Self-limiting Negative Beliefs

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung

How Self-limiting Negative Beliefs Are Formed

Everyone operates with a core set of beliefs that shape their lives and their worldviews. For people with negative or self-limiting beliefs, life can be more challenging. Self-limiting or negative beliefs are beliefs that we hold about ourselves that can have an unfavourable influence on our behaviour and our well-being. Often stemming from past experiences in early childhood, self-limiting or negative beliefs are held deep in our subconscious minds, often making them difficult to access consciously. Directing our actions at an unseen level they can lead to behaviours such as avoidance, perfectionism, people-pleasing, withdrawal and self-sabotage, impacting all areas of life.

How To Identify Core Beliefs

In order to change self-limiting or negative beliefs, you must first identify what they are. This requires a level of self-awareness and self-monitoring of your current behaviour and thought patterns.

Journaling: One way to identify your self-limiting or negative beliefs is to journal. Writing down your thoughts and feelings can help identify reoccurring thought patterns. Through this process of investigation, you may recognise patterns of thought, self-talk, and behaviour from past experiences that reflect what you currently see in the present.

Monitor Self-talk: Research by psychologist Russell Hurlburt suggests that about 30 to 50 per cent of people regularly think to themselves in internal monologues. For self-critical people, an inner critical voice can lead to low self-esteem, anxiety, lack of confidence and depression. By intentionally monitoring your self-talk throughout the day, you can begin to pick up on any negative self-talk or limiting beliefs that you have about yourself.

Seeking Feedback: Asking family members and trusted friends for their perspectives is another way of exploring our negative thinking and self-limiting beliefs. Family and friends can be great sources to gain insight and to provide objective perspective.  

How To Deal With Negative Core Beliefs

Once you know what your self-limiting or negative beliefs about yourself are, the next thing to do is to understand its impact on your life. For example, is the belief impacting your self-esteem or job prospects? Next is to look for and understand how the source of the belief or beliefs came about and to challenge the belief by finding what evidence you have for it. Finally, once you have gathered the evidence, you need to decide whether the evidence is substantiated or not. If you find your belief to be substantiated, then acknowledge and accept the facts and create a plan to assist in dealing with the current situation. On the other hand, if your evidence disputes the belief, then you have the opportunity to replace it with a new belief.   

In closing, overcoming self-limiting or negative beliefs requires regular, intentional effort. The important thing to remember is that it is never too late to rewrite beliefs that are not serving us well and replace them with new, encouraging beliefs that help us achieve and create better, healthier versions of ourselves.