Beliefs vs. Limiting Beliefs.....................

Sitting in a 2 day leadership meeting at the "day job" this week eventually turned to this topic; the idea of building a culture of belief and confidence vs.the oposite, where a belief of not succeeding is widely accepted and therefore, realized.

The example used to clarify the point was Roger Bannister and the under 4 minute mile he logged many years ago setting a world record. Until him, it was widely believed that no man could run a mile under 4 minutes; it was said that it "can't be done". And yet, after he shattered this milestone for the first time, many have hit this high level of performance since. Great success spawns great success and vice versa. Once it was proven that it could be done, it set a new benchmark for others to "believe" and acheive.

Belief: Beliefs are about how we think things really are, what we think is really true and what therefore we expect as likely consequences that will follow from our behavior.


Limiting Belief: Behavior is not what you want, but you think you cannot change it. Each of us carries core limiting beliefs inside of that make us believe we are not good enough. LImiting beliefs can be self imposed or imposed upon you by others.

So how does this all track back to Steelfit and our self proclaimed "Pursuit"?

I can think back to many days in the gym where I uttered the word "can't".......... "can't do a muscle up or can't do kipping pull ups", etc. These self imposed limiting beliefs created mental road blocks that required a lot of energy and influence from others to eventually overcome. In another situation that comes to mind, two friends of mine hade been hooked on Crossfit for well over a year, but when it came time for pull ups, the band free variety was elusive. In both cases, they simply said, "they can't do it". Well, with some coaching one of them broke the barrier, followed quickly by the other........funny how that works.

There are shelves and shelves of books written on the topic of Limiting Beliefs vs. Empowering Beliefs. Lessons to be learned for sure. A couple of take aways for me personally 1) Be concious of limiting beliefs that may have been imposed upon you by others.....we all have the power to make our own beds; don't let others tell you what you can't do 2) Surrounding yourself with like minded folks has and always will have benefits and will support achieving higher levels of performance.

For Steelfit, our pursuit of the perfect pull up is a belief and a passion....nothing limiting and nobody to hold us back.