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Top 55 Limiting Beliefs Quotes

Limiting Beliefs Quotes

This post contains some of the best limiting beliefs quotes.

Limiting Beliefs Quotes

1. “Confidence is the basis of imagination—which is required for seeing and choosing a future beyond your current capability and circumstances. Confidence reflects your personal belief in what you can do, learn, and accomplish.” – Benjamin Hardy

2. “You believe your viewpoint is objective rather than just a single and limited perspective of an event or experience. This type of thinking creates what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset,” which is the belief that you cannot change, grow, or develop in specific areas. It is the belief that your skills, personality, and character are “fixed” traits that are innate and unchangeable.” – Benjamin Hardy

3. “Likewise, you as a person can only be understood in context. If you had grown up at a different time and in a different place, you’d be a different person. You’d have different memories, connections, and beliefs.” – Benjamin Hardy

Related: Negative Core Beliefs List (& 8 Tips On How To Challenge Them)

4. “Anyone can discover a more fulfilling path. This has nothing to do with age or responsibility, and has everything to do with identifying and unlearning the beliefs that don’t help or empower you to be your authentic self.” – Jonathan Heston

5. “The idea that something is holding you back is, in itself, a limiting belief in your abilities and greatness.” – Jonathan Heston

6. “Identifying and changing these perceptions and beliefs is the fast track to freedom, because it transforms you.” – Jonathan Heston

7. “This is an inside look into the dark ways that limiting beliefs are formed: from the confusing stories our minds tell us, to traumatizing events from our childhood, to our preprogrammed responses to emotions.” – Jonathan Heston

8. “While limiting beliefs themselves are fairly simple, understanding the entire picture of where they come from and why we have them is not. That is why we get stuck. We don’t understand the context of our thoughts, so we are led to a deepening abyss of confusion and self-doubt.” – Jonathan Heston

9. “Limiting beliefs then, are partially the stories our mind feeds us which limit who we are and where we want to go. They disempower, instead of empower us.” – Jonathan Heston

Related: How To Do Thought Work In 3 Simple Steps

10. “If negative emotions keep “popping up” at random times, what type of stories will our minds create? Limiting ones. Each time they show up, our minds will attempt to explain them. Hence, we create a whole new set of limiting beliefs.” – Jonathan Heston

11. “Limiting beliefs can surface in every area of your life. Some of them give many clues about the root cause, and some of them are so hidden that you will likely not be able to find them without a close friend, mentor, or coach helping you uncover them.” – Jonathan Heston

12. “You might even have a layered set of a few different beliefs limiting you in an area. This “layering” happens over time, when you continually try to break free of a limiting belief, yet fail, causing you to build “reasons” and beliefs for being stuck.” – Jonathan Heston

13. “When you identify areas where you continually have a struggle, you have found areas where you are likely dealing with a strong limiting belief or set of limiting beliefs.” – Jonathan Heston

14. “Anyone driven by a deep mission will always face areas of discomfort and stretching. However, a limiting belief will cause what should be a simple stretching of one’s comfort zone to be paralyzing uncomfortable.” – Jonathan Heston

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15. “You likely have subtle limiting beliefs keeping you stuck in the cult of comfort. At one point you worked past your discomfort to get where you are, but the longer you settled, the more you became detached from your life mission, and the more you got lulled by your current success or comfort.” – Jonathan Heston

16. “Courage is your natural setting. You do not need to become courageous, but rather peel back the layers of self-protective, limiting beliefs that keep you small.” ― Vironika Tugaleva

17. “What you believe your future holds for you impacts your attitude, decisions and success.” ― Maddy Malhotra

18. “You don’t know who you are; you just know what they’ve told you about who you are!” ― Maddy Malhotra

19. “It is actually much easier, once you understand limiting beliefs, to live fully alive than only half alive.” – Jonathan Heston

20. “The great news is that existing beliefs can be deconstructed, and new beliefs fashioned. By hacking limiting beliefs, thoughts can be leveraged for our massive advantage, exponentially increasing freedom and powerful beliefs.” – Jonathan Heston

