Your pen feels heavy on the paper. You are stuck for ideas and everything looks wrong. Your draft concept is due for a client presentation tomorrow but it’s miles off where it needs to be.
“You’re not creative enough,” your mind plays on repeat subconsciously.
Have you found yourself in a similar position – even after doing the work to set the right goals and adopt a goal-achieving mindset? If left unchecked, these pesky mental blocks or self-limiting beliefs can stand in your way.
This article explores what self-limiting beliefs are, how they can stifle career growth for even the most talented design professionals, and how the coaching process can help you overcome them.
Self-Limiting Beliefs: What are they?
First, a self-limiting belief is simply a belief that is holding you back in some way. They’re anything you’re telling yourself that stops you from taking action to achieve the things you want to achieve. These could be:
I’m not good enough
I don’t have enough time
I am incompetent
I don’t have the skills or the personality
I don’t deserve it
I will fail
How Self-Limiting Beliefs Stall Career Growth
We don’t often stop and question whether the things that we are telling ourselves are actually true now and in the future. Beliefs develop during our lives based on the experiences we have had or the things we have been told. This doesn’t mean that they are helpful or true, especially right now.
There is absolutely no right or wrong to the beliefs we hold. I believe the only thing that makes a belief limiting is when it is getting in our own way and holding us back from what we truly want.
When we are unaware of our self-limiting beliefs it can leave us vulnerable to taking criticism harshly. If you believe, for example, that you are incompetent and then someone at work gives you the same message, it can be really detrimental and confidence-shattering. It can affect our relationships with co-workers and it can leave us stuck not knowing how to progress.
If we believe that we are who we are and we can’t change, it can stop us from exploring personal growth and taking the action required to live the lives we would truly find fulfilling.
Challenge Self-Limiting Beliefs To Reach Your Goals
So, what are you telling yourself that is keeping you in some way stuck? How is this affecting your career?
In my experience, the process for changing self-limiting beliefs is to identify them and observe how they show up in your life. This requires being vulnerable and challenging the very essence of our thought processes, and debunking what we held to be true.
If we are successful, then it can help boost confidence, enable acceptance of ourselves and help us to take the right action. This can get us closer to living the life we want with more authenticity and freedom.
To achieve the goals we set, we really do need to have the right beliefs to get us to take action and keep going even through adversity. If we hold a belief to be true that stands in opposition to us achieving the very thing we want, then we are unlikely to be able to achieve it.
Trapped By Self-Limiting Beliefs? Coaching Can Set You Free To Achieve
Identifying and rewriting self-limiting beliefs is a core part of coaching. During a coaching engagement, the coach and coachee work together to set goals and then work on whatever is needed to achieve those goals. Often this is through identifying and challenging limiting beliefs. Having a coach by your side through this process can be really helpful for bringing light to what is unconscious.
A coach can also help highlight themes and explore thoughts through alternative lenses such as imagination, creative processes and storytelling. This helps the coachee to have insights which can lead to a change in beliefs enabling goals to be reached.
If you are interested in learning more about the coaching process, please book a free 30-minute consultation with me.
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P.S. My Favourite Books on Self-Limiting Beliefs
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Here are some of my favourite books that can help you with this ongoing process.
