How to Release Fear-Based Limiting Beliefs
Do you have dreams, goals, and ideas that roam through your mind and spark excitement in your soul? Do you find yourself constantly talking yourself out of pursuing these dreams and ideas? If you answered yes to these questions, keep reading. In this article, we call out the driving force behind all that dream-squashing naysayer self-talk and teach you how to break free from it.
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the economy, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”
Here’s what you’ll learn from this post:
The single driving force behind all limiting beliefs.
How the mind is wired to take your fears seriously (and what to do about it).
Two techniques to release even the most stubborn and scary of limiting beliefs.
A real-life example of releasing limiting beliefs and changing careers.
Let’s get to it!
CRACK OPEN YOUR LIMITING BELIEFS
(If you haven’t already done so, take a moment to read through this article and complete the exercise outlined under the ‘Dig ‘Em Up’ section before reading any further. Once you’re done, come back and dig in below.)
Take a moment to review the defining beliefs you wrote down last week.
Give yourself a pat on the back for each of your “cheerleader beliefs.”
Now, let’s take a closer look at those limiting naysayer beliefs.
The emotional theme behind nearly every limiting belief can be boiled down to the F word.
FEAR.
That’s right.
Let’s call a spade a spade.
Limiting beliefs are just fear in fancy, personality specific clothes.
Quick clarification: We’re not talking about the body’s instinctual, survival-based fear mechanisms. Those are purposeful and distinct from the mind-derived fears of the ego that underpin most limiting beliefs.
Are your limiting beliefs convincing you to play small? Play safe? Minimize risk? Avoid potential criticism or failure?
If so, you’re up against fear… and you’re in excellent company.
It’s fear that stands between who we are and who we’re destined to be. An invisible barrier that prevents us from fully aligning with our soul-driven purpose.
In the wise, soul-awakening words of Marie Forleo:
“Fear is one of the most misunderstood F-words. Left unexamined, it’s a dream killer. A soul squelcher. The grand maester of mediocrity.”
Fear is an essential part of being a growing, evolving, ever-expanding human.
If you’re not at least a little bit afraid, that should tell you something.
Even the most successful and experienced people on this earth experience fear.
As long as you’re pushing the edge of your comfort zone, you will encounter fear.
And if you’re not already doing so, you need to be pushing the edge of your comfort zone. In doing so, you’ll feel alive, lit up, and inspired. The world needs that goodness. And you deserve it.
FEAR IS A COMPASS
“The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.” — Steven Pressfield
The most admired, revered, and awe-inspiring people to have ever walked this earth have something major in common: They’ve reworked their entire relationship with fear.
When these people encounter fear, they don’t retreat back into the safety of their comfort zone.
They eagerly grab fear’s hand and use it as a guiding light; a compass on their purpose-driven journey.
Instead of running from fear, they’ve learned to dance with it.
As it turns out, fear is a trustworthy indication that we’re moving in the direction of our destiny.
“Nine times out of ten, our fear is directive. It’s a signpost, pointing us in the exact direction our soul wants to go.” — Marie Forleo
Fear isn’t saying: “STOP! Beware. Do not pass!”
It’s saying: “Yay! You’re here! We’ve been waiting for you. Are you ready to step beyond your (imagined) limits and expand forward?”
In this sense, the craziest thing we can do is take our fears and limiting beliefs seriously.
THE FEAR CLAUSE
We’ll bet we can guess the first two words in nearly all of your fear-based thoughts…
“What if…”
More specifically, “What if [insert mind-derived catastrophe]?”
Renowned worry-busting psychologist, David A. Carbonell, refers to this two-clause phrase—what if + catastrophe—as “the worry sentence” or the Mad Lib of fear.
In his book, The Worry Trick*, Carbonell reveals that the seemingly innocent ‘What if’ portion of the worry sentence gets translated by the mind into this phrase:
“Let’s pretend…”
And so if your fears lead you to wonder, “What if I fail,” your mind takes it one step further and says, “Let’s pretend you’re failing right now.”
The subconscious mind is brilliant but gullible. It isn’t able to differentiate between actually experiencing a feared scenario and merely thinking about one.
And so when your limiting beliefs begin to play fear-based Mad Libs, your subconscious mind believes those catastrophes are actually happening.
This experience is made worse by the fact that worries tend to crop up while we’re multitasking. When the mind is multitasking, it tends to gloss over the “let’s pretend” clause, zero in on the catastrophe clause, and absorb its message as truth.
