739: How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs (There’s a Practice You Can Start Today)

Imagine if one day you woke up without any fear that you wouldn't succeed. Not only that, but you realize that you can be, do or have almost anything you want. Further, you always have enough and you'll continue to have enough to support the kind of life you'll be enjoying. This, my friends, this is what life without scarcity, thinking, lack thoughts or limiting beliefs actually looks like. And is it attainable? Well, how bad do you want it? Even dropping just a few limiting beliefs can have an enormous impact. So we're going to use some flow dreaming today to get this started, as well as to explore other ways that you can surface and get rid of limiting beliefs. Flow dreaming Still Kind of Woo Woo is just what it sounds like. An escape into the world of woo. Also a ride into you and how to feel happier, wiser and more self aware in every way. It's your ultimate journey into personal growth and inner power. We'll explore ideas like how your energy self influences the kinds of opportunities you encounter, or how your personal growth can drive your business growth, or even how that feeling of being stuck is really always coming from something else. We just have to figure out what. That's right, we're a dash of woo woo. A sprinkle of self care, a heap of problem solving and pattern busting, and a giant cup of encouragement. We're going to relight so much passion, purpose, self love and confidence in you that you practically stagger. I'm Summer McStravik, your host and welcome to Flow Dreaming Still Kind of Woo Woo. Welcome back as we take a quick dive into your limiting beliefs and how to find them and once you find them, how to start getting rid of them. So I was inspired to dive into today's topic because limiting belief seems to be a perennial, constant source of just rumination and discussion. Everybody talks about the way your own mind, the way your own thoughts hold you back, right? That's the whole mindset craze that we've been, you know, immersed in these last, I don't know, this last decade or so now, many, many years ago, I began speaking about limiting beliefs, but I would call them something a little different. I called them lack thoughts or scarcity thinking. But they always boil down to this. I can't have, I can't do, or I can't be. And really it just comes down to tracing where those thoughts come from and reevaluating if they're actually accurate or not. Once you do this, you can then transform them and become all the things that you before couldn't do. Be or have. So I'm making it sound very, very simple because honestly, at heart it is. So we're going to go into a few techniques today on how you can start to surface some of these. Maybe not all of them, but really just the ones that are getting in the right, the biggest weed in the garden. Now, before we do, I do have a couple of things to tell you about. I've recently opened up a new group. It's called the Flow Dreaming Starlight Society. Starlight Society, right. Because it does. It evokes flow and the universe and something kind of beautiful. A place where we gather together. Now, it's 100% free. And if you are wanting an invitation, you just need to be sure that you're on my email list, which just means going to my website. And I'll start by giving you a couple free Flow Dreams to work with, which are audio meditations, energy activations, and then you'll get an invitation right there in your inbox to come join us. It's a fabulous and free place. In addition, some of you would like to hear a little more from me than just the podcast. You'd like to know what do you do in your actual classes when you're teaching? Because here in the podcast I give you ideas, I throw stuff out at you. But when I'm actually teaching you in a workshop or one of my intimate classes with students, we go much deeper. All the concepts and ideas that I kind of toss at you here, we take into action, we do something about, and we do it in class and we actually do this inner work of change and expansion and growth and then we watch it pay off again and again and again. It's like a one armed bandit at a casino. So if you're interested in anything deeper with me, just reach out, ask me what I got and pay attention to some of the emails that I'll be sending to you. There are the Rising Light Leaders where we get together once a month and we do a deep, hefty and gorgeous workshop together. There's the Celestial Circle where we get together three times a month and I really keep you focused and on track and I get to know you intimately. And then of course, there's the Diamond Council. And that is for those of you who are looking ahead at next year and saying this has got to be different. It's time to fix this, bust through this, or just become this, reach this, attain this. And I want to tell you that you can, it is very, very possible, imminently possible. It really just starts with you Taking that, I don't know, risk inside yourself. Speaking of risk inside