Freedom Blog

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Are You Creating Your Perfect Reality? Part 3- Limiting the Influence of Your Limiting Beliefs.

No Limits | The Freedom Blog


Are You Creating Your Perfect Reality? Part 3- Limiting the Influence of Your Limiting Beliefs.

Written by Steven Griggs | stevengriggs.com

“A belief is not an idea held by the mind, it is an idea that holds the mind” Elly Roselle

“Your conscious beliefs are what you think you believe. Your subconscious beliefs and deepest convictions are what you really believe.”                        Susan Shumsky


In the quest to uncover your limiting beliefs I asked you to listen to your inner critic and to pay attention to your inner dialogue.

Identifying a limiting belief requires paying close and honest attention to your reactions in certain situations.

For example, your next door neighbors decide to put in a pool. What are you feeling? Are you happy for them or do you begrudge them a little? Do you hear yourself saying “Sure they can afford it because they both have great jobs.” Or maybe “Who wants to have to clean and maintain a pool?”

Unless you really don’t like pools, do you hear the negative push back?

Let’s say another good friend buys a Porsche. How would that make you feel? You’ll probably say “Great” ‘That’s fantastic!” “Can I take it for a drive?” and mean it because you are happy for your friend but what are you really saying to yourself on a deeper level?

Are you finding reasons why owning a Porsche would be a bad idea? How it’s not really you? “It costs too much to maintain a car like that” or “Good luck with all the speeding tickets!”

You probably had the thoughts that you can’t afford these things because you don’t make enough money. You may rationalize that you don’t make enough money because you’re not as educated or talented as your friend. Or that Jim is just that kind of guy, he always seems to get what he wants.

These examples of push back all translate to the underlying limiting belief that you aren't good enough.

So whatever the examples are that you come up with, the actual reason is the underlying belief - “I’m not good enough”. The reasons are the symptoms.

So that is the tricky part. Identifying and accepting these truths about ourselves.

You have to own it, and this is the hardest part because actually saying that you have this belief and acknowledging the truth of it to yourself can be difficult.

You have to be completely honest with yourself. This is when you are tested. Can you accept that you have this belief or do you find yourself being pulled back into the belief and then heap on more evidence to prove why it is true.

In my article The Best Way To Change a Habit I talk about how we actually change our beliefs to match our reality.

For example, telling ourselves that eating the grapes in the fruit section of the supermarket is O.K. because we need to test their freshness. We make it O.K. for us to do something we know is wrong by changing our belief about it.

A belief is actually a feeling. There are only positive feelings and negative feelings.

When you are truly aligned with your positive feelings and take inspired action, you can create the results you seek. Conversely you can have a positive feeling about something and take action but the underlying negative feeling or limiting belief counters the positive and you end up going nowhere.

You keep getting the same unsatisfactory results.

That’s why so many people have a problem with the Law of Attraction. They are only getting part of the story. Unless you are clear and able to release limiting beliefs you are just spinning your wheels.

Vision boards and positive thinking are just exercises in futility. You can’t over power a limiting belief by trying to cover it over with positive thoughts and envisioning yourself having what you want. They are simply too imbedded and powerful.

But by identifying your negative programming and getting clear on how you got the limiting belief in the first place, you can begin the process of reducing and eliminating the belief.

In a previous article on Limiting Beliefs I recommend three techniques that work to release limiting beliefs.

Please know that this is a continual process. You can’t just magically snap your fingers and make all your limiting beliefs disappear. They need to be worked on all the time. Some beliefs may dissipate but then show up later in a slightly different form.

It takes constant vigilance.

Here are the three techniques:

Meditation.
A really good method is through meditation.  There are some really interesting healing meditations. You actually have a conversation with your childhood self and help him or her to understand the situation that occurred to give you a certain limiting belief. I will be posting some meditations in future articles.

Byron Katie-The Work
Another method is through the four questions from “The Work” by Byron Katie.
  • Is it true?
  • Can you absolutely know it’s true?
  • How do you react, what happens when you have that thought?
  • Who would you be without the thought?
Visit her website www.byronkatie.com to learn more.

EFT
 A third method is called Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) or Tapping.  This technique addresses your limiting beliefs by tapping on certain parts of your face and hands. These tapping points are the Ch'i or energy channels that run through our bodies.Visit their website: www.tapping.com. 

Really, once you dig in and get to the bottom of your issues you will discover they mostly revolve around self-worth or self-esteem.

But as you get clearer and consciously work on these issues, you will become lighter and more in tune with your true self.

Then things will start moving faster, things will happen faster and you will be off and running.


www. stevengriggs.com

Friday, November 22, 2013

Creating Your Perfect Reality, Part 2- Identifying Your Limiting Beliefs

No Limits | The Freedom Blog


Creating Your Perfect Reality, Part 2- Identifying Your Limiting Beliefs

Written by Steven Griggs | stevengriggs.com

“You can have anything you want if you are willing to give up the belief that you can’t have it.”
Robert Anthony

“If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint” then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced”                                                                          Vincent Van Gogh

In order to begin to identifying your limiting beliefs, I asked you to start listening to your inner critic’s voice, to start tuning into the way you talk to yourself.

The inner critic’s voice is actually your internal minder. Its job is to constantly remind you and guide you by whispering in your ear. You’ve been listening to this voice all your life. It has always been there. And it seems so normal I’ll bet that sometimes you don’t even hear it.

But it’s there. It keeps up a non- stop running commentary on everything you do.

