Unchain your dream
Are your self-limiting beliefs holding you back? After years of turning down career-changing opportunities, Heidi Scrimgeour sought expert help
work
Promotion is not for me; I struggle with responsibility anyway; my boss doesn’t even like me…Welcome to the perpetual soundtrack inside my head. These negative thoughts have been the backdrop to my working life for the past 20 years. They are so familiar that, until recently, I assumed that they plague everyone.
But that’s not true – these are not ‘normal’ thoughts, says psychoanalyst and cognitive hypnotherapist Steve McKeown. These are selflimiting beliefs, and they have been holding me back in my professional life for far too long. The good news is that there is a way to clear my professional future of these mental roadblocks.
Making assumptions
‘The first selflimiting beliefs we develop, in early childhood, are low selfesteem and social anxiety,’ says McKeown. ‘Beliefs and selflimiting beliefs act as a rule book to how we filter and react to the world around us,’ he says. ‘A belief is an assumed truth, and our selflimiting beliefs serve to protect us from being judged by others.’ We each have our own selflimiting beliefs, but the common ones are:
● I’m not management material