Identifying Obstacles: Understanding Excuses & Limiting Beliefs

Are you guilty of making excuses? It’s easy to get caught up in excuse-making when we allow complacency, fear, or insecurity to drive us. They will only ever hold you back. 

A limiting belief is generally influenced by a circumstance, situation, or event that left you powerless. Both excuse-making and limiting beliefs can hold you back and hinder you from making progress. 

Limiting beliefs are often unconscious; they are there underneath everything driving your actions, thoughts, and words. They are quietly shaping your reality and creating the gap between what you say you want and what you do. 

Please think about that for a moment. Imagine that instructions or values are embedded deep in your unconscious mind. This set of instructions will determine the thoughts you think, the words you speak, and the actions you follow up with. Your experiences and the situations that you have lived through created that unconscious set of instructions. You made that programming; you embedded it, even if it was cold. 

If you have had overwhelmingly positive experiences throughout your life, then you are empowered by a positive set of instructions. However, if you have been through a lot of trauma, experienced a lot of negativity, or had a difficult life. There’s a good chance those experiences have tarnished your instructions and may create a negative view of the world. That’s where limiting beliefs come from. 

Sometimes, it’s easy to spot patterns of limiting beliefs, negative excuses, and emotions because they permeate your every thought and conversation. But sometimes, they can be challenging to pinpoint because we layer the reason in some form of truth in those cases. It makes it difficult to argue against those excuses because there is evidence to hold up as truth.