Kids believe the strangest things — and as adults, we carry our own kind of limiting beliefs that are just as untrue.
Take my childhood, for example. My older brother once told me that eating a certain dish I hated would make hair grow on my chest. I believed him and ate so much of it that now it’s one of my favorite dishes.
Maybe you believed this one along with me: if you accidentally swallowed an apple or watermelon seed, it would start growing in your stomach. This urban legend was probably passed around by generations of kids. And my parents never corrected my faulty thinking.
But the crown jewel of my childhood fears was one I came up with entirely on my own: if I stayed seated on the toilet when I flushed, I would get suctioned to the seat and never get up again. No one told me this. I didn’t read it anywhere. My own brain just decided this was a real and present danger, and I believed it far longer than any reasonable child should have.
We can laugh about these things now, because they’re delightfully, obviously false. A tree was never sprouting in my stomach. My chest hair situation had nothing to do with dinner. And the toilet, as it turns out, is not secretly plotting against small children.
What’s not nearly as funny are the limiting beliefs we carry around as grown adults — the ones we’ve convinced ourselves are just as real as suction-powered toilets.
The Limiting Beliefs That Follow Us Into Adulthood
You know the ones. You’re never going to reach your goals. You’re destined to stay exactly where you are for the rest of your life. Your ideas aren’t good enough to be worth pursuing. Somewhere along the way, we picked these up too — maybe from a comment someone made offhand, maybe from a setback we let define us, maybe from nowhere in particular except our own overactive imagination, much like my toilet theory.
Here’s the tricky part: unlike apple seeds and chest hair, these beliefs have a way of becoming true if we let them. Psychologists call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it works exactly like it sounds.
Believe you’ll never reach your goals, and you’ll quietly stop taking the actions that would get you there. Believe your ideas aren’t worth pursuing, and you’ll never share the one that could have changed everything.
The beliefs I carried as a kid were never going to come true no matter how hard I believed them. That’s the strange and wonderful difference with the beliefs we carry now — they only become true because we believe them.
Which means the reverse is also true. Refuse to believe the lie, and you take away its power to shape your future. That doesn’t mean the doubt disappears overnight or that a good pep talk fixes everything. It means you start making decisions — small, consistent ones — based on who you’re capable of becoming instead of who your loudest inner critic says you are.
It takes believing you’re worth something, that you have something real to offer, before you can start proving it. Not the other way around. You don’t wait until you’ve achieved the goal to believe you’re capable of it. You have to believe first, then let your actions catch up.
So here’s your assignment, should you choose to accept it: think about one belief you’re holding onto that’s quietly shaping your decisions. Is it actually true, or is it just a story you’ve been repeating so long it feels true — a toilet-suction theory for grown-ups? Then ask yourself what would change if you simply stopped believing it.
As the saying goes, whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right. The goals you want, the ideas you’re sitting on, the future version of yourself you can picture but haven’t quite become — none of it requires you to have it all figured out. It just requires you to stop believing the lie.
If you’re ready to trade the limiting beliefs for an actual plan, let’s talk. I offer a free 20-minute strategy call where we’ll look at where you are, where you want to be, and what’s really standing in the way
Book your free strategy call today, and let’s start proving those old beliefs wrong — together.