Limiting Beliefs: How to Prevent Them From Ruining Your Dreams

One of the main reasons people fail to manifest their desires when working with the Law of Attraction, is because they are either unaware of, or unable to combat, the limiting beliefs that are lurking within the confines of our subconscious minds.  As an example, suppose my number one goal in life was to become President of a large corporation.  I’d read all the books and taken all the courses I could find on the Law of Attraction.  I did everything they suggested in order to make it happen.  I wrote down all my goals and worked every day at getting one step closer to realizing them; however, deep down in my soul and in my subconscious mind, I had the limiting belief that “I was not important”.  Not only did this belief exist, but, in actuality, it had been there for the majority of my life.  The cold, hard truth is, that as long as I had this belief about myself, I would never become President of any large corporation simply because I believed I wasn’t important enough to do so.  In all probability, the only chance I would have at achieving such a dream would be to first eliminate or, at least neutralize, this limiting belief.

Anytime we have difficulty manifesting a particular desire, more often than not, the root of the problem can be traced back to one or more limiting beliefs we have about ourselves that will continue to prevent our dreams from taking place.  These beliefs may have been instilled in us at a very young age and then reinforced over time through similar and repetitive events.  Hence, trying to eliminate them with a positive affirmation or visualization technique is simply bound for failure.  We have to either neutralize the belief or eliminate it altogether.  There are various ways of accomplishing this and in order to determine the most effective method, we need to take a closer look at the belief itself and how it originated.

As an example, let’s take a closer look at the sample we used above.  In order to eliminate our belief that “I am not important”, we have to go way back and examine our past to try to determine where this belief got started.  By doing so, we may discover that it all started at a very young age, when we would approach our parents, all excited about something we just had the show them, only to be repeatedly turned away with lines like, “not now, I’m on the phone” or “can’t you see I’m busy” or “sorry, but I have to feed your sister”.  It’s easy to understand how an impressionable young child could arrive at the conclusion that he was simply not important in his parent’s eyes or anyone else’s for that matter.  Without much ability to reason at such a young age, we simply accept our belief as fact and carry it with us in our subconscious minds throughout our lives.  That is, unless we, as intelligent adults, look back and re-examine each of these limiting beliefs, utilizing our more advanced reasoning abilities in order to eliminate them once and for all.

Getting back to our example, as adults, we may now be able to reason that our parents were simply far too busy with work or with caring for our brothers and sisters to be able to give us their full attention every time we “required” it.  Thus, it may be quite easy now to see that we actually formed this belief because we interpreted the situation incorrectly, thinking that we weren’t important when the truth of the matter was that our parents were simply too busy at the time.  Coming to such a conclusion can have a profound effect on our belief systems because we realize that what we believed to be the truth was in actuality not the truth at all, but merely an incorrect interpretation made by a young child with very limited reasoning ability.

Now, it’s important to acknowledge that not all limiting beliefs will be this easy to counteract and that this is simply one way of doing so, but I think you’ll be surprised at just how many of our limiting beliefs can be neutralized in this manner.  For the rest, we’ll have to examine alternative methods for accomplishing the same feat, but rest assured there are plenty of other, equally effective methods out there for doing just that.  We will examine some of these in a future post.

My Secrets to You,

Ron

Understanding the Subconscious Mind: A Crucial Step

Everyday, people from all over the world read or listen to what the Law of Attraction gurus have to say.  They then proceed to get all pumped up and excited about all the wonderful changes they’re about to make in their lives, and then, after a few days or weeks, perhaps even months, they ultimately resort back to their old ways of thinking and doing.  They don’t see any immediate changes in their lives, so they slowly start to lose focus and/or faith in what they’ve learned and fall right back into their old habits.    Does this sound familiar?  It’s not that what they’ve learned is wrong.  It’s just that it is not complete.  In order to be successful at making major changes in our lives, it is critical that we first understand how our minds work.

Think of the conscious mind as a laptop computer, with limited memory and processing power.  Through your laptop (conscious mind), you can install programs or issue commands to control most of your bodily functions based on data that you observe or experience at any given moment.

 The subconscious mind, on the other hand, is like a supercomputer or server, with all of your human instinctual behaviours pre-programmed at birth and everything you’ve ever experienced through any of your five senses stored away in it’s massive memory banks for safe-keeping.  On it, is but one program (or operating system), and for every piece of data (or experience) it processes, a corresponding set of commands (reactions) is issued to the body based upon all of its stored data.  It is this supercomputer that maintains control over all of your bodily functions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, over the course of your entire lifetime.  That is, unless, it receives an overriding command issued through your laptop computer (conscious mind).  Also, it is only through your supercomputer (subconscious) that you are able to access the Internet (or Universal Mind) through which all other supercomputers are connected and accessible to each other.

