The beliefs you carry are nothing more than psychological rules that shape your thoughts and create the filter you perceive reality through.
Limiting beliefs are what keep you confined to a reality that no longer serves you.
They’re what hold you back in your professional and personal life.
The ability to tap into your subconscious mind and rewrite your limiting beliefs is the key to unlocking the life you crave.
This post will provide you with mind-hacking questions designed to help you find the limiting beliefs that are hiding in your subconscious mind.
It will also show you how you can let go of beliefs and replace them with beliefs that serve your highest good.
Everything you see, think, and feel can get traced back to your beliefs
What’s wonderful about this is that you can change anything you’re unhappy about by changing your beliefs.
The problem with this is that beliefs are tricky, and they’re great at hiding from your mind’s conscious awareness.
Without the right tools, your beliefs will hide within your subconscious mind, leaving you unaware of why the same problems and painful patterns keep showing up in your life.
If you don’t have the tools to find old beliefs and then choose the beliefs you want to carry, then you likely have limiting beliefs that are:
- Not yours
- No longer serve the adult version of you
- Making you sick
- Causing painful patterns & cycles to repeat
- Causing you to play small
- Getting in the way of your goals, dreams, desires
- Potentially holding you back from becoming the person you know you’re meant to be
These beliefs were programmed into your subconscious mind during your most formative years.
From when you are in the womb to age seven, you are like a sponge — constantly picking up beliefs, habits, and behaviors that mirror your surroundings.
After age seven, you can still form new beliefs, but these beliefs are formed through habitual repetition.
It’s not your fault that you unknowingly picked up limiting beliefs that don’t serve your highest good, but it is your responsibility to change the ones that are causing pain for you or those around you.
So, let’s dive into the questions you can ask to uncover limiting beliefs that are hiding in your subconscious mind.
Spotting subconscious limiting beliefs
You can start detecting subconscious beliefs by paying attention to how you feel in regular, everyday experiences.
Start observing what emotions you feel, when you feel them, and what you think caused them.
Paying attention to what you regularly feel is so powerful because a feeling is never a random lone wolf; it is always cultivated from within and connected to everything you are.
Emotions are like a portal to the subconscious.
If you want the harness the power to change your subconscious beliefs, then you must learn to connect to your feelings.
If you allow yourself to dive into your feelings without judgment, you’ll be taken directly to what’s buried within.
When people don’t allow themselves to feel, it can take them years (or even lifetimes) to connect their feelings to a belief.
To quickly find a belief that isn’t serving you, all it takes is a trigger, the right questions, a willingness to allow yourself to feel, and a little patience.
The next few sections will run through step-by-step mind-hacking questions that will help you bypass the conscious mind, connect to the subconscious mind, and find your subconscious limiting beliefs.
To effectively make lasting change, you’ll want to bring yourself to a calm state while asking these questions.
You can bring yourself to a calm state by placing your hand on your heart and slowly breathing in and out until in a meditative (calm) state.
This is for three main reasons.
- You’ll want to get your mind into the theta state (or as close to it as possible) The theta state is the brain-state that allows you to learn new information, change beliefs, and create new habits FAST.
- Placing your hand on your heart brings all your awareness to your heart-center. Physiologically, this triggers your vitals to calm down.
- Your heart has an intricate network of complex ganglia, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells in it (little brains) that emit a frequency 60 times stronger than the brain. Meaning your heart is the most powerful source of knowledge and information in your body. You’ll want to tap into your heart for you to receive clear answers upon asking yourself these questions.
Let’s dive in!
Step 1: What story led me here?
The next time you feel a low-vibrational emotion (anxiety/worry, judgment, jealousy, anger, fear, resentment, guilt, shame, blame, impatience, etc.) ask yourself, “what story led me here?”.
The story you tell yourself will always lead to how you feel about an experience, a thing, a person, an event, or even your life.
And your stories are constructed based on the beliefs you carry.
It doesn’t matter whether someone else has triggered this feeling or not because your feelings always come from the same source- YOU.
This isn’t suggesting to ignore how someone is treating you. This is putting the power to change your experience back into your hands.
Asking yourself, “what story led me here,” is an effective way to uncover a belief that’s hiding below the surface of your current awareness.
What often happens when people run through this exercise, is they tend to get stuck justifying why they feel a certain way, rather than looking at the facts of the story.
Be careful with this trap.
Justifications will trap you in your illusions, keeping the unwanted belief hidden beyond your awareness.
When asking and answering, “what story lead me here,” a powerful trick is to pretend you are a scientist and that your life is your greatest experiment.
Scientists can’t let emotions lead to a decision.
They’re just looking for the raw data- they need the facts.
So, when asking, “what story led me here,” what are the facts of your story?
It’s ok if a fact is, “he told me X, which made me feel X”.
That’s a simple fact of your experience.
When you go on (and on) about that one fact, it is a sign that you have fallen into the trap of justifying your own story.
Have fun becoming a scientist.
Imagine that your life is your greatest experiment! And stick to simple facts to avoid falling into illusions.
This step might be all you need to uncover a limiting belief that is keeping you chained to an unwanted feeling or experience.
