Episode 014 – Get Ahead of Your Limiting Beliefs… Before They Materialize!

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

Maybe like a lot of people on a personal development journey,  you’re doing the work – you’ve read the books, gone to the events, listened to all of the podcasts and YouTube videos – but it feels like there is still a disturbance in your force.

You understand that your thoughts are creating your reality and you want to keep growing – personally, spiritually, emotionally –  but you’re still experiencing more hustle, grind, stress, and anxiety than you would like. You’re still trying to find a way to become a more powerful creator and claim control over your life, but to do so  without having to strip yourself down emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.

Well, buckle up, because I’m about to share with you a game changing distinction to help you accelerate your growth and reduce the amount of suffering you need to incur in the process

You Don’t Have To Wait For The Car To Crash To Become A Better Driver 

This distinction actually came out of a question that a very successful entrepreneur asked me at a very intimate retreat I was doing at my home here in Puerto Rico.  He said, 

“I get that I’m creating my own reality, but I’m learning through the things that I’m creating that I don’t like. I’m learning through the challenges. I’m learning through the contrast. I’m looking at my reaction to the experiences of my life. That I don’t want anymore and I’m uncovering the limiting beliefs that have actually created them.”

This all sounded great to me, so I congratulated him and asked him what the problem was.  And he responded with a question: 

“Do I always have to learn through the materialization of my childhood traumas and my limiting beliefs?  In other words, do I always have to wait until the car accident to become a better driver? 

I thought this was such an amazing question. Frankly, I’m surprised more people don’t ask about it.  But the answer is no, you do not have to wait until you’re creating chaos in your life in order to become more self aware of your limiting beliefs or to understand the inner workings of your mind. There’s a way to actually get out ahead of all of it. 

Now, I commonly talk about how one of the simplest and most effective ways to gain more clarity about your desires, which is the first step in actualizing them, is to first get clear on the things you no longer want to experience in your life.  In other words, think about what you don’t want in order to find out what you do want.

But what if you want to get out ahead of the materialization of your consciousness?  Is there actually a way that we don’t have to wait until we create something that we don’t like in order to more deeply understand our thoughts, our emotions, our limiting beliefs, so that we can change them? Can we get out ahead of the car wreck? Yes, we can – here’s how it works…

Taking A First Principles Approach To Powerful Creation 

It is true that Earth is a trauma based learning environment and that we have passed down from generation to generation to generation all kinds of traumas, misunderstandings and limiting beliefs. And that the purpose of our life in many ways is to actually work through those misunderstandings and we do that because we’re powerful creators – so our thoughts or our beliefs become our reality.  This is the spiritual game that we’re all involved in and it’s the way that personal development has been encouraging us to manage our life. The experiences that we’re having, and the thoughts we have about them, aren’t actually an effect of the experiences themselves, but they are that which created the experience in the first place.  Stick with me…

The challenge with playing that game this way is that you have to wait until you’ve created something in your life in order to grow personally, in order to grow spiritually, in order to transform what I would call the unintelligent thinking that has materialized or has manifested whatever that experience is in your life.

Over 2000 years ago, Aristotle had this concept called First Principles, which are a deep philosophical understanding of what creates the experiences of our life or what is the original cause.  Now today, most people pay attention to the effects of life and they try to model those effects.  But by modeling those effects, they don’t end up producing the results that they want.  Why?  Because they’re focused on the effects, not the cause.

Elon Musk, who’s the 2nd richest man alive, says that he attributes his great business success and his ability to accumulate so much wealth and so much influence in the world to this First Principles approach.  This approach involves NOT looking at a strategy that produces an outcome, but instead developing an understanding that that strategy is an effect of something that is a prior cause.

The mistake that most people make is looking at the actions that other people are taking and trying to model them for ourselves.  But you can take two people who are implementing exactly the same strategy, but they produce entirely different results. Why? Because the invisible forces that are creating those strategies and the end result are actually your thoughts, your emotions, and your belief systems.

So if we were really to look at what the original cause of everything that we’re creating is, I would suggest it is energy. And if you can find a way to tap into higher levels of energy, you can overcome any challenge and you can produce any result. Now, I’m not talking about energy as in vibrancy or vitality or getting a good night’s sleep. I’m talking about energy in terms of where you’re putting your focused attention and energy in terms of how you feel. 

Which just makes sense, right? If you can be in a powerful state of being and operate from a place of courage, curiosity, excitement and joy, you’re going to be more resourceful. You’re going to take more consistent action. And no matter whether or not that action produces the immediate result, you’ll continue to put the energy and the effort out there through inspired action and eventually create the success that you want. 

