Who’s Been Pulling Your Strings?

Photo by Aakash Dhage for Unsplash+

I have never personally trained an elephant, so I don’t know for certain that this is true. But I have it on good authority that real trainers of elephants use (or once used) a technique called “elephant chaining” to make sure their trainee remained a captive audience. When the elephant is a baby, trainers wrap a heavy chain around one of its legs and attach the other end of the chain to a stake in the ground. The chain is too strong for the young elephant to break, and struggling against it is painful, so the elephant gives up trying to free itself and accepts that it is not strong enough to escape. When the elephant grows to adult size, the same chain is enough to restrain it – though by now the elephant is strong enough to break the chain easily – because the elephant continues to believe it is no match for it.

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It turns out that humans are not smarter than elephants. We, too, are easily chained by beliefs that we learned as children and haven’t tested – beliefs that limit what we think we can do. And like mature elephants, we can easily break these self-limiting beliefs once we identify them for what they are.

We all have self-limiting beliefs.

I’ll go first.

I believe I am an introvert – which is probably true – but I have convinced myself that therefore I must avoid stepping into most social situations, or certainly in more than one per day, because they exhaust me. In all likelihood, that’s an exaggeration. But because of this belief, I limit how often I attend community and social events.

As an author trying to promote book sales, that’s not just self-limiting, it’s self-defeating. It also tends to shrink my world, to limit opportunities for conversation, to miss easy opportunities to maintain friendships, to shut off exposure to other opinions and new ideas.

There are many more self-limiting beliefs that get in our own way. To cite just a few: fear of the unknown, fear of being judged, fear of not being good enough, fear of unworthiness, fear of not doing enough, fear of not having enough, fear of being too old, fear of being outclassed.

You may not even be aware that you believe these things about yourself. Yet they affect your life choices as surely as a puppeteer pulling your strings.

It’s not easy for us to recognize our own self-limiting thoughts, which tend to be buried deep in our subconscious, where they have lived unchallenged for decades. Often, we only become aware of them when someone else points them out to us. A discerning spouse, a best friend, a trusted advisor, or a professional therapist can act as the mirror, reflecting back to us the thought patterns we likely don’t recognize.

One helpful clue: Notice thoughts that show up repeatedly, such as “That’s just how I am,” “I’ve always been this way,” “this is what always happens to me,” or “that’s just how the world works.” Ask yourself where these assumptions come from. Turn them around: Consider what these statements – if true – say about you.

Recognizing the self-limiting beliefs is only the first step in ridding yourself of them. Without going deep into psychological methods – something I am not licensed to do – here are some suggestions you can try, alone or with assistance.

• Challenge self-limiting beliefs. Write one down and then list reasons why it isn’t true or might not be true.

• Observe your self-talk and notice how often these beliefs color what we say about ourselves to others, and how often we repeat them to ourselves.

• Once you have evidence that the belief might not be true, create a new belief that counters it. It doesn’t have to be true 100% of the time, just something you can confidently say most of the time.

A personal example: Several years ago, I hit a wall in my writing career when I kept reminding myself that my work did not compare favorably to such masters as Dickens, Cervantes, and Hemingway. With the help of a coach, I turned it around to telling myself what my writing did do well. That was enough to get me back on track.

When you can identify and root out the self-limiting beliefs that keep you from being all that you are capable of being, you will discover that the chain was not really strong enough to hold you down. You are free to pull your own strings and dance to your own tune.

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