When you believe you are not deserving of success or doubt yourself from the start, you make your chances of success considerably slimmer. Your best chance at success is to believe you can succeed, because only then will you be able to give it the effort that you need to truly achieve it.

Limiting beliefs are often caused by poor thinking habits. The following exercises are known to be good ways to change negative thinking into positive thinking.

• Write About Only Good Things – When you experience your day, write everything you experienced down in your journal – but only what you enjoyed about the experience. Force yourself to write at least a page if not more about all of the good things about the experience, even if it ended in a negative event. Do not qualify the good things with “buts” or “only” – these should all be unquestionably positive things.
   
• Write Out Affirmations with Both Hands – An interesting exercise for increasing your positive outlook is to write positive affirmations out twice – once with your dominant hand, once with your weak hand. This ensures both parts of your brain are activated by the affirmation, helping improve your positivity.
   
• Fake It – A final exercise is to simply pretend you don’t feel the way you do. Limiting beliefs are limiting because of the way that you respond to the scenario. But simply by pretending as though you are not limiting yourself, you can get used to how positivity looks and feels – and possibly even accomplish those things you set out for yourself.

It is very important to reduce the “Cannots” and “Will Nots” in your life. Only by reducing limiting beliefs do you no longer limit yourself and your abilities.

28 February 2011