What are Limiting Beliefs?

As children people often develop values and beliefs based on the cultural tradition and family morals that they are bought up with.  However, these beliefs can often that can fall short in the validity department due to changing contemporary values and culture.

The beliefs we established as children were often established according to a different set of circumstances and situations that we now find our selves in as we grow into adults. But, because we love our family, culture and, more often than not, enjoyed our childhood and upbringing, we think our beliefs to be imbued with an innate wisdom and truth that transcends our contemporary situation.  We decide that the ways of our parents and ancestors served them well all their lives (or so it seems) and so we instinctively fall under the illusion that what worked for them should work for me. It is a subconscious decision but essentially we accept the truths and perceptions of our forbears as our own reality. 

As we mature, the traditions and beliefs or our forbears sometimes begin to contradict our self discovered principles, and as they do we instinctively adapt them according to our situation and our own needs and requirements.

However, depending on how deeply our beliefs were imbued to use, sometimes it is almost impossible to shake them or adapt them to make way for our own needs.  When this happens we can find ourselves in a sense of turmoil because we feel as though we are dishonoring our family or culture by trying to follow our own truth rather than adhering to the beliefs that were imparted to us.

Beliefs may hinder your ability to achieve what you want in life

Lots of people don’t achieve the full potential of the mental capacity not because they don’t have the opportunity or the ability to do so but because their mind is not clear due to limiting beliefs. Our mental faculties aren’t so much limited by our education but more so by our upbringing. Our upbringing is mainly responsible for instilling our perceptions and attitudes of the world. Very often beliefs installed by our parents or upbringing can result in Limiting Beliefs  that hinder achieving our goals and desires because changing contemporary attitudes do not support those beliefs as they once did.

Many people choose to accept limiting perception of themselves, their abilities and the opportunities that are presented to them by some sort of authority figure in their lives. It may be a parent, a partner, The Media or it may be as a result of past failures in their life. They essentially minimise their belief in themselves due to preconditioning and peer perception of themselves and others. They think that person couldn’t do that so I couldn’t possible have any success with that either. Many people chronically under estimate themselves in all areas of their lives and as a consequence their level of achieve is in line with their expectations and self perceptions.

If we sift through our thoughts and analyse them we can see the biases and hidden infatuations that have impacted on our thinking process. Gratitude is an excellent way to address and overcome some of the negative through patterns we accumulate throughout our lives.