It starts in our childhood. In order to help us grow up as successful adults our parents and teachers did their best to help us develop our strengths and mitigate our weaknesses.

Or what they “perceived” were our strengths and weaknesses.

They were also very concerned with helping us to avoid disappointment (protecting us from failure) and helping us to avoid shame, notice the key word- avoid.

Some of this “guiding” also came from our parents own limiting beliefs that they projected onto us.  Their intention was to save us from the pain they may have felt when they were growing up.

So if you were not the prettiest girl in your class your mother may have done things to help you cope with your perceived disadvantage, like encourage you to be more personable or funny or studious. Or she could have encouraged you to cut your hair a certain way to reduce the focus on your face or even to cover more of your face.

If you were a strong, fit guy you were probably encouraged to play sports. In my day, almost all boys played sports, even if you were on third string and sat on the bench most of the time. 

This probably did more damage than not playing but there we were, trying to fit in, trying to belong, trying to please our parents.….. .

Not to mention the subtle and not so subtle messages that teenage boys transmit to each other which probably created enough beliefs to undermine most of the team.

Does this sound familiar? Can you see how these experiences could set your limits, how they could create limiting beliefs?

Eventually the underlying belief developed that you weren't good enough and needed to do or not do certain things in order to be accepted.

In addition, during our childhood and adolescence the process of our parents teaching us right from wrong pretty much kept us in some kind of conflict with them and eventually that tension  created the feeling that something was wrong with you, that somehow you weren't “all right”.

So you can see how the double whammy of not meeting your parent’s and family’s expectations and not being able to do things right is enough to undermine you completely!

Sometimes it wasn't even words or comments but just subtle signals like a certain disapproving look from your mother or father.

But you can see how it began and how it slowly but surely inserted a belief system within you.

The difficult part of understanding or discerning a limiting belief is that when we took on the belief our mind then worked very hard to conform with the belief and soon the belief disappeared into the finished product- you.

We became who we believed we needed to be. And eventually we became who we are today.

Photography by Gina M. Billino
So it can be hard to separate the voice from the belief that this is you, that this is just who you are.

The answer lies in paying attention to your inner critic’s comments and judgments.

Listen to yourself when you comment to yourself. Hear what you say when you look at a car you like or a house you like, just anything that you don’t currently have that you wish you had.

I use a lot of examples such as cars and homes because they are symbols that our society values as badges of success.  I don’t personally believe in these symbols anymore but I sure did once upon a time. 

I had them all.

So begin listening and test yourself by watching your reactions when you see certain things in a magazine or TV show.

Watch how you react, watch what thoughts come up. If you notice yourself saying anything that sounds like a criticism or a justification or a negative remark or comment, you’ve probably hit on a limiting belief.

Really, any comment that pushes against the situation or issue is a clue.

Start to make a list of the things you notice that you have resistance to, things that you push back against.

Once you have this list you’ll be able to see a pattern and then you should be able to break it down into a few areas that you’ll need to work on. Just remember, the examples you'll see are just the symptoms of the belief and not the actual belief.

In my next article I’ll talk more about getting clear on what you need to work on and how to do it.



Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Are You Creating Your Perfect Reality?

No Limits | The Freedom Blog


Are You Creating Your Perfect Reality?

Written by Steven Griggs | stevengriggs.com

“To understand the limitation of “things”, desire them” 
Lao Tzu

“The wise man is one who knows what he does not know”
Lao Tzu

How many dreams that you've dreamed of have come true? 

I’ll bet many of them, in fact I’ll bet all of them.

Some may be saying “No! I rarely get what I wish for”.

But when I say that, I am referring to the belief that lies beneath the dream, the underlying belief you have about that day dream.

Some will answer “Wrong! I didn't want these circumstances, this terrible situation. I didn't ask for stress and never ending financial struggles”.

But you did.

You may say “No, I dreamed of having a beautiful house and a new sports car and hitting the lottery!”

Yes, but you believed more that you were unlucky and never win anything, that you could never have a million dollar house or ever own a Porsche or Mercedes.

These thoughts aren't a loud nagging voice or really even a voice at all. This is your inner critic. It is just a tiny persistent whisper that keeps reminding you of your reality

Your beliefs.

I've talked about this many times. We create or attract what we put out there. Good, bad or whatever.

It is the subconscious “under-programming” that gets heard not our wishes, wants or day dreams.

It is what your unconscious mind really believes in that happens.

So what do you do? How can we change it or at least begin to change our under programming?

The first step is to get clear on what you are really believing. To do that you have to learn to hear those little internal whispers that reflect your limiting beliefs.

How do you do that?

This is where it can get tricky.

The critical part about identifying our limiting beliefs is being able to separate them from our definition of ourselves or our self-view.

This is because in taking on these beliefs we “agreed “to believe them. We actually became comfortable believing them.

So identifying them and taking action to remove them can sometimes be a challenging process.

We began to believe that this is who we are, that we were born this way and this is our lot in life, etc.

The most common limiting beliefs all revolve around self-worth or self-esteem.

“I’m not good enough”
“I’m not smart enough”

Therefore most of your limiting beliefs will be sourced from these basic beliefs.

"I don’t make enough money, because…...."
"I don’t have a good job because……."
"I’m not successful because……."
"I don’t deserve this because……."

So your homework for this week is to listen to yourself. Watch how you talk to yourself.

Hear your inner critic's voice when it gives you those little hints or clues about how you are really feeling about yourself.

Next time we’ll talk more about getting a clearer picture of your limiting beliefs and how to begin to change them.