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Your Best Year Ever — Chapter-02: Some Beliefs Hold You Back
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2 Some Beliefs Hold You Back How little we see! What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, The Beauties of Nature I once had a client whom I’ll call Charlie. That’s not his real name. Let’s just say I’ve changed his identity to protect the guilty. Charlie derived significance from feeling wronged, put upon, and persecuted. He griped about everything. Everyone was an idiot but him. Nobody could do anything right. Life was rigged. If we went to lunch, which I dreaded, he never picked up the check—even if he called the meeting. I always left his presence drained and diminished. And it wasn’t just me. Charlie was that way with everyone. His employees and friends rolled their eyes when I mentioned his name. He approached every relationship with a hoarding mentality. People around him lived in constant fear that their livelihood and well-being were at risk. And guess what? The success he craved always seemed out of reach. Charlie exemplifies what I call scarcity thinking. Now, compare Charlie with another friend of mine. Robert is one of the most generous people I know. He always greets me with a big smile, a hug, and an encouraging word. I always leave his presence energized, feeling great about being me. And he’s like this with everyone. He treats employees, vendors, booking agents, publishers, and everyone else as if they were his best customers. He routinely invests in their success, and it comes back to him in a thousand ways. Robert exemplifies what I call abundance thinking.
Scarcity vs. Abundance To accomplish anything, we have to believe we’re up to the challenge. That doesn’t mean it will be easy or that we even know how we’re going to accomplish it. Usually we don’t know. It just means we believe we’re capable; we have what it takes to prevail. Why is that important? Because every goal has obstacles. When some people have trouble getting over those obstacles, they doubt they have what it takes. Think Charlie. But others are confident they’ll prevail if they just work harder or come at the problem from a different direction. Think Robert. Researchers label the first group entity theorists. They think their abilities are set in stone. You’ve heard people say this: “I’m just no good at x, y, or z.” These are the scarcity thinkers. Researchers call the second group incremental theorists. When they struggle with an obstacle, they just look for new approaches to the problem. They know there’s a workaround or a solution if they just keep working at it. These are the abundance thinkers.1 Of these two habits of thinking, one leads to failure, fear, and discontent. The other leads to success, joy, and fulfillment. The main difference? Scarcity thinkers like Charlie operate from a web of limiting beliefs about the world, other people, and themselves, whereas abundance thinkers like Robert operate from a platform of liberating truths. SCARCITY THINKERS ABUNDANCE THINKERS
- Are entitled and fearful
- Believe there will never be enough
- Are stingy with their knowledge, contacts, and compassion
- Assume they are the way they are
- Default to suspicion and aloofness
- Resent competition, believing it makes the pie smaller and them weaker
- Are thankful and confident
- Believe there is always more where that came from
- Are happy to share their knowledge, contacts, and compassion with others
- Assume they can learn, grow, and develop
- Default to trust and openness
- Welcome competition, believing it makes the pie bigger and them better
- Are optimistic about the future, believing the best is yet to
SCARCITY THINKERS ABUNDANCE THINKERS 7. Are pessimistic about the future, believing that tough times are ahead 8. See challenges as obstacles 9. Think small and avoid risk come 8. See challenges as opportunities 9. Think big and embrace risk So what’s your mindset? Achieving our goals starts by understanding the distinction between limiting beliefs and liberating truths. Three Kinds of Limiting Beliefs It’s easy to spot limiting beliefs in our own thinking if we’re attentive. Start with assumptions we hold about the world. “I can’t start a new business right now; the market is terrible,” somebody might say. Or, “I don’t trust management; they’re always trying to cheat us.” Or, “Those politicians are going to deep-six the economy and make it impossible for me to get ahead.” These can be very deep-seated beliefs. But they’re not always reality, and they’re rarely the whole truth even when they seem accurate. We’ve got to learn to question and even dismiss them or they will limit our freedom and motivation to act. We also have limiting beliefs about others. “It’s no use asking,” you might say. “He’s too busy to meet with me.” Or, “Hey, she’s just a bean counter. What can she possibly know?” Or, “He hasn’t responded yet. I guess he must be upset with me.” Or, “Someone like her would never go out with a person like me.” These aren’t truths necessarily. They’re just beliefs we let influence us.
Watch out: limiting beliefs distort our view of the world, others, even ourselves. The third type of limiting belief is where it really hits home for most of us. I’m talking about beliefs about ourselves. We might say, “I’m a quitter. I never finish what I start.” Or, “I can’t help it. I’ve never been physically fit.” Or, “I’ve always been terrible with money.” Or, “I’m just not the creative type.” These beliefs are often false, half-truths at best. And they will roadblock any progress you want to make in life. How do you know if you’re falling into the trap of limiting beliefs? In his book Making Habits, Breaking Habits, Jeremy Dean mentions three dead giveaways: Black-and-white thinking. That’s when we assume we’ve failed if we don’t achieve perfection. Reality is usually a sliding scale, not a toggle switch. Personalizing. That’s when we blame ourselves for random negative occurrences. Catastrophizing. That’s when we assume the worst even with little evidence.2 To that list we can add a fourth: Universalizing. That’s when we take a bad experience and assume it’s true across the board.
