A Step-by-Step Practice for Limiting Beliefs

You’re someone who takes this work seriously. You’ve invested in it. You understand, at least conceptually, why limiting beliefs form and what they do. You may have even identified the ones most actively shaping your business and your sense of what’s possible.

Now you need a practice. Not another explanation — a practice. Something you can actually do, step by step, that produces real and lasting change.

This is it. The practice is rooted in a principle that’s simple and counterintuitive: your suffering isn’t caused by your circumstances. It’s caused by your thoughts about your circumstances. And thoughts — including the beliefs underneath them — can be examined. And when they’re examined with sufficient honesty and depth, they lose their grip.

Before You Begin

You may want to read this in pieces rather than all at once. This is careful work. If you find a particular step bringing up something that feels large, give yourself permission to pause, breathe, and return to it. You might also find it helpful to have support — a coach, a therapist, a trusted peer — for the deeper inquiry.

What you’re doing here is not intellectual. It involves accessing the actual emotional charge of a belief, which means you’ll be working with real feelings. That’s the point. That’s where the leverage is.

Phase 1: Identify the Painful Thought

Step 1: Find a specific belief that’s causing recurring friction.

Don’t start with the most abstract or comprehensive belief you carry. Start with something specific — a thought that creates a consistent feeling of contraction, resistance, or suffering in your business life.

Not “I’m not enough” — that’s too broad. Something like: “My potential clients will think I’m too expensive.” Or: “If I’m too direct about what I offer, people will think I’m pushy.” Or: “I can’t succeed without burning myself out.”

Write it as a statement. One sentence. As specific as you can make it.

Step 2: Let yourself feel it.

Before doing any inquiry, let the belief bring up what it brings up. Don’t analyse it yet. Just notice: what happens in your body when you hold this thought as true? Where do you feel it? What does the sensation tell you?

This emotional contact is not optional. The inquiry works best when you’re in genuine contact with the feeling the belief creates — not just thinking about it from a distance.

Phase 2: Apply the Four Questions

Step 3: Is it true?

Ask yourself — honestly, not rhetorically — whether the belief you’ve written down is true. Don’t rush to an answer. Sit with the question.

Notice if your immediate response is automatic (“yes, of course it’s true — I’ve experienced it”) versus considered. The difference matters.

Step 4: Can you absolutely know it’s true?

This is the question that shifts everything. Not “do you believe it’s true” — but “can you absolutely, with complete certainty, know that it’s true?”

Would you stake your life on this belief? Can you know for certain what other people will think? Can you know that there is no version of the future in which this belief turns out to be wrong?

For almost every limiting belief, the honest answer to “can I absolutely know it’s true?” is some form of “no.” And that “no” creates a gap — a space between belief and certainty — where something can begin to breathe.

Step 5: How do you react when you believe this thought?

Now map the cost. When you believe this thought is absolutely true, how do you behave? What do you do? What do you avoid? How do you treat yourself? How do you treat others?

Be specific. “When I believe that raising my prices will drive clients away, I consistently underprice my offers, then feel resentful and undervalued, then either over-deliver to compensate or begin avoiding the clients I’ve attracted.”

Write it out. The cost of believing this thought matters to see clearly.

Step 6: Who would you be without this thought?

You’re not being asked to drop the thought forever. Just to imagine, in this moment, what life would look like without it. Who would you be if this thought simply weren’t there?

Notice what opens up. What would you try? What would you say? What would you charge? How would you show up?

This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s a glimpse of who you are without the filter the belief creates.

Phase 3: Apply the Turnarounds

Step 7: Turn the belief toward yourself.

Take your original statement and rewrite it so it applies to you instead of to others or circumstances.

“My clients will think I’m too expensive” becomes “I think I’m too expensive.” Find three genuine, specific examples of how this reversal might be true. Not forced examples — real ones.

Often this turnaround reveals that the belief you’re projecting outward is something you’re doing to yourself first.

Step 8: Turn the belief toward others.

Rewrite the statement so it points in the opposite relational direction.

“My clients will think I’m too expensive” becomes “I think my clients are too expensive.” Or: “I’m too expensive for myself — I invest in others but not in what I need.”

Again, find three genuine examples. Let the inquiry take you somewhere unexpected.

Step 9: Turn the belief to its opposite.

Write the statement in its complete opposite form.

“My clients will think I’m too expensive” becomes “My clients will find my pricing completely reasonable.” Find three genuine examples of how the opposite might be true or could become true.

This turnaround doesn’t require you to believe the opposite. It just invites you to test whether the original belief is the only possible way to see the situation.

Step 10: Identify which turnaround lands most powerfully.

Not the most comfortable — the most alive. The one that makes something shift in your body. That’s the one pointing to where your real work is.

Phase 4: Live the Inquiry

Step 11: Apply this process to daily life.

The real power of this practice emerges not from doing it once but from using it consistently when painful thoughts arise. The moment you notice a familiar contraction — the voice saying you’re not enough, that it’s not safe, that this won’t work — you have a choice. You can let the thought run automatically. Or you can pause and ask: “Is this absolutely true?”

That pause is the practice.

Step 12: Take the action the turnaround points to.

The inquiry isn’t complete when you’ve found insight. It’s complete when you act on what the turnaround revealed. If the turnaround “I think I’m too expensive” showed you that you don’t value your own work, the action might be raising a price, or investing in something you’ve been putting off, or simply naming your rate without apology the next time you have the opportunity.

Insight without action remains intellectual. Action makes the shift real in your nervous system.

What This Practice Builds Over Time

Used consistently, this inquiry transforms your relationship with painful thoughts. You stop treating your beliefs as facts and start treating them as conclusions that can be examined. You discover that your reactions reveal what you’re believing — not what’s true. You begin to see the projection in your judgments. And you find that the most powerful prescription for change is usually hidden in the belief itself, revealed through the turnarounds.

For conscious entrepreneurs, this often dissolves self-sabotage patterns that persist despite good strategy, because it addresses them at their actual source. And it builds the kind of genuine self-trust that comes not from never having difficult thoughts but from knowing how to work with them.

Support for the Journey

This practice is most powerful when done with support — someone who can hold the process with you, reflect back what they see, and help you stay with the inquiry when it gets uncomfortable.

The Abundance GPS community is built around exactly this kind of supported inner work for conscious entrepreneurs. The first seven days are free. If you’re ready to do this practice with real community, come and see what that looks like.