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IT ISN’T ONLY IN YOUR HEAD

Before I give you some tools to help you shift toward a more positive mindset, let’s just talk for a minute about how important positive thinking is. There are clear connections between positive thinking and physical health. In a Johns Hopkins study, Dr. Lisa Yanek found that “positive people from the general population were 13 percent less likely than their negative counterparts to have a heart attack or other coronary event.”⁴
Meanwhile, the Mayo Clinic notes that “The positive thinking that usually comes with optimism is a key part of effective stress management. And effective stress management is associated with many health benefits.”
They note that these benefits include:


Increased life span
Lower rates of depression Lower levels of distress
Greater resistance to the common cold Better psychological and physical well-being
Better cardiovascular health and reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease
Better coping skills during hardships and times of stress⁵

REFRAMING LIMITING BELIEFS

There’s a metaphor I’ve always found useful when helping people to move away from limiting beliefs. I tell them that the difference between limiting beliefs and a limitless mindset is like the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. A thermometer has only one function: to react to the environment. It reads the temperature and nothing more. This is similar to how people commonly react to limiting beliefs. They read their sense of restriction, react in a constrained way to that, and conduct their lives in a limited way.
On the other hand, a thermostat gauges the environment and makes the environment react to it. If a thermostat notices that a room is too cold or too hot, it changes the environment to fit the ideal for which it is set. Similarly, if you encounter external or internal attempts to put constraints on you, you can act like a thermostat to reject those limiting beliefs and create an environment that aligns with your most ambitious goals.
So, how do you minimize limiting beliefs and develop a superhero mindset? To me, there are three keys.

Key 1: Name Your Limiting Beliefs

You’ve seen some examples here of limiting beliefs, but there are many more where those came from (and we’ll go over the seven most prevalent limiting beliefs on learning in a moment). They might have to do with your talents, your character, your relationships, your education, or anything else that leads to internal whispers that you can’t be what you want to be. Start paying attention right now to every time you tell yourself that you’re incapable, even if you think that this particular thing might not be consequential in your life.
For example, maybe you tell yourself that you’re terrible at telling jokes. Perhaps this isn’t a big deal to you, because being a good joke-teller isn’t a personal aspiration. But you might also be telling yourself that you don’t think you’re entertaining, or good company, or an enjoyable companion; and that kind of self-talk can ultimately cause you to double-clutch when you’re in an important social situation or when you need to speak in front of a group. So, listen carefully every time you find yourself using phrases like “I can’t,” “I’m not,” or “I don’t.” You’re sending messages to yourself that are affecting how you think about your life in general, even if what you’re
beating yourself up over is something specific and seemingly not important to how you define yourself.
At the same time, try also to identify the origin of this sort of self-talk. Limiting beliefs often start in childhood. That doesn’t automatically mean that your family is their only source. Early social settings can cause limiting beliefs, as can early experiences with education. Some might take hold simply because something didn’t go well for you the first few times you tried it as a kid.
Being aware of how you’re holding yourself back with your self-talk and spending some time to get to the source of these beliefs is extremely liberating, because once you’re aware, you can begin to realize that these aren’t facts about you, but rather opinions. And there’s a very good chance that those opinions are wrong.
Once you identify the voices in your head that are focusing on what you can’t do, start talking back to them. When you find yourself thinking, “I always screw up this sort of thing,” counter with, “Just because I haven’t always been good at this in the past doesn’t mean that I can’t be great at it now. Keep your opinions to yourself.”

Key 2: Get to the Facts

One of the fundamental tyrannies of limiting beliefs is that, in so many cases, they’re just plain wrong. Are you really terrible at speaking in public? Are you really bad at leading a group? Are you really the least interesting person in the room wherever you are? What’s the evidence to support that? How many times have you actually been in these situations, and what have the results been?

One of the most pernicious things about limiting beliefs is that they play so heavily on our emotions. When you come up against a limiting belief, you’re likely to find those beliefs warring—and usually winning—against your rational self. But how much of this self-talk has a basis in reality? Think about your experiences speaking in public (an extraordinarily common fear, by the way). Rather than focusing on how you felt in these instances, consider how things went. Were you booed off the stage? Did people come up to you afterward to laugh at you and tell you how awful you were? Did your boss sit you down the next day to say that you might want to consider a career where you never had to utter a word?
I’m guessing none of these things happened. Instead, it’s likely that your audience felt connected to what you were saying. If it was in a professional setting, maybe they were taking notes, and you almost certainly taught them something. Does this mean that your next speech should be at TED? Of course not. But it definitely means that you’re likely much better at conveying information to a group than that voice in your head is telling you that you are.
And then there’s this question to ask: How much of my perceived poor performance was because my self-talk just wouldn’t leave me alone? This is a real issue for many people. They’ll be in the middle of doing something in which they lack confidence, and the inner critic will become so distracting that they can’t focus on what they are doing . . . and therefore don’t do it very well. This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to learn to face down and quiet your limiting beliefs. The better you are at this, the better you’ll be at keeping down distractions during your biggest growth challenges.
So, when you’re examining the facts behind your limiting beliefs, be sure to consider two things: whether there is in reality any evidence to prove that you are truly hampered in this area and whether even that evidence was tainted by the noise in your head.

Key 3: Create a New Belief

Now that you’ve given your limiting beliefs a name and now that you’ve carefully examined the reality of those beliefs, it’s time to take the most essential step—to generate a new belief that is both truer than the LIEs
you’ve been accepting and beneficial to the limitless you that you are creating.
You’re going to see this process at work in the next chapter, but let’s take it for a spin right now. Let’s say that one of your limiting beliefs is that you always come up short at the most important moments in your life. Having identified that as a limiting belief, you’ve then taken the step of examining the facts. What you realize is that, while you have occasionally succumbed to nervousness in pressure-packed moments, very few of these instances have been disastrous for you and, upon examination, you can think of several times when you “came through in the clutch.” In fact, now that you really think about it, you’ve succeeded way more often than you’ve faltered.
So, now it’s time to create a new belief. In this case, your new belief would be that no one triumphs at the most critical juncture 100 percent of the time, but that you should be proud of yourself for how many times you’ve performed at your best when the pressure was highest. This new belief completely supplants the old belief, is fully supported by the facts, and gives you a much healthier mindset the next time a critical situation comes along.
I have one more tool for you to use here. I’ve spoken to many experts over the years, and the conversation often comes back to the same thing: as long as you believe that your inner critic is the voice of the true you, the wisest you, it’s always going to guide you. Many of us even use phrases like, “I know myself, and . . .” before announcing a limiting belief.
But if you can create a separate persona for your inner critic—one that is different from the true you—you’ll be considerably more successful at quieting it. This can be enormously helpful and you can have fun with it at the same time. Give your inner critic a preposterous name and outrageous physical attributes. Make it cartoonish and unworthy of even a B-grade movie. Mock it for its rigid dedication to negativity. Roll your eyes when it pops into your head. The better you become at distinguishing this voice from the real you, the better you’ll be at preventing limiting beliefs from getting in your way.