By Counseling Department

In order to make progress in life and move forward you need to understand your own beliefs and which beliefs are limiting. When you believe your life will be hard, your mind will concentrate on this belief and will search for evidence to back up this belief. This happens all the time, have you ever been searching for a book saying to yourself “I can’t find the book” you look everywhere without being able to locate the book, this leads you to becoming angry and frustrated. Your friend comes in and tells you that there on the table in front of you – the place you checked three times! By telling yourself you can’t find the book, stops you from finding it.

Another example is when you meet someone you fancy for the first time, as you tell yourself that you are attracted to this person, you look for the things you like about them; a nice smile, funny and interesting. With some relationships, after a couple of dates you change your belief from “I really fancy this person” to “I don’t think this relationship will work out” after changing your belief you start to look for new evidence to back up this new belief; hairy ears, overweight, always late and uses bad perfume.

As you will agree, the same happens with our own limiting beliefs we tell ourselves something negative about ourselves and then look for evidence to back this up. To challenge your beliefs, question the evidence that backs up your limiting belief, look for the generalizations, check to see what is missing-essentially create doubt in your belief.

As you can see, once you start questioning your limiting beliefs you will start to create doubt which will lead to you changing your beliefs.

You need to ask yourself “what is my limiting belief stopping me from doing?” Is my limiting belief doing more harm than good? If I had a new belief or could change a limiting belief would this help me move forward? Would I be happier? Would I feel I have more choices?

Take your limiting beliefs and update them, giving yourself a new opportunity.

See the following examples:

If you are struggling with such limiting beliefs, reach out to the Counseling Center and have a discussion with our counselors, we are ready to walk with you in creating a new way of thinking and having better beliefs that will help you to make progress in your life.