In this post, I will describe what a limiting belief is, how it affects you, where it comes from, and what to do with them.
Repression is the first layer of blocks you must bust through. The second layer involves your beliefs. The longer I watch people succeed and fail, the more convinced I get that beliefs in and of themselves have objective value. Some beliefs are literally better than others.
In order to explain this, I need to first define what a belief actually is. A person's mind is an imperfect thing, in that it cannot provide you with a complete vision of the universe. It cannot even provide you with a complete vision of the room you're in. In order to gain that vision, you must imagine the rest of the room that your eyes don't see. It will be hazy, unless you swivel your head around to take a look, or you've had security awareness training.
Beliefs function exactly the same way. Beliefs are imaginations, in the sense I just outlined, of the relationships between events. Something happens, something else happens. Whatever causal relationship between those two events that exists in your mind is a belief about those two events and others like them. It could involve anything, a popular set of beliefs concern an intelligent entity that guides all of these events.
That's the nuts and bolts of it. Let's zoom back and look at your life, at your beliefs. I said repression comes from other people, primarily your family, maybe teachers or friends. Limiting beliefs come from you, and only you. You can't choose what your parents have repressed you with. You can choose how your mind perceives a pair of events. If those two events happen to be getting dumped, twice in a row, by two different girls, you'll form a belief around it.
Not paying careful attention to how your mind is shaping your world for you results in beliefs that, simply put, don't make the slightest bit of sense. There's probably a hundred lurking in your attic somewhere cluttering it all up. The sheer number of limiting beliefs we have is staggering, and it's necessary to bite them off in small chunks. Nobody became enlightened in a day.
But before you even look at your beliefs, you should go back to part one and re-read it another ten times or so. Any repression you've got lurking in your attic will utterly destroy any progress you make in this area. The energy released by liberating your beliefs will get blocked by repression, and the experience will form more limiting beliefs. This is a dangerous game of whack-a-mole you're playing. Are you sure you don't want to go back and read part one again?
Convinced yourself that you're free of repression or that you don't need the structure of my ideas, just the content? OK then, read on.
To recognize a limiting belief, you first have to become aware of it. Fortunately this is easy, all you have to do is look at some part of your life and make a distinction between what you thought would happen and what actually happened. Or what you wanted to happen that didn't happen. Once you have this, you need to think clearly about why, what thing about the universe you didn't know, that if you did know, would have produced a better outcome? How could you have changed it?
That difference is your limiting belief. If you think about it long enough, you'll start naturally doing the mental calculus necessary to overcome the belief. Making predictions is important. I've made several predictions here that were right on the money. I predicted that Steve Pavlina's Subjective Reality experiment would wreck his life, and that he would have to rebuild it piece by piece, and that the rebuilt life would be ten times better than his old life ever could be. That's exactly what happened.
As you start making traction and start powering through your poor beliefs rather than letting yourself get caught by them, you'll find a wealth of intuition lying just under the surface for you to pull up. Reach down and pull up a vine of intuition. Anchor it by stating your prediction, either aloud, on paper, or silently in your head. I recommend making the prediction aloud to friends so that their social pressure will make you take them that much more seriously. If you're silent about it you'll tend to forget it, but if you're shy and don't want to look pretentious, just say them in your head.
Whether you're right or you're wrong, you'll have gained valuable insight examining the relationships between events that led to your prediction's success or failure. The more you can break events down to their base elements, the more success you'll have in creating good beliefs that stand the tests of the universe. You'll start seeing everything in greater resolution, concepts won't stick together as much.
You will need this fine-grained attention to causal detail to tackle the third level of blocks, cognitive biases. As before, I want you to go out and play with these ideas. Try the exercises out and see for yourself. They're very simple and only require investments of time and an open mind. Sooner or later you'll be keeping your consciousness clean, like a well-run kitchen or operating room. You will need it.
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