yourself, that is a perfect segue for us to start talking about what's a limiting belief? All right, I assume you all know, so I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on the definition, but generally it's a way of thinking or believing about yourself or your life or other people or perhaps even the universe itself that somehow limits your ability to grow, expand, or become. This means limits the amount of money or income you can have. It limits the number of friends or people that love you and care about you that you have in your life. It limits the health and the longevity of your body. It limits you being able to get to what you want in your life and do the things you want to do, whether it's opening up your own new business or healing practice or switching jobs or moving across the country or. Well, you know, the list is pretty long and very intimate to each one of us. Limiting beliefs are frankly the first thing that get in the way of all of that. And we always say, no, no, no, no. It's stuff outside me that's, that's in the way. It's lack of money or it's lack of support. Support, or I'm too old. And here we go, right? The list starts to pile up. But I want us to look at this a little differently right now. Now, first of all, many of you have used journaling in the past as a way to surface limiting beliefs. And that truly is one of the best ways to initiate it. Because often otherwise we're waiting on having a negative feeling or a feeling of I can't, or just feeling down or sucky or despondent. That's the way we usually clue in that there's a limiting belief in here. But if you're not going to wait for something like that to happen, then you take the bull by the horns and you begin journaling for this kind of self inquiry. So you might start with a prompt like, what do I believe about myself in this area of my life and how do these beliefs shape what I do? Pretty basic question. Maybe it's relationships, career, Maybe it's your health. Maybe it's something to do with the kind of people that you always attract into your life or seem to be there hovering and around you and making you miserable. Well, what do I believe about myself? Do I believe I can have more or better? Do I believe I've somehow found my way into a karmic loop where I just can't get out of this and I gotta suffer through it till the rest of my days are done. What's going on in that head of yours? Do you believe that the lack of a relationship that's been satisfying and loving and long term and trustworthy comes from the fact that you didn't have that role model as a child? When you trace it back, you're going to discover the why. That is where the golden, the golden, the gold is, frankly. Because when you discover the why, you begin working with the sort of core understanding, the core belief that's led you to the feeling that you currently have the quote, limitation that you currently have, then you're going to go into the next step, which is, am I allowed to get rid of this? If I do get rid of this, what do I think will happen to myself? And often that's where our limiting beliefs come and clobber us a second time. If we get rid of them, we think we're going to be dumb and silly and stupid and we're going to get hurt and disillusioned and smacked in the face. So we decide that it's better to keep them than risk that disappointment or failure of knowing that we'll try and they won't go away. Thus they become a kind of self fulfilling prophecy for many of us and really hard to get rid of, but not necessarily right. Not anymore. Now, the second way that I wanted you to consider, you know, figuring out where your limiting beliefs come from, I already hinted at it. When we have a negative emotion that comes up, a kind of lack thought, a scarcity thought could come up about anything. Maybe you could think of one. Right now I'd like to have Thanksgiving at my house, but my house is too small. I would like to be able to take a beautiful vacation this summer, but I don't know where the money would come from. I don't seem to have enough. I would like to retire, but I can't see how to do it because I don't have the money and I don't know how to get the money but. And I don't know who's going to hire me at this point to give me more money. All these things I'm saying, you're probably nodding your head like, yeah, those seem pretty rational and reasonable and agreed. They are. And they will remain that way as long as you continue to hold them firmly in your grip and let them explain to you why you are where you are. In fact, the stronger we hold them, and this is teaching that comes straight from MI School, some of you remember I taught MI School for about 10 years to multiple waves of classes. We this the segment on rationalizations and justifications. And this is where the more water. Watertight our explanation was for why we couldn't have, do or be something, the more one kind of comfortable we felt having that limitation. Because, gosh, if it's that watertight, nobody could change it. It's unchangeable. Why try? I mean, just give up