So the name of the game is actually energy, but what does this have to do with getting out ahead of the car wreck?  What does this have to do with not having to wait until the problems or challenges in your life to become aware of what you believe and then transform your thinking, but instead be able to unlock untapped potential in your life without having the chaos hit first? 

Unbinding The Bound Energy Keeping You Stuck

I had a client who said to me, “Hey Dave, I want to grow my business and in order to do that, I want to be on more speaking stages. I want to generate more high paying clients. I want to be able to generate more consistent and predictable revenue. What strategies can you give me to be able to get out and speak on more stages?”

Now, the traditional personal development approach would be to say, let’s take a look at what you believe about speaking or whether your message is good enough or whether or not you feel you’re deserving or good enough. What do you believe about people paying you high prices for your services? Or what do you believe about marketing your business in the midst of a recession or with all of this inflation going on?

And we might identify some limiting beliefs that my client has and use the tools that we teach to transform those limiting beliefs into what we call new, empowered decisions. And to be clear, that’s a highly effective way for you to approach growing your life. The challenge in this case, is that you have to first experience not being on as many stages as you would like to be on, not having as many clients as you would like, not generating as consistent and predictable of revenue as you desire.

So what does this have to do with this concept called “bound and unbound” energy?  

I asked my client,  “If you were to scan your life right now and you were to look at the area of your life that feels like it’s creating contraction, or it’s draining your energy, or where there happens to be some locked up potential or energy, where would that be?”

His answer was immediate. “In my relationship,” he said.

So while it might seem counterintuitive, my recommendation to him was, “if you want to get on more stages and you want to have more consistent clients and more predictable income, you need to go and become more available in your relationship with your wife.” 

Naturally, he was somewhat puzzled by my response. He asked me what his relationship had to do with growing his business.  And I told him, “That’s where the bound energy is in your life.” And wherever there’s bound energy somewhere in your life, it means you’re not being available to something. So I asked him, “Where are you not available or what are you resistant to in your relationship with your wife?”

He told me that sometimes his wife comes to him with frustrations or complaints (sounds like any relationship, right?).  So I asked him what he does in those moments, and he told me he ends up getting defensive.  In other words, he wasn’t available to be open and receptive to his wife’s concerns and frustrations.  So I told him that if he could become more available and receiving for his wife and give her the space to speak and vent, and do so without taking it personally, the energy can start to move in the relationship.

And if the energy can start to move in the relationship, the energy can start to move freely through the other areas of your life as well. I continued asking my client where else in his relationship he was unavailable.  And his answer was, “Well, a lot of times she has a demand for my time, but I need to grow my business over here. Once I can get our income coming in more predictably and I can start making more money and I can be growing my business, then I can go back and spend some time with my wife.” 

I hear stuff like this all the time. In this man’s case, as is the case for many people, he was getting things backwards. 

So counterintuitive to the advice he thought I’d give him, I told him that moving forward, his business plan was to be more available for whatever concerns or complaints or emotional release that his wife has and to spend more time fully-connecting with her.  Naturally, he asked “how is spending more time with my wife and being more available in my relationship going to help me get on more stages and attract more clients?”

I told him that he had been looking at his life in an inappropriately siloed and segmented way.  The reality is that all of our lives are holistic and need to be treated as such.  For all of us, the quality of our lives and everything that we’re trying to achieve is going to depend upon the availability of energy within the ecosystem of our lives. For my client, his energy was being compressed or bound in the relationship component of his life.

In his case, he needed to look at where he needed to become more available in order to unlock that energy and allow it to flow into the other areas he was concerned about, namely his business.  Even when perhaps it doesn’t feel good and it’s hard to not take things personally, he needed to allow his wife to move her emotional energy and commit to spending time with her –  rather than thinking that’s something that he could do after he reached his business goals. 

I explained to him that energy understands where it needs to go once it’s unbound. In other words, Energy is what’s required in order to get on more stages, new thoughts, new ideas, more productive perceptions of opportunities that are in front of my client, more synchronicities and coincidences and timing that materializes and manifests in his life.

Accomplish More…By Doing Less?

Energy is free flowing.  Any time you want to achieve something, you’ve already placed your request to Spirit or the Universe or God or Jesus or Allah – whatever your Higher Power is for you. What’s required is that enough energy is available and flowing freely  in order to materialize those desires you have.  For my client, in order for him to get on more stages, he needed to release the energy that was trapped in his relationship with his wife.

This was a massive breakthrough for him. He said, “Wait a minute, you’re telling me that my job is actually to go do the things that I’d like to do now that I feel like I can’t because I believe I have these other priorities and that will actually feed into creating success out of the other priorities I have?”  

Yes, that’s exactly the answer.