21. “Remember, your beliefs do not determine your worth.” – Jonathan Heston

Related: How To Be Gentle With Yourself? Top 5 Ways To Practice Self-Compassion

Negative Thoughts Worksheets (2)

22. “After identifying a negative belief you’d like to change, you need to examine it for other related beliefs that keep it in place because those will also have to be addressed. Mistaken beliefs tend to generate others.” – Gina Lake

23. “All of us know that a belief is confidence or trust in something. But most of us do not realize that beliefs are not necessarily based on a rational ground.” – Jack Thomas

24. “Belief is the energy behind the placebo effect. However, this psychological power isn’t seen just in remarkable placebo studies and infrequent cases of spontaneous recovery. Your beliefs operate for or against you daily in each area of your life.” – Jack Thomas

Related: Top 10 Practical CBT Exercises For Generalized Anxiety Disorder Relief

25. “Beliefs are what you believe to be true. A belief system is a set of or a group of beliefs that create a system and influence how you think, feel, and behave. What if you think, feel, and behave in a certain way? Obviously, you will achieve a certain result. But what if the result is not what you want? Then you have to change your belief.” – Jack Thomas

26. “Beliefs should be respected and honored, but they must also be inspected carefully. A belief is just a generalization. If you take the risk that you may be thinking things which are really holding you back, then you have taken the first step toward altering your behavior, your entire body, and your own life.” – Jack Thomas

27. “Beliefs that have strong feelings tied to them don’t stay in the realm of thought but spill out into reality through action. Beliefs fueled by feelings often cause people to harm themselves and others. Because negative feelings are uncomfortable, people often try to get rid of them by acting them out.” – Gina Lake

28. “But changing belief at the conscious level is not enough, you have to change your belief in the subconscious mind! Change your subconscious belief, change your life!” – Jack Thomas

29. “Changing or altering your belief about an area or thing you want to change or improve in your life is essential for moving forward because if you try and fight the current belief while also trying to move forward it will be like riding a bike with the brakes on.” – Jack Thomas

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30. “Feelings also make reprogramming negative beliefs a challenge. When a belief has strong feelings attached to it, that belief feels very true. Feelings make beliefs especially believable. Feelings feel much more real than thoughts. Feelings cause physical reactions in the body and motivate actions. They are, in fact, the fuel that translates thought into action.” – Gina Lake

31. “Getting free of our conditioning is a two-fold task: We can free ourselves from our negative beliefs by reprogramming our mind with positive beliefs. We can also get free by seeing that all of our beliefs are just conditioning and that that conditioning doesn’t have to be what determines our actions and reactions.” – Gina Lake

Related: 30 Day Social Anxiety Challenge That Will Help You Feel More Confident

32. “Giving up certain beliefs feels frightening because you don’t know who you’ll be without them. Even if they haven’t served you well, at least you know who you have been. Not knowing what life will be like without certain beliefs or how you will behave is frightening, so frightening that we often cling to negative beliefs because even they feel better than the unknown.” – Gina Lake

33. “If you observe an inner resistance every time you consider pursuing an idea, learning a skill, or doing anything you truly wish to do, that’s because of the fears and limiting beliefs you have created over the years.” – Jack Thomas

34. “Many beliefs cause problems for us and cause us to feel contracted, but the most detrimental (and untrue) ones come charged with negative feelings.” – Gina Lake

35. “Most of our core beliefs are developed during our childhood and are not supported by logical proofs. They stay in our subconscious and guide our perception and behavior without us knowing it. Our childhood irrational beliefs control most of our behavior even today. Sounds funny?” – Jack Thomas

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36. “Once you’ve uncovered each belief, it’s helpful to find a statement that will counteract or neutralize it. The best statement isn’t always the opposite of the belief or the negation of it. Sometimes, the opposite belief (e.g. “I’m lovable” instead of “I’m not lovable”) is too big a leap for the unconscious mind and therefore unbelievable.” – Gina Lake