and just settle for what you've got and just, just stop, you know, stop torturing yourself already. So many of us would reach that level based on that feeling alone. Now the why, here's the funny part. The justification rationalization, it's often not true, or it's not true any longer, or it's not always and permanently true. There's so many ways to poke holes in it if we only start allowing ourselves to. So one of the ways you can discover where some of these limiting feelings and thoughts are is the next time you have a feeling like, I want to do this and. Or I want to go there, or I want to experience this, or it's time for me to have this or to whatever it may be, lose that weight, get healthy again, just, you know, have a windfall of wealth come into my life. Anything. I mean, just pick anything and notice the feeling that comes hot on the heel of that desire. And if that feeling that comes hot on the heel is, yeah, right. Ha. That's not gonna happen. Who do you think? Come on, you've tried that in the past. It hasn't worked before, it's not gonna work now. I'm looking for feelings like that that erupt in you. It's important that you find those. Those are practically begging you, screaming at you, shouting at you, help me. I don't want to be here any more than you want to be here. And then you say, but now I'm flying in the face of logic. I'm flying in the face of rationality. How can I spend money that I don't have? How can I believe that I'm lovable when no one's loving me? How can I? And this is again where we dip into the realm of flow dreaming what we really talk about here in this, you know, this podcast. More than anything, life follows beliefs. It's not the other way around. Now, we do develop beliefs in response to what life has done to us or what we've experienced in life. But if that's all we ever do, develop responses based on what life has done for us or the way we grew up, the sort of powerless situations we've been in, you can see how that would perpetuate a kind of constant powerlessness. A kind of constant, well, let's see what the cat drags in. Because that's obviously going to inform who and what I am going forward and what I can have. Gosh, doesn't that feel unfair? It does. It does to me. Especially because if I contrast that to this feeling that I am a being that's come here to grow. I am a consciousness that's come here to experience myself in relation to others and myself in relation to myself. Yet if I'm always saying I can't experience that in me until life gives me a reason to do that, or other people, people or things, what's going to happen is that I'm going to end up with this very wonky kind of hodgepodge way of discovering myself. Because if I look at the world around me and imagine this, you walk into a supermarket or a Walmart, right? You walk in and sure, you're there to buy stuff and so is everybody else. Everybody came in with a different need. Someone's got to buy some fishing tackle and you're there for some dog food and someone else is there browsing for some, you know, new, you know, dance tights for their kids. What if you just walked up to somebody and whatever they decided for you is what you got? They're like, nah, you wanted dog food, I'm sorry, you're gonna get these eggs instead. It would be a kind of baffling and weird experience, right? And you'd probably walk out most of the time, not with something you actually wanted. And maybe you'd say to them, no, I really need dog food. And maybe they're kind hearted and generous and it doesn't hurt them at all. And they're like, sure, have, have dog food. Or maybe they say, actually, there's only one bag left, it's fine, you're gonna have eggs. What I'm getting at is if we're relying on this sort of incoherent or decoherence of other people's random responses to us, life itself, we will end up with a kind of randomness in us, meaning we are always asking, we are always begging, we are always wanting, we are always feeling like, I don't get my needs met. Then we say to ourselves, well, I can get my needs met if I start doing something about it. If I initiate some control over this. Oh, yes, that is the first step. Ah. Everybody says, all right, write your goals down and start you Know, moving toward them. Do the thing, get the thing done. Go there. You can do this. And that's a beautiful first step. Then it means, now you walk in, you walk right up to somebody who works at the store, and you say, I need dog food. Can you please show me where it is? I'm going to go get it right now, and I'm going to buy it and take it home. Now you're starting to have this kind of inner initiative. What if instead, though, instead of dog food, you were looking for something a little more maybe out of reach? Maybe you go in and say, I want to buy a $300,000 RV so I can travel the country in my retirement. And the store clerk says, do you have 3,000, 300,000? And you say, no. And they go, well, go away. You can't. You can't. Until you come, can't leave until, you know, I can't sell it to you. Notice how at this point, a feeling