Remember, the story will lead you to your belief, but sometimes you’ll need to shift your perspective of the story to finally let go of the unwanted belief.
Step 2: Is it true?
After you’ve uncovered the story that led to the emotion, you can then ask the next mind-hacking question- Is this story true?
Is it absolute truth, or are there ANY assumptions involved?
If you are telling a story about the future, you know it is an assumption that you believe will be true about the future.
If there is anyone else involved in the story, you may be inserting an assumption you believe to be true about another person.
For example, are you assuming that someone said X to you, which MUST MEAN he feels X about you?
Do you know that’s what it means on his end, or are you assuming it?
If you’re assuming anything, you know you’ve inserted a belief.
If you want to find the subconscious belief that drove the assumption, you can uncover it by then asking yourself:
- Why am I assuming this is true?
- Where did this assumption come from?
- What happened in the past that makes me think this is true here?
Now, it’s important to note that assumptions can be helpful too.
They are a result of learning from past experiences and exist for a good reason.
This way, we don’t need to keep feeling the pain of getting burned by a hot flame. We can assume that because we see the color of the flame or feel the heat radiating, that we may get burned.
But it’s important to stay aware of why certain assumptions exist, so we don’t become disillusioned from the pain we hold buried deep within.
“Is it true“ can work for countless scenarios.
This opens up the subconscious mind to notice new options.
It might look obvious when written here, but people often weaken their power to change by stating their beliefs as absolute truths.
And for now, IT IS an absolute truth to them.
So, the point of doing this is to bring awareness to an opportunity that my client has to choose differently. It’s an awareness that the opportunity exists somewhere out there, and all they need to do is learn to connect to it.
Asking ‘is it true,’ and uncovering that it’s a belief, is sometimes all you need to bring awareness to a moment and choose a different action.
Meaning, you don’t always need to work with a coach to move past underlying subconscious blocks.
Sometimes the combination of radical self-awareness and the right questions is enough to make a significant change.
To summarize, any time you have created a statement about yourself or your experience that is not absolute truth, you know you have inserted an assumption. When assumptions are involved, you can trace that assumption back to a belief that causes it.
When you uncover the belief as to why you made that assumption, you then have an opportunity to consider if that belief serves you or not.
If it doesn’t serve you, then explore what belief will better serve your highest good. What belief will you replace it with?
How will the new belief radically improve your life?
Let’s continue to another powerful mind-hacking question that will allow you to start opening to higher possibilities…
Step 3: Is this the only possibility?
People often carry elaborate stories as to why they feel stuck in an emotion, job, relationship, etc.
Within the story, there’s usually a limiting belief that is causing the feelings of being stuck.
When you feel stuck, consider the story.
Ask why you’re stuck, and allow the story to unfold.
When the story unfolds, break it down piece by piece. Then ask, “Is this the only possibility?” to each element of the story.
The potential trap here lies in the first initial reaction, which is usually a frustrated, “yes, it’s the only possibility.”.
This practice can be tough to do on your own because your ego will resist your act of challenging its story.
Stay patient through your feelings of resistance.
Awareness that it is natural to feel resistance at this stage might be all you need to progress patiently.
By dissecting your story and asking if each phase is the only possibility, you are triggering your subconscious mind to search for solutions.
Step 4: Transforming limiting beliefs
Shifting limiting beliefs takes acceptance, persistence, and patience.
When you notice a belief, an enlightening question to ask is, “where else is this showing up in my life?”.
Beliefs are never subject to the one area you’ve already gained awareness of. If a belief exists, you can expect that it has already seeped its way into other areas of your life.
You can access additional deep-rooted limiting beliefs by asking your subconscious to show you the other areas this belief is affecting.
In some cases, this question will cause you to connect the dots in a new way, showing you a new perspective that digs deeper into your underlying beliefs.
When asking to see the other areas this belief shows up in, consider how it might affect the ordinary, everyday areas of your life.
You might uncover that a belief affects the way you brush your teeth in the morning. You will be surprised at how much beliefs traverse into your routine actions.
After you have uncovered the belief and can see the different areas it’s showing up in your life, you can then consider what belief you want to replace it with.
What new belief can impact all the areas the old belief is showing up in?
As you consider the new ways this belief will show up, sit with (or meditate on) how much better it feels to hold this new belief.
Imagine a future you that lives in alignment with this new belief. Consider how you’ll act in everyday scenarios. How will you show up in the world? What habits do you have? How do you treat people? What are micro ways you can live in alignment with your new belief in the small everyday moments? How does it feel to hold your new belief in all of these areas? Get SUPER clear on this. Feel it with your whole being.
Paint the picture of how your new belief changes your life. Have fun as you create a future wildly better than your current reality all due to changing this belief! GO BIG.
“Great things are done by a series of small things done together” – Vincent Van Gogh
This article mapped out tactics you can use to uncover limiting beliefs and replace them with higher vibrational beliefs.
Some additional ways you can reprogram limiting beliefs include hypnotherapy, sleep hypnosis, working with an NLP practitioner, working with a Rapid Transformational Therapist, or practicing a deep meditation of FEELING a new belief regularly.