37. “Our belief system acts as a filter through which we process our experience and perceive the outer world. It is through this filter that we act upon our surroundings in return. In simple words, it is due to our beliefs that the things, situations, experiences make sense to us, and it is our beliefs that govern the way we behave.” – Jack Thomas

38. “Our belief system is a cohesive set of mutually dependent beliefs. One belief supports the viability of the other, and it proceeds as a chain of beliefs and resulting thoughts and ideas. You can also visualize the belief system as a hierarchical set of beliefs where basic beliefs act as the roots and the dependent thoughts as the child nodes.” – Jack Thomas

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39. “Our beliefs have a powerful impact on our experience of life. They filter our perceptions. For example, if you believe that love is everywhere, which it is, then you’ll experience that. If, on the other hand, you believe that evil is everywhere, that is what you’ll see, no matter how much love is in front of your eyes.” – Gina Lake

40. “Some beliefs are a lot more powerful than others. With the potential exception of religious beliefs, individuality beliefs are the most powerful of all. It’s possible to spot a belief in your individuality by what you say after “I’m.” “I’m an overeater” is an identity notion.” – Jack Thomas

41. “Some beliefs that drive our behavior negatively are unconscious. This is especially true of addictions and compulsions.” – Gina Lake

42. “Subconscious beliefs are always more powerful than conscious beliefs, in part because they operate under the surface, and we usually don’t know they are there—but they still direct our actions. In fact, if you have two opposing beliefs, one conscious and the other subconscious, the subconscious belief will always dominate.” – Jack Thomas

43. “Think about beliefs as psychological applications installed in your mind that take in raw information through your perceptions and apply significance to it. If you see that, “My weight has not changed this week,” you might think, “This implies that this diet does not work and I will never get rid of the weight.”” – Jack Thomas

Related: Impulsive vs Intrusive Thoughts (& How to Manage Them)

44. “Those beliefs have been there for a very long time, so we can’t expect them to disappear the instant we first see them, but seeing them repeatedly in this way, with compassion and acceptance, eventually allows them to release their hold on us.” – Gina Lake

45. “To discover the beliefs behind a negative feeling, we have to be willing to be with that feeling without repressing it or expressing it. This takes awareness, will, and commitment to uncovering the truth and freeing ourselves from those beliefs.” – Gina Lake

46. “We are programmed to be fearful and self-centered, and we are programmed with and acquire all sorts of false beliefs that often cause us to react detrimentally and irrationally. These reactions eventually expose our false beliefs because the reactions cause problems, and we learn from the suffering caused by them.” – Gina Lake

Related: How To Stop Self-Critical Thoughts Using These Top 10 Techniques

47. “We are what we believe ourselves to be (so true is this statement).” – Jack Thomas

48. “We evolve because the suffering caused by our mistaken and negative beliefs causes us to question them. We eventually discover that life goes more smoothly when we hold more positive and true beliefs and when we live from love and unity instead of fear and separation.” – Gina Lake

49. “When we are identified with the ego, it seems like our beliefs protect us and keep us safe. We believe we need them to function, so dismissing certain beliefs can feel dangerous. We are afraid that if we stop believing something, our life won’t work, we won’t be a good person, others will shun us, or any number of other bad things will happen.” – Gina Lake

50. “When we replace a negative belief with a positive one, it erases the negative belief, and the positive one becomes the basis for our automatic responses to life instead of the negative one.” – Gina Lake

51. “Without your beliefs, you wouldn’t be who you think you are. So letting go of even false and detrimental beliefs causes the ego a great deal of discomfort, and it won’t welcome this process. Tossing out your beliefs one by one is like tearing the ego apart piece by piece, and it isn’t going to go without a fight. And yet all the ego has to fight with is more beliefs—and feelings, particularly fear.” – Gina Lake

Related: Best 10 Intrusive Thoughts Books

52. “Years of negative self-talk create an inner critic inside you, a pesky, strong voice that always spews venom inside your mind. This voice gives rise to your fears, toxic beliefs, and limiting ideas that keep you from moving forward in life.” – Jack Thomas