Scriptures and wisdom teachings tell us that we live in a creative, loving, intelligent Universe and that life itself is actually asking us to move out of the fear based system that we’ve been indoctrinated into  and to start living according to faith.

What that means on a practical level is that all of us need to start re-prioritizing where we put our time, energy, and attention and to become more available and present for the people, experiences, and activities that actually matter and give us the most energy. 

By the way, this is what all of the great teachers talked about, though they may have talked about it in different ways. For example, Gandhi has a beautiful adage, which is, “I have so much to do today, I must meditate for two hours instead of one.” Gandhi understood that life was all about energy and that no matter how much you work, how hard you hustle, or how willing you are to grind, you can’t outwork timing and you can’t out hustle Intelligence.

If you’re able to show up with a full resource of energy, in any activity or goal that you’ve set, you’re going to be able to accomplish that goal in a much shorter period of time. So this is the opposite of the hustle and grind culture that we’ve been indoctrinated into.  When we can free up the bound energy in our lives, it allows us to get out ahead of the challenges, the problems, or the materialization of the traumas from our childhood that we bring into our life.  It allows us to take the steering wheel of our lives and consciously decide where we want to go, rather than waiting for something bad to happen in order to create transformation.

I had another client attend one of my live events. One of my coaches came over and said, “Hey, one of our people is having a bit of a nervous breakdown.” So I invited her over to have a conversation and asked her what was going on.  She explained to me that she was freaking out because she only had four months of cash flow left.  She told me that she never should have started her business in the first place and that she had no idea what she was doing.  If you’re familiar with our work, this woman was in what we call a state of suffering – she wasn’t thinking intelligently.

I helped her calm down and asked her, “What were the things that you were doing when you were inspired to start this business? When you had the courage to leave your job and create this new business opportunity that is your passion, what were you doing then that you’re not doing now?”   She responded by telling me that was going to church once a week.  She was volunteering once a week to a cause she was passionate about.  She was having more get togethers and social time with her friends.

But she’d stopped doing all of these things that had previously brought her joy and that gave her energy.  So, like the other client I previously talked about, I gave her a new business plan – start doing the things she enjoyed that she had stopped doing.  Because when you can unbind the bound energy in your life, it translates itself into thoughts, ideas, perceptions, coincidences, synchronicities, and timing. 

To be clear, this isn’t some sort of “woo woo” approach to creating success in your life.  It’s an understanding from a First Principles perspective that energy is what translates into thoughts and ideas.  And thoughts and ideas are what translate into action and strategies. And then outside of that, there is this co creative element with the Universe and Intelligence, which is simultaneously responding to your energy, resulting in creating the coincidences and synchronicities that lead to results.

Now, in this woman’s case, I could have given her strategies to implement, but no matter what strategies I gave her to grow her business, if she continued to operate in this contracted state of energy, no matter what she does, she’s not going to be able to produce the results.  The same is true for all of us.

When Nothing’s Working… Try Doing Nothing

So if right now in your life you’re facing a crisis or trying to solve a problem, oftentimes one of the best things you can do is walk away from the problem. Go for a walk, play with the dog, take a bubble bath, listen to some inspiring music, go to the movies, go to dinner with friends.

You have to tap into energy  in order to become resourceful enough to solve the problem you have. And again, another very useful activity could be taking inventory of this concept, maybe it’s once a month.  Sit down and evaluate where there is bound energy in my life? And what am I being unavailable to in that area of my life?

Maybe you’re experiencing bound energy around a chronic health condition. Maybe you’re experiencing bound energy around the fact that you’re alone and you want to be in a relationship. Well, what can you be more available for? Maybe you can be more available for your pain. Knowing that this health challenge will resolve itself if you can move into a higher energetic state. Maybe you could be more available for being alone right now, but not forever. 

So, scan your life.  Look for where there’s bound energy, and ask yourself, “What am I being unavailable to, and what would it look like to be more available in this area of my life?”  On the flip side of that, where can you source more energy? What are the things that you do that fill you up? And go do more of those things, even though it seems counterproductive. You may be in a place where you feel like you don’t have enough time, or you have to figure some plan out, or you have so much going on that you can’t get all of the things on your to-do list done.

These are all reasons why you probably need to meditate for two hours instead of one, as Gandhi would say.  I’m not saying that you don’t need to take action, but when you let the energy in your life flow, you’ll take more inspired action. For all of us, there are times in our lives where we’re simply trying way too hard to solve a problem.  But one of the best things we can do is to take a step back, relax, and simply exist in the present moment.

Sometimes doing nothing is what’s required in order for us to get away from the contraction and to move into a more energetic state. And energy is always the solution, the life you love is the result.