One of the fascinating things about limiting beliefs is that they aren’t immediately obvious. They are woven into ways of thinking that run between conscious, subconscious, and unconscious frames of thought and can often go all the way back to childhood. What’s worse, you may struggle to overcome them even when you’ve found one, isolated it, and attempted to deal with it.
What you have to realize about limiting beliefs is that they are exactly what’s advertise. They are beliefs and they limit you. Let’s start with the belief part first.
What’s a belief? A primary definition is “an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.” A big limiting belief that I finally started to deal with last year was:
If you want to grow your business, your life will get worse.
Looking at it now, in print, it’s even more embarrassing, but I’m hoping that sharing this with you will help you see that identifying such a belief is an important first step.
Why did I think this way? Just from what I had seen and observed. But I hadn’t ever actually talked with someone who had grown a business and then had a terrible life as a result. It just followed the normal thought pattern of “more growth = more work = less personal time = terrible life.”
But if you’ve been following what I’ve been writing about for some time now, you’ll realize that part of the entrepreneurial journey for me is working less, not more. So why didn’t I think I could simply continue that? Why did I hold myself back? Why did I, despite putting system after system into place that empowered my team and bought back more time for me, assume I couldn’t do that as I grew?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that as a result of that limiting belief, I slowed down the growth of my own business. I consciously took my foot off the gas, trapped by my beliefs.
Even the process of creating the franchise system for MaidThis was hampered by this belief and as a result I had to battle this belief even to take my company to the next logical step.
It’s often said that it’s not enough to get rid of a bad habit: you must replace it with a positive one. So too with limiting beliefs. It’s not enough to identify one and start to work against it, you have to replace it with an empowering belief that contradicts it. In my case:
If I grow my business bigger, my life will get easier.
What’s fun about this belief is what comes after…my customers’ lives will get better, because I’ll be able to serve more of them. My team’s lives will get better, because with more growth comes more personal development and pay. Other franchisees’ lives will get better, because they’ll have more colleagues to get to know and share the journey with.
But it all starts with my own belief that yes, growing is a positive thing.
And it has been.
I started a podcast. I’ve shared my story and gotten to hear from really interesting entrepreneurs. I’ve also learned even more about my business partner, David.
I’ve leaned into Twitter. I’ve gotten great ideas, shared a few of my own, and even had the chance to meet some of the great people on there in real life.
I haven’t eradicated the belief entirely. It’s still back there nagging a bit: “Hey man, why are you doing all this stuff? More growth means a stressful life!” But the empowering belief is growing and pushing it out of my mind as I see the results in front of me: growth isn’t limiting me. Limiting my growth is limiting me. And there’s not going to be any more of that.
Photo by Yann Allegre on Unsplash
This article was written by Neel from MaidThis Franchise, a remote-local franchise opportunity for people looking to escape the rate race and reach financial freedom. Learn more here.
