What I Wish I'd Known About Self-Limiting Beliefs Before the Hard Years

Something I keep noticing, in boardrooms, at conferences, in one-on-one conversations with women who are objectively excellent at what they do: there's a gap between how capable they are and how capable they believe themselves to be.

It’s not exactly imposter syndrome, but it is a big part of it, as I mentioned in my last article.

I’m talking about the accumulated belief that we’re not quite ready yet. Every opportunity we pass on because we’re not ‘ready’, every time we keep quiet about an idea because it wasn’t perfect.

No one sits down, looks in a mirror and decides they’re not good enough. Self-limiting beliefs become real to us over time, when they’re not named and challenged. It’s the thought patterns that happen in the background that become the reality we live in.

What self-limiting beliefs actually are

A self-limiting belief is an internalized story about what you're capable of, what you deserve, or what's realistic for someone like you. It’s something running in the background, rather than something you think about consciously.

Recently, I was talking to a young freelancer who had been feeling some economic pressure. She pulled me aside after an event to talk about her feelings about working under another consultant, doing the work and making a fraction of the money, even though it was her skills doing all the heavy lifting.

When I asked her why she didn’t take on clients directly and charge what local consultants were charging the clients (for her to do the work anyway, mind you), she said, without hesitation, ‘I don’t have the experience to charge that much.’

This young woman, doing the work under someone else's name without earning the money she’s worth or getting the credit for the work…somehow doesn’t have enough experience?

She didn’t just decide that one morning. This is a self-limiting belief in action.

Without having a discussion, she may have taken years to realize her worth and start making the money she’s worth.

Because self-limiting beliefs never identify themselves out loud, most women carry them for years without realizing that they're making decisions for them.

Like that freelancer, most women I work with have been carrying those limits for years, steering them away from opportunity and advancement. Deciding which roles they should apply for. What conversations they should avoid. What vision of themselves they thought they could be in a room full of their peers.

Self-limiting beliefs are dangerous because they feel like they are your real, lived experience. It feels like knowing your limits. Knowing your worth. It’s why they’re so effective at keeping you exactly where you are.

What your inner champion is

Most people are familiar with the inner critic. The voice that catalogues the gaps in your experience, amplifies your mistakes, and gets loudest when you’re on your way to something good.

What I work with is the Inner Champion. It’s the counterweight to the Inner Critic, the defence against imposter syndrome. It’s a mindset that you can cultivate and practice over time.

A champion mindset isn't a personality type or a level of confidence you either have or don't.

It's a set of practiced principles that, practiced together, change how you respond to difficulty and how you see yourself within it.

It starts with self-belief, which is the hardest part, built up over time through specific practices so you have a track record of success to look back on and help you identify your self-limiting thoughts.

It's built on resilience, the ability to absorb a hard stretch and come back with your purpose and passion intact, even if the challenges you face knock you back a little from your goals.

It requires authenticity, knowing what you actually value and making decisions from that place rather than from fear or comparison.

It grows through a commitment to continuous learning, treating setbacks as information rather than failures.

None of the Core Principals Of A Champion Mindset are fixed traits you’re either born with or not. They’re skills. And skills can be learned and strengthened over time.

How you build it

The inner champion gets stronger through the same process the inner critic uses, repetition and evidence, just pointed in a different direction.

It starts with learning to recognize self-limiting beliefs as they surface in the moment. When you notice yourself pulling back from an opportunity, softening a position, or deciding you're not quite ready yet, that's the moment to ask whose voice that actually is. Whether it's an accurate reading of the situation or a self-limiting belief running on autopilot.

That kind of awareness is a skill, or a reflex, that’s built up over time.

It's built through consistent practice, with a framework that gives you something to do with what you notice.

When that freelancer goes to a networking event on her own, instead of with the consultants who subcontract her skills, she’s making a decision to challenge her self-limiting beliefs. When she applies for the same opportunities as her consultant clients, to earn the same level of income as the people she works for, she’s challenging her self-limiting beliefs.

It’s a difficult process, but it becomes easier over time. As you collect evidence for your Inner Champion to bring out and show you whenever times get tough. Your Champion Mindset helps you identify those beliefs and put them to the side so you can carry on without them.

Challenge self-imposed limits

Continually challenging the limitations you’ve set for yourself is part of the work toward building up your Champion Mindset. It’s something you can do today.

Write down one thing you believe is a limit you have. Something you've told yourself you're not quite ready for, not quite right for, or not quite capable of. Don't overthink it, because the first thing that comes to mind is usually the one worth looking at.

Now ask yourself whether it's actually true.

Look for the evidence you have that supports it, and think carefully about where that evidence came from.

Then look just as honestly at the evidence that contradicts it, the things you've done, the moments you've handled, the capabilities you've demonstrated, that you might be dismissing without realizing.

Most self-limiting beliefs don't survive honest scrutiny. They survive because we never stop to look at them. They feel like facts because we've repeated them to ourselves so many times, but a thought you've rehearsed often is not the same thing as a truth.

The limit you just wrote down may be real. But it may also be a story that has been making your decisions for a very long time without your permission, and the first step to changing that is deciding to look at it directly.

The next steps

If this exercise brought something up for you, that means there's work worth doing, and you don't have to figure out how to do it alone.

The Champion Women's Program was built for exactly this moment. It's a program for women who are done letting self-limiting beliefs, the inner critic, and the pressures of an uncertain world make their career decisions for them.

Over the course of the program, you'll get the tools to identify and challenge the beliefs that have been holding you back, build your inner champion, and develop a practical framework for the mindset work that high-performing women need and rarely get.

The women who show up to do this work are not the ones who have it all figured out. They're the ones who have decided that figuring it out is worth the effort. If that's you, you can learn more and register at changechamp.ca/champion-womens-program.