An upper limit is a wall you run up against. It happens in the early stages of success. You start to feel good, but then a little voice in your head says something that makes you doubt yourself. It’s very subtle at first but slowly creeps in, and you can’t tune it out. You start to wonder if you can sustain the course you’re on. That’s when you hit the wall. That’s when you’ve reached your upper limit.
Whether we are talking business, diets, or exercise — self-limiting beliefs such as fear, anxiety, and negativity can swoop in, knock you down, steal your confidence, and rob you of joy. Self-limiting beliefs will keep you stuck, hold you back from success, and prevent you from living life to the fullest.
One day I was talking with a very successful entrepreneur client. He said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I made a million dollars last year but I lost half of it. I can make money, but I always seem to blow it.”
As we continued talking, he eventually revealed he was bullied as a child. It was much worse. Growing up, he experienced a lot of personal pain, grief, and neglect. He developed an extremely critical inner voice that tells him he will fail that he’s worthless, and other self-deprecating thoughts. He suffers from low self-esteem. No matter how hard he works or what he accomplishes, he never feels good enough.
“If you have a value or belief system about yourself, or if you were conditioned to believe you don’t deserve success, whether it is right or wrong, it doesn’t matter, if you believe it — it’s true to you.”
“I think you have an upper limit issue that’s deeply seated in your unconscious,” I said. “You reach the million-dollar mark and question whether or not you deserve it so you start sabotaging your efforts. It’s like knowing you could climb Mount Everest but you settle for Pikes Peak. You think of a thousand excuses why you can’t do something. Your inner critic is a gremlin and it’s not your friend.”
The Inner Critic
The inner critic refers to that inner voice that loves to judge, criticize, and shame. It’s like a devious gremlin that thrives on chaos, confusion, and darkness.
My friend is not alone. Most struggling business owners I talk to are highly critical and deeply entrenched in self-sabotaging patterns. They get stuck in negative narrative loops that play over and over all day long and keep them up at night.
The best way to deal with the inner critic is to understand how it was formed, where the self-destructive patterns come from, and how the unconscious thought processes keep us from being our best selves.
To overcome the inner critic, we need to understand the mental processes of our conscious and unconscious minds. Our conscious mind is like the tip of the iceberg. It’s what we are aware of. The giant part of the iceberg that we can’t see is our unconscious mind. We are unaware of it, but it has a major influence on our behavior, judgments, and emotions. Our past experiences are stored in the unconscious and have a powerful impact on our motives, decisions, and feelings. So if we were told we weren’t good enough or were physically or emotionally abused or neglected as a child, those experiences get lodged in our unconscious and become part of our belief system.
Interestingly, the unconscious will decide when to reveal memories when you are ready to process them consciously. Just like my friend, he never really thought about his childhood experiences until he saw the connection of how it was affecting his life. It was the AHA moment he needed to turn things around.
Face It and Replace It
Here are some tips on how to overcome your self-limiting beliefs and soar past your upper limit:
- Diminish the little gremlin or sabotaging tyrant (your inner critic) by giving it a name. Thank it for reminding you of past failures and mistakes. Failures are a part of life, and we learn valuable lessons from mistakes. This will help flip the critical, negative self-talk to constructive, positive self-talk.
- Remember not to believe what the little tyrant tells you. The voice and message of the inner critic is a viewpoint but not reality. Think of it as an alien point of view.
- Visually imagine ways you can get rid of the gremlin. I like to think about shooting arrows or sending a band of coyotes after him. Hey, whatever works!
- Be gentle with yourself. It doesn’t do any good to try to force or browbeat your unconscious into submission by telling yourself to stop thinking about something. Don’t think of biting into a lemon, and don’t feel the sourness pucker your salivary glands. Nope, don’t think of it right now. See? It doesn’t work.
- Your unconscious accepts what you believe to be true, not just a bunch of words. Affirmations will not work if your conscious and unconscious minds are not in agreement. But if affirmations are specific and don’t cause a mental conflict or argument, you will get results.
- The unconscious mind is powerful. It preserves the body, keeps us breathing, and our blood pumping. Some have compared it to a 6-year-old who likes to serve and take instructions literally. So if you say, “My life sucks,” your unconscious will find a way to make sure your life sucks! Learn to tell it what you want out of life, not what you don’t want.
- The unconscious doesn’t process negatives and absorbs pictures, not words. If you say, “I don’t want to lose money,” the unconscious generates a picture of you losing money. Switching the image from negative to positive takes more energy. It’s better to say, “I am advancing, progressing, and getting wealthier every day.”
Honor your subconscious. Make friends with it. Expect good. Expect answers. Expect success. Mentally concentrate on all things good. Success, wealth, health, love, and know that your unconscious mind answers you always. It never fails.
