A Step-by-Step Practice for Limiting Beliefs
There’s a difference between knowing how to work with limiting beliefs and having a clear sequence to follow when you’re actually in the middle of one.
Knowledge is useful. But in the moment when the pattern is running — when you’re about to not send the email, or lower the rate again, or stay quiet when you wanted to speak — what helps most isn’t understanding. It’s a clear next step.
This is that sequence.
Before You Begin: Find Your Regulation Baseline
The single most important precondition for this practice is that you’re in a regulated enough state to engage with the belief rather than be consumed by it.
If you’re in full activation — heart racing, thinking tunnel-visioned, the pattern running at full pitch — this practice won’t be effective. The first step isn’t the inquiry. The first step is regulation.
Three minutes of extended exhale breathing (four counts in, six to eight counts out) is usually enough to create sufficient regulatory access. Do that first. Then begin.
Step 1: Name the Belief
Write the belief as a first-person present-tense statement. Not a description of the pattern — the belief itself.
Not: “I tend to undercharge.” But: “I am not the kind of person who charges premium rates.”
Not: “I avoid visibility.” But: “Being fully visible is dangerous.”
The sentence format matters. You’re looking for the core identity claim that the pattern is built on. Usually it starts with “I am…” or “It is…” or “People like me…”
Read it back. Does it have charge? Does it feel more true than you’d like? Good. That’s the belief.
Step 2: Locate It in the Body
With the belief fully present in your awareness, scan your body. Where does it live?
Be specific. Not “in my chest” but: is it in the sternum? The upper chest? Does it feel like tightening, heaviness, a held breath, heat?
Give it a specific location and a specific quality. This isn’t abstract — it’s useful data. The body’s response is often more honest than the thought, and knowing the physical signature means you can catch the belief earlier in its activation sequence.
Step 3: Trace the Origin
Ask: “When did I first decide this was true?”
You’re not looking for a precise memory necessarily — a felt sense is enough. A period of life. A particular kind of experience. A specific relationship.
If something surfaces, let it be brief. You don’t need to process the origin right now. You’re just acknowledging that the belief came from somewhere, that it was a conclusion drawn under specific circumstances, and that it’s been running on a kind of autopilot ever since.
This step loosens the belief’s claim to being objectively true. It was a decision, once. Decisions can be revisited.
Step 4: Question It
Ask four questions slowly, with genuine curiosity:
- Is this belief absolutely true, without exception, in all circumstances?
- Who told you this — explicitly or implicitly — and were they a reliable source?
- What has believing this cost you, specifically and concretely?
- What becomes possible if this belief simply weren’t there?
Don’t labour over the answers. Let them come naturally. The goal isn’t to argue the belief into submission — it’s to create space around it. Space in which the belief’s automatic authority over your behaviour begins to feel optional rather than inevitable.
Step 5: Find One New Possibility
This step is deliberately modest. Not “replace the belief with its opposite.” Just: find one new possibility.
One thing that would be different if the belief were slightly less true than you currently experience it as being.
You don’t have to believe the new possibility. You just have to be able to imagine it. “Possibly, there is a version of this situation where visibility doesn’t end in rejection.” “Possibly, there are circumstances where charging the full rate is both right and received well.”
That’s enough. One small possibility, held lightly.
Step 6: Take the Smallest Available Action
From the slightly expanded space created by steps 1–5, identify the smallest available action in the direction of the new possibility.
Not the full transformation. The smallest step. The one your nervous system can actually tolerate right now.
“Send the email, even without editing it one more time.” “Name the number, even quietly.” “Let the compliment land without immediately redirecting.”
The smallness is intentional. You’re not trying to prove anything dramatic. You’re creating one piece of evidence that the new possibility exists — and evidence, accumulated over time, is what actually shifts the belief’s grip.
The Compounding Effect
This six-step sequence, done consistently with the same belief over weeks, produces something that single sessions can’t: accumulated evidence. Each pass through the sequence generates a slightly different response. Each small action creates a data point that the old conclusion might not be the only possible one.
The belief doesn’t need to be eradicated. It just needs to gradually lose its monopoly on your behaviour — until the new pattern has been practiced enough times that it becomes the more familiar one.
Understanding how genius types relate to limiting beliefs — specifically, how working against your natural strengths can generate false evidence for a belief that you’re not enough — is a useful layer of context for this practice. And the daily practice structure gives this sequence a reliable home in your morning and evening.
The Invitation
Practicing this sequence alone is possible. Practicing it in community — where others are doing the same work, where accountability is built into the structure, and where the small actions are witnessed and celebrated — is significantly more effective.
The Abundance GPS community provides exactly that container. Seven-day free trial. Come and follow the sequence with people who understand why each step matters.
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