British stand up comedian Eddie Izzard had 5 weeks of training prior to running 7 weeks of back to back marathons for charity. He then went on to run 43 marathons in 51 days. This phenomenal achievement clearly wasn't based on a natural talent for long distance running or on an inhuman ability to transport oxygen from the atmosphere into his bloodstream. It was based on the enabling belief of "I am a capable athlete" and the resulting confidence, dogged determination and mental strength that accompanies that enabling belief.
A person with limiting beliefs would have never lined up to start the challenge. Long before the first day of training thoughts such as "it can't be done", "I'll overheat, keel over and die" or "only Olympic athletes can achieve challenges such as that" would have been circulating around their minds. Eventually the idea would have been chucked on the "nice idea but will never happen" scrapheap in the corner of the mind.
"If you're worried about falling off the bike, you'd never get on." Lance Armstrong
Eddie Izzard would have approached the challenge with enabling beliefs. Instead of thinking only Olympic athletes can achieve such feats he would have thought if someone can repeatedly run long distances then others can too. He might have thought of examples in his life when he overcame great obstacles, he might have accessed memories in his life when he had achieved something that others thought impossible. This evidence would have been the empowering factor in believing that the challenge could be completed.
"Winning is about heart, not just legs. It's got to be in the right place." Lance Armstrong
Your internal dialogue is a good indicator of the type of beliefs you have in place. If you are ever aware of that little voice saying "I can't do that", then there's a limiting belief in action. It wants you to stay within your comfort zone, hold back, avoid taking risks, in fact it could be actively discouraging you from doing those things that would bring you massive success.
You might be wondering why you would deliberately sabotage your own success through holding limiting beliefs, when there's no sense in doing that. However, beliefs are often not based upon a logical framework of ideas and can be extremely resistant to logic, hence why do people believe that they can't do something when they have no past experience upon which to base that idea? Your beliefs create your reality, so in order to have a different reality, the beliefs need to change first.
Much research has been carried out in the medical world on the power of beliefs as part of the healing process. The placebo effect has been well documented, in which people suffering from the same ailment are split into groups and told that they will be prescribed a new drug to treat their condition. One group will be given the genuine drug, another group will be given a pill that contains no drugs whatsoever, a placebo.
When results are compared, it has often been the case that the placebo group have displayed results as beneficial, if not more so, as the group that were taking the genuine drug. The Placebo group had faith in the skills, knowledge and abilities of the doctor prescribing them their pill and this faith generated a belief that they would benefit from taking it. And so they did.
"Anything is possible. You can be told that you have a 90-percent chance or a 50-percent chance or a 1-percent chance, but you have to believe and you have to fight." Lance Armstrong
Similarly, many studies have been conducted on 'cancer survivors' defined as being people who had been given a terminal diagnosis of cancer with a poor prognosis for recovery and yet are alive and healthy ten or twelve years later. In one study, it was found that there were no common patterns in the treatment received by these people. Their treatments were different and included chemotherapy, radiation therapy, nutrition programmes, surgery, spiritual healing and so on. However, the one thing that all these survivors shared was that they believed that the method of treatment they were getting was going to work for them. The belief, rather than the treatment, made the difference.
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