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Changing the I Can't - Challenging Limiting Beliefs.


Over a period of time, we traverse through life and develop a set of beliefs about ourselves. These beliefs are a culmination of things we've heard from our primary caregivers - grandparents, parents, siblings, etc. Growing up we develop a belief system that comes from interacting with our classmates at school and things we have been told by our teachers. These limiting beliefs paralyze our way of thinking and are definitely obstacles in
These are deeply rooted in our subconscious and our brain mostly confirms these beliefs to form a thinking pattern. These beliefs mainly come from our childhood and transform into a series of experiences as adults.
Our beliefs are formed from our experiences and these could be positive or negative. We start to expect certain things, based on our belief systems, and the brain influences the outcomes.
For eg. If a teacher said you weren't good enough at math, that may have formed a part of your belief system. This will somewhere manifest in some of our life choices and actually makes us believe we are not good at say math and so we have an aversion to anything to do with numbers in our education and our careers. When you realize that you are eventually in a job that includes calculating taxes - you realize that you are actually good numbers. What you actually believed is completely untrue.
Maybe someone told you - you can't write or sing or draw or do something and that stopped you, even though you so badly wanted to. You didn’t even test it. You just gave up.
The brain has a tendency to predict the future and develops patterns.
These limiting beliefs come in the way of our goals many a time. These goals could be our personal relationship goals and probably areas of our lives like our career or a certain venture we take on.
How do we identify these beliefs?
This is a lot of work, but this may happen with some introspection.
The moment you hear yourself saying I can't do this, ask yourself what is this CAN'T based on? Identify if the CAN'T is based on a fact. Asking ourselves what is stopping us may be a good starting point.
Positive affirmations do work as they challenge our unhelpful limiting beliefs. They do make you feel better. While they sometimes seem silly, they do change your outlook.
While this looks like a lot of hard work, it does start from a willingness to stop being in a rut and change the stories we tell ourselves. These stories are way far from the truth.
The I CAN'T do this has to be replaced by I CAN. Change the narrative. You are the author of your story.


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