Limiting Beliefs come in all shapes and sizes. From the seemingly surface-level more practical things like “I’m no good at presentations” to the deeper-rooted emotional ones like “I’m not good enough” or “I don’t deserve happiness”. It’s always said that the first step to changing something is awareness, and that’s certainly true. We all have varying degrees of awareness of our Limiting Beliefs and the ways in which they affect us. But sometimes that awareness can bring with it more frustration. Once you know something that is holding you back that is only coming from you, it can be hugely frustrating not to be able to change it. Why can’t I change myself, you think. All I have to do is change my mindset. Surely I can do that? I know I have felt that way when I’ve wanted to change something about myself but it’s not that simple. Our Limiting Beliefs are often ones we have held for a long time and lie deep in our unconscious mind.
What do I mean by the unconscious mind?
The concept of the unconscious mind was first introduced in the 18th century by a German Friedrich Schelling, but it was developed and popularized by the neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He described the mind as having 3 parts: the conscious, the pre-conscious and the unconscious. This is best brought to life using the iceberg analogy. This metaphorically represents the mind’s three levels:
- CONSCIOUS – the visible tip of the iceberg
- PRECONSCIOUS – the part just below the surface
- UNCONSCIOUS – the vast submerged portion
We know what’s going on in the conscious mind as it contains everything we are currently aware of, for example I may be aware that I am thirsty so will go and get a drink. We may be aware of feeling hot/cold and we will be aware of what we are currently experiencing / thinking about.
The preconscious mind contains easily accessible memories, such as passwords we use or anything we are not currently thinking about but we can remember immediately.
The unconscious mind stores our feelings, motives, and past experiences, which often powerfully influence our current behaviour even though we are unaware of them. It also takes care of running our bodies every minute of every day, doing all the things you don’t need to be aware of until something goes wrong, like breathing, moving, pumping blood around your body and blinking.
Willpower vs the Unconscious Mind (Laptop versus Supercomputer)
The unconscious mind is like an autopilot for your body, run by an incredibly powerful supercomputer which processes millions of bits of information every second and runs hundreds of programs that keep your body functioning without you even being aware of it. You don’t have to consciously think about breathing, blinking or digesting. Your unconscious mind just gets on with all of them and only brings something to your attention when it needs to. In comparison your conscious mind is like a laptop. It’s pretty good but it can’t deal with anything like as much information at the same time as your unconscious mind.
As well as running your body your unconscious mind also manages any habits you have. For example, have you ever swapped your watch from one wrist to the other? Try it. For at least a few hours, if not longer, you will instinctively look at your original watch location whenever you wonder what the time is, but eventually that habitual reaction will swap over and you will look at the new location without having to think about it. This shows that you can change what’s in your unconscious mind, but it’s not always as easy as swapping wrists!
Once you understand that your Limiting Beliefs reside in your unconscious mind, alongside your deep-rooted habits, it is easier to comprehend why simply trying to change your mindset about a Limiting Belief is so hard.
When we try to use mindset or willpower to change how we behave we are using the conscious mind, where rational thought and willpower reside. Powerful though our conscious minds are, that laptop has no chance against the super-computer that is the unconscious mind. Just think about all those things the unconscious mind is doing for you without you even thinking about it. If you have a Limiting Belief in your unconscious mind and you try to change it using willpower alone it’s an uphill battle. You may have some success for a short while but often it fades and you may know yourself that your heart isn’t really in it. Just think of all those New Year resolutions people set about wellbeing and fitness. Many of them don’t even last into February because underneath the stated aim of weight loss or being beach-body ready will be a Limiting Belief about themselves which is going to overpower any willpower they try to use.
I know this for myself so I’m going to tell you about a Limiting Belief that I held for many years, and tried to get rid of using my conscious mind, before I knew anything about the unconscious mind and its power.
“I’m not creative”
This is the Limiting Belief I held for a long time. I didn’t draw or write or do anything creative (or did I? – spoiler alert!). Why did I hold this belief? Whilst I don’t fully know the answer to this question I can think of a couple of potential reasons:
- In my family there were other people who I viewed as highly creative. My grandfather painted, my Dad writes short stories and poetry. More recently both my kids do amazing art work and writing. I saw what they could do and never thought anything I could even attempt would ever match theirs.
- I love art and literature. I appreciate great writing when I read it. This means that the gap between anything I tried to write and what I read was always just too big. I never thought I could be a great author but the fact that anything I wrote felt like it was something written by a primary school child was just too painful.
