Exactly one year ago I was standing outside of the LA convention center with 6,500 people preparing to walk across burning hot coals barefoot!
Never in a million years would I have thought I would do something so crazy but that night I was at Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within seminar and firewalking was just the beginning of a life-changing weekend.
The overall purpose of the seminar is to challenge you to break through your fears and limitations in order to create an extraordinary life. Over the course of four days (some days lasting from 8am-1am,) Tony teaches you how to take control of your beliefs, needs, and emotional patterns in order to reach your ultimate potential.
In order to do this you must first discover your limiting beliefs and transform them into empowering beliefs – so this is exactly what we did.
The control our limiting beliefs have over us is unbelievable and they’re the reason so many people never reach a fraction of their true potential. What makes uncovering them so difficult is that the majority of us don’t even realize we have them. This is because the belief is so ingrained in our minds that to us it’s not a “belief”, its just a facts, so we have no reason to question it.
The results have been nothing short of amazing and in the past 365 days I’ve accomplished more than I ever believed I could.
In this article, I’m going to show you how to uncover your limiting beliefs by sharing how I personally worked through each step.
Step 1: Ask yourself this question: “What area of your life is not where you would like it to be?”
At the time here was my answer:
“My career…I enjoy my job but I want to do something more challenging and fulfilling. I would love to run my own business where I get to decide how, when and why things are done.”
Step 2) Why haven’t you changed this part of your life already?
My thoughts:
“I can’t just do it…I have no idea what business I would even start.”
“How would I make enough money to start my own company?
“What about health insurance…that’s impossible to get on your own.”
“I have a really good job now with tons of room to grow, it would be stupid to leave.”
“Anyway, I’m not an entrepreneur…I have a degree in business and am not creative enough to come up with a business idea that would be successful.” (Ding, Ding Ding… we have uncovered the limiting belief!)
Everyone has fears about starting something new. I had way more than I listed but if you can uncover your underlying limiting belief you will start to find ways to break through those other fears.
If you’re having a hard time differentiating your limiting belief from other worrisome thoughts see if there is something that you are telling yourself about your IDENTITY.
For example, the first four thoughts I had were fears about circumstances and the process of starting a business but the last one was one I believed to be true about me as a person.
People will go to extreme measures to confirm beliefs about their identity, even if it goes against their best interest. This may be done consciously or subconsciously but if you believe something about yourself you will act in ways that are congruent with this belief.
Because I believed I lacked creativity and that I was not the type of person that could be an entrepreneur, I was blocking myself from generating creative ideas and holding myself back from taking action because I believed at a very deep level that I wasn’t that type of person.
Step 3) Figure out why you believe this?
I don’t have a significant amount of insight as to where I really developed this belief but if I had to guess I would say it had something to do with the fact that while I was growing up I always excelled in sciences and math and I’m very analytical.
I had always heard that there are right brain people (creative, artistic) and left brain people (analytical, scientific, logical) so since I considered myself to be the left brain type I thought I couldn’t really be good at any of that right brain stuff. Many scientific studies have dis-proven this left brain vs the right brain theory but it doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what we believe. Your perception is your reality.
Step 4) Ask yourself what will happen if you don’t change this belief?
It’s important not to sugarcoat this part. The purpose of this question is to really drive in what you will be sacrificing if you don’t make a change.
Here’s what I would’ve had to look forward to…
“I’ll have to wake up every morning and go to work for someone else…I will never have the freedom and flexibility to enjoy life the way I want to…when I have kids I will have to send them to daycare every day instead of being with them.”
“I’ll be missing out on fulfilling my purpose in life”
“I’ll never make the amount of money I really want to and won’t be able to live life to the fullest.”
Step 5) Finally, replace your limiting belief with a new empowering belief.
If you’re able to uncover a limiting belief that’s huge progress but the works not over yet. A limiting belief can be very difficult to overcome it.
You have to remember that this is something that you have programmed your brain to believe for many years and although you may have identified it on a conscious level you’ll still believe this subconsciously.
In order to eliminate a limiting belief ask yourself what would you have to believe about yourself to achieve the results you want?
I replaced mine with the following…
“I always succeed at anything I put my mind to no matter what obstacles are placed in my path.”
Throughout the seminar, Tony worked with the audience extensively to reprogram our mind with our new empowering beliefs and dispel the limiting ones. This was probably one of the most beneficial parts of the seminar (although that is really hard to choose).
Some things you can do on your own include:
- Write your empowering belief every morning and night.
- Say your empowering belief out loud with high positive emotions.
- Visualize yourself living your life with this new belief and what you will be able to achieve because of it.
The purpose of all of this is to form new neural pathways so we can start thinking differently.
Here’s an example of what I mean… Towards the end of the seminar Tony asked everyone in the audience that owned their own business to stand up and as soon as he asked this I stood up without hesitation.
After a few seconds, I realized what I was doing and quickly sat back down. I laughed to myself because I definitely did not own a business and wasn’t sure why I stood up like that so I attributed it to not paying attention. However, when I reflect back on this now I have a much different explanation.
The reason I so quickly and confidently stood up was that over the course of the weekend I was able to successfully break through my limiting beliefs that had been holding me back and I convinced myself, all the way down to a subconscious level, that I would start a business I loved.
By uncovering and transforming a limiting belief I have been able to transform my life.
After leaving the seminar I decided to stop just thinking about how great it would be to start my own business and instead, actually follow through with it. I gave myself 6 months to make this happen.
This timeline wouldn’t sound so unrealistic if I had any idea what I wanted to do but I didn’t have a clue. Regardless, I knew I wanted to work for myself and I was determined to find a way.
Now here’s the coolest part…
If I was back at the seminar today and Tony asked the business owners in the room to stand up, I’d do the exact same thing I did before but this time it would be true :).
At the beginning of October, six months after the seminar, I put in my resignation from my corporate job in Hospital Administration. As if almost like magic I went from having no idea what I wanted to do, to finding my passion and making it a reality.