53. “You have beliefs about your surroundings, your behaviors, your abilities, as well as your own identity. As soon as you develop a belief, you are going to act like it is true, and you’re going to withstand often or filter out anything that disagrees with it.” – Jack Thomas

54. “Your assumptions, which are positioned midway between your automatic thoughts and your core beliefs, act as a kind of translator between the two. They aren ’ t as fundamental as core beliefs, yet they aren ’ t as superficial as automatic thoughts.” – John B. Arden

55. “Core beliefs are broad generalizations about yourself and how the world works. When these beliefs are associated with anxiety, they paint you into a corner psychologically, so that whatever you do, you ’ re faced with an insurmountable challenge — one that will always fail.” – John B. Arden

Related: Best 10 Books For Overthinking And Anxiety

How to Identify and Challenge Limiting Beliefs?

Identifying limiting beliefs is an important step in personal growth and overcoming obstacles. Here are some strategies that can help you identify your own limiting beliefs:

1. Self-reflection: Take some time to reflect on your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in different areas of your life. Look for recurring patterns or negative self-talk that may indicate underlying limiting beliefs. Consider situations where you feel stuck or hold yourself back, and try to uncover the underlying beliefs that contribute to those feelings.

2. Thought monitoring: Pay attention to your thoughts throughout the day. Notice any thoughts that are self-critical, fear-based, or that reinforce negative narratives about yourself or your abilities. These thoughts often stem from limiting beliefs.

3. Journaling: Write down your thoughts, fears, and doubts in a journal. This can help you gain clarity and identify patterns of limiting beliefs. Document situations where you may have felt restricted, held back, or lacked confidence. Look for common themes or underlying beliefs behind those experiences.

Related: +20 Overgeneralization Examples & How to Avoid It

4. Seeking feedback: Trusted friends, family members, or a therapist can provide valuable insight into your limiting beliefs. They may notice patterns or beliefs that you are not aware of. Be open to receiving feedback and perspectives that can help you identify and challenge your limiting beliefs.

5. Core beliefs exploration: Core beliefs are deeply ingrained beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world. Reflect on what you truly believe about yourself and your capabilities. Are these beliefs empowering or limiting? For example, if you believe “I’m not smart enough” or “I don’t deserve success,” these could be limiting beliefs that impact your potential.

6. Questioning assumptions: Start questioning the assumptions you make about yourself and the world around you. Ask yourself why you believe certain things and examine the evidence supporting or contradicting those beliefs. This can help you identify if certain beliefs are based on facts or simply assumptions.

Use the following prompts to challenge your limiting beliefs:

1. What evidence supports this belief? What evidence contradicts it?
2. Where did this belief come from? Is it based on personal experiences, external influences, or assumptions?
3. How does this belief limit me in my personal or professional life?
4. What alternative interpretations or beliefs could I consider that would be more empowering?
5. How would my life change if I let go of this belief?
6. What would I tell a friend or loved one who held this belief? Can I apply that same advice to myself?
7. Have I ever achieved or accomplished something that goes against this belief? What can I learn from that experience?
8. What are the potential drawbacks of holding onto this belief? How does it hold me back or affect my well-being?
9. Can I find examples of people who have overcome similar challenges or circumstances? How did they do it?
10. What steps or actions can I take to challenge and change this belief? What small changes can I make to shift my perspective?

Related: What Causes Cognitive Distortions? (+Top 10 Common Cognitive Distortions & How To Challenge Them)

Conclusion

Identifying limiting beliefs is an ongoing process that requires self-awareness and introspection.

Once you become aware of your limiting beliefs, you can begin working on challenging and replacing them with more empowering and supportive beliefs.

References

  • Portions of this article were adapted from the book The Unlimited Self, © 2015 by Jonathan Heston. All rights reserved.

By Hadiah

Hadiah is a counselor who is passionate about supporting individuals on their journey towards mental well-being. Hadiah not only writes insightful articles on various mental health topics but also creates engaging and practical mental health worksheets.

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