Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,32

should be proud of yourself for how many times you’ve performed at your best when the pressure was highest. This new belief completely supplants the old belief, is fully supported by the facts, and gives you a much healthier mindset the next time a critical situation comes along.

I have one more tool for you to use here. I’ve spoken to many experts over the years, and the conversation often comes back to the same thing: as long as you believe that your inner critic is the voice of the true you, the wisest you, it’s always going to guide you. Many of us even use phrases like, “I know myself, and . . .” before announcing a limiting belief.

But if you can create a separate persona for your inner critic—one that is different from the true you—you’ll be considerably more successful at quieting it. This can be enormously helpful and you can have fun with it at the same time. Give your inner critic a preposterous name and outrageous physical attributes. Make it cartoonish and unworthy of even a B-grade movie. Mock it for its rigid dedication to negativity. Roll your eyes when it pops into your head. The better you become at distinguishing this voice from the real you, the better you’ll be at preventing limiting beliefs from getting in your way.

THE POSSIBILITIES BECOME LIMITLESS

Now that you know how to conquer your limiting beliefs, you can start to bring your positive mindset to bear on your quest to become limitless. That might sound like an audacious plan, but there’s lots of evidence to support the connection between mindset and accomplishment.

One of my podcast guests, James Clear, the New York Times best-selling author of Atomic Habits who you will meet again later in this book, wrote about a study performed by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, a positive psychology researcher at the University of North Carolina. He prefaced their conversation by underscoring what negative emotions do to us, using the example of encountering a tiger in the forest. “Researchers have long known that negative emotions program your brain to do a specific action,” he noted. “When that tiger crosses your path, for example, you run. The rest of the world doesn’t matter. You are focused entirely on the tiger, the fear it creates, and how you can get away from it.”6 The point that Clear is making is that negative emotions drive us to narrow the range of what we are capable of doing. It’s all about getting away from the (metaphorical) tiger, and nothing else matters. If we let negative emotions (such as limiting beliefs) control us, we’re regularly operating in survival mode and therefore confined to a reduced range of possibilities.

What Dr. Fredrickson discovered is that a positive mindset leads to precisely the opposite result. She created an experiment where participants were divided into five groups and presented with film clips. The first group saw clips that elicited joy. The second saw clips that elicited contentment. The third saw clips that generated fear and the fourth clips that generated anger. The fifth group was the control group.

After they’d seen the clips, the participants were asked to imagine similar situations to what they just saw and how they would react to these situations. They were then asked to fill out a form that had 20 prompts that began with, “I would like to.” The people who experienced fear and anger wrote the fewest responses, while those who experienced joy and contentment listed far more than even the control group. “In other words,” Clear noted, “when you are experiencing positive emotions like joy, contentment, and love, you will see more possibilities in your life.”7

What’s also essential to note is that the benefits of a positive mindset extend well beyond the experience of a positive emotion. Clear offers this example:

A child who runs around outside, swinging on branches and playing with friends, develops the ability to move athletically (physical skills), the ability to play with others and communicate with a team (social skills), and the ability to explore and examine the world around them (creative skills). In this way, the positive emotions of play and joy prompt the child to build skills that are useful and valuable in everyday life. . . . The happiness that promoted the exploration and creation of new skills has long since ended, but the skills themselves live on.8

Fredrickson refers to this as the “broaden and build” theory because positive emotions broaden your sense of possibilities and open