Limiting Beliefs Are Destroying You (How To Cut That Shit Out)

The Mastery Letter #8

Tread lightly when using certain language while thinking to yourself.

It may seem harmless, but overtime this has a negative self-hypnosis effect.

In my past, I had extreme self-doubt because I underperformed in school. I refused to participate in things that bored me, so I would always skip class, or sleep.

This led to deep feelings of “If you can’t do school, what can you do?” or “All my friends did great in school. They were in AP classes. I am a dumbass”.

It always made me feel inferior.
I believed I would never succeed if I can’t perform in public school.

LIMITING BELIEFS.

All bullshit.

There was a short story I read once that talked about a farmer whose son was supposed to do x, y and z, but a “negative” thing kept happening to change his trajectory.

I forget the details, but after every negative thing, it turned out being a positive.

He fell off a horse and broke his leg, but because of that, he wasn’t drafted into the war. etc etc.

The point of the story is you can always find advantages in what are seemingly disadvantages.

While it is true that I didn’t do well in public school system, a place where you are given different check boxes to tick off for 18 years, I started adapting to life and figuring out my mission early.

I was good at figuring things out and creating my own goals and check boxes.

There are many that do well in these comfortable structured environments like school, with task boxes to complete, that do terrible when they are out in the real world where they have to create their own mission task list.

Another good example…

I always thought my biggest disadvantage was my dad dying to cancer when I was 5.

BUT...

It forced me into leadership at a young age.

It forced me into finding dozens of amazing mentors.

It allowed me to be close with my mother and learn empathy, kindness and love.

As an extremely ambitious, mission oriented, and highly disagreeable person, this balanced me out.

If it wasn’t for my mother’s supportive, kind and selfless personality, who knows how I would have turned out.

Probably a huge asshole.

You have to destroy these limiting beliefs and turn your situation into leverage.

I see this every day in life, people saying, “I am an anxious person” “I could never fast and not eat breakfast!” “I could NEVER do that!” and so on.

This sets yourself up for failure from the get-go.

You are assigning yourself an identity that shouldn’t exist. It doesn’t exist.

You are whatever you WANT to be, you can do whatever you choose.

Another common one is “I want to be happy" “I can’t be happy until X”

Happiness is simply when our conditions match our expectations. If you have conditions set in the future at some arbitrary point, you automatically disqualify yourself from being content in THIS moment.

Why not avoid chasing this arbitrary “happiness” all together and just accept the present moment for what it is?

Are you feeling anxious? Mad? Peaceful? Great, just observe it for what it is. No need to judge.

That is all life is, a snapshot of different moments of experience and emotions.

Stop constantly judging it against your arbitrary expectations of what you SHOULD feel.

STOP.
Unless you want to be miserable.

Emotions come and go. We have to stop setting arbitrary expectations as if life is going to hand you a permanent snapshot of “happiness” at X point in our life.

It will not.

Today is today.

Tomorrow will feel like today.

5 years from now WILL FEEL LIKE TODAY.

They are all just snapshots of the present moment.

Stop squandering snapshots hoping the next one will be better or else you will wake up one morning at 80 and realize you’ve wasted it.

You have to create your own life for yourself NOW by:

• Lowering your expectations to match your life conditions by living in the moment and accept it as is

• Improve your life conditions to surpass your expectations by taking ACTION.

Want to know the key?

DO BOTH.

Constantly strive for improvement in all aspects of life. Chase your potential. All while living in the moment and loving the journey.

Make it so you are constantly progressing while loving every moment so that you out pace your expectations.

Honestly, if you live without expectations, you are not plagued with constant disappointment when things out of your control occur.

Everything in life is a bonus if you just take it as is.

You will just raise your expectations anyways once you meet the arbitrary goal you have set, so might as well enjoy the current snapshot of life.

There are many life lessons from rock climbing.

Yes, I am bringing up rock climbing again.

And I will time and time again because it’s amazing and it has so many life lessons.

You learn so much about yourself, you can grow 5 years’ worth in 6 months of outdoor climbing.

Back to the point.

The more you analyze the route, the more difficult the climb due to anxiety and lack of clarity.

Limiting beliefs kick in ALL the time in climbing before starting a route.

I will subconsciously start saying “I can’t do this, I can’t do that, the conditions are x, this problem is x and i’m y” so on and so forth.

You have to train the mind snap out of it.

Quickly correct the belief “Yes I fucking can and I will right now” and EXECUTE.

The key is to figure out the FIRST move and solve as you go. You will see what you cannot from the ground.

Same with business.

Same with any skill.

When you catch yourself making statements like these, attack them immediately.
Attack them and take immediate action toward the thing.

Accepting thoughts creates your belief system.

Your belief system controls your identity.

Your identity controls your behaviors.

Your behaviors control your daily habits.

Your daily habits control your choices.

Your life is a sum of millions of choices.

As you can see, you have to learn positive self-hypnosis and stop those thoughts, even though it sounds lame.

You have to forcefully write the code of mastery into your belief algorithm.

You think that homeless heroin addict by the local pizza spot got that way over night?

No.

Instead of carefully crafting their belief system into mastery they succumbed to chaos.

They allowed chaos to write their belief algorithm.

They’ve been consumed by entropy.

They had negative thoughts telling them they weren’t good enough stemming from some type of early trauma, failure, or negative event of their past.

Those thoughts turned into beliefs about themselves.

Often the parents’ belief systems are controlled by chaos, and thus this is grandfathered into their kid’s belief system.

Sad.

Either way, they coped, gave in more, and those beliefs created an identity for them.

That identity is a drug addict that is homeless.

That identity invited other similar identities forged by chaos into their lives naturally.

Their behaviors adjusted to this identity of chaos.

Those behaviors led to bad choices and more chaos.

The cycle repeats.

Chaos and entropy run rampant.

The brain just goes back to the track record of failure, which goes back to the beliefs and identity, and the algorithm continues.

Your belief system is everything.

You need to constantly critique and update it based on new information from books, mentors, experiences, etc.

It is your operating system.

An operating system that will either guide you to the glory of mastery or the misery of chaos.

Your choice.

Smell ya’ later.

-Brandon

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