Create New Habits

If you do, I have a great little gift for you this week. It's a 50 page ebook on how to achieve your goals by creating new habits.

Here's the link to the pdf (no email required): Create New Habits

This ebook is written by Mayo Oshin and is full of different tips and techniques on how to develop the habits which will lead you to living the life you really want.

Dreams Don't Exceed Beliefs

He goes on to explain that what he means by this is, "If we find ourselves committing to plans and goals but never actually following through consistently — we need to honestly examine our underlying self beliefs and change them first."

So, if you say things like:

It could be a sign that you have underlying beliefs blocking you from achieving the goals that are truly the most important to you. There's no limit to the excuses we will come up with to justify why we can't go after our dreams when we're actually dealing with an underlying limiting belief.

So, if you find that you're not making much progress with your life goals, you may need to take the time to figure out what underlying beliefs you have towards your dream.

Do you really believe you can accomplish it or do you think it'll always be a dream?

It's totally natural to have doubts whenever you start going after something that's really important to you. It'll feel scary or uncomfortable and even overwhelming at times.

It's when the doubts prevent you from taking constructive action that you need to start working on your limiting beliefs. But don't worry, it's just one extra step you'll need to do in order to make more significant progress with your goals.

Often once you figure out the underlying beliefs getting in your way, they stop being an issue and you can move past them. It's bringing them to the light of day so you can process them and let them go that can be the hardest step.

So, pay attention if you find you tend to procrastinate a lot on something you really want to do. It's incredibly frustrating when you know what you want to do but you don't seem to be able to get yourself to work on it. See this as a sign that you have underlying beliefs getting in the way. It's not that you're lazy or anything. There's just some pre-work you need to do first.

Another Possible Cause of Resistance

But here's one you probably haven't heard of before. You may resist working on something that's important to you due to the limbic system of your brain, the part that controls the fight or flight feelings when facing "danger", being triggered by the thought of doing that particular work.

In the book I'm reading right now called, "Around The Writer's Block: Using Brain Science to Solve Writer's Resistance" by Roseanne Bane, she gives the example if you were criticized by a teacher for your writing, your limbic system would have seen that as a threat and taken over. You would have been in a position of trying to decide whether to run or fight what the brain considered a verbal attack.

The problem that can then occur is that in the future whenever you think about writing, the brain remembers that previous time with the teacher and the limbic system is triggered and warning bells start to go off. The brain considers this a potentially dangerous place for you to be and wants you to avoid going any closer. So, you'll have intense feelings of resistance.

You're also going to find that when your limbic system is in control, it shuts down the creative cortex of your brain so even if you can force yourself to work on your writing, you're going to find it very difficult to come up with the words.

The end result being that you'll struggle every time you think about sitting down and writing.

She says you may not even know what set off the limbic system originally so she has other ways of re-programming your brain so it's not continually triggered by the thought of writing.

I haven't finished the book yet but so far it's interesting seeing how the brain works and learning the techniques she provides on how to re-program it.

The book is written for writers but I think the brain science could be used for non writers as well.

So, if you're finding you resist doing important tasks, this might be another useful resource for you.

Additional Resources to Help Let Go of Limiting Beliefs