by Franka J. Haddley May 31, 2020 1513 views

Power of Being Limitless. 3 Bullheads of How You Limit Yourself

It took me a while to reflect on this idea – you can be anyone and do anything you want, but for some reasons you keep replacing doors with walls and then cry ‘how unfair life is.’

It may look like the whole world is against you but what is really happening is that you keep limiting yourself, creating new and new barriers on your way to a happy living.

Subconscious has unimaginable power over your life; all the things it believes in sooner or later becomes your only reality. If you believe that you have no time or capability to work towards your dream, then you lost without even starting.

3 Bullheads of How You Limit Yourself

You predict without actual trying

Think how many times you came to a conclusion based merely on your thoughts. How many things that life had offered you were declined just because you limited yourself to what you only THOUGHT you could or could not do? I bet, the answer will shock you.

You let failure define you

Bad experience is a great lesson and yet, it’s still just an experience and in no way does it define who you are. On the other hand, failure gives you the wider knowledge and therefore it gives you the power to try and win next time. So why would you intentionally avoid winning just because last time it did not work out?

You quit

The most interesting thing about quitting is that you quit not because you’ve done everything you could, but because you THINK you did everything you could.

You abandon your dream without a reason, calling upon countless excuses and coming up with new ways to justify your decision to turn away from the only thing that could make your life meaningful.

This is what quitting really is about.

But besides these 3 bullheads, self-limiting became a day-to-day habit and reached a new level of absurdity that we somehow tend to miss.

For a few years now, I’ve been practicing to-do lists and other forms of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly planning. As you may guess, my day-to-day life looked like an attempt to follow my lists, task after task, trying to be as consistent and productive with it as I could. And this is where for the first time I noticed a seed of self-limiting.

This is quite absurd, but I am going to share it anyway; as a self-employed by the business of one (or tête-à-tête business), I created a strict morning routine that helped me to wake up, get in the right mood flow, and gather my frenzy from the other night thoughts into a semi-order to stay focused and productive during my working day. And this morning routine was nothing more but three simple steps; meditation, brushing teeth, breakfast.

Easy-breezy but effective or so I thought. It does look like a normal routine, right?! But real life is not as perfect as lined down tasks in our to-do lists. It’s a bit more diverse and complicated.

Because I’m one of those people who tends to go to bed long after midnight and miss morning hours quite often.

So in the morning, while following my morning routine, I would feel anxious and worried about time, because while brewing coffee and cooking breakfast, time would be slipping away with the speed of a falling comet.

But I had a strict routine, remember; meditation, brushing teeth, breakfast. My work, according to this, started right after.

Now the questions: what was wrong with me? Why would I follow this routine that seemingly did not give my mind a peace I so needed? Why I was limiting myself to that routine which I only THOUGHT helped me to control my self-employed life?

And the most important question; why the hell couldn’t I have my breakfast and start working at the same time?

This may look like a trifle but this is where it all starts. To step over this limiting mechanism, I had to change the way I looked at things. I had to accept that even though I had a daily practice of writing to-do lists, I had no control over what today or next day would really look like. I might oversleep again, or lose track of time while checking email, or wake up to a new job offer, or receive an important call from a friend of family which will imply change of plans. Life is unpredictable and in order to be able to live it, we need to stay flexible in our thoughts and actions.

Just like a writer who writers any time there appears a free minute or two; Chuck Palahniuk (one of my all times favorite writer), for example, loved writing in airport lounges which is both odd and genius place for writing.

Flexibility as a practice for limitless living

Just as body flexibility helps to improve the quality of your life, flexible thinking helps to adopt to any changes in your daily life, leveling up your productivity and performance.

Stop putting yourself in an imaginable box where it’s only allowed to walk in circles. Aim for what’s beyond this box.

Don’t give the power over your life to countless excuses. Stay flexible and creative about the ways you build your life day-to-day. Don’t be afraid of changes if you feel like some routines or habits are not working for you.

Allow yourself to experience life to its fullest. Don’t limit yourself to just one pattern behavior; you can do and be so much more. Start working while having your breakfast, take lunch on the go and try something new even if you know nothing about it.