Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,31

yourself back with your self-talk and spending some time to get to the source of these beliefs is extremely liberating, because once you’re aware, you can begin to realize that these aren’t facts about you, but rather opinions. And there’s a very good chance that those opinions are wrong.

Once you identify the voices in your head that are focusing on what you can’t do, start talking back to them. When you find yourself thinking, “I always screw up this sort of thing,” counter with, “Just because I haven’t always been good at this in the past doesn’t mean that I can’t be great at it now. Keep your opinions to yourself.”

Key 2: Get to the Facts

One of the fundamental tyrannies of limiting beliefs is that, in so many cases, they’re just plain wrong. Are you really terrible at speaking in public? Are you really bad at leading a group? Are you really the least interesting person in the room wherever you are? What’s the evidence to support that? How many times have you actually been in these situations, and what have the results been?

One of the most pernicious things about limiting beliefs is that they play so heavily on our emotions. When you come up against a limiting belief, you’re likely to find those beliefs warring—and usually winning—against your rational self. But how much of this self-talk has a basis in reality? Think about your experiences speaking in public (an extraordinarily common fear, by the way). Rather than focusing on how you felt in these instances, consider how things went. Were you booed off the stage? Did people come up to you afterward to laugh at you and tell you how awful you were? Did your boss sit you down the next day to say that you might want to consider a career where you never had to utter a word?

I’m guessing none of these things happened. Instead, it’s likely that your audience felt connected to what you were saying. If it was in a professional setting, maybe they were taking notes, and you almost certainly taught them something. Does this mean that your next speech should be at TED? Of course not. But it definitely means that you’re likely much better at conveying information to a group than that voice in your head is telling you that you are.

And then there’s this question to ask: How much of my perceived poor performance was because my self-talk just wouldn’t leave me alone? This is a real issue for many people. They’ll be in the middle of doing something in which they lack confidence, and the inner critic will become so distracting that they can’t focus on what they are doing . . . and therefore don’t do it very well. This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to learn to face down and quiet your limiting beliefs. The better you are at this, the better you’ll be at keeping down distractions during your biggest growth challenges.

So, when you’re examining the facts behind your limiting beliefs, be sure to consider two things: whether there is in reality any evidence to prove that you are truly hampered in this area and whether even that evidence was tainted by the noise in your head.

Key 3: Create a New Belief

Now that you’ve given your limiting beliefs a name and now that you’ve carefully examined the reality of those beliefs, it’s time to take the most essential step—to generate a new belief that is both truer than the LIEs you’ve been accepting and beneficial to the limitless you that you are creating.

You’re going to see this process at work in the next chapter, but let’s take it for a spin right now. Let’s say that one of your limiting beliefs is that you always come up short at the most important moments in your life. Having identified that as a limiting belief, you’ve then taken the step of examining the facts. What you realize is that, while you have occasionally succumbed to nervousness in pressure-packed moments, very few of these instances have been disastrous for you and, upon examination, you can think of several times when you “came through in the clutch.” In fact, now that you really think about it, you’ve succeeded way more often than you’ve faltered.

So, now it’s time to create a new belief. In this case, your new belief would be that no one triumphs at the most critical juncture 100 percent of the time, but that you