Find Your Limits

>> Welcome back. In this lecture, we're going to dig in and find your custom limits so that we can shift them and completely change your identity. Before we start, I want to ask you a question. What makes someone a different person? Imagine someone who has what you want, someone who has the big business, the great family, etcetera, someone who gets results, right? Well, what's different about them? Obviously, their physical body for sure and they also have a different history than what you do of course. But, likely, a more important difference is really that their body and their history lead to a way of being today that is different than your way of being. And so they get different results than you do. They think different thoughts, they do different things, they have different habits and behaviors. And if I were to ask a client why aren't you that person that gets all those results, they might answer, "Well, you know, that's just not me. That's okay for that person, but I don't do those things." And that's really the point, isn't it? We can't stay the same, keep our same ideas, keep our same habits, keep our same beliefs and expect different results, can we? So for you to change, you're going to have to change those things. You'll have to change your thoughts, your beliefs, your habits because those are the things that are getting you your current feelings and your current results. So how do we do it? How does someone go from a 100-pound overweight person to spin instructor and living a new identity of "I am an athlete"? How will you go from where you are to becoming an incredibly successful entrepreneur or anything else that you want to become? There are three simple steps to create this shift and the acronym I use is LCR, right? Look, challenge, replace. Step one is to look. The first thing we need to do is to become aware of any internal limiting beliefs, whether they're conscious or unconscious. What we want to do is we want to find the negative thoughts that you have about the shift that you're trying to make. For the woman trying to lose the 100 pounds, we'd have to find out how she was speaking to herself. And here's just some of the thoughts that she had. She said to herself, "I am a loser. I have no willpower. I will never be thin." And listen to this one, "I hate myself." Imagine that for a second, actually saying, "I hate myself." It's worse than what other people would say about her. Imagine how bad that feels and what she would need to do every day to feel better. Exactly, more food. More food is a great way that she could immediately feel better from those horrible feelings about herself, and it's like a vicious cycle that just reproves itself over and over again. To break out of negative thinking, we need something new, we need a new choice of thought. By the way, this is not about willpower. The only reason that willpower works overtime when it does is because you've normalized a new possibility for your identity. You've used your will to do this thing that didn't feel like you, like going to the gym every day for a month or doing some other new habit, if you can actually apply your will long enough, it will become habituated and change your subconscious. But that only becomes natural once your subconscious, once your identity says, "Oh, I'm somebody who works out. That's what I do now." Willpower's actually only necessary for the things that don't feel like us yet. The much faster route is just to change your identity first, change the internal instead of doing it through singular behaviors that are external to you. So we're going to look for your limiting thoughts so that we can shift your internal identity. For you, this probably isn't about your weight but instead around resistance to becoming a successful entrepreneur. You might have thoughts like, "I'm going to fail at sales calls" or "I don't really have what it takes" or "I don't know how to become an entrepreneur yet." We want to find all the things that your system is telling you subconsciously on autopilot that may be holding you back. The next step is to challenge those limiting beliefs and pick new thoughts and a whole new identity to implant. For my client, we challenged each of the beliefs that we found and had her pick a new empowering choice instead. Things like "I have no willpower" became "I can do anything I put my mind to." Her thought of "I hate myself" actually became "I love myself." We looked at each of these and exposed that they weren't true, they weren't useful, and they were just unconscious patterns that she had picked up from different times in her childhood. We also decided on a better identity. We of course found "I am an athlete". It's an incredible one to choose. It holds all the behaviors that we wanted to normalize. It's a great anchor and a healthy way for her to think about herself. Now step three is going to be to implant and re-pattern this. The last step is to implant this into the subconscious, to normalize and re-pattern the new identity. For this woman, I taught her a simple process that takes only minutes to do. She was to presence herself, get into the moment, she was to state her new choice out loud, imagine it to be true in different ways, and then feel the emotion of that new choice deeply in her being. What this process does is remarkable. It actually speaks directly to the subconscious mind so that a new automatic choice exists where there wasn't one before, where there was only stuckness. Now there's a new option that's much more pleasurable and easy for the subconscious mind to choose. It works so well that people, again, often plagued with massive dysfunction and negative thinking, they have a hard time relating to those past limits once they've gone through it. It's literally like they can't remember them. As fast as just a week or two later, the change is shocking and dramatic. Now for this woman, I suggested to do this process and bookend it in her day for a week or two. When I say bookending, I mean doing it morning and evening. We're going to get you to do this so that you can implant and normalize your new empowering identity. You're not going to lose a thing in the process, nothing of you that you want to keep will go away, you're only going to gain all the benefits of what your new identity has. So to summarize this changing process, the change we need to do to shift your identity, to do that, we're going to shift the subconscious because many of us are set on autopilot, often carrying limiting beliefs that we don't even see. We use self-sabotage to keep us safe so that our existing identity can stay alive. We have to change the subconscious, and there are three steps to do that. Number one, look, become aware of the way that you we're talking and thinking, find all the ways that are holding us back. Number two, challenge, we need to challenge those limits, show our self that they're not true. And then three, we're going to replace. We're going to pattern in a new empowering belief structure so that they go all the way in and change your self-concept, your very identity. Let's start the process right now. You're going to want to have some paper and a pen so that you can do some brainstorming. We're going to go through exactly how to find your limits. We're looking for