This is why so many of us experience physical sensations at the mere thought of a feared topic.
To top it all off, when we’re in a fearful state, we underestimate our own resilience.
And so we blanket catastrophize every “let’s pretend” fear that enters the mind.
Quick recap because this is important:
When you imagine a fear playing out in your mind, you unintentionally strengthen it because:
To the subconscious mind, imagining and experiencing are the same.
The body reacts to the subconscious mind with actual physical sensations of fear (e.g., pit in stomach, sweating).
You neglect or downplay your resilience.
Although fascinating on paper, if you’ve experienced this triple-threat phenomenon first hand, you know how convincing a single fear-based thought can be once it’s run amuck in your mind.
This is why limiting beliefs are so powerful.
The more we think about our fears (or our limiting beliefs), the bigger they become because the subconscious mind treats every “let’s pretend” fear as if it’s really happening.
It’s no wonder we’re afraid of stepping outside our comfort zone. We’ve done so over and over again in the mind’s eye and failed miserably each time.
Pause.
Breathe. ✨
Now that we understand how limiting beliefs operate in the mind, let’s take a look at what we can do to release them.
YOU CAN’T OUT-THINK FEAR
Try as you might, you can’t think your way out of fear or limiting beliefs.
No amount of thinking quiets fear, because it doesn’t want you to think. It wants you to act.
We love this insight from Marie Forleo:
“What if fear’s message wasn’t ‘Danger’ but ‘DO IT!’ Fear was jumping up and down, waving her hands and causing the biggest ruckus she could: YES! YES! YES! This is important!! Go ahead—do THIS thing! Fear did her job and sent her signal. It was our interpretation that was off.”
We’ve been trained to run away from fear. But the trick is to take action despite it and to stay present for any naysayer belief baggage that bubbles up as we do.
In doing so, we bring the light of consciousness to the darkness that once protected the fears of the mind.
And guess what? As Marie notes, once we can actually see our fears, we realize they’re nothing more than paper tigers.
“Avoidance doesn’t extinguish your fear, action does.” — Marie Forleo
CONFRONT YOUR FEARS
But what if your limiting beliefs have taken on a fear story so big, so convincing that you can’t even fathom taking action?
First of all, no shame in this game. We get it. Girl, do we get it. Remember, when it comes to our passions, creativity, and the work we love, fear is directive.
“So if you’re paralyzed with fear, it’s a good sign. It shows you what you have to do.” — Steven Pressfield
Second of all, we’ve got you covered.
If your fears have grown so big that you can’t imagine taking action, use one or both of these thought-challenging techniques:
Fear Taming—à la Marie Forleo.
In Everything Is Figureoutable*, Marie notes that our fears are debilitating because they’re vague. She goes on to note that because we don’t slow down enough to thoroughly question our fears or assess their probability, we have no clue how likely they are to come true.
Here’s what she suggests you do:
Write down the worst, worst, worst-case scenario that could possibly happen if you move ahead with your exciting-but-fear-inducing idea.
Next, rate it on a scale from one to ten in terms of the likelihood that this worst-case scenario will occur, with one being improbable and ten being it’s practically guaranteed to happen.
Finally, imagine the worst-case scenario does indeed come true. Then what? Write down an action plan for how you’d recover, rebuild, and get back on your feet.
Flip it and reverse it. Now, imagine all the potential benefits and best-case scenarios you might gain from moving forward toward your exciting-but-fear-inducing idea. Write those down too.
The Worry Experiment—à la David Carbonell, PhD.
In The Worry Trick*, Dr. Carbonell suggests confronting chronic fears with a simple, exposure-based, three-step process. (We’ve lightly adapted it to be applicable to limiting beliefs.)
Create a sentence, maximum of twenty-five words, that expresses the strongest version you can create of one of your typical worries about your exciting-but-fear-inducing idea. You already know the first two words—“what if”. From there, insert your catastrophe. Be specific. The idea is to create a strong fear expression—read: it should trigger fearful feelings in your body when you say it.
Example: If your fear centers around giving a presentation on a topic you’re passionate about at an important conference...
WEAK: What if I get nervous?
BETTER: What if I get nervous and start sweating and forget my speech?
GOOD: What if I get nervous, start sweating, forget my speech, pee my pants, and everyone laughs at me and avoids me for the rest of my life?
Write the numbers one to twenty-five on a sheet of paper.
Sit, or stand, in front of a mirror so you can see yourself. Say the fear sentence out loud, slowly, twenty-five times. Don’t argue with it or try to solve it, just say it and let the fear hang out there naked.
