge.

The Value of Proving Myself Wrong

In that moment, I realized that my change in plans had little to do with the actual plans. The thing is never about the thing itself. There’s always something else.

In this case, the change in plans was really about proving myself wrong.

Typically, we want to prove ourselves right. Proving myself right is a great confidence booster. It reminds me to trust my instincts and my inner voice.

But proving myself wrong also has value: it illuminates and disproves my limiting beliefs.

The 3 Best Ways to Disprove Limiting Beliefs

Much work that we do to rewire limiting beliefs and thought patterns is hypothetical. We imagine consequences of beliefs or see how those beliefs play out, then we conceive of a truth in opposition. It’s fine, but not the most effective way.

The best ways I have found for disproving limiting beliefs are the three E’s: evidence, experience, and experiments.

(1) Evidence: I can observe that the belief is false based on what I observe in the world around me.

(2) Experiments: I can run experiments to disprove the belief.

(3) Experience: I can disprove the belief through my own actions and experience.

Of these, experience is the most effective. Evidence can be circumstantial. We may harbor subconscious doubts that what we see may not be real. Maybe there are factors we don’t know about.

Experiments can produce different results. We question whether it will happen that way every time. Both evidence and experiments create doubts. So some of the belief remains.

Our own experience gives us knowledge — embodied memories that the statements we made were false.

There’s no way. It’s virtually impossible.

Until it isn’t.

The next time that belief comes up, I’ll know: this is a lie.