Where do these beliefs come from?
The Source of Limiting Beliefs Some of our limiting beliefs, as I’ve said, come from previous failures or setbacks. Repeated setbacks can train us to assume the worst. They can condition us to hoard what we have and avoid risks. But if we’re observant we can spot other influences. The news media, for instance, has a strong negativity bias. As J. R. R. Tolkien quipped, it’s mostly murders and football scores.3 “Studies have shown that an overabundance of news can make you depressed, anxious, and, for the most part, doesn’t usually provide you with the ability to actually change or influence anything being reported,” says Michael Grothaus—and he’s a professional journalist.4 Tune in, and it’s easy to believe the world is getting worse and worse—more crime, more poverty, more violence than ever. It’s like a long litany of worry and fear, interrupted by commercials about scary medical conditions. News organizations are predisposed to show you negative news because fear triggers the more primitive parts of our brains and keeps our eyes glued to the threat. To make matters worse, their industry is in decline. So the media increasingly appeal to fear in order to deliver eyeballs to their advertisers. Then there’s social media, which can mirror this negativity bias. After our most recent election cycle, it seemed like a never-ending stream of negativity. But you can also detect a positivity bias at work. Check Facebook, and it can seem like everyone’s leading a charmed life. Happy kids, beautiful friends, gorgeous vacations, fulfilling work. We’re instantly, usually subconsciously, aware we’re not measuring up. We’re not as smart, creative, educated, successful, lucky, athletic, or artistic as everyone on Instagram. Scholar Donna Freitas conducted a large-scale study of social media and students on more than a dozen college campuses. “Facebook is the CNN of envy, a kind of 24/7 news cycle of who’s cool, who’s not, who’s up, and who’s down,” she writes in The Happiness Effect, a book that reports her findings. “Unless you have rock-solid self-esteem, are impervious to jealousy, or have an extraordinarily rational capacity to remind yourself exactly what everyone is doing when they post their glories on social media [that is, positioning and bragging], it’s difficult not to
care.”5 I’m a huge advocate of social media, but it’s no wonder that time on Facebook is predictive of feeling crummy about our lives.6 And then there are negative relationships, everyone from friends and coworkers to our family or faith community. We often pick up these beliefs in childhood. They become part of what University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy D. Wilson calls our “core narratives” about life.7 Many of these core narratives are good and helpful. But some are not, and they can be hard to let go of and disruptive when we try. Other times we pick up limiting beliefs later in life at church, the college quad, or the office. Regardless of when or where we acquire them, our beliefs create the lens through which we see the world. And it’s good to recognize the shape of that lens is influenced by relationships, including negative ones. “The undeniable reality is that how well you do in life and business depends not only on what you do and how you do it . . . but also on who is doing it with you or to you,” says psychologist Henry Cloud in The Power of the Other.8 Hang around people like Charlie, and you can start seeing the world from his perspective. And the reverse is also true. Surround yourself with Roberts and everything starts looking up. If we want to experience our best year ever, we have to begin by recognizing which of these two kinds of thinking dominates and intentionally move toward abundance. There’s no reason to let limiting beliefs hold us back. You Choose Shortly after Apple CEO Steve Jobs died in 2011, family, friends, and others gathered at Memorial Church on the Stanford University campus. The invitation-only event drew several hundred to pay tribute to a visionary innovator and leader they had come to admire, respect, and love. Journalist Brent Schlender recounts the moment at the close of his book Becoming Steve Jobs. Bono, Joan Baez, and Yo-Yo Ma performed. Oracle founder Larry Ellison spoke, as did lead Apple designer Jony Ive. But what struck Schlender the most were the words of Jobs’s wife, Laurene Powell. “He shaped how I came to view the world,” she said of her husband, adding:
It is hard enough to see what is already there, to remove the many impediments to a clear view of reality, but Steve’s gift was even greater: he saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary. He imagined what reality lacked, and he set out to remedy it. As a result, she said, Jobs possessed “an epic sense of possibility.”9 So ask yourself: What’s not in your world right now that could be, must be there? What’s lacking that only you can remedy in your relationships, your health, your career, or your spiritual life? As we begin to think about designing our best year ever, we need to recognize that most of the barriers we face are imaginary. There are a million thoughts running through our heads, but we alone get to choose what we’re going to believe. And the best way to overcome limiting beliefs is to replace them with liberating truths. It’s possible to upgrade our beliefs.