After each repetition, cross off the next number on the sheet of paper, so you can keep count. (Don’t count in your head—it requires too much concentration, and it’s important to give the fear sentence your full, undivided attention.)
Once you’re done, take a moment to review the experience. How did the emotional impact of the last repetition compare to the emotional impact of the first repetition? Which was more bothersome? Chances are, the fear thought lost power with repetition.
MAKE IT REAL
Below you’ll find our personal example/s with this topic.
Ashley’s Example
“When I was trying to make the decision whether or not to leave my job as a psychologist (more on my background here), the fearful thought that kept running through my mind was:
‘But no one leaves this job. This was supposed to be my dream. It pays well. People will think I’m crazy to give it up. I have over 200k in student loans. How am I going to make money?’
While I was terrified, I couldn’t get the idea of leaving out of my head.
My intuition (and my fears, for that matter) had been calling me towards an alternative, creative path for years. I had dreams of working for myself and maybe even writing a cookbook one day.
And yet every time I thought about it, my mind would hit play on that fear-based broken record.
I remember listening to a podcast while driving to work one chilly January morning in 2014. It was an interview with a creative who had successfully taken a brave leap like the one I’d been contemplating.
In the interview, she mentioned how for years prior to taking that leap, her fear of failing combined with the security of a job that left her unfulfilled had built a prison around her. And how one day, she realized that the prison she was living in, no matter how safe and secure, was far worse than failing miserably. And so she quit her job to pursue her dream.
You ever have one of those moments when something just hits you? The right wisdom at the right time? This was one of those.
It was this moment that initiated a paradigm shift in the way I interpreted fear. Instead of perceiving my fears as a stop sign, I began to see them as breadcrumbs leading me down a trail. And I started following them.
Rather than sitting around wondering “what if?”, I began to take real action.
Instead of teetering nervously on the edge with one foot in and one foot out as I had been for years, I committed to my blog, Blissful Basil, with all my free time and all my heart.
I also began taking brave action towards making it profitable.
Instead of sitting around hoping and dreaming, I committed to being consistent.
Even if I ‘failed’ miserably from a conventional standpoint, I knew I’d learn something big and important.
And if Blissful Basil grew into something more than the passion hobby it had been for the first four years of its existence, then I’d take it as a sign to leap.
I stopped waiting for a miracle, and took action to make one happen myself.
Here’s what proceeded to unfold outwardly once I made this pivotal inward shift to release limiting beliefs and commit to the path my fears had been guiding me towards:
(I started my blog in 2010 but switched platforms, so I don’t have data from the first three years, but fyi, my monthly pageviews were in the hundreds during that time.)
It’s a little difficult to see, but from what I now call “the turning point” onward, my monthly blog traffic went from 12,399 pageviews to 23,719 pageviews and increased month after month (except for December—wellness-oriented food blogs aren’t exactly popular around the holidays 😆).
By the end of 2014, my blog was averaging 150,000 monthly pageviews and by mid-2015, it hit 230,000 monthly pageviews.
In terms of yearly pageviews, this equated to a 10-fold increase in 2014 and a 20-fold increase in 2015—from yearly pageviews in the tens of thousands pre-turning point to yearly pageviews in the millions post-turning point.
In September 2014, just nine months after that turning point, a literary agent from the #1 agency in the country reached out and offered me representation in the event that I’d like to write a cookbook.
If you’re familiar with book publishing, you know that an author usually pitches an agent, not the other way around. (I don’t share this to toot my own horn but to inspire you to consider what a difference a fear-facing paradigm shift can make in your life.)
I moved forward with the agent, wrote my cookbook proposal that fall, signed my first book deal in early 2015, and put in my notice in early 2016.
The rest, as they say, is history. But then again, not really, because there have been plenty more fears, hurdles, and hiccups to face since then. More on that another time. 🙂”
INTENTION
Fear is my guiding light. I bravely walk in the direction of my fears and release my limiting beliefs by committing to consistent action.
RESOURCES
Book: Everything is Figureoutable* by Marie Forleo
Book: The Worry Trick* by Dr. David Carbonell, PhD.
Video: Steven Pressfield: Overcoming Resistance + Why Talent Doesn’t Matter Marie TV Episode
Article: Five-Step Process for Releasing Limiting Beliefs by iNLP Center
*This is an affiliate link. Purchasing through affiliate links helps fund us at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support!
