Episode 021 – How to Permanently Eliminate Your Limiting Beliefs and Become a Whole Human

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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.

“David, I’ve been doing the work.  I’ve been on the personal development merry-go-round for years.  Why haven’t I changed yet?  What am I missing?”

Today, we’re going to answer these questions.  Why do so many people feel like there’s a gap between the way they’re currently experiencing life and the way they want to be living – even after they’ve spent so much time immersed in the world of self-help?  I know I experienced this.  I spent years learning from the great teachers, reading all the books, going to the conferences, and becoming more self-aware about my limiting beliefs.  

But while there were incremental improvements in my life, there were some limiting beliefs that I was able to alleviate myself of, and my life was getting slightly better – I was still experiencing a lot of suffering, stress, anxiety, overwhelm.  I was still comparing myself to other people. I was still struggling with indecision, procrastination, self-sabotage, and anxiety.  There was still a lot left in terms of the desired experience I had for my life.

Embodying Personal Growth At A Deeper Level

Despite the best intentions of both those teaching personal development and those learning the principles of personal growth, the missing piece always seems to be integration and embodiment.  In other words, you can spend a ton of time consuming, learning, and doing, but the change you’re looking for doesn’t actually stick.

Part of the reason is that “Personal Development 1.0” has been very intellectual, motivational, and inspirational.  You learn a lot, you get hyped up, you jump up and down, but at the end of the day, you still feel like the same person.  And if that’s been your experience – like it was for mine for many years – you’re probably still searching for the “missing piece” that’ll experience the change you’re looking for.  Whether that’s getting out of financial insecurity, taking your relationship to the next level, having more vibrant health, whatever it may be.

Now, if you’ve been in our community or gone through our work before, you know that creating real change – in any area of your life – is not about the resources you have, the plan you follow, the strategy you use, or any external factor.  The reality is that all of life, and everything we create, achieve, and become in it, comes down to a single, simple equation:

Desire + Non-Resistance = Desired Outcome

Not understanding this keeps a lot of well-intentioned individuals on the “self-help hamster wheel”.  Because we often think that our possibilities are limited to our resources, strategies, or some kind of divine intervention.  But the key to accomplishing just about anything isn’t about figuring out HOW to do it – the key is to look within yourself and become aware of what psychological or emotional resistance exists that stands in your way of executing the how in the first place.

If you don’t have any resistance to making more money and can hold onto a vision of what a more abundant and prosperous life can look like for you, you’re substantially more likely to make more money.  Behavioral psychology tells us this – it’s the actual science of how thoughts become things.  But when you hold onto thoughts and beliefs that money is hard to make, or evil, or only obtainable by certain people, that internal “truth” materializes in your reality.

On top of that, when you can hold onto this vision within your brain and nervous system, along with excited and anticipatory emotions around fulfilling your desires, you activate synchronicities and coincidences that begin to formulate the materialization of the results you want.  This vibration activates other people to support you in achieving your goals, fresh ideas, and new opportunities.  In other words, whatever you think, you create – even if it’s at a nuanced, unconscious level.

So the reason why most people struggle to create change in their lives is because they don’t understand the rules of the game or abide by this simple formula.  In reality, all of the external changes we want to create can be produced by an internal adjustment – by dropping the resistance.

What Is Resistance…And How Do We Drop It?

Fundamentally, resistance is whatever is holding you back from experiencing the reality you want.  Typically it exists internally and most people recognize resistance as their limiting beliefs, which are just the tip of the iceberg.  There are a total of four areas of resistance that we recognize and work to transform within our methodology, and I’m going to touch briefly on each of them here.

These limiting beliefs that we all have – “I’m not good enough”…”money is evil”…” people can’t be trusted”…just to name a few examples – were formed at an early age as we experienced life and interpreted the influences of our surroundings.  We created memories of our various experiences, gave these memories meaning, and created the beliefs that we still hold onto today – about pretty much everything in life.

As we age, we continue to experience our lives through the lens of the beliefs we’ve formed about different people, ideas, places, institutions, and things.  Then when we come into the phenomenal world of personal development, we become more aware of the fact that these beliefs – aka resistance – are not serving the vision we have for our life or contributing to the changes we want to make.

Why Some Beliefs Are Harder Than Others To Transform

Maybe you’ve had the experience of being able to transform certain limiting beliefs, but others continue to linger.  Or, you feel like you’ve done the work of transforming a belief, but after a certain period, it reverts back.  What we’ve discovered is that some limiting beliefs are tied to the resentments that we hold, which have a way of “locking” those beliefs into place.  These resentments are the second layer of resistance.