any limiting beliefs, any negative thoughts about yourself, any ways that you might sabotage your own success. Now why is this hard for us to do? It's mostly because these don't usually feel like thoughts we're choosing, instead they feel like they're true to us. So we now need to actually open to challenging our own truths. For an overweight woman, it was true that she was a loser. She had years of evidence of losing. But to shift it, we had to show her that "I'm a loser" was only true because she was choosing it. As soon as she made a different choice, it was no longer true. So let's try to find some of your truths that might be holding you back. The rules for this game are going to be, number one, I want you to try to be courageously honest in this process. It's not going to serve you unless you're really trying and looking at this stuff really honestly. Number two, the next thing is I want you to list out anything negative, even if it feels potentially unchangeable, even if the things that you're coming up with feel really true to you. They might not feel like they can even be rewired because they're just a fact of life, but we want to challenge those as well. Number three, we're going to write down things that you know are not true as well. If you hear yourself saying, "I don't have any friends," but you know you have friends, that's still bad software in the system. So write things down even if they're fully true or even if they're only 1% true. We're just looking for all your negative thoughts, whatever comes up for you. And the last rule, before we really get into this is that I just want you to have as much fun as you can. I want you to take this really seriously but don't get overwhelmed and feeling bad about yourself going through all these negative thoughts because we're actually working to get free of this. If you don't have paper and pen with you, right now would be a good time to grab them, feel free to pause the video any time if you need to or you just want more time to brainstorm. Let's get that pen moving and start creating a list of your limits. The first prompt question that I want you to write some answers to is this, "Where do you feel like you've come up short?" Are there any things in your life that you've repeatedly tried to do or get or accomplish where you feel that you've come up short? For each of those, see if you can list what it's like, what happened for you, where did you come up short, maybe it's "I was never able to make the team" or "I've failed at business before" or "I never really seem to get the job I wanted". We're looking for any negative thoughts that come up for you, whatever those things are. Now I want you to try and list out, for any of those, why do you think it is that you came up short? Was there something missing or wrong in you? Again, feel free to pause here if you need to spend some time brainstorming this out. One thing that's interesting is that you can actually say that you love money, you can really, really believe that you love money, but then if you look at a wealthy person, you might think to yourself, "I bet that guy doesn't really deserve that" or "I bet he's doing something really shady to get that nice car." Your subconscious doesn't actually let you become what you resent. So try and find if there's any of that stuff going on for you, like jealousy or envy about others, maybe you feel that the world is a dangerous or difficult place, maybe it's limited and there's only so much of a pie for you to get, right? Instead of feeling abundant about things, you feel like there are big limits. Do you feel like you're limited because you're shy or you don't have discipline or you don't have follow-through or any of those ideas? Write down any of these that resonate with you as well. Do you think to yourself, "Success is hard, money is hard or bad" or "Rich people are jerks" or "I have enough already, I shouldn't want more"? Do you sometimes think, "I'm not attractive" or "The world is dangerous" or "I'll never succeed" or "I'm clumsy, nobody's going to take me seriously"? Maybe you think, "I don't have enough confidence" or "I'm not talented." Or maybe you think, "It's too good, I don't deserve all this, I'm embarrassed with all that I have. Maybe I'm never really going to amount to anything. I'm lazy, I'm too much, people can't handle me. I'm annoying and loud, I'm too shy. Maybe I have no discipline. The world is cruel and rough, I haven't suffered enough." Maybe there's one at the bottom that says, "I'm not enough." Take some time and brainstorm any other thoughts that you think during your worst times, when you're up late, not sleeping, what do you worry about? Now realize nobody's ever going to judge you about what these are. We all have these crazy thoughts that fly around, and you're just looking for them. So just find anything. It doesn't matter at all if you really think it's true, even if 99% of you knows it's not true, but again it's just 1%, I want you to list it out, okay? So feel free to pause here. If you need to do this more, don't miss this opportunity. While this can be really uncomfortable to do, you can get through it. And when you do, you'll stop resisting change and instead you'll open up to it. Okay, the next part of this exercise is that I want you to circle the top triggers from this list. Some of you could probably just keep writing. We don't need 200 of these. We need your top 10 or 15. So take a moment and go back through your notes and pick out and circle your top negative thoughts and beliefs. Once you've done that, now we have a concise list of some of your biggest limits. And now we're looking at the last step of this looking phase, right? The last step is really important. I want you to look at all this list and I want you to look for the core issue. For me, personally, when I wrote out mine, when I've done this in the past, the one at the bottom for me is, "You know what, I'm not enough". It's just like, "I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not rich enough, I'm not there yet, I'm not enough." So when you're looking through yours, some of them are going to seem much more serious than others. I want you to do your best to try and find if there had to be one that wrapped up all the other ones in it, what would that one limit be? What is that core thing? Now an important note here, this will probably be an identity level issue. If it's not, I'd like you to see if you can find an identity level issue so it's an "I am something," okay? Like, "I am not enough," all right? Now once you've done all of that, I want to say to you, congratulations for doing this hard work. I know that it's not fun. But don't forget, one of the rules here is to do your best to have fun with this. Now once you go through this, I want you to take this list that you created to the next exercise so that you can challenge these ideas and start building your new identity as soon as you possibly can. You can do this from a detached place and actually enjoy what it takes to see yourself more deeply and to free yourself of this because this is a thing that's going to honestly get you unstuck forever. In the next video, I'm going to take you through creating your new identity and literally stepping into it. I'll see you there as soon as you're ready.