Are this the words you tell yourself when you ask yourself whether you are:

• Experienced?
• Rich?
• Pretty?
• Handsome?
• Smart?
• Brave?
• Creative?
• Worthy?

If you ever told yourself not enough in any of these areas, then you my friend need to get past these feelings of inadequacy to move forward. You may think to yourself, how can you do it when you have always felt this way? Well, I am sure you can recall that when you were little, you never questioned whether you can do any of these things.

You just did it.

If you wanted to fly, you tied on an old towel over your shoulders and you put your arms out like Superman and you took the leap. Sure, you might have ended up with a busted lip and maybe a broken ankle but you believed that you can fly and you did it.

Unfortunately, as we grow into adults, the usual encouragement we get from the adults around us went from “you can be anyone you wish to be” to “that’s a silly dream, go find something else more practical to do”.

Suddenly, we went from having complete belief in ourselves to zero belief and we resign ourselves to our “practical” jobs. This happens especially to young adults going from college to their first proper job.

During your school time, you were full of hope and dreamed of the person you would become only to find that the person you want to become doesn’t match your current paygrade. If you even have a paygrade that is.

Two Types of Inadequacy

I believe that there are two types of inadequacy that we experience. One is real, because we know that we either do not possess the skillset to do something or that our level of expertise hasn’t grown enough for us to fill confident in what we do, and the other is false sense of inadequacy where we believe that we are not able to do something. You know those moments you talk yourself out of doing something even before you get close to it because you don’t think you can do it? You know what I am talking about. Our self-imposed beliefs about what we can or cannot do is so much stronger that you think. Many of our beliefs about our capabilities did not appear overnight, they were conditioned over many years and very often with the influence from people around us. There are situations when inadequacy is real, for example, I know that I am NOT a great surgeon because I simply do not have the expertise, the training nor the knowledge for it. Simply believing that I am a great surgeon doesn’t make it so and thank god for it, can you imagine the tragedy that will ensue if anyone can simply believe they are doctors and get a job at the hospital?If you want to start a business for example, there will be lots of things you do not know how to do. The logical step will be for you to learn or hire someone to do it. Or how about working out at a gym? You may not know how all the machines work on the first day you step into a gym, but you can learn how.So real inadequacy is knowing what you do not know and then acquiring the skillset through learning or engaging someone to carry out the task.

Self-limiting Beliefs

Next, let’s talk about the real problem here: Self-limiting beliefs. Often, we confuse a lack of skillset for the lack of belief in what we can do, you know this is happening when you think I must get certified in this before I can do x. Self-limiting beliefs are beliefs that stop you from achieving things. They manifest as fears and doubts in your mind especially when you have something real at stake. The deeper the meaning your goals hold for you, the more your brain will manifest these fears and doubts. Self-limiting beliefs come in a few forms because we deal with our own beliefs differently and you can recognise them from the words you choose:

• I do/ don’t – limiting beliefs regarding how we define ourselves
• I can’t – limiting beliefs in how we see ourselves (our self-image)
• I should/shouldn’t – limiting beliefs arising from shame and judgement or out of obligations
• I am/ am not – limiting beliefs that is focused on who we think we are
• Others are / will – limiting beliefs that occurs when we assume that others will judge us

Think about some of the reasons you have chosen to justify why you cannot do something that has the potential to change your life.Tell me if any of these types of reasoning sounds familiar:

• I don’t have enough experience to apply for this job
• I can’t be an actress because I am not tall enough.
• I shouldn’t start a business when the economy is so bad.
• I am not clever enough to start a business.
• My friends and family (others) will laugh at me if I told them I am writing a book.

If you have said or thought about any of these reasons above, congratulations, you are only human.

You can conquer your self-limiting beliefs

When I first started thinking about becoming a general manager at my last job, I thought to myself, I did not have enough experience to be a manager. After all, I was a marketing professional and some of the other not so happy team members asked why is the marketing lady being promoted to a general manager, what are her qualifications? Remarks like this could have totally killed my self-confidence but in my heart, I knew I could do the job and even though I still felt inadequate, I decided to just go for it and surprise, surprise, the world did not end.

Truth is you are going to feel like you are not capable in doing somethings even when you really are and here are some of the exercises you can use to help you conquer these limiting self-beliefs.

Exercise 1:

When you are next faced with something that you are immediately convincing yourself you can’t do, identify what it is exactly you believe about yourself that is stopping you from achieving the things you want.

Next, ask yourself why you believe this to be true about yourself.

Does your reason for the belief sound convincing to you?

Ask yourself what if you did it anyway? What would be the best thing and worst thing that could happen?

In our minds, many situations are amplified beyond truth and reason. Same goes for our beliefs too. We justify the hell out of not doing something, what if we justified our reasons for taking action? We may feel the same fear but at the same time be assured that perhaps the worst that could happen may not be so bad and on the flip side, the best that could happen may be much better than we had initially hoped for.

Exercise 2:

Recall the last time you felt completely confident in your action.

What was the situation and what did you do?

Why do you think you felt confident at the time?

Would you be able to borrow this same sense of confidence and carry it over to your current situation?

All of us have past experiences that tested our courage, our confidence, our capabilities and sometimes simply reminding ourselves that we had accessed the same courage before and can do it again can help us conquer our limiting self-belief.

Exercise 3:

If you had a friend who held the same self-limiting belief as you in a similar situation, what would you say to your friend?

Could you say the same to yourself?

Most of us are quite capable of seeing qualities and capabilities in another person but fail to see the same in ourselves. This exercise will help you see that in fact you can be as encouraging to yourself as you are to your friends.

Ending Note

When we have bouts of self-limiting beliefs, it is not a big deal especially when we can work our way out of it. The sneaky thing about these beliefs though is that when you expose yourself to it enough times, your mind starts to accept it as the truth and over time your self-confidence gets eroded away.

These three exercises above are meant to be used over and over again, don’t think that you just need to apply once and your self-belief will magically inflate, we just do not work that way.

When you start to recognise that these beliefs are made up and that they are stopping you from growing, you can take the necessary steps to encourage your own beliefs in your capabilities.

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