will come up. There is going to be a limiting belief that surfaces, and it's going to say something like this, gosh, I don't have the 300k because I made stupid and foolish choices my whole life. I must make stupid and foolish choices a lot. I really can't trust myself. Or, I had the money, but I lost it all when I invested in that property that then went, you know, underwater when I went through that divorce, when I used it to pay for things that I wish I hadn't. Now all this gunk is surfacing in you. Thoughts about you, your thoughts about you. Here's where it becomes tricky. These thoughts become locked in. You start to use them to describe you all the time as a kind of caution to you. It would be like if a teacher was talking to a parent at a school, you know, teacher, parent meeting and saying, your child is. Is disruptive. They are. They can't learn. I don't expect them to ever go past high school, if they graduate at all. You should really just give up on them right now. You know, they're. They're. It's too hard. Can you imagine as a parent? Yeah, I might. I might go, oh, okay. My child has some spirit, you know, special needs that need to be addressed. And I'm going to. What am I going to do? I'm actually going to give more to my child. I'm not going to do less. I'm not going to pull back because the teacher said, give up. You're going to go, oh, no. This child needs supports. This child needs different ways of learning. Or perhaps a different learning environment and definitely a different teacher, because we're going to do this. And I'm going to discover where their actual genius lies, because I believe it's in there. Imagine if you're that parent talking that way now about your own self. What? They said I couldn't make 300,000, or I was dumb or I made bad decisions, or I this or that. Who said that? Oh, I said that. Well, I typically think I'm right, so maybe I'm right. That right there, that's your catch 22. Meaning that's exactly the thing that has to be destroyed. You. You have to stop being right. You have to stop being right about yourself. Especially because that rightness has probably turned into a kind of inflexible jail over time, over the years. And you know how you know that? Because if you look around at the empty spaces in your life where you don't have the things you want or haven't reached or become what you want, that's evidence right there that you have bought into that way of thinking, hook, line and sinker. Made it very real. And of course, the result is an absence of the thing that you initially wanted. Now, fortunately, we don't have to stay there. I hope you will not stay there. I hope that you will bust out of this and say, nope, no more. I'm ready to try a different way. I would love for you right now to think of a couple limiting beliefs you have about yourself. Your life, your money, your health, the people that you love, the people that you would love to love, that maybe aren't there yet anything, any part of yourself or your life. Three things where you say, I can't because it's impossible, because it's too late for nobody will want. You know. You know what these start with. I'm just modeling for you how the thoughts usually begin. Think of three. Because you want this year ahead. We're about to enter a brand new year. You want this year ahead to be all about dismantling them and seeing what's there. Once you bulldoze them down, you're going to discover whole new, beautiful, fertile ground underneath these old artifacts that are just crumbly and yucky. Anyway, so take these three. And now I want you to do something. I want you to ask why. Why do I think this? Why do I believe this? Why is this true for me? Why does this have to remain true for me? Okay, the idea here is we want to pull this apart. You can also ask, is this actually true? Do I know for a Certain for a fact that this is true right there you're going to discover. No, I don't know for a fact. Oh, you mean so there's wiggle room? You actually might be good with money. If you had ever been taught, if you'd taken a class in financial literacy, if you had ever studied it, or if you had ever made it a priority, or if you had ever been given the resources to use. Huh. So maybe it's not actually true. This is the beginning. Now the next thing I want you to do is think about using flow dreaming as a way to not just surface it. Right? The lack thoughts will surface themselves using and the limiting beliefs using some of the methods I just shared with you. But then what? That's where many of us stop and we realize, okay, I have these lack thoughts, I have these limiting beliefs now what? They're still in control even though I can see them? Oh yeah, they're still in control. Flow dreaming is the antidote. Flow dreaming is where we go in. And if you haven't used the practice before, I want to really encourage you. Go to my website, flowdreaming.com or there's an app on your mobile phone or mobile device, your tablet. It's called Flow Dreaming for Meditation and Manifesting. Download it and I will teach you how to