“I lack self-confidence.”
“I’m incapable of doing that.”
“If I raise my prices, I’ll lose my clients.”
“I always end up with the wrong people.”
“People like me don’t succeed in this field.”
“I know my clients: I know exactly what they want.”
All these sentences have something in common.
They may be true. Or partly true. Or completely false.
The problem is that when we treat them as indisputable truths, we often stop checking.
And that is when a belief can become a limiting belief. Not simply because it is negative, but because it begins deciding for us what is possible, impossible, dangerous, reasonable or even worth trying.
What is a limiting belief?
A belief is a representation we consider sufficiently true to use it to interpret the world.
We need them.
We cannot start every morning by experimentally checking whether fire still burns, whether our colleagues exist or whether gravity is still working.
Our brains build models.
The problem arises when certain conclusions become too rigid, even though the reality that produced them was much more circumstantial.
I failed once.
“I’m not capable.”
Someone left me.
“People always end up abandoning me.”
Three prospects rejected my price.
“Nobody will pay that much.”
I have always worked this way. Or the famous “we’ve always done it this way”, which drives me up the wall.
“It’s the only way that works.”
An experience becomes a rule. Then the rule influences our decisions.
And our decisions can eventually create a reality that looks suspiciously like our original belief.
Limiting beliefs, confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecies
This is where things get really interesting.
Because we love being right. Even when what we believe is making our lives bloody miserable.
Once a belief is established, we may tend to notice information that confirms it and minimise information that contradicts it: this is one form of confirmation bias.
You think:
“Nobody is really interested in what I say.”
Someone looks at their phone while you are talking:
EXHIBIT NUMBER 847.
Someone else listens attentively for forty minutes?
Strangely enough, that piece of evidence disappears from the case file.
And sometimes our beliefs also influence our behaviour.
If I am convinced that nobody will listen to me, I speak less. I defend my ideas less. I make myself smaller. Other people therefore ask for my input less often.
And I conclude:
“See? Nobody cares what I have to say.”
The loop is complete and the toast has been thoroughly buttered.
Why is it so difficult to change certain beliefs?
Because a belief does not merely describe reality.
It can also protect us.
If I believe:
“I can’t succeed in this field because I don’t have the right qualifications”,
that idea may hurt.
But it also saves me from a particularly unpleasant experience:
trying and discovering that I might fail for other reasons.
A belief can protect our identity.
Our sense of safety.
Our belonging to a group.
Our self-esteem.
It can help us make sense of a painful experience.
And sometimes, let’s be frankly less romantic about it:
it can save us from getting off our arse and doing something.
“It’ll never work” has one considerable advantage: you do not have to try.
A limiting belief is not always self-deprecating
We readily associate limiting beliefs with low self-confidence:
“I’m useless.”
“I don’t deserve to succeed.”
“I’ll never manage it.”
But a belief can also be extremely flattering.
“I know my clients perfectly.”
“I know how this market works.”
“I have nothing to learn from those people.”
“If it doesn’t work, it’s because other people don’t understand.”
The belief is no longer protecting only against a feeling of inferiority.
It can protect a sense of superiority.
And the result can be exactly the same:
we stop confronting our representation with reality.
That is how an entrepreneur who is absolutely convinced they know what their clients want can spend six months building a fantastic offer…
that nobody buys.
Then conclude that clients really are idiots.
That is one hypothesis. There may be others. But they have just created a belief, and they will have no shortage of opportunities to confirm it for themselves and build another offer using exactly the same logic.
“My clients will never pay that price”
I hear this one regularly in coworking workshops about our relationship with money, pricing, positioning or price adjustments.
Someone considers raising their rates.
And immediately:
“I can’t do that or I’ll lose my clients.”
Question:
How many?
Silence.
Which clients?
Slightly longer silence.
Which ones explicitly told you they would leave? Were they clients or prospects? Have they ever paid for one of your services before?
Silence, accompanied by a sudden fascination with the ceiling.
Maybe the person is right.
A price increase can indeed cause you to lose some clients. (But it can also attract others who are perfectly compatible with your service.)
Coaching is not about replacing a pessimistic belief with magical thinking such as:
“I deserve abundance, so I’ll triple my prices and the universe will provide.”
Thanks, but no thanks.
Instead, we can ask:
What is your current price?
What is your margin?
How are you positioned in your market?
What value does your offer create?
Which clients are genuinely price-sensitive?
Have you already tested a different price?
With how many prospects?
What happened?
We then move from a belief to a testable hypothesis.
And that shift is enormous.