I was harshly judging myself and I was afraid of the judgement of others. And it made me a little sad because I think being creative is a truly special thing that sets humans apart from other creatures and can bring joy to both the person creating and others.
How did this belief hold me back?
For a very long time I just accepted this belief as true. And as you’ll know if you’ve read my last blog on 22nd July, our beliefs affect how we perceive the world, so I only saw the things that confirmed or supported my belief. For example, I believed that I wasn’t creative even though in 6th form I wrote 2 sketches for our end of year show. In my mind, because they were just rip-offs of 2 popular TV shows (Blackadder and the Krypton Factor) that didn’t count as creative. And I used to write newsletters for some of the teams / offices I worked in. But that didn’t count as it was more factual than creative (in my mind). And there are more examples of creativity that I chose to discount because of my Limiting Belief.
Holding this Limiting Belief stopped me even trying to do anything creative just for myself or for enjoyment. The examples above were things I did for other people, but I never sat down to do something creative just for the sheer love of it or the enjoyment of the creative process. I became acutely aware of this during lockdown in 2020. When we had so much time confined to our home, the rest of my family started drawing more often. My husband rediscovered his love for art, which he hadn’t really done much of since school, and I loved seeing him do that and the joy he got from it. But try as I might I just couldn’t seem to get the same feeling, and I really wanted it.
Wanting to change it wasn’t enough
I tried to change how I felt about being creative, I really did. I bought a notebook and I tried writing some poetry, but the truth is that I knew even as I was doing it that I was going through the motions. I was trying to “brute force” myself into a creative mindset and I knew it wouldn’t work. For a while I became more and more frustrated with my inability to change my mindset. Why couldn’t I do this? Even if I never showed anyone else anything I created, why couldn’t I just do it for me and enjoy it? Being aware of my Limiting Belief actually made me more frustrated. After a while I moved beyond the frustration and became convinced that I had to accept that “it’s just the way I am”. My attempts to change actually resulted in me having a more fixed mindset than I had before.
Of course this was before I went on my NLP Practitioner course and learned about the power of the unconscious mind. The explanation of the iceberg analogy and how our beliefs change our perception were a revelation to me. Not only that but they were incredibly exciting, because I realised I had a chance to change something that had frustrated me my whole life. I might finally have a chance to be creative.
The breakthough
Through my personal development journey with NLP I was able to get rid of that Limiting Belief of “I’m not creative” AND replace it with the positive, empowering belief that “I am very creative”. The ease with which I was able to do it once I understood about the unconscious mind and how to access / change it, was truly remarkable. What was also really interesting was that when we originally elicited the Values I hold in my unconscious mind (a story for a future blog) creativity was not on the list, but after I got rid of that Limiting Belief, guess what, creativity did make it onto the list.
So what’s changed?
My old belief that I wasn’t creative was probably something that most people weren’t aware of outside of my family. And I probably thought it only really affected me in terms of my leisure time. But once I let go of it I started to realise that it had affected me in more ways than I realised.
The very obvious things were that I was finally able to write / draw purely for my own pleasure. I tried writing a poem when my eldest child challenged me to, and I actually enjoyed the process and was not overly critical of what I produced. I took my sketchbook with me when we went away and tried drawing things I saw in the landscape or copying pictures from books. I enjoyed the way I needed to focus, and the gradual incremental improvements I could see when I kept trying. I realised that my fixed mindset (I’m not creative so don’t even bother trying) had been replaced with a growth mindset (These are skills I can learn and improve, and I can enjoy the process just as much as the outcome).
Additionally, I started to see all the examples of creativity that I had shown, that previously I had discounted or undervalued, and I felt proud of them. And I noticed examples that I hadn’t seen before such as ones in a work context to do with communications or presentations to others.
Most importantly, I felt able to look for opportunities to be creative, whether in work or outside, knowing that I felt capable of giving it a go AND of getting enjoyment from it. When I started my own business I looked at the chance to create my own website, brand and materials (such as this blog) as an exciting opportunity rather than with fear and trepidation that I wouldn’t be able to do anything well enough to meet my own standards or those of others.
Above all, I know deep down that I believe it now when I say “I am creative”, rather than I am saying it to convince myself. That’s because I know I changed the Limiting Belief held in the supercomputer that is my unconscious mind, rather than the clunky laptop that is my conscious mind. That belief is here to stay, and I know I feel so much happier and more fulfilled because of it.
So have you ever tried to consciously change a Limiting Belief? How did that work out for you? Maybe it worked for a bit? If you didn’t manage to embed that change maybe this blog has given you some food for thought about why that might be. And some hope that you can make that change if you choose to.