Scientific studies have demonstrated that once a fact is known by at least one person, it can then be accessed by the subconscious minds of others, thus supporting this Universal Mind theory.  Understanding how the human mind works and how to gain access to it, enables us to then acquire this knowledge from the subconscious minds of others by way of our sixth sense, intuition. 

For hundreds of years, everyone believed that it was impossible for a human being to run a four-minute mile, until, of course, Roger Bannister figured out a way to do so.  Within the next few years, 24 other runners were able to accomplish this same, previously unfathomable feat.  Could this be considered further evidence supporting a Universal Mind theory?

Anyway, back to our computer analogy; even though our conscious minds (laptops) do have some control over our bodies, it is still our subconscious (supercomputer) that maintains control whenever our conscious mind is overwhelmed with data (sensory experiences) or shuts down completely (sleeps).  So, what little control our conscious minds have, will always be handed back over to our subconscious when we become distracted (new input), overwhelmed (too much input) or go to sleep (power down).  Hence, in order to make lasting changes in your life, you must:

1. Never lose focus or become distracted (highly unlikely),
2. Never be overwhelmed (impossible), or
3. Find a way to modify your supercomputer’s operating system (ie. make changes to your subconscious mind)

This is what so few people appear to be able to do successfully.  In order to reprogram your subconscious mind, you have to find a way to override years and years of learned behaviours and somehow impress a powerful enough message that it will take precedence over all of these automated behaviours and responses.  In essence, you will have to find a way to program new lines of instruction or code into the subconscious’ operating system that will have the ability to override potentially thousands of lines of existing code in order to achieve your desired outcome (response).  Can it be done?  Absolutely, but the process is definitely more complex than simply reading a few books or repeating a set of positive affirmations.

There are actually several ways of getting through to our subconscious, and now that we have a basic understanding of how our mind(s) work, we can proceed to exploring the various methods available for incorporating meaningful and lasting changes for the better.  This is the key to designing a better life.  We must find a way to modify our deepest beliefs about ourselves.  More on this subject will be made available in a future post.

My Secrets to You,

Ron

The Law of Attraction Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

Ask a self-proclaimed expert how to apply positive thinking or the Law of Attraction in order to improve your life and he will probably suggest any number of available tools like positive affirmations, subliminal messaging, vision boards, mind movies, self-hypnosis CDs, and so on and so forth.  What he may not tell you, however, is that using these tools may actually do more harm than good!  It’s not that he’s purposely trying to harm or even mislead you.  He may just simply not be aware of the possible dangers in using such tools without sufficient background knowledge.

In a study conducted by Canadian psychologists, Joanne Wood and John Lee of the University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic of the University of New Brunswick, it was found that positive self-statements or affirmations actually make people who are already down on themselves feel worse rather than better.  The reason for this is that a person already low on self-esteem is more likely to view a positive affirmation as a contradictory thought.  So, instead of making them feel better about themselves, the affirmation must do battle with a lifetime full of contradictory experiences, ultimately losing out and giving way to the exact opposite effect of what was intended.  Anyone understanding the true power of the Law of Attraction should immediately recognize the negative scope of such a finding. 

The Law of Attraction is constantly at work in everyone’s day-to-day life, bringing about events and experiences that are in line with each person’s thoughts and own self-image.  Attempting to change a subconsciously rooted image, constructed through years of personal experience, with one positive, yet contradictory affirmation, is sheer lunacy.  Instead, it simply intensifies feelings of low self-worth, causing a person to focus even more on negative thoughts, leading to more and more negative experiences. So, what then can a person with low self-esteem do to escape this downward spiral?

Fortunately, there are ways to get around this problem, but it becomes much more complicated when the positive image or affirmation you’re trying to adopt conflicts with your subconscious blueprint.  Simply repeating the image or affirmation a number of times in this case will not allow you to achieve your intended result.  Instead you have to get to the root of the problem by closely examining the origins of your limiting belief and then eliminating, or at least neutralizing that belief until it no longer conflicts with the message you are attempting to convey to your subconscious mind.  How we do that, I will have to cover in a future post.

My Secrets to You,

Ron