The comfort zone is the playground of limiting beliefs. We don’t want to think about stepping outside our comfort zone because people talk about it a lot that way and that can make us feel isolated and fearful.

I talk about expanding our comfort zone, you know taking baby steps, changing things, doing something different each day, just to push that comfort zone out further and to do something different. One of the things I say about fear is that most of the time when you are afraid, it’s not whether you are going to get hurt or killed, it’s a fear of what others might think: what if I look silly, what if I’m a nuisance, and all those sort of things. It’s not a real fear. It feels real, but it’s not because you know rationally when you’re out of the situation that it’s a silly thing to worry about. Very often you will convince yourself that next time you won’t act like that again, but then you go into a similar situation and the fear surfaces automatically and you experience the fear again.

Think of fear or the fear signal you get as a traffic light system.

You’ve got red, amber and green; a lot of people go to the red stoplight as soon as they feel the fear.

Before a full-scale panic and retreat sets in, learn to see it as an amber light instead and make a decision. Think about it; is it something you really don’t want to do, or do you actually wish deep down that you could do it? You know the situation where you tell yourself you want to do something and that other voice comes in, your inner critic, and reminds you or tells you that you can’t do it or shouldn’t do it because …

However, if it’s something you really don’t want to do, and both you and your inner voice agree, then go to red. Don’t do it; you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.

If it’s something you know deep down you want to do, perhaps it’s one of those things where you wish you were different and could do it, then don’t take that fear as a signal to beware, but take it as a signal to be aware. Be aware – this is something different or new and you need to pay attention, focus and apply any necessary skills to enable you to navigate through it and learn by the outcomes you get. Quite often, that fear signal is not really a fully-fledged fear, but an uncomfortable feeling because you don’t have a pattern or strategy in your mind for approaching this particular activity with confidence.

It’s like that driving lesson again. The one when you’re sweating and thinking, “I’m not going to remember all this”, it’s just because you’re not used to it, you’ve not done it before, or you’ve not done it enough times yet.

Take that fear as a signal to be aware, think “This is something new, I’m going to have to pay attention, it’s going to feel uncomfortable until I get used to it.”

So everything has a pattern, all of our fears are patterns, and you either have to chip away at the limiting beliefs (covered in the next chapter), or change them, or get so much motivation that they pale into insignificance. How could that work?

Well, for instance, the fear of flying. Let’s say someone has a fear of flying and they can’t get on a plane. Yet, if someone puts a gun at their head, they’ll get on a plane! Perhaps they just haven’t got enough motivation in that example! It’s so often not that we can’t do things; it’s that we won’t do them. We will be looking at that very soon but, before we do, let’s just finish up our thoughts on fear and the comfort zone.

So, take this “fear signal” that comes up when you are outside your comfort zone as a signal to be aware and not beware: that’s what it’s all about, the amber light. Once you are able to hold at the amber light and consider situations, you can then decide if you go to red and stop, or green and proceed. Often, when you proceed, you still can feel some of that fear and carry on regardless.

Take, for instance, Jonny Wilkinson, the English rugby player; he’s done a number of big kicks at the end of the game that will determine whether England wins or loses the World Cup. No pressure there then.

A radio interviewer asked him, “Jonny, do you ever get scared before you do those kicks?”

Jonny replied, “Yes, every time, but I know that fear is part of the process.”

You need to realize that sometimes fear and feeling uncomfortable is part of the process if you’re doing something different, no matter how simple it is, and knowing that can help you proceed from the amber light to the green light; from there, things can be so different.

Before we move on to looking at limiting beliefs, I want to remind you briefly about confidence and what I said earlier in this book.

People use the word confidence all the time without really thinking about what it is.

It’s your degree of certainty about an outcome, about how you’ll perform, how you’ll feel in a situation; a lack of confidence means you’ve got an amount of uncertainty about a situation or the outcome. One of the keys, as I mentioned earlier, is expecting a good outcome by having a good way of thinking about it – a good strategy – or changing what you believe about yourself or a situation. Perhaps both a great strategy and changing some negative beliefs you may have.

Limiting Beliefs

Limiting beliefs are really just bad strategies, the person who sees a spider and panics, just has a bad strategy; the person who says, “I can’t give presentations”, “I can’t make cold calls” or whatever, just has a bad strategy running in their head. If you think about it, most of these things we can see other people doing and the only thing that’s different, if you’ve got the same skill knowledge, is just how you’re thinking about it on a mindset level, your belief, confidence and motivation level.

So let’s look at limiting beliefs, which are the beliefs we have about ourselves, what we need to do, the world in general, etc. that limit us from taking action or being the best we can be.

When we say things to ourselves, it can have a huge impact on how we feel about ourselves and our ability to progress and change.

For instance, if there is a situation where you keep getting results you don’t like, you might be saying something like one of the following to yourself about it:

“Oh, I’m just stupid and don’t know why I even attempt to do things.”

OR:

“I just don’t know how to do this yet.”

Which of them would you most likely use?

It makes a huge difference to how your mind operates afterwards, and to the likelihood that you will ever be motivated to learn any new skills necessary.

So, quite often limiting beliefs can be changed if you attempt to force yourself through things; you find out you can do them. Likewise, even somebody else doing something can change your beliefs.

Quite often, if somebody else does something you don’t believe is possible, it can give you the belief that maybe you can do it too.

It happened with the four-minute mile; no-one believed a human could run a mile in under four minutes. Then Roger Bannister did it and over the following twenty four months, six other people did it too. The belief was broken and others were then able to do what previously seemed, or was believed to be, impossible.

You can have personal beliefs about yourself and what you’re capable of, and you can have global beliefs about people or the world in general.

“I can’t speak in public” is a personal belief.

“Teenagers these days are all trouble” is a global belief.

“Money is the root of all evil” is also a global limiting belief.

A lot of people often don’t appreciate these global limiting beliefs actually exist, but these common expressions heard all the time can be held at a subconscious level with people and it stops their progress.

I worked with a lady who was working for a large London legal firm. She was a senior manager who had an opportunity to become a partner but she said she couldn’t go for it, something was holding her back. When we drilled down in this group session with her, we found out that she had two reasons. First, she had this image inside her mind like a banner saying, “I don’t deserve success”. It was going on inside her head, which wasn’t really ideal, but it turned out it was something her mum had said to her at one stage. The other thing she had was this belief she had been taught as a young child that “Money was the root of all evil”.

Now one way we can deal with global limiting beliefs when we notice them is this: if you say “Money is the root of all evil”, it must mean that the opposite is also true, “The lack of money is the root of all good”. Now we know that’s not the case, so, when you do something like that, you can bring two beliefs together actually dispelling the original one and making them clash with each other because they conflict. Both beliefs can’t be true so, therefore, perhaps neither are.

Limiting beliefs can impact your life so much and hold you back from doing things you could actually do if you changed those particular beliefs.

So you need to think about what the biggest obstacle to your success is; what is the biggest limiting belief that’s holding you back? As I mentioned before, normally it’s ourselves and something we believe about ourselves, or what we believe about something we’re going to do.

One of the things we need to do is to get back to being more like young children, because our brains love stories and we love pretending. That’s how we learnt when we were young; you may remember my bigheaded bookstore visualization in Part One. So if there are calls you don’t like making, then go pick the phone up, keep your hand on the receiver and pretend you’re making a call.

It sounds stupid, but it helps. You get different emotions attached to the action of going over and picking up the phone, which at the moment has got some fear emotion, and you can start to chip away at that if you get used to taking the action in a non-fearful way. You can change the association; or find a bit of music that really makes you feel empowered or feel good, play it, and then go and make the call. Dial while the music is playing and just as they answer, pause the music. That sort of thing can easily flip over your emotional state to get you to do that thing; then you should find, after you’ve done it a few times, you start to associate different feelings with that experience. In NLP terms, this is called an “anchor”, something that links you back to an emotion or memory with an associated emotion.

On one occasion, before I had finally overcome my own fear of public speaking, I was scheduled to be on stage to speak to a large audience one Sunday morning. All day Saturday I was all right. However, when I woke up on Sunday morning, all I could think was “I can’t do this, there’s no way I can do this! What am I going to say? I know, I’m ill … no, what am I going to say?”

All these negative thoughts of doom went through my mind, but I had to put the brakes on and say, “Stop, hold on, slow down, there is a part of you Mark that wants to be able to do this, that would love to be able to do this.”

I basically thought, “I’m going to have to do something”. So, I got my MP3 player, put on some music that made me feel I could do anything, and it really worked. After about ten minutes, not only was I exhausted from jumping around the hotel room like a lunatic, I was ready to go and do the talk. However, I realized one important thing – and this is important about so many things in life – you have to break the patterns that lead to these emotions.

You see how I used music there to change my state. At the time, I was in such a panic that I didn’t have time to start thinking about some of the things we’re going to explore in the next chapters. I just knew that I quickly needed to change my emotions and so I found music was the quickest way; a quick fix.

Shortly, we will learn an easy process to start breaking down those limiting beliefs where you say you can’t do something. First though, let’s take a look at that inner voice and the language we use when we talk to ourselves in our thoughts.

We want to use that voice as an inner coach as opposed to the inner critic that it tends to be for most of us if we don’t train it properly.