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THE POSSIBILITIES BECOME LIMITLESS

Now that you know how to conquer your limiting beliefs, you can start to bring your positive mindset to bear on your quest to become limitless. That might sound like an audacious plan, but there’s lots of evidence to support the connection between mindset and accomplishment.
One of my podcast guests, James Clear, the New York Times best-selling author of Atomic Habits who you will meet again later in this book, wrote about a study performed by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, a positive psychology researcher at the University of North Carolina. He prefaced their conversation by underscoring what negative emotions do to us, using the example of encountering a tiger in the forest. “Researchers have long known that negative emotions program your brain to do a specific action,” he noted. “When that tiger crosses your path, for example, you run. The rest of the world doesn’t matter. You are focused entirely on the tiger, the fear it creates, and how you can get away from it.”⁶ The point that Clear is making is that negative emotions drive us to narrow the range of what we are capable of doing. It’s all about getting away from the (metaphorical) tiger, and nothing else matters. If we let negative emotions (such as limiting beliefs) control us, we’re regularly operating in survival mode and therefore confined to a reduced range of possibilities.
What Dr. Fredrickson discovered is that a positive mindset leads to precisely the opposite result. She created an experiment where participants were divided into five groups and presented with film clips. The first group saw clips that elicited joy. The second saw clips that elicited contentment. The third saw clips that generated fear and the fourth clips that generated anger. The fifth group was the control group.
After they’d seen the clips, the participants were asked to imagine similar situations to what they just saw and how they would react to these situations. They were then asked to fill out a form that had 20 prompts that began with, “I would like to.” The people who experienced fear and anger wrote the fewest responses, while those who experienced joy and contentment listed far more than even the control group. “In other words,” Clear noted, “when you are experiencing positive emotions like joy, contentment, and love, you will see more possibilities in your life.”⁷
What’s also essential to note is that the benefits of a positive mindset extend well beyond the experience of a positive emotion. Clear offers this example:
A child who runs around outside, swinging on branches and playing with friends, develops the ability to move athletically (physical skills), the ability to play with others and communicate with a team (social skills), and the ability to explore and examine the world around them (creative skills). In this way, the positive emotions of play and joy prompt the child to build skills that are useful and valuable in everyday life. . . . The happiness that promoted the exploration and creation of new skills has long since ended, but the skills themselves live on.⁸

Fredrickson refers to this as the “broaden and build” theory because positive emotions broaden your sense of possibilities and open your mind, which in turn allows you to build new skills and resources that can provide value in other areas of your life.

The theory, together with the research reviewed here, suggests that positive emotions: (i) broaden people’s attention and thinking; (ii) undo lingering negative emotional arousal; (iii) fuel psychological resilience; (iv) build consequential personal resources; (v) trigger upward spirals towards greater well-being in the future; and (vi) seed human flourishing. The theory also carries an important prescriptive message. People should cultivate positive emotions in their own lives and in the lives of those around them, not just because doing so makes them feel good in the moment, but also because doing so transforms people for the better and sets them on paths toward flourishing and healthy longevity.⁹

The new mindset that comes from silencing your inner critic presents you with a world of possibility. When you’re surging with positive emotions, you’re seeing—and seizing on—opportunities you might never have noticed before. And with a high sense of motivation (and, really, how could you not be motivated by this?) and the right methods, you’re well on the road to becoming virtually limitless.