flow dream for free. And I'll give you a couple of them to start working with. Flow dreaming is like meditation in that you can do it by yourself for no cost at all. Or if you like guided meditations, as I happen to, because they do the heavy lifting. They tell me what to see, what to think about. I have hundreds of them for you. I also have, of course, the Rising Light Leaders Mastermind, where I have 36 courses that you can bite into right away. And almost every one of these courses is going to surface and help you clear some kind of limiting belief somewhere in your life. Imagine if you just did one a month for the year ahead, 12 areas of your life where limiting beliefs surfaced and cleared for a fraction of the price of even going to a therapist. I mean, yeah, like a fraction literally of the price. So you're gonna go and you're gonna do some flow dreaming now. And what flow dreaming is going to do is it's going to re pattern your emotional conduits, your emotional pathways. It's going to start generating new and different feelings and emotions about yourself to replace the limiting belief. See, most of us, we get caught in again this kind of feedback loop of I see it and now I want to do Something about it, but I don't know what to do anything about. I don't know what to do. So it's just going to stay there until life gives me another opportunity to challenge it. But remember walking into the grocery store? I don't know when life is going to give you that opportunity. I mean, sure, because you have the intention, it's going to start aligning towards you, but wouldn't you like to speed that along? Wouldn't you like to do it with a lot more intentionality? Wouldn't you like to just bulldoze through it as fast as possible instead of waiting and lingering and taking months or even years or even decades? This is where you are now. Instead, practicing a different set of feelings, you are practicing something that is the exact opposite of your limiting belief. Yeah, I have that. 300,000 comes from a wonderful source. You know how I got it? I don't know, but it came from a source that I felt tickled with and delighted with. You know, it's so funny because I used to always drink tea at night. And one day I, you know, I realized I gave some to a friend and they said, this is the best tea I've ever had. What is it? And you said, well, you know, I've actually mix it myself using some herbs from my garden. And your friend says, well, you should really sell this on Etsy. And you say, well, maybe I will, but who makes money on Etsy? And your friend says, I don't know, I'd buy your tea if you sold it. And so one day you put up that tea on Etsy and then someone sees it and says, this is a really good tea. And then you're like building this little shop and sure, it's only a couple hundred dollars, you know, a month or something, you know, it's just a little bit, it's fun. And then someone reaches out from Celestial Seasonings or one of the big tea companies and says, I tasted your tea, it's great. Can we have the recipe? We're willing to pay you 300,000 and buy you out. And you say, huh, this is where in your head right now a limiting belief may have just popped up. Oh my God. That would never happen. That's a divine, a divine intervention. That's a divine act of, you know, impossibility. I want you to know this stuff happens all the time. And you know it, you know it. You just happen to say it happens for other people. I was, I was actually browsing the Internet earlier today and there was this one creator who Was she has a podcast, and she was talking about how to be a social media influencer and so on. And. And I looked at her and I thought, yeah, it's easy for you to say that because you've got like a million followers. I stopped myself and I realized, wow, that is a limiting belief. What did that come from? Well, because she's more popular, because she got in at the right time, because she's just a more likable person than me, because she's actually secretly savvy and a big marketer, and she's trying to pretend that she's not. To give us all confidence. I started running down this list in my head of reasons why she could be this very big social influencer and I could not. Or why she had the success and I did not. Or why. Luck or fate. It's one of my favorite ones. Luck or fate dropped in and just gave it to her. But, you know, I can't make luck or fate happen. That's the ultimate rationalization, the ultimate justification where I throw my hands up and say, yeah, it's totally out of my hands. It's in God's hands. It's in my higher powers hands. And if they don't want me to have it, then I don't get it. As long as I keep on that feedback loop, I will never get it. So I had to catch myself and say, all of that is baloney. If all of that is baloney and it's actually possible for me to become a giant social media influencer within a year, a million followers too, what would happen if I actually wrapped my heart and my feelings around that, like, full. All. All in. I would do a lot of different things next year. A