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WHAT LIMITING BELIEFS DO TO US

Limiting beliefs are often revealed in our self-talk, that inner conversation that focuses on what you’re convinced you can’t do rather than what you already excel at and what you’re going to continue to achieve today and into the future. How often do you stop yourself from attempting to do something or from pursuing a dream because that voice convinces you that it is beyond your reach? If this sounds like you, you are very far from alone, but you’re also not doing yourself any favors.
“We come into this world not knowing if life is hard or easy, if money is scarce or abundant, if we’re important or unimportant. We look at two people who know everything: our parents,”¹ said belief change expert Shelly Lefkoe in our podcast interview. Parents are our first teachers, and although they probably meant us no harm, we still come away from our childhoods with the limiting beliefs they unconsciously instilled in us.
Limiting beliefs can stop you in your tracks even when you’re doing something at which you normally excel. Have you ever had the experience of being in a pressure situation where you need to do something that typically comes easily to you—writing a memo or doing a quick calculation, for example—but the intensity causes you to doubt yourself so much that you fail at this task? That’s a limiting belief setting you back. If
you could just get out of your head, you’d have no trouble getting the job done, but your inner voice confounds you.
Now, take that situation and extend it to an entire segment of your life. Your career aspirations, perhaps, or your ability to make friends. If your limiting beliefs are in control, you could find yourself mired in underachievement, either wondering why you never really get ahead or convinced that you don’t deserve it.
Alexis, who cofounded Kwik Learning with me, struggled with learning as a child much like I did, but for very different reasons. She was born in South Korea to entrepreneurial parents who struggled in business. They didn’t have a lot of money, but always worked hard to make ends meet. While she had a roof over her head, her family of four lived in a one-room basement in Korea. Their second business had just failed when they received a letter from the United States saying their visa application had been approved—they had filed seven years earlier. On the verge of desperation, her family thought this was a new chance, so they borrowed the equivalent of $2,000 and left for America.
Alexis didn’t know a word of English when she arrived. It was total culture shock—she didn’t know what was being said around her, and the cultural norms were entirely different. Her parents didn’t speak English either, so they were all struggling to understand their new world.
Alexis enrolled in school near her new home. She was a shy and introverted student, and, because she didn’t know the language, she often sat alone at the lunch table or ate in a bathroom stall just to avoid feeling like an outcast.
It took Alexis six years to be able to truly understand English, and both the kids and the teachers in her school didn’t understand why she struggled for so long. After a couple of years, classmates started to criticize her for being a slow learner. “What’s wrong with you?” “Are you stupid? “You’re weird,” were phrases she heard frequently as a child.
Her difficulties in school even extended to physical education, the one area where she ostensibly didn’t need to use many words. She remembers sitting on the bleachers repeatedly copying out the words, “I will bring my gym clothes to class.” But she had no idea what she was writing, and no one managed to communicate to her that she needed to bring a change of clothing.
By the time she was in her early twenties, Alexis had a hard time reading a book from front to back. She battled with her internal voices whenever she attempted to learn. One overarching voice constantly criticized and doubted her abilities, while another small voice questioned that critic. Something inside her couldn’t fully accept the notion that she was “dumb.” Her parents worked hard to give her a second chance, and she couldn’t let them down. While there were moments where she felt she wasn’t good enough to do anything special in her life, there were also moments where she was sure there had to be more to life than merely accepting her circumstances.
If Alexis allowed those external voices to shape her reality, then it would’ve stopped her in her tracks. She wouldn’t have searched for solutions to her problems. Instead, she looked for answers by observing and learning from others. She started wondering what they were doing differently to find success and happiness. She wanted to know if it was sheer luck and genius, or if there was a method behind it. In her quest to learn how to be successful, she ended up in one of my early classes. She wasn’t sure what she was getting into, but knew she wanted something different for herself—she needed to feel a sense of hope.
On day one, we covered memory. It was eight hours of intense training, but at the end of the session, Alexis felt refreshed and even excited about what she was learning. “How else can I use my brain?” she wondered. For the first time in her life, she didn’t feel slow and she felt excited about learning.
Day two was all about speed reading. She wasn’t initially excited about this because of her previous challenges. But when Alexis learned the smart reading habits and went through the speed-reading exercises, a lightbulb turned on. She suddenly saw the potential—and even the fun—of reading. She realized she was not too slow or stupid to understand; she was just never shown how to learn and use the super-computer between her ears. As she experienced the power of learning, the years of negative self-talk and limiting beliefs took a backseat in her mind.
After that class, Alexis read a complete book for the first time and was blown away by how much she understood, how much she remembered, and how much she liked the experience.
It was a huge turning point in her life. She went from a limited mindset, believing that “things are the way they are,” to knowing that she could
change and shape her mind to reach her goals. For the first time in her life, she began to believe in herself and imagine what might be possible.
Today, Alexis doesn’t shy away from learning something new. She doesn’t feel inadequate if she doesn’t know something. She goes out to find answers and applies them. Out of her passion for learning, she also started Kwik Learning Online with me to share the transformation she experienced with others in every country in the world.
In their book Mequilibrium, authors Jan Bruce, Dr. Andrew Shatté, and Dr. Adam Perlman call these kinds of beliefs “iceberg beliefs” because of how many of them lie beneath the surface of our subconscious. “Iceberg beliefs are deeply rooted and powerful, and they fuel our emotions,” they say in the book. “The more entrenched an iceberg is, the more havoc it wreaks on your life. . . creating your schedule chaos, getting in the way of successfully sticking to a diet, or holding you back from seizing opportunities.”
And, perhaps most significantly, they say, “If we get a handle on our icebergs, we gain an enormous amount of control over our feelings and our lives. Melt an iceberg and all the downstream events it causes get washed away as well.”²

Dr. Jennice Vilhauer, director of Emory University’s Adult Outpatient Psychotherapy Program in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science in the School of Medicine, implores us to come face-to-face with our inner critic, “the voice in your head that judges you, doubts you, belittles you, and constantly tells you that you are not good enough. It says negative hurtful things to you—things that you would never even dream of saying to anyone else. I am such an idiot; I am a phony; I never do anything right; I will never succeed.”
She adds: “The inner critic isn’t harmless. It inhibits you, limits you, and stops you from pursuing the life you truly want to live. It robs you of peace of mind and emotional well-being and, if left unchecked long enough, it can even lead to serious mental health problems like depression or anxiety.”³
Let’s revisit our failed superhero from the beginning of this chapter. She certainly had the motivation to save the day. And she certainly had the methods to save the day. But what she didn’t have was the mindset. Her inner critic convinced her that she wasn’t good enough, so she sat on the sidelines feeling sorry for herself instead of taking care of business. Certainly, one takeaway from this story is that our failed superhero blew it. She flopped at a critical time because she couldn’t get out of her own head.
But there’s another hugely important component to this story: our superhero had everything inside of her to succeed. If only she’d been able to prevail over the beliefs that were holding her back, her extraordinary talents would have shone through.
That’s how important it is to conquer your limiting beliefs.