How can you loosen a limiting belief?
I actually prefer the word loosen to “eliminate”.
Because trying to eradicate a belief with positive affirmations may simply mean replacing one rigid certainty with another.
Take:
“If I set boundaries, people will abandon me.”
Abruptly replacing it with:
“People will always love me when I set boundaries”
is not much more serious.
Some people may indeed react badly.
Instead, we can loosen it:
“Some people may react badly when I set a boundary. Others will respect it. I can learn to distinguish between the two and decide which relationships I want to build.”
Now something changes.
The new thought is not artificially positive.
It is simply more complex and more open to reality.
To loosen a belief, I like working with a few questions:
- What exactly do I believe?
- Since when?
- What experiences is this belief based on?
- In which situations is it true?
- In which situations is it not true?
- What information do I tend to dismiss?
- What does this belief allow me to avoid?
- What would I risk if it were false?
- How could I test it without taking a disproportionate risk?
- What wording would be more nuanced while still feeling credible?
The aim is not to think positively.
The aim is to think more precisely.
“I can’t do that because…”
This wording is extraordinary.
Whenever it appears, I want to hear what comes next.
“I can’t turn down this client because…”
“I can’t change jobs because…”
“I can’t ask for that because…”
“I can’t raise my prices because…”
“I can’t say what I think because…”
The “because” often contains the whole story.
Because what?
And then?
What if that actually happened?
What would the consequence be?
Would it be unpleasant or genuinely catastrophic?
Could you deal with it?
How often has that consequence actually occurred?
Sometimes the danger is perfectly real.
And sometimes we discover that we have organised our lives for ten years around a “because” that nobody ever seriously questioned.
When our beliefs reinforce our sense of powerlessness
Some beliefs serve another purpose.
They explain why we have no power.
“People don’t change anyway.”
“That’s just how things work in my industry.”
“I have no choice.”
“With my personality, I’ll always be like this.”
“Other people are lucky. I’m not.”
Again, some constraints are real.
Not everything is possible for everyone.
Our resources, history, environment and power relationships genuinely exist.
But there is an enormous difference between recognising:
“I don’t control everything”
and concluding:
“I control nothing.”
A limiting belief sometimes loves to slip precisely into that gap.
Because powerlessness also has a psychological advantage:
if I can’t do anything, I don’t have any difficult decisions to make.
“I lack self-confidence” can become a belief too
Here is a little irony.
Even low self-confidence can eventually become an identity.
“I’m someone who lacks confidence.”
Okay.
Always?
With everyone?
In every area?
Since forever?
Have you never made a courageous decision?
Never defended someone?
Never learned something you thought you were incapable of doing?
Never made it through a difficult situation?
The aim is not simply to answer:
“Of course you can! You’re amazing!”
That would be fairly useless.
It is about putting some granularity back into a sentence that has become enormous.
Perhaps:
“I lack self-confidence”
actually means:
“When I have to defend my expertise in front of someone I consider more legitimate than me, I strongly doubt my own value.”
And that is much more interesting.
Because we can work on that.
How can you identify your limiting beliefs?
They hide particularly well behind certain generalising words:
always.
never.
everyone.
nobody.
necessarily.
impossible.
that’s just who I am.
people are like that.
that’s how it works in my profession.
I know that…
Whenever a sentence turns a complex experience into a general rule, it may deserve a quick inspection.
Not to automatically conclude that it is false.
But to ask:
“How do I know this is true?”
Coaching is not about replacing your beliefs with mine
This is something I care about particularly.
A coach’s role is not to look at your belief system and decide:
“That’s false. That’s true. Now think like me.”
Otherwise, we have solved nothing.
We have simply changed gurus.
My job is more about creating a little movement inside certainties.
Questioning.
Looking for exceptions.
Bringing a contradiction into view.
Distinguishing a fact from an interpretation.
Building an experiment that allows us to test a hypothesis.
And sometimes asking:
“Okay. And if what you just told me were completely false, what would that change?”
Then watching what happens.
Stop letting your beliefs drive
I would keep one image from my old article:
your beliefs should not be your GPS.
They are more like an old map.
Some roads are still perfectly drawn.
Others have changed.
Some directions have probably saved you from some spectacular ravines.
And there may also be an entire motorway that was built after the map was printed.
So the aim is not to burn the map.
It is to look out of the window regularly.
And when a belief tells you:
“You can’t.”
do not necessarily answer:
“Yes I can!”
Ask it a much more annoying question instead:
“What makes you so sure?”
That is often where the work begins.