How Do Your Limiting Beliefs Impact Your Ability to Succeed

Brendan Lawler
Sep 17
8 min read

Your mindset plays a pivotal role in your success. Regardless of what goals you set for yourself, what you believe is possible is the difference between whether or not you do achieve those goals. If you’re like me and like most people, you believe in LIEs (Limited Idea Entertained). LIEs are ideas that you entertain about yourself that define you as something less than what you truly have the potential to achieve. You’re giving these ideas energy and allowing them to take residence in your mind, but they’re really nothing but BS (Belief System).

The LIEs and BS that you believe can either hold you prisoner, or set you free.

Mindset Definition:

Let’s first start with defining the term mindset. If you scroll through social media today, it feels like every other influencer says something along the lines of “it’s all about the mindset bro! You need to have a good mindset!”. But what does mindset mean?

In Jim Kwik’s book Limitless, he defines it as “mindset (noun) - The deeply held beliefs,

attitudes, and assumptions we create about who we are, how the world works, what we are capable of and deserve, and what is possible”.

Limited Mindset Meaning

A limited mindset is a belief that limits what you can accomplish in your life. It holds you back from achieving your greatest potential. Understanding the limited mindset meaning can be a powerful step towards personal growth. When you have a limiting mindset, you tend to believe that your abilities, intelligence, and talents are fixed and limited and cannot be significantly changed or improved. It acts as a barrier to realizing your true potential.

Limitless Mindset Meaning

A limitless mindset is an attitude of endless possibilities in different aspects of your life. A person with a limitless mindset can think outside of the box and seek growth.

If you want some real life examples of people who have a limitless mindset I would recommend Googling the following names:

Jim Kwik (author)
Roger Bannister (first person ever to run a mile in under 4 minutes)
David Goggins (became a Navy SEAL despite being 300lbs)
James “The Iron Cowboy” Lawrence (50 Ironmans in 50 days in all 50 US States, 100 Ironmans in 101 consecutive days
The Wright Brothers (invented the airplane)
Thomas Edison (does he really need an introduction?)

All of those people (and many more that I haven’t named) have accomplished truly remarkable feats. Successfully inventing things that scientists said shouldn’t be possible. Successfully accomplishing physical feats that medical professionals swore would not be possible/the person would die trying to accomplish (spoiler, they didn’t die). They were told the things they wanted to accomplish were “impossible”, but they believed in themselves. They believed that the impossible was possible, and because of that belief success was inevitable.

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 that sounds like you, you’re not lone but you’re also not doing yourself any favors.

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 but the intensity causes you to doubt yourself so much that you fail at the 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.

It Isn’t Only In Your Head

Before we talk about how to shift your mindset into a more positive mindset, let’s talk about how important positive thinking is. There is a clear connection between positive thinking and physical health. One study showed 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.”

Additionally, Mayo Clinic notes that “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.”

Those benefits include:
Increased life span
Lower rates of depression
Lower levels of distress
Greater resistance to common cold
Better psychological and physical well-being
Better cardiovascular health and reduce risk of death from cardiovascular disease
Better coping skills during hardships and times of stress

Reframing Limiting Beliefs

When it comes to limiting beliefs, people read their sense of restriction, react in a constrained way to that, and conduct their lives in a limited way. They react to their world around them and allow their beliefs to be molded by their environment/the people around them. Limitless beliefs work in the opposite way. You encounter external or internal attempts to put constraints on you, and you reject those limiting beliefs and create and environment that aligns with your most ambitious goals.

So, how do you minimize limiting beliefs and develop a limitless mindset?

Key 1: Name Your Limiting Beliefs

There are so many examples of these. They might have to do with your talents, your character, your relationships, your education, or anything else that leads to interval 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. 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 effective in 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. Try to also identify the origin of this sort of self-talk. Limiting beliefs often start in childhood. Not only family, but also early social settings can cause

limiting beliefs, as can early experiences with education.

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 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 belief is that, in so many cases, they’re just plain wrong. Ask yourself: What’s the evidence that supports this belief? How many times have you actually been in these situations and what have the results been?

Limiting beliefs rely heavily on emotion. When you come against a limiting belief, it’s usually warring against your rational self. When thinking back on past experiences, don’t think about how you felt but think about how the event went. Ask yourself: How much of my perceived poor performance was because my self-talk just wouldn't leave me alone?

This is the issue for so 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’re 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.

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 you’ve examined the reality of those beliefs, it’s time to make the most crucial step - generate a new belief that is both truer that the LIEs you’ve been accepting and beneficial to the limitless you that you are creating.

If you have a limiting belief that you “always mess up at the most critical times”, analyze that belief. Is it true that you “always” mess up? Or can you think of a handful of times that you came in clutch? Now that you think about it, you’ve come out of situations successful more often than you’ve failed!

So now for the new belief! Your new belief should be that no one is successful at the most crucial moments in life EVERY time, but 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 replaces the old belief, is fully supported by facts, and gives you a much healthier mindset the next time a critical situation comes along.

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 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 different from the true you - you’ll be considerably more successful at quieting it.

Have fun with it! Give your separate persona a goofy name and have 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

If You Change Your BS, You Change Your Life

The evidence is undeniable. What you choose to believe becomes your reality. If you live your life with a limited mindset, you are holding yourself back from reaching your full potential. If you live your life with a limitless mindset, you free yourself from the cage that you have placed yourself in. Not only that, but you’ll be physically and emotionally healthier, which will lead to longevity in life. When you reframe your mindset to no longer believe the LIEs and create a positive BS (yes I am enjoying these acronyms), you’ll be on the path to a better, healthier, limitless you.

If you have limiting beliefs regarding any physical feats such as weight loss, completing an obstacle course race, running an endurance race (5k-ultramarathon), or completing a triathlon; please reach out to me. I believe that anything is possible, as long as you are willing to put in the work. I’ll help you build the roadmap to success and I’ll do my best to hold you accountable, and together we shall RULE THE GALAXY!...Sorry my inner nerd came out. Let’s try that again - *clears throat* - together we can and will accomplish any goal.