Sean Smith walks through three ways to spot the limiting beliefs holding you back: notice what you say to yourself, watch which things trigger you emotionally, and look for the gap between what you say you want and what you actually do. He uses a story about someone crying over a 90-day goal to show how that conflict reveals what you really believe.
Chapters
How do people determine if they have limiting beliefs? And then if they determine that they do, how do they identify which ones they have? Right. I teach three things. Number one is pay attention to your language, because language is the representation of our beliefs. So some people walk around and they're always focused on everything that's going wrong. You know, how was your day? Oh, I had so much traffic to get here. And, you know, they're talking about how life is so hard and they're plugged into the economy and how nobody has money and all that stuff. Obviously, those are their beliefs manifesting into language. And then, you know, some people are the exact opposite, right? They look at the sun that's out, and they live life through a gratitude filter, and that's their beliefs, you know, being manifested. So look at your external language, and you can listen for the beliefs, but then also look at your internal language, and that becomes a little bit more clear if we pay attention. What I have a lot of my clients do is, is just journal their internal dialogue, right? It's like being. What are the people called in the courtroom as a stenographer that pay attention? They're not filtering whatever these people say. Whatever those people say are getting written in. And so what I want my clients to do is just pay attention to the internal dialogue. Don't wrestle with it. Don't argue with it. Just jot it down. And then what you'll have is basically your belief system. So if your internal dialogue is saying relationships are hard and nobody cares about you and nobody's ever gonna accept you as a friend or as a companion or anything like that, those are your beliefs really hammering you. So language is the first way. The second way is emotional response. Because whatever. We have our beliefs, it's like our beliefs have emotional buttons on them. So if I have a belief called I'm not good enough, then anything or anybody that kind of pushes that button will release these emotions all around not being enough. You know, frustration and irritation and pain and anger and all that stuff. But if I don't have that button, then it doesn't matter what anybody says. It doesn't matter what happens around me. That button can't be pushed because I don't have it. Right? And so when we pay attention to our emotional responses, we can kind of track that back. Okay, what was just said, you know, let's say you're listening to somebody and she's talking about not fitting in, and you start to get emotional about it, and you start crying. Well, there's probably a belief there that you don't fit in. Then if you go back to my experience when I was doing my 90 day goal, what I realized now, I didn't know at the time, I didn't realize this, but now looking back, I realize what was happening in that instance, and I think a lot of people will really relate to this, is I was writing a goal down, and consciously I was committing to this goal. I was emotionally drunk. I was at a seminar like most of us do. We go, oh, I'm emotionally drunk. Yeah, exactly. Nothing's going to stop me. And that's how we get in those environments. And so I was saying, yeah, I can do anything. And I was writing this 90 day goal. That was my conscious commitment. But then at an unconscious level, there was this piece of me going, there's no way. We don't deserve it. There's all kinds of fear of success. If we do that, bad stuff's going to happen. So what was happening is there was a conflict, like a clash of the titans. I had a conscious commitment that wanted the goal, but I had an unconscious commitment that was scared of going after that goal. And as you know, the unconscious mind is so much stronger. So these opposing forces, a lot of times create emotion. It's like if you wanted to wring out a washcloth, if there was some water in there, you wanted to wring it out. You have to twist in different directions because if you just wring both of them in the same direction, no water's coming out. So that's really what's happening with me. I had a conscious commitment twisting one way, I had an unconscious commitment twisting another way. And a bunch of water came out right in the form of my tears. And so I think a lot of times, if people really look at their.