lot of the things that would have stopped me would be gone. If somebody said to me, hey, Summer, if we just get on every day and just say a few words, you know, just let your heart guide you and educate yourself and do the right things, you'll have a million people by the end of the year. Do you know how I'd feel? I would. I would jump. I'd be like, oh, my God, yes. Okay, I'm in. Oh, really? It's guaranteed? Yeah, it's guaranteed. Oh, my God, let me get me. Let me at it. Right? Do you see how that you would feel the same way too? You'd be like, yeah, heck yeah, man. If I was guaranteed, I want you to have that it's guaranteed feeling. Because when you start with that feeling, you're basically saying to the universe, it's Guaranteed. It's guaranteed. We're guaranteed. Can you see the power of that? Can you see the power of waking up holding that feeling every single day, day after day after day? Can you see how it might end up being harder for the universe to not guide you toward that than to. Than to give it to you? Because literally it would have to be pulling you out of that mindset every day. It'd have to be consciously blocking you and pulling you away from it every single day against the energy and the will and the flow and the, and the manifestational power, the alignment that you're putting out. It'll be harder for it to block that and not align than to simply shrug, give in, and go along with you. Yet we don't do it. Well, actually, some of us do. And that was my point. We could all look around at someone who's done the thing that we hoped or wished and we all have reasons why they got it and did it and we don't. That, my friends, is what we're taking sticks of dynamite to right now. Kaboom. Boom, boom. Get rid of those. And the way again that we do that is with Flow Dreaming. We're gonna go in into flow space and we are going to feel, I have this. I am this. Pick something that you are feeling in your heart, like, oh my God, if I knew 100, I would so do that. I'd start tomorrow, whatever that may be. 100, give yourself to it for a year. Let's see what happens now. Even if you reach the end of the year and you owned it, only end up getting like 80 of it or 50%. That is so much better than nothing, right? Maybe it'll take one more year. Who cares? You went from 0 to 50 or 80. So you're going to Flow dream and I'm going to help you with this process again. You can go to my website or open my app. I've got Flow Dreams and they are manifestational tools. They are energy alignment and entrainment tools. You're going to pick up this practice, you're going to do it every single day and you're going to see what happens again. If you want to go deeper and ask me questions, come join me at the Flow Dreaming Starlight Society. 100% free. You'll get an invite the minute you sign up for my email list. I will be sending out information to you. If not, just ask me, email me. And of course, I hope some of you will decide to come into the Rising Light Leaders, Celestial Circle or the Diamond Council. Yes, There are actually four layers to my programs. Depending on your level of desire, I make it very flexible for you. The diamonds are the ones, they're the racehorses. They are chomping at the bit. They're like we have no time to lose. I'm all in. Celestial circle is right behind them, hot on their heels, rising light leaders. They are saying, well okay, this sounds pretty cool. I can give a little of myself to it. So pick where you want to be and I hope to see you with that. I'm going to wrap this one up. Lots of lots of love to you. And please be decide take those three limiting beliefs. If you do nothing next year in any personal growth at all, you know, do that, do those, focus on those absolute game changer life game changer. And I know because I've done it myself. I have the world around me to show for it. My home and my family. My beautiful Flow Dreaming company that I've created from scratch in the personal growth space. My multi published books. You guys, you. You've got stuff like this too. It's time to bring it out and forward. So start with those beliefs. All right, lots of love again and I'll see you all for another episode of Flow Dreaming. If you're serious about healing and manifesting through Flow Dreaming, I invite you to join me in the Flow Dreaming mastermind. Every month we hold powerful workshops aligned with the moment, moon and the seasons. They're fun with grounding rituals combined with transformative Flow Dreaming energy. Think of it as a series of exclusive events and you're invited to each one as a Mastermind member. Beyond live events, you also gain immediate access to 36 Flow Dreaming courses, complete with 42 Flow Dreams and worksheets. Plus it's incredibly affordable. You'll connect with like minded souls worldwide for joyful Flow Dreaming parties, energy cleansing and even some witchy rituals. The lighter and brighter you become, the more your life reflects it. Check it out@flow dreaming.com because our next Flow Dreaming event is right around the corner. I hope to see you there.