Do you remember how bold your imagination was a child? If you were anything like me, you could spend hours dreaming up a game to play with your friends or imagining what the world was like beyond what you’d seen with your tiny little eyes.
A child’s imagination is completely untethered from doubt and limitation because children haven’t learned yet to be skeptics. The universe is literally a child’s mental playground.
Do you remember what you dreamed of as a child? Do you recall how you pictured what life would be like as an adult? Is it as you imagined it? Is your career what you dreamed it would be? Your answer to that last question is probably no, but why is that?
You may have changed your mind about what you wanted to do as you got older. Maybe something happened in your life that caused you to take a different route. It’s possible that, as you got older, you settled for things in your life that were less than what you dreamed you were worthy of, or you just flat out stopped dreaming as vividly as you once did.
Can we ever dream that vividly again — the way we did as children — when we’ve been affected by so many experiences that have caused us to keep our feet planted firmly on the ground? We can certainly try.
To do this, we must identify and deprogram our limiting beliefs — or the beliefs that hold us back from doing the thing(s) we dream of doing. For example, I had a male friend who really wanted to go to nursing school. He had been raised to believe that nursing was not a “manly” profession. Any time he mentioned his desire to become a nurse, his father would shut him down and disparage the whole idea of men being nurses.
It wasn’t until after his father passed away, and he had his own experience being hospitalized, that he saw for himself that plenty of men become great nurses. He eventually decided to go to nursing school and has been a nurse for years now. He’s very happy with his profession, but if he hadn’t been able to remove that limiting belief, he wouldn’t have ever fulfilled his purpose.
What are the beliefs that you currently hold that might be holding you back from your dreams. If you’d like to start a business, what is holding you back? It’s very likely that it’s a limiting belief that you can remove from your thinking, but the first step is to identify all those beliefs — even the ones deeply ingrained in you.
Make a list of your limiting beliefs. This process may be easy for some and not so easy for others. In tomorrow’s post, we’ll take a look at how to replace limiting beliefs or remove them all together so that you can move forward in fulfilling your entrepreneurial purpose. See you tomorrow!