Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Many of us struggle with limiting beliefs. In fact, it’s often the primary reason most people fail to live well and fulfill their dreams. If you’re reading this article, it’s likely that tons of thoughts like these pop up in your head every day:

• “You’re not good enough.”
• “You’re pathetic.”
• “Tons of people failed before. What makes you think you can succeed?”
• “You are worthless.”
• “Other people are dangerous and can’t be trusted.”

If you suffer from self-sabotage or believe these thoughts are real, you severely restrict your potential and how much you can achieve. Limiting beliefs are called this way for a reason – you impose limits on your capabilities and slowly kill your dreams.

It doesn’t have to be this way though. In this article, I want to offer you a 5-step guide that will help you get rid of limiting beliefs and pursue your best life without mental restrictions. Grab a pen, a notebook, sit down in a quiet room, and we can begin.

1: Analyze Your Actions

First, we need to take a look at your average day. What is your typical routine? What are your habits? How do you usually feel during the day? How do you socialize with other people? Do you act friendly around them, or do you shy away?

Take some time to answer these questions in detail. In case you wonder how this is related to limiting beliefs, I ask you to do this because your beliefs manifest through your day-to-day actions. If you feel like one or several spheres of life suffer due to self-sabotage, we must look at your actions and find out why you’re doing them.

Write down your typical habits, even weird ones, and try to find out reasons you engage in them. For example, you may find that yourself scrolling on TikTok when you should work or study. It may be because you are afraid of experiencing mental discomfort. It could also be for another reason – maybe you perceive yourself as a bad worker or student, and want to escape those feelings though doing easy actions like mindless scrolling.

Whatever the habits and reasons are, write them down in detail. Analyze your behavior and try your best to find subconscious reasons you do the things you do. Once you finish answering, we can move on to the next step.

2: State The Limiting Beliefs

Now we want to look at the reasons of your bad habits and understand what negative beliefs you may have based upon them. For convenience, we’ll continue with the example of constant scrolling on TikTok.

What subconscious processes drive you to do these harmful actions? Why do you continue scrolling and avoid doing the necessary work? Is it because you perceive yourself as a person who can’t achieve anything? Or is it because you lack impulse control and can’t control your desires for instant pleasure?

Whatever the reasons are, analyze them, and write down negative beliefs that correspond with those subconscious processes. State these beliefs in form of “I am …”, “People are …”, “Life is …”.

You can’t fight an enemy if you don’t even know them. Now you are aware of your negative beliefs, and will soon be able to replace them with better ones.

The past during which limiting beliefs have formed doesn’t matter. What happened – happened, and you can do nothing about it. What is in your control, however, is your ability to see that these beliefs do no good, and that they simply aren’t true. This is what we’ll do in the next steps.

3: Realize The Damage of Negative Beliefs

To help you discard limiting beliefs, we must analyze their nature, and see the consequences of keeping them inside your subconscious mind. We need to do this so that your mind realizes the irrationality of the negative perceptions, and discards them more easily.

If you keep thinking that you aren’t good enough, what will happen to you in your financial, personal lives, your health, and your relationships?

How Self-Sabotage Will Ruin Your Life

You will suffer financially, as you’ll keep thinking about yourself as a bad worker, and keep making the same mistakes. You won’t get promotions, and you likely won’t try any new businesses: after all, if you can’t do normal jobs, how would you manage a whole business?

Negative beliefs will make you neglect your health, as you will think you don’t deserve to have good health. You will purchase shitty processed foods to save time, neglect your sleep, and indulge in alcohol, weed, or even drugs to soothe the mental pain of being an inferior person. Your health will get worse day by day, and you’ll suffer strongly because of it.

Your relationships will deteriorate too, since most people won’t want to be with a person who has self-esteem issues. You will dissapoint your family and let them down, since you don’t believe you’re good enough to live a better life.

There will be no personal growth, since it only happens outside of your comfort zone. If you keep believing that you aren’t good enough, you will stay the same 5, 10, 20 years from now, and accept mediocrity. Comfort will slowly eat away your soul and make you give up on your dreams. After all, it is one of the major reasons people fail in life.

This definetely isn’t the future you would want for yourself. The example above is a bit extreme, I know, but it clearly demonstrates the long-term consequences of self-sabotage and neglect.

Write down the consequences of keeping limiting beliefs, acknowledge them, see the damage they do to you, and move on to the next step.

4: Challenge The Limiting Beliefs

Now that you know how harmful your negative habits and beliefs truly are, it’s time for us to realize that they aren’t true at all.

You are a human being, a creation of God. You have the same abilities, limbs, brain, and body as everyone else has. No matter what your current circumstances are, you can achieve your dreams if you put in the necessary effort.

Whoever convinced you that you aren’t good enough, or that you are a bad someone has lied to you. Would a happy, fulfilled, mature, and confident individual belittle a kid, and tell them that they aren’t good enough?

How pathetic do you need to be to tell a child that they are worthless/stupid/dumb, and that their dreams are nothing? Very fucking pathetic.

Don’t allow your environment to tell you your worth or how much you can achieve. Your life is defined not by other people, not by external circumstances, not by your environment, but by you. You are the architect of your life, and you can make it anything you want it to look like, if you just put in the effort.

Not only your limiting beliefs don’t serve you, but they also aren’t true. Why hold on to them? It’s time to simply let them go and adopt new beliefs that will build you up.

5: Make Small Changes

It can be challenging to start doing something you thought you weren’t good at if you have no prior experience. For this reason, we will start small and make small changes.

If you previously thought that you weren’t good at exercising, or that you’re too old for it, start by walking outside every day for 10-15 minutes. It isn’t difficult, and it will slowly build up your confidence to do more exercise.

If you thought of yourself as a bad worker, start by spending less time on distractions, and more time on accomplishing important work that you need to do. Divide big tasks into small ones, and complete the little chunks to build up your confidence for more ambitious achievements.

Start building 7 fundamental good habits to improve yourself as a man, and commit yourself to removing bad habits that sabotage your life. At first, do little things like meditating for 3 minutes and reading 5 book pages daily, and when you feel more confident, do good habits more intensely. Meditate for 20 minutes, write down 10 gratitude statements, spend 1 hour in the gym.

Make small changes in your daily actions, build up your confidence, gain momentum, escalate the good habits, say affirmations, and you’ll change your subconscious mind to believe that you’re a good person who can achieve his dreams.

Summary

Limiting beliefs can ruin your life if you let them to. They will limit your potential, keep you in your comfort zone, and sabotage your attempts of getting onto self-improvement.

To change your life, dive into some introspection. Look at your daily actions, see what could make you do them, and state limiting beliefs that cause self-sabotage.

After this, realize the damage that they deal to your life, and recongize that these beliefs are simply beliefs – perceptions of reality. If you know that something is harmful, and that it isn’t true, it will be easier for you to adopt new beliefs that build you up.

Make small changes in your daily routine. Start exercising, doing a bit more work than usual, boosting your testosterone, health, being kind to people. Build up your confidence through small actions, and use affirmations to change your self-image.

If you manage to implement these steps consistently for just 2-3 months, you will get rid of negative beliefs and self-sabotage. You will see new opportunities and develop a growth mindset that will help you boost all spheres of life, from money to relationships. Take action and get rid of mental parasites that have limited your potential up until this point. Remember: you have the potential to change youir life, and you are the one who defines it.

Before you finish reading, ask yourself these 2 questions:

• What have I been doing wrong in my life?
• How can I fix these mistakes and live life better?

If you have any questions about the article, suggestions for new posts, or simply want to share your opinion about the guide above, feel free to do so in the comments below. See you next time.