Our thoughts are powerful. Along with words, mind-chatter is often the number one support tool we have to guide us towards our goals. When we don’t believe we can, we won’t.
Those things we think and say to ourselves manifest in our lives. Limiting beliefs are those things you believe about yourself that ultimately place limitations on your abilities. Limiting beliefs are your sub-conscious thoughts creeping in and telling you something that is ultimately not a truth. For example, “bad things always happen to me”, “I’m no good at public speaking”, “my parents say I’m no good at sport”, “I’d never make a good manager” or “I could never start my own business”.
Limiting beliefs are simply assumptions about reality that are not true. In order for our actions to have the greatest positive effect, we need to have beliefs that are as close to reality as possible. Deceiving ourselves with false realities and limiting beliefs will take us further from the goal.
A limiting belief, when it comes down to it, is just a belief that you have that isn’t true. As coaches, some clients will need a lot of support to change their beliefs. The coach will need to challenge, encourage and support the client every step of the way as they are guided to the place where they can achieve their full potential.
Our job as coaches is to use a variety of techniques to raise the client’s awareness of what their limiting beliefs are. Through answering powerful questions, the client will be prompted to actually see the truth for the first time. Once the coach has an indication of the client’s limiting beliefs, they can help them to address and change them. Often, even a temporary suspension of a limiting belief is enough of a step forward to unblock the mind in order to explore outside the boundaries imposed by limiting beliefs and move closer towards the goal.
The top 10 human limiting beliefs are:
1. We fear greatness
2. We fear failure
3. We fear we are not good enough to achieve what we want
4. We fear not being loved
5. We fear rejection
6. We have negative attributes assigned to rich people. For example, rich people are…
7. We fear success
8. We don’t deserve / We’re not worthy of success
9. We have to work very hard, long hours for our money
10. There are lots of deep-rooted beliefs that hold me back.
Recognising any of these in your own thought process? It’s okay, it is likely to happen to all of us at some stage of our lives and careers. By taking the time to consider what you want to believe you can choose your beliefs and values or sabotage you / your clients’ path to success.
Changing your belief system is one of the most important steps to take in achieving success.
Believe that you can and you will!
The Coaching Academy was established in 1999, and is now the world's largest coaching school.
In that time we have trained over 14,000 people to become life coaches.
We are accredited by the International Coach Federation and the Association for Coaching, and we're rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot.
