It’s all about your beliefs now.
If you’ve been following this journey with us the past few weeks, this may very well be the most important and challenging step you take. We work with all kinds of people, across all levels of seniority, strengths and skillsets. They are all incredibly committed to improving themselves and unlocking their potential, but for some reason at this final point they can’t seem to convert all their hard work into action, and essentially find themselves getting stuck.
Why? Thanks to their own limiting beliefs. A lot don’t even know that they have these beliefs - they just feel bloody frustrated that they can’t seem to convert their thinking into action.
By now you’ve done so much work to get to this point; interrogating your why, understanding your values, getting into a growth mindset, mapping out your career so far and planning the next chapters... how do you package all this up to be something meaningful, to really unlock your potential AS WELL as letting go of these limiting beliefs that you may or may not know you have?
You have two tasks to complete:
We want you to pull everything you’ve learned about yourself up until this point into one cheat sheet, for want of a better term. This is basically “you” on a page!
If over the weeks you’ve put the hard work in - this is the reward! You can clearly articulate who you are, what you’re innately good at, what environments you flourish in, and what you’re looking for next.
You can use our template or draw your own house, and then start to fill in the things that make you who you are. As you can see, it all starts with ‘your why’, the foundation of the house. Without a solid understanding of your purpose and what drives you, you can’t build success - it’s as simple as that.
Once you’ve got this in place, it’s time to write down the key values that will guide you through your career - this is the front door of your home, it sets the tone for everything else. On the first floor, you’ve got what you’ve done so far - your career map highlights.
Then we build up with the insights you’ve learned from career planning about what your next steps should be. Your strengths will form the roof and outside of your house - they’re what you will lead with as you move forward.
This one-pager will be an incredibly powerful resource in recognising and making choices as they present themselves to you, and will essentially help you make the most out of your working life.
At this point, credit where credit is due - you’ve just done something that some people take their whole lives to do. You now know who you are and what you want. Congratulations!
Okay, the next step – let me be really clear, this part is critically important but it takes a certain level of bravery. It’s not easy, but I can say with certainty that the rewards will speak for themselves.
Identify and let go of your limiting beliefs
Limiting beliefs are incredibly challenging to identify as they are so ingrained in who you are. They are the stories that you’ve been telling yourself for so long that they have become your reality.
There’s a couple of ways to identify if you have a limiting belief. One strategy is to ask those who know you the best whether they have seen anything that is holding you back in terms of your belief set. Perhaps you assume you’re bad with money and so you never attempt to save. Maybe you tell yourself you’re not good at learning new things. Once you have a view on this, think about what advice you would give your closest friend who had this barrier. Sometimes we are freer with offering objective (and kinder) advice to our friends than ourselves. Your limiting beliefs can be anything - but the most important thing to realise is that they’re usually not grounded in truth.
Another good approach is to engage a coach. Some people that come to us because they want someone completely independent and objective to help them assess what’s holding them back, and that approach has its merits as well. Through coaching, we are able to unlock what their limiting belief is and why they believe what they do. We work through why the belief is limiting their potential, what their proof points are for this limiting belief, and how they can work on disbanding it so they can move forward and realise their potential. It doesn’t need to be an expensive exercise - though from those that we have worked with, it’s proven that your future self will thank you for it! If this is something that you’re like to do, book a session with us here to get started.
The reason why we are challenging and pushing you on this is that we want you to live a fulfilled life. You’ve essentially created a picture of your future and we want to make sure you move towards it without any fake narratives holding you back.
For those of you who may not feel you have any limiting thoughts, at the very least we hope reading this will make you more aware if at some point they do creep in.
