How your limiting beliefs are holding you back

Mr. Mint

The Backstory

In high school, I found track and field as a result of an injury I sustained during the basketball season. I “caught” a deflected pass between my pinky and my ring finger which spread them laterally away from each other a few inches leaving my pinky dangling uselessly off a broken hand bone. With the baseball season just around the bend, a centerfielder isn’t worth much if they can’t throw or swing a bat. It was time for a change.  

A few of my friends had already quit the baseball team and joined the track team. They told me I didn’t even need hands to high jump and hurdle. They were right! On day one I began to learn how to hurdle in a cast. When I got out of the cast I started throwing the javelin. It stuck and I ended up throwing in college and later professionally. 

A Limiting Belief is Born

It has always been trendy for throwers to say that they hate running. High school throwers stereotypically get into throwing because it does not involve running. Throwers tend to be on the bigger side and not particularly suited to logging mileage. Nike even produced a line of shirts that said “Running Sucks” and distributed them to their sponsored throwers. It was fun. 

While training to make my second Olympic team, I lived at the Olympic Training Center. Housing and meals were paid for which was a pretty incredible FI hack before I knew what FI was. Future world champion and Olympic medalist shot putters would routinely stop part way up a flight of stairs for some “heavy breathing” which involved clutching the handrail while breathing significantly more heavily than necessary and wiping real or fake sweat from their brow. The 30 second walk from the dorms to the dining hall was considered “cardio”. 

Javelin throwers require significantly more running (mostly sprinting) in their training than the other throwers because their event takes place on a runway like a jumping event as opposed to the other throws that take place in a concrete ring about 8 feet wide. But make no mistake, the javelin throwers got swept up in hating running as well. 

While we knew the importance of sprint training to our performance, we considered anything over 150 meters to be torture. How did those maniac distance runners settle in for their 18 mile long runs? Or 800m repeats? I liked sprinting but running was for chumps.

A Limiting Belief Tested

Flash forward to 2020. It’s been four years since my retirement from throwing. Clorox stock  prices soared. Reasonable people debated the merits of holding their breath as they walked by other people. Surfers all over California were being chased along beaches for breaking the lockdown. Brave Instacart workers delivered the groceries to people who disinfected them before bringing them into their homes. The proverbial dookie had hit the fan.

It was in this weightroom-less, muscle-shriveling, strength training wasteland that I learned a valuable lesson. My wife and I went on a run. The next day we ran the same loop but timed it this time. Every day became the day we’d run the loop faster or pick a new loop to run. To my complete disbelief, I liked running.

To see our neighborhood on foot was amazing! We ran across bridges over rivers,  through parking lots, behind the police station, past the recycling facility. It was mundane but exhilarating at the same time.

A Limited Belief Analyzed

Had I been lying to myself all those years about hating running? Or had I changed? Either way, I like running and I never could have imagined that just a few years before. 

Looking back it’s  clear that believing that I hated running was a limiting belief. Something that I told myself about myself. Something that I believed because why would I not trust myself? No different than believing that I have bad luck with technology (which I definitely do) but here I am hunting and pecking a blog post. Or believing I couldn’t ever become financially independent on a coaching salary. No different than believing I couldn’t ever make more in my business than in my day job.

I no longer trust myself so much when I hold a belief that is limiting. I remember how often I have proved myself wrong when the opportunity presented itself for me to do so. 

Smokey Bear: Only You Can Prevent Limiting Beliefs

If you’re holding limiting beliefs about yourself, it’s time to stop. How ludicrous would it be to tell yourself that your interests are toy trucks, dollhouses and snuggling with mommy because that’s what you liked as a toddler? Or to believe that you won’t be a good mother because in 1997 that family across the street never hired you again to babysit after the first time? 

It’s time that you stop blindly trusting the things that you tell yourself about yourself. You have the ability to change over time. At 30 you’re not the same person that you were at 15 and at 45 you will be dramatically different than you were at 30. The more you examine your beliefs about yourself, the more you can recognize your limiting beliefs.

Think about the last time something happened to you that you thought would end your life as you knew it. A poor performance review from your boss. Getting laid off from a job. A break up with a partner.  Slipping out a fart you thought would be silent but deadly on a first date that turned out to be an ass nova. In the moment your brain tells you, “YOUR LIFE IS OVER” yet a few months later you are bouncing back or you might be able to look back on the situation and laugh. 

The Inverse of the Limiting Belief

Hold on to your hats and get ready to have an inverse negative reaction infarction. If our limiting beliefs can be so detrimental to positive change in our lives, then it might also be the case that telling ourselves positive stories about ourselves could encourage positive change. 

During my transition from collegiate athlete to post-collegiate (professional) athlete, I read a lot of sports psychology books.  One book recommended writing down three things that I struggled with as an athlete. I came up with this:

1. I struggle to be independent at meets since I am used to having my coach there at all times 
2. I struggle to stay confident when I have injuries or other setbacks that knock me off my plan
3. I say terrible negative things to myself that I would never say to another human being when I am performing below my expectations for myself

Then it recommended flipping these things on their heads and writing how you want to be in relation to the struggles.  I came up with this:

1. I am independent
2. I am confident
3. I am positive with myself
4. I am a fucking unstoppable beasthouse 

I’m going to call these ‘empowering beliefs’. I added the fourth one to get me extra fired up. The book recommended writing these phrases somewhere I would see them  every day in the morning. I wrote them on the bathroom mirror  and got a ton of shit from my roommates. 

The Outcome

So did it work? You bet your ass it worked, I made an Olympic team that year! In the transition from collegiate athlete to post-collegiate,  I competed at multiple meets without my coach present and still stayed focused and excelled. I was confident (most of the time). I was able to identify when I was going into a negative self-talk spiral by mentally slapping myself in the face and saying to myself “don’t say that shit about me!” 

It’s not going to be perfect, but remember; perfect is the enemy of improvement. Start identifying and testing your limiting beliefs and developing your empowering beliefs and let me know if it works for you too. 

Disclaimer: FI is easier to achieve for some than it is for others. There are a million challenges that people are up against like: poverty, substance abuse, caring for sick or disabled family members, racism, sexism, consumer debt, lack of education or low wages.  There is no doubt that there are many people who are severely disadvantaged and these disadvantages can slow or even prohibit people from achieving FI and yet, the tenets of FI can help everyone get to a better place in their lives.