Gotcha! A Limiting Belief Caught Red-Handed

Announcement: surprise! Today is Monday and here is a post. From now on I’ll be posting 3 times a week, on Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays. Not all blogs work well with more post frequency, so I want to experiment with this formula for a while and see if you people -and Herr G:, too- like it

—

It is usually difficult to talk of one’s own limiting beliefs, because the chances are: 1) You don’t know you have one, and then you cannot tell about it 2) You do know that you have it, and then, by making it conscious, it usually flakes out. But the way people around us manage things can give us a lot of clues to develop our own gotcha detector.

For example, a particularly common and harmful limiting belief in my environment is the scarcity mindset. It’s mostly about focus on what you don’t want, what you don’t like, what you don’t intend to happen. All of which is an excellent system to give precise face, name, surname and features to the thing you don’t want to happen, instead of investing your mental energy and willpower in something more worthwhile (call it Law of Attraction or not, but it works that way).

A quite common set of limiting beliefs is related to money; infected issue if there is any -there is nothing wrong with money, a tool as innocent in itself as a brick or an address book, but with the beliefs we associate to it; we absorb common beliefs from the environment, and regarding money there are pretty poisonous ones out there. But other times, the problem seems to be simply that people should really dream bigger.

I thought about this the other day, when I saw in the subway a street musician playing his flute. I got my coin ready, and when I passed by, I found it a really difficult exercise to drop it, because the guy had only set a tiny wicker dish on the floor, five fingers of length at most and very very flat, so my coin bounced away from the otherwise empty container.

As I have already blogged here, I have been experiencing intermittent knee problems, so at that moment, instead of money, I felt a strong impulse of giving that guy a punch. I have a busy life, like anyone else, and giving money on the go at the subway is already quite a dangerous exercise; couldn’t you at least make it comfortable on your side? How about a shoe box, you idiot? Was it that difficult to figure out?

Obviously, this was a guy who had set himself for failure. I can imagine him whining at home late at night about why everything’s wrong and he doesn’t earn enough (how about because there’s no room for money in a wicker dish, you moron?)

This example tells in a very visible way what, in other levels, works as kind of invisible ‘scaffolding’ round our actions in most of us. What about you: have you ever noticed in other people telltale behaviors regarding their limiting beliefs? What’s your favorite weapon to locate and dissolve your own limiting beliefs if there is any? Is there any ‘wicker dish’ you could replace in your life?