The Best Way to Break a Limiting Belief

Excuses sucks. They keep you small. You become a great coach (and salesperson) when you take someone’s excuses away from them.

When all the excuses are gone, the only thing left to do is grow. 

So how do you remove a client’s excuse? Many people think you have to completely reverse it. If the person is afraid of failing, you somehow flip it into that person being completely jacked up about success.

Yeah, good luck with that.

A better way is not to change the belief, but to add just enough doubt to it that the person starts to - for the first time in ages - actually question their limiting beliefs.

See the problem with beliefs is you believe them. Like 100%. If you believe you’ll fail, it’s as factual to you as the sun rising in the east. The belief is the foundation of your action (or lack thereof) and I want to put a strategic crack into that foundation.

Example - I use a close I call the failure close and it goes like this: 

“You tell me you’re afraid of failing but is that really it? You know failure. You do it all the time. But what about success? You have no idea what that’s like. It’s completely unknown to you and what’s unknown is scary. So you tell me, is it really fear of failure holding you back or is it the fear of success?”

I don’t expect anybody to actually agree with me (sometimes they do, which is awesome but unusual). I do expect them to take an automatic thought - “I do this, I fail” and bring consciousness to it. “Am I really afraid of failure? Or is it something else?” 

This is how you take a closed mind and open it. And an open mind becomes open to a new opportunity. 

Then it’s a matter of removing silly distractions like success and failure and getting at the heart of it - is it right for you? But we can’t have that conversation if a limiting belief will kick out any sane and rational thought.