Your Limitations Are Your Choice

I’m going to tell you the truth, and I hope you’re ready to hear it. You are the limiting factor in your life. You are the bottleneck to achieving your hopes and dreams, the thing that gets in the way of you discovering and living authentic happiness, and the roadblock to feeling fulfilled and significant in the ways you’re contributing to the world. While that might sound like a bad thing it’s actually a really good thing because that means you are in control. You’ve probably heard the expression “mind over matter” before and it’s a powerful thought because the mind knows no limits. Whatever you set your mind to (and choose to believe) sets the boundaries for what you can or can’t do in life. 

Taking this to heart, I’ve been running an experiment on myself for the last few weeks that demonstrates this. Every morning as part of my morning routine I do 10 minutes of stretching. It’s full body, usually top down, but I always end it with a hamstring stretch as that’s the most painful and where I can push myself the most. For as long as I can remember I’ve always been much more flexible in my left leg than my right, and I resolved to believe that’s just how it was. That meant that I accepted the fact that I didn’t need to reach as far when stretching my right leg. 

But then I realized, I was just choosing to tell myself the story that my left leg was more flexible than my right. And in telling myself that story every morning I was okay taking action in a way that actually further separated my flexibility. I was feeding myself a limitation and it was making things worse.

So I changed my story. I started telling myself that I’m working on getting the same flexibility in my right leg as my left. And what that did was it set an intention in my morning stretching to not settle for less. I didn’t allow myself to make excuses when I started feeling more pain. And in repeatedly pushing myself and putting my body in that stretch, it adjusted. Now maybe 4 weeks of doing it, the difference in flexibility between my two legs is only slightly noticeable, and I’m confident my flexibility will be the same within a month.

We constantly tell ourselves limiting stories and beliefs that are designed to keep things how they already are. This is one way, among many, that your mind sabotages your success. Here's the kicker - As long as you choose to neglect how these forces are present in your life, you will be holding yourself back. You will be the roadblock, the bottleneck, and the obstacle.

Defeating self-sabotage will transform your life. The first step to anything is awareness, and if you want to learn more about self-sabotage, and your own self-sabotaging tendencies, then I have something for you. I sat down with a good friend and expert on the topic, Gina Worful, and we had a fascinating conversation all about it. It’s almost half an hour long, and you can start freeing yourself from all the unnecessary weight by learning how it's affecting you in the first place. Access the conversation here: https://grow.selfimprovementdailytips.com/self-sabotage-discussion

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