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Self-limiting beliefs is a concept that comes up particularly in the self help area with some frequency. It seems easy enough to understand, but for the hard things in life I’ve never heard or found a way to overcome them. Until just recently.
I came to understand self-limiting beliefs differently and that opened the door for me to change them into self-expanding beliefs.
Often self-limiting beliefs are associated with “I can’t” phrasings. There are definite cases where a mindset change can help overcoming these self-fulfilling prophesy type of statements. The approach to being more open minded by changing the “I can’t” is easy and discussed by various people. This is very important if you are limiting yourself in this way.
There are other self-limiting beliefs that are limiting you in other ways and no one is talking about them and how to approach overcoming them.
I Can’t
Sentences with “I can’t” are self-limiting, but they aren’t self-limiting beliefs as I understand them. For sure, if you go into something telling yourself – “I can’t” – the chances are you won’t be able to. Occasionally, you may surprise yourself and you will.
With small children we often push them past a “I can’t” mentality by basically forcing them to do it. Generally we know the child can do it when this is successful. Children’s forming brains are great at recognizing that they did it and provided that evidence knowing they can, even if they fail again later.
Inverting “I can’t”
Linguistically the inverse is easy, just remove the negation “’t” or not.
“I can’t speak Czech” becomes “I can speak Czech”
“I can’t just walk up to her and start a conversation” becomes “I can just walk up to her and start a conversation.”
If we pretend the first sentence is a statement we make to ourselves, does the second sentence in the pair ever make sense? I don’t believe they do and yet there is a way we can open the doors to change.
There are two types of “I can’t” that I recognize, demonstrated by the examples above. The first I term “skill based” and the second “belief based”
Skill based “I can’t”
“I can’t speak Czech.” This was a truth for me. I did not have that skill set. ”I can speak Czech” does not change the fact I never studied the language and had no developed abilities.
In this case even just a small change opens the door for changing this outlook, adding “yet”. By acknowledging that this is a skill based limitation, we open our mind to the possibility that we could gain those skills. We still can’t speak Czech, but we are aware the limitation is only because we have not developed the skills. This open mindset can make a huge difference in lives.
Belief based “I can’t”
Over the years I’ve tried to invert “I can’t” wanting to get past some hurdle, in my case usually related to social anxieties. I have literally repeated to myself “I can just walk up to her and start a conversation.” over and over again, only to “prove” that I can’t in my failure to approach.
This approach has never worked for me. I’ve tried. It never has rung true within myself. Now I understand why. The can’t was just a symptom of some deeper belief, something down in our psyche. These are more of “I am” statements, which manifest as the “I can’t”.
With these belief based “I can’t” statements, there is not a skill gap, though to protect ourselves sometimes we will tell ourselves that it is.
Learning a foreign language there is typically a point where you can start to speak with others, but you don’t. Social anxieties pop up and “I can’t speak Czech” now isn’t skill based, but belief based. Classic worries like “What if make a fool of myself?” show up. Being forced into a situation where you have to speak Mandarin enough times to force you to recognize that you can work and is the way many people make the leap – I’ve done it this way too.
The tricky part is because the “can’t” isn’t the core belief that is limiting you, it is difficult to change it. The reason is that even with evidence that it isn’t true, the self-limiting belief has not changed. It was not affected by that evidence and the human psyche is very good at discounting counter evidence for self-limiting beliefs.
Overcoming Self-limiting Beliefs
To overcome self-limiting beliefs, you first just have to recognize the belief itself. When an “I can’t” crops up that is not strictly skill based, you need to find the belief. There is an “I am” hiding behind the scene.
Sometimes there is an “I don’t” that is can be rephrased into a belief. “I don’t approach people” is a fact like statement hiding a belief, “I am not the kind of person who approaches others”.
“I am” is a belief about who you are. It is part of your identity. An “I am” may not be objectively true. Others may or not believe this about you. You believe it about yourself though, which makes it very powerful. You believe it about yourself and your own psyche will strive to maintain it as true.
While this works against us if we are trying to change a “I can’t”, it does provide an opening for us to change, fundamentally. Convince yourself of a new “I am” and your mind will start working to make it true. This isn’t necessarily easy to do, but replacing the old self-limiting belief with a new self-expanding belief can be done with enough resolution.
Inverting Self-limiting beliefs
The language of the self-limiting belief is usually not very fixed and can be rephrased in a way that makes it easy to invert. We are usually aware of the “I can’t” not the “I am”, so phrasing in a way that makes it easy for us is often valid.
“I am not” or “I am the kind of person that doesn’t …” are come phrasing. Reversing this is just the negation. “I am the kind of person that … “.
Sometimes this doesn’t ‘ring true’ for us. The leap is too big for us to accept part of our new identity. Luckily, the pliability we identified can help us.
What I did when I first discovered this approach was to rephrase it to “I’m the kind of person that use to be afraid to ….”. This worked for me like a wonder. It acknowledged the underlying “I am” while moving forward. I could believe that.
Beyond “I can’t” and Self-Limiting Beliefs
In this post I’ve presented what I have come to understand are true self-limiting beliefs and differentiated them from mindset limiting statements like “I can’t”. Both kinds of these are shackles we place on ourselves. They keep us from growth and really hurt us, both externally and internally.
I believe with the right approach, discussed above, there are ways for us to stop self-limiting ourselves and grow. By using tweaks of language, we can changing the dialog with ourselves. We can permit ourselves to grow and change in places where we previously held our own selves back.
Dr. Blom is a long time researcher in the VR field and founder of Virtual Human Technologies, which applies VR and avatar technologies to human problems and helping better understand people. Virtual Orator exists largely because Dr. Blom wishes he had had such a tool when he was learning to speak in public.