This makes sense if you think about it, seeing as most of our limiting beliefs were formed in relationships with other people.  Your mother or father may have said or done something in your childhood and you gave a meaning to that experience, which caused you to adopt a certain belief.  You might not be conscious of it, but you likely hold resentment towards the person who made you feel this way.  So you can do all the work you want around the limiting belief itself, but if you’re still holding onto this resentment, no matter what you do, the belief will continue to remain rooted in your psyche.

If you can inventory your resentments, let go of them, and find forgiveness, then you not only free yourself from the other person and the past experience that you had with them, but you free yourself from the limiting belief that is the bond between you two.  This is why so many people don’t understand why certain limiting beliefs are so hard to shift – it’s because we haven’t really socialized or popularized this idea that they’re connected to resentments.

What you’ll notice if you do a Resentments Inventory is that you’ll realize that you likely hold resentments toward a variety of people who had nothing to do with the original experience that formed the resentment in the first place.  Your experiences with other people in your life are guided through the lens of your mom or dad, for example, and you create ways to blame or judge those people in the same way you would the original “culprit” of the resentment.

And it’s not just people either.  If you sit down to think about it and take inventory, you might find that you’re holding onto resentments about God or the religion you were raised in, your own body and health, 3-letter governmental institutions, and a variety of other influences.  In all of these cases, you can’t have a healthy relationship with these things if you’re continuing to resent them.  You can’t exactly love your body if you resent the way it looks and feels.  So we need to identify this second layer of resistance – our resentments – and clear them out. 

Discovering Your Core Program 

A few years ago, as I was going through a bout of overwhelm and worry and struggling to understand why, I realized that every person I know seems to struggle with something that’s even more deeply rooted than any limiting belief or resentment.  It could be shame, guilt, control, or a variety of other things, all of which point back to early childhood traumas.

What I discovered is that every single human being has a Core Program, which is almost like a “super limiting belief” – this is the third layer of resistance.  What’s interesting about this layer is that you can’t actually get rid of it – you’re not supposed to.  Your Core Program is an integral part of your identity and the seed of your entire personality – your “emotional home” if you will.  At the surface, your Core Program can be mistaken as a fault or flow but, unconsciously, it becomes the strengths you’re most proud of – your natural gifts, talents, and skills.

But your Core Program has its upper limits.  It’s gotten you through life up to a point, but it won’t necessarily take you to where you want to go, which presents an opportunity.  When you can unbind the compressed energy of this “super limiting belief” – NOT try to change it – you can unlock your next level of personal power, emotional capacity, and spiritual strength.  Just as freeing yourself from your resentments requires forgiveness, transforming your Core Program requires surrender.

The key to surrender is not doing the activity that’s creating insanity in your life, it’s about doing some sort of healthy activity that allows you to relax rather than react. Why? Because we need a pattern interrupt to get us to see things differently, and the way that we achieve that is by actually seeing that in everything that we’ve created in our life, we haven’t actually been responsible for – there’s been a power greater than ourselves guiding us the whole time.  In other words, to reach your next level of personal evolution, you have to learn to trust that something bigger than you will guide you there.

The Final Layer Of Resistance

Every human being inherently feels at some level that they’re “not enough”, and it motivates a lot of behavior in our lives.  It might show up consciously daily.  It might be a lingering, subconscious feeling.  But to address this fourth layer of resistance, the first three must be transformed first.  Only then do we create the opportunity to start planting new seeds, so to speak, of self-love and self-esteem.

Now, there are a variety of ways that we can do that. We like to use the technology of affirmations or incantations and reminders to ourselves of our inherent worthiness and the fact that the Universe itself is in support of our greatest growth, prosperity, and personal evolution.

In other words, we are loved not only by ourselves but by life itself. As we develop this into a daily practice of reminding ourselves that all is well, that we are safe, and that we are inherently good in our existence, we start to become solid within ourselves.  Otherwise, we tend to outsource our self-approval and become codependent on others to dictate how we feel about ourselves.

The goal in addressing this “not good enoughness” is to establish esteem and love for ourselves.  When we can do that, we no longer become a victim of our external circumstances.  We can become more present and recognize that the Universe and life itself have our backs.  And with the support of this higher power, we can begin to change our experience of life.

Creating Your Masterpiece Life 

To wrap things up, the most important thing that we can focus on in our lives is identifying the resistance that’s inside of us.  Once we become self-aware of what’s holding us back and commit ourselves to a daily spiritual practice of transforming these layers of resistance, we open ourselves up for a much more powerful living experience.

You don’t need to be “perfect” or have some magical mindset superpowers to do this.  You don’t have to find a way to be 100% resistance-free – that’s just not realistic.  If you can just make some small, incremental changes to your inner architecture, identify some limiting beliefs, work with your Core Program, and begin to install new seeds of self-love and self-esteem, you can create dramatic shifts in your life.