Have you ever stopped to wonder why you always seem to self-sabotage your success or any progress you might have made with things that are important to you?
There is a lot more to it than it just being “something you do.” My question to you is, WHY is it just “something that you do…?”
Today I’d like to chat about the “upper limit problem” that all of us experience. I learnt this from the amazing book, “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks. This book was recommended to me by my cosmic co-pilot Rebekah Kiger.
How much data…???!!!
Every single second, we are overloaded with data. What we see, hear, touch, smell, feel and experience. In fact, life presents us with 126 million bits of data per second! 🤯 And because we cannot consciously process anywhere near that amount, our unconscious mind helps us out…
Its job is to filter all the 126 million bits of data by either;
- Deleting
- Distorting
- Generalising
And then it feedbacks to your conscious mind, 1.6 million bits of data so that you’re able to actually function and concentrate. Clever hey..? 🤓
Your perception is your projection
If you want success, abundance or to generate more happiness in your life externally, it has got to come from within first 👈🏾 how many times have you heard me say that!?! 🤣
Your internal model of the world is made up of your identity, values, beliefs and how confident you feel in your capabilities as a person.
Take a look at the transformation triangle below:
The ironic thing is, everywhere else on the internet, this triangle is upside down. Not literally but figuratively. Everywhere I’ve seen it, “behaviour” is at the bottom as the foundation and spirituality and identity are at the top…
I see this as completely backward – unless I’m misinterpreting it the wrong way, which is entirely possible!
Our circumstances do not create our life experience, it’s how we perceive the circumstances, that create our experience.
And how we perceive life depends entirely on our identity, values and beliefs…! Get it?
So it HAS to start within, meaning for us to change our behaviours and ultimately our lives, we HAVE to first change our identity.
This is why most people can’t change long term. They are focusing on and using all of their energy by will powering their way to change their behaviour when they really need to do to create lasting change is to change their IDENTITY.
If you change your identity, you change yourself at a cellular level. You have the power.
How to change your identity
We need to go deeeeep for this my love, let’s peel back the layers and start asking yourself questions that you’ve most likely never asked yourself before…
✍🏼 What do you want?
Think big here. If anything was possible and I had a magic wand, what would you want to be different in your life?
✍🏼 Who do you need to become to be the person who already has what you want?
✍🏼 What empowering beliefs would you need to believe about yourself and the world?
✍🏼 Looking at your answers above, now write down all of the reasons why you can’t do that or why that’s just not possible for you.
EG – I will give you a real-life example of a few of my old ones:
✍🏼 If anything was possible what would I want?
“I’d love to be totally happy with who I am and to love myself unconditionally. I would love to feel proud and confident in and of my body. I’d love to feel sexy. I’d love to eat what I wanted when I wanted without guilt. I’d also love to be healthy, strong and fit.”
✍🏼 What kind of person would I need to be to get what I want?
“I would need to be the kind of person who generally didn’t give a shit about what anyone else thought about them. I would need to just be myself without worrying about what others would think about me. I would eat whatever I wanted without worrying if it fit my macros. I would be happy with my body, feel sexy and be proud of myself for taking care of myself physically, emotionally and mentally. I would be fit and healthy and have loads of energy. I would be an inspiration to others.”
✍🏼 What empowering beliefs would I need to believe about myself and the world?
“I would believe that I can be fit, healthy and feel sexy without having to be on a diet forever to get and then to stay small. I would believe that showing up as my unapologetic self would help and inspire others to do the same. I would believe that I get paid in abundance in my business just by being me. I would believe that my cellulite and “flaws” are part of being human and that they actually make me, me.”
✍🏼 Looking at your answers above, now write down all of the reasons why you can’t do that or why that’s just not possible for you.
“You can’t be fit and healthy without being slim.
It’s impossible for me to like my body and to feel sexy without losing weight first.
I can’t show up as myself because people will think I’m weird or “too much.”
I can’t get paid just for being me, that’s ridiculous!
I hate my cellulite, how could I ever look at it positively?”
✍🏼 Now it’s your turn…
Outdated limiting beliefs
All of the reasons you gave for why you can’t be the person you’d love to be are all outdated limiting beliefs, my friend!
If you take a look at the word BELIEF it actually has the word LIE within it. 👀 There is no truth when it comes to beliefs. We only believe the things we believe to be true because we have been taught these beliefs since we were born and our parents have been taught them too throughout generations and through our ancestors.
“REAL” truth is true for all people all of the time, like gravity or the law of attraction – they are science. Anything else, no matter how true it feels, is not the truth, it’s simply a belief.
The most exciting thing about all of this is that you literally get to choose what you want to believe. If you get to choose to believe things that empower you to live your best life, full of freedom, liberation and bursting with self-love, then why wouldn’t you…? 🤷🏽♀️
So start to challenge those limiting beliefs that you have. Question them. Find evidence against them being true for you. You can do this by asking yourself questions such as:
“Where /who did I learn that from?”
“Is that the actual truth?”
“Is believing that empowering me or disempowering me?”
Find people who are living the life you want to live. Who have chosen to believe the opposite of your limiting beliefs.
Find evidence to support the new empowering belief.
Choose to believe that for yourself.
What are your values?
✍🏼 Let’s take a look at your values… what are your values?
✍🏼 Are your values truly in alignment with who and what you want to be? Why or why not?
✍🏼 Can you align your values with the goals you have?
For example, if you’re goal is to be happy with your body and live in food freedom and your current values are:
- Persistence
- Control
- Dedicated
- Perfection
- Commited
How can you line those values up with your goal?
Most women who come to me(and my past self) have continuously gone “all-in” on a diet with those kind of values driving them…hello diet-binge cycle!!!
Instead of attempting to completely change who we are overnight, we can use these values to our advantage. If we allowed the process of living in food and body freedom to be driven by these values – persistence, dedication and commitment – no matter how difficult or uncomfortable it turned out to be, we would be gifting ourselves a different reality. A new paradigm. By arriving in food and body freedom through not giving up on the process and taking control of your mindset to do the inner work needed t make the shift.
No matter how committed you are – dieting doesn’t “work” long term because you’re fighting against your own biology. The action and inner shifts needed to live in food and body freedom are working with your biology… And your biology will always win in the end.
Are you self-sabotaging or expanding?
Take a look at where you tend to self-sabotage in your life. If you were already BEING the best version of yourself, what would you do differently? Would you choose self-growth and expansion over self-sabotage?
✍🏼 What part of your identity, values and beliefs are holding space for and allowing self-sabotage?
✍🏼 Why is that?
Take the time to journal and then act on all of the questions I’m offering you today and you will radically change your life!
Signs of self-sabotage
- Worrying
- Over critical
- Blaming others
- Deflecting compliments
- Externalise an internal problem. EG, I didn’t do it good enough – whats underneath that trigger could be “I’m not good enough as a person.”
Upper limit problem
Now let’s get to the root of our self-sabotaging behaviour, shall we? Which is our “Upper Limit Problem.” This is our inability to receive, accept and then to hold pleasure, abundance, success, love and happiness. It all comes down to self-worth.
If we feel guilty or “bad” for experiencing deep love, kindness and happiness then we need to work on the capacity to “have what we want and know that we are worthy of it and more.”
We don’t have to “Earn” or “Deserve” anything, contrary to what we’ve been made to believe. We – YOU – were born 100% worthy and deserving of infinite love, success and abundance.
Don’t feel that…?
Raise your worthiness thermostat setting
Each and every one of us has an internal thermostat setting. And when we exceed the setting we self-sabotage.
For example, let’s say you’ve been conditioned to believe that romantic relationships never last, men don’t listen and there’s always something you have to “put up with” in a relationship. AKA “You can’t have it all.”
If you then found yourself in a relationship that was the opposite of this – a man who listened, was fully committed to the relationship and who was willing to come up with solutions to things that you weren’t fully happy with – you would unconsciously find ways to create a “problem” in the relationship so that it would break up.
Your upper limit problem would kick in and you would self-sabotage the relationship… maybe by messaging an ex-boyfriend or looking for things that your partner does “wrong” without speaking to him about it so you can complain instead to your girlfriends.
Your upper limit problem is stopping you from receiving and holding that beautiful relationship because unconsciously you don’t feel worthy of it. Do you see?
Disclaimer; That is actually my own real-life example that I’ve just shared!
I had to work on my self-worth, self-love and expand my capacity to receive and hold pleasure to enable me to be and stay in such a wonderful conscious relationship
So my question to you is:
✍🏼 Be radically honest with yourself… where are you self-sabotaging?
The real issue is where are you stopping the flow of love, abundance and success?
We are meant to have as much abundance as we want but we block ourselves from receiving it. We feel bad and guilty for receiving what we truly want deep down in our souls.
Ask yourself, ✍🏼 Where am I stopping the flow and how can I increase that?
Move into your upper limit with curiosity, excitement and wonder as you move out of self-blame and criticism.
Ask yourself questions such as, “I wonder why I treated myself like that? I wonder why I did that?” etc.
It all starts within
Before we start blaming others, we need to take full responsibility for everything in our lives.
For example, If you think your partner doesn’t listen to you…
Are you listening to YOURSELF? Are you honouring your body’s feedback for rest, food, pleasure or adventure? Why or why not?
Are you listening to your partner? Why or why not?
If you are listening to yourself and your partner, have you communicated how you feel with your partner? Without making your partner wrong? Why or why not?
To address our upper limit problem, it always has to start from within.
Being aware
Start to become aware of when you hit the upper limit problem – what was the old belief that was driving this pattern?
Which belief is going to win at this moment? The old limiting belief or the new empowering one?
Another great question you can ask yourself in difficult or uncomfortable situations is:
How is this happening for me?
What has this taught me?
***Sometimes we have so much trauma around where our beliefs have come from that we need to seek out therapy or/and do some inner child healing work in order to choose new empowering beliefs.
4 main upper limit problems
There are 4 main upper limit problems. We download these “upper limit problems” into our unconscious mind from the moment we are born until we are around 7 years old. (I even believe these can also be passed down through DNA, past lives and also obtained in the womb)
And from then on we just keep attracting more of what we already believe about ourselves into young adulthood, adulthood etc and keep playing the same patterns over and over again throughout our lives – until we become aware of it and do something about it. Which is what you’re doing right now! 🙌🏻
By the age of 7, we have already have unconscious ideas of how happy and successful we can be. We automatically download any family trauma. We see how happy our parents are, what kind of relationship they have, whether money comes easily or has to be earned through hard work and stress etc
We have our own set of self-imposed limits.
Unless we do the work to expand our potential for happiness and abundance, we will stay “stuck.” We must move through our blocks and open ourselves up to infinite love, success and abundance. It is our birthright after all.
1. Feeling fundamentally flawed
We don’t feel good enough at our core.
We always seem to fail.
We keep ourselves small.
We think there is always something bigger outside of us that we need to achieve in order to “be good enough”
We have a worthiness wound.
The love received growing up was conditional. Then you give yourself conditional love.
You may have been hugely congratulated whenever you achieved something – really good grades for example – yet you were never complimented for just being you.
You were not congratulated for trying and failing, only if you “won”.
2. Disloyalty and abandonment
You feel that you can’t expand to your full potential because if you did you’d end up alone.
If you were to be successful you would be abandoning yourself or your family.
You would have to break your families spoken or unspoken rules if you were to become successful. EG, wealthy people are greedy and corrupt. “They’ve changed since they became rich/got married etc”
3. You’re a burden
You believe that the more success you have makes you a burden.
You feel that you can’t take up space in the world as you will annoy others.
You can’t express your emotions, they’re not valid.
You feel guilty for feeling.
Acknowledge that you’re not a burden but in fact, you are a cause for celebration!
4. Crime of outshining
You have an unconscious belief that if you achieve your full success, you’ll make others look bad
You cant shine too much as you’ll make others feel uncomfortable
You must make everyone around you feel better or good about themselves
You don’t want to be “too much”
Childhood
These upper limits problems always come from an experience in your childhood. As I mentioned previously, some inner child healing work may be necessary in order for you to really embrace raising your thermostat and breaking through the upper limit problem.
Your limiting beliefs are the glass ceiling to your potential. Break through them and live the life you’ve always dreamed of.
✍🏼 What are the hidden beliefs that are stopping me from achieving all the success I want and desire?
The cure
✍🏼 How can I expand my capacity to hold more love abundance and success?
✍🏼 What new beliefs do I need to embody?
Action step
Really practice feeling your upper limit problem in your body.
When does this happen for you?
When you consciously notice that you’re self-sabotaging, take a breath, create space and sit with yourself quietly. Then ask yourself these questions:
What do I feel?
Where do I feel it?
Just hold yourself through experiencing this feeling and then when you’re ready, think of something that you are so grateful for. Something you feel so much love for when you think about it.
Then imagine a big ball of loving light filling up your body. It starts in your heart and then it expands beautifully throughout your whole body.
How does that feel? Allow yourself to feel that love and good feeling.
Do this whenever you notice that you’re hitting an upper limit problem. Hold the feeling of success, love and abundance in your body. Don’t push it away.
Increase your ability to receive it all. Challenge any guilt that crops up.
Hold the feeling of expansion of love and success in your body.
Connect to your new empowering belief and BE the version of you that already HAS IT ALL. She would ALLOW that abundance. She would welcome it all in.
“Thank you, more please”
Remember that whenever we hit a block, feel stuck or self-sabotage, THAT’S when we can choose to step into a new paradigm